Bitcoin in India: Drivers and Barriers to Adoptionby Jonathan Stacke With talk of inflation and capital controls familiar to the bitcoin community, one might think Indian citizens would be jumping at the opportunity to adopt the digital currency, yet the hurdles to wide-scale bitcoin proliferation in India may be significant for the foreseeable future. While demand for gold has grown in India, the multiple applications it offers culturally and industrially in addition to acting as an alternative store of wealth may mean that such demand does not translate to bitcoin.
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[A correlation exists] between bitcoin adoption and internet penetration in a given country. India, with just 12.6% of its citizens having internet access, has the sixth lowest internet penetration of the 100 largest countries. Despite that fact, the size of the total Indian population – more than 1.2 billion – makes India the third largest internet-using population in the world, with 150 million users, behind only China and the US.
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It is possible to buy and sell bitcoin through a number of websites including buysellbitco.in and there does appear to be a healthy LocalBitcoins market.
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Not to be overlooked is India’s mobile phone penetration of 71%, or approximately 900 million total users. […] only 44 million Indians are smartphone subscribers.
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M-PESA, the mobile payment system that has changed the lives of millions in Kenya recently rolled out in India. […] If mobile payment systems like these gain traction in India as they have in Africa, acceptance of digital currency would prove to be a less significant hurdle.
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India had the highest remittance volume in the world in 2011 with $58 billion, or 3.1% of GDP, according to the World Bank.
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Forward-thinking companies like Buttercoin have recently stepped in to apply the potential of bitcoin to these markets […]
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The Reserve Bank of India has stated that it does not immediately intend to regulate bitcoin, but their historic actions indicate that may change soon enough […]
- http://thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-in-india-drivers-and-barriers-to-adoption
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From another thread: Bitcoin is mostly hashing, so most of an ASIC would be SHA256 cores stamped out side by side on the chip. Such cores are fairly compact.
I'm not a Litecoiner, but I believe they have it set to require 128KiB of memory per core. That means you have to stamp out (core) (128KiB) (core) (128KiB) across the chip; therefore you get far fewer cores per chip.
The alternative is to have an ASIC with a memory bus to some external DRAM chips. That makes the RAM cheap but you now have to get a much bigger ASIC for all the bus lines, and you still won't get very many cores on a chip before the RAM speed becomes a bottleneck.
Originally people thought the RAM requirement would prevent GPUs from being useful at all. That was wrong, but I don't think they can escape the RAM bottleneck generally, so ASICs, like GPUs, will be limited mostly by the RAM you can attach. That might change if someone can put together an inexpensive ASIC with RAM on die. I don't expect that to happen faster than the rate GPU-mem-bandwidth-per-dollar increases, but you never know.
I do think LTC was too conservative with their memory size. They were trying to keep it in L2 cache to keep it targeted at general purpose processors, but I think they would have done better requiring a few hundred megs per core.
tldr: If there ever is an ASIC for scrypt, it won't be one that gives a improvement two orders of magnitude over GPUs like SHA256 ASICs gave. |
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CaVirtex affiliates will earn 30% of net revenue from each customer they register in the customer’s first year of trading and 10% of net revenue in each succeeding year.
That's pretty incredible. Imagine a bank sharing with its affiliates nearly a third of the ATM fees on every withdrawal, and a third of all debit card merchant fees for every purchase made by customers that the affiliate signed up or an account. |
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In technical terms, what would happen if someone with a bunch of ASIC miners pushed their machines onto a Scrypt chain?
Obviously, an ASIC for SHA256 mining cannot do Scrypt mining. So you are asking what would happen if an ASIC that does Scrypt were invented? It probably depends on how the ASICs are put into play. If they are intended to be units for sale to the public, then it might be something that would benefit the leading Scrypt-based alt. If the units are intended to be used in a 51% attack, then it is lights out for whatever Scyrpt-based alt(S) they target. |
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-1 for using the "busted buying drugs" in the headline. Silk Road's E-Wallet can be used without placing any orders whatsoever so there simply being proof that funds were sent to Silk Road doesn't prove anything other than that you sent funds to Silk Road. The researcher was not able to conclude that the funds had been used to purchase drugs.
Additionally, there was no bust. Nobody was arrested nor was there any law enforcement involvement whatsoever. So the title was a shameless attempt to drum up page views.
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Follow The Bitcoins: How We Got Busted Buying Drugs On Silk Road's Black Marketby Andy Greenberg With the data from just 344 of their own transactions, they were able to label the owners of more than a million Bitcoin addresses. And by making just four deposits and seven withdrawals into accounts held on Silk Road, Meiklejohn says the researchers identified 295,435 addresses as belonging to that drug market.
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Once our bitcoins had been mixed up with other users’ bitcoins in the Silk Road’s 40 bitcoin account, it became impossible to track them further. So even though Meiklejohn could show that we had deposited bitcoins into a Silk Road account, she couldn’t see that those bitcoins were later paid to a drug dealer
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/09/05/follow-the-bitcoins-how-we-got-busted-buying-drugs-on-silk-roads-black-market/
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BTCBitcoin gladly accepted!
Would be nice if you put that into the listing. There is a marketing concept known as touchpoints, which says that a typical person becomes aware of a brand after experiencing a certain number of "touchpoints". So a person might see "bitcoin" for the first time in a Craigslist ad, or it might be their fourth time. Either way ... even that little addition helps to build the Bitcoin brand. - http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/marketing/a/brandbuildingsg.htm |
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Advisory Opinion Request to U.S. Federal Election Committee (FEC) August 13, 2013 Location: Washington, DC, USA Abstract: A Political Action Committee solicits the FEC's opinion on varios aspects of Bitcoin being accepted for political campain contributions. CAF wishes to accept Bitcoins as monetary and in-kind contributions from individuals and organizations otherwise lawfully able to contribute. CAF also intends to sell, spend, and directly contribute these Bitcoins. These actions are similar to those permitted by other Advisoiy Opinions, including BARTERPAC and Cogswell, and the FEC should have no concern in pennitting them. So CAF can ensure compliance with FECA and FEC regulations, CAF seeks guidance on valuing, retaining, selling, spending, and contributing Bitcoins received as contributions. Advisory Opinion Request of Conservative Action Fund PAC - http://saos.nictusa.com/aodocs/1245451.pdf - http://bit.ly/17FKUC1 (via browser-based PDF viewer) Feds could allow Bitcoin campaign donations - http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/bitcoin-campaign-donations-96301.html?hp=l12 |
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I didnt understand the bitzino example You gave. did You mean that the bitzino verification is from a neutral source and cant be manipulated?
Yup. two pieces of information (the hash they provide and then after that the seed my client provides) are known by me before each play. Then after the game is played the secret is revealed. It can be proven later that their secret [Edit: deck] didn't change as it should hash to the same value they provided prior to the game play. So then for shuffling the deck bitZino uses a few functions, sha256, MersenneTwister19937, and FisherYatesShuffle. The pseudocode for it is at the bottom of this post: - https://techblog.bitzino.com/2012-06-30-provably-fair-shuffling-through-cryptography.htmlSo after the game is over I can verify that the results of the deck shuffle were not altered during play. From there each game can be verified. Each type of game has a unique challenge. Even though I know how the cards were shuffled for blackjack, for instance, I would still need to track each play -- where did I stand or bust on the hand, did I split, etc. So that part of the verification isn't necessarily generic. The player's actions would need to be fed to a verifier that knows the rules of the game. This technology won't be something the casinos would be anxious to develop. So this would be an innovation rising from the bottom-up, pulled forward because it protects the player from a dishonest operator (or even an operator that is unaware of a bug or other situation causing players to not be paid out properly). |
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Individuals are today selling bitcoins by accepting cash deposits (e.g., using Bitcoin-Brokers.org) through their bank account. Some of them might be considered money transmitters by FinCEN, I suppose. Will banks need to scrutinize every account that sees a cash deposit to try to figure out if the transaction was for a digital currency trade? |
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The innovation referred to as "Provably fair" gaming is an innovation that has driven the growth of Bitcoin-based online wagering. The problem with Provably fair is that actually verifying each hand (or round, play, etc.) from the service to ensure it was truly fair is something very difficult to do, today. Each site has its own verification techniques and the ones that use a random number generator for the client seed includes challenges for verification as well. If a provably fair site were to want to cheat, it could probably get away with it for a while before some techie was manually performing verification analysis and discovered that cheating had occurred. This is not a bitcoin-gaming specific challenge. I see the need for some protocol so that the game can get the client seed from a user-defined source not under the control by the gaming service (e.g., a browser plug-in, or external, consumer-owned, hardware device even), and then then after each play the plug-in or device would then verify that the results of the game were computed accurately. There's probably only a handful of seed + verification approaches that would suffice for most provably fair gaming offered today. I know that BitZino uses at least two, as their slots needed a different approach (factoradics) than their other games needed: - https://bitzino.com/about/fairIf this seed + verification protocol were created and plug-ins and/or devices were available, most Bitcoiners would only play the online gambling services where this protocol is offered. Competitive forces would draw other services to use the protocol as well, possibly even into the casino industry where Bitcoin is not (yet) even used. At a minimum, such a protocol would give Bitcoin-based online wagering added legitimacy since you would no longer need to trust that the provably fair service isn't cheating you. Any thoughts on the topic? |
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One nice thing about SatoshiDICE is that it is easy to externally audit. It grew so fast because it was among the best methods for wagering. There is no way for me to know for sure if the wagers that appear in the chat (troll) box for wallet-based wagering sites are actual wagers or if they've been fabricated to make it look like lots of play is occurring. BitZino had publicly shared some growth numbers some time ago and they were impressive: - https://bitzino.com/about/numbers/10_million_handsBut still even if all the Bitcoin-based online casino sites were doing as well, the aggregate amount is still a tiny fraction of all online wagering, which itself is a tiny fraction of casino gaming that occurs. But not having the most popular wagering service doesn't mean it isn't either sustainable or useful. But collectively the sites keep getting better (e.g., see http://BitcoinVideoCasino.com's latest update), providing more value (e.g., the higher payout available with http://just-dice.com), available in a wider scale (e.g., Bitcoin Video Casino's mobile app for Android), more entertaining (e.g., .... [your suggestions here]), etc. |
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* With the exception of clients in the states of VA, NY, and CA at this time.
With most banks having branches in multiple states, are there restrictions from me opening a Wells Fargo account in, oh say, Nevada with my California address? [Update: Or is it the address of the customer and not the location of the home branch that determines the state, as far as FastCash4Bitcoins is concerned?] |
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Ripple will never be open source. It is just the bait to build the network. Once it is large enough there is little reason to open source it.
Would the arrival of the day men with guns show up to confiscate hardware and shut it down increase the likelihood they release as open source? Today Ripple is being used as the successor [Edit: a successor] to the "redeemable code" -- a debt-based voucher. Releasing as open source is the only way for that network to continue [Edit: and existing XRPs held by anyone to continue to have value] after such an event. |
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Probably fork right, but what fork?
Well, let's take the unintentional change to the Bitcoin protocol that happened with the Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind v0.8 release. It caused a hard fork. It took less than an hour for a sufficient amount of hashing capacity to conclude that coins mined using v0.8 blocks would become worthless and thus abandon it to go back to the protocol as it exists in v0.7 and prior (or use a v0.8 patch that fixed the incompatability). That's because the economic majority favored the v0.7 side. - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majorityAnd that's for a change that introduced that unwanted behavior had slipped through undiscovered. An intentional change to alter the protocol would likely not go unnoticed as there are many eyes on every change to the source that is released: - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Release_process |
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Bitcoin payments are irreversible, just hope that satoshi read this and send your coin back to you
Sending a large chunk there and claiming it was an accident would be a nice attempt to see if Satoshi is monitoring this forum! |
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There will always be seigniorage in the bitcoin world as the transaction fees will support the miners
But that isn't seigniorage. That's simply fees paying the freight. |
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How could we explain this spread between btc price and google trends.
The first time I learned about the word twerking I did what many others did and googled it. I've heard the word twerking hundreds of times since and occasionally have seen it occur but I've not once done a search on it in ever since. So even though there is (presumably) more twerking occuring today than there was yesterday, the frequency of Google searching for twerking is down today versus yesterday. So similarly, for Bitcoin, Google trends will spike when there is an influx of those who are becoming aware of bitcoin for the first time, but Google trends can drop even though the actual subject of the term is seeing an increase in activity. But because financial speculation discussion (due to a rising exchange rate) is the primary reason people are learning of the term "bitcoin", the google trends will lag, not lead, the exchange rate. Thus Google searching for the term bitcoin can drop significantly without the exchange rate falling as well. |
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