Category Archives: Cryptocurrency

BitCoin, LiteCoin, etc.

Reddit (sort of) launches its own nebulous cryptocurrency, Reddit Notes

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We've already heard that 2015 is supposed to be the year of cryptocurrency, and Microsoft recently announced that Bitcoin is an acceptable form of payment. Now Reddit is getting in on the virtual currency action. Kind of. Well, perhaps. The details are vague at the moment, but the intriguingly-named Reddit Notes have been announced.

It comes just a few months after Reddit managed to secure $50 million in funding, and at the time "the investors in this round have proposed to give 10% of their shares back to the community". The birth of Reddit Notes is the start of this payback, but it's not yet clear who will receive them or what they will be used for.

The name has the distinct feel of a cryptocurrency, and Reddit explains that there are "approximately 950,000 reddit notes to divide among active user accounts". The notes can be viewed like shares at this stage, and it's obvious that there will have to be some sort of selection process if less than 1 million shares are to be distributed between users: there are just too many users for everyone to be included.

In a blog post, Reddit explains:

There aren't as many reddit notes as there are accounts, so if you get one, lucky you! Eligible recipients of reddit notes will be determined based on activities before 9/30/14, and we plan to give them away in the fall of 2015. We're still working out details on both the technological and legal aspects of the project, especially regarding how reddit notes will work within existing government regulations.

Reddit Notes are surrounded in ambiguity at the moment -- well, you have to get the hype machine going somehow --but a basic infographic shows that Reddit Notes can be donated, given, traded, used as payment, or saved. There's no hint about when we might know more, but Fall 2015 is a way off yet, so there's plenty of time for more details to come out.

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Reddit (sort of) launches its own nebulous cryptocurrency, Reddit Notes

Clustering bitcoin accounts using heuristics

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Editors note: well explore present and future applications of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies at our upcoming Radar Summit: Bitcoin & the Blockchain on Jan. 27, 2015, in San Francisco.

A few data scientists are starting to play around with cryptocurrency data, and as bitcoin and related technologies start gaining traction, I expect more to wade in. As the space matures, there will be many interesting applications based on analytics over the transaction data produced by these technologies. The blockchain the distributed ledger that contains all bitcoin transactions is publicly available, and the underlying data set is of modest size. Data scientists can work with this data once its loaded into familiar data structures, but producing insights requires some domain knowledge and expertise.

I recently spoke with Sarah Meiklejohn, a lecturer at UCL, and an expert on computer security and cryptocurrencies. She was part of an academic research team that studied pseudo-anonymity (pseudonymity) in bitcoin. In particular, they used transaction data to compare potential anonymity to the actual anonymity achieved by users. A bitcoin user can use many different public keys, but careful research led to a few heuristics that allowed them to cluster addresses belonging to the same user:

In theory, a user can go by many different pseudonyms. If that user is careful and keeps the activity of those different pseudonyms separate, completely distinct from one another, then they can really maintain a level of, maybe not anonymity, but again, cryptographically its called pseudo-anonymity. So, if they are a legitimate businessman on the one hand, they can use a certain set of pseudonyms for that activity, and then if they are dealing drugs on Silk Road, they might use a completely different set of pseudonyms for that, and you wouldnt be able to tell that thats the same user.

It turns out in reality, though, the way most users and services are using bitcoin, was really not following any of the guidelines that you would need to follow in order to achieve this notion of pseudo-anonymity. So, basically, what we were able to do is develop certain heuristics for clustering together different public keys, or different pseudonyms. Im happy to get into the technical details, but Im not sure how relevant they are. The point is that, if you think these are good heuristics, then basically they provided evidence that a certain set of pseudonyms were called into the same owner. In that owner could be a single individual or it could be an entire service, like bit scams or another exchange.

In the course of their research, Sarah and her collaborators realized that addresses used to collect excess bitcoins (change addresses) provided a good clustering mechanism:

If you think about making change with physical cash, if I walk into a physical store and I hand the clerk a $20 bill, and my thing only costs $5, then Im going to get $15 back in change, right? And in bitcoin, that process of making change is actually completely transparent, so you can observe the change public key in the blockchain.

What we tried to do is distinguish change addresses, as we called them, from the legitimate recipient in the transaction. So, in my example in the store, youd see two public keys as the out in that transaction, one of them would receive $5, and the other would receive $15. What we tried to do is develop a heuristic for distinguishing that $15 part of the transaction from the legitimate $5 recipient. That turned out to be much trickier, but that really was the bulk of the work in the project, just trying to make that heuristic as safe as possible.

Once they settled on heuristics with which to cluster addresses, the research project still required a data set for testing their theories. This entailed conducting and following transactions through the bitcoin ledger:

Image courtesy of Sarah Meiklejohn.

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Clustering bitcoin accounts using heuristics

Bitcoin worse investment than the ruble in 2014

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Bitcoin, the online cryptocurrency recently hailed as the most successful of its kind, has been valued as potentially the worst investment in 2014 by business site Quartz.

Bitcoins value has plummeted massively in the last 12 months, currently showing a bigger drop than the Greek stock exchange or the Argentine peso. According to the Guardian, one bitcoin is now worth less than half of what it was this time last year, having devalued by 52% since the start of 2014.

Even the Russian ruble which was declared the worst performing currency of 2014 and which has registered single day falls worse than those seen in Russias 1998 economic crisis, had outperformed Bitcoin as of Wednesday morning GMT.

Jim Urquhart/REUTERS Some of Bitcoin enthusiast Mike Caldwell's coins are pictured at his office in this photo illustration in Sandy, Utah, January 31, 2014.

Currently the rubles rate of devaluation in 2014 is 51%.

According to Andrew Davies, a Newsweek business writer, it isnt highly surprising the cryptocurrency has hit a rough patch as the novelty of bitcoin makes it highly sensitive to changes in the trading climate.

Right now people are feeling very worried and so are dumping holdings that they fear might fall sharply in value, Davies says.

Bitcoin is a prime candidate for this treatment because its value depends always on what I call the greater fool - i.e. someone who is willing to pay even more for it than you did in order to take it off your hands and give you a profit. Davies adds.

A surge in popularity of bitcoin trading over the first half of 2014 caused the value of the currency to skyrocket, hitting the highest ever rate of $900 per single coin and prompting the number of merchants trading in the currency who have made a billion dollars in revenue to increase from zero to 10 by the end of the year.

In the second half of 2014 however, the excitement surrounding bitcoin decreased and volatility in oil, equities, bonds, currencies and commodities has scared traders away from experimental currency such as bitcoin causing the value to drop to $334 per coin on Wednesday.

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Bitcoin worse investment than the ruble in 2014

Welcome To Bitcoin, USA: St. Petersburg Merchants Embrace Cryptocurrency Before ‘Bitcoin Bowl’

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At The Alligator Attraction in Madeira Beach, Florida, tourists can learn about koi fish, take photos with a tortoise, or feed huge alligators. But come Monday, visitors who stop by the attraction will be able to do something even stranger: Theyll be able to pay for those experiences using bitcoin.

The Alligator Attraction is one of 86 businesses in Madeira Beach -- a 2-mile-long town near St. Petersburg -- that are gearing up to accept bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency. Thats because Madeira Beach is a partner of the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl football game and recently became the first city in the world to officially embrace bitcoin.

Its the age of technology. Its time to move forward with payments, said Sonny Flynn, the business manager of The Alligator Attraction and two other Madeira Beach businesses that are set to begin accepting bitcoin.

Madeira Beach has always been a tourism hotspot, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors each year who want to relax on the small towns sugar white sand beach, go deep-sea fishing off its shores, or have dinner and drinks at its boardwalk eateries. But after Madeira Beach was picked to host the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowls annual Beach Bash event through 2016, the citys leaders figured they could get themselves extra publicity and lure more travelers by becoming a tourism destination for bitcoin users around the globe.

Late last month, the city passed a resolution to begin accepting bitcoin for certain payments. Residents can now use the cryptocurrency to pay for boat fuel and fishing tackle at the city-run marina, and come next year, theyll be able to pay for parking tickets using the code-based money. In the meantime, city officials are in a mad rush to sign up as many businesses as they can by Christmas Eve, the day of the Beach Bash.

That event is expected to draw as many as 5,000 visitors to the small town to watch the players from the University of Central Florida and North Carolina State University as they compete in silly beach events like Hoola Hoop and belly-flop contests before they face off on the gridiron. By then, Madeira Beach officials hope it will be possible for tourists to go the entire day in the city making payments using nothing but bitcoin.

"Bitcoin users are very loyal to it. Theyre into it, and if they find a city where they can go and use it, they are going to book their vacation there, said Misty Wells, a spokeswoman for Madeira Beach.

To use bitcoin in the real world, consumers have to sign up for a bitcoin wallet. They can do that through services such as Trucoin or Airbitz, which will be signing up fans at the game on Dec. 26. After that, consumers exchange dollars for bitcoin, and then go to a merchant that accepts the cryptocurrency. At the point of payment, the merchant will show the consumer a code that they scan using their smartphone. The code tells their bitcoin wallet who to send the payment to, which occurs after the consumer enters the amount owed and approves the payment.

Madeira Beach officials hope to get more than 100 merchants, or more than 80 percent of the citys businesses, signed up to accept bitcoin by game day. Helping them in that effort is BitPay, a bitcoin-processing startup based out of Atlanta and the title sponsor of the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl through 2016. BitPays goal for the game is to get bitcoin further into the mainstream, said Stephanie Wargo, BitPay vice president of marketing.

"We thought that this was a nice, easy, fun introduction to the masses on what bitcoin is, Wargo said. The game needed it to be somewhere that we could make a destination place that even after the bowl game all of these businesses could still attract bitcoin consumers to their business. We wanted to make sure it was some place that you would want to come and visit. Being next to the beach, it makes it quite nice.

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Welcome To Bitcoin, USA: St. Petersburg Merchants Embrace Cryptocurrency Before 'Bitcoin Bowl'

Bitcoin stalls after hitting record prices in 2013

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A Bitcoin sign in a Toronto shop window in May, in better times. Photograph: Mark Blinch/Reuters

After skyrocketing to more than a thousand dollars in price late last year and attracting global attention, bitcoin, the leading digital currency, has stalled.

Figures obtained by Reuters show that while wallets cyberspeak for accounts are being created at a steady clip, many of them are empty.

Analysts also provided Reuters with data that shows liquidity in the cryptocurrency remains limited.

Bitcoin, a virtual currency created through a mining process where a computers resources are used to perform millions of calculations, has been hailed as revolutionary because of its lack of ties to a central bank and its potential as an alternative to credit cards for paying for goods and services.

However, the currencys volatility has slowed broader acceptance. The price of bitcoin has plummeted roughly 50% so far this year. It most recently traded at $356.26, down from a peak of $1,163 in December 2013.

Two of its primary appeals the lower transaction fees compared to credit cards and its use in cross-border transactions have not been enough to offset its ups and downs.

Until a unique application emerges that separates it from credit cards, online payments or other currencies, the expansion may remain slow, many market insiders said.

There has to be some motivation that would help this whole bitcoin system explode, like really good applications for consumers, said Jonathan Levin, a London-based digital currency consultant and co-founder of the Oxford Virtual Currency Group. At the moment, there isnt.

Last weeks second auction of bitcoins by the US marshals service, which showed a drastic drop in bidders from the first sale in June, demonstrated just how far bitcoin has fallen off the radar. The first auction attracted 45 unique bidders, with 63 bids, while the December sale showed just 11 buyers and 27 bids.

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Bitcoin stalls after hitting record prices in 2013