Stuff you Can Buy Today with Bitcoin on Portland’s Craigslist

Things you can buy off craigslist with Bitcoin

Bitcoin burning a hole in your e-wallet? With a growing number of craigslist sellers stating they’ll trade in Bitcoin, we thought we’d share a fun snapshot of what you can buy on craigslist with Bitcoin in Portland, on Monday, April 8th, 2013. Prices calculated at current $184 / 1 BTC.

Item Name Price USD Price BTC Satoshi Location
Freshwater Crystal Red Shrimp $3 0.01639344 1,639,344 Battle Ground
Freshwater Blue Tiger Shrimp $8 0.04371585 4,371,585 Battle Ground
Montague Folding Mountain Bike $850 4.64480874 464,480,874 N Portland
AT&T Mobile Hotspot $100 0.54644809 54,644,809 Clackamas
Logitech 880 Harmony Remote Control $80 0.43715847 43,715,847 Oak Grove
Starbucks Verismo 585 Coffee Maker 250 1.36612022 136,612,022 Oak Grove
Schwinn S-15 Bike 169 0.92349727 92,349,727 Mcminneville
Sunlight Grow Light Controler $120 0.6557377 65,573,770 Hillsboro
Native Instruments Drum Machine $330 1.80327869 180,327,869 Beaverton
Yamaha APX500 Acoustic Electric Guitar $220 1.20218579 120,218,579 Beaverton
Kindle Keyboard $100 0.54644809 54,644,809 Portland
Nike Aero Thunder Fuse Baseball Bat $60 0.32786885 32,786,885 Corvallis

Many cities on Craigslist have stuff for sale in exchange for Bitcoin. At the time of our snapshot it appeared Los Angeles has the largest number of different sellers. Austin is distinguished in that it is the only city selling not one, but two different types of fertilized chicken eggs available in exchange for Bitcoin:

Update: Hello Digg and other folks. Gliph is a technology startup based in Portland, Oregon. If this is your first time hearing about Gliph, welcome!

Gliph is a digital identity platform that lets you send secure messages and complete transactions with people.  You can download our iPhone or Android app. We also have a great mobile web application.  You can follow the company on twitter @gli_ph.

Something awesome you can do right now with Gliph is protect your email address from spammers and scammers using Cloaked Email. Try it out!

New Gliph Facet: Bitcoin Wallet Address

Bitcoin Wallet Address Facet GliphWe’ve added a new Facet to Gliph accounts that lets you save and share a Bitcoin wallet address.

This means you can connect with another Gliph to discuss at transaction. If you decide to go through with it, you can use Gliph to securely share the wallet address.

New users signing up for Gliph will see “Bitcoin Address” in the list of Facets that may be bound. For existing users, you can now add a bitcoin address using the following steps:

On iPhone:
  1. In the Menu, choose Settings
  2. Tap the Edit button
  3. Scroll down to “Bind additional facets”
  4. Find “Bitcoin Address”

Gliph is Now Accepting Bitcoin Payments

We’re pleased to share that we now accept Bitcoin as a payment method for Gliph products, in addition to In-App Purchases (IAP) and traditional credit cards. Today, that means you can purchase additional Cloaked Email addresses, and add upgrades to your account using Bitcoin.

What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a new kind of money that is decentralized and not controlled by a single organization or government. You can send Bitcoins to other people and businesses around the globe without going through a bank. This means Bitcoin can be used in any country, and fees for sending the currency are very low.

Why did you decide to take Bitcoin?
Many of our users are privacy and security conscious folks and we have had requests for the company to take payment over Bitcoin since we launched Cloaked Email Pro. We also appreciate the following aspects of the Bitcoin currency:

  • Privacy – While Bitcoin was not designed for anonymity, it can be used in a way that abstracts transactions away from identity.
  • Security – Bitcoin uses mathematics to allow the network to create Bitcoins and validate transactions. The currency itself is not controlled by any particular institution.
  • Trust – You don’t need to trust anyone other than yourself and the person you’re sending money to. No one can get in the way of your transactions.

How do I pay Gliph with Bitcoin? Continue reading →

Introducing Selective Push, Privacy Protection for Push Notifications

Have you ever felt the need to turn your phone upside down so people won’t read a message in a push notification?

Today, in an update for iPhone and Android, we’re allowing you to choose which conversations you want to show up in push and which should stay locked up for viewing in the app.

So far, Gliph has only allowed push notifications to say “Someone sent you a message.” With this update, you can now choose to show the tag of who is sending you a message, and if you want, the content of the message as well.

Unique to Gliph, you can make these changes on a per-contact basis, meaning for one contact in Gliph you can show message content or tag in the push notifications, and for another show nothing at all.

Let’s look at an example, where another Gliph user you’re connected with and have tagged “Erin” sends you the message “Hey, what are you up to tonight?” The following three examples show how a Gliph Message push notification will appear using different settings:

 

How to Enable Message Content in Push Notifications on Gliph
Turning on message content in push notifications is just two taps from any conversation. We made a short video explanation of how to set up message content to show in push notifications. Here are written instructions:  Continue reading →

Gliph Opposes CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act

At Gliph, we take a conservative view toward user privacy. Gliph’s privacy policy is clear: a Gliph user’s Facet information belongs to them and remains under their control. Gliph offers specific features that give users privacy in their personal communications.

Like many internet companies, Gliph is based in the United States and is governed by the laws of this country. Gliph respects the United States’ need to maintain national security. However, Gliph opposes CISPA as proposed because the legislation conflates cybersecurity with surveillance and information sharing. CISPA significantly erodes the privacy of internet users.

What is CISPA?
At the time of this writing, CISPA is H.R. 624, (web, pdf), the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. CISPA is just a bill, which is a proposed piece of legislation that has the potential to become a federal law in the United States.

CISPA’s purpose is to help the United States investigate cyber threats and ensure the security of networks against cyber attacks. The bill aims to add legal framework for the sharing of information between private companies and the United States government.

Why Oppose CISPA?
Gliph appreciates the pressing global context around cybersecurity, yet is adamant about the preservation of civil liberty and personal privacy. We are joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Defense League in our opposition to this bill. You can learn about the below bulleted issues and more in the EFF’s page about the bill.

Here are some of the key issues with CISPA Gliph is concerned about: Continue reading →

Privacy Violations: Pollution of the Digital Revolution

Today’s Dropbox is a small but shining invention of our Digital Revolution. Technology startups are now designed to grow, and done successfully can be enormously profitable. Great software is empowering people by giving them efficient control over their social lives, financial plans, travel needs and health care in ways never before possible.

But the Digital Revolution is also introducing a new hazard with a wild and unpredictable impact: privacy violations.

The first drop box was invented by Robert Kay in 1760. It increased the speed and efficiency of fabric weaving and helped usher in the Industrial Revolution. For seventy years, advances in mechanics, chemistry and urbanization resulted in both unprecedented improvements to living standards and the foundation of the modern capitalist economy.

The swift change brought with it unintended consequences. Coal-burning factories choked citizens and darkened the sky with a mix of smoke and fog. In London, fatal outbreaks of Cholera resulted from draining raw sewage directly into the Thames. In Cleveland, oil refineries spilled crude into the Cuyahoga River causing it to catch fire three times in 1800s.

During the Industrial Revolution people paid the price of progress with the destruction of the environment. Today, we pay with our privacy. Continue reading →

Cloaked Email Updates: One-click Block, BCC Yourself, Lean Emails

Today we’re debuting some updates to Cloaked Email. All three changes are in direct response to feedback from people just like you. Remember to share your ideas and suggestions with us using the Support Gliph or by email at support at gli.ph

One-click Block
You can now click a link at the bottom of any email received over one of your Cloaked Email addresses to stop receiving email from a particular address. This super-opt-out feature allows you to avoid many hoops that companies make you go through to get off their email list.

If you accidentally block a sender, or change your mind and want to unblock someone, you can still do so. Under Cloaked Email, choose the Cloak you want to edit the block list for and then tap the Edit button to Unblock a particular address.

Copy Yourself on Outgoing Cloaked Email
You can now send yourself a copy of an outgoing email sent over Cloaked Email. The Chrome and Firefox plugins have been updated with a “Send me a copy” item that will copy you on outgoing emails sent via Cloaked Email. Some people describe this as BCCing themselves.

This feature is also available in the Gliph Mobile Web client (https://gli.ph), and will be a part of an upcoming release for iPhone. Here are some handy links to the Firefox and Chrome pages:

Lean Emails (Paid Feature)
We’ve added a new upgrade for Cloaked Email called Lean Emails. This paid option removes all promotional content from emails sent or received over Cloaked Email. We’ve added this in direct response to multiple requests for a paid option to remove Gliph company messaging from Cloaked Email.

This feature is currently for sale in the Gliph Web Store and will be a part of an upcoming release for iPhone in-app purchase.

The Official Company Gliphs: Support and Product Updates Gliph

The first thing you notice after signing up for Gliph is that you are connected to the Support Gliph and have an open inbound connection request from the Product Updates Gliph. This entry sheds a bit of light on what these Gliphs are.

The Support Gliph
The Support GliphThe Support Gliph is the primary channel for you to ask questions, make suggestions and communicate with the company.

This account is watched by a few of our team members, and we try to reply as soon as possible. Often we answer questions posed to the Support Gliph within minutes of receiving them.

The Product Updates Gliph
Product Updates GliphWe are often releasing improvements to the Gliph platform, sometimes the changes are rather small and don’t warrant an immediate email newsletter. The Product Updates Gliph is intended as a way for us to announce minor improvements and changes to the Gliph platform.

Company newsletters, and the Gliph Twitter feed continue to be good ways to stay up-to-date on changes, but if you connect with the Product Updates Gliph, you’ll be the first to know. These updates will come in the form of Gliph Messages, and if you have Push enabled, you’ll get them right away.

What Are You Sharing? Marking International Data Privacy Day with Gliph

We’d like to wish everyone a very happy 5th annual Data Privacy Day. For the fifth year in a row, the US, Canada and 27 other countries have marked January 28th as a day to “raise awareness of and generate discussion about data privacy rights and practices.”

A variety of companies and publications have released new articles or information to mark the day. Microsoft released results of a new survey of 1,000 US adults that shows privacy is becoming more important to people, yet a sense of powerlessness pervades.

In the key findings of the report, 45% of people feel they have little or no control over personal information gathered by companies about them. Below is a graphic that shows how much control people feel they have over personal information shared online: Continue reading →

Using Gliph with Fluid App for Secure Desktop IM and Messaging on Mac OS X

Gliph mobile web app in os x doc secure

Did you know that you can securely chat with friends using Gliph messaging from your desktop computer?

This blog entry explains how you can combine Gliph for the web with Fluid app to have secure IM conversation with friends and family from your desktop Mac. This is handy if you’re stuck behind a computer at work while your friends or family are out in the world on their mobile devices.

Why use Gliph Mobile Web
Gliph’s mobile web client is one of the least recognized yet differentiating aspects of the product. There aren’t many secure messaging solutions with clients supporting Android, iOS and the web concurrently. While the mobile web is built for mobile web browsers, it also works great on Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Unfortunately, like most web applications, it is easy to lose the Gliph web app among all the other browser windows that you have running. This is a bummer when you need to regularly switch back and forth between a Gliph messaging or Cloaked Email and your other desktop tasks.

Enter Fluid App. Fluid helps you turn web applications, (including Gmail and Pandora) into actual applications. It does this by creating a small instance of Safari and adding a fully executable binary to your Applications folder.  Here are some instructions on how to set up and configure Fluid app for Gliph: Continue reading →