ibmethatswhoib
Elite Member
- Feb 17, 2011
- 1,567
- 1,171
Fair enough, just checking, I guess you did say why you thought it was doomed to fail instead of being against it.
BitCoin and Cryptocurrencies - Will they fail? My 3 Predictions!
- Thread starter Wilson Grant Fisk
- Start date
lancis
Elite Member
- Jul 31, 2010
- 1,682
- 2,443
As the value goes up, the theories will become wilder.
No wonder, 'conspiracy theories' is an evergreen niche.
Wilson Grant Fisk
Elite Member
- Nov 10, 2012
- 15,677
- 46,840
Bitcoin Is a High-Tech Dinosaur Soon to Be Extinct
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-31/bitcoin-is-a-high-tech-dinosaur-soon-to-be-extinct.html
For all the regulatory crackdowns on Bitcoin in recent weeks, the cryptocurrency?s advocates remain unfailingly optimistic. Bitcoin is the future, they tell us; it heralds a future where private, stateless currencies will dethrone the dollar and other monetary dinosaurs.
Sorry, but Bitcoin isn?t the future. If anything, it?s a throwback to an earlier era, when private currencies circulated alongside government-sponsored money. In fact, if you strip away its technological trappings -- the encryption, the peer-to-peer networks -- and Bitcoin closely resembles these earlier private efforts.
This isn't a comforting historical parallel. The alternative currencies of the past are long gone, thanks to a decades-long campaign by governments aimed at monopolizing the money supply. The lesson of their rise and fall is one that Bitcoin?s boosters would be foolish not to heed.
* * *
Outside of libertarian circles, it has become conventional wisdom that it is both natural and desirable for governments to monopolize the production and quantity of currency. Rulers and regents throughout history certainly believed as much, claiming that they alone could issue -- and just as often, debase -- coins used by their citizens.
But such claims of monetary sovereignty collided with the realities of monetary exchange. For centuries, rulers found it impossible to keep competing currencies out of circulation. This was particularly true of the sorts of coins that served as small change for the lower classes of society. According to monetary historian Eric Helleiner, merchants in England issued low-denomination coins made of copper, lead and tin from the 13th century onward. By the 17th century, approximately 3,000 different businesses in London alone issued ?unauthorized? tokens.
The authorities turned a blind eye, largely because the crown wasn?t able to supply much-needed small change. Indeed, by 1787, only 8 percent of all the copper coins in circulation looked as though it came from the mint, though much of this was likely counterfeit. Similar conditions prevailed elsewhere. In Mexico, for example, Helleiner estimates that 2,000 shopkeepers in Mexico City issued their own coins in 1766.
Private currencies got a further boost during the industrial revolution, when British factory owners became desperate for small change to pay wages. As economic historian George Selgin documents in "Good Money," the nation?s industrialists minted their own cash in far greater quantities and at a cheaper price than the government itself could muster. The right to ?make money? was most definitely not in the exclusive hands of the government at this time.
Much of this currency consisted of coins made of copper, or occasionally silver, but by the nineteenth century private paper currencies became common as well. In Tokugawa Japan, for example, local lords issued their own paper notes, with 1,694 different kinds of currency in circulation by the 1860s. Likewise, in the U.S., state-chartered corporations -- banks, mostly -- issued a dizzying diversity of so-called ?bank notes.? By the eve of the Civil War, at least 10,000 different kinds of notes competed with the coins issued by the U.S. Mint.
And this wasn?t the only evidence of the weakness of governments in monetary affairs. In most nations, foreign coins often circulated alongside official coins, sometimes supplanting them. The most famous of these interlopers, the Spanish peso or silver piece of eight, was the de facto currency in America. If you visited the U.S. and asked for a dollar in coin, in all likelihood you would get handed a Spanish piece of eight minted in a place like Potosi, Bolivia. Such coins remained legal tender in the country until the 1850s; in other countries, such as China, they served as a de facto currency into the 20th century.
So what changed? How did governments, which had shown little inclination, never mind ability, to exercise their monetary sovereignty, come to monopolize the issuance of money? Over the 19th century, nationalist politicians in a number of countries came to view the private and foreign currencies circulating inside their borders as impediments to the creation of unified nations and national markets.
In particular, reformers pushed for standardization and control over small change in order to reduce transaction costs. While thousands of different kinds of currencies may work well enough for small, local markets, national markets demanded national monies -- or so the thinking went. In Britain, the government seized control over the currency from issuers of private tokens as early as 1812, ramping up production of standardized copper coins while banning private tokens.
Reform came later in the U.S., and for different reasons. During the Civil War, far more sweeping monetary legislation put an end of the era of private paper money, which was taxed out of existence by 1866, replaced by uniform fiat currency known as greenbacks and a new, standardized system of ?national bank notes.? This was a wartime exigency, but it was framed as an act of patriotism. As one defender of an exclusive, state-issued currency averred in the darkest days of the war, ?Government and the people ? would for the first time become inseparably united and consolidated. The people would have acquired a new and direct interest in the support of the Government, because their currency would depend for safety on the maintenance of that Government.?
Advocates of a more powerful central government came to view a common, state-issued currency as a valuable tool for accomplishing a host of nationalist projects, from collecting taxes to influencing economic conditions by controlling the money supply. The creation of central banks was but a further extension of this logic, giving nation-states even further control over the currency. Even the design of the nation?s money, argues Helleiner, came to be seen as a means of instilling allegiance to the state, with nationalist imagery becoming commonplace on currency at this time.
All of this was accomplished at great cost and with considerable controversy. To eradicate older currencies and to drive competing currencies from circulation was a monumental undertaking, and in most countries it took years. Private mints fought back, as did issuers of non-state currencies, but in the end the economic nationalists triumphed, steamrolling the opposition and prosecuting anyone who dared challenge the state?s monetary prerogatives. The process was largely complete by the early 20th century.
Anyone who thinks that Bitcoin will triumph has to believe that it will succeed where earlier generations of private currencies failed -- that Bitcoin will, improbably, manage to overthrow more than century?s worth of accumulated state power, jealously guarded and ruthlessly enforced.
That?s a preposterous fantasy -- and a dangerous one, if you?re an investor. Indeed, people who believe that governments of the world will let a stateless cryptocurrency usurp their hard-won monetary prerogatives aren?t forecasting the future. They?re living in the past.
(Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, is a contributor to the Ticker. Follow him on Twitter.)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-31/bitcoin-is-a-high-tech-dinosaur-soon-to-be-extinct.html
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[h=1]The Serious Disadvantages of Bitcoin[/h]http://wallstreetpit.com/102032-the-serious-disadvantages-of-bitcoin-2/
You?ve all heard about Bitcoin. No one knows who created it, although some writers have made very educated guesses about the identity of the pseudonymous creator. I have sometimes wondered whether Bitcoin is the product of some transnational criminal organization or rogue state that wants to undermine developed economies by casting their payment systems into doubt. I am less concerned with Bitcoin?s origin than with its flaws. I shall enumerate those flaws forthwith.
Bitcoin enables fraud and other criminal activities. This is absolutely the single most salient feature of Bitcoin?s anonymity. Conventional currencies are indeed subject to laundering and counterfeit. There is probably no way to eliminate those risks completely. Bitcoin magnifies those risks because it can only be exchanged anonymously. It dominates dark networks that have been known to traffic in narcotics. Law enforcement efforts to shut those networks down will terminate the ability of any financial actor to transact in Bitcoins even for legitimate reasons. When the network is down, your Bitcoins are gone. Conventional currency doesn?t work that way in real transactions. Banks and brokerages have offsite business continuity backups. Securities exchanges and central banks maintain counterparty records. These mechanisms lack Bitcoin?s anonymity but make up for that in resiliency and trustworthiness.
Navigate: Home Latest, Market Today The Serious Disadvantages of Bitcoin
[h=1]The Serious Disadvantages of Bitcoin[/h] By Anthony Alfidi Jan 1, 2014, 11:15 AM Author's Website
You?ve all heard about Bitcoin. No one knows who created it, although some writers have made very educated guesses about the identity of the pseudonymous creator. I have sometimes wondered whether Bitcoin is the product of some transnational criminal organization or rogue state that wants to undermine developed economies by casting their payment systems into doubt. I am less concerned with Bitcoin?s origin than with its flaws. I shall enumerate those flaws forthwith.
Bitcoin enables fraud and other criminal activities. This is absolutely the single most salient feature of Bitcoin?s anonymity. Conventional currencies are indeed subject to laundering and counterfeit. There is probably no way to eliminate those risks completely. Bitcoin magnifies those risks because it can only be exchanged anonymously. It dominates dark networks that have been known to traffic in narcotics. Law enforcement efforts to shut those networks down will terminate the ability of any financial actor to transact in Bitcoins even for legitimate reasons. When the network is down, your Bitcoins are gone. Conventional currency doesn?t work that way in real transactions. Banks and brokerages have offsite business continuity backups. Securities exchanges and central banks maintain counterparty records. These mechanisms lack Bitcoin?s anonymity but make up for that in resiliency and trustworthiness.
Digital QR codes make it vulnerable to theft. One Bloomberg TV anchor learned this the hard way. Transmuting digital Bitcoins into a paper medium means the QR code reveals their underlying location. Scanning that QR code means anyone can anonymously steal Bitcoins. That?s the bad part about anonymizing a currency. Masking ownership means no audit trail to recover a thief?s digital fingerprints.
Mining Bitcoins is a health hazard and energy sink. People run obsolete hardware just because the video cards can process random digits into raw Bitcoins. This is a kind of ?mining? that?s unlike the real-world mining I?ve studied for years, because it transforms nothing into an encrypted version of nothing. Nerds who run multiple machines overnight to mine Bitcoin risk heat stroke from the machines. If you don?t believe me, do a Google search of ?Bitcoin heat? and note all of the cooling problems Bitcoin miners discuss amongst themselves, with the real world watching them fry. Crypto-nerds advocate data furnaces as an economic solution to waste heat generation from Bitcoin mining. Gimme a break already. There is no way a distributed network of Bitcoin mining operations could ever be a backbone for currency transactions or an alternate energy grid. No cloud provider in its right mind will ever farm out data storage needs to distributed servers with zero physical security. Bitcoin?s so-called solutions just multiply its problems.
There is no central bank for Bitcoin. Indeed, there never will be one, because Bitcoin?s evasion of central control appeals to its users. The Federal Reserve, for all of its flaws, has enabled the US to withstand financial panics because it could manage a unified national currency. A central bank manages fractional reserve lending that allows a national economy to expand. The supply of crypto-currency is limited by algorithmic design, so an economy running on Bitcoin cannot expand to accommodate a larger population or natural resource base. A Bitcoin economy cannot grow because it cannot deploy excess capital for innovation.
Minting copycat currencies is easy. Run through the gamut of crypto-currencies like Litecoin, Dogecoin, Namecoin, Peercoin, and others to see how unserious most crypto-currency enthusiasts are about money. Dogecoin in particular is obviously a joke based on an Internet meme. Using a currency named after memes doesn?t impress me. Imagine someone in the early 20th Century printing a dollar with Mickey Mouse?s smiling visage and convincing others to take it seriously. The US economy tolerated decentralized currency minting for some of its history until the settlement of the frontier demanded a nationally integrated economy. Copycat currencies destroy the credibility of Bitcoin.
I am totally convinced that Bitcoin is at best a joke and at worst a fraud. Hi-tech startups should be be radical, disruptive, transformational, chaotic, revolutionary, and all that but those are not the characteristics of a currency. People who use currencies as a medium of exchange and store of value need them to have conservative characteristics, so that one unit today has pretty much the same value next year. Stability enables consumption and investment in reliable amounts at acceptable intervals among counterparties. Bitcoin does not accomplish these purposes.
Bitcoin is baloney. I?m waiting for some jokester to create Baloneycoin that will evaporate when minted and play some funny animation. Look up ?Cosbycoin? for an early attempt at turning this idea into a joke. The parody site that features Cosbycoin is hilarious but the real joke is on anyone who takes Bitcoin seriously as an investment. I do not use Bitcoin, nor will I do business with anyone who wants to transact in Bitcoin. I may be a nerd but I?m far too intelligent to use something as stupid as Bitcoin.
http://wallstreetpit.com/102032-the-serious-disadvantages-of-bitcoin-2/
[h=1]Why I Lost Faith In Bitcoin As A Money Transfer Protocol[/h]http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/01/why-i-lost-faith-in-bitcoin-as-a-money-transfer-protocol/
As 2013 came to an end, many reflected on last year?s biggest tech news ? and Bitcoin was a serious contender. But the main question remains: why are people interested in Bitcoin?
This whole debate reappeared when Charlie Stross stated that ?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.? Paul Krugman then quoted his post, neither denying nor approving this thought.
But Chris Dixon (and Fred Wilson in the comment section) reiterated their strong interest in Bitcoin while sharing that they are both Democrats.
If major Bitcoin enthusiasts don?t have any political agenda in mind, then what is the future of Bitcoin? At its heart, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that doesn?t rely on any central bank. Bitcoins are just a chain of characters defined by algorithmic rules, and transactions are handled by the network of miners.
Yet, in a month?s time, the value of a bitcoin went from $200 to more than $1,000 on all the exchanges. In other words, it is as volatile as it can get. Right now, there are only around 12 million of bitcoins in circulation, and many Bitcoin holders are recent converts that buy and sell every day. So how could you think about using bitcoins to pay the rent? You could simply hold your bitcoins and expect to triple your wallet value in a couple of weeks instead.
That?s why I believe Bitcoin isn?t the next world currency. Bitcoin?s true purpose is not what everyone originally expected ? you won?t buy a pizza in bitcoins anytime soon. Moreover, Bitcoin won?t be able to remain an unregulated currency for long.
So Bitcoin?s true purpose lies somewhere else. As Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment network, you don?t need any banking institution to make large transfers. Bitcoin could become the first meta-currency that sits on top of traditional currencies, the common language between USD and EUR. That?s what Dixon finds interesting, Bitcoin is as much a money transfer protocol as a currency. And it has the potential of disrupting the traditional banking system.
[h=3]Replacing Forex Transactions With Bitcoin[/h] As I live in France and work for an American company, I thought I would be the perfect candidate for this particular use case. I tried to use Bitcoin to transfer a small amount of money between the U.S. and France. At first, I purchased bitcoins using Coinbase and my U.S. bank account (a couple of dollars in fees). The process was very easy, but because I don?t meet the requirements to make instant purchases, I had to wait about a week before I could actually do anything with my bitcoins. Coinbase had to verify the transaction first.
While I take Coinbase as an example here, there aren?t many trustworthy and easy-to-use services to make Bitcoin transactions yet ? and all services have flaws. People ask me all the time how they could buy bitcoins, and I don?t have a simple answer.
In that period of time, bitcoins went from about $850 a bitcoin to more than $1,000, then back to $700 ? I only could sit back and enjoy the ride. Then, when I finally got my bitcoins, I transfered them to Bitstamp in a couple of hours (no fee) ? it was flawless and a great example of the beauty of Bitcoin. Finally, I transfered my bitcoins to my French account ($1.24 fee to convert into EUR with a very good conversion rate). I had to wait a few days before getting my money because of the traditional banking system.
Overall, it was a painful experience, even more painful than using traditional foreign exchange services. But more importantly, I don?t see how I could trust Bitcoin as a money transfer protocol with such a high volatility. Fees were much lower, but it doesn?t matter if you don?t know how much money you will get on your bank account in the end.
A couple of weeks ago, Bitcoin?s value went from more than $1,100 to around $650 in a few hours, because of a new rule in China. You can?t use Bitcoin for serious amounts of money if there is a chance of losing 40 percent of your money overnight.
As long as Bitcoin remains a young and volatile currency, Bitcoin?s mechanisms will remain beautiful on paper. Using it for real world transactions would be crazy, and I think we are still a couple of years away from getting a stable Bitcoin that can be trusted. Until then, using Bitcoin will remain a wild ride ? it?s definitely fun, but don?t take Bitcoin seriously just yet.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/01/why-i-lost-faith-in-bitcoin-as-a-money-transfer-protocol/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-31/bitcoin-is-a-high-tech-dinosaur-soon-to-be-extinct.html
For all the regulatory crackdowns on Bitcoin in recent weeks, the cryptocurrency?s advocates remain unfailingly optimistic. Bitcoin is the future, they tell us; it heralds a future where private, stateless currencies will dethrone the dollar and other monetary dinosaurs.
Sorry, but Bitcoin isn?t the future. If anything, it?s a throwback to an earlier era, when private currencies circulated alongside government-sponsored money. In fact, if you strip away its technological trappings -- the encryption, the peer-to-peer networks -- and Bitcoin closely resembles these earlier private efforts.
This isn't a comforting historical parallel. The alternative currencies of the past are long gone, thanks to a decades-long campaign by governments aimed at monopolizing the money supply. The lesson of their rise and fall is one that Bitcoin?s boosters would be foolish not to heed.
* * *
Outside of libertarian circles, it has become conventional wisdom that it is both natural and desirable for governments to monopolize the production and quantity of currency. Rulers and regents throughout history certainly believed as much, claiming that they alone could issue -- and just as often, debase -- coins used by their citizens.
But such claims of monetary sovereignty collided with the realities of monetary exchange. For centuries, rulers found it impossible to keep competing currencies out of circulation. This was particularly true of the sorts of coins that served as small change for the lower classes of society. According to monetary historian Eric Helleiner, merchants in England issued low-denomination coins made of copper, lead and tin from the 13th century onward. By the 17th century, approximately 3,000 different businesses in London alone issued ?unauthorized? tokens.
The authorities turned a blind eye, largely because the crown wasn?t able to supply much-needed small change. Indeed, by 1787, only 8 percent of all the copper coins in circulation looked as though it came from the mint, though much of this was likely counterfeit. Similar conditions prevailed elsewhere. In Mexico, for example, Helleiner estimates that 2,000 shopkeepers in Mexico City issued their own coins in 1766.
Private currencies got a further boost during the industrial revolution, when British factory owners became desperate for small change to pay wages. As economic historian George Selgin documents in "Good Money," the nation?s industrialists minted their own cash in far greater quantities and at a cheaper price than the government itself could muster. The right to ?make money? was most definitely not in the exclusive hands of the government at this time.
Much of this currency consisted of coins made of copper, or occasionally silver, but by the nineteenth century private paper currencies became common as well. In Tokugawa Japan, for example, local lords issued their own paper notes, with 1,694 different kinds of currency in circulation by the 1860s. Likewise, in the U.S., state-chartered corporations -- banks, mostly -- issued a dizzying diversity of so-called ?bank notes.? By the eve of the Civil War, at least 10,000 different kinds of notes competed with the coins issued by the U.S. Mint.
And this wasn?t the only evidence of the weakness of governments in monetary affairs. In most nations, foreign coins often circulated alongside official coins, sometimes supplanting them. The most famous of these interlopers, the Spanish peso or silver piece of eight, was the de facto currency in America. If you visited the U.S. and asked for a dollar in coin, in all likelihood you would get handed a Spanish piece of eight minted in a place like Potosi, Bolivia. Such coins remained legal tender in the country until the 1850s; in other countries, such as China, they served as a de facto currency into the 20th century.
So what changed? How did governments, which had shown little inclination, never mind ability, to exercise their monetary sovereignty, come to monopolize the issuance of money? Over the 19th century, nationalist politicians in a number of countries came to view the private and foreign currencies circulating inside their borders as impediments to the creation of unified nations and national markets.
In particular, reformers pushed for standardization and control over small change in order to reduce transaction costs. While thousands of different kinds of currencies may work well enough for small, local markets, national markets demanded national monies -- or so the thinking went. In Britain, the government seized control over the currency from issuers of private tokens as early as 1812, ramping up production of standardized copper coins while banning private tokens.
Reform came later in the U.S., and for different reasons. During the Civil War, far more sweeping monetary legislation put an end of the era of private paper money, which was taxed out of existence by 1866, replaced by uniform fiat currency known as greenbacks and a new, standardized system of ?national bank notes.? This was a wartime exigency, but it was framed as an act of patriotism. As one defender of an exclusive, state-issued currency averred in the darkest days of the war, ?Government and the people ? would for the first time become inseparably united and consolidated. The people would have acquired a new and direct interest in the support of the Government, because their currency would depend for safety on the maintenance of that Government.?
Advocates of a more powerful central government came to view a common, state-issued currency as a valuable tool for accomplishing a host of nationalist projects, from collecting taxes to influencing economic conditions by controlling the money supply. The creation of central banks was but a further extension of this logic, giving nation-states even further control over the currency. Even the design of the nation?s money, argues Helleiner, came to be seen as a means of instilling allegiance to the state, with nationalist imagery becoming commonplace on currency at this time.
All of this was accomplished at great cost and with considerable controversy. To eradicate older currencies and to drive competing currencies from circulation was a monumental undertaking, and in most countries it took years. Private mints fought back, as did issuers of non-state currencies, but in the end the economic nationalists triumphed, steamrolling the opposition and prosecuting anyone who dared challenge the state?s monetary prerogatives. The process was largely complete by the early 20th century.
Anyone who thinks that Bitcoin will triumph has to believe that it will succeed where earlier generations of private currencies failed -- that Bitcoin will, improbably, manage to overthrow more than century?s worth of accumulated state power, jealously guarded and ruthlessly enforced.
That?s a preposterous fantasy -- and a dangerous one, if you?re an investor. Indeed, people who believe that governments of the world will let a stateless cryptocurrency usurp their hard-won monetary prerogatives aren?t forecasting the future. They?re living in the past.
(Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, is a contributor to the Ticker. Follow him on Twitter.)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-31/bitcoin-is-a-high-tech-dinosaur-soon-to-be-extinct.html
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin's Big Year and Uncertain Future Bloomberg Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) ?- MIT Technology Review Deputy Editor Brian Bergstein and Tangent Capital Partners Senior Managing Director Jim Rickards ... [TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Is a High-Tech Dinosaur Soon to Be Extinct Bloomberg For all the regulatory crackdowns on Bitcoin in recent weeks, the cryptocurrency's advocates remain unfailingly optimistic. Bitcoin is the future, they tell ...
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[TD] Bitcoin Exchanges in India get Shut Down JOSIC: News, Sports, Style, Culture & Technology The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has declared the use of bitcoins can be classified as ?illegal and illicit? activity. Following this announcement, Bitcoin ...
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[TD] 2013: The year of bitcoin MarketWatch (blog) 2013 was quite possibly the year of bitcoin; it was the year in which its price skyrocketed above $1,000 as it simultaneously moved from the dark ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] The Serious Disadvantages of Bitcoin Wall Street Pit You've all heard about Bitcoin. No one knows who created it, although some writers have made very educated guesses about the identity of the ...
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[TD] Get Free Bitcoins with 8 Website Faucets that Really Pay The Mac Observer Bitcoin Faucet Bitcoins are all over the headlines, but did you know there are websites that pay out "free" Bitcoins for visiting them or doing tasks?
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[TD="colspan: 2"] How Bitcoin Demonstrates the Value in Facebook Motley Fool One bitcoin is worth $700,000. Or $0. Or $1,300. Now that this specific cryptocurrency is mainstream, everyone has an opinion on its exact value.
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Fortress is forming a Bitcoin fund Fortune (blog) FORTUNE -- In September we discussed how SecondMarket had launched the first U.S.-based investment vehicle dedicated exclusively to Bitcoin, ...
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[TD] Now Bitcoin Malwares Target Personal Computers Siliconindia.com "Bitcoin users have become the hot target for cyber criminals as bitcoin transaction is permanent and has no reversal of charges," Trend Micro ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Exton firm buys Bitcoin platform, loses auditor Philly.com (blog) 26, WPCS said its newly-purchased New York subsidiary, BTX Trader LLC, "has released a beta version of its Bitcoin trading platform," enabling ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Why I Lost Faith In Bitcoin As A Money Transfer Protocol | TechCrunch Romain Dillet As 2013 came to an end, many reflected on last year's biggest tech news -- and Bitcoin was a serious contender. But the main question remains: why ... [TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Chris Dixon Defends Bitcoin - Business Insider Julie Bort There's been a lot of debate lately about Bitcoin and its political role. On Tuesday, Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon explained why he liked Bitcoin.
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin ASIC manufacturer HashFast facing lawsuits over alleged ... Joel Hruska Bad behavior from ASIC manufacturers in the unregulated Bitcoin industry is unsurprising, but there are multiple facets to the BTC ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Fortess Investment Is Forming A Bitcoin Fund | Zero Hedge Tyler Durden Two months after the CIO of Fortress Investment Group recommended "putting a little money in Bitcoin," the massive fund is preparing to luanch its ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Roundup: More Merchants, More ATMs, Better than Credit ... Brian Doherty Some stories and speculations from the Bitcoin beat: ?Attempts on the part of the Chinese government and banking system to restrict free trade in ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Developers flock to hot APIs for Bitcoin, translation, and stock ... Jordan Novet If they want to add complex features users will dig, like a tool for handling payments in the Bitcoin virtual currency, they can tap external services.
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Weekly 2014 January 1: Indian government raids BTC ... Kyt Dotson Happy New Year everyone in the Bitcoin community! This little cryptocurrency that could has racked up yet-another-year of the interesting and the ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Intro Mastercoins. This is a game changer within Bitcoin protocol ... twilson1utk To explain this, you must understand that fundamentally Bitcoin itself is an experiment. The world has never seen/tried it before. We can guess what is ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Yet More on Tyler Cowen on Bitcoin Bob Murphy To put this in simpler terms, Bitcoin's network externalities should drive the value of Bitcoin. Tyler says in theory you could argue that Bitcoin's price ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] My concerns with Bitcoin as a currency | Wrong Side of Memphis Jaime Buelta So, to start the year, I've decided to share some of my thought on the bit coin issue, and some of the problems I see. As I am not an economist, I'm not ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin's Incredible Year - Forbes Last year at this time, valued at just $13.50, one Bitcoin could get you a movie ticket if you could find a theater that had 1) heard of Bitcoin and 2) ... [TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[h=1]The Serious Disadvantages of Bitcoin[/h]http://wallstreetpit.com/102032-the-serious-disadvantages-of-bitcoin-2/
You?ve all heard about Bitcoin. No one knows who created it, although some writers have made very educated guesses about the identity of the pseudonymous creator. I have sometimes wondered whether Bitcoin is the product of some transnational criminal organization or rogue state that wants to undermine developed economies by casting their payment systems into doubt. I am less concerned with Bitcoin?s origin than with its flaws. I shall enumerate those flaws forthwith.
Bitcoin enables fraud and other criminal activities. This is absolutely the single most salient feature of Bitcoin?s anonymity. Conventional currencies are indeed subject to laundering and counterfeit. There is probably no way to eliminate those risks completely. Bitcoin magnifies those risks because it can only be exchanged anonymously. It dominates dark networks that have been known to traffic in narcotics. Law enforcement efforts to shut those networks down will terminate the ability of any financial actor to transact in Bitcoins even for legitimate reasons. When the network is down, your Bitcoins are gone. Conventional currency doesn?t work that way in real transactions. Banks and brokerages have offsite business continuity backups. Securities exchanges and central banks maintain counterparty records. These mechanisms lack Bitcoin?s anonymity but make up for that in resiliency and trustworthiness.
Navigate: Home Latest, Market Today The Serious Disadvantages of Bitcoin
[h=1]The Serious Disadvantages of Bitcoin[/h] By Anthony Alfidi Jan 1, 2014, 11:15 AM Author's Website
You?ve all heard about Bitcoin. No one knows who created it, although some writers have made very educated guesses about the identity of the pseudonymous creator. I have sometimes wondered whether Bitcoin is the product of some transnational criminal organization or rogue state that wants to undermine developed economies by casting their payment systems into doubt. I am less concerned with Bitcoin?s origin than with its flaws. I shall enumerate those flaws forthwith.
Bitcoin enables fraud and other criminal activities. This is absolutely the single most salient feature of Bitcoin?s anonymity. Conventional currencies are indeed subject to laundering and counterfeit. There is probably no way to eliminate those risks completely. Bitcoin magnifies those risks because it can only be exchanged anonymously. It dominates dark networks that have been known to traffic in narcotics. Law enforcement efforts to shut those networks down will terminate the ability of any financial actor to transact in Bitcoins even for legitimate reasons. When the network is down, your Bitcoins are gone. Conventional currency doesn?t work that way in real transactions. Banks and brokerages have offsite business continuity backups. Securities exchanges and central banks maintain counterparty records. These mechanisms lack Bitcoin?s anonymity but make up for that in resiliency and trustworthiness.
Digital QR codes make it vulnerable to theft. One Bloomberg TV anchor learned this the hard way. Transmuting digital Bitcoins into a paper medium means the QR code reveals their underlying location. Scanning that QR code means anyone can anonymously steal Bitcoins. That?s the bad part about anonymizing a currency. Masking ownership means no audit trail to recover a thief?s digital fingerprints.
Mining Bitcoins is a health hazard and energy sink. People run obsolete hardware just because the video cards can process random digits into raw Bitcoins. This is a kind of ?mining? that?s unlike the real-world mining I?ve studied for years, because it transforms nothing into an encrypted version of nothing. Nerds who run multiple machines overnight to mine Bitcoin risk heat stroke from the machines. If you don?t believe me, do a Google search of ?Bitcoin heat? and note all of the cooling problems Bitcoin miners discuss amongst themselves, with the real world watching them fry. Crypto-nerds advocate data furnaces as an economic solution to waste heat generation from Bitcoin mining. Gimme a break already. There is no way a distributed network of Bitcoin mining operations could ever be a backbone for currency transactions or an alternate energy grid. No cloud provider in its right mind will ever farm out data storage needs to distributed servers with zero physical security. Bitcoin?s so-called solutions just multiply its problems.
There is no central bank for Bitcoin. Indeed, there never will be one, because Bitcoin?s evasion of central control appeals to its users. The Federal Reserve, for all of its flaws, has enabled the US to withstand financial panics because it could manage a unified national currency. A central bank manages fractional reserve lending that allows a national economy to expand. The supply of crypto-currency is limited by algorithmic design, so an economy running on Bitcoin cannot expand to accommodate a larger population or natural resource base. A Bitcoin economy cannot grow because it cannot deploy excess capital for innovation.
Minting copycat currencies is easy. Run through the gamut of crypto-currencies like Litecoin, Dogecoin, Namecoin, Peercoin, and others to see how unserious most crypto-currency enthusiasts are about money. Dogecoin in particular is obviously a joke based on an Internet meme. Using a currency named after memes doesn?t impress me. Imagine someone in the early 20th Century printing a dollar with Mickey Mouse?s smiling visage and convincing others to take it seriously. The US economy tolerated decentralized currency minting for some of its history until the settlement of the frontier demanded a nationally integrated economy. Copycat currencies destroy the credibility of Bitcoin.
I am totally convinced that Bitcoin is at best a joke and at worst a fraud. Hi-tech startups should be be radical, disruptive, transformational, chaotic, revolutionary, and all that but those are not the characteristics of a currency. People who use currencies as a medium of exchange and store of value need them to have conservative characteristics, so that one unit today has pretty much the same value next year. Stability enables consumption and investment in reliable amounts at acceptable intervals among counterparties. Bitcoin does not accomplish these purposes.
Bitcoin is baloney. I?m waiting for some jokester to create Baloneycoin that will evaporate when minted and play some funny animation. Look up ?Cosbycoin? for an early attempt at turning this idea into a joke. The parody site that features Cosbycoin is hilarious but the real joke is on anyone who takes Bitcoin seriously as an investment. I do not use Bitcoin, nor will I do business with anyone who wants to transact in Bitcoin. I may be a nerd but I?m far too intelligent to use something as stupid as Bitcoin.
http://wallstreetpit.com/102032-the-serious-disadvantages-of-bitcoin-2/
[h=1]Why I Lost Faith In Bitcoin As A Money Transfer Protocol[/h]http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/01/why-i-lost-faith-in-bitcoin-as-a-money-transfer-protocol/
As 2013 came to an end, many reflected on last year?s biggest tech news ? and Bitcoin was a serious contender. But the main question remains: why are people interested in Bitcoin?
This whole debate reappeared when Charlie Stross stated that ?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.? Paul Krugman then quoted his post, neither denying nor approving this thought.
But Chris Dixon (and Fred Wilson in the comment section) reiterated their strong interest in Bitcoin while sharing that they are both Democrats.
If major Bitcoin enthusiasts don?t have any political agenda in mind, then what is the future of Bitcoin? At its heart, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that doesn?t rely on any central bank. Bitcoins are just a chain of characters defined by algorithmic rules, and transactions are handled by the network of miners.
Yet, in a month?s time, the value of a bitcoin went from $200 to more than $1,000 on all the exchanges. In other words, it is as volatile as it can get. Right now, there are only around 12 million of bitcoins in circulation, and many Bitcoin holders are recent converts that buy and sell every day. So how could you think about using bitcoins to pay the rent? You could simply hold your bitcoins and expect to triple your wallet value in a couple of weeks instead.
That?s why I believe Bitcoin isn?t the next world currency. Bitcoin?s true purpose is not what everyone originally expected ? you won?t buy a pizza in bitcoins anytime soon. Moreover, Bitcoin won?t be able to remain an unregulated currency for long.
So Bitcoin?s true purpose lies somewhere else. As Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment network, you don?t need any banking institution to make large transfers. Bitcoin could become the first meta-currency that sits on top of traditional currencies, the common language between USD and EUR. That?s what Dixon finds interesting, Bitcoin is as much a money transfer protocol as a currency. And it has the potential of disrupting the traditional banking system.
[h=3]Replacing Forex Transactions With Bitcoin[/h] As I live in France and work for an American company, I thought I would be the perfect candidate for this particular use case. I tried to use Bitcoin to transfer a small amount of money between the U.S. and France. At first, I purchased bitcoins using Coinbase and my U.S. bank account (a couple of dollars in fees). The process was very easy, but because I don?t meet the requirements to make instant purchases, I had to wait about a week before I could actually do anything with my bitcoins. Coinbase had to verify the transaction first.
While I take Coinbase as an example here, there aren?t many trustworthy and easy-to-use services to make Bitcoin transactions yet ? and all services have flaws. People ask me all the time how they could buy bitcoins, and I don?t have a simple answer.
In that period of time, bitcoins went from about $850 a bitcoin to more than $1,000, then back to $700 ? I only could sit back and enjoy the ride. Then, when I finally got my bitcoins, I transfered them to Bitstamp in a couple of hours (no fee) ? it was flawless and a great example of the beauty of Bitcoin. Finally, I transfered my bitcoins to my French account ($1.24 fee to convert into EUR with a very good conversion rate). I had to wait a few days before getting my money because of the traditional banking system.
Overall, it was a painful experience, even more painful than using traditional foreign exchange services. But more importantly, I don?t see how I could trust Bitcoin as a money transfer protocol with such a high volatility. Fees were much lower, but it doesn?t matter if you don?t know how much money you will get on your bank account in the end.
A couple of weeks ago, Bitcoin?s value went from more than $1,100 to around $650 in a few hours, because of a new rule in China. You can?t use Bitcoin for serious amounts of money if there is a chance of losing 40 percent of your money overnight.
As long as Bitcoin remains a young and volatile currency, Bitcoin?s mechanisms will remain beautiful on paper. Using it for real world transactions would be crazy, and I think we are still a couple of years away from getting a stable Bitcoin that can be trusted. Until then, using Bitcoin will remain a wild ride ? it?s definitely fun, but don?t take Bitcoin seriously just yet.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/01/why-i-lost-faith-in-bitcoin-as-a-money-transfer-protocol/
Wilson Grant Fisk
Elite Member
- Nov 10, 2012
- 15,677
- 46,840
[h=1]Bitcoin ATMs Are Spreading Across the World[/h]
Sometimes the future can sneak up on you. Like when you find out that a startup incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, whose employees live in New Hampshire and whose products are made in Portugal, is selling digital-currency ATMs to Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
These are only two of the countries that have purchased Bitcoin ATMs from manufacturer Lamassu, which announced Monday that it had sold 120 of the machines to customers all over the world. A map Lamassu created to mark the occasion, showing the far-flung sales locations of its Bitcoin ATMs, not coincidentally illustrates the global appeal of Bitcoin.
Zach Harvey, Lamassu's chief executive, said as much in a press release. "We will be shipping to 25 different countries, ranging from Canada to Kyrgyzstan, and we've translated our user interface into more than a dozen languages, including Russian, Chinese and Friulian," Harvey said.
Lamassu has delivered about a dozen ATMs so far, with plans to ship the others in spring 2014.
Related: India's No. 1 Bitcoin Exchange: Shutdown 'In No Way' Reflects Bitcoin's True Potential
In October 2013, another company, Robocoin, made headlines for its Bitcoin ATM, said to be the first in the world that was available to the public, when one of its machines was installed in a coffee house in Vancouver. Within its first month in operation, the ATM had processed more than CAD$1 million in transactions.
Robocoin's machine, which costs $20,000, or four to five times as much as Lamassu's (the company offers price discounts for bulk orders), allows users both to buy bitcoins with paper bills and to withdraw cash by selling bitcoins. Lamassu's table-top ATM, which is much more compact than Robocoin's kiosk, cannot provide cash in exchange for bitcoins, only the other way around.
Although Bitcoin ATMs are still in their infancy, they already represent a contentious space, in which each company is jealous of its claim to fame. After Business Insider Australia reported Monday that a company called 21st Century Bitcoin Exchange was setting up the first Bitcoin ATM in Australia, Lamassu corrected the news site on Twitter, saying it had already installed one of its own ATMs in Melbourne, with "about 15 more on their way."
Robocoin's chief executive, for his part, took a shot at buy-only machines such as Lamassu's when his company's ATM debuted this past August. "Seriously, how bush league is an 'ATM' if it can't do the equivalent of deposits and withdrawals?" Robocoin CEO Jordan Kelley said.
Lamassu will be presenting its Bitcoin ATM for trial use at the CES Startup Debut event in Las Vegas on January 5, prior to the Consumer Electronics Show that will kick off two days later. After one of Lamassu's machines was installed in Bratislava, Slovakia, a local man named Juraj Bedn?r created a YouTube video demonstrating how easy it is to use.
"It's always exciting for a young startup to have sales ramp up," Harvey said in the release. "But what's really thrilling for us is to know that these will be out in the wild, providing millions of people with effortless access to Bitcoin every single day."
Related: Actually...Bitcoin's Recognition Is Pretty Darn High
Sometimes the future can sneak up on you. Like when you find out that a startup incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, whose employees live in New Hampshire and whose products are made in Portugal, is selling digital-currency ATMs to Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
These are only two of the countries that have purchased Bitcoin ATMs from manufacturer Lamassu, which announced Monday that it had sold 120 of the machines to customers all over the world. A map Lamassu created to mark the occasion, showing the far-flung sales locations of its Bitcoin ATMs, not coincidentally illustrates the global appeal of Bitcoin.
Zach Harvey, Lamassu's chief executive, said as much in a press release. "We will be shipping to 25 different countries, ranging from Canada to Kyrgyzstan, and we've translated our user interface into more than a dozen languages, including Russian, Chinese and Friulian," Harvey said.
Lamassu has delivered about a dozen ATMs so far, with plans to ship the others in spring 2014.
Related: India's No. 1 Bitcoin Exchange: Shutdown 'In No Way' Reflects Bitcoin's True Potential
In October 2013, another company, Robocoin, made headlines for its Bitcoin ATM, said to be the first in the world that was available to the public, when one of its machines was installed in a coffee house in Vancouver. Within its first month in operation, the ATM had processed more than CAD$1 million in transactions.
Robocoin's machine, which costs $20,000, or four to five times as much as Lamassu's (the company offers price discounts for bulk orders), allows users both to buy bitcoins with paper bills and to withdraw cash by selling bitcoins. Lamassu's table-top ATM, which is much more compact than Robocoin's kiosk, cannot provide cash in exchange for bitcoins, only the other way around.
Although Bitcoin ATMs are still in their infancy, they already represent a contentious space, in which each company is jealous of its claim to fame. After Business Insider Australia reported Monday that a company called 21st Century Bitcoin Exchange was setting up the first Bitcoin ATM in Australia, Lamassu corrected the news site on Twitter, saying it had already installed one of its own ATMs in Melbourne, with "about 15 more on their way."
Robocoin's chief executive, for his part, took a shot at buy-only machines such as Lamassu's when his company's ATM debuted this past August. "Seriously, how bush league is an 'ATM' if it can't do the equivalent of deposits and withdrawals?" Robocoin CEO Jordan Kelley said.
Lamassu will be presenting its Bitcoin ATM for trial use at the CES Startup Debut event in Las Vegas on January 5, prior to the Consumer Electronics Show that will kick off two days later. After one of Lamassu's machines was installed in Bratislava, Slovakia, a local man named Juraj Bedn?r created a YouTube video demonstrating how easy it is to use.
"It's always exciting for a young startup to have sales ramp up," Harvey said in the release. "But what's really thrilling for us is to know that these will be out in the wild, providing millions of people with effortless access to Bitcoin every single day."
Related: Actually...Bitcoin's Recognition Is Pretty Darn High
jazzc
Elite Member
- Jan 27, 2009
- 2,964
- 14,717
You need to look in the mirror.
xicebreaker69x
Newbie
- Dec 31, 2013
- 18
- 1
it will fail eventually bitcoin will reach its max.. and people will start selling their coins..
Wilson Grant Fisk
Elite Member
- Nov 10, 2012
- 15,677
- 46,840
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[TD] Some see Bitcoin as next vehicle for trade Kansas.com Bitcoin is an electronic currency allowing for financial exchanges without regulation by any government, financial institution or centralized bank.
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoins can buy beer, shoes in ČR Prague Post Prague, Jan 1 (ČTK) — About 30 businesses in the Czech Republic have started to accept virtual currency bitcoin so far, but they agree the possibility ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin kicks off 2014 at $755 on Bitstamp MarketWatch Bitcoin kicks off 2014 at $755 on Bitstamp ... Over on the trading exchange Mt. Gox, bitcoin was at $821.78, within a 24-hour range of $793.11 to ...
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[TD] Is Bitcoin a hi-tech dinosaur? Economic Times NEW YORK: For all the regulatory crackdowns on Bitcoin in recent weeks, the cryptocurrency's advocates remain unfailingly optimistic. Bitcoin is the ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin/USD: Is this the end of bitcoin? BofA Merrill Lynch asks the ... iNVEZZ The PRC's increasingly strident bitcoin regulation has somewhat pulled the rug from under the aspirant currency, which had hitherto experienced a ...
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[TD] Bitcoin Set to Boom in Latin America PanAm Post (blog) Bitcoins (BTC) are currently accepted at a range of establishments, including WordPress.com, OKCupid, over 13,000 restaurants in 3,150 cities listed ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Wishing for a Very Bitcoin 2014 Bloomberg For the world's Bitcoin miners: The solving of more algorithms -- thus producing more blocks, like this one -- and therefore more Bitcoins. And a fervent ...
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[TD] See all stories on this topic [/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] What's the point of Bitcoin again? GigaOM Last April I wrote that we should care about Bitcoin because it represented a new conception of currency, one untethered by traditional restrictions like ...
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[TD] See all stories on this topic [/TD]
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[TD] Here's what should bolster bitcoin in 2014 Moneycontrol.com Last year was nothing short of exciting for bitcoin and with 2014 set to be another interesting year for digital currencies, the Bitcoin Foundation expects ...
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[TD] See all stories on this topic [/TD]
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[TD] Blogs [/TD]
[TD="align: right"] 10 new results for BITCOIN [/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Value Continues to Puzzle Economists | WebProNews Brian Powell 2013 will be a year remembered for many important reasons, with perhaps the most interesting being the rise of the digital currency, the bitcoin. [TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Just Another Post on Bitcoin... - Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada Caleb McMillan At the risk of starting a war in the comments section, here are my 0.00000002 bitcoins on Bitcoin. Bitcoin's value comes from what people are willing to ...
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[TD] Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada [/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Is a High-Tech Dinosaur Soon to Be Extinct Robert Wenzel For all the regulatory crackdowns on Bitcoin in recent weeks, the cryptocurrency's advocates remain unfailingly optimistic. Bitcoin is the future, they tell ...
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[TD] EconomicPolicyJournal.com [/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] 8 Predictions For 2014 - Gold, Bitcoin, 3D Printing [SPDR Gold Trust ... Jason Hamlin Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust ETF (), 3D Systems Corporation (NYSEDD), SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (NYSEARCAIA), SPDR Gold Trust ...
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[TD] SeekingAlpha.com: Home Page [/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] First Bitcoin MLM Launches Simultaneously Worldwide Tina Williams Bitcoin-Economy will write history by pre-launching the world's first Bitcoin MLM simultaneously in all countries all over the world on January 1, 2014 at ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] With Bitcoin in your pocket, is your identity finally safe? Public ... Jo Breiner "Bitcoin is supposedly bullet proof but recent robberies of over $220 million worth of coins demonstrate that controls are not fail-safe. Coin secrecy also ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Not Bombs 2013 year in review podcast Drew Recently the BNB team got together to produce a Podcast for the LetsTalkBitcoin.com open call. It's likely we wont make the top 4 out of the incredible ...
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[TD] Bitcoin Not Bombs [/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Here's what should bolster bitcoin in 2014 @ Forex Factory From cnbc.com Here's what should bolster bitcoin in 2014 - Last year was nothing short of exciting for bitcoin and with 2014 set to be another interesting year for ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Isn't the Way of the Future - JD Journal | JD Journal Jaan Introduced in 2009 by developer Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment network based on an open source protocol and a.
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin ATMs to expand in 2014 | The Liberty Beat The Liberty Beat Bitcoin ATM manufacturer Lamassu has announced that it sold 120 machines and has plans to ship to 25 countries in 2014. So far Saudi Arabia and ...
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[TD="align: right"] 4 new results for BITCOIN [/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Why I Lost Faith In Bitcoin As A Money Transfer Protocol | TechCrunch As 2013 came to an end, many reflected on last year's biggest tech news -- and Bitcoin was a serious contender. But the main question remains: why ... [TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Is a High-Tech Dinosaur Soon to Be Extinct - Bloomberg Sorry, but Bitcoin isn't the future. If anything, it's a throwback to an earlier era, when private currencies circulated alongside government-sponsored ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] With Bitcoin In Your Pocket, Is Your Identity Finally Safe? - Forbes "Because Bitcoin works on a public-key cryptography, anything passed during a Bitcoin transaction is useless to identity thieves."
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Here's what should bolster bitcoin in 2014 - CNBC.com Going into 2014, the Bitcoin Foundation expects wider adoption and the recognition of its potential to support bitcoin going forward.
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[TD] www.cnbc.com/id/101304916 [/TD]
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[TD="align: right"] 10 new results for BITCOIN [/TD]
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| Bitcoin now accepted by Bond New York Inman.com In what may be a first for a traditional real estate firm, Manhattan-based brokerage Bond New York has announced that it will now accept Bitcoin as ... [TABLE="width: 100%"] [TR] [TD] See all stories on this topic |
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[TD] Some see Bitcoin as next vehicle for trade Kansas.com Bitcoin is an electronic currency allowing for financial exchanges without regulation by any government, financial institution or centralized bank.
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoins can buy beer, shoes in ČR Prague Post Prague, Jan 1 (ČTK) — About 30 businesses in the Czech Republic have started to accept virtual currency bitcoin so far, but they agree the possibility ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin kicks off 2014 at $755 on Bitstamp MarketWatch Bitcoin kicks off 2014 at $755 on Bitstamp ... Over on the trading exchange Mt. Gox, bitcoin was at $821.78, within a 24-hour range of $793.11 to ...
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[TD] Is Bitcoin a hi-tech dinosaur? Economic Times NEW YORK: For all the regulatory crackdowns on Bitcoin in recent weeks, the cryptocurrency's advocates remain unfailingly optimistic. Bitcoin is the ...
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin/USD: Is this the end of bitcoin? BofA Merrill Lynch asks the ... iNVEZZ The PRC's increasingly strident bitcoin regulation has somewhat pulled the rug from under the aspirant currency, which had hitherto experienced a ...
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[TD] Bitcoin Set to Boom in Latin America PanAm Post (blog) Bitcoins (BTC) are currently accepted at a range of establishments, including WordPress.com, OKCupid, over 13,000 restaurants in 3,150 cities listed ...
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[TD] See all stories on this topic [/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Wishing for a Very Bitcoin 2014 Bloomberg For the world's Bitcoin miners: The solving of more algorithms -- thus producing more blocks, like this one -- and therefore more Bitcoins. And a fervent ...
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[TD] See all stories on this topic [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] What's the point of Bitcoin again? GigaOM Last April I wrote that we should care about Bitcoin because it represented a new conception of currency, one untethered by traditional restrictions like ...
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[TD] See all stories on this topic [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
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[/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD] Here's what should bolster bitcoin in 2014 Moneycontrol.com Last year was nothing short of exciting for bitcoin and with 2014 set to be another interesting year for digital currencies, the Bitcoin Foundation expects ...
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[TD] See all stories on this topic [/TD]
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[/TD]
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[TD] Blogs [/TD]
[TD="align: right"] 10 new results for BITCOIN [/TD]
[/TR]
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| Top News - WebProNews |
[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Value Continues to Puzzle Economists | WebProNews Brian Powell 2013 will be a year remembered for many important reasons, with perhaps the most interesting being the rise of the digital currency, the bitcoin. [TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[/TD]
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[/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Just Another Post on Bitcoin... - Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada Caleb McMillan At the risk of starting a war in the comments section, here are my 0.00000002 bitcoins on Bitcoin. Bitcoin's value comes from what people are willing to ...
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[TD] Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
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[/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Is a High-Tech Dinosaur Soon to Be Extinct Robert Wenzel For all the regulatory crackdowns on Bitcoin in recent weeks, the cryptocurrency's advocates remain unfailingly optimistic. Bitcoin is the future, they tell ...
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD] EconomicPolicyJournal.com [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] 8 Predictions For 2014 - Gold, Bitcoin, 3D Printing [SPDR Gold Trust ... Jason Hamlin Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust ETF (), 3D Systems Corporation (NYSE
DD), SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (NYSEARCAIA), SPDR Gold Trust ...[TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[TD] SeekingAlpha.com: Home Page [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
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[/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] First Bitcoin MLM Launches Simultaneously Worldwide Tina Williams Bitcoin-Economy will write history by pre-launching the world's first Bitcoin MLM simultaneously in all countries all over the world on January 1, 2014 at ...
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD] Direct Selling Facts & Figures [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] With Bitcoin in your pocket, is your identity finally safe? Public ... Jo Breiner "Bitcoin is supposedly bullet proof but recent robberies of over $220 million worth of coins demonstrate that controls are not fail-safe. Coin secrecy also ...
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD] Public Relations [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Not Bombs 2013 year in review podcast Drew Recently the BNB team got together to produce a Podcast for the LetsTalkBitcoin.com open call. It's likely we wont make the top 4 out of the incredible ...
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD] Bitcoin Not Bombs [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Here's what should bolster bitcoin in 2014 @ Forex Factory From cnbc.com Here's what should bolster bitcoin in 2014 - Last year was nothing short of exciting for bitcoin and with 2014 set to be another interesting year for ...
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD] Forex Factory [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
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[/TR]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Isn't the Way of the Future - JD Journal | JD Journal Jaan Introduced in 2009 by developer Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment network based on an open source protocol and a.
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD] JD Journal [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin ATMs to expand in 2014 | The Liberty Beat The Liberty Beat Bitcoin ATM manufacturer Lamassu has announced that it sold 120 machines and has plans to ship to 25 countries in 2014. So far Saudi Arabia and ...
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD] The Liberty Beat [/TD]
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[TD] Web [/TD]
[TD="align: right"] 4 new results for BITCOIN [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
| techcrunch.com/.../why-i-lost-faith-in-bitcoin-as-a-money-tran... |
[TD="colspan: 2"] Why I Lost Faith In Bitcoin As A Money Transfer Protocol | TechCrunch As 2013 came to an end, many reflected on last year's biggest tech news -- and Bitcoin was a serious contender. But the main question remains: why ... [TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[/TD]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="colspan: 2"] Bitcoin Is a High-Tech Dinosaur Soon to Be Extinct - Bloomberg Sorry, but Bitcoin isn't the future. If anything, it's a throwback to an earlier era, when private currencies circulated alongside government-sponsored ...
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD] www.bloomberg.com/.../bitcoin-is-a-high-tech-dinosaur-soon-... [/TD]
[/TR]
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[/TD]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="colspan: 2"] With Bitcoin In Your Pocket, Is Your Identity Finally Safe? - Forbes "Because Bitcoin works on a public-key cryptography, anything passed during a Bitcoin transaction is useless to identity thieves."
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD] www.forbes.com/.../with-bitcoin-in-your-pocket-is-your-identi... [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="colspan: 2"] Here's what should bolster bitcoin in 2014 - CNBC.com Going into 2014, the Bitcoin Foundation expects wider adoption and the recognition of its potential to support bitcoin going forward.
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[TD] www.cnbc.com/id/101304916 [/TD]
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Wilson Grant Fisk
Elite Member
- Nov 10, 2012
- 15,677
- 46,840
I won't be posting these alerts/updates anymore and will just post the occasional article if I find it interesting.
Use Talkwalker or Google Alerts.
http://www.talkwalker.com/alerts
http://www.google.com/alerts
Use Talkwalker or Google Alerts.
http://www.talkwalker.com/alerts
http://www.google.com/alerts
lancis
Elite Member
- Jul 31, 2010
- 1,682
- 2,443
Guess what will happen if your bank' servers lose power.
Patel
Senior Member
- Mar 1, 2011
- 1,154
- 1,519
Free wealth for everyone?
DotComCompany
BANNED
- Nov 3, 2013
- 29
- 12
To stupid to google yourself for it?At least thats what you always reply to noobs that they should use the search button instead of asking for source.
I would recommend using your own advice and stop acting like a complete noob.
I would recommend looking his interview in russia where he explains bitcoin but dont ask me stupid questions like URL.I give a fuck if you see it or not.At least use sources which are worth being quoted instead of rehashed shit.
@jazzc
I would recommend a bigger mirror for you and your ego
and here a small bait for people who are still unable to use google themself
Last edited:
Wilson Grant Fisk
Elite Member
- Nov 10, 2012
- 15,677
- 46,840
I don't think you should be insulting Mods.
Has Zynga caused the rise?
Zynga tests bitcoin payments on its website for games including FarmVille 2
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetel...-its-website-for-games-including-farmville-2/
lancis
Elite Member
- Jul 31, 2010
- 1,682
- 2,443
@DotComCompany is correct, here is the source:
http://www.sharpenedsticks.com/2013/07/03/bitcoin-was-created-by-the-nsa-the-latest-shocking-snowden-revelation/
Sadly, he was successfully trolled, because: Sharpened Sticks is a satirical news magazine focused on the nexus of technology and culture. Featuring content from a range of industry veterans, we provide caffeine fueled enlightenment for the clouded masses. Yes, that means it's supposed to be funny.
Source: http://www.sharpenedsticks.com/about-sharpened-sticks/
Patel
Senior Member
- Mar 1, 2011
- 1,154
- 1,519
jazzc
Elite Member
- Jan 27, 2009
- 2,964
- 14,717
lol trolled, and then try to convince others
Easiest bird to catch is the one that thinks it 's smart
Wilson Grant Fisk
Elite Member
- Nov 10, 2012
- 15,677
- 46,840
Bitcoin me: How to make your own digital currency
Move over Dogecoin: the Herncoin is here. But what can making your own currency teach you about the world of bitcoin?
Bitcoin may have become a thing of fascination for the media very recently, but the digital currency actually celebrated its fifth birthday this month as its value hovered at around $1,000 per coin.
Bitcoin was never intended to be the one cryptocurrency to rule them all, because anyone can make their own version of it. The code which underpins the currency is released under what's known as an open-source licence. Anyone can use it themselves, and alter any aspect they want, in order to create a whole new currency.
A whole class of alternative crypto-currencies, based on the fundamental aspects of bitcoin, have been created over the past couple of years. The first and biggest of the "altcoins", called Litecoin, was created in 2011 to address some perceived flaws in the Bitcoin protocol.
Litecoin is much harder to build specialised "mining" machines for, which, according to its founders, prevents it from being dominated by a few rich miners. Additionally, it clears payments faster and has a much higher cap of 84m coins.
Since November 2011, Litecoin has tracked the value of Bitcoin fairly closely, but in December last year it spiked in value. Overnight, a Litecoin was worth 10 times what it had been before, and its total market cap now stands at $623m, around 16% of that of its parent.
Wow, very cryptocurrency
Measuring press attention alone, Litecoin is surely eclipsed by another altcoin with a far more compelling hook: Dogecoin.
Whereas Litecoin requires an already deep understanding of cryptocurrencies to explain the ways in which it improves on Bitcoin, Dogecoin has simpler selling point: it's got a picture of a Shiba Inu dog on the front.
Read with a straight face, it's a triumph of marketing. Take a field which anyone can enter, and where the average user has little or no way to distinguish between competing examples; and then whack the most popular meme of 2013, Doge, on the front of your own. (Doge, for those of you still unaware, is a meme involving pictures of a confused-looking Shiba Inu with brightly coloured comic sans text surrounding it, spelling out in idiosyncratic broken English the animal's thoughts. Wow. Very internet. Such bafflement.)
Except, of course, reading it with a straight face is not the point: Dogecoin was created as a joke, to appeal to the sort of person who would find it funny. And it worked - the total value of all Dogecoins in circulation is now worth almost $7m, making it the 16th most valuable alt coin in existence.
If it seemed like Dogecoin was the pinnacle of the altcoin madness - coinmarketcap.com, which only tracks the ones people have actually bothered to buy and sell on exchanges, already records almost 70 - then the news from Thursday that a few coders were preparing to launch a currency based on Kanye West called, naturally, [Coinye West], proves that the idea still has legs.
How to make your own vanity money
So obviously I wanted a piece of the action. It was time to launch Herncoin.
It turns out, though, that cloning bitcoin is actually harder than it looks. Although the code behind the currency is open source, it's not like the designers have just left a nice file where you can change a few lines of code to end up with a whole new currency.
It actually takes some serious programming ability to get started: Dogecoin's technical co-founder, a software engineer from Portland, had to put in a couple of days of solid work to get the currency off the ground. Without a solid backing in C programming in the C language, I had no hope of creating Herncoin myself.
Thankfully, Matt Corallo, a veteran bitcoin developer, came to the rescue. On Friday, he opened the doors to Coingen.io, offering to create a forked version of Bitcoin for anyone with 0.01 BTC (around $10) to spare.
With Corallo's tools, the job becomes the work of minutes.
One Herncoin Photograph: /Alex Hern Following the theme of vanity, I set the initial parameters of the coin to a series of numbers based on my name. So, for instance, the first few blocks "mined" will give 112,524 coins to the computer that mines them - that's Alex spelled out in numbers, with 1 for A, 12 for L, and so on - and other characteristics done the same way.
Once the payment had processed, I was delivered the necessary tools to run my Herncoin.
Democracy and currency
It's all silly, obviously, but there's an important point behind the proliferation of altcoins. To bitcoin advocates, they represent the democratic underpinning of the currency - a democracy far fairer than the unaccountable central banks which run real-world currencies.
"Bitcoin enforces majority consensus," says Mike Hearn, a developer of the currency. "By taking part in the economy and running the software, or by choosing which alt coins you accept, you are effectively voting on how the currency should work... We'd like Bitcoin to be perfect, of course. If lots of people started switching to an alt coin, there'd be pressure to upgrade Bitcoin to match the alt's advantages.
"We must remember that our existing currencies are controlled entirely by private banks," he adds. "The central bank in most countries is not a democratic institution or even a government controlled one - indeed that's the whole point of them. The Bank of England was given independence precisely because politicians knew they could not be trusted with the power to print money."
In this view of the world, the existence of Litecoin acts as a competitor to bitcoin, allowing uses to vote with their wallets in a very literal sense: if they would rather have Litecoin's benefits, they can start taking that currency, and if too many people switch, bitcoin will be forced to make concessions. It's as though, if you thought the interest rate was too low in the UK, you could start using yen instead.
Herncoin doesn't offer any of such improvements. Instead, it's mostly focused around my face and my name. As a result, it seems to be having trouble taking off. I've been mining Herncoins on and off for a couple of days and, other than making my laptop really, really hot (we're talking "if I didn't quite like this laptop I would fry an egg on it for the photo opportunity" hot), not a huge amount has happened. Well, I've accrued a wealth of several million Herncoins, but not much else. No one else has connected to my network, which means my money may as well exist as a text file on my computer reading "Alex Hern is really quite wealthy".
But it's an alternative of sorts. The question for bitcoin is whether the ability to make alternatives like Litecoin (and Herncoin) lessens the responsibility on those who control the currency to take a pro-active stance in managing the bitcoin economy, like that which we require of central bankers. If the Bank of England releases data showing the quantitative easing isn't working to boost the economy, we wouldn't accept Mark Carney telling us that we're free to move to France if we don't like his style.
The sci-fi author Charlie Stross, in a piece titled "Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire", argues that: "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." The economist Paul Krugman approvingly cited Stross's conclusion in his own piece headlined "Bitcoin is evil".
For Hearn, the inability of bitcoin to respond to economic events the way managed currencies do is an unambigious positive. The bitcoin model, he says, "is not only more democratic but more robust. Although central banks are undemocratic and unaccountable, they are nonetheless run by people who can be put under lots of pressure. We saw this in recent years with the euro... Politicians made a lot of very public noise about how Mario Draghi was personally responsible for destroying the euro, and he eventually folded.
"So we currently have the worst of all worlds."
I'm not so sure. After three days of running my own currency, I'm fairly certain that a world based on Herncoin would be significantly worse.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/bitcoin-me-how-to-make-your-own-digital-currency
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).
TLR; 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. ([SIZE=-1]NSFL danger: do not click that link[/SIZE])
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html
Bitcoin Is Evil
It's always important, and always hard, to distinguish positive economics — how things work — from normative economics — how things should be. Indeed, on many of the macro issues I've written about it has been obvious that large numbers of economists can't bring themselves to make that distinction; they dislike activist government on political grounds, and this leads them to make really bad arguments about why fiscal stimulus can't work and monetary stimulus will be disastrous. I don't, by the way, think that this effect is symmetric: although people like Robert Lucas were quick to accuse people like Christy Romer of fabricating macro arguments to support a big-government agenda, this didn't actually happen.
But I come now to talk not about macro but about money — specifically, about Bitcoin and all that.
So far almost all of the Bitcoin discussion has been positive economics — can this actually work? And I have to say that I'm still deeply unconvinced. To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value. And it remains completely unclear why BitCoin should be a stable store of value. Brad DeLong puts it clearly:
But as I said, this is a positive discussion. What about the normative economics? Well, you should read Charlie Stross:
Stross doesn't like that agenda, and neither do I; but I am trying not to let that tilt my positive analysis of BitCoin one way or the other. One suspects, however, that many BitCoin enthusiasts are, in fact, enthusiastic because, as Stross says, "it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish."
So let's talk both about whether BitCoin is a bubble and whether it's a good thing — in part to make sure that we don't confuse these questions with each other.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/?_r=0
Remember people these articles are just to promote discussion and debate. They are not necessarily my views
Move over Dogecoin: the Herncoin is here. But what can making your own currency teach you about the world of bitcoin?
Bitcoin may have become a thing of fascination for the media very recently, but the digital currency actually celebrated its fifth birthday this month as its value hovered at around $1,000 per coin.
Bitcoin was never intended to be the one cryptocurrency to rule them all, because anyone can make their own version of it. The code which underpins the currency is released under what's known as an open-source licence. Anyone can use it themselves, and alter any aspect they want, in order to create a whole new currency.
A whole class of alternative crypto-currencies, based on the fundamental aspects of bitcoin, have been created over the past couple of years. The first and biggest of the "altcoins", called Litecoin, was created in 2011 to address some perceived flaws in the Bitcoin protocol.
Litecoin is much harder to build specialised "mining" machines for, which, according to its founders, prevents it from being dominated by a few rich miners. Additionally, it clears payments faster and has a much higher cap of 84m coins.
Since November 2011, Litecoin has tracked the value of Bitcoin fairly closely, but in December last year it spiked in value. Overnight, a Litecoin was worth 10 times what it had been before, and its total market cap now stands at $623m, around 16% of that of its parent.
Wow, very cryptocurrency
Measuring press attention alone, Litecoin is surely eclipsed by another altcoin with a far more compelling hook: Dogecoin.
Whereas Litecoin requires an already deep understanding of cryptocurrencies to explain the ways in which it improves on Bitcoin, Dogecoin has simpler selling point: it's got a picture of a Shiba Inu dog on the front.
Read with a straight face, it's a triumph of marketing. Take a field which anyone can enter, and where the average user has little or no way to distinguish between competing examples; and then whack the most popular meme of 2013, Doge, on the front of your own. (Doge, for those of you still unaware, is a meme involving pictures of a confused-looking Shiba Inu with brightly coloured comic sans text surrounding it, spelling out in idiosyncratic broken English the animal's thoughts. Wow. Very internet. Such bafflement.)
Except, of course, reading it with a straight face is not the point: Dogecoin was created as a joke, to appeal to the sort of person who would find it funny. And it worked - the total value of all Dogecoins in circulation is now worth almost $7m, making it the 16th most valuable alt coin in existence.
If it seemed like Dogecoin was the pinnacle of the altcoin madness - coinmarketcap.com, which only tracks the ones people have actually bothered to buy and sell on exchanges, already records almost 70 - then the news from Thursday that a few coders were preparing to launch a currency based on Kanye West called, naturally, [Coinye West], proves that the idea still has legs.
How to make your own vanity money
So obviously I wanted a piece of the action. It was time to launch Herncoin.
It turns out, though, that cloning bitcoin is actually harder than it looks. Although the code behind the currency is open source, it's not like the designers have just left a nice file where you can change a few lines of code to end up with a whole new currency.
It actually takes some serious programming ability to get started: Dogecoin's technical co-founder, a software engineer from Portland, had to put in a couple of days of solid work to get the currency off the ground. Without a solid backing in C programming in the C language, I had no hope of creating Herncoin myself.
Thankfully, Matt Corallo, a veteran bitcoin developer, came to the rescue. On Friday, he opened the doors to Coingen.io, offering to create a forked version of Bitcoin for anyone with 0.01 BTC (around $10) to spare.
With Corallo's tools, the job becomes the work of minutes.
- Get yourself some bitcoin. You'll need 0.01 BTC to make your own altcoin, but if you're serious you'll want to splash out another 0.1 BTC to get the source code to your creation. Though... if you're actually serious, you probably want to hire an actual programmer to code your vanity money.
- Customise your coin. Coingen.io lets you pick a name and a logo, and then alter the starting paramenters of bitcoin as you see fit. If you have strong opinions over how many bitcoins should be given as a reward for mining, this is your chance to have a say. Again, though, if you have strong opinions about that sort of thing, maybe an off-the-shelf cryptocoin isn't for you.
- Download your vanity coin. It'll only work on Windows or Linux, sadly, but just run the finished software and away you go. I'll leave the hardest bit - finding someone else to join in - to you.
Once the payment had processed, I was delivered the necessary tools to run my Herncoin.
Democracy and currency
It's all silly, obviously, but there's an important point behind the proliferation of altcoins. To bitcoin advocates, they represent the democratic underpinning of the currency - a democracy far fairer than the unaccountable central banks which run real-world currencies.
"Bitcoin enforces majority consensus," says Mike Hearn, a developer of the currency. "By taking part in the economy and running the software, or by choosing which alt coins you accept, you are effectively voting on how the currency should work... We'd like Bitcoin to be perfect, of course. If lots of people started switching to an alt coin, there'd be pressure to upgrade Bitcoin to match the alt's advantages.
"We must remember that our existing currencies are controlled entirely by private banks," he adds. "The central bank in most countries is not a democratic institution or even a government controlled one - indeed that's the whole point of them. The Bank of England was given independence precisely because politicians knew they could not be trusted with the power to print money."
In this view of the world, the existence of Litecoin acts as a competitor to bitcoin, allowing uses to vote with their wallets in a very literal sense: if they would rather have Litecoin's benefits, they can start taking that currency, and if too many people switch, bitcoin will be forced to make concessions. It's as though, if you thought the interest rate was too low in the UK, you could start using yen instead.
Herncoin doesn't offer any of such improvements. Instead, it's mostly focused around my face and my name. As a result, it seems to be having trouble taking off. I've been mining Herncoins on and off for a couple of days and, other than making my laptop really, really hot (we're talking "if I didn't quite like this laptop I would fry an egg on it for the photo opportunity" hot), not a huge amount has happened. Well, I've accrued a wealth of several million Herncoins, but not much else. No one else has connected to my network, which means my money may as well exist as a text file on my computer reading "Alex Hern is really quite wealthy".
But it's an alternative of sorts. The question for bitcoin is whether the ability to make alternatives like Litecoin (and Herncoin) lessens the responsibility on those who control the currency to take a pro-active stance in managing the bitcoin economy, like that which we require of central bankers. If the Bank of England releases data showing the quantitative easing isn't working to boost the economy, we wouldn't accept Mark Carney telling us that we're free to move to France if we don't like his style.
The sci-fi author Charlie Stross, in a piece titled "Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire", argues that: "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." The economist Paul Krugman approvingly cited Stross's conclusion in his own piece headlined "Bitcoin is evil".
For Hearn, the inability of bitcoin to respond to economic events the way managed currencies do is an unambigious positive. The bitcoin model, he says, "is not only more democratic but more robust. Although central banks are undemocratic and unaccountable, they are nonetheless run by people who can be put under lots of pressure. We saw this in recent years with the euro... Politicians made a lot of very public noise about how Mario Draghi was personally responsible for destroying the euro, and he eventually folded.
"So we currently have the worst of all worlds."
I'm not so sure. After three days of running my own currency, I'm fairly certain that a world based on Herncoin would be significantly worse.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/bitcoin-me-how-to-make-your-own-digital-currency
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
R; 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. ([SIZE=-1]NSFL danger: do not click that link[/SIZE])http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html
Bitcoin Is Evil
It's always important, and always hard, to distinguish positive economics — how things work — from normative economics — how things should be. Indeed, on many of the macro issues I've written about it has been obvious that large numbers of economists can't bring themselves to make that distinction; they dislike activist government on political grounds, and this leads them to make really bad arguments about why fiscal stimulus can't work and monetary stimulus will be disastrous. I don't, by the way, think that this effect is symmetric: although people like Robert Lucas were quick to accuse people like Christy Romer of fabricating macro arguments to support a big-government agenda, this didn't actually happen.
But I come now to talk not about macro but about money — specifically, about Bitcoin and all that.
So far almost all of the Bitcoin discussion has been positive economics — can this actually work? And I have to say that I'm still deeply unconvinced. To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value. And it remains completely unclear why BitCoin should be a stable store of value. Brad DeLong puts it clearly:
Underpinning the value of gold is that if all else fails you can use it to make pretty things. Underpinning the value of the dollar is a combination of (a) the fact that you can use them to pay your taxes to the U.S. government, and (b) that the Federal Reserve is a potential dollar sink and has promised to buy them back and extinguish them if their real value starts to sink at (much) more than 2%/year (yes, I know).
Placing a ceiling on the value of gold is mining technology, and the prospect that if its price gets out of whack for long on the upside a great deal more of it will be created. Placing a ceiling on the value of the dollar is the Federal Reserve's role as actual dollar source, and its commitment not to allow deflation to happen.
Placing a ceiling on the value of bitcoins is computer technology and the form of the hash function... until the limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached. Placing a floor on the value of bitcoins is... what, exactly?
I have had and am continuing to have a dialogue with smart technologists who are very high on BitCoin — but when I try to get them to explain to me why BitCoin is a reliable store of value, they always seem to come back with explanations about how it's a terrific medium of exchange. Even if I buy this (which I don't, entirely), it doesn't solve my problem. And I haven't been able to get my correspondents to recognize that these are different questions.Placing a ceiling on the value of gold is mining technology, and the prospect that if its price gets out of whack for long on the upside a great deal more of it will be created. Placing a ceiling on the value of the dollar is the Federal Reserve's role as actual dollar source, and its commitment not to allow deflation to happen.
Placing a ceiling on the value of bitcoins is computer technology and the form of the hash function... until the limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached. Placing a floor on the value of bitcoins is... what, exactly?
But as I said, this is a positive discussion. What about the normative economics? Well, you should read Charlie Stross:
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.
Go read the whole thing.
Stross doesn't like that agenda, and neither do I; but I am trying not to let that tilt my positive analysis of BitCoin one way or the other. One suspects, however, that many BitCoin enthusiasts are, in fact, enthusiastic because, as Stross says, "it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish."
So let's talk both about whether BitCoin is a bubble and whether it's a good thing — in part to make sure that we don't confuse these questions with each other.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/?_r=0
Remember people these articles are just to promote discussion and debate. They are not necessarily my views
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since when is Google a reliable source of information? This forum is filled with methods and techniques for gaming Google.
You shouldn't believe everything you read on Myspace.
yeah, we don't want you to do anything stupid, like providing evidence to your baseless claims.