Bitcoin wants to grow. Sadly, because the Bitcoin protocol restricts the size of every block mined on the network to 1MB, it can’t scale easily. There’s a limited amount of transactions/data that can be consolidated into every block, which creates something of an artificial scarcity problem.

Some maintain good old fashioned capitalism can resolve the problem. If there’s a limit, people who want to transact quickly should pay to have their transactions/data prioritised in the chain.

Miners, especially those having a tough time covering their costs these days, favour this approach. Their view is that the sooner block size is restricted, the sooner the market will be able to find a true value for bitcoin transactions. Also, it’s not healthy for the miner network to depend on speculative inflows forever. True miner revenue would be like giving bitcoin a proper business model. It might also help eliminate blockchain spamming and free-loading.

Mastercard seems to be between a rock and a hard place. They will never catch Visa in the payments markets, according to the latest global figures, and see a real threat on the horizon in Bitcoin. Why would they spend the last year attacking digital currency in videos, to the Australian Senate, and now in a 4-page written statement? Something wicked this way comes. Something far better, as well. It’s called “The Future of Money.”

You know what your problem is, Bitcoin?

Mastercard has been around a long time, since 1979 in its current form and is a global leader in payment services. To thwart this existential threat to their future thiefdom, Mastercard has crafted this response to Bitcoin and digital currencies, in general. This is after the United Kingdom released its “Digital currencies: Call for information” missive. Mastercard and Bitcoin are about as similar as tuna fish and peanut butter, but, feeling threatened, Mastercard couldn’t help but give its two cents on the matter. Here we’ll go over key excerpts of their argument against the generally unregulated nature of Bitcoin and digital currencies, in general. Plus, let’s provide a point-counterpoint analysis of their information or misinformation on Bitcoin as a whole.

Well, it would obviously fail in the END.  The thing is to know when to stop when you're ahead.  I think I've found out how!  When we're in the moment, we make some YOLO decisions that we wouldn't normally do if we didn't have that adrenaline from gambling.  So, perhaps we should gamble but have a friend watch over you and tell them in advance when to stop you.  IDK, it worked for me

Blockchain technologies could reduce banks' infrastructural costs by $15-20bn a year by 2022, a new report from Santander InnoVentures claims.

The FinTech 2.0 Paper, produced in collaboration with Oliver Wyman and Anthemis Group, says distributed ledger technology could save banks money by eliminating central authorities and bypassing slow, expensive payment networks.

Beyond payments, its authors identify other areas of potential for distributed ledgers, noting: "In time, distributed ledgers will support 'smart contracts' – computer protocols that verify or enforce contracts. This will lead to a wide variety of potential uses in securities, syndicated lending, trade finance, swaps, derivatives or wherever counterparty risk arises."

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the oldest and most storied venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, has named a bitcoin startup founder to the staff of its new seed-stage fund.

Called the Edge Fund, the early-stage operation will provide investments of $250,000 to help selected startups with development, programming and recruiting. Targets for the $4m fund reportedly include a full range of emerging technologies including virtual reality, digital health and the blockchain.

According to The New York Times, the venture is the brainchild of Kleiner Perkins partners Anjney Midha and Mike Abbott. Its staff will include former Google product manager Ruby Lee and Roneil Rumburg, founder of the bitcoin and dogecoin transaction service Backslash.

Gyft and bitcoin API developer Chain have partnered to create Gyft Block, a trading platform aiming to make gift cards easier to exchange.

Announced at Belfast's MoneyConf, the news marks Gyft CEO Vinny Lingham's latest step in transitioning his mobile gift card company from one of bitcoin's most active merchants to a more direct supporter of its underlying technology.

Gyft Block is part of Gyft's broader mission to digitize gift cards so that they can be securely traded using bitcoin's public ledger, the blockchain. Termed 'gift cards 2.0', the ambitious project was first revealed at SXSW in March and followed Lingham's own involvement as an advisor and investor in so-called 'crypto 2.0' firms, including Koinify and Trustatom.

Cryptocurrency-powered social network Reveal has closed $1.5m in seed funding from investors including Mike Hirshland of Resolute Ventures, Boost VC, Digital Currency Group and the Stanford StartX Fund.

Founded by Matt Ivester, former CEO of social network Kindr as well as college gossip news site JuicyCampus, and Kindr CTO Josh Beal, Reveal is perhaps best described as a visually oriented, Q&A social mobile app.

Like Instagram, SnapChat, Vine and other new social media incumbents, Reveal targets users in high school and college. Unlike these market leaders, Reveal's posts offer a unique combination of doodles, photos, video and cryptocurrency.

As expected, Bitcoin has ended its boring period over the weekend and things have taken an interesting turn as the price rose above strong resistance levels. Bitcoin has jumped 1.4% since Friday’s observation to trade at $232.17, a level which is eagerly watched by all market participants. And technically, the current market conditions strongly favor the bulls.

Technical analysis of the above presented 240-minute BTC/USD price chart conveys that bulls might eventually take the price higher to $245.

The last comments were made out of complete ignorance. I get a refund for housing and since with my folks I can use the remainder as I see fit

Not had an address quoted and looks like it could help if the time came.

1FfJpxKHKRUquiQqoDfzWnFtoP18J1HKYm

Thanks in advance.

The Bitcoin technology has a lot of applications, and the Music Industry is one of the areas where this new technology can bring up a lot of innovations. The underlying wizardry behind the Blockchain will enable the creation of a new ecosystem for content producers and consumers and to revolutionize the Music Industry.

The Blockchain is a digital ledger that is maintained by the users of the system.  The system uses cryptography and group consensus to avoid fraud and errors.

Before the Bitcoin technology there was no such thing as a non-duplicable piece of data, but now with the Blockchain content producers can develop ways to avoid unwanted duplication and illegal distribution, while acting as real proof of ownership.

Balaji Srinivasan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and founder of the research-based Stanford Bitcoin Group, and Jerry Brito, executive director of Coin Center (a startup focusing on public policy issues for digital currency called), discussed Bitcoin for Goldman Sachs in one of their Talks@GS sessions.

In Srinivasan’s explanation on why Andreessen Horowitz believes Bitcoin will be the most important technology of this decade, he starts with elucidating that Bitcoin is best understood as a protocol, not paper based money, but, instead, packet based money. A topic that was on the tip of everyone’s tongues, seemingly, was regulation.

“You can regulate the intermediaries, and so a lot of the businesses that are building out infrastructure around Bitcoin – the wallet providers, merchant processors, etc. – are gonna be subject to all sorts of regulations, anti money laundering, money transmission regulations,” Brito told the audience. Srinivasan commented on where he sees the most liberal Bitcoin regulation.

In the 14th century, the Medici family used the power of its newly invented, double-entry accounting system to build a cross-border banking empire that banks still use today. Now more than 600 years later, cross-border payments total more than $22 trillion.

These transactions are essential to conducting international business, and increasingly important as global commerce continues to expand — a 14th century process is simply not good enough. Medici’s system uses “nostro” and “vostro” accounts — in English that translates to “ours” and “yours.”

The bitcoin ledger, a two-column spreadsheet with who owns what, is simply the 21st-century version: 12 million rows — one for each person who owns bitcoin. The second column shows how many they own and that column totals 14 million bitcoins today. It’s a very clear public record of who owns what — one that does not require paying a third party to keep those accounts.

Anywhere you look, there seems to be a consensus that something has to change with the size of the Bitcoin blocks. Words like “scaling” come up a lot, and how we must be able to compete with Visa and MasterCard if everyday people are ever going to take Bitcoin seriously.

While this may be true, there are extremists on both sides of the issue. There are some who advocate lowering the block size to 400kb, and there are others who believe a fork will be necessary in spite of those opposed. This could be an astronomically bad situation for Bitcoin. If the majority of miners don’t go along with the fork direction, ostensibly Bitcoin-XT, then the new network won’t be near as secure and likely won’t be as fast as the nodes and miners left on the other side of the fork.

In any team situation, there are going to be people you don’t like working with. That doesn’t mean you leave and start a new project, solely for that reason. Rather, you find a reasonable solution to the problem at hand, one that the element you don’t agree with will eventually accept. As John Light said in my recent CCN podcast, there isn’t really a discussion on whether or not the block size needs to be increased. The question is really how and when.

There is an often tacit assumption in discussions of traceability in the bitcoin sphere that bitcoins can, in some sense that is meaningful to all those who use the term, be “owned”. So, people wonder what will happen if the arms race between tracking techniques and evasion capabilities is won, even temporarily, by the tracer: won’t that impair the fungibility of bitcoins, they ask, and thus undermine the effective circulation of funds?

You're right. Total time logged in is often manipulated via a reloader extension and similar software. The total time logged in can be boosted without getting in trouble, while you might get banned if you boost your posts too much (spam).

There are plenty things that we can do for achievements. I've already stated that other websites have these and they are a nice addition to the overall experience when one is spending time on a forum.
Here is an example on Kickass: https://kat.cr/achievements/

Combined, smartphones and bitcoin have created a whole new vehicle for sending and receiving money. With the widespread use of smartphones and the increasing popularity of bitcoin, it is not surprising the two have found a way to compliment each other. In fact, smartphones are poised to drive anonymous bitcoin transactions in a massive way.

They are real!!!
NASA and the US government knows it all!
What happens at the dark side of the moon??
It is well known by NASA but a mystery for us!

humans have enough resources but they are spent on bankers hookers and blow, not space exploration 

If someone total access to my account the funds are deposited to they have 3400 and they can either transfer thr owed amount to their own serve account or trade for bitcoins to cover the amount and thr 20 person. I would even go as far as having a comtact drawn

 Thew woul happen to be reputable btw

Would be very easy ptofit forv5-6"days. Willing to negotiate interest. You will have complete access of the account the money is going ro and absolute proof it is going there and soon as it hits account uou can transfer it to yiur serve card or buy btc on local bitcoin with the serve. This vis a great secure way to profit quickly amf you'll have all my personal info we canvtalk on phone first 7242170017

LOL! I've seen people risk 1 BTC just to make 10 satoshis or so. Eventually they leave the bot running on auto-bet and in the morning they wake up with a 0 BTC balance.