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Anarchast Ep. 175 Maciek Ziolkowski: A Bitcoin Embassy in Poland! – Video

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Anarchast Ep. 175 Maciek Ziolkowski: A Bitcoin Embassy in Poland!
Jeff Berwick in dangerous Anarchapulco interviews Polish bitcoin evangelist Maciek Ziolkowski, topics include: the desire for liberty, liberty in Poland, the Polish Zloty, Russia and Ukraine...

By: TheAnarchast

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Anarchast Ep. 175 Maciek Ziolkowski: A Bitcoin Embassy in Poland! - Video

Bitcoin ATM Now Dispensing Cash in Pioneer Place Food Court

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You can now buy Bitcoin virtual currencyand trade it for cold, hard cashat Pioneer Place mall. Local company BitcoinNW has installed a Bitcoin ATM in the Pioneer Place food courtas of November 15.

Bitcoin is an electronic currency that is not tied to any state governmentmaking it popular among web libertarians. But until recently, Bitcoins could be traded only on the Internet, and are accepted as currency only at a small number of businesses such as Whiffie's Fried Pies food cart, burlesque-centric strip club Kit Kat Cluband the website Overstock.com. It is the most prominent such alternative currency, though a Beaverton programmer designed another popular currency called Dogecoin that briefly had more trading volume than Bitcoin.

Users of the Pioneer Place ATM can now trade the virtual currency for U.S. dollarsin $20 and $100 bills. The world's first Bitcoin ATM was installed in Vancouver, B.C., in October 2013; Furs bought his first Bitcoin there. Seattle installed its first Bitcoin ATM in May. Two other Portlanders designed a Bitcoin ATM this year, but the Skyhook machine does not dispense cash. Other ATMs are located at PDX Hackerspace and Float On, but this is by far the most prominent location for a Bitcoin ATM.

Oregonian and former banker Mike Fors, founder of BitcoinNW, writes that he spent seven months working with the state of Oregon to comply with regulations in order to install the ATM. Though it works like an ATM from the user's perspective, it is essentially an automated currency exchange: The value of Bitcoins versus the dollar has fluctuated wildly, from a peak of over $1,000 in December of last year to its current value of $400; the currency started at an equal exchange of one dollar per Bitcoin.

Fors also helps local businesses accept Bitcoin, which the company says avoids bank processing fees. One hurdle, however, is that due to the user verification system Bitcoin transactions can take minutes to process. The ATM removes this hurdle for point-of-sale transactions. The machine charges a 5 percent currency-exchange fee on transactions, which can be conducted for amounts up to $2,500 per day.

Here are Fors' videos about how to use the ATM.

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Bitcoin ATM Now Dispensing Cash in Pioneer Place Food Court

Bitcoin tipping sees giant growth: ChangeTip exceeds 10,000 tips in one day

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Yesterday, Bitcoin tipping service ChangeTip announced that it had exceed 10,000 user generated bitcoin tips in one day, marking a milestone in the phenomenon of microtransacted bitcoin tipping across the Internet.

As a currency that can be broken down into extremely tiny fractions and still traded, Bitcoin has always had an ephemeral edge when it comes to the potential for microtransactions. There may be potential problems with transaction fees (which are tiny) but it still stands out as an excellent method for remitting very small amounts. This makes Bitcoin perfect for tipping.

This led to the rise of tip botsone of the most notable is the Reddit BitcoinTip bot, which has since been consumed by the ChangeTip bot.

The ChangeTip service enables users to tip others with bitcoin via many social media outlets by simply leaving a comment that triggers the service. The bot works on Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, GitHub, Google Plus, Tumblr, and StockTwits. Tipping actions can be customized as well allowing users to set tip amounts to symbols (or words) such as @changetip 1 beer if beer were set to 50 mBTC or something similar would then tip that amount.

There will be a 1% fee to withdraw tipped funds from ChangeTip beginning January 15, 2015.

Tipping has been a function of the Bitcoin community for some time now, but recently its gained a great deal of traction and ChangeTip has been reaping the benefits.

Aside from breaking the 10,000 tips per day milestone, ChangeTip also reported that it has built up a userbase of over 34,000 user accounts.

Our community extends from San Francisco to New York, from Tokyo to Buenos Aires and its growing quickly, says Nick Sullivan, ChangeTIp CEO. We are proud that this growth has come organically, primarily through word of mouth.

Right on the cusp of this surge in bitcoin tipping, Bitcoin wallet Coinbase released its own tipping mechanism. However, instead of going the social media route, Coinbase offers a type of donate button that can be attached to web pages.

In the social media tipping market, ChangeTip is still leaderand fairly much the only show in townbut it likely wont be long for others to catch up.

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Bitcoin tipping sees giant growth: ChangeTip exceeds 10,000 tips in one day

Why Some Retailers Are Accepting Bitcoin

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Some of the virtual currency's unique characteristics have proven attractive to some businesses.

Bitcoin's broadest impact might happen outside payments, but some retailers are already finding value in accepting Bitcoin for goods and services. A panel of businesses that are taking Bitcoin payments discussed their experiences with the virtual currency at a Money2020 panel this month.

Surprisingly, security was one of the biggest benefits of Bitcoin for two of the businesses represented on the panel: Amagi Metals, a trading site for precious metals, and Newegg, an online computer and electronics retailer.

Typically, fraudsters want to use stolen credit card credentials to buy goods that can be a store of value (like gold, silver, or high-end electronics). Stephen Macaskill, Amagi's CEO, said his company is a constant target for fraudsters. "We always have people trying to make orders with fraudulent credit cards. We have to have a whole department to make sure that all of our credit card transactions are legitimate, so it is expensive for us. We catch people on a weekly basis."

Amagi was hit with chargebacks from fraudulent card transactions in 2012, and it started accepting Bitcoins that year. Thanks to the Bitcoin Blockchain, it doesn't have to worry about any chargebacks with its Bitcoin transactions. The Blockchain, a public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions, makes it impossible to counterfeit Bitcoins. Each transaction recorded in the Blockchain is verified by a third party.

[For more on the Bitcoin Blockchain, check out: Banks, Bitcoin & the Blockchain]

"I don't see a way to end credit card fraud and we have the highest rate of credit card fraud in precious metals," Macaskill told the audience. "With Bitcoin, we don't ever have to worry about chargebacks."

Security might not be the first benefit that comes to mind when people think about Bitcoin, after incidents like Mt. Gox this year. But the Blockchain technology gives the virtual currency security as a payment mechanism, even if some of the Bitcoin exchanges have proven far less secure.

Ted Rogers, chief strategy officer of Xapo, told Bank Systems & Technology that Bitcoin advocates need to provide a great deal of education about the security benefits of the Blockchain for payments.

"There's a security aspect that's partly educational. Our challenge is explaining why this technology is so secure," he said. "It is easier to steal the Mona Lisa than to steal a Bitocin in a cold wallet."

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Why Some Retailers Are Accepting Bitcoin

Bitcoin is Not a Ponzi Scheme — Detroit Hacked! — Draper to Bid on Silk Road Bitcoins Again – Video

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Bitcoin is Not a Ponzi Scheme -- Detroit Hacked! -- Draper to Bid on Silk Road Bitcoins Again
Donate: https://blockchain.info/address/1LAYuQq6f11HccBgbe6bx8DiwKwzuYkPR3 Subscribe: http://patreon.com/madbitcoins Sponsor: http://MadBitcoins.com November 18th, 2014 -- Start aging ...

By: MadBitcoins

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Bitcoin is Not a Ponzi Scheme -- Detroit Hacked! -- Draper to Bid on Silk Road Bitcoins Again - Video

Bitcoin Billionaire – Android IOS iPad iPhone App Gameplay Review [HD+] #03 Lets Play – Video

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Bitcoin Billionaire - Android IOS iPad iPhone App Gameplay Review [HD+] #03 Lets Play
Tipps, Tricks und Cheats fr Bitcoin Billionaire und vielen anderen IOS, Android und Windows Apps: http://www.appzialist.com/ Bitcoin Billionaire - Android IOS iPad iPhone App Gameplay Review...

By: AppZialist

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Bitcoin Billionaire - Android IOS iPad iPhone App Gameplay Review [HD+] #03 Lets Play - Video

The big problem with bitcoin regulations

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The recent BitLicense carve-outs for software developers and bitcoin miners seem to allow for a level of innovation free from regulation. So far, so good. At a glance, the New York Department of Financial Services seems to be on the right track. Providing a regulatory framework in which bitcoin exchanges, online wallets and merchant processing services can operate is an important step forward in the evolution of virtual currencies and legitimizes their use.

Read MorePolice forced to pay bitcoin ransom

However, when one digs deeper into the NFS BitLicense proposal, what we actually see is a regulatory framework that imposes unrealistic requirements on bitcoin users and merchants. You see, a very large part of the regulation deals with trying to remove one of the biggest benefits to society that bitcoin provides: anonymity. BitLicense, as written, forces merchants to collect names and addresses for the simplest of transactions. Can you imagine having to give your name and address at the drive through checkout just to buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin? That's what the proposal is trying to enforce.

So just why is the anonymity aspect such a benefit to society? Since 2013, hackers have stolen over 1 billion consumer records. The estimated cost of this data theft is a staggering $5 billion dollars a year, which inevitably gets passed down to consumers and merchants in the form of higher prices and fees.

There is a global data-security crisis. Indeed, a war is being waged and that's making it harder and harder for the good guys to win. The hackers only have to succeed a small percentage of the time to make a very big dent on our society. As a result, we are in an era where securing personal information requires more and more complex security and surveillance, by merchants, banks and the government agencies.

Read MoreIs Apple Pay a bitcoin killer?

The system of credit-card processing introduced in the 1940s and 1950s, perfected in the 1970s and 1980s, was never designed for the 21st century, a century in which the Internet and the open-source community and the dark web accelerate technology innovation at a pace far more rapid than slow moving merchant and banking infrastructure can keep up with. To address this global data security crisis requires us to fundamentally re-think what it means for a consumer to spend money. As it stands today, a simple trip to the grocery store or buying gifts online at Christmas, subjects hundreds of millions of people to potential fraud, identity and credit-card theft. Crimes that may affect their credit record, their finances, indeed even their ability to work. Moreover, the current approach to addressing these problems, ring fencing, surveillance, detection and tracking is leading us as a society down a very slippery road. It's an approach that means everything we do, every dollar we spend, our location, everyone we talk to, it all needs to be monitored and tracked, relationships mapped, algorithms applied just to catch a very small number of bad actors causing a very large amount of damage.

Bitcoin solves these problems, because it does not require us to expose personal information just to go out to dinner or shop online. Every transaction is done with a bearer instrument that does not give the receiver any information that might be used or stolen to exact future payments, or perform any fraud. It's just like cash, only designed for the 21st century, designed for the world we live in now. It protects consumers from identity theft, fraud, and reduces the massive costs associated with processing transactions, opening up global economies and bringing massive new consumer markets into an integrated 21st century economy.

Read MoreWebcam hackers may be watching you

Unfortunately, the NFS BitLicense proposal explicitly strips consumers of these benefits, reducing consumer protection, since, as written, it requires bitcoin merchant-payment-processing companies to collect personal identifying information on every transaction, forcing merchants to collect it, thus destroying the huge opportunity that bitcoin presents to solve the global data-security crisis. Requiring this information on every transaction also makes transactions in bitcoin at your local retailer more complex than spending dollars or using a credit card, thus significantly impeding adoption and innovation.

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The big problem with bitcoin regulations


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