http://www.paymentssource.com/news/how-bitcoin-is-blossoming-in-germany-3015408-1.html

"In our neighborhood there are a few dozens of bitcoin-accepting businesses by now and a bitcoin-based economic cycle starts to develop," says Joerg Platzer, owner of Room77 and principal of the Crypto Economics Consulting Group in Berlin. "I do not have to change the bitcoins we take in back into euro. I can pay my beer supplier, my printer and other goods and services with it already. We call it our 'alternative local currency with global reach.'"

"[German regulators] are trying to put some measure of control around it, rather than stymie it or erect barriers to try and discourage it"

Great idea! Thanks, we'll add it

Actually we don't know of any other sites that do what we do, which is why we made it!

Hey Bitcoin Friends!

We just put up our first website here at BitGo! It's a utility to monitor your bitcoin addresses and stay up-to-date with bitcoin news. We found that there were just too many different sources to go look at each day, so this is a one-stop dashboard. BitGo aggregates news, watches addresses and can also send you SMS or email notifications for account/address transactions. It's sort of like a personalized My Yahoo, finance.google.com, or Bloomberg for Bitcoin.

We'd love for you to try it out and give us feedback!

https://bitgo.com/

Features:
   •   See your account balances at a glance
   •   Get notified via SMS or Email for any transactions on your accounts
   •   See the current market conditions 
   •   Get today's bitcoin news, curated from the best bitcoin journals

Cheers!

Tiffney from BitGo

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/6487/bitcoin-in-berlin/

"Over the past two years, Berlin has gained a reputation as one of the Bitcoin capitals of the world."

"The most recent meetup on August 1 saw unusually high attendance, with a number of prominent Bitcoin activists from Europe and around the world attending; stateless political activist Mike Gogulski, Defense Disributed‘s Cody Wilson, Bitcoin developer Amir Taaki, bitcoin.de operator Oliver Flaskamper and Mihai Alisie and myself from Bitcoin Magazine were all present."

"there is no other city in the world with even ten Bitcoin-accepting locations, with second place perhaps going to San Francisco with around five. Berlin is thus pretty much the only city in the world where one can live entirely on Bitcoin without relying on an established support network, and enjoy the experience."

"Bitcoin lobbyists host meet-and-greet with Homeland Security and other agencies today"

http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/26/4657950/bitcoin-lobbyists-host-meet-and-greet-with-homeland-security-and

"Members of the Bitcoin Foundation, the trade organization that represents the virtual currency that approximates cash on the internet, are having a series of "educational meetings" today with politicians, regulators, law enforcement officials, and federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, Treasury Department, and Federal Bureau of Investigation."

"The overall message that the Foundation is trying to send is that Bitcoin has proven itself to be a useful and enduring tool, and that the US will suffer competitively if the currency becomes illegal or too onerous to use under American law."

"Can Bitcoin make a good first impression with top federal agencies?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/26/can-bitcoin-make-a-good-first-impression-with-top-federal-agencies/

"Bitcoin advocates are meeting with a handful of federal agencies Monday at an event hosted by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes and Enforcement Division (FinCEN) to talk about how the government might regulate the digital money."

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/global-observer/bitcoin-takes-off-in-berlin/13680

"Platzer began accepting Bitcoin at Room 77 in his heavily gentrified Graefekiez neighborhood two years ago as a sociopolitical critique of government and the banking industry. It wasn’t long before word spread, and other bars, shops, cafes and restaurants on the block followed suit. Today, some 25 to 30 participating businesses in the area accept the digital currency, constituting the largest local Bitcoin economy in the world — and even attracting Bitcoin tourism."

"“To show most people that Bitcoin is a valid alternative, you need projects that demonstrate how you can pay for dinner, how this works person-to-person,”"

"“Through this value creation chain people suddenly realize, ‘aha, no fees’, ‘aha, no administrative costs!’ These are the kinds of things we’re trying to bring to the forefront.”"

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/518541/rich-get-richer-effect-observed-in-bitcoin-digital-currency-network/

"Kondor and pals recreated the network so that each node represents a BitCoin address and drew a link between two nodes if there was at least one transaction between them. They then analysed the way the network has evolved over time."

"Kondor and co say that the network grew by preferential attachment. In other words, a node with a large number of links is likely to attract more links than a node with only a few links."

"This is a well-known effect in network science. Economists call it the Matthew effect after the biblical observation that the rich get richer."

"The Matthew effect is thought to be the origin of the 80:20 distribution of wealth– that 20 per cent of the population own 80 per cent of the wealth."

"Kondor and co say a similar phenomenon is clearly observable in the BitCoin network. Not only are popular nodes likely to attract more links, their wealth is also likely to grow more quickly than less popular nodes."

http://www.cio.com.au/article/524368/does_bitcoin_promote_illicit_ecommerce_/

"The researchers credit Bitcoin for achieving, at a large scale, what no other payments system has been able to do: provide direct, trusted exchanges of currency over a distributed peer-to-peer network that keeps track of debits and credits."

"That absence of an intermediary to verify and process transactions could make Bitcoin a far more economical platform for global payments"

""On the other hand, Bitcoin's decentralized nature also presents opportunities for crime," they write. "The same qualities that make Bitcoin attractive as a payment system could also allow users to evade taxes, launder money and trade illicit goods.""

""[A]s a technology, Bitcoin is neither good nor bad; it is neutral. Paper dollar bills, like bitcoins, can be used in illicit transactions, yet we do not consider outlawing paper bills. We only prohibit their illicit use. Furthermore, there is only anecdotal evidence about the extent to which bitcoins are utilized in criminal transactions. It would be wise to put the criminal use of the technology in perspective alongside its legitimate uses. As the bitcoin economy grows, legitimate uses of bitcoins will likely dwarf criminal transactions, just as we see with paper dollar bills.""

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/bitcoin-and-china-more-than-meets-the-eye/

"China saw its first major interaction with the Bitcoin community when the One Foundation, the largest independent charity in China, started accepting Bitcoin donations for a disaster relief campaign, and received 230 BTC (then $30,000) within two days. Two weeks after that, China became the first country to overtake the US in BitcoinQt client downloads, and keeps a position of second place to this day."

"for China, encouraging the growth of Bitcoin business is an opportunity to tread the waters with increased economic freedom without compromising its social and economic regulatory structure as a whole."

"general censorship and surveillance in China remains rampant. However, anything that allows the Chinese government to honestly say “we’re better than the United States”, no matter how small, represents an opportunity to frame the debate in China’s favor and improve the country’s highly authoritarian reputation."

BUT "So far, there is still almost no evidence that the Chinese government actually intends to be lax on Bitcoin in the future,"

"perhaps, China’s Bitcoin-friendliness is still simply the result of government blindness, and a crackdown is due to come in two or four months. We don’t know. But with every passing week the alternative hypothesis is becoming increasingly likely; perhaps China’s Bitcoin acceptance has more behind it than meets the eye."

This article is pretty relevant because bitcoin is based on an open-source cryptographic protocol, and this article is about cryptography. I think we should be aware of any potential issues with cryptography in order to keep bitcoin safe.

http://phys.org/news/2013-08-encryption-thought.html

"In information theory, the concept of information is intimately entwined with that of entropy. Two digital files might contain the same amount of information, but if one is shorter, it has more entropy."

"The problem, Médard explains, is that information-theoretic analyses of secure systems have generally used the wrong notion of entropy. They relied on so-called Shannon entropy"

"But in cryptography, the real concern isn't with the average case but with the worst case. A codebreaker needs only one reliable correlation between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file in order to begin to deduce further correlations."

""It's still exponentially hard, but it's exponentially easier than we thought," Duffy says."

"Bloch doubts that the failure of the uniformity assumption means that cryptographic systems in wide use today are fundamentally insecure."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread-pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road/

"“Meeting in person is out of the question,” he says. “I don’t meet in person even with my closest advisors.”"

"All my communications with Roberts are routed exclusively through the messaging system and forums of the website he owns and manages, the Silk Road."

"Roberts also has a political agenda: He sees himself not just as an enabler of street-corner pushers but also as a radical libertarian revolutionary carving out an anarchic digital space beyond the reach of the taxation and regulatory powers of the state"

"THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS isn’t shy about naming Silk Road’s active ingredient: The cryptographic digital currency known as Bitcoin. “We’ve won the State’s War on Drugs because of Bitcoin,” he writes."

"“We’re talking about the potential for a monumental shift in the power structure of the world,” Roberts writes. “The people now can control the flow and distribution of information and the flow of money. Sector by sector the State is being cut out of the equation and power is being returned to the individual.”"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/13/congress-starts-investigating-bitcoin/

"Homeland Security Committee is asking the Obama administration to provide details about all of its current “policies, procedures, guidance or advisories” related to virtual currencies and information about “plans or strategies regarding virtual currencies.”"

Girl w/a Tail Buys $1 Worth of Bitcoin From a Briefcase DEFCON 2013:

http://youtu.be/XUrT6fP8H0E

https://btcglobal.net/blog/post/bitcoin-is-not-illegal-in-thailand

""I can confirm that Bitcoin is not illegal [in Thailand]," says BTCXpert and former Bank of Thailand employee Frankie Bishop. An official announcement on Bitcoin has yet to be made by the Bank of Thailand, and none of the Thai media channels report any such announcement.

The Bank of Thailand does not decide the legality of Bitcoin. Any regulations on crypto-currencies in Thailand will need to go through its formal process like Bitcoin does in other countries. None of the "Roles and Responsbilities" listed by the Bank of Thailand give it authority to determine the legal status of any currency."

Maybe this is the true answer? Since even 1 BTC can be divided as many times as we need.

We're supposed to end up with 21 million bitcoins. But actually this can never be true since bitcoins are easy to lose permanently. All it takes is for someone to lose their private key and zap! BTC disappears forever. Apparently in the beginning of the BTC realm, many people lost their private keys because a lot of people didn't take bitcoin seriously. And what if the Winklevii lost their private keys? Sure would reduce down the number of BTC quite a bit (no pun intended).

What do you think this means for a future world operating in bitcoin? Do you think Satoshi considered this problem when he wrote up his formulas? Do you think there's any way to counter-act the diminishing supply? 

If we get to the point where there is a general consensus that some AI bots are thinking for themselves, and there is a demand among the people to hold bots responsible for prohibited actions, then our legal system might allow non-humans to be punishable by law. If so, the creators of our laws like developing balancing tests for grey-area situations like these. They'd probably develop a multi-factor test to help determine just how much of the bot's actions is created from it's own processes and how much is a product of the original programmer. They would call in AI experts and go through the details carefully to flush out just how autonomous the particular bot in question is. But you are right in the sense that there may be a segway period where even if people consider bots highly autonomous, these bots might be held under similar vicarious liability laws of which minors & parents are held.

[please note this is not legal advice]