FTP Episode 001 Minecraft Gaming Bitcoin, Mining and Altcoin Discussions – Video


FTP Episode 001 Minecraft Gaming Bitcoin, Mining and Altcoin Discussions
Fun Time Podcast Episode #001 Join us for some Minecraft Gaming with discussions about Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining and the Altcoin markets. http://funtimepodcast.com (under construction) #hypergg...

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FTP Episode 001 Minecraft Gaming Bitcoin, Mining and Altcoin Discussions - Video

Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum, Proof of Stake, The future of Bitcoin – Video


Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum, Proof of Stake, The future of Bitcoin
Join us and our very special guest, Vitalik Buterin, the inventor and co-founder of Ethereum. If you have any questions or topics you would like to suggest for the show, please email them to...

By: Epicenter Bitcoin

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Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum, Proof of Stake, The future of Bitcoin - Video

Russians move into bitcoin as ruble tanks

Transaction volumes between the ruble and digital currency bitcoin enjoyed their biggest day of the year on Tuesday as the Russian central bank failed to halt the ruble's tumble.

The ruble plunged more than 11 percent against the greenback Tuesday its steepest intraday fall since 1998 as traders dumped a currency that has crumbled on the back of weaker oil prices and sanctions against Russia by the West.

Volatile trading continued on Wednesday, with the currency gaining over 10 percent against the dollar, although it remains down 13 percent on the week.

Other than the dollar, the beneficiaries of this flight from Russia appeared to be the euro, the yen, sterling -- and bitcoin. Data from bitcoincharts.com, which tracks financial and technical statistics for bitcoin, shows that transaction volumes with the ruble spiked on Tuesday spiked to 819 from an average of 230 trades for the last 30-day period. This was close to a 250 percent increase in transactions and was the highest volume seen since December 2013, according to the website.

"The news coming out of Russia is indeed unparalleled," Bobby Lee, the co-founder and CEO of prominent Chinese bitcoin exchange BTC China, told CNBC via email.

Read MoreRussia starts selling its foreign currency stock

"The high trading volumes with the ruble is to be expected, given the flight away from this struggling currency. Bitcoin is therefore a natural destination, as well as other strong central bank currencies."

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Russians move into bitcoin as ruble tanks

Was Bitcoin the Worst Investment of 2014?

David, thanks for joining us.

Good morning.

A lot of people, including the producers of the show are constantly making one of me because i was and am such a bi tcoin believer.

It has come down from $1100 to $350. does that bum you out?

If you look at december of 2012, bitcoin was $13. if you have been a long-term holder of this asset, that's a pretty good return.

And more important than the short-term price movements, you've seen these incredible announcements in the last few days.

Take microsoft -- you know, it does not get much larger than microsoft as far as companies that could be accepting bitcoin.

And more importantly, we see a huge user growth in people creating bitcoin wallets.

If you are having these great announcements and support, why is a trading like you know what?

I think it is a long-term valuation creation.

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Was Bitcoin the Worst Investment of 2014?

Monkey Cage: Bitcoins financial network is doomed

Tim Lee at Vox argues that Bitcoin is destined to succeed not as a currency but as a financial network.

Its a mistake to think about Bitcoin as a new kind of currency. What makes Bitcoin potentially revolutionary is that its the worlds first completely open financial network. Think about the internet. It didnt seem like a very practical technology in the 1980s. But it was an open platform that anyone could build on, and in the long run it proved to be really useful. The internet succeeded because Silicon Valley have created applications that harness the internets power while shielding users from its complexity. Bitcoin applications can work the same way.

The Bitcoin network serves the same purpose as mainstream payment networks such as Visa or Western Union. you want to build a business based on one of those networks, you have to get permission from the owner. And thats not always easy. To use the Visa network, for example, you have to comply with hundreds of pages of regulations. The Visa network also has high fees, and there are some things Visa wont let you do on its network at all. Bitcoin is different. Because no one owns or controls the network, there are no limits on how people can use it. One obvious application is international money transfers. Bitcoin is a payment network that happens to have its own currency, not the other way around.

This looks, initially, like a plausible and attractive argument. But from a political science perspective, it misses something very, very important. There is a reason why you have to comply with hundreds of pages of regulations to use the Visa network that goes beyond Visas selfish corporate interests. That reason is government. Governments regulate payment networks very heavily, for a wide variety of reasons, which include making sure that people dont use these networks to support activities that governments dont like. They use financial intermediaries as points of controlthat allow them to control who does business with whom. The Obama administrations undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, David Cohen, delivered a speech four days ago that copiously illustrates this point.

Over the past decade or so, one important way that the United States has protected our nations core interests, projected power, and exercised leadership on the world stage is through the increasing use of financial measures. Far from just focusing on terrorist financing and money laundering, my office in the Treasury Department is now regularly called upon to help advance a variety of U.S. national security and foreign policy goals. financial measures have become far more powerful tools of statecraft, and their effects are multiplied in a world defined by economic interdependence.

Compare, for example, Jeffersons failure to our ongoing efforts to use sanctions to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Together with partners around the world, we have imposed what many believe is the most effective set of financial and economic sanctions in history. Carefully designed and customized to maximize pressure, they have impeded Irans ability to acquire material for its nuclear program, isolated it from the international financial system, drastically slashed its oil exports, and deprived it of access to a sizeable portion of its oil revenues and foreign reserves. Not surprisingly, the impact on Irans economy has been dramatic: its budget deficit and inflation have spiked, the value of its currency has sharply declined, foreign investment has all but dried up, and overall economic activity has stagnated.

The reason that the U.S. can do this is because it has a lot of effective control over financial networks. It can put pressure on banks (including foreign banks, which have been fined billions of dollars for not complying with the U.S. sanctions regime) to isolate Iran from the international system. In Cohens words:

Put simply, financial institutions everywhere need dollars to serve their customers, and thus require access to U.S. banks through correspondent accounts to settle their customers transactions. That means that foreign banks are especially attuned to our sanctions.

Because so many international transactions are (a) settled in dollars and (b) settled across payment systems run by banks and other financial intermediaries that are vulnerable to U.S. pressure, the U.S. can use these systems to exert political control. Now, imagine the likely response of the U.S. (and the E.U., and, for that matter, China) to a payment network which is designed from the ground up to be decentralized, so that it is impossible for any specific intermediaries to really control payment flows from one actor to another. Such a network would be impossible for states to control. The U.S.wouldnt be able to use it, for example, to squeeze Iran out of the world financial system. If such a network ever showed signs of really becoming established (rather than being a relatively small-scale thought experiment, and money suck for libertarians with more ideology than good sense), the U.S.would ruthlessly act to isolate it from the international financial system.

And that is the story of Bitcoin. Up to this point, regulators have largely tolerated Bitcoin as a curiosity and experiment. While Bitcoin allows consumers to buy illegal drugs on Tor Hidden Services sites like Agora and Evolution, they dont do so on a sufficiently large scale to really cause enormous alarm. Regulators still dont know quite what to do with Bitcoin. But if Bitcoin were ever to threaten to become a truly decentralized payments network, owned by no one, and with no one e.g. capable of implementing Know Your Customer rules, regulators would know very well what to do with it. Theyd introduce regulatory guidances and pass laws to freeze it off from the regular financial system. Very possibly, Bitcoin could still survive at the margins (as the Hawala system has survived). However, it would be isolated, and in no position to threaten Visa or Mastercard, let alone the underlying payment and messaging services that really underpin the world financial system.

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Monkey Cage: Bitcoins financial network is doomed

Why There's Confusion Over Valuing Bitcoin

Bitcoin presents a new type of nontraditional, highly technical, experimental, and global digital instrument to our already complex world. That fact should not conjure fear. It should engender excitement.

When I caught wind of Bitcoin as a newly minted MBA in the summer of 2012, I immediately scoffed. At the time, one bitcoin was trading at around $10, with a total market cap of about $50 million, which I thought was outrageous. It was a new, unregulated, "imaginary" Internet currency. Even though I initially rejected the idea as utopian, it stuck with me for some time thereafter.

Fast forward to early 2013, when the European banking crisis was reaching a fever pitch and Cyprus was on the verge of the first modern bank "bail-in." As the bitcoin price began to rise rapidly on a daily basis, and the situation in Europe continued to deteriorate, I decided to remove my "I know everything" MBA grad cap for an "I know nothing" crypto dunce cap. And, boy, am I glad I did.

The more I read, watched, and listened to bitcoin experts attempt to explain the most confusing and thought-provoking advancement since the Internet, the more fascinated I became, not only with the idea of frictionless transactions, but also by the idea of stateless currency.

Given the complexity of bitcoin (economic, financial, political, ideological), there are many topics of discussion that deserve specific attention in their own right. The Digital Currency Council does an excellent job of providing an overview of these issues in its free courses. In today's piece, we will focus on one of my favorite, and most misunderstood, topics: bitcoin valuation.

Valuing bitcoin: A traditional perspective First, I think it is important to give readers an idea of just how difficult it is to categorize bitcoin for valuation purposes. Unlike equities, bonds, and real estate, bitcoins create no cashflow. Most traditional financial analysis is based on terminally valuing an asset's or entity's discounted cashflows in order to determine a fair present value price for those future cashflows. In the case of equities, the earnings of a particular company that are distributed as dividends can be theoretically extended in perpetuity and discounted at current "risk-free" interest rates, thus creating what is knows as a discounted cashflow (DCF) valuation. Since bitcoin has no cashflow, this method of valuation is not useful.

With regard to stocks, thousands of companies in hundreds of industries provide a pool of potential comparables to value companies from a comparative and/or historical perspective. Again, there is only one bitcoin (and it is the first of its kind), so there is no use for this methodology, either. There are "altcoins," but they are not proper comps for bitcoin. (That is a topic for another day).

Moving to bonds or other interest-bearing instruments, they too provide steady and somewhat predictable cashflows due to the interest coupons that holders of the securities collect at set periods of time. Once again, we run into a problem with bitcoin due to the lack of regular cash payments, though this can be programmed into the blockchain as an added protocol layer. (Again, that is for another time.)

Lastly, real estate projects -- at least those purposed for investor profit and not for proprietor dwelling -- also produce steady cash revenue in the form of rents and homeowners' fees that act just as dividends and interest payments. No surprise that bitcoin cannot fit into this category, either, given its currency/commodity-like properties.

So the obvious question is still "What is the value of a bitcoin, and how do we derive it?"

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Why There's Confusion Over Valuing Bitcoin

Tech companies vs. net neutrality, Microsoft accepts Bitcoin, Sony DDoS ‘s torrent sites – Video


Tech companies vs. net neutrality, Microsoft accepts Bitcoin, Sony DDoS #39;s torrent sites
Over 60 companies write a letter to the FCC against reclassifying the Internet as a utility; Microsoft now accepts Bitcoin; Sony is using DDoS attacks to dis...

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Tech companies vs. net neutrality, Microsoft accepts Bitcoin, Sony DDoS 's torrent sites - Video

The Bitcoin Group #60 — Pirate Bay Still Down – The CIA Tortures – Hong Kong – Reddit Bitcoin Tip? – Video


The Bitcoin Group #60 -- Pirate Bay Still Down - The CIA Tortures - Hong Kong - Reddit Bitcoin Tip?
THIS WEEK: ---------------------------- THE PIRATE BAY HAS NOT BEEN RESURRECTED YET http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-has-not-been-resurrected-yet-141...

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The Bitcoin Group #60 -- Pirate Bay Still Down - The CIA Tortures - Hong Kong - Reddit Bitcoin Tip? - Video

The Bitcoin Group #50 – 76 Million Hacked – FBI Silk Road Evidence? – Butterfly Labs – US Military – Video


The Bitcoin Group #50 - 76 Million Hacked - FBI Silk Road Evidence? - Butterfly Labs - US Military
THIS WEEK: ---------------------------- Issue 1 -- Cyberattack Against JPMorgan Chase Affects 76 Million Households http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/jpmorgan-discovers-further-cyber-security...

By: thebitcoingroup

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The Bitcoin Group #50 - 76 Million Hacked - FBI Silk Road Evidence? - Butterfly Labs - US Military - Video

EB57 Allen Scott & Ian DeMartino: CoinTelegraph and The Rise of Crypto-Powered Independent Media – Video


EB57 Allen Scott Ian DeMartino: CoinTelegraph and The Rise of Crypto-Powered Independent Media
CoinTelegraph Chief Editor, Allen Scott, and writer, Ian DeMartino join Sebastien (Brian is away) for a conversation about the independent Bitcoin media. Cryptocurrencies enable new business...

By: Epicenter Bitcoin

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EB57 Allen Scott & Ian DeMartino: CoinTelegraph and The Rise of Crypto-Powered Independent Media - Video