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Will the price crash affect the bitcoin mining network? .::. Flipside Bits 15 – Video

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Will the price crash affect the bitcoin mining network? .::. Flipside Bits 15
Tips: 17pUWwrkjCBxGsBYmR1TaDoTYWEiYWXWeu -= DJ BOOTH =- Twitter: https://twitter.com/djbooth007/ Web: http://www.flipsidebits.com/ -= EPISODE 15 =- We #39;re kicking off this week #39;s show by...

By: World Crypto Network

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Will the price crash affect the bitcoin mining network? .::. Flipside Bits 15 - Video

Bitcoin Tycoon Denies He’s Behind Illegal Drug Marketplace Silk Road – Video

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Bitcoin Tycoon Denies He #39;s Behind Illegal Drug Marketplace Silk Road
Another person has been implicated as the possible mastermind of Silk Road, once the world #39;s largest online marketplace for illegal drugs. While 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht is on trial for allegedly...

By: WochitGeneralNews

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Bitcoin Tycoon Denies He's Behind Illegal Drug Marketplace Silk Road - Video

Will Bitcoin ever rebound? – Jan. 15, 2015

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

Bitcoin lost more than 60% of its value last year. The digital currency has already plunged another 30% in the first few days of 2015 -- and that includes a 30% rebound on Thursday!

The price of Bitcoin (XBT) briefly fell below $200 on Wednesday, an important psychological barrier, before bouncing back.

According to Bitcoin news site Coindesk, it is not profitable for people to process transactions or mine for Bitcoins when the price falls below $200. "Mining" is the term used to describe the complex math puzzles solved by computer networks in exchange for new Bitcoins.

So what's next for Bitcoin? There is an intense debate about its future.

Bitcoin was a bubble that has burst. Jeffrey Gundlach, head of influential investment firm DoubleLine, is firmly in the Bitcoin bear camp. In a webcast on Tuesday, Gundlach declared that Bitcoin is "on its way to being relegated to the ash heap of digital currencies."

Those comments may be one of the reasons why Bitcoin plunged on Wednesday.

But is it fair to focus on Bitcoin's price as a measure of failure or success? This is a currency after all.

Related: Bitcoin was one of the tech failures of 2014

The problem is that some fans of Bitcoin seem to think that it is also something that could be a good investment.

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Will Bitcoin ever rebound? - Jan. 15, 2015

Bitcoin revealed: a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth …

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If Bitcoin were a currency, it'd be the worst-performing one in the world, worse even than the Russian ruble.

But Bitcoin isn't a currency. It's a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another. At least that's all it is right now. One day it could be more. Venture capitalists, for their part, are quick to point out that it's really a protocol, like the early internet, and its underlying technology could still be revolutionary. What are they supposed to say, though, whenthey've bet hundreds of millions of dollars on it?

But that's not much of a consolation to anyonewho bought anywhere near Bitcoin's $1,100 top. Or near $1,000, or $900, or $800, or, well even yesterday's prices. That's because Bitcoinhasn't just fallen 76 percent the past year. It's fallen 36 percent the past two days, as you can see below, with a 24 percent decline the past 24 hours. It's too bad Bitcoin doesn't have a central bank to help stabilize its value.

Source: Coindesk

What in the name of Satoshi Nakamoto is going on? Well, two things. First, Bitcoin's big bubble has been slowly deflating for over a year now. It has no inherent value, after all, because, despite companies trying to get free PR by saying they'll accept it, almost nobody uses it to buy anything other than drugs. Second, though, is a problem that's all too familiar to anyone who tried flipping condos in Miami ten years ago. Bitcoin miners, you see, borrowed moneyand real money, as in dollarsthat they could only pay back if Bitcoin prices kept rising, or at least didn't fall this much.

Bitcoin, remember, is a digital "currency" that lets you send money online without needing a bankto confirm it. That's because it substitutes a decentralized network of middlemen for a single middleman. And instead of paying them fees, it pays them with new Bitcoins. Think about it this way. The problem with sending money online is that you don't know if I'm trying to scam you by sending the same money to someone else, too. So the solution has been to have a bank sit in between us: I send the money to the bank, it verifies that I haven't sent it to anyone else, and then sends it to you, all for a 2 percent cut, of course.

Bitcoin, though, has a network of miners sit between us instead. These miners try to win new Bitcoins by solving difficult math problems that get even more difficult the more miners there areand, in the process, they create a public ledger of every single Bitcoin transaction. This means we don't need a bank to know that I've sent money to you and only you, but it comes at the cost of making it irreversible. (And that makes Bitcoin an even more appealing target for hackers who know that you have no recourse if they steal your money).

The key here is that the math problems the miners have to solve get harder the more of them there are. If there's a big influx of miners, say, because of a big bubble that pushes prices into quadruple digits, then there's even more pressure on everybody to upgrade to the latest supercomputers to stay competitive. The thing about the latest supercomputers, though, is that they're expensive to buy and expensive to run. (That's why some miners have set up shop in Iceland, where they can use geothermal energy to powertheir computers, and Arctic air to cool them). So miners had to borrow lots of money to try to keep up in the Bitcoin arms race.

Butall that borrowing hasn't paid off now that Bitcoin prices are free falling. In fact, it's part of the reason that they're doing so. Bitcoin prices are so low, you see, that miners are spending more money running their supercomputers than they're making from new coins. So why are they still going? Well, they have dollar debts that they need to pay back, and where else are they going to get the money? They're stuck, in other words, in a catch-22: they can't afford to keep mining, but they can't afford to stop mining, either. (This, coincidentally, is the same dilemma that oil drillers who borrowed a lot during the boom face now during the bust). This has already forced one big mining group into default. And it's forced the rest to sell the only assets they haveBitcoinsto pay back their dollar debts. That, of course, only pushes the price of Bitcoin down even further, which makes even more miners sell their Bitcoins to pay back they owe as mining becomes more unprofitable. And so on, and so on.

Bitcoin, in other words, is suffering a deleveraging shock like the one that hit our economy in 2008, but without a Federal Reserve to cushion the blow. That means this doom loop of debt and Bitcoin deflation could take prices down a lot further still. The only solace is that, in the long run, the system should self-correct, as miners drop out and mining gets easier.

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Bitcoin revealed: a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth ...

Bitcoin price plunges, prompting concerns about mining …

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Bitcoin is getting hammered in markets that trade the digital currency, prompting providers of its core computing infrastructure to shut down operations.

The selloff, which appears to have been exacerbated when Asian traders were forced to meet collateral demands under margin trading rules, left bitcoin down 14.49% at $194.04 in the late New York morning Wednesday, following a 15.02% plunge Tuesday, according to news service Coindesk. The digital currency is now down 39% from Dec. 31 alone and is off 83% from the all-time high of $1,165 that it hit at the end of a furious rally in November 2013.

That price decline is creating something of a mini-crisis in the business of bitcoin mining, the vital process through which new bitcoins are added to the money supply. Working within a network of independent computers, bitcoin miners are tasked with confirming transactions initiated by users of the digital currency and compete to solve a mathematical puzzle in order to be compensated for that work with newly issued bitcoins.

As the price of bitcoin falls against the dollar and other fiat currencies, it induces miners to shut down operations, because they can no longer cover costs such as equipment, rent and electricity quoted in those traditional currencies. The problem was made more acute by what had been a yearlong, exponential buildup in mining infrastructure -- machines comprised of highly specialized, super-powerful computers -- which made competition for bitcoins tougher. Bitcoins core software algorithm periodically adjusts the difficulty of its mathematical puzzle to keep it in line with the amount of computing power in the network. That way, new bitcoin payouts are kept to more or less a 10-minute schedule regardless of how well equipped the miners are to solve the puzzle.

On Monday, CEX.io, a company that mines bitcoins on behalf of clients that rent out its computing power, announced that it would temporarily halt this cloud mining operation, citing the recent bitcoin price drop, as well as the upscaling of the mining difficulty.

An expanded version of this report appears at WSJ.com.

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Bitcoin price plunges, prompting concerns about mining ...

Bitcoin might be dead. It doesn’t matter. – Telegraph

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

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

Other manipulations occur which are more intentional and less benign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interviews from the road: Coinarch CEO gives Tatiana an overview of Bitcoin trading – Video

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Interviews from the road: Coinarch CEO gives Tatiana an overview of Bitcoin trading
I sat down with Jeremy Glaros, CEO of Coinarch. I learned a bit about trading and finance. This is always a trickier topic, though interesting. Luckily, Jere...

By: Tatiana Moroz

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Interviews from the road: Coinarch CEO gives Tatiana an overview of Bitcoin trading - Video

Bitcoin GitHub History Visualization – Multiple Projects (Jan 2015) – Video

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Bitcoin GitHub History Visualization - Multiple Projects (Jan 2015)
As always, this video was created with the open-source version control visualization software Gource (http://code.google.com/p/gource/). This time, though, I decided that annotations were old...

By: Coding In My Sleep

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Bitcoin GitHub History Visualization - Multiple Projects (Jan 2015) - Video


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