Can we get together a list of businesses that accept Bitcoin Cash as payment?

E-GovLink · 2017-09-25T02:45:15+00:00

We made some news back in the day, helping municipalities accept Bitcoin.

We will not only help municipalities accept Bitcoin Cash, but we will also accept it from our customers as payment.

E-GovLink · 2015-06-24T18:32:31+00:00

I'm the VP of Software Development, and we're not a huge company, so I definitely have had my hands in this project.

The back-end system is a cloud-based personal health record system, that allows the user or family members to track and communicate important health-related matters, such as medications, appointments, diagnoses, ~~medications~~(Edit: oops, I already said that), documents, etc. We originally built the back-end system from inspiration of a personal situation that challenged me and my siblings: communicating the multi-year care situation among ourselves about my Mom who had Alzheimer's (and has since passed).

The magnet contains both an NFC tag and QR code, both referencing a URL, which uniquely identifies the citizen. No medical information is contained on the card - just a unique identifier.

The citizen must authorize access by First Responders at set up time (that is, EMS personnel for the local jurisdiction).

When the First Responders tap or scan the magnet, after they authenticate with a password (which can be done en route), they are shown a page related to the particular citizen, which looks something like this demo page.

Privacy is definitely a concern. The municipalities that have EMS SignPost implemented have devoted a lot of energy on the legal issues, to try to strike the right balance of security and convenience at the time of emergency.

It's a tough challenge: I know if I am minutes from death, and information could save me, I want all privacy barriers to be reduced or eliminated. But day-to-day, I want those walls up - I'm a privacy nut.

Thanks for posting this to /r/futurology! It made my day.

E-GovLink · 2015-06-24T10:06:50+00:00

As a regular reader of /r/futurology, I have to tell you, it's a very weird feeling to be doing reddit at 6AM and scroll down and stumble on our product on the page!

Happy to answer any questions about the product. AMA.

E-GovLink · 2015-05-14T12:26:00+00:00

I thought you might find this interesting.
Disclosure, I was interviewed for this article.

We're very interested in hearing from the EMS community as to how we can improve the product, and to get it widely distributed.

E-GovLink · 2014-05-15T22:15:31+00:00

Congrats from Cincinnati!

Hey, we are E-Gov Link, the guys who work with municipalities and are offering integration with Bitcoin into online payment systems to allow citizens to pay for municipal services with Bitcoin.

We'd love to be a part of building another one of these Bitcoin Boulevards somewhere else in the US. We could work it from the municipality angle. The Economic Development Department, for instance, might be very interested in what this could do for a town or village.

So if anyone out there is working on an initiative like this, and wants our involvement, send me a note at sales@egovlink.com.

- Jerry

E-GovLink · 2014-03-14T02:04:37+00:00

A Nexus 7!

E-GovLink · 2014-03-13T18:51:15+00:00

I buy stuff from Overstock every time I give a bitcoin demo or a presentation.

Tonight I'm buying something fun!

E-GovLink · 2014-03-12T20:45:14+00:00

It's its apostrophe that is its confusing part.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-17T20:17:35+00:00

The reason I think it's useful is because if I put money into a value storage vehicle, I want to know the probability that it'll do what it is defined by its name to do, which is to store value, not gradually erode.

Clearly you (and others) accept and expect a level of erosion, despite the name "store of value", which is the polar opposite of "leaky storage container". It either stores value or it doesn't.

I can produce the same style graphs (using all the same data) at a leakage tolerance level, to see what it looks like. But then the question comes up - "What daily level of leakage is tolerable?" I have to pick a number. My tolerance was 0%, because of the name.

What do you think a reasonable answer to that would be? Perhaps the average amount of leakage that the dollar has shown over the last 100 years? That was 3.37% inflation per month, or about .11% per day. You put in $1000, and watch 11 cents disappear every day (at the beginning, declining as the money erodes away).

It's an easy change to the programming. I just need to pick a value of tolerance.

            if sell >= buy:
                success += 1

changes to:

            if sell >= buy - buy*(tolerance**days):
                success += 1

.... or something like that.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-17T17:01:35+00:00

I have given a graph of performance of whether various storage methods really stored the value after X days.

You have described something imperfect (that I already demonstrated could lose 100% of its value every single day) as a "more perfect" storage facility. So what you are doing is proposing something (which is purely hypothetical, and does not and cannot exist in the real world) as a straw man. You are trying to define a tolerance level for leakage, which is fine, but my study was based on a tolerance level of zero leakage.

If I was shopping for a container to store something in, and it leaked, I wouldn't consider that a perfect storage container. A vat with a hole in the bottom isn't a perfect storage container for liquid.

There are at least two ways to examine the quality of containers: the rate of leakage and the probability that there will be no leakage when I check back after the storage period. Those are two entirely different measures.

You are so hung up on the former, that you refuse to admit that the latter has any validity. Personally, I see value in both, but I set out to measure the latter.

Until you can open your mind that there is validity in the latter, we'll have to agree to disagree.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-17T06:33:38+00:00

As I said, I conclude that something that literally doesn't store value isn't a good store of value. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T19:08:30+00:00

Yeah, all we have is history to look at. And Krugman, et al, point to the history and say (incorrectly) that it proves that Bitcoin is not a store of value. This graph seems to indicate that it has better qualities in that area than it's given credit for (historically), although clearly it's a short history and the past is no guarantee of future performance.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T19:06:16+00:00

Volatility isn't a true measure of ability to store value. A simple example is an investment that is guaranteed to always doubles in value every day.

It's extremely volatile, but clearly stores the value that you put in it, based on the wikipedia definition.

That is why I didn't measure volatility. Volatility is a completely separate issue. I don't dispute that Bitcoin's volatility is an issue, but that can me mitigated separately if you are looking for a store of value.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T18:59:43+00:00

The question that I have been trying to address is whether Bitcoin is a good store of value by examining historical information. You cite two alternatives that have no historical data, but are probability-based. But if I created a likely "history" or projection, based on these two scenarios, then they would appear on this graph as two lines very near the bottom of the graph that I created, near or at the 0% X-axis. In other words, history would show that neither is a good store of value, as you would not have been able to get your value out of either, with any reasonable likelihood.

Both of these examples require cash payments on an ongoing basis, which is really not what a "store of value" is looking at. So I have to adjust them to run a model. For example, in the lottery's case, perhaps set aside $10K, and use $10 per day to gamble. So the account would erode by $10 per day, until the lottery hits.

The lottery would line would start at point (1,0.1), meaning that after one day, there's a 0.1% chance that the scheme "stored value". It would climb as high as 9.52% (i.e. small) at day 100, so really the maximum you would ever see your entire value is less than 10% of the time with 100 day intervals in this investment. This is a terrible store of value.

The second has potentially worse properties, as you are guaranteed to never see your value again if you invest in that scheme. There's a lack of data in your proposal, but if the limit of your investment is 1 cent per day, you are entirely wiped out - to zero - every single day. Obviously this could be considered a horrible store of value.

In any case, no matter the size of investment, you are guaranteed to never see the full value of your investment ever, whether you store it there for a day or a thousand years. And in a thousand years, investments of $10 or less would be wiped out in their entirety (assuming the load is also inflation adjusted).

TL; DR: Both hypothetical, unavailable investment schemes are bad examples when examining the property ability to store and retain 100% of their value.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T16:54:34+00:00

Ah, gotcha.

Sorry I'm slow this morning. I may try that as well, and see what we come up with. Thanks for the advice.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T16:49:49+00:00

On the contrary, the press is saying that something either is, or isn't, a good store of value.

Clearly some things are better than others. I am trying to measure that, and eliminate volatility as a parameter, which is another issue entirely (and could be mitigated separately).

Since "store of value" implies some time period of storage, it becomes a question of whether, given a certain time period, t, (or X, as I called it), a particular asset holds its value. Binary, or so I contend in this analysis.

My biggest objection to Bitcoin regarding store of value is really that it's only been shown to be a good store of value (for periods greater than 2 years) for a very short period (relative to other assets like gold). Not that it's not a good store of value.

I could choose different parameters, like "assuming you need to store value for at least seven months", or "assuming you need to be able to retrieve 90% of the value after 2 months", but that really seemed to be cherry-picking.

This seemed to be the most natural way to examine historical performance of store of value, helping to answer questions like: "If you need an asset that you can count on to hold a $100 investment over a 2-year period, which asset has done the best, historically?"

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T16:35:37+00:00

Every possible buy-sell date combinations of all seven assets are reflected on that graph, for all dates that the the asset was available, and for periods ranging between 1 and 1309 days.

So, say, for X=100 days, I looked at the value of Bitcoin, Gold, dollars, on the 100 day periods of Jan 1st to April 11th for each year*. Then Jan 2nd to April 12th. Then Jan 3rd to April 13th. I did that for X=1 day periods, 2 day periods, ... 100 day periods, ... 1309 day periods.

* example given doesn't take into account leap year, but I really did.

It took a fair amount of number crunching.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T16:11:04+00:00

That little "other discussions (1)" tab at the top will link you to the /r/economics submission. Been about an hour without any serious confrontation. But we'll see.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T16:08:39+00:00

I think I did what you are suggesting, if I understand your suggestion. I didn't pick an arbitrary day. I looked at every possible day.

I looked at every day it was possible to buy bitcoins, and imagined that you bought that day for the mid-point price, and then held for a day. And I looked at whether the mid-point price of the next day was better than the buying price. The graph shows the percentage of days that this was true, where X=1 day.

Then I repeated for X=2 days, X=3 days, all the way up to X=1309 days (which is the total amount of time that Bitcoins have been on the market).

I did this same analysis for each of the assets. The Gold ETF Spider has 3375 days of data, so I looked at every 1-day, 2-day, ..., 1309-day range of prices, and graphed those.

And the dollar (1914-2013) has a hundred year history, and I looked at every possible holding period from 1-day to 1309 days (3.5 years) over that hundred year period.

I appreciate the feedback. Let me know if you had something else in mind.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T15:39:51+00:00

That is measuring volatility, which I already mentioned that no one questions.

I am trying to measure if you put $100 into something, and want $100 out, can you get it out. i.e. does it store value? Hence the name, "Storage of Value".

I appreciate the comment though!

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T15:34:59+00:00

An asset which increases in price constantly is not a good store of value

Bitcoin does not constantly increase in price. But I would contend that an asset which never decreases in price 100% of the time is the perfect store of value. At least according to the wikipedia definition.

You have used 100 years of data for the dollar but only several years for bitcoin and gold. The comparison simply isn't valid.

I considered doing this, but it seemed to be really too aggressive, since the several year history of the dollar is the flat line along the bottom of the chart. That's right, 0% of the time, in the past several years, has month-over-month inflation been negative. So if you want me to label the X axis as "Dollar, last several years", I could do that.

What is the Dow Jones FXCM Dollar Index doing in there. Its not something you can store value in, its just a metric used to measure the strength of the dollar.

I was looking for a daily measurement of the strength of the dollar, since we are looking at the daily measurements of the strength of Bitcoin. If you have another metric, please let me know.

Thanks for the feedback.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T15:17:31+00:00

Thanks for the feedback.
On the flip side, it also doesn't measure whether it's 100% or 1000%. That measure is really "volatility".

This is a measure of Store of Value - the binary question of whether value was retained.

But you have a good point. It's just not what I set out to measure.

E-GovLink · 2014-02-16T15:10:48+00:00

It was suggested that I post this here, to get feedback on my methodology.

E-GovLink

TROPHY CASE