Category Archives: Cryptocurrency

Federal regulator finds the cryptocurrency qualifies as "money or something of value" but imposes restriction on its use.

Bitcoin

Bitcoins may soon be helping fund an election campaign near you.

The US Federal Election Committee on Thursday unanimously approved a proposal for political action committees to accept donations in the form of Bitcoin, finding that the cryptocurrency qualified as "money or anything of value" as defined by the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. However, with its 6-0 vote, the commission that enforces US campaign finance laws imposed several conditions on its acceptance.

PACs must sell the bitcoins they received and convert them to into US dollars before depositing the proceeds into a campaign account. The commission did not approve the use of Bitcoin to acquire goods and services.

The decision came in response to a proposal by the Make Your Law committee to accept individual Bitcoin donations up to $100. To address the anonymous nature of Bitcoin use, the MYL promised that all Bitcoin contributors would be required to provide their name, physical address, and employer.

While the decision was issued as guidance and not as new regulations, the commission's vote suggests that other PACs will be allowed to operate under similar conditions.

In its decision, the commission acknowledged that "government agencies, courts and others are grappling," but said it "expresses no opinion regarding the application of federal securities law, tax law, or other law outside the Commission's jurisdiction to MYL's proposed activities."

Bitcoin's acceptance has grown dramatically in the past couple of months. Cryptocurrency ATMs have begun to pop up, some casinos have said they would accept digital currency payments, and even eBay has begun allowing for limited sales of Bitcoins on its US and UK sites.

The FEC's decision comes a day after the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued an advisory warning investors to be wary of Bitcoin and other virtual-currency related investments. Noting that the cryptocurrency is uninsured, unregulated, and volatile, the SEC said its chief concern was the risk of fraud.

See the article here:

Bitcoin wins US election panel's approval for political donations

In hopes of creating a bitcoin 'ecosystem,' two MIT students are spearheading a project to give all 4,500 MIT undergraduate students $100 in bitcoin and study how the cryptocurrency plays out on campus.

Some colleges give students planners or bookmarks when they enter a new school year.

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly Digital Edition

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the other hand, will give $100 in bitcoin to all incoming undergraduate students next fall.

The initiative, which was announcedTuesday in MIT's student newspaper The Tech, was the idea of a sophomore and graduate student with backgrounds in bitcoin. So far, they have raised more than $500,000 from alumni and other donors to fund what they are calling the MIT Bitcoin Project, and have the blessing of the school. Their hope is to create a bitcoin ecosystem on campus, in order to create a campus-wide case study of the nascent cryptocurrency.

Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with Internet access at the dawn of the internet era, says Jeremy Rubin, the sophomore electrical engineering and computer science major who is one of the founders of the Bitcoin Project,in a release. The other founder is Dan Elitzer, founder and president of the MIT Bitcoin Club and a first-year graduate business student at MIT's Sloan School of Business.

Their aim is both specific and purposefully ambiguous. After the bitcoins are distributed to the students, a variety of professors and researchers will be running studies watching how the MIT community uses the currency. One faculty supporter says this offers a way to peek into our likely data-filled future.

I am supporting them because it is generally an awesome hack, and more specifically I am working to understand how our society can thrive in an age where everything is datafied and can be controlled by computer, says Alex Sandy Pentland, director of the human dynamics laboratory at the MIT Media Lab, to The Tech. While the specific properties of bitcoin have some real problems, getting everyone at MIT to start playing with bitcoin will prompt the MIT community to begin thinking seriously about how we can live in an all-digital future.

Other than those studying how the currency operates around campus, students are also free to use the currency however they please. To prepare, Mr. Rubin and Mr. Elitzer are hosting a bitcoin expo this weekend to begin further discussions on the project, and have gained the support of many other student organizations and faculty members. Over the summer, they will also be readying local merchants for bitcoin payments.

Continued here:

MIT undergrads will each receive $100 in bitcoin

Know How 74 Cryptocurrency

By: Dennis Roman

Read more from the original source:

Know How 74 Cryptocurrency - Video

7 hours ago May. 4, 2014 - 8:00 AM PDT

An unlikely sponsormaking its NASCAR debut later on Sunday: Dogecoin, with its cartoon Shiba Inu staring down drivers in a cuteway from the bumper of car 98.

Josh Wise, the cars driver, qualified for the Aarons 499 race in Talladega but needed the money for the sponsorship. The Dogecoin community reached out to Wiseand raised more than $55,000 to pay for the doge-wrapped car. Like many people, Wise had never heard of the cryptocurrency instead, the Doge community found him.

The meme-based altcoin is worth a fraction of a penny, but its true value is in its ability to introduce people to the concept ofcryptocurrency, which has become a very big deal over the last year with the advent of bitcoin. For the Dogecoin community, Wises situationwas a chance to help someone out Shibes, as the community members call themselves, areknown for their fundraising.But through the Dogecoin activism, the cryptocurrency community is gaining something even more valuable: exposure to new audiences.

Acurrency that looks like a joke started as one.

The doge meme, pronounced DOHJ, pairs a mispronunciation of dog from a Homestar Runner videowith a photo of a Shiba Inu with raised eyebrows.On the photo,phrases like Such Doge. Much happy. Wow are overlaid in colorful Comic Sans.Jackson Palmer, a marketing professional at Adobe, first tweeted in November that he was going to invest in Dogecoin after hed seen a bunch of different altcoins with ridiculous names.

The momentum and virality of the meme took it from there.

After a couple people encouraged Palmer to create Dogecoin, he bought the domain name, put a picture of Doge on the virtualcoin and slapped on a funny tagline. He kept getting retweeted and the visitor count went through the roof. Billy Markus, a programmer who had been developing a spinoff of an altcoin, tweeted at Palmer that he was able to change all of the fonts in his currency to Comic Sans. A few weeks after Palmers first tweet, the pair launched Dogecoin on Dec. 8, 2013.

We thought Yeah, well release it and like most funny things online, people will use it for three days and then theyll give it up and thats it, said Palmer in an interview with Gigaom. We put it up on Dogecoin.com and the thing just exploded. I wasnt even mining it at the time.

In the first month alone, the site had more than a million unique visitors and even surpassed bitcoin in the number of daily transactions for a couple weeks. The Dogetipbot, which doge fans can use to tip people through social networks for posting funny or interesting comment, has already processed more than $150,000 in tips. With those numbers, its obvious that the Internet found dogecoin to be funny but kept coming back.

Originally posted here:

Such Dogecoin. Much Validity. How one altcoin may have turned into cryptocurrencys best marketing tool

There has been an argument made that we have had plenty of distractions to keep us from paying attention to the economy. From the situation in Europe to the missing plane in East Asia, there are a lot of people that are looking at the crisis of the week knowing full well than when all of the dust clears, when the wreckage is found and put back together we will have to deal with an economy that is devolving and what it may become in the near future.

Arguably, there seems to be a positive outcome of the shaky economy and that is the birth of cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin at the moment has captured the imagination of banks and investors. Bitcoin has the worlds largest virtual currency market capitalization at over $8 billion dollars. Apart from bitcoin, there are at least 100 other cryptocurrencies, ranging from Ripple at ($1.4 billion) and Litecoin ($453 million) also at the high end there is Germanys Deutsche eMark ($106,000) and Grumpycoin ($88,000) at the low end. Even criminals have begun to diversify into homemade cryptocurrencies.

There is also a cryptocurrency called Mazacoin that was created by Payu Harris in hopes that the Lakota can use it in order to have greater independence.

The question is: does the boom in cryptocurrency indicate that people want to become independent of the almighty dollar?

There are many people that agree that while we are seeing successes and failures with cryptocurrency that the dollar will eventually go the way of digital.

InformationWeek reports: According to former Central Intelligence Agency CTO Gus Hunt, in the future, the dollar could well become a crypto currency. Governments going to learn from Bitcoin, and all the official government currencies are going to become crypto currencies themselves, he said during a recent panel discussion in San Francisco hosted by information security firm eSentire, for which he sits on the board of advisers.

Others are saying that bitcoin will do for digital currency what Napster did for downloading music.

It is creating the format for which all digital dollars will be distributed.

Excerpt from:

Cryptocurrency | Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis

The Mises View: "Taxing Cryptocurrency" | Jeff Deist
Jeff Deist explains some of the compliance burdens of the IRS #39;s latest guidelines for cryptocurrency and other electronic media of exchange. Deist is the president of the Mises Institute. For...

By: misesmedia

Read more here:

The Mises View: "Taxing Cryptocurrency" | Jeff Deist - Video

Cryptocurrency Explained The Tech Guy 1046

By: Dennis Roman

Visit link:

Cryptocurrency Explained The Tech Guy 1046 - Video

Austin, Texas (PRWEB) May 02, 2014

Recently, the Coin Pursuit cryptocurrency information website has established a reputation within the industry as a no-nonsense resource for digital currency traders and enthusiasts. Their development team has been working on a unique interactive element for their website, designed to complement the original content and resource links Coin Pursuit already provides. Now that beta testing and tweaking have been completed, the company is announcing the official launch of this new service being offered to their readers. They have named it SliceFeeds.

SliceFeeds has a social media network feel to it, with similar personal connectivity features. Whereas many digital currency forums often have long threads where specific and unbiased information is difficult to find, SliceFeeds is being offered up as a cleaner and more efficient alternative. Additionally, it is positioned as a network strictly for cryptocurrency traders and merchants, eliminating the need for users to sort through unrelated or irrelevant information, as they would on the more generalized social media outlets. It offers a tight and focused community setting, where investors, enthusiasts and businesses can learn and educate one another, as well as promote their products and services.

Some of the major features of the network are as follows:

Network Rankings: SliceFeeds' main page features tables that show, by category, the popularity of digital currency types, wallets and exchanges, and these are updated in real time as members make changes to their personal preferences. User rankingswhich are generated by several factors, such as their number of followers, overall activity and so forthare shown here, as well. Users who earn higher rankings will enjoy higher visibility on this page, which can help generate more interest in their input.

SliceFeeds also has a unique rumor-ranking feature; if a member hears a rumor, they can submit it to their fellow members, who can then vote on its validity. Rumors that have been verified by the network's membership, based on a percentage of members, will appear in their own ranking table here; debunked rumors will not make the listings at all. Other tips, conversations, links and videos from all members show in this public feed for users to interact and find other members to follow.

Profile Creation: Once a user joins the networksigning up is freethey can adjust several settings on their profile page, effectively creating their own personal network-within-the-network. Privacy settings will allow them to select who sees what they post, from the general public down to just the people who subscribe to their feeds. These settings can be set individually for each category of posts (or Slices, in the network lingo) a user makes, including notes, tips, rumors, conversations, links and videos. From their profile page, they can create slices (similar to a tweet in Twitter) and watch the Slices of the people they follow, arrange their favorite currencies, exchanges and wallets, track their Slice feeds, and see a listing of the people they follow and who follow them.

Monetization: The SliceFeeds network presents a unique opportunity for the monetization of information, goods and services. Since its membership consists of those interested in alternative currencies, it also offers a concentrated and motivated base of customers for sellers who accept them as payment. Merchants can advertise their companies and wares, and bloggers and trading consultants can charge for subscriptions to their more exclusive content.

Privacy and Security: These are very important concepts in the cryptocurrency community. SliceFeeds' only requirements for membership are a user name and valid email address; no other personal information is required to set up an account. Additionally, no coins are stored on Coin Pursuit or SliceFeeds servers; all transactions are made directly between members. Users who offer subscriptions will need to use their public keys in order to do so, but they are not required for general membership. Absolutely no member information will be shared with any outside parties.

Members will also be able to take advantage of the private messaging system on SliceFeeds. They simply select another member's profile, and click on the Message User button provided on that member's profile page.

Excerpt from:

Coin Pursuit Launches SliceFeeds Interactive Cryptocurrency Network

CS 171 Final Project: Cryptocurrency Visualizations
Alex Liu and Karine Hsu ( #39;16)

By: Karine Hsu

See the rest here:

CS 171 Final Project: Cryptocurrency Visualizations - Video

CryptoCurrency - cryptobars commodity Launch!
http://tinyurl.com/cryptobars - Crypto Currency like bitcoin and litecoin have been extremely successful. Approximately 300000 Crypto Commodity GoldBars (GB...

By: Kos Mick

Originally posted here:

CryptoCurrency - cryptobars commodity Launch! - Video