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Category Archives: Bitcoin

Bitcoin Brothers Petahash Mining — UK Treasury to consult Bitcoiners — MadBitcoins in Vegas! – Video

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Bitcoin Brothers Petahash Mining -- UK Treasury to consult Bitcoiners -- MadBitcoins in Vegas!
Sponsored by http://RBBI.co -- a trusted name in precious metals Donate: https://blockchain.info/address/1LAYuQq6f11HccBgbe6bx8DiwKwzuYkPR3 Subscribe: http://patreon.com/madbitcoins ...

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Bitcoin Brothers Petahash Mining -- UK Treasury to consult Bitcoiners -- MadBitcoins in Vegas! - Video

Bitcoin & Beanie Babies: How to Spot a Tech Bubble

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We're headed into another collapse. All the signs are there, and the latest portent of tech-doom is bitcoin.

I've personally witnessed at least two tech bubbles. One was in the 1980s, triggered by the game console market collapse in 1982-1983, which would later affect the computer industry. More recently was the dotcom collapse of 1999-2000, which was exacerbated by money wasted on Y2K scams followed by the 9/11 attacks, throwing everything into a tailspin.

If you were to take this as a cycle of perhaps 17 years then it should happen again in 2016-2017. This coincides with a lot of economic doomsaying.

These collapses are visible to those on the lookout. Anthony B. "Tony" Perkins released a book in 1999, just months before the collapse began in earnest, called The Internet Bubble. If everyone had sold every bit of equity owned the day the first edition came out, they'd have been in great shape. But nobody was interested at the time.

I'm personally fascinated by these ups and downs and there is no doubt that one is underway now. Just look for the signals.

One is simply what you hear on the street. Comments like "Wow, that's nuts." Or "Apple is the most valuable company in the world."

During these massive bubble-creating upswings the news becomes vacuous, as if nobody wants to do any real thinking when things are going so well. Take, for example, the publicity garnered over the past few weeks by Taylor Swift (look, even I am writing about her). For what? A new album? How is this news? Why has she appeared on every news show? Even my friend at The Register, Andrew Orlowski, wrote about how she is taking her music off Spotify without noticing that this too was a publicity stunt. This is a sure sign of a bubble. In 1999, the Taylor Swift icon was Britney Spears. Perhaps Olivia Newton-John or Joan Jett in 1982. Seventeen years earlier it was Diana Ross.

Of course these pop icons come and go and may not be a harbinger. But there's one thing I'm convinced is a harbinger: an insane illogical fad. In 1999 it was Beanie Babies.

Today it is bitcoin.

I've said before that bitcoins are the new Beanie Babies, and suffice it to say that it looks, sounds, and feels like the Beanie Baby era without the TV shows that cropped up around the stupid stuffed animals.

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Bitcoin & Beanie Babies: How to Spot a Tech Bubble

Innovations: The liberating idea behind Pragues bitcoin-only cafe

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By Tuan C. Nguyen November 5 at 9:25 AM

Step inside the newest coffeehouse on Dlnick street in Prague and it doesnt take long to notice that somethings amiss. Theres no cash register, nor a counter where customers would typically form a line.

Instead, youll find a long, wood slab table situated ever so slightly towards the left side of the room, where a wide selection of pastries, along with menus, plates, cups, utensils, jugs of water and an expresso machine can be found neatly laid out in the open.

Oddly enough, theres something about the arrangement thats refreshing, and at the same time, a bit disconcerting. Upon passing through the first time, my initial reaction was to quickly scan the room for any apron-wearing employee. And as the confusion intensified, so did the urge to grab a cup and, heck, whip up a latte myself.

Just as I began mulling over that very notion, a gentlemen with a tightly-trimmed beard and who looked to be in his 20s, got up from a nearby table, where he had been seated with a couple of young women, and walked over to greet me.

I know the set-up can be sort of disorientating, but thats the whole point, Michal Navrtil, operations manager and part-time barista, assured me. The idea is that by not having uniforms, we also get rid of the imposed separation between patrons and workers.

Paraleln Polis, which in Czech means Parallel World, is known mostly for being perhaps theworlds first bitcoin-only cafe. (Heres my photo essay of what its like to buy coffee in the shop.) All transactions from wages to point of sale are processed virtually, using one of the most well-recognized cryptocurrencies. More broadly though, the recently-renovated space, which includes a co-working room and hacker space, was conceived as way to demonstrate on a micro level how an entirely decentralized society might function.

Even within the management team, there are no hierarchies, saida spokesman for the cafe who goes by the pseudonym Petr lka. Everyone who works here is considered a partner in the organization.

To understand whats going on here is to peer into the collective mind of Ztohoven, the rabble-rousing band of artists and hackers that run the joint. Known for their elaborate, guerrilla-style pranks, the anonymous group made headlines back in 2007, when six of its members hacked a live news broadcast signal and inserted a computer-generated atomic mushroom cloud that projected onto viewers TV screens. Prosecuted for scaremongering, they characterized the stunt as nothing more than a statement about the medias capacity to brainwash the public. Criminal charges was subsequently dropped.

Since then, almost allinvolved have come clean with their true identities and are now channeling their penchant for subverting authority toward educating the public about what they perceive to be the encroaching tyranny of centralized institutions.

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Innovations: The liberating idea behind Pragues bitcoin-only cafe

The Bitcoin Group #54 — FinCen Clarifies, Bitcoin 2.0 in the clear? SEC, CVS, RiteAid and Happy … – Video

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The Bitcoin Group #54 -- FinCen Clarifies, Bitcoin 2.0 in the clear? SEC, CVS, RiteAid and Happy ...
THIS WEEK: ---------------------------- Congrats to Chris Ellis: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/world_passport/ FinCen Clarifies https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/fincen-clarifies-virtual-currency-...

By: World Crypto Network

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The Bitcoin Group #54 -- FinCen Clarifies, Bitcoin 2.0 in the clear? SEC, CVS, RiteAid and Happy ... - Video

Free Bitcoin Zebra Faucet Feed the zebra and win up to 1000 satoshi every hour! – Video

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Free Bitcoin Zebra Faucet Feed the zebra and win up to 1000 satoshi every hour!
All registered users are able to mine with cloud-based GHS as well as trade cloud-based GHS for BTC according to the market price. Free Sign Up: https://cex.io/r/0/DexteR/0/ EOBot Cloud Mining...

By: Martin Senigla

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Free Bitcoin Zebra Faucet Feed the zebra and win up to 1000 satoshi every hour! - Video

The Bitcoin Fluid Dispenser 2.3 : Compatibility (feat. Breadwallet and Mycelium) – Video

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The Bitcoin Fluid Dispenser 2.3 : Compatibility (feat. Breadwallet and Mycelium)
The compatibility of the Bitcoin Fluid Dispenser is demonstrated with several bitcoin wallets and the bitcoin payment protocol is demonstrated using https via an internet connection. http://AndySc...

By: andyschroder

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The Bitcoin Fluid Dispenser 2.3 : Compatibility (feat. Breadwallet and Mycelium) - Video

Banks, Bitcoin & the Blockchain

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The Bitcoin Blockchain could offer benefits to banks that are willing to experiment with it.

The modern financial system has a fundamental problem: Its not designed for the Internet. Even though money and transactions are becoming increasingly digitized, we keep using payments rails that were originally designed for paper checks. And, in some ways, the financial system is less than compatible with the online world people are shopping and transacting in.

A good example of this conundrum is how the Internet has affected payments security. JPMorgan Chase, which suffered a data breach this past summer, will likely double its $250 million annual cyber security budget in the next five years. Our payments rails just werent built with advanced persistent threat attacks and malware in mind.

All of the work that people are doing in cyber security, its really people are trying to patch for that problem that our financial system wasnt built for the Internet, Will OBrien, CEO of BitGo, said yesterday at a Money2020 panel on how traditional payments players can dabble in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was built for the Internet. Strip away the currency aspect and look at the technology behind Bitcoin, and you have the first Internet protocol for storing and exchanging value. And that protocol leverages the Blockchain, the first open-source financial database that records everything that happens on the Bitcoin network and verifies all of that activity with a third party. The implications of the Blockchain technology could go well beyond payments. So there are opportunities for companies beyond Bitcoin startups to leverage it.

Bitcoin is potentially the most important technology innovation of our lifetime. It has such far-reaching potential, Cedric Dahl, CEO of Buttercoin, remarked. The Blockchain has enabled something that has never been possible before: Two people who dont know or trust each other can agree that they trust each other with something.

The Bitcoin Blockchain could be used to verify more than just possession of funds for Bitcoin transactions. It could be leveraged to verify all sorts of records like legal documents. Or it could be used to verify the credit-worthiness of unbanked or underbanked individuals, Adam Ludwin, CEO of Chain.com, commented.

[For more on alternative uses of Bitcoin, check out: Exploring New Use Cases for Bitcoin.]

The real value of the anonymity of Bitcoin is that you dont need to know your customer. The Blockchain can substitute for the credit-worthiness of an individual. It can enfranchise people and bring them on to the financial grid, Ludwin said.

It might not lookas ifthese things are possible yet, as Bitcoin is still in its early days. And Bitcoin companies acknowledge that more innovation is necessary for the Blockchain technology to reach its full potential.

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Banks, Bitcoin & the Blockchain

Online Drug Dealers Are Now Accepting Darkcoin, Bitcoins Stealthier Cousin

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When the cryptocurrency darkcoin launched earlier this year, it distinguished itself from dozens of bitcoin copycats by promising to keep users transactions far more anonymous than its predecessor. Now that promise is being tested in the Internets fastest-growing proving ground for privacy technologies: the online black market for drugs.

Over the last month, two of the dark web markets selling an anonymous, mail-order catalog of narcotics and other contraband have begun supporting darkcoin transactions. On a site called Nucleus, visitors can now use darkcoin to buy LSD, MDMA, and marijuana. On the competing market Diabolus, dealers accept it for cocaine, synthetic stimulants like ethylone and alpha-PVP, and even counterfeit Euros. Those two markets still represent only a tiny fraction of the growing dark web drug economymost of which uses bitcoin exclusively. But darkcoins entrance could signal a new means of transaction in that underground industry, and one thats far harder for law enforcement to trace.

Using [darkcoin] on Diabolus is no more difficult than using bitcoin, and we hope that this currency will receive more adoption because of its superior anonymity, a Diabolus administrator known as Accida wrote on the Reddit forum devoted to dark net markets two weeks ago. Ultimately, Diabolus cares about protecting your security and anonymity, and well consistently take action to maintain it as best we can.

PVP-alpha, marijuana, and ecstacy being sold for darkcoin on the drug site Nucleus. Screenshot: WIRED

Darkcoin is designed to scramble any attempts at blockchain tracing. Darkcoin users can, whenever they want, swap their coins with two other users, a process known as CoinJoin. That exchange is organized by a so-called Master Node, one of the servers that runs the darkcoin network in exchange for periodic payments in the currency. And since that coordination of CoinJoin transactions is protected by encryption, its nearly impossible for an outside observer to match up darkcoin payments with anyones identity.

Despite all of that, darkcoins creator Evan Duffield says hes never intended darkcoin to be used for dark web drug sales. But he cant stop drug vendors from being attracted to its privacy properties. Yes, it was accepted and implemented by these two markets. I cant really control that, he says. The goal has always been to make a currency thats privacy-centric and is more for mass consumer base types of things. Its not just for buying drugs online.

But he still sees Diabolus and Nucleus adoption of darkcoin as a positive sign for his budding currency system. Bitcoin, he points out, got an early boost from Silk Road, which accepted it long before more mainstream vendors like Dell and Overstock.com. Duffield points to dozens of websites that already accept darkcoin payments, many in exchange for private web hosting or VPN services to encrypt and anonymize internet traffic. Early on with bitcoin the only thing you could do with it was gamble and buy drugs. Then it got past that and was accepted on many sites all over the internet, says Duffield. The same thing is happening with darkcoin.

Adoption by the narcotics underground could give darkcoin a needed injection of demand: A speculative bubble brought darkcoins price to more than $13 in May, making it the second-most valuable cryptocurrency after bitcoin at the time. But since then, its exchange rate has plummeted back to less than $2; all existing darkcoins are now worth close to $8 million.

Booms and bust in value, however, have never mattered to the privacy-sensitive dark net economy as much as they do to cryptocurrency speculators. A currencys privacy properties, after all, have little to do with its dollar value, as the black market Silk Road administrator known as the Dread Pirate Roberts said after a bitcoin crash in 2013. Bitcoins foundation, its algorithms and network, dont change with the exchange rate, he wrote in a message at the time. It is just as important to the functioning of Silk Road at $1 as it is at $1,000. That may be even more true of darkcoin, which is specifically designed to allow anonymous transactions.

Since the FBI takedown of the Silk Road in October of last year, next-generation cryptomarkets have been evolving and experimenting, using features like multi-signature transactions and even peer-to-peer selling systems to better protect transactions from surveillance. But bitcoins fundamental privacy problems persist. Darkcoin, along with other anonymous money projects like Dark Wallet and the still-in-development cryptocurrency Zerocoin could change that.

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Online Drug Dealers Are Now Accepting Darkcoin, Bitcoins Stealthier Cousin


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