Coin News

The CSBS has announced its task force will examine bitcoin, among other payments topics, at an upcoming May hearing.

pple has recently approved Bitple for the App Store. Bitple is a virtual Bitcoin trading simulator that allows users to experience trading Bitcoin with fake money. The user is given $10,000 of play money and is then left on their own to create buy and sell orders and to try to generate a profit from trading […]

The post Apple Approves Virtual Bitcoin Trading Simulator Bitple appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Dorian Nakamoto, the subject of a March Newsweek profile naming him as the creator of Bitcoin, has released a new video in which he once again denies the charge. 

The video was uploaded by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a programmer who also appears in the video.

"Thank you very much for your support throughout this ordeal that I’m still fighting," Nakamoto begins. His lawyer has not confirmed whether Nakamoto is pursuing legal action against the publication, and Nakamoto does not explain that comment further.

He then holds up a copy of the March issue.

"I’m not Satohsi Nakamoto as portrayed as the creator," he says. "My name is Doranin Satoshi Nakamoto, and of course, if I was the real creator I would never use my real name. So from that point of view, I’m sure you guys would know that Satoshi Nakamoto is not me."

Nakamoto goes on to express his gratitude for the thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin raised on his behalf by the Bitcoin community for his , and that he now considers himself a full-fledged Bitcoin

Check it out:  

Join the conversation about this story »

 The alleged "face of Bitcoin," Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, has taken to YouTube with noted Bitcoin activist, Andreas Antonopoulos, to thank the Bitcoin community for sending him over $20,000 in BTC donations. Read More

La moda de la tecnología “ponible” llega al mundo Bitcoin en forma de pulsera que permitiría pagos rápidos y sencillos con solo un gesto. Tecnología que se lleva Cada día vemos como cada vez más marcas se apuntan a la moda de crear tecnología que se integra con nuestra persona. Desde las famosísimas Google Glasses, […]

The post Paga con Bitcoin con un solo gesto gracias a Alive OS appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

U prošlim tekstovima smo se bavili osnovama. Šta je Bitcoin, kako i gde se koristi. Sledeće logično pitanje je kako doći do njega. Imajući u vidu da je cena po komadu prilično visoka za balkanski standard, postavlja se pitanje ima li lakšeg načina. Zavisno od osobe koju pitate, dobićete različiti odgovor. Drugi način za dolaženje […]

The post Uvod u Bitcoin i kriptovalute III appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

The fuel pump accepts only bitcoin, and is ready for pilot installation, its creator says.

Dogecoin has become a very popular cryptocurrency since it was introduced in December 2013. Since then, this currency based on the popular internet meme has been widely used as a “tipping” system for dogecoin Reddit users, while also acting as a successful medium for crowdfunding campaigns. The internet meme features funny, nonsensical and misspelled captions overlayed atop images of a Shiba Inu dog. For those unfamiliar, these captions include, “so very wow,” “such coin,” “very moon,” some of which are hard to understand for those outside the growing community. Developed and created by Billy Markus, with an aim to create a “fun” cryptocurrency that could reach a broader demographic than Bitcoin, Dogecoin has achieved sizeable growth in the short six […]

The post So Very Wow! Dogecoin Sponsors a NASCAR Racer appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Dogecoin has become a very popular cryptocurrency since it was introduced in December 2013. Since then, this currency based on the popular internet meme has been widely used as a “tipping” system for dogecoin Reddit users, while also acting as a successful medium for crowdfunding campaigns. The internet meme features funny, nonsensical and misspelled captions overlayed atop images of a Shiba Inu dog. For those unfamiliar, these captions include, “so very wow,” “such coin,” “very moon,” some of which are hard to understand for those outside the growing community. Developed and created by Billy Markus, with an aim to create a “fun” cryptocurrency that could reach a broader demographic than Bitcoin, Dogecoin has achieved sizeable growth in the short six […]

The post So Very Wow! Dogecoin Sponsors a NASCAR Racer appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Graphic designer J.P. Brenner has come up with a multiple-sided bitcoin logo, supposedly representing its dynamic nature.

BitGive's latest charitable endeavor finds it joining with The Water Project to raise money for clean water in Africa.

How can you put your Bitcoin to good use? In so many ways! One opportunity that you have to consider today is donating to the BitGive Foundation’s Water Project Campaign. The Water Project recently began accepting Bitcoin and focuses on delivering clean water to Sub Saharan Africa. As a 501(c)(3) organization, the Water Project seeks to build a foundation in communities in need of a sustainable water supply. You can be apart of this project. Most of us simply take our running faucets and clean water for granted, but many do not have access to clean drinking water. I agree with the Water Project that, “clean water saves lives.” Donating even 5 USD in BTC can and will truly make […]

The post BitPay Pledges 1 BTC Match to BitGive’s “The Water Project” Campaign appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

An ethical coffee shop and creative space has received a helping hand from Manchester’s small dogecoin community.

At this point in time, Maidsafe is still in the process of raising Bitcoin in their safecoin presale. Safecoin can be “saved” by sending BTC to their address, which will then guarantee you a certain amount of Maidsafecoin. Once the SAFE network is fully released (date still unknown) Maidsafecoins can be exchanged 1:1 with Safecoins. […]

The post Maidsafe Embroiled In Safecoin Presale Mastercoin Pump And Dump appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

At this point in time, Maidsafe is still in the process of raising Bitcoin in their safecoin presale. Safecoin can be “saved” by sending BTC to their address, which will then guarantee you a certain amount of Maidsafecoin. Once the SAFE network is fully released (date still unknown) Maidsafecoins can be exchanged 1:1 with Safecoins. […]

The post Maidsafe Embroiled In Safecoin Presale Mastercoin Pump And Dump appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

We gave our Person of the Year award for 2013 to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.

We know some of you laughed. 

If you did, you may want to read on. It's becoming increasingly clear that Satoshi's creation has the potential to change how much of commerce itself works, and for reasons not even many Bitcoin fans realize.

By many accounts, Satoshi came up with a real-world solution to an actual longstanding computer science paradox known as the double-spend problem, or the Byzantine General's problem (the professor who named it thus explains why he did so here). The challenge is how to send and receive money online without the need for a trusted third party, like PayPal, ensuring that the same digital credit standing in for the amount being exchanged isn't being spent twice.

In the real world, this problem gets avoided with cash, which is quite difficult to counterfeit. In practice, digital counterfeiting is much easier. 

Satoshi's solution was what has become known as the blockchain: a ledger of all transactions owned and monitored by everyone but ultimately controlled by none. It's like a giant interactive spreadsheet everyone has access to and updates to confirm each digital credit is unique. 

It is this technology that programmers are now working to deploy for uses that go far beyond Bitcoin. Ironically, Satoshi does not appear to have been looking to solve this problem when he created Bitcoin. But his design for the blockchain, which he spelled out in his 2008 Bitcoin spec paper, has profound implications.

"For the first time, two people can exchange a piece of digital property, without any prior relationship, and in a secure way, over the Internet," Jeff Garzik, one of Bitcoin's core developers now employed by payment processor BitPay told Business Insider. "As a computer scientist, and in computer science in general, when you talked about building distributed systems, there tended to be a purely theoretical view about how computers would talk to each other, how to keep them coordinated. Satoshi and the blockchain really solved that problem in an elegant and unexpected way.

I don't think the computer science community has really caught up yet.

"I don't think the computer science community has really caught up yet."

The breakthrough means that, theoretically, any act of commerce on the web can be decentralized and stripped of a controlling authority. 

Perhaps the most straightforward example of a post-Bitcoin service currently using Satoshi's blockchain is Proof Of Existence. Created by Manuel Araoz, a 23-year-old developer in Argentina, the site allows you to upload a file to certify that you had custody of it at a given time. Neither its contents nor your own personal information are ever revealed — rather, all the data in the document gets digested into an encrypted number. Proof Of Existence is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain (there's a 0.005 BTC fee), so the thousands of computers on that network have now collectively verified your file.

A slightly more politicized application of the blockchain is Namecoin. Currently, international nonprofit ICANN governs nearly all top-level Web-address domains such ".com." But three years ago, engineers developed something called Namecoin that serves as a new domain name system for registering Web addresses that end in ".bit." In this case, instead of ICANN controlling the domain name system, you and all the other people in the Namecoin system control the domain names.

Again, blockchain technology makes it so that something that previously required a centralized authority can now be managed via community. 

At this point, payment processors like Western Union probably have the most to fear from blockchain competition, according to Gil Luria, a managing director at Wedbush Securities covering financial technology. You may have heard this before, but Luria explained why the blockchain is the true threat: Most processors currently use hub-and-spoke models, he said, which are able to charge fees for crossing jurisdictions, and for smaller transaction amounts. Decentralizing and distributing the network gets rid of all that.

"It’s a much more competitive business model," Luria told us by phone recently. "Instead of paying 5% to 10% in fees to Western Union, you're going to be 2% to 3%, possibly even less.

A startup called Ripple represents the most active threat to the mega-processors. (We profiled Ripple, and the group that created it, last month.) Computers all familiar with each other on Ripple's network mutually agree on changes to its blockchain (Ripple calls it a "ledger"). This allows transactions to be processed instantly and without a third party. It's even faster than the Bitcoin network, because everyone using the Ripple ledger gets their own copy of the whole ledger, in contrast with the nodes on the Bitcoin network all sharing a single one. 

The blockchain is even stalking credit-card companies. In an interview in Goldman Sachs' note on Bitcoin last March, Fred Ehrsam, the CEO of mega-Bitcoin payment processor Coinbase, observed that a Bitcoin-like payment network would solve the problem of having your credit-card info stored with a big box retailer like Target. Even sending money through Venmo, the app that lets you text your friends for picking up dinner that one time, still takes five days to clear.

Of course, it's possible the existing financial behemoths could adopt their own blockchain technologies. In the same Goldman note, Goldman information technology services analyst Roman Leal writes that, "just as a flurry of new entrants – such as Square, Groupon, and PayPal - encouraged payment networks and payment processors to develop a mobile payments strategy, we expect traditional payment players to develop digital currency strategies." 

Two groups, BitShares and Ethereum, are hoping to blockchain-ify...everything. BitShares founder and CEO Daniel Larimer has his eye on stock exchanges, voting, music distribution, and on. He calls such futuristic entities distributed autonomous corporations. To use the music example, Larimer envisions artists having the ability to issue shares in their own songs, incentivizing fans to spread the tune far and wide to increase returns. "We give power to shareholders without centralizing in any way, because we’ve eliminated the barriers to entry for starting a company," Larimer told us at the "Inside Bitcoins" conference recently. 

Incidentally, he said having a conference called "Inside Bitcoins" was akin to having a conference called "Inside AltaVista." 

There are of course loads of technological and regulatory hurdles that must still be overcome for all of this to materialize. And there are plenty of things that could be reset on a blockchain. But investors don't seem too concerned: Marc Andreessen (who also invests in Business Insider) and Fred Wilson are betting big in this space.

Our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle. — Fred Wilson  

In a recent blog post, Wilson equated the breakthrough Blockchain represents to the web browser and social media. He specifically refers to this moment as the "blockchain cycle."

Our 2004 fund was built during social. Our 2008 fund was built during social and the emergence of mobile. Our 2012 fund was built during the mobile downturn. And our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle. I am looking forward to it.

"I think we see every week now somewhere between one and three entrepreneurs come in with blockchain ideas," Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon told BI. "There's definitely some momentum behind it."

We'll leave you with an extremely futuristic example of how the blockchain could be deployed. In a talk given last fall at the Turing festival, Mike Hearn, a former Google employee who quit his job to work full-time on Bitcoin, laid out this scenario: A 20-something Scottish girl named Jen wants to meet up with her friends downtown. She doesn't own a car — no one does in the future — so she dials up a cab through a network Hearn calls TradeNet.  

Jen's request acts as a request-for-bid on TradeNet, and all the robot cabs available start automatically posting offers, like on an exchange. Jen's node then ranks the bids and presents them to Jen based on criteria including price but also things like whether she's used that cab before, and what other people have said about it. All of this is done on a distributed, blockchain system, so no centralized taxi company needs to manage the orders.

The blockchain, by the way, will have improved that recommendation process, Hearn says. Currently many recommendation systems at places like Yelp or Seamless say they use your social network to help you choose services. In practice, they end up producing what amount to spam reviews, since it's unlikely a friend you trust will have reviewed the same service you're looking into. Hearn says cryptography — without which Bitcoin couldn't exist — has helped reduce spam by providing more authoritative, useful authentication.

In this future scenario, the roads on which Jen is driving will have also become autonomous actors, doing trades with the car on TradeNet. They can submit bids to the car about how much they're going to charge to use them. If she's in a hurry, Jen can choose a road that's a bit more expensive but which will allow her to get into the city faster.  

Awesome, right? 

"This is possible because of Bitcoin," Hearn says. "Bitcoin has no intermediaries, therefore there's really nothing to stop a computer from just connecting to the internet and taking part all by itself. All you need to do to instantiate a Bitcoin wallet is generate a large random number."  

Hearn gives other examples of where the TradeNet could be deployed, like buying fruit and vegetables, or units of computation time if you're buying clouds services. Any transactions that are fast, lightweight and commoditized — which the current system, Hearn says is bad at — could be done so much better on the Blockchain.

The entirety of Hearn's talk is pretty amazing, and we recommend you watch it.

With a handful of exceptions like Proof Of Existence, it's still too early to see fully functional applications of blockchain technology. Ripple, for instance, is still courting financial institutions that would benefit from using its payment rail. Bitcoin's main developers are still figuring out ways to tweak its protocol without bringing down the entire network. And of course there remain a host of outstanding regulatory issues that will need to get sorted out before massive expansion of these proposed services can occur.

The blockchain helps end the debate about what Bitcoin is. Previously there's been discussion about whether Bitcoin is a currency, or commodity, or technological protocol. There are good arguments for each categorization, but each is unsatisfying in some way.

Now we know why this debate is so unsatisfying. Bitcoin represents a novel form of organization — a blockchain-based enitity — that's not quite like anything seen before it.

SEE ALSO: An Interview With A St. Louis Fed Economist On Bitcoin

Join the conversation about this story »

We gave our Person of the Year award for 2013 to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.

We know some of you laughed. 

If you did, you may want to read on. It's becoming increasingly clear that Satoshi's creation has the potential to change how much of commerce itself works, and for reasons not even many Bitcoin fans realize.

By many accounts, Satoshi came up with a real-world solution to an actual longstanding computer science paradox known as the double-spend problem, or the Byzantine General's problem (the professor who named it thus explains why he did so here). The challenge is how to send and receive money online without the need for a trusted third party, like PayPal, ensuring that the same digital credit standing in for the amount being exchanged isn't being spent twice.

In the real world, this problem gets avoided with cash, which is quite difficult to counterfeit. In practice, digital counterfeiting is much easier. 

Satoshi's solution was what has become known as the blockchain: a ledger of all transactions owned and monitored by everyone but ultimately controlled by none. It's like a giant interactive spreadsheet everyone has access to and updates to confirm each digital credit is unique. 

It is this technology that programmers are now working to deploy for uses that go far beyond Bitcoin. Ironically, Satoshi does not appear to have been looking to solve this problem when he created Bitcoin. But his design for the blockchain, which he spelled out in his 2008 Bitcoin spec paper, has profound implications.

"For the first time, two people can exchange a piece of digital property, without any prior relationship, and in a secure way, over the Internet," Jeff Garzik, one of Bitcoin's core developers now employed by payment processor BitPay told Business Insider. "As a computer scientist, and in computer science in general, when you talked about building distributed systems, there tended to be a purely theoretical view about how computers would talk to each other, how to keep them coordinated. Satoshi and the blockchain really solved that problem in an elegant and unexpected way.

I don't think the computer science community has really caught up yet.

"I don't think the computer science community has really caught up yet."

The breakthrough means that, theoretically, any act of commerce on the web can be decentralized and stripped of a controlling authority. 

Perhaps the most straightforward example of a post-Bitcoin service currently using Satoshi's blockchain is Proof Of Existence. Created by Manuel Araoz, a 23-year-old developer in Argentina, the site allows you to upload a file to certify that you had custody of it at a given time. Neither its contents nor your own personal information are ever revealed — rather, all the data in the document gets digested into an encrypted number. Proof Of Existence is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain (there's a 0.005 BTC fee), so the thousands of computers on that network have now collectively verified your file.

A slightly more politicized application of the blockchain is Namecoin. Currently, international nonprofit ICANN governs nearly all top-level Web-address domains such ".com." But three years ago, engineers developed something called Namecoin that serves as a new domain name system for registering Web addresses that end in ".bit." In this case, instead of ICANN controlling the domain name system, you and all the other people in the Namecoin system control the domain names.

Again, blockchain technology makes it so that something that previously required a centralized authority can now be managed via community. 

At this point, payment processors like Western Union probably have the most to fear from blockchain competition, according to Gil Luria, a managing director at Wedbush Securities covering financial technology. You may have heard this before, but Luria explained why the blockchain is the true threat: Most processors currently use hub-and-spoke models, he said, which are able to charge fees for crossing jurisdictions, and for smaller transaction amounts. Decentralizing and distributing the network gets rid of all that.

"It’s a much more competitive business model," Luria told us by phone recently. "Instead of paying 5% to 10% in fees to Western Union, you're going to be 2% to 3%, possibly even less.

A startup called Ripple represents the most active threat to the mega-processors. (We profiled Ripple, and the group that created it, last month.) Computers all familiar with each other on Ripple's network mutually agree on changes to its blockchain (Ripple calls it a "ledger"). This allows transactions to be processed instantly and without a third party. It's even faster than the Bitcoin network, because everyone using the Ripple ledger gets their own copy of the whole ledger, in contrast with the nodes on the Bitcoin network all sharing a single one. 

The blockchain is even stalking credit-card companies. In an interview in Goldman Sachs' note on Bitcoin last March, Fred Ehrsam, the CEO of mega-Bitcoin payment processor Coinbase, observed that a Bitcoin-like payment network would solve the problem of having your credit-card info stored with a big box retailer like Target. Even sending money through Venmo, the app that lets you text your friends for picking up dinner that one time, still takes five days to clear.

Of course, it's possible the existing financial behemoths could adopt their own blockchain technologies. In the same Goldman note, Goldman information technology services analyst Roman Leal writes that, "just as a flurry of new entrants – such as Square, Groupon, and PayPal - encouraged payment networks and payment processors to develop a mobile payments strategy, we expect traditional payment players to develop digital currency strategies." 

Two groups, BitShares and Ethereum, are hoping to blockchain-ify...everything. BitShares founder and CEO Daniel Larimer has his eye on stock exchanges, voting, music distribution, and on. He calls such futuristic entities distributed autonomous corporations. To use the music example, Larimer envisions artists having the ability to issue shares in their own songs, incentivizing fans to spread the tune far and wide to increase returns. "We give power to shareholders without centralizing in any way, because we’ve eliminated the barriers to entry for starting a company," Larimer told us at the "Inside Bitcoins" conference recently. 

Incidentally, he said having a conference called "Inside Bitcoins" was akin to having a conference called "Inside AltaVista." 

There are of course loads of technological and regulatory hurdles that must still be overcome for all of this to materialize. And there are plenty of things that could be reset on a blockchain. But investors don't seem too concerned: Marc Andreessen (who also invests in Business Insider) and Fred Wilson are betting big in this space.

Our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle. — Fred Wilson  

In a recent blog post, Wilson equated the breakthrough Blockchain represents to the web browser and social media. He specifically refers to this moment as the "blockchain cycle."

Our 2004 fund was built during social. Our 2008 fund was built during social and the emergence of mobile. Our 2012 fund was built during the mobile downturn. And our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle. I am looking forward to it.

"I think we see every week now somewhere between one and three entrepreneurs come in with blockchain ideas," Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon told BI. "There's definitely some momentum behind it."

We'll leave you with an extremely futuristic example of how the blockchain could be deployed. In a talk given last fall at the Turing festival, Mike Hearn, a former Google employee who quit his job to work full-time on Bitcoin, laid out this scenario: A 20-something Scottish girl named Jen wants to meet up with her friends downtown. She doesn't own a car — no one does in the future — so she dials up a cab through a network Hearn calls TradeNet.  

Jen's request acts as a request-for-bid on TradeNet, and all the robot cabs available start automatically posting offers, like on an exchange. Jen's node then ranks the bids and presents them to Jen based on criteria including price but also things like whether she's used that cab before, and what other people have said about it. All of this is done on a distributed, blockchain system, so no centralized taxi company needs to manage the orders.

The blockchain, by the way, will have improved that recommendation process, Hearn says. Currently many recommendation systems at places like Yelp or Seamless say they use your social network to help you choose services. In practice, they end up producing what amount to spam reviews, since it's unlikely a friend you trust will have reviewed the same service you're looking into. Hearn says cryptography — without which Bitcoin couldn't exist — has helped reduce spam by providing more authoritative, useful authentication.

In this future scenario, the roads on which Jen is driving will have also become autonomous actors, doing trades with the car on TradeNet. They can submit bids to the car about how much they're going to charge to use them. If she's in a hurry, Jen can choose a road that's a bit more expensive but which will allow her to get into the city faster.  

Awesome, right? 

"This is possible because of Bitcoin," Hearn says. "Bitcoin has no intermediaries, therefore there's really nothing to stop a computer from just connecting to the internet and taking part all by itself. All you need to do to instantiate a Bitcoin wallet is generate a large random number."  

Hearn gives other examples of where the TradeNet could be deployed, like buying fruit and vegetables, or units of computation time if you're buying clouds services. Any transactions that are fast, lightweight and commoditized — which the current system, Hearn says is bad at — could be done so much better on the Blockchain.

The entirety of Hearn's talk is pretty amazing, and we recommend you watch it.

With a handful of exceptions like Proof Of Existence, it's still too early to see fully functional applications of blockchain technology. Ripple, for instance, is still courting financial institutions that would benefit from using its payment rail. Bitcoin's main developers are still figuring out ways to tweak its protocol without bringing down the entire network. And of course there remain a host of outstanding regulatory issues that will need to get sorted out before massive expansion of these proposed services can occur.

The blockchain helps end the debate about what Bitcoin is. Previously there's been discussion about whether Bitcoin is a currency, or commodity, or technological protocol. There are good arguments for each categorization, but each is unsatisfying in some way.

Now we know why this debate is so unsatisfying. Bitcoin represents a novel form of organization — a blockchain-based enitity — that's not quite like anything seen before it.

SEE ALSO: An Interview With A St. Louis Fed Economist On Bitcoin

Join the conversation about this story »

We gave our Person of the Year award for 2013 to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.

We know some of you laughed. 

If you did, you may want to read on. It's becoming increasingly clear that Satoshi's creation has the potential to change how much of commerce itself works, and for reasons not even many Bitcoin fans realize.

By many accounts, Satoshi came up with a real-world solution to an actual longstanding computer science paradox known as the double-spend problem, or the Byzantine General's problem (the professor who named it thus explains why he did so here). The challenge is how to send and receive money online without the need for a trusted third party, like PayPal, ensuring that the same digital credit standing in for the amount being exchanged isn't being spent twice.

In the real world, this problem gets avoided with cash, which is quite difficult to counterfeit. In practice, digital counterfeiting is much easier. 

Satoshi's solution was what has become known as the blockchain: a ledger of all transactions owned and monitored by everyone but ultimately controlled by none. It's like a giant interactive spreadsheet everyone has access to and updates to confirm each digital credit is unique. 

It is this technology that programmers are now working to deploy for uses that go far beyond Bitcoin. Ironically, Satoshi does not appear to have been looking to solve this problem when he created Bitcoin. But his design for the blockchain, which he spelled out in his 2008 Bitcoin spec paper, has profound implications.

"For the first time, two people can exchange a piece of digital property, without any prior relationship, and in a secure way, over the Internet," Jeff Garzik, one of Bitcoin's core developers now employed by payment processor BitPay told Business Insider. "As a computer scientist, and in computer science in general, when you talked about building distributed systems, there tended to be a purely theoretical view about how computers would talk to each other, how to keep them coordinated. Satoshi and the blockchain really solved that problem in an elegant and unexpected way.

I don't think the computer science community has really caught up yet.

"I don't think the computer science community has really caught up yet."

The breakthrough means that, theoretically, any act of commerce on the web can be decentralized and stripped of a controlling authority. 

Perhaps the most straightforward example of a post-Bitcoin service currently using Satoshi's blockchain is Proof Of Existence. Created by Manuel Araoz, a 23-year-old developer in Argentina, the site allows you to upload a file to certify that you had custody of it at a given time. Neither its contents nor your own personal information are ever revealed — rather, all the data in the document gets digested into an encrypted number. Proof Of Existence is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain (there's a 0.005 BTC fee), so the thousands of computers on that network have now collectively verified your file.

A slightly more politicized application of the blockchain is Namecoin. Currently, international nonprofit ICANN governs nearly all top-level Web-address domains such ".com." But three years ago, engineers developed something called Namecoin that serves as a new domain name system for registering Web addresses that end in ".bit." In this case, instead of ICANN controlling the domain name system, you and all the other people in the Namecoin system control the domain names.

Again, blockchain technology makes it so that something that previously required a centralized authority can now be managed via community. 

At this point, payment processors like Western Union probably have the most to fear from blockchain competition, according to Gil Luria, a managing director at Wedbush Securities covering financial technology. You may have heard this before, but Luria explained why the blockchain is the true threat: Most processors currently use hub-and-spoke models, he said, which are able to charge fees for crossing jurisdictions, and for smaller transaction amounts. Decentralizing and distributing the network gets rid of all that.

"It’s a much more competitive business model," Luria told us by phone recently. "Instead of paying 5% to 10% in fees to Western Union, you're going to be 2% to 3%, possibly even less.

A startup called Ripple represents the most active threat to the mega-processors. (We profiled Ripple, and the group that created it, last month.) Computers all familiar with each other on Ripple's network mutually agree on changes to its blockchain (Ripple calls it a "ledger"). This allows transactions to be processed instantly and without a third party. It's even faster than the Bitcoin network, because everyone using the Ripple ledger gets their own copy of the whole ledger, in contrast with the nodes on the Bitcoin network all sharing a single one. 

The blockchain is even stalking credit-card companies. In an interview in Goldman Sachs' note on Bitcoin last March, Fred Ehrsam, the CEO of mega-Bitcoin payment processor Coinbase, observed that a Bitcoin-like payment network would solve the problem of having your credit-card info stored with a big box retailer like Target. Even sending money through Venmo, the app that lets you text your friends for picking up dinner that one time, still takes five days to clear.

Of course, it's possible the existing financial behemoths could adopt their own blockchain technologies. In the same Goldman note, Goldman information technology services analyst Roman Leal writes that, "just as a flurry of new entrants – such as Square, Groupon, and PayPal - encouraged payment networks and payment processors to develop a mobile payments strategy, we expect traditional payment players to develop digital currency strategies." 

Two groups, BitShares and Ethereum, are hoping to blockchain-ify...everything. BitShares founder and CEO Daniel Larimer has his eye on stock exchanges, voting, music distribution, and on. He calls such futuristic entities distributed autonomous corporations. To use the music example, Larimer envisions artists having the ability to issue shares in their own songs, incentivizing fans to spread the tune far and wide to increase returns. "We give power to shareholders without centralizing in any way, because we’ve eliminated the barriers to entry for starting a company," Larimer told us at the "Inside Bitcoins" conference recently. 

Incidentally, he said having a conference called "Inside Bitcoins" was akin to having a conference called "Inside AltaVista." 

There are of course loads of technological and regulatory hurdles that must still be overcome for all of this to materialize. And there are plenty of things that could be reset on a blockchain. But investors don't seem too concerned: Marc Andreessen (who also invests in Business Insider) and Fred Wilson are betting big in this space.

Our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle. — Fred Wilson  

In a recent blog post, Wilson equated the breakthrough Blockchain represents to the web browser and social media. He specifically refers to this moment as the "blockchain cycle."

Our 2004 fund was built during social. Our 2008 fund was built during social and the emergence of mobile. Our 2012 fund was built during the mobile downturn. And our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle. I am looking forward to it.

"I think we see every week now somewhere between one and three entrepreneurs come in with blockchain ideas," Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon told BI. "There's definitely some momentum behind it."

We'll leave you with an extremely futuristic example of how the blockchain could be deployed. In a talk given last fall at the Turing festival, Mike Hearn, a former Google employee who quit his job to work full-time on Bitcoin, laid out this scenario: A 20-something Scottish girl named Jen wants to meet up with her friends downtown. She doesn't own a car — no one does in the future — so she dials up a cab through a network Hearn calls TradeNet.  

Jen's request acts as a request-for-bid on TradeNet, and all the robot cabs available start automatically posting offers, like on an exchange. Jen's node then ranks the bids and presents them to Jen based on criteria including price but also things like whether she's used that cab before, and what other people have said about it. All of this is done on a distributed, blockchain system, so no centralized taxi company needs to manage the orders.

The blockchain, by the way, will have improved that recommendation process, Hearn says. Currently many recommendation systems at places like Yelp or Seamless say they use your social network to help you choose services. In practice, they end up producing what amount to spam reviews, since it's unlikely a friend you trust will have reviewed the same service you're looking into. Hearn says cryptography — without which Bitcoin couldn't exist — has helped reduce spam by providing more authoritative, useful authentication.

In this future scenario, the roads on which Jen is driving will have also become autonomous actors, doing trades with the car on TradeNet. They can submit bids to the car about how much they're going to charge to use them. If she's in a hurry, Jen can choose a road that's a bit more expensive but which will allow her to get into the city faster.  

Awesome, right? 

"This is possible because of Bitcoin," Hearn says. "Bitcoin has no intermediaries, therefore there's really nothing to stop a computer from just connecting to the internet and taking part all by itself. All you need to do to instantiate a Bitcoin wallet is generate a large random number."  

Hearn gives other examples of where the TradeNet could be deployed, like buying fruit and vegetables, or units of computation time if you're buying clouds services. Any transactions that are fast, lightweight and commoditized — which the current system, Hearn says is bad at — could be done so much better on the Blockchain.

The entirety of Hearn's talk is pretty amazing, and we recommend you watch it.

With a handful of exceptions like Proof Of Existence, it's still too early to see fully functional applications of blockchain technology. Ripple, for instance, is still courting financial institutions that would benefit from using its payment rail. Bitcoin's main developers are still figuring out ways to tweak its protocol without bringing down the entire network. And of course there remain a host of outstanding regulatory issues that will need to get sorted out before massive expansion of these proposed services can occur.

The blockchain helps end the debate about what Bitcoin is. Previously there's been discussion about whether Bitcoin is a currency, or commodity, or technological protocol. There are good arguments for each categorization, but each is unsatisfying in some way.

Now we know why this debate is so unsatisfying. Bitcoin represents a novel form of organization — a blockchain-based enitity — that's not quite like anything seen before it.

SEE ALSO: An Interview With A St. Louis Fed Economist On Bitcoin

Join the conversation about this story »

Sometimes, there's such a thing as being too forward-thinking. Take MEVU and its prototype payment bracelet as an example: the wrist-worn Bluetooth wallet lets you pay with Bitcoin using only air gestures. Sounds cool, right? In many ways, it is. As...

Europe will get its first bitcoin centre this May, with the launch of La Maison du Bitcoin in Paris.

Kako to već biva, dosta vesti se svakodnevno pojavljuje vezano za kriptovalute. Ovaj nedeljni pregled ima za cilj da izdvoji događaje koji su obeležili proteklu nedelju, a i one bitne za ceo ovaj mesec. Proteklu nedelju obeležilo je: Strah od kineske zabrane Bitcoin-a je umanjen. Cena koja je prilično varirala se stabilizovala trenutno na oko […]

The post Nedeljni pregled – April 20. 2014 appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

itcoin and Dogecoin were among the list of at least 20 words banned by the popular /r/technology subreddit. The scandal shook the Reddit sphere last week. Monday, Reddit punished the censorship by obscuring the community. They officially pulled the subreddit from the list of “default subreddits” awarded to popular sub-communities. In response to the scandal, the moderators, issued […]

The post Reddit Punishes /r/technology for Censoring Keywords, Including “Bitcoin” and “Dogecoin” appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

itcoin and Dogecoin were among the list of at least 20 words banned by the popular /r/technology subreddit. The scandal shook the Reddit sphere last week. Monday, Reddit punished the censorship by obscuring the community. They officially pulled the subreddit from the list of “default subreddits” awarded to popular sub-communities. In response to the scandal, the moderators, issued […]

The post Reddit Punishes /r/technology for Censoring Keywords, Including “Bitcoin” and “Dogecoin” appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

We recently gave you a list of 25 trends that would be making people billions.

Most of the phenomena will end up benefiting everyone.

But if you fancied yourself as someone who could be turned into a billionaire, you were arguably cheating — these were things everyone has already figured out.

The real challenge — and the greater value and more lucrative pursuit — would be to come up with the solutions to problems that have befuddled engineers for decades or more.

We thought of 10 of them. Check it out:

1)  Wireless Power

Digital devices have become so small that it can be cumbersome to plug them into a power source. Longer-lasting batteries? Nope — Apple iPod God Tony Fadell says pursuing greater efficiency in batteries themselves is a trap. The key instead is to find ways of squeezing more efficiency out of the devices' other parts — and stealing power from what's around you. University of Washington engineers, among others, are now at work on harvesting existing TV and cellular transmissions and turning them into a power source. "This novel technique enables ubiquitous communication where devices can communicate among themselves at unprecedented scales and in locations that were previously inaccessible," they say.

2)  Rural, Remote Internet

Everyone agrees this is a priority. But there appears to be a hard way and an easier way to achieve it. The former involves lots of expensive regulatory clearance and installations. The latter, which is currently being spearheaded by Google, is called Project Loon. The company plans to send renewables-powered balloons to the edge of space to create an Internet network in remote parts of the world. "We believe it's possible to create a ring of balloons that fly around the globe on the stratospheric winds and provide Internet access to the earth below," they say. Whoa. 

3)  Cheap, Scalable Solar

There are two ways to reduce the cost of raw solar power. One is to have a super cheap photovoltaic cell, with the tradeoff off that it's quite inefficient. Of course, more efficient cells cost more to make. So everyone is racing to find a material or process that eliminates the tradeoffs. We may be close: Australian researchers say they've achieved commercial-scale efficiency with a set of dirt-cheap materials first experimented with a century ago but never considered for this use: Perovskites. The scientists say they could help cut solar costs by 75% to as low as 10 cents a watt.

4)  Clean Coal

The technology was recently the subject of a cover story in Wired, which said carbon capture and storage "may be more important—though much less publicized—than any renewable-energy technology for decades to come," since it would allow the world to keep burning its most abundant fuel source. But it goes on to note that "developing reliable, large-scale CCS facilities will be time-consuming, unglamorous, and breathtakingly costly." 

5)  Super Low-Cost International Payments

While this isn't a problem that touches the average consumer directly, the fees paid by financial institutions to wire funds overseas can eventually filter down. Remittances, too, while not over burdensome, would be much cheaper if they were sent over a decentralized or distributed network free from network, acquiring or interchange fees (see the chart below). This, of course, is the problem Bitcoin and Bitcoin-like technologies, like Ripple, are looking to address. 

6)  A Pill That Actually Makes You Lose Weight

The holy grail of modern society, and another that may prove impossible. But there may yet be a way: in 2012, scientists at UCLA say they'd genetically engineered mice brains to a key compound that craves fats. The results, according to The Week, "These mice lived in a 'hypermetabolic state,' burning fat calories far more efficiently than normal mice, study researcher Daniele Piomelli said in a statement. They were 'resistant to obesity,' staying thin despite a high-fat diet without exercise. They even had normal blood pressure, and showed no increased risk of heart disease or diabetes."

7)  Cheap Desalination 

Water shortages continue to make the list of the world's most pressing issues. This year's crippling drought in California further drove the point home. But desalination plants have proven way too expensive and inefficient to build. But earlier this year, BI's Dina Spector profiled the company behind a kind of solar-powered desalination process that uses one-fifth the electricity of methods that use fossil fuels. If something like this doesn't pan out, we'll have to keep relying on massive conservation efforts — which basically means we've already lost.

8)  Detecting Or Predicting Major Weather Or Natural Events

A new book on the San Andreas fault frames the issue: "...the world community of seismologists remains divided—at times, vehemently—over the issue of whether it will ever be possible to predict earthquakes. It’s a question that’s been raised again as the network of faults in Southern California has awakened with seismic activity in recent months. It is a complex problem. And, to date, no one has yet predicted an earthquake." Meanwhile the number of billion-dollar meteorological events climbs inexorably higher.

9)  Unhackable Passwords

Wired has said 2012 was the year passwords broke. Hackers have through brute force so far been able to break through practically every firewall ever invented. There must be a better way. And engineers are working on them. Google, for instance, continues to search for ways to turn your smartphone or some other device into a computer "car key," Another involves what was once thought the holy grail of cryptography, called obfuscation, which masks the inner workings of a computer program.

10)  Death

It's happening: Google — yes, they've appeared multiple times on this list, but that's because they're interested, and they can — just hired biophysicist Cynthia Kenyon from UCSF to join its Project Calico anti-aging team. Her experiments have produced roundworm as old as the equivalent of 80 human years but looks and acts the equivalent of 40. Google admits it's a moonshot, but they've proven pretty decent at those. 

SEE ALSO: 25 Trends That Will Make People Billions

Join the conversation about this story »

We recently gave you a list of 25 trends that would be making people billions.

Most of the phenomena will end up benefiting everyone.

But if you fancied yourself as someone who could be turned into a billionaire, you were arguably cheating — these were things everyone has already figured out.

The real challenge — and the greater value and more lucrative pursuit — would be to come up with the solutions to problems that have befuddled engineers for decades or more.

We thought of 10 of them. Check it out:

1)  Wireless Power

Digital devices have become so small that it can be cumbersome to plug them into a power source. Longer-lasting batteries? Nope — Apple iPod God Tony Fadell says pursuing greater efficiency in batteries themselves is a trap. The key instead is to find ways of squeezing more efficiency out of the devices' other parts — and stealing power from what's around you. University of Washington engineers, among others, are now at work on harvesting existing TV and cellular transmissions and turning them into a power source. "This novel technique enables ubiquitous communication where devices can communicate among themselves at unprecedented scales and in locations that were previously inaccessible," they say.

2)  Rural, Remote Internet

Everyone agrees this is a priority. But there appears to be a hard way and an easier way to achieve it. The former involves lots of expensive regulatory clearance and installations. The latter, which is currently being spearheaded by Google, is called Project Loon. The company plans to send renewables-powered balloons to the edge of space to create an Internet network in remote parts of the world. "We believe it's possible to create a ring of balloons that fly around the globe on the stratospheric winds and provide Internet access to the earth below," they say. Whoa. 

3)  Cheap, Scalable Solar

There are two ways to reduce the cost of raw solar power. One is to have a super cheap photovoltaic cell, with the tradeoff off that it's quite inefficient. Of course, more efficient cells cost more to make. So everyone is racing to find a material or process that eliminates the tradeoffs. We may be close: Australian researchers say they've achieved commercial-scale efficiency with a set of dirt-cheap materials first experimented with a century ago but never considered for this use: Perovskites. The scientists say they could help cut solar costs by 75% to as low as 10 cents a watt.

4)  Clean Coal

The technology was recently the subject of a cover story in Wired, which said carbon capture and storage "may be more important—though much less publicized—than any renewable-energy technology for decades to come," since it would allow the world to keep burning its most abundant fuel source. But it goes on to note that "developing reliable, large-scale CCS facilities will be time-consuming, unglamorous, and breathtakingly costly." 

5)  Super Low-Cost International Payments

While this isn't a problem that touches the average consumer directly, the fees paid by financial institutions to wire funds overseas can eventually filter down. Remittances, too, while not over burdensome, would be much cheaper if they were sent over a decentralized or distributed network free from network, acquiring or interchange fees (see the chart below). This, of course, is the problem Bitcoin and Bitcoin-like technologies, like Ripple, are looking to address. 

6)  A Pill That Actually Makes You Lose Weight

The holy grail of modern society, and another that may prove impossible. But there may yet be a way: in 2012, scientists at UCLA say they'd genetically engineered mice brains to a key compound that craves fats. The results, according to The Week, "These mice lived in a 'hypermetabolic state,' burning fat calories far more efficiently than normal mice, study researcher Daniele Piomelli said in a statement. They were 'resistant to obesity,' staying thin despite a high-fat diet without exercise. They even had normal blood pressure, and showed no increased risk of heart disease or diabetes."

7)  Cheap Desalination 

Water shortages continue to make the list of the world's most pressing issues. This year's crippling drought in California further drove the point home. But desalination plants have proven way too expensive and inefficient to build. But earlier this year, BI's Dina Spector profiled the company behind a kind of solar-powered desalination process that uses one-fifth the electricity of methods that use fossil fuels. If something like this doesn't pan out, we'll have to keep relying on massive conservation efforts — which basically means we've already lost.

8)  Detecting Or Predicting Major Weather Or Natural Events

A new book on the San Andreas fault frames the issue: "...the world community of seismologists remains divided—at times, vehemently—over the issue of whether it will ever be possible to predict earthquakes. It’s a question that’s been raised again as the network of faults in Southern California has awakened with seismic activity in recent months. It is a complex problem. And, to date, no one has yet predicted an earthquake." Meanwhile the number of billion-dollar meteorological events climbs inexorably higher.

9)  Unhackable Passwords

Wired has said 2012 was the year passwords broke. Hackers have through brute force so far been able to break through practically every firewall ever invented. There must be a better way. And engineers are working on them. Google, for instance, continues to search for ways to turn your smartphone or some other device into a computer "car key," Another involves what was once thought the holy grail of cryptography, called obfuscation, which masks the inner workings of a computer program.

10)  Death

It's happening: Google — yes, they've appeared multiple times on this list, but that's because they're interested, and they can — just hired biophysicist Cynthia Kenyon from UCSF to join its Project Calico anti-aging team. Her experiments have produced roundworm as old as the equivalent of 80 human years but looks and acts the equivalent of 40. Google admits it's a moonshot, but they've proven pretty decent at those. 

SEE ALSO: 25 Trends That Will Make People Billions

Join the conversation about this story »

Los cajeros automáticos de Bitcoin se están expandiendo por todo el mundo facilitando el acceso a esta moneda como alternativa a los exchanges. Esta vez es el turno de Dubái, donde ya hay cientos de máquinas esperando a ser actualizadas para permitir la compra de Bitcoin. El anuncio de la llegada de estos nuevos cajeros […]

The post Primer cajero automático de Bitcoin en Dubái appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

hile many users of Bitcoin have already decided to move to millibitcoins or microbitcoins on their own, the reality is that there haven’t been any official moves to create an official, widely-used denomination of bitcoins. Some people still like saying bitcoins, while others think that millibitcoins are more welcoming to new users of the cryptocurrency. […]

The post Bitcoin Developers Debating Move from ‘Bitcoins’ to ‘Bits’ appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

The Airbitz team won the hackathon with DarkMarket, an innovative a peer-to-peer market open to everyone, everywhere.

A wearable technology startup has announced the first wearable bitcoin wallet that tracks movement to make payments.

First Major Artwork Trading for Bitcoin One week remains in the sale of famous post-impressionist Paul Gauguin’s painting, The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa (Marquesan Man in the Red Cape). This oil painting was Gauguin’s third-to-last work, from his Second Tahiti period, prior to his death on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa in 1903. […]

The post The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa by Paul Gauguin Available for ~90,000 BTC appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.