Category Archives: Bitcoin

BitCoin Dentist GoCoin Fox News Interview

By: GoCoin

Go here to see the original:

BitCoin Dentist GoCoin Fox News Interview - Video

Mini Bitcoin Mining Rig with 11 USB Block Erupter from ASICminer
Donations for any help appreciated 🙂 1PMrJ6TmkHwKVoChpuBpsjttoH8yEK9C8m Just to actually show you how silent this is - nothing compared to my 2011 rig with . Want to mine bitcoins now? No...

By: Albert Dram

Go here to see the original:

Mini Bitcoin Mining Rig with 11 USB Block Erupter from ASICminer - Video

4/29/14 - MIT Bitcoin Project, Mt Gox revival plan, Mastercard lobbyists Team Rubicon
http://moneyandtech.com/apr29-news-update/ Here are today #39;s top news stories in Money Tech: A pair of students at MIT have raised $500000 in bitcoin, which they intend to distribute evenly...

By: Money Tech

Original post:

4/29/14 - MIT Bitcoin Project, Mt Gox revival plan, Mastercard lobbyists & Team Rubicon - Video

As hundreds of altcoin knockoffs are minted online, bitcoins no longer dominate as the principal form of digital currency

Hundreds of bitcoin knockoffsaltcoins, as they are commonly calledhave been built. Credit: Casacius via Wikimedia Commons

At a bitcoin conference in Miami this January, Jeffrey Tucker, a laissez-faire economist and libertarian icon, made an unexpected observation. There are people in this room who would think bitcoin is a little old-fashioned, he quipped. Well, that was fast. After all, it was only five years ago that bitcoin appeared on the scene and provided the world with the first open-source, decentralized alternative to government controlled currencies. And its really only in the last year that bitcoin has begun to gain traction as a payment option. Now bitcoin faces competition. Hundreds of bitcoin knockoffsaltcoins, as they are commonly calledhave been built. The software that underpins bitcoin is open-source, so anyone can copy and tweak the code to create their own digital currency. You can even pay someone to do it for you: The owner of a Web site called Coingen, for example, promises to start a new bitcoin clone for anyone who pays a fee of 0.05 bitcoin. All you have to do is give it a name. Some of these new altcoins are truly innovative. People have made bitcoin versions that process transactions faster, consume less energy or better protect user privacy. Other iterations differ from bitcoin only in their branding and implementation. For example, a few altcoins are intended to serve specific geographical communities. Last month an altcoin called auroracoin was distributed to the people of Iceland to serve as a nation-specific digital currency. (Of course not all altcoins attempt to create an improved product. Many are pump-and-dump schemes. Someone will make a new version of bitcoinusually tweaking minor features of the protocolhype it as the new best thing and then cash out as soon as the coins take on a bit of value.) Regardless, altcoins are now advancing the evolution of digital currency at a rate that bitcoin, as a relatively established project, can no longer keep pace with. Although none of these altcoins have yet flourished enough to surpass bitcoin in either value or rate of adoption, many are doing well enough to prove one point: the alternative currency experiment is far from over.

2014 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

View Mobile Site All Rights Reserved.

Give a 1 year subscription as low as $14.99

Subscribe Now >>

See original here:

Bitcoin Vies with New Cryptocurrencies as Coin of the Cyber Realm

From left, Cody Wilson and Amir Taaki. Photo: Andy Greenberg

Government regulators around the world have spent the last year scrambling to prevent bitcoin from becoming the currency of choice for money launderers and black marketeers. Now their worst fears may be about to materialize in a single piece of software.

On Thursday, a collective of politically radical coders that calls itself unSystem plans to release the first version of Dark Wallet: a bitcoin application designed to protect its users identities far more strongly than the partial privacy protections bitcoin offers in its current form. If the program works as promised, it could neuter impending bitcoin regulations that seek to tie individuals identities to bitcoin ownership. By encrypting and mixing together its users payments, Dark Wallet seeks to enable practically untraceable flows of money online that add new fuel to the Webs burgeoning black markets.

This is a way of using bitcoin that mocks every attempt to sprinkle it with regulation, says Cody Wilson, one of Dark Wallets two 26-year-old organizers. Its a way to say to the government Youve set yourself up to regulate bitcoin. Regulate this.

Heres a teaser video the group posted earlier last week ahead of the softwares release:

See original here:

Dark Wallet Is About to Make Bitcoin Money Laundering Easier Than Ever

Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology want to give Bitcoin a boost.

Two students at the prestigious university announced Tuesday the creation of the MIT Bitcoin Club, which will distribute US$100 in bitcoins to all of the schools 4,500-plus undergraduates who opt in to the program.

The project is aimed at creating a hyper-concentrated community of backers around the technology, which could support the development of new software and services built on top of bitcoins infrastructure.

It could also be thought of as equal parts a mini bitcoin economy and techy social experiment.

Bitcoin is a very important technology, said Jeremy Rubin, a sophomore studying computer science at MIT and the projects co-founder. MIT is not super focused on it right now, but we should be innovating in this space.

Plans for the project involve a range of activities, including working with other professors and researchers to study how students use the bitcoins, as well as possible entrepreneurial activity at the school, the projects founders said in their announcement.

Their hope is to establish MIT as a global hub where Bitcoin-related research, ideas and ventures can be studied, discussed and developed.

The project has $500,000 in funding, the bulk of which comes from MIT alumni, with additional support from the bitcoin community. The funding will cover the distribution of the bitcoins to undergraduates, as well as infrastructure and informational activities. Rubin said they were still working out which exchange would be used to distribute the bitcoins.

At current exchange rates of roughly $444, $100 is equivalent to less than one-quarter of a bitcoin. Bitcoin also faces an uncertain future, given the risks of cyber theft and the increased oversight from government regulators.

By the time the fall semester comes around, the state of the industry could be vastly different from today.

Read the original here:

New Bitcoin student club at MIT will promote the virtual currency

Radar has a backchannel, and sometimes we have interesting conversations on it. Mike Loukides and I recently had a long chat about bitcoin. Both of us were thinking out loud and learning as we went along, and on re-reading the thread Im astonished by our advanced level of ignorance. I would like to publish it because it hints at just how hard it is to understand the bitcoin network. The founding papers that describe the system leave a lot of implementation to the imagination, and the level of mis(dis?)information around the web is staggering. Its no small thing to get the basics right. But beyond the basics, the bitcoin network has that property of an inside-out onion, where the harder you look, the more (and bigger slices of) complexity you find.

Anyway, were not going to publish it. I dont mind looking stupid, but I dont want to look that stupid also, the comments would be torture.

However, some of the things we were wondering about are worth wondering about publicly. Especially this: what happens when the mining subsidies end? Will transaction fees pick up the slack? I think ultimately the answer is yes, but maybe not in the way a lot of people expect.

If you read around the web, the typical answer to that question sounds something like, Yeah, of course they will. Costs will go down as some miners exit, but people will start voluntarily paying transaction fees. Also, unicorns. Of course, the transaction fee bit is striking because a lot of people think one of the key benefits of digital cash is that, compared to credit card processors, they dont charge fees.

Well, they dont now. Now they subsidize the operation of the network by printing new money, er, mining which I suppose is crypto libertarianisms answer to quantitive easing. With 25 new bitcoins being minted every 10 minutes or so (at a current value of $11,600), the dearth of transaction fees is just noise. But over time, the pace of mining will drop (halving after every 210,000 blocks).

Before I get to the question posed in the title of this piece, we probably need a brief explainer so the rest of what I say has a chance of making sense. If you already know how bitcoin works, you can skip this part. Or, better yet, read it anyway and tell me what I get wrong. Im well aware that Im treading into speculative territory and probably dont have this all sorted. In fact, thats true for this entire post.

Bitcoins central feature is a distributed ledger called the block chain that contains a record of every verified transaction ever, going back to the genesis block of the first 50 bitcoins. Its called a block chain because transactions are verified in blocks, and the blocks are chained together, each new one pointing to the one before it. Each block contains the worldwide transactions from approximately a 10-minute period.

Every bitcoin in existence can be traced back to one of these blocks. Either it originated in the genesis block, or it was issued as a reward to the miner who verified a more recent block.

One of the counterintuitive things about bitcoin is that there really arent bitcoins. Not in the sense that there is an indivisible coin with some unique identifier associated with it. Instead, users of the bitcoin network get value as an input (either from a transaction or from source coins issued in mining) and then they can either hold that value, or spend it as an output via a transaction. The transactions associate value with their key value, which substitutes for their identity.

Bitcoin is known as an anonymous or pseudo-anonymous system, but really it is completely transparent. Every transaction ever completed is available in the block chain for anyone to see. Smart users will take pains to change their encryption key with every transaction and be careful not to associate their public key with their real identity, but bitcoin probably has that common and awkward property of being less anonymous the more you use it. More data in the block chain means more opportunity to de-anonymize you.

Go here to read the rest:

Bitcoin: what happens when the miners pack up their gear?

reXBT.com Andreas M. Antonopoulos L.A. Bitcoin Meetup The Network Effect Part 2 of 8
reXBT.com Andreas M. Antonopoulos L.A. Bitcoin Meetup The Network Effect Part 2 of 8 videos.. Please click here to subscribe to my channel.. reXBT.com Andreas M. Antonopoulos L.A. Bitcoin Meetup...

By: David Watson

See more here:

reXBT.com Andreas M. Antonopoulos L.A. Bitcoin Meetup The Network Effect Part 2 of 8 - Video

Bitcoin Expo 2014: Fireside Chat with Dr Gavin Wood
Fireside Chat with Dr. Gavin Wood. Video recorded on a Canon XA10. Audio recorded on a potato.

By: Ethereum

Go here to see the original:

Bitcoin Expo 2014: Fireside Chat with Dr Gavin Wood - Video

As the films title indicates,The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin is the Mross brothers love letter to bitcoin and itspotential to transform the global economy. The documentary provides unprecedented insight into the peculiar but growing bitcoinsubculture and introduces us to some entrepreneurs who have risked their livelihood and freedom to make bitcoinmore accessible to the general public.

Nick and Dan Mross came to New York last week to debut The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, where they discussed the confounding complexities of bitcoinwith International Business Times.

International Business Times: "The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin" addresses the difficult question of what bitcoinis, exactly. The film does a really good job of illustrating how hard it is to explain it by comparing bitcoin's comprehensibility to the early days of the Internet. Even now, most of us can't explain exactly what the Internet is, even though it's an essential part of our lives. Do you think there will come a time when bitcoin will be so embedded in our culture that we won't have to define exactly what it is?

Dan Mross: I do ... Every day when you use the Internet, you use a DNS system, and most people have no idea what that is. Right now, bitcoinis a protocol ... and there's nothing built on top of it. We're just dealing with the raw material itself. You have to have a pretty deep knowledge of how it all works to use bitcoinnow, but there are startups that will make it more accessible for everyone.

IBT: I had previously thought of bitcoinas kind of wanting to take over federally backed currency, but after watching the documentary, it looks like that's not the case, at least not right now. It seems like they need to coexist ...

Dan: I'm really glad you said that because that's what a lot of people hear about bitcoin... that these anarchist groups are going take down the banks with this thing. That's the impression you get on the news, or that it's about money laundering. But it's just a protocol. That's what we wanted to show.

Nick Mross: It's a tool, and a lot of people can use it for different things. And if there are bad actors, they are separate from bitcoin itself. That's what we wanted to show in the film -- it's this technology, and it's not really tied to any one thing. How [bitcoin and centralized currency] will coexist across the globe will be interesting to see. But we're hoping here in the U.S. that it finds a way to work within the current banking system.

IBT:Bitcoin has an open-source foundation, which is for the most part considered to be very secure, but the recently discovered Heartbleed bug exposed how easily a simple typo can wreak serious havoc. Did Heartbleed prompt anyone in the bitcoin community to rethink OSS? What is the worst-case scenario?

Dan:The Heartbleed security bug was a very bad problem, but security flaws occur in both open and closed source software. Open source software allows the greatest number of people to do auditing and testing, so I still firmly believe it to be a better development methodology. Bitcoin would not be possible any other way without fundamentally altering the properties that allow it to function as a global currency

IBT: I still feel like I don't fully understand how bitcoin can be used. I haven't noticed anywhere in New York where you can use bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee. Is that where we are going?

See more here:

'The Rise And Rise Of Bitcoin' Filmmaker: 'There Is No Answer Yet'