I started a seller account on Blender Market and in the payment section there is PayPal and Bitcoins. I don’t have a credit card so I choosed bitcoins. Now how do I convert them to cash if I want to buy something offline?
I already read the basics and precautions about bitcoins.
Bitcoins are a form of “barter.” They are used by people who agree among themselves that they are valuable to one another, and who agree to accept them in payment. But they are not “coins.” They have no intrinsic value whatsoever and cannot be converted to, say, Dollars, except by someone (such as an exchange service) who agrees to do so.
In my opinion, Bitcoins are mostly a vehicle for selling gullible nerds “coin mining gear,” which often costs thousands of … uhh … dollars. :rolleyes:
There are many interesting technical characteristics of these tokens, but one crippling disadvantage: they are computationally difficult to produce. This, of course, is precisely the characteristic that is touted as an advantage, but currency in the real world must be cheap to produce and available in unlimited amounts to satisfy demands for liquidity. Because of these limitations, bitcoins are both illiquid and scarce, which makes them useless as a currency candidate.
If somone could develop a crypto-based algorithm that produced tokens with these same characteristics at will, and opened-up the method for peer review and it subsequently passed that review, this would utterly revolutionize the banking industry … but not in the way that bitcoin advocates suppose.
If it brings food on the table. Though even dollar is already ‘imaginary’ currency.
Oh, you can also pay with BC on location… check maps as:
https://coinmap.org
http://bitcoinmaps.info/
http://usebitcoins.info/index.php/bitcoin-in-the-real-world
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Real_world_shops
android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.openbitlab.bitcoinmap&hl=en
So kinda like any modern currency then. The money we use has no intrinsic value, we have just agreed that it has.
Unlimited amounts of money leads to inflation. Just look what happened in Germany after WWI and in Zimbabwe more recently.
Literally billions of dollars change hands every day for mundane purposes such as buying lunch, gas, and … coffee! 
At the end of the day, all of those currency units (whether represented by paper or metal, or, most likely, not …) are “none the worse for wear.” They have moved from one hand to another, perhaps many times a day. (That dollar you paid for coffee might have gone out the door moments later as somebody else’s “change.”) Currency is, and must be, completely liquid. And you must never find yourself unable to buy the gas to get to work because you “haven’t dug-up a coin.”
The bitcoin is an independently verifiable token … which is huge … but new “coins” must be computationally “discovered.” The system relies upon the tokens being “difficult to come by,” which is necessary because by definition there isn’t a central regulating authority.
If it were possible to produce tokens with these verification characteristics “at will,” that would be an enormous technical advance. Of course, it would destroy a premise of the present bitcoin model, but it would open up possibilities that are unattainable today.
Arguments that “the number of currency units in circulation must be limited” are, in fact, specious. The requirement of a currency system is that there must always be, “by definition,” sufficient liquidity to guarantee that any transaction which people want to conduct can be conducted. Chick-Fil-A can sell 100 million chicken sandwiches tomorrow if it’s able (and lucky enough) to do so, and it will never have to turn a customer away because “the currency needed to settle the transaction doesn’t exist.”
There’s absolutely nothing illegal about “barter transactions” of any kind. And in fact, a “currency” can be anything, too. For instance, the currency of the Micronesian island of Yap for a very long time was a huge stone called a rai, and the system worked remarkably well until an Irish American (it figures …) named David O’Keefe began to import them by the shipload. Today, the islanders treasure the stones as an important symbol of their cultural heritage, but they use the US Dollar for their currency of choice.
The thing is, there isn’t unlimited amounts of money, and that’s a good thing.
Let’s say a small country, for example Sweden (as they don’t use Euro) wants to buy China. Now, Sweden has a limited amount of money at its disposal, even though they print their own money. They could of course just print enough to equal the value of Chine, but this would cause the money to become worthless due to inflation.
The United States is experiencing that right now … although its public isn’t being told that. The US Government “borrows from itself” about $2.5 million USD per minute, and it uses that money to pay for things. (Namely, “war.”) This has led to “artfully concealed and officially denied inflation.”
Anytime the supply and production of “currency” does not correspond to underlying economic activity, inflation is the result.
The US is told that “one percent” of the country controls “most” of the money, and maybe they do. But, by definition, they are no more than one percent of “the human economy.” They might be sitting on bank-accounts with “very large floating-point numbers” in them, but they don’t control or cause a corresponding flow in the production(!), distribution, and selling of goods. Hence, their “stupendous wealth” is specious. Too good to be true.
For many decades, the US was happy to trade with China, since, until last week, China’s currency was not in the “world reserve currency” basket. In order to buy and sell with China, you had to buy Dollars, Yen, Pounds, or Euros first. Usually it was Dollars, such that China currently holds massive amounts of “Dollar debt” that it basically can’t get rid of, no matter how much American real estate it can manage to buy. (The Chinese government also found it necessary to “peg” their currency to … “the Dollar.” Presumably to make the best of a decidedly one-sided situation in which they found themselves stuck … (“rather absurdly,” if I may say) … on “the ‘other’ side.”)
Well, “the IMF has spoken,” and, because of it, the IMF Headquarters may soon be moving to Beijing.
October next, the Chinese Yuan joins the basket and China can simply require to be paid in its own currency, and they surely will. (The effect will be felt much sooner, since international contracts are often made several years in advance, secured by “currency futures.”) Furthermore, they can finally get rid of those Dollars. It will soon be a very different world at Wal-Mart. But, a whole lot more fair.
This is certainly a direct response to the US’s habit of “printing its own money” promiscuously. The US liked to trade with China because there was nothing China could do about it. “Now, they can: what goes around, comes around.”
In a very real sense, what America was officially(!) doing amounted in-effect to a mash-up of counterfeiting and swindling. It was legal. But it was not fair.