Category Archives: Bitcoin

The price of Bitcoin has taken bit of a dive over the last couple of days, shedding over 20 percent of its value in the last 24 hours. The sell-off, like other sell-offs and rallies before it, draws a lot of attention and questions about what it means for the future of the technology. Heres why I dont focus on price much.

Bitcoin is best thought of as a 5- to 10-year project, and were at the very early stages. An (admittedly imperfect) analogy is the early Web.

Like the early Web, Bitcoin is an open platform that no one owns, and on top of which anyone can build without having to get anyone elses permission. And just like the early Web, success requires investors, entrepreneurs, and developers to build out the infrastructure and applications that will make it useful to average users.

The World Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee; he published a paper proposing it in March of 1989. The following year he worked to implement the idea in code, making the first website in December of 1990. The first popular Web browser didnt come until 1993 when Marc Andreessen and the team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic. The following year Andreessen started Netscape and released the Netscape Navigator browser in 1994.

Those of us old enough to remember using Navigator to browse the Web over a Winsock connection on a 56k baud modem can attest that it was not the amazing experience we take for granted today. In fact, if you couldnt see that the technology would evolve, you would have concluded that it was practically useless. For one thing, there was no easy way to find things on the Web. Well, we didnt get Google until 1998.

Google is now the most visited website on the planet. Second to it is Facebook, and for many people the Web is virtually synonymous with social networking. Yet Facebook was not founded until 2004a full 14 years after the Web was first conceived.

So heres the parallel: Bitcoin was conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto and proposed in a paper published in 2008. He worked on implementing the idea into code, mining the first block of the blockchain in January of 2009. So, if we take the Web as a parallel, were at the stage in Bitcoin were we would hope to see a Mosaic level development, not a Facebook.

In other words, its early days. The Googles and Facebooks of Bitcointhe killer apps that will make the technology indispensable for ordinary usersmay not come for another 5 years.

Unlike the early Web, though, Bitcoin has a price ticker people look at daily, and so they wring their hands. Every dip and spike in the price gets a lot of attention and spells either doom or irrational exuberance. But as Marc Andreessen has pointed out, the price of domain names didnt determine the usefulness of the Internet.

With a longer time horizon in mind, you can put the short-term drops and rallies in price of Bitcoin in perspective. So dont worry so much.

Read more:
The Price of Bitcoin Doesn't Matter Right Now | WIRED

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The Swiss Franc might be the currency getting all the attention, but the real blood bath is in Bitcoin.

Remember how Bitcoin was supposed to change everything? And the dollar was dead? Boy, was that ever wrong. The value of Bitcoin is in absolute freefall as the U.S. dollar strengthens and looks even more promising given the Feds stance on rates.

Talk about a bust. Today you can buy a Bitcoin for $196.546, says currency tracker Oanda. Thats means the digital currency that was supposed to render the greenback obsolete has lost two-thirds of its value in just six months. Ouch.

Chart source: Oanda

Some are suggesting that the precipitous decline in the currency is probably its death knell. Remember Bitcoin, asked widely respected money-manager Jeffrey Gundlach at DoubleLine Capital during his annual forecast with investors this week. Its pretty much on its way to the ash heap of alternative currencies, he told investors.

Maybe someone is already working on Bitcoin 2.0?

Continued here:
Bitcoin is headed to the ash heap | America's Markets

In any case, the experiment is new and most Bitcoin Whales got in early and cheap. The way you feel about a $177 Bitcoin has a lot to do with what you paid for it. If you bought in January 2011 you paid just $0.38. A year later you spent $15.11, and a year from that youd have been stung for $854.

So, whats causing this crash? Bitcoin exchanges are unregulated and market fluctuations can be as unusual as they are unexplainable. A cryptography nerd who mined coins as an experiment in 2010 could have found himself a millionaire many times over in 2013, holding so many coins that cashing-out moved markets.

Other manipulations occur which are more intentional and less benign.

Some suggest that the recent Bitstamp hack could be behind losses, which is probably true to some extent. But the exchange honoured all lost coins and has since re-opened for business, so it seems unlikely to be the only cause. Especially as the price was already sliding before it happened.

The crux of the issue, the important point which should be made, is this: Bitcoin the currency may be dying, but it doesnt matter because Bitcoin the technology is thriving.

The currency is just one application of the Blockchain which powers it. It has served a purpose, in that it has established the infrastructure on which a flotilla of new services will launch in coming months.

Essentially, Bitcoin runs without any central authority. Instead there is a Blockchain, a digital ledger of all transactions. Each and every payment made in Bitcoin is encoded into this Blockchain by miners by performing some mathematical and cryptographic heavy-lifting.

These miners could be an individual on a laptop or a warehouse full of dedicated machines in China. But they power Bitcoin and are rewarded for their efforts with new coins that are periodically created.

Benefits of that become clear when you imagine a social network free of shareholders, advertising or privacy intrusion, or a voting system that's mathematically impossible to manipulate. Or perhaps a whole new internet outside the reach of governments who want to censor, filter or delete information?

All of that is being worked on, right now. Hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital investment has been poured into Bitcoin startups like these in recent years, and they are only now beginning to bear fruit.

Continued here:
Bitcoin might be dead. It doesn't matter. - Telegraph

Bitcoin under 250$
http://worldcryptonetwork.com http://twitter.com/worldcryptonetwork Donations: BTC 1AUEW7mtcRGBs5LLVd8mvrkNWxdhUyFhdg.

By: World Crypto Network

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Bitcoin under 250$ - Video

Bitcoin HD-BIP32 Business Multi-Sig wallet Demo 4
USCyberlabs has created the first true commercial grade Bitcoin HD-BIP32 Business wallet system. Today older Bitcoin wallets are not shareable so they become a problem with companies that need...

By: Richard Amores

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Bitcoin HD-BIP32 Business Multi-Sig wallet Demo 4 - Video

OneCoin event in Kuching, Malaysia, 7 Nov 2014
One Coin better than Bitcoin !? http://www.onecoin.eu/signup/matik OneCoin is not a copy of a BITCOIN. It is new generation of cryptic currency. You can find same, proven qualities from OneCoin...

By: Margarita Tsepenyuk

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OneCoin event in Kuching, Malaysia, 7 Nov 2014 - Video

Bitcoin lesson from Superman
When ever the price goes up and down wildly. I remember this scene. Learning to go to the moon takes some ups and downs.

By: 1bitbybit

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Bitcoin lesson from Superman - Video

SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: SmartContracts with Sergey Nazarov

By: SF Bitcoin Developers

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SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: SmartContracts with Sergey Nazarov - Video

SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: Profitable Self-Sustainable DApp/DAC Haskell
Tom Ding (Koinify) and Ronan Lynch.

By: SF Bitcoin Developers

Originally posted here:
SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: Profitable & Self-Sustainable DApp/DAC & Haskell - Video

SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: Payment Channels with Alex

By: SF Bitcoin Developers

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SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: Payment Channels with Alex - Video