Currency: The made-up money exchange

http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-save/currency-the-madeup-money-exchange-8160840.html


[entire article text]
This week saw the launch of Britain's latest community currency. But how does its value compare to other imaginative monetary adventures?

Bristol Pound = £1 sterling.

Bristol's new currency is available for use in selected independent stores in Bristol and aims to boost the city's economy. Stroud, Totnes and others have similar schemes.

Bitcoin = £7.70

Bitcoin is an electronic money system designed so that web users can transact without having to use traditional banking methods. Despite being made of binary, £158,000-worth of it was stolen last week from the Bitfloor currency exchange. Don't ask.

One Whuffie = several high fives

Term from a sci-fi book by Cory Doctorow in which currency is replaced by social credit. Since adopted in real life by people who really ought to know better.

One Euro = 80p

Fanciful invented on the idea that European nations could share a monetary union without a complete fiscal union. Whatever next, eh?

The Near Future: When Silver Does not Protect Your Privacy


2012-09-20

http://silvervigilante.com/the-near-future-when-silver-does-not-protect-your-privacy/

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All the risks of using bitcoins are present when using the dominant financial system. It’s quite obvious considering the systemic fraud of the way things are that bitcoin can only be safer. As long as you stay away from fantastical bitcoin schemes promising too-good-to-be-true returns, so far in the bitcoin experiment you would have been fine assuming you did not wrongly speculate on market volatility. The reasons to use bitcoin are much greater and diverse than the reasons to use the dominant financial system. For instance, allowing bitcoins to freely circulate will increase options for payment available to all consumers. From a merchants’ perspective, bitcoins can only bring more business, not less.
...
Where silver and precious metals fail to protect your privacy and you from political persecution, bitcoin does not.
...
Of course, holding bitcoin alone is, in my opinon, as risk as holding any one thing. In the modern age, we can not only move into alternative currencies, we can diversify in them as well.

Cybercrime: Businesses Using Anonymous-Style Hacking to Ruin Competitors
Online businesses are increasingly employing denial of service attacks against competitors, as criminals monetise Anonymous' preferred hacking technique.

David Gilbert
2012-09-20

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/386351/20120920/business-attacking-competitors-ddos-anonymous.htm

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One of the more prominent services is Gwapo, which promises to take down a personal website for an hour, for just $5. For larger websites the cost moves up to between $10 and $50 per hour.

To avoid detection, the service only accepts payment though anonymous services such as Liberty Reserve and Bitcoin.
...

Report: Most ZeroAccess zombie computers found in U.S.

Marcos Colon
2012-09-20

http://www.scmagazine.com/report-most-zeroaccess-zombie-computers-found-in-us/article/259986/

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According to the SophosLabs report, the two primary tactics used are click fraud, unknowingly clicking on an ad repeatedly to drive up countable hits, and bitcoin mining, a way of stealing virtual currency by using a machine's computational power. These strategies can earn the botnet owners a potential $100,000 each day.
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Researchers have been analyzing ZeroAccess for at least three or four years, Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser at SophosLabs, told SCMagazine.com on Tuesday. Since the U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world, he believes it's much more likely to be a target.

“Americans have really powerful computers,” Wisniewski said. “When we see malware that's meant to steal banking credentials, [attackers] like to focus on the countries that have the money. If you target Americans, you're going to get a lot more bitcoins.”
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The ZeroAccess Botnet – Mining and Fraud for Massive Financial Gain

James Wyke, Senior threat researcher SophosLabs
2012-09

http://www.sophos.com/en-us/why-sophos/our-people/technical-papers/zeroaccess-botnet.aspx

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The ZeroAccess botnet that communicates on port 16471 (32-bit) and 16470 (64-bit) is currently downloading plugins that facilitate Bitcoin mining.
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These statistics clearly show that the Bitcoin mining botnet is the most prevalent, followed by the click fraud botnet with the kernel-mode botnet a very distant third.
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If we estimate the total size of all ZeroAccess botnets to be 1,000,000 machines and use the statistics acquired from the successful installs data that suggests that the proportion of the total machines that connect to the Bitcoin mining botnet is 62%, then we have 620,000 machines that could be participating in Bitcoin mining.
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We can see that ZeroAccess’ mining pool is close in size to some of the biggest public pools. These generate huge numbers of Bitcoins, for example the DeepBit pool [14] has mined over 1 million Bitcoins in the course of one year.
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Using botnets to mine Bitcoins deprives hard-working legitimate Bitcoin miners from generating those coins and therefore receiving payment.
More importantly this activity taints the Bitcoin image. There have been several cases of Bitcoin exchanges being broken into and Bitcoins stolen [17], and there are concerns that the currency may die off like some digital currencies have done so before it [18].
A continued association with botnets and malware does nothing to increase the more widespread adoption of Bitcoin.
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Bitcoin thieves yet to spend stolen hoard

Mark Ward
201-09-19

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19633980

Cyberthieves who stole more than $250,000 (£158,000) in digital money are still sitting on the cash.
The haul, in what is known as bitcoins, was stolen in a raid on the Bitfloor online currency exchange this month.
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Who Is Really Commander in Chief?
As the power of nations wanes, and the reach of global money grows, we just may need a great negotiator


Stephen Marche
2012-09-19  (to be published in October 2012)


http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/who-is-commander-in-chief-1012


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The development of bitcoin, a species of Internet money, could fundamentally challenge the capacity of governments to distribute money. And that will be the end of the state as an instrument of power.
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Why Bitcoin Acceptance Should Be A Litmus Test Of Liberty Proponents

Trace Meyer
2012-09-18

http://www.howtovanish.com/2012/09/why-bitcoin-acceptance-should-be-a-bellweather-of-liberty-proponents/

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By accepting bitcoins merchants protect their customers from potential identity theft or political persecution from purchasing liberty orientated products and services. Failure to accept bitcoins casts aspersions on their sincerity towards the fight for liberty because it leaves open the possibility of them being a honeypot.
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Would be great if you provide a history of the matter so we can verify for ourselves that it's a trend, and just a few "uptick".

Paper bitcoins left in a safe will be conveyed upon your passing, but what about those in an encrypted wallet??

M of N escrow will provide more options.  The appointed executor of a will is given one key and family members are each given a copy of the other key (or told the secure location where it is stored).

This is one of those things though that nobody thinks will happen to them, but over time it will happen somewhere.

Eh... If the patch.exe is a crack/keygen for Altium Designer this kind of sounds logical

Two sides of the bitcoin :

- You need to deliver fast to be among the first to mine with ASICs
- ASICs will at the end place the profitability of mining to the lowest possible value, and within a year or something only the low consumption systems will be profitable.

These two concepts being contradictory, you'll have to find a compromise

bfgminer version 2.8.0 - Started: [2012-09-18 08:24:01] - [  0 days 00:21:36]
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 5s:559.2 avg:795.6 u:258.4 Mh/s | A:78  R:0  HW:0  E:229%  U:3.6/m
 TQ: 0  ST: 3  SS: 0  DW: 0  NB: 1  GW: 34  LW: 744  GF: 0  RF: 0
 Connected to http://x.x.x.x:8777 with LP as user x
 Block: 00000040412b763328116fea4b69a1f3...  Started: [08:24:01]
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 [P]ool management Settings Display options Quit
 ECM 0:                | 399.1/398.4/ 59.6Mh/s | A:18 R:0 HW:0 U:0.83/m
 ECM 1:                | 399.0/397.2/198.7Mh/s | A:60 R:0 HW:0 U:2.78/m
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Anyone buying one today either has free electricity or doesn't understand math hasn't performed the proper profitability computations.