BitCoin

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: BitCoin

Postby 8bitagent » Sat Dec 14, 2013 8:45 pm

JackRiddler » Fri Oct 18, 2013 11:21 am wrote:
Who uses the Deep Web?

Though the Deep Web does have its share of criminals and hackers (just like the surface web), it also serves some pretty important functions. For one thing, Tor software can be used by citizens in countries with governments that closely monitor their Internet activity and curtail their free speech. The Tor project, the 501c3 nonprofit that maintains the Tor network and software, states on their website that journalists, militaries, law enforcement, activists and whistleblowers use Tor.


Thanks, TIME!


Time, like NPR/Boing Boing/Buzzfeed/Pitchfork.com/Vice making sure we know what's hip and cool!
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
User avatar
8bitagent
 
Posts: 12243
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2007 6:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby 8bitagent » Sun Dec 15, 2013 4:07 am

from the onion, comes COINION...for all your bitcoin news! http://www.coinion.com/2013/12/14/obama ... es-change/
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
User avatar
8bitagent
 
Posts: 12243
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2007 6:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Dec 17, 2013 11:55 pm

.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/will-b ... er-of.html

In 2002, social networking hit really its stride with the launch of Friendster. Friendster used a degree of separation concept similar to that of the now-defunct SixDegrees.com, refined it into a routine dubbed the “Circle of Friends” (wherein the pathways connecting two people are displayed), and promoted the idea that a rich online community can exist only between people who truly have common bonds

Friendster was replaced by Myspace and Myspace was replaced by Facebook.
Google+ competes with Facebook.
Sina Weibo, Twitter and Linkedin are also significant players

Bitcoin is major cryptocurrency now but there are many others

Image

Bitcoin is open source software.
Linux is an open source operating system.
Will the future evolution of cryptocurrency follow something similar to the model operating systems ?

It seems very likely that there will be many more successful cryptocurrencies and variations for different purposes and with different backers.

The world economy has about $80 trillion in GDP and closing in on 1 quadrillion in total accumulated value and net worth.

The world foreign exchange market is $5.3 trillion per day.

Cryptocurrency has a long way to go.


Comments:

Brock_C • 6 days ago
One of the few things I'm certain of is that the value of a BitCoin is basically zero over the long term. It's completely useless as either money or a product.

What is useful is secure peer-to-peer payments and proof of ownership. The distributed but secure block chain is a brilliant invention. But the block chain is a ledger that currently only has one asset type on it (BitCoins). People own BTC because they have to in order to use the ledger. They don't actually want them except as a speculative "greater fool" strategy.

BitCoin has a number of other shortcomings. It's price volatility is just a symptom of that. Eventually something better will come along, and when that happens no one will need to hold BTC anymore and they will fall in price to their intrinsic value (zero).
6 1 •Reply•Share ›
Avatar
HoboJerky Brock_C • 6 days ago
Colored Coins is probably what you're thinking of. It would allow anyone in the world to pay bitcoins(the value) to receive "shares" of whatever(with the associated counter-party risk of course), with almost no friction. Would that be enough to bump it's value from zero to something?

This layer is almost here.
1 •Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Write In Vote • 6 days ago
It is a mistake to think Bitcoin is free of govt tampering. It may take till 2025 when there are 1 million qubit quantum computers to crack the hashing function, but the NSA designed it so by definition it's backdoored, and designed so that it cannot be replaced in a backwards compatible way. Bitcoin didn't catch the NSA off guard. The NSA were exploring virtual currencies as early as 1996 and they have a history of designing open source code, eg. Google Android.
1 •Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Tom_Craver Write In Vote • 6 days ago
Wouldn't it be cool if someday it comes out that one day the top officers at the NSA were sitting around complaining about how they feel bad and are unable to sleep because they were always being so evil, and one of them said "Yeah, we need to do something good to balance that all out." and another one said "Yeah, but what?" and after none of them could think up anything non-evil to do, one of them said "Hey, I know, lets create another NSA front company, except we'll give it just one mandate - 'Don't be evil - except when we tell you to' ! Then we can go on doing as much evil as we want, and still sleep at night!"

And so, Google was born... (For public consumption, they decided to shorten their slogan a bit.)
1 1 •Reply•Share ›
Avatar
gareththomasnz • 6 days ago
In a computing sense none of these currencies are "Green" in that they require redundant processing of data.

A "Green" currency would perform meaningful computation & provide distributed computing services while performing currency operations.

This is a wide open opportunity waiting to be implemented.
2 •Reply•Share ›
Avatar
HoboJerky gareththomasnz • 6 days ago
Again: What problems would these be, and how would this still allow the removal of counter-party risk from transactions?

Best bet is something like Peercoin, as noted by another user.
•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Andrew_notPorC gareththomasnz • 6 days ago
Check out PeerCoin, number three in the list above.
•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Galileo2 • 6 days ago
Does anyone have a link to an article that compares these cryptocurrencies to each other? Some of those Brian listed here I don't know much about.
1 •Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Jason Burbank Galileo2 • 6 days ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Galileo2 Jason Burbank • 6 days ago
Thanks!
1 •Reply•Share ›
Avatar
egallag • 6 days ago
I just don't get how these can be reasonably considered currencies, as a means of exchange or as a store of value. A game yes, pyramid scheme probably, conceptual art sure. What is the benefit really?
1 •Reply•Share ›
Avatar
egallag egallag • 6 days ago
Thanks for all the replies. It's interesting as hell I just don't see the benefit -but I said the same thing about YouTube 8 years ago and PCs 20 years ago and 25 years ago when at a bar my friend Nick was talking about chat rooms and message boards- I got in to an argument with him saying that there were not a bunch of rooms in the UofI English Philosophy building where random people went and argued about stuff.

http://www.theonion.com/articl...
•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
fpacc egallag • 6 days ago
An enviable record of failure. (Got any stock tips?)
•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
egallag fpacc • 5 days ago
I stick to index funds. It's mostly worked out ok.
•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Jason Burbank egallag • 6 days ago
Are you kidding? You have nothing in your wallet except pieces of paper and strips of magnetic tape. Currencies aren't the magical thing you think they are. They are just something that are easy to exchange and for which transactions are reliable. A nice bonus feature is a stable value.
2 •Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Camaxtli egallag • 6 days ago
Here is a really excellent introduction to what they are and why they are valuable and useful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Dec 18, 2013 12:00 am

.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/opini ... .html?_r=0

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Much Ado About Bitcoin
By ADRIAN CHEN
Published: November 26, 2013

FOR the obsessive followers of the volatile virtual currency bitcoin, the price of a single bitcoin at the time their fixation began holds undue significance. I know one bitcoin cost around $9 when I first stumbled on it in the summer of 2011. That was before I single-handedly sent the price of bitcoin soaring.

I wasn’t trying to manipulate an underground economy. I was just doing my job as a blogger for the website Gawker when I broke the story of the online underground illegal drug market Silk Road, on which bitcoin was the only accepted currency because of its relative anonymity. The article went viral and introduced hundreds of thousands to bitcoin.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, helped, too. During a news conference a couple of days after my article was published, he called bitcoin “an online form of money laundering.” I suppose a lot of people thought that sounded pretty cool. The price of bitcoin surged to $14.

Huh, I thought, maybe I should buy some bitcoin.

But I didn’t, and as of this writing, one bitcoin is worth around $880. Senate hearings held to discuss regulating bitcoin earlier this month were “lovefests,” according to The Washington Post. Abroad, Chinese investors are flocking. Bitcoin seems on the brink of respectability.

Still, there’s a zaniness about the currency. Bitcoin is built on a weird mix of the most old-fashioned kind of speculative greed, bolstered by a contemporary utopian cyberlibertarian ideology. Boosters say that bitcoin is the currency of the future. I’d argue that the phenomenon is a digital gold rush perfectly emblematic of the present.

Some of bitcoin’s appeal comes from the fact that it does not physically exist. Each bitcoin is just a string of numbers. Instead of a bank, a decentralized network of computers ensures the authenticity of bitcoin and issues new ones by doing complex calculations. This allows bitcoin to be traded peer to peer, bypassing credit card companies and payment processors. It’s digital cash, offering the same relative anonymity and freedom as a paper sack of bills. WikiLeaks began accepting bitcoin donations in 2011 in order to bypass PayPal and credit card companies, which had frozen payments to the organization.

The WikiLeaks episode hints at the utopian promise built into bitcoin by its creator, a mysterious programmer called Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is a subject of dispute and intrigue. The ideas behind bitcoin can be traced to a 1988 tract called the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, which loftily predicted a future where anonymity-protecting technology made state control of the market impossible. Everything would be for sale to anyone all the time, 100 percent tax-free. Many of bitcoin’s hard-core fans see the currency as a revolutionary step toward this anarchocapitalist wonderland.

I’m skeptical. I don’t think we’ll all be paying in bitcoin for tickets to Kanye West’s 2024 presidential victory tour. You can’t use bitcoin for much today besides gambling in online casinos and reserving seats on Virgin Galactic spaceflights, and a vast majority of it is held by speculators. Even with the imprimatur of government regulation, the promise of bitcoin seems to end with helping online retailers avoid credit-card processing fees. Bitcoin is mainly innovative in the way of credit default swaps: new ways to gamble with money.

Bitcoin is most interesting on an emotional level. Its sheen of technomagic has let uber-rational geeks treat the casino-floor frenzy as a serious technological story. Tech blogs breathlessly track the price of bitcoin. Each new business that accepts bitcoin is heralded with the fanfare of a despot opening his country’s borders to a new, previously outlawed luxury. The drumbeat suggests that getting rich is as simple as being an early adopter.

So many have bought in because the Internet is very good at stoking the fear of missing out. There’s even a trendy acronym, FOMO, to describe the anxiety inspired by scrolling through the social media accounts of people having more fun than you. Bitcoin fosters a particularly potent brand of FOMO. Recently there was the story of the Norwegian 20-something who discovered that his long-forgotten bitcoin, bought for basically nothing, was worth so much that he traded some of it to buy an apartment. Bitcoin holders have taken to posting screenshots of their swollen accounts. I know a guy who bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of bitcoin as a sort of joke years ago. Now he’s made enough to buy a nice car.

All I can say is that the crash is going to be great. Bitcoin is too dependent on speculative mania to be of practical use as a currency. But as a symbol of the misguided dream that one can tap into the global data stream and download riches like a pop song, it’s gold.

Adrian Chen is a freelance journalist and an editor at The New Inquiry.

COMMENTS:

MillyBitcoinAtlantic CityNYT Pick
It is a bubble on top of volatility on top of a steady increase. Just because the price is in a bubble at the moment does not necessarily mean the who thing is a bubble or it is going to crash to nothing. the media likes to cover the anarcho-capitalist angle while the investors and innovators see it as fixing a broken payment system.
Nov. 27, 2013 at 8:15 a.m.RECOMMENDED8

CapelaavaBangkokNYT Pick
The original thought to use bit coins a a a form of payment and avoid many fee associated with at has up to this point failed. At is inception in functioned in that way especially on sites such as Silk Road. Now it is to expensive to be used for payment purposes. It has become a speculative type of commodity and the commodity is "dreams with nothing behind except the next person buying it. A form of 'Ponzi"
It is at $864 per BTC now. More than apple or goggle stock. You can lose or gain dramatically in a single day. One day the Chinese will be hit hard and the price will drop hundreds of dollars in 1 day. Ponzi, stock, commodity, dreams, gambling, greed, foolishness. adda few more adjectives if you want. The more expensive it gets the harder it will be to sell . Risking 10 bucks BTC is not like risking $900 per BTC. Who can continue to play the game at that price.
Nov. 27, 2013 at 8:18 a.m.RECOMMENDED25

Fintan CostelloIrelandNYT Pick
I'm not organised enough to use BitCoins: if I bought any I would surely lose track of the keys identifying them at some point. However, I don't think BitCoin is going to have a significant crash. This is because BitCoins have at least 2 sources of value: speculative value (someone thinks "I'll buy BitCoins now because they will go up in value and I'll be able to sell them at a profit later") and intrinsic value (someone thinks "I'll buy BitCoins now because I want to buy something illegal, and with BitCoin I can do that without being traced"). The more effective enforcement and tracing procedures for standard currency becomes, the greater the intrinsic value for BitCoin will be. Since it is hard to imagine these enforcement and tracking procedures becoming less effective in the future, it is clear that BitCoin's intrinsic value will rise. Since BitCoin's intrinsic value will rise in the future, by this reasoning, BitCoin will continue to have a speculative value in the future also (people thinking "I know BitCoin's intrinsic value will rise in the future, so I'll buy some now and sell them at a profit later").
Nov. 27, 2013 at 9:36 a.m.RECOMMENDED6

Jeff BNYCNYT Pick
Truly, we must be living in that dystopian future predicted in so many bad sci-fi novels when people take Bitcoin seriously.

Their leading exchange (MT.GOX) was originally a trading platform developed to sell online Magic the Gathering cards (it really does stand for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange). Not real Magic The Gathering cards, mind you but their online facsimiles!

The curious thing about the rise in the price of Bitcoin is that it's major use (buying narcotics via the Silk Road) is impossible now because the FBI shut down the site and arrested its founder for soliciting the murder of three people (paid, of course, through Bitcoin).

In addition to the fact that it can no longer be used to buy narcotics, the various exchanges are no longer able to cash out Bitcoins into US dollars or are limited in doing so. Mt. Gox and the other sites have difficulty cashing out into USD. So all you can do with your Bitcoins is...buy more Bitcoins (and keep the price soaring upwards with miniscule amounts of trading).

At this point, in order to get your money out (you know, so you can pay bills and buy food) I guess if one wishes, you could go to Vancouver and use the ATM some bitcoin fanatics installed in a coffee shop to transfer their bitcoins into an actual useful currency.

In the end, maybe people will learn that rampant and hype-fueled speculation based on something without any social utility is not a sound investment strategy.
Nov. 27, 2013 at 9:38 a.m.RECOMMENDED29

JP TolinsMinneapolisNYT Pick
In any speculative commodity or asset bubble, when they start writing about it in the NY Times, it's too late to climb aboard.
Nov. 27, 2013 at 9:38 a.m.RECOMMENDED60

William FairmanColumbia, MONYT Pick
Monetary instruments in the form of gold, US dollars, bit coins are all worth only what people will "pay." Your precious gold cannot be eaten and cannot be transported very far on your back, but it does have some intrinsic value as trinkets or a great conductor of electricity. US Dollars work as long as people the world over believe that the US Government will fulfill it's commitments and that our government will continue to transfer power peacefully and that our economy continues to hum. Bit coins have other virtues (especially for illegal transactions) and are worth what folks will "pay."

Anyone one who believes one form of currency is absolute in it's worth is fooling themselves. Every form of currency is a bet; some more volatile than others.

When dollars are valued in bit coins instead of bit coins valued in dollars, I'll be impressed.
In reply to karlostjNov. 27, 2013 at 9:51 a.m.RECOMMENDED22

David TroyBaltimore, MDNYT Pick
Yes, Bitcoin, as a currency and value store, will prove to be very volatile and yet another fad. However, to focus on *holding* bitcoins is missing the point. What's interesting is its transactional aspects. Bitcoin may be the future of digital transactions, which means it can potentially disrupt everything from Square, Paypal, EFT, ACH, banks, etc.

Consider developing nations, where banking infrastructure is poor or does not yet exist. In the same way that those places leapfrogged wireline technology and went straight to wireless, they can bypass banks and go straight to peer-to-peer electronic transactions using a smartphone. That's truly disruptive.
Nov. 27, 2013 at 10:14 a.m.RECOMMENDED19

Jameson LoppNCNYT Pick
Um, Bitcoin is not "too expensive" to use for payment purposes, as it is devisible to 8 decimal places. It's perfectly feasible to perform microtransactions via Bitcoin in amounts that equate to pennies.
In reply to CapelaavaNov. 27, 2013 at 10:14 a.m.RECOMMENDED9

CraigChelsea, NYCNYT Pick
Part of the system design is a controlled release of coins through mining up until a certain amount. After which, no more will be made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
In reply to William DavisNov. 27, 2013 at 10:38 a.m.RECOMMENDED1

JeffNew YorkNYT Pick
Unfortunately, the situations are exactly comparable. A limited supply of a commodity, demand growing to increase price, increasing price causing speculators to buy them to ride the increasing price, price rising above underlying value. Classic definition of a bubble. And they always have to crash. Something will happen to cause some big holders to sell, the price will start to fall, the bulk of the populace will try to get out before losing their investment and the crash happens.

The creators of Bitcoin guaranteed that result by limiting the total number that will be created. Unless they change their mind and remove the cap on Bitcoins, and allow the quantity to fluctuate, tulips and Bitcoins will forever be entwined it economic studies of completely unnecessary bubbles.
In reply to portwineboyNov. 27, 2013 at 10:40 a.m.RECOMMENDED15

CAMichiganNYT Pick
It's not at all clear why shiny rocks should enjoy a monopoly on value. I mean, I seem to have an amazingly easy time exchange these pieces of paper in my pocket for goods and services considering how worthless they supposedly are.

Gold is admittedly sometimes nice to look at, depending on one's taste, but what's the functional difference between a Bitcoin, a ”peice of paper”, and a shiny rock?

I will say, at this point, only one has a military, police force, and banking institutions to protect its value, and it's also the only one you can use to pay your taxes. That's about as real as money gets, even if it is "only" paper.

Constitutions and contracts are printed on paper too. Care to argue those aren't real either? Would you have us chisel them onto gold tablets before you concede their reality?

But, you know, if you're so convinced of the worthlessness of paper currency, I volunteer to take the inconvenient stuff off your hands free of charge!


http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/ ... d-to-fail/

A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail
BY EDWARD HADAS
The developers of bitcoin are trying to show that money can be successfully privatized. They will fail, because money that is not issued by governments is always doomed to failure. Money is inevitably a tool of the state.

Bitcoin relies on thoroughly contemporary technology. It consists of computer-generated tokens, with sophisticated algorithms guaranteeing the anonymity, transparency and integrity of transactions. But the monetary philosophy behind this web-based phenomenon can be traced back to one of the oldest theories of money.

Economists have long declared that currencies are essentially a tool to increase the efficiency of barter, which they consider the foundation of all organized economic activity. In this view, money is a convenient instrument used by individuals to get things done. It is not inherently part of the apparatus of government.

I think of the concept of privately issued tender as “right money,” because the whole idea appeals instinctively to right-wing thinkers. They dislike centralized authority of all sorts, including monetary authority. For example, Friedrich Hayek, Margaret Thatcher’s favorite economist, proposed replacing the state’s monopoly on legal tender with competing currencies offered by rival banks.

Mr. Hayek presumably would have approved of bitcoin. The currency’s issuer is an unknown computer programmer, about as far from a government as can be imagined. Right now, bitcoin is tiny; at the current exaggerated exchange rate, the total projected volume of “coins” is worth less than the gross domestic product of Mongolia. Still, Mr. Hayek might well have dreamed of bitcoins becoming a global currency for wages, prices and loans. He would, though, have hoped for a more stable value, not the increase from $13 to $900 per bitcoin in less than a year.

But the right-money historical narrative is simply wrong, as the anthropologist David Graeber explains in his book ”Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” Straightforward barter played a tiny role in all premodern economies. Instead, what we think of as purely economic activity was inseparable from an intricate structure of social relationships and spiritual beliefs. Purely commercial activity was rare — and it almost always relied on some form of government-issued money. Barter was not the precursor to money; it has always been the inferior alternative.

So it is not surprising that barter economies only develop when governments break down. Similarly, truly private money is an inferior alternative to the money that comes with the backing of a political authority. After all, no bank or bitcoin-emitter can be as public-minded as a government, and no private power can raise taxes or pass laws to unwind monetary excesses.

In short, while the freedom promised by right money may be ideologically appealing, monetary relations are too closely interwoven with other economic, political and social relations to be managed well by any institution with less sway than a government. The detailed work of money creation can be delegated to independent central banks and to a credit system of regulated private banks, but the ultimate authority of any functioning monetary system will always be the ultimate political authority.

Bitcoin exemplifies some of the problems of private money: Its value is uncertain, its legal status is unclear, and it could easily become valueless if users lose faith. Besides, if bitcoin ever really started to take off, governments would either ban it or take over the system. The authorities might be motivated by a genuine concern about the stability of a shadow monetary system or they might act out of self-preservation. Tax evasion would be too easy in a right-money parallel economy.

Mr. Hayek thought left-wing thinkers ignored the dangers of big government. He may have been right, but his idealism cannot overturn reality. All effective money is state-backed — what could be called “left money.”

Of course, the global monetary system has suffered from appalling management in recent years. The authorities, especially in the United States, first allowed banks to act almost as if they were in a right-money world, lending and speculating wildly. That led to a typical right-money disaster — a sudden loss of trust and the failure of leading institutions. The authorities rescued the financial system, but their monetary system still cannot provide steady support to the rest of the economy.

The outcome could have been much worse. Banks are still in business and consumer inflation rates are generally low. Still, the typical current combination of low interest rates, large government deficits and high ratios of debt to G.D.P. amounts to an invitation to monetary accidents.

Part of the interest in virtual currencies like bitcoin is that their anonymity can provide a convenient cloak for criminal activity. Part is technological — this is a cool idea. And part is speculative — gamblers bet that bitcoin’s value will increase.

But I suspect another important factor is political: Bitcoin appeals because governments are not fully living up to the responsibility that comes with state-sponsored money. Bitcoin, or something like it, will thrive until the authorities do better.


Edward Hadas is economics editor at Reuters Breakingviews. For more independent commentary and analysis, visit breakingviews.com.



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/sunda ... ology.html

NEWS ANALYSIS
The Bitcoin Ideology
By ALAN FEUER
Published: December 14, 2013

IF you’ve only recently tuned in to the seemingly endless conversation about bitcoin, you could be forgiven for thinking that the digital currency is little more than the latest Wall Street fetish or a juiced-up version of PayPal. After all, so many headlines in the last few weeks have focused on its market price and the cool stuff you can get with it: Bitcoin breaks $1,000! Bitcoin plunges by a half! Bitcoin has a banner Black Friday! Use bitcoin to buy a ride on Richard Branson’s starship!

But all the talk about bitcoin’s value (or lack thereof) obscures the fact that it was never really meant as an investment nor primarily as a way to purchase sex toys or alpaca socks — let alone a brand-new Lamborghini. One could argue that bitcoin isn’t chiefly a commercial venture at all, a funny thing to say about a kind of online cash. To its creators and numerous disciples, bitcoin is — and always has been — a mostly ideological undertaking, more philosophy than finance.

“The ideas behind it — that’s what attracted me,” said Elizabeth Ploshay, a regular writer for Bitcoin magazine, which describes its mission as being “the most accurate and up-to-date source of information, news and commentary about bitcoin.” And if the magazine has a mission, so, too, does the subject that it covers. As Ms. Ploshay explained it, bitcoin isn’t merely money; it’s “a movement” — a crusade in the costume of a currency. Depending on whom you talk to, the goal is to unleash repressed economies, to take down global banking or to wage a war against the Federal Reserve.

For those with an uncertain understanding of its history, bitcoin entered the world on Jan. 3, 2009, when a shadowy hacker — or team of hackers — working under the name Satoshi Nakamoto released an ingenious string of computer code that established a system permitting people to transfer money to one another online, directly, anonymously and outside government control, in much the way that Napster once allowed the unrestrained transfer of music files. In a 500-word essay that accompanied the code, Nakamoto suggested that the motive for creating bitcoin was anger at the financial crisis: “The root problem with conventional currencies is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.”

It was fundamentally a political document and, as such, it attracted followers among libertarian and anarchist groups who saw in bitcoin a means of removing the money supply from the grasping hands of government. In blog posts and at bitcoin conferences around the globe, these evangelists began to spread its gospel. It is only in the last few months, as bitcoin has attracted the attention of political parties, regulators and speculative investors that the narrative of bitcoin as a tool for change has been drowned out by a simpler story line: that of bitcoin as a kind of crypto-credit card — or, even more, as a digitized casino game.

“Price is the least interesting thing about bitcoin,” said Roger Ver, an early investor who is often called, in a typical movement phrase, the Bitcoin Jesus. “At first, almost everyone who got involved did so for philosophical reasons. We saw bitcoin as a great idea, as a way to separate money from the state.”

While the bitcoin hype has inspired Ron Paulian dreams of evading inflation and undermining the Federal Reserve, the currency has also gained cachet among less conspicuously conservative adherents, like the founders of BitPesa, a start-up firm in Nairobi, Kenya, that plans to help Africans abroad send money to their families at home. According to the World Bank, $1.3 billion in remittances is sent each year to Kenya, a process that costs about $110 million in fees. By using bitcoin’s peer-to-peer technology to avoid banks and wire-transfer companies like Western Union, BitPesa hopes to reduce these fees by a third, saving ordinary Africans $74 million annually.

You know you’re talking to a true bitcoin believer if you hear the word “disruption.” But that’s how bitcoin is seen within the broader movement: as an unruly tool with potentially transformative effects on entrenched businesses like retail payment and asset management.

“Right now in the United States, bitcoin is mainly considered a get-rich-quick scheme with a little financial privacy thrown in,” said Jon Matonis, the executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation, the self-proclaimed center of the decentralized crusade. “But its larger implications down the road are major disruptions to certain legacy industries.”

Mr. Matonis added that the ideology of bitcoin was wide enough to accommodate people on all points on the spectrum — “from libertarian capitalists to socialists.” It not only has a following among the anti-central bank crowd, he said; it has also proved attractive to communitarians like the residents of the Kreuzberg neighborhood in Berlin, which now boasts the highest density of businesses accepting bitcoin in the world.

There are even those who see bitcoin as the ultimate alternative to the global banking system. Ryan Singer, a co-founder of the bitcoin exchange Tradehill, based in San Francisco, compared the currency to email, conjecturing that it would gradually supplant traditional banking, just as digital messaging displaced handwritten letters. “When kids wake up to the fact that they don’t need their parents’ help to create a bitcoin wallet,” Mr. Singer said, “when they can use bitcoins for free international transactions, at any hour, in every major city on the planet, then you’ll know that something has changed.”

Perhaps the best proof of bitcoin’s ideological underpinnings is that a schism has emerged in recent weeks between moderate elements in the movement who sense the necessity of cooperating with officialdom, and a more uncompromising faction that wants to keep bitcoin free from any government regulation. The hard-line bloc is exemplified by the crypto-anarchist developers of a bitcoin product called Dark Wallet, which is scheduled to be introduced next year and will include extra protections to ensure that bitcoin transactions remain secure, anonymous and difficult to trace.

“We see this as part of the total sublation of the state,” said Cody Wilson, Dark Wallet’s director, who gained fame earlier this year when he published online the blueprints to a pistol that could be manufactured with a 3-D printer. “I know I sound like some kind of weird Jehovah’s Witness, but we’ve only just begun. We admit that we are ideologues.”

Alan Feuer is a metropolitan reporter for The New York Times.
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Dec 18, 2013 4:44 pm

.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101281272


NOSEDIVE

The price of bitcoin has plummeted by 50 percent since record highs in late November, with selling accelerating on Wednesday after reports that the People's Bank of China (PBoC) has ordered third-party payment providers to stop using the virtual currency.

The price of a bitcoin fell to below $600 after stabilizing near $800 for the last couple of weeks after a price slump from $1,200 in late November. At 8 a.m. London time on Wednesday the currency was trading at $555 on major exchange Mt Gox and $550 on CoinDesk's index, which measures a basket of prices around the world.

China's central bank has ordered third-party payment agencies - which provide clearing services for bitcoin exchanges - to stop any "custody, trading and other services" related to the virtual currency, according to a report Tuesday by Yicai.com. The Chinese website - which is affiliated with the China Business Network TV station - added that platforms were told to end working relationships with virtual currency exchanges before Chinese New Year which commences at the end of January.

Zhou Jinhuang, the deputy director of payment clearance at the People's Bank of China is reported to have chaired the closed-door meeting on Monday when more than 10 third-party payment platforms were given the news. Attendees included a representative from Alipay, which is China's leading third-party online payment solution, according to its website.

BTC China, the world's largest bitcoin exchange, according to Bitcoinity.org, stopped accepting deposits in Chinese yuan on Wednesday due to the clampdown. Bobby Lee, the CEO of BTC China told CNBC that he had received notice from his third-party payment processor on Wednesday.

"They essentially have cut us off from allowing customer deposits into BTC China's bitcoin exchange," he said. "Customers don't have to worry, the deposits are still here, the withdrawals will still be allowed. So there's no need to panic on that."

Lee added that he believes the recent clampdown is not due to government officials in the country fearing that bitcoin is helping customers to move yuan out of China. "Bitcoin exchanges are legal...so our business model is still valid but we're under some pressure in terms of being able to work with third-party payment companies. So we're looking for alternatives," he said.

Bitcoin: Fad of all fads?

BTC China only deals with bitcoin yuan trades due to the strict currency controls in the country. Lee said that his company did not have any near-term plans to look at other currencies. Zennon Kapron, founder of Shanghai-based financial consultancy group Kapronasia, agrees with Lee that the clampdown wasn't necessarily due to fears of capital outflows.

"The wealthy in China have always found ways, ether legally or illegally, to move their money out of the country," he told CNBC via telephone. He said that hints from the central bank that bitcoin exchanges were still legal meant there were "mixed messages" from the government. Chinese curbs may have hit the price of bitcoin hard but Kapron believes that the U.S. still plays a major role in the industry and it remains to be seen how U.S. authorities will regulate the digital currency.

As well as the news from China, the U.S. Treasury Department also offered a warning on bitcoin on Wednesday. The Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has sent "industry outreach" letters to about a dozen firms, according to Reuters, which highlights that businesses linked with bitcoin may have to comply with federal law and regulation as money transmitters.

Confidence in bitcoin?
Silicon Valley guru Mark Andreessen's firm is investing $25 million in Coinbase, which is reportedly the largest-ever investment in a bitcoin-related company, reports CNBC's Mary Thompson.
Bitcoin is a "virtual" currency that allows users to exchange online credits for goods and services. While there is no central bank that issues them, bitcoins can be created online by using a computer to complete difficult tasks, a process known as mining. Some 12 million bitcoins are believed to be in circulation, with a cap of 21 million — meaning no more bitcoins can be created after that point.

The initial fall in price in early December coincided with a statement released on the website of China's central bank which warned of the risks that the crypto currency posed. It warned that Chinese financial institutions should not trade the digital currency saying that while it does not yet pose a threat to China's financial system, it carries risks.

Its surge to over $1,000 in November was attributed partly to increased interest from Chinese users as well as favorable comments by regulatory officials at a U.S. Senate hearing in November. Former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder has been quoted as saying that the crypto currency shows "promise".

BTC China exchange is now believed to have the highest number of registered users and received $5 million in November from institutional investors Lightspeed China Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Chinese search engine Baidu announced in October that it had started to accept bitcoin for its security service. This came after Chinese state television company CCTV broadcast a documentary detailing the digital currency in the summer. Many analysts see that as a key point at which interest in bitcoin increased.

Downloads of bitcoin wallets surged in China in the days following the documentary, according to statistics from SourceForge, rising to second place in the global ranking behind the United States. Bitcoincharts.com has data that shows the Chinese yuan is the second most traded currency pair with bitcoin after the U.S. dollar.

— CNBC.com's Matt Clinch. Follow him on Twitter
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby cptmarginal » Thu Dec 19, 2013 11:25 am

Who Owns the World’s Biggest Bitcoin Wallet? The FBI

Who owns the single largest Bitcoin wallet on the internet? The U.S. government.

In September, the FBI shut down the Silk Road online drug marketplace, and it started seizing bitcoins belonging to the Dread Pirate Roberts — the operator of the illicit online marketplace, who they say is an American man named Ross Ulbricht.

The seizure sparked an ongoing public discussion about the future of Bitcoin, the world’s most popular digital currency, but it had an unforeseen side-effect: It made the FBI the holder of the world’s biggest Bitcoin wallet.

The FBI now controls more than 144,000 bitcoins that reside at a bitcoin address that consolidates much of the seized Silk Road bitcoins. Those 144,000 bitcoins are worth close to $100 million at Tuesday’s exchange rates. Another address, containing Silk Road funds seized earlier by the FBI, contains nearly 30,000 bitcoins ($20 million).


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/144000_%28number%29

:D

Jehovah's Witnesses believe that exactly 144,000 faithful Christian men and women from Pentecost of 33 CE until the present day will be resurrected to heaven as immortal spirit beings to spend eternity with God and Christ. They believe that these people are "anointed" by God to become part of the spiritual "Israel of God".[6][7] They believe the 144,000 (which they consider to be synonymous with the "little flock" of Luke 12:32) will serve with Christ as king-priests for a thousand years, while all other people accepted by God (the "other sheep" of John 10:16, composed of "the great crowd" of Revelation 7:9,14 and the resurrected "righteous and the unrighteous" ones of Acts 24:15), will be given an opportunity to live forever in a restored paradise on earth. According to the Witnesses, the first of the 144,000 were resurrected in 1918 and others who die thereafter are immediately resurrected to heaven.[8][9]


"other sheep"

Because most bitcoin addresses haven’t been publicly identified — like the FBI’s — it’s hard to say exactly makes up the new Bitcoin top 10. Meiklejohn says that they’re likely to include wallets created by up-and-coming Bitcoin exchanges or businesses. One of them is the wallet that’s thought to contain 96,000 bitcoins stolen from the Silk-Road successor, Sheep Marketplace.


:partyhat

The satirical Church of the Subgenius believes that somewhere between 144,000 and 144 people will be taken with the Xists aboard the pleasure saucers.
cptmarginal
 
Posts: 2741
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:32 pm
Location: Gordita Beach
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby MayDay » Thu Dec 19, 2013 11:23 pm

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... -in-a.html
Found this on BoinBoing today, my other haunt on the web:
Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
By Charlie Stross

Bitcoin just crashed 50% today, on news that the Chinese government has banned local exchanges from accepting deposits in Yuan. BtC was trading over $1000 yesterday; now it's down to $500 and still falling.

Good.

I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: this is a start, but it's not sufficient. Let me give you a round-up below the cut.

Like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached. Decisions we take about how to manage money, taxation, and the economy have consequences: by its consequences you may judge a finance system. Our current global system is pretty crap, but I submit that Bitcoin is worst.

For starters, BtC is inherently deflationary. There is an upper limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be created ('mined', in the jargon: new bitcoins are created by carrying out mathematical operations which become progressively harder as the bitcoin space is explored—like calculating ever-larger prime numbers, they get further apart). This means the the cost of generating new Bitcoins rises over time, so that the value of Bitcoins rise relative to the available goods and services in the market. Less money chasing stuff; less cash for everybody to spend (as the supply of stuff out-grows the supply of money). Hint: Deflation and Inflation are two very different things; in particular, deflation is not the opposite of inflation (although you can't have both deflation and inflation simultaneously—you get one disease or the other).

Bitcoin is designed to be verifiable (forgery-resistant) but pretty much untraceable,and very easy to hide. Easier than a bunch of gold coins, anyway. And easier to ship to the opposite side of the planet at the push of a button.

Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency". You can visualize it as some kind of scarce precious data resource, sort of a digital equivalent of gold. Nation-states don't control the supply of it, so it promises to bypass central banks.

But there are a number of huge down-sides. Here's a link-farm to the high points:

Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell (as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars). This essay has some questionable numbers, but the underlying principle is sound.

Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware.

Bitcoin violates Gresham's law: Stolen electricity will drive out honest mining. (So the greatest benefits accrue to the most ruthless criminals.)

Bitcoin's utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination (and drugs and child pornography).

It's also inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society. You think our wonderful investment bankers aren't paying their fair share of taxes? Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion. Moreover, The Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia, and the "if this goes on" linear extrapolations imply that BtC will badly damage stable governance, not to mention redistributive taxation systems and social security/pension nets if its value continues to soar (as it seems designed to do due to its deflationary properties).

To editorialize briefly, BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Which is fine if you're a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).

TL:DR; the current banking industry and late-period capitalism may suck, but replacing it with Bitcoin would be like swapping out a hangnail for Fournier's gangrene. (NSFL danger: do not click that link)
User avatar
MayDay
 
Posts: 350
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2012 7:30 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Dec 26, 2013 3:09 pm

Via: [url]BitCoinTalk Forum[/url]

So Logically

1994 => NSA publishes paper on Electronic Currencies

1998 => Nick Szabo conceives bitgold

1999 => Circle is founded. Possible joint venture between Szabo Karpeles, and others.

2000 => Mark Karpeles registers bitcoins.com


2004 => Bitpay is founded, paving the way for a ready to roll bitcoin payment processor.

2004 => Mt Gox is founded, paving the way for a bitcoin exchange.

2008 => Bitcoin.org is registered.

2009 => Bitcoin is launched by Satoshi Nakamoto



correct me if i'm wrong but... whooooaaaa


And a good comment:

A lot of people saw Bitcoin coming. Few people envisioned it exactly the way it works now.
Nobody knew the full solution on how to create it so it would actually work, but there was a large crowd of mathematicians, cryptography enthusiasts and early digital currency developers who were looking into this. Hashcash was invented by Adam Back in 1997 mind you. Some people today were already trying to invent proof-of-work based currencies 10 years earliers and the public somehow lost interest. Plenty of fiction back then was already talking about the idea of digital credits. The words 'bit-coin' and 'bit-gold' 'e-gold' 'e-cash' were pretty popular.


And ARIN link: http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/r ... tcoins.com
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby nomo » Fri Dec 27, 2013 12:43 am

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/opini ... arism.html?

Bits and Barbarism
By PAUL KRUGMAN



This is a tale of three money pits. It’s also a tale of monetary regress — of the strange determination of many people to turn the clock back on centuries of progress.

The first money pit is an actual pit — the Porgera open-pit gold mine in Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s top producers. The mine has a terrible reputation for both human rights abuses (rapes, beatings and killings by security personnel) and environmental damage (vast quantities of potentially toxic tailings dumped into a nearby river). But gold prices, while down from their recent peak, are still three times what they were a decade ago, so dig they must.

The second money pit is a lot stranger: the Bitcoin mine in Reykjanesbaer, Iceland. Bitcoin is a digital currency that has value because ... well, it’s hard to say exactly why, but for the time being at least people are willing to buy it because they believe other people will be willing to buy it. It is, by design, a kind of virtual gold. And like gold, it can be mined: you can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that require both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the computers.

Hence the location in Iceland, which has cheap electricity from hydropower and an abundance of cold air to cool those furiously churning machines. Even so, a lot of real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use.

The third money pit is hypothetical. Back in 1936 the economist John Maynard Keynes argued that increased government spending was needed to restore full employment. But then, as now, there was strong political resistance to any such proposal. So Keynes whimsically suggested an alternative: have the government bury bottles full of cash in disused coal mines, and let the private sector spend its own money to dig the cash back up. It would be better, he agreed, to have the government build roads, ports and other useful things — but even perfectly useless spending would give the economy a much-needed boost.

Clever stuff — but Keynes wasn’t finished. He went on to point out that the real-life activity of gold mining was a lot like his thought experiment. Gold miners were, after all, going to great lengths to dig cash out of the ground, even though unlimited amounts of cash could be created at essentially no cost with the printing press. And no sooner was gold dug up than much of it was buried again, in places like the gold vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where hundreds of thousands of gold bars sit, doing nothing in particular.

Keynes would, I think, have been sardonically amused to learn how little has changed in the past three generations. Public spending to fight unemployment is still anathema; miners are still spoiling the landscape to add to idle hoards of gold. (Keynes dubbed the gold standard a “barbarous relic.”) Bitcoin just adds to the joke. Gold, after all, has at least some real uses, e.g., to fill cavities; but now we’re burning up resources to create “virtual gold” that consists of nothing but strings of digits.

I suspect, however, that Adam Smith would have been dismayed.

Smith is often treated as a conservative patron saint, and he did indeed make the original case for free markets. It’s less often mentioned, however, that he also argued strongly for bank regulation — and that he offered a classic paean to the virtues of paper currency. Money, he understood, was a way to facilitate commerce, not a source of national prosperity — and paper money, he argued, allowed commerce to proceed without tying up much of a nation’s wealth in a “dead stock” of silver and gold.

So why are we tearing up the highlands of Papua New Guinea to add to our dead stock of gold and, even more bizarrely, running powerful computers 24/7 to add to a dead stock of digits?

Talk to gold bugs and they’ll tell you that paper money comes from governments, which can’t be trusted not to debase their currencies. The odd thing, however, is that for all the talk of currency debasement, such debasement is getting very hard to find. It’s not just that after years of dire warnings about runaway inflation, inflation in advanced countries is clearly too low, not too high. Even if you take a global perspective, episodes of really high inflation have become rare. Still, hyperinflation hype springs eternal.

Bitcoin seems to derive its appeal from more or less the same sources, plus the added sense that it’s high-tech and algorithmic, so it must be the wave of the future.

But don’t let the fancy trappings fool you: What’s really happening is a determined march to the days when money meant stuff you could jingle in your purse. In tropics and tundra alike, we are for some reason digging our way back to the 17th century.
User avatar
nomo
 
Posts: 3388
Joined: Tue Jul 26, 2005 1:48 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby justdrew » Fri Dec 27, 2013 1:38 am

By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
User avatar
justdrew
 
Posts: 11966
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 7:57 pm
Location: unknown
Blog: View Blog (11)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Mar 06, 2014 3:48 pm

.

Just a bit of catching up Re: recent developments in the last few weeks:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2105280/ ... osion.html

10 things you need to know about Mt. Gox's Bitcoin implosion

How do half a billion dollars vanish into thin air? That seems to be what happened at popular Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, which made a a bankruptcy protection filing in Japan last week.

The staggering, unprecedented loss of about 850,000 bitcoins, worth roughly $474 million, has prompted investors, government officials and journalists to scrutinize the Tokyo-based exchange, but clear facts are few. It seems that no one knew exactly what was going on inside Mt. Gox, even CEO Mark Karpeles, who apologized at a press conference for “weaknesses in the system.”

The case remains murky but we’ve taken a stab at answering some of your questions based on what we know so far.

What is Mt. Gox, anyway?
Mt. Gox started as a market for trading cards used in the “Magic: The Gathering” fantasy game, but diversified in 2010 into an exchange for bitcoin, a little-known virtual currency launched a year prior. It rapidly became the dominant bitcoin exchange due to a lack of competitors, and was run by CEO Mark Karpeles, a Frenchman. The site had 1 million customers as of December 2013, according to a document posted on the web last week that purported to be a leaked business plan.

How did it go from bonanza to bust?
Success seems to have bred complacency at the highest levels of Mt. Gox. In June 2011, about $8.75 million in bitcoin was stolen from the exchange through an online attack using stolen passwords. Any security improvements implemented since then were obviously not up to scratch if the latest loss is the result of a massive heist. Anecdotal accounts have suggested a corporate culture that tended toward laissez-faire rather than strict diligence.

Why did Mt. Gox file for bankruptcy?
Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection in Tokyo District Court on Feb. 28, saying it couldn’t account for 750,000 of its customers’ bitcoins and 100,000 of its own, worth as much as $474 million. The company also can’t account for $27.3 million in cash customer deposits.

How do you lose 850,000 bitcoins?
That, of course, is the million-dollar (or bitcoin) question. The coins may be missing due to a long-known security flaw called transaction malleability that can in some cases enable fraudulent withdrawals. Some observers and investors, however, are accusing the company of fraud, even alleging the collapse was an orchestrated scheme. Other commentators have said Mt. Gox had the best intentions but was just poorly managed.

Can you run a company that badly?
Seems like it. A company source who spoke on condition of anonymity told us the code was such a mess it was like “spaghetti,” bugs were routinely ignored and that there was no regime in place to first test changes to the code before implementing them. Karpeles had a firm grip on the programming reins and refused to let developers fix the code, said the source, who also questioned whether there really was a “cold storage,” an offline vault that bitcoin exchanges are supposed to have. According to the leaked business plan, Mt. Gox had a leak in its online hot wallet, which “wiped out” the cold storage, and theft had been happening for years.

What triggered Mt. Gox’s collapse?
Mt. Gox long had problems processing international wire transfers for people who wanted to cash out their bitcoins. On Feb. 7, it halted bitcoin withdrawals while investigating a security flaw called transaction malleability. Bitcoin software experts said Mt. Gox’s highly customized code may have exacerbated that issue. Other bitcoin exchanges also temporarily suspended trading. With no explanation, Mt. Gox’s website went blank on Feb. 25. It filed for bankruptcy three days later, with Karpeles accepting blame with a bow, a Japanese custom acknowledging failure.

Does this mean other exchanges are vulnerable to the malleability flaw too?
Transaction malleability, which allows for transaction IDs to be renamed, has been known in the Bitcoin community since 2011. Yet other exchanges have also been affected. On Feb. 11, for instance, Bitstamp suspended withdrawals blaming a transaction malleability attack, but said it had fixed the problem four days later. The Bitcoin Foundation, an industry trade group, said last month that it is working with core developers to solve the issue.

Can the missing bitcoins be traced?
Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public ledger called the “blockchain,” which shows movements from one bitcoin address to another. There is no identifying information attached to a bitcoin address showing who is transferring the coins, but it is possible through crowd-sourced data to see what particular addresses a company has previously used to transfer bitcoins. But due to a lack of custom software tools to analyze the blockchain, tracing a chain of transactions can be like following a set of muddy footprints in the rain.

Will depositors get their money or bitcoins back?
At least one class-action suit has been filed in the U.S., with another planned in the U.K. Mt. Gox has said “we need to investigate a huge amount of transaction reports in order to establish the truth.” Due to bitcoin’s complexity, an investigation could take a long time, and international lawsuits are unlikely to proceed quickly. Mt. Gox claims it has US$63.6 million in liabilities. The leaked document describing its supposed future business plans suggests the company may have just slightly over half that figure in assets.

What does this mean for the future of Bitcoin?
Mt. Gox’s viability has long been questioned by users. But the bitcoin community, stung by past thefts and frauds, is largely looking forward, saying it will have little impact on the long-term prospects for the virtual currency. The price of bitcoin has been relatively stable amid the Mt. Gox collapse and is now around $660. The total market capitalization of all bitcoin is roughly $8.3 billion.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asi ... story.html

CEO of bitcoin exchange found dead in Singapore

SINGAPORE — The American CEO of a virtual currency exchange was found dead near her home in Singapore.

A police spokesman said Thursday that initial investigations indicated there was no suspicion of “foul play” in the Feb. 26 death of 28-year-old Autumn Radtke, meaning officers do not suspect murder.

The spokesman said police found Radtke lying motionless near the apartment tower where she lived.

Police have so far classified the death as “unnatural,” which can mean an accident, misadventure, or suicide.

Radtke’s company, First Meta, said it was “shocked and saddened by the tragic loss.”

First Meta allows users of virtual currencies such as bitcoin to trade and cash out the currencies. It is one of several such exchanges.

The future of bitcoin has been under scrutiny since the collapse of the Mt. Gox exchange in Tokyo last month.

Radtke had worked at other tech companies. A funeral for her was held Wednesday in Hales Corners, Wisconsin, according to Hartson Funeral Home.

Postings on her Facebook page showed her to be a believer in the potential of virtual currencies.

Last month, she linked to an article on entrepreneurs suffering depression, commenting above the link: everything has its price.

User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby semper occultus » Wed Dec 09, 2015 7:13 am

Revealed, the elusive creator of Bitcoin: Founder of digital currency is named as an Australian academic after police raid his Sydney home

The creator of Bitcoin has been known by pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto
The new report suggests Dr Craig Wright is the person behind the alias
It lists an array of documents which suggest Dr Wright is in fact Nakamoto
Australian Police have raided the Sydney home of Dr Wright on Wednesday
Officers said they were 'clearing the house' and denied a link to the report


..it appears he is actually an Australian academic – called Craig Steven Wright.

An investigation from tech site Wired claims the 44-year-old Sydney academic likely real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous figure that first released bitcoin's code in 2009.
And in a bizarre coincidence, more than a dozen Australia Federal Police officers raided Dr Wright's Gordon property on Sydney's north shore at 1.30pm – but they denied any link to the report.

The AFP referred all inquiries about the raid to the Australian Tax Office, who told Daily Mail Australia they were not willing to comment on the raid.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3352117/Man-controversial-currency-Bitcoin-Australian-academic.html

http://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-this-unknown-australian-genius/
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby DrEvil » Wed Dec 09, 2015 1:24 pm

Bitcoins, aka Dunning-Krugerrands.

I've lost count of how many Bitcoin companies that are under investigation for ripping off their customers.

"Hey, I've got a magical machine that prints money, but since I'm such a nice guy I'll sell you the money at a discount instead of just pocketing it myself." :wallhead:
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
User avatar
DrEvil
 
Posts: 3972
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Agent Orange Cooper » Sat Feb 20, 2021 5:34 pm

Resurrecting this old thread in favor of the "blockchain/digital currency" thread because Bitcoin, Not Blockchain.

For reference, Bitcoin has appreciated approximately 50000% since this thread was created, currently sitting at $56000 per coin with a recently passed milestone: a total market cap of over $1 trillion.

From valueless magic internet money to a trillion dollar asset in 12 years.

Liked this post:

smiths » Tue Oct 15, 2013 7:54 pm wrote:when you actually look at the way money, ideas, conversations, and wealthy people flow around the world, the tying of currencies to single nations states looks increasingly anachronistic,
whether you have objections to how value is measured, or what money is defined as, or how capitalists operate is irrelevant

decentralized currency, uncontrolled by single state entities is the the future of money

bitcoin is simplistically a protocol or a method of organization, verification and communication

but it is also the most radical form of money in about half a millennia,
it is also a political action, a move to bitcoin is a vote against the central banks and the traditional money powers
and yes, of course they are getting in on it,
Coinbase is run by a load of former Goldman guys, are they builders or wreckers? i dont know

it is vulnerable to manipulation, it is also inevitable/



But my reason for resurrecting, is this phenomenal stuff here from Allen Farrington.

Bitcoin is Venice
https://allenfarrington.medium.com/bitc ... 14dda42070

It's a 35 minute read, but here are the pull quotes from Ferrington's twitter thread.

"Bitcoin is simply an alternative; an exit valve; an opt-out. It is competing only insofar as it is proving to be a far superior alternative. It is not a sword for Theseus to fight the Minotaur, but a thread to follow to exit the labyrinth. Bitcoin is Ariadne."

"What remains of interpersonal, non-programmatic banking is likely to look very similar to the proscriptions of Islamic finance, with a dramatically reduced role for debt, and a focus on risk-sharing rather than risk-transfer. Bitcoin is halal."

"Bitcoin was weakest when smallest, but less so the more time passes. Bitcoin is a black hole sucking unsustainably artificial value beyond its event horizon. As it grows, so does its pull. Bitcoin is gravity."

"No alternative has ever actually worked. Given the problems Bitcoin solves are very clearly not just academic but are core to human civilization, actually working is rather important. Bitcoin is techne."

"I am quite partial to the romantic idea that Bitcoin was discovered rather than invented. It is a foundation to scale the next great phase of economic progress. Bitcoin is Venice."
User avatar
Agent Orange Cooper
 
Posts: 610
Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2015 2:44 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:10 pm

.

Good call resurrecting this, as it allows for a more focused analysis/noteworthy sharing of updates specific to Bitcoin/digital currency w/out tying it necessarily to 'Great Reset' plans.

As a snapshot in time, here's where prices sit right now:

Image
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 40 guests