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Have you heard of Bitcoins yet? If not, listen to our episode with Jerry Brito as he explains what this virtual currency is, how it can be used, and what the future holds for them.  Jerry Brito is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and director of its Technology Policy Program. He also serves as adjunct professor of law at George Mason University. His research focuses on technology and telecommunications policy, government transparency and accountability, and the regulatory process. Brito received his J.D. from George Mason University School of Law and his B.A. in political science from Florida International University. Brito is the creator of OpenRegs.com, an alternative interface to the federal government’s regulatory docketing system, and the co-creator of the accountability web site Stimulus Watch.
Stream Listen live at http://imitechtalk.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/bitcoins-nothing-inherently-bad/
MP3 Download at http://imitechtalk.com/mp3/2011/20110710_TechTalk.mp3
Awesome thanks to taelor for this "I finally got my radio show to do a Episode on Bitcoin. "It's like cash on the Internet" - best quote from our guest Jerry Brito." http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ipksn/i_finally_got_my_radio_show_to_do_a_episode_on/
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 http://blogs.forbes.com/timothylee/2011/07/14/how-private-are-bitcoin-transactions/Are Bitcoin transactions really private? In an age of ubiquitous government surveillance and corporate information collection, the peer-to-peer currency‘s boosters tout privacy as a major benefit. I’m not convinced.
Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer method for clearing payments means that the currency’s “books” are inherently open. Every transaction ever made using the currency is available for inspection using a tool like Bitcoin’s Block Explorer.
The privacy benefits come from the fact that you can create an unlimited number of anonymous Bitcoin identities. Block explorer tells me that someone sent 36953.2525 Bitcoins to the address 148X4kTYZhjeKQcd1AVhcytXvh5gL6FNSe. I don’t know who owns that address and there’s no central database where I can look it up. Nor is there a Bitcoin Inc. that could be compelled to create such a database. And this, Bitcoin enthusiasts say, give their currency a privacy edge over the US dollar.
But the fact that the database doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it couldn’t be created. Remember, people want money so they can buy stuff. There are a few goods and services, like pornography or consulting work, that can be delivered entirely over the Internet. But people mostly buy products that need to be physically delivered. An American who wants to deal primarily in Bitcoins will, at some point, need to either buy food and shelter in Bitcoins or convert some of their Bitcoins to dollars. And that means making Bitcoin payments to people in the US.
But the US government could easily require any business accepting Bitcoin payments (or converting Bitcoins to dollars) to collect identification information from their customers in the same way that “know your customer” regulations require financial institutions to collect information about their customers. And once the government has de-anonymized a significant fraction of the addresses on the network, they’ll be able to infer many of the others using basic detective work. Remember, the full pattern of transactions is a matter of public record. Officials trying to identify a particular address will have a complete record of every address that’s ever sent money to, or received money from, that address. If any of them are within the United States, they can be compelled to disclose details (IP addresses, shipping addresses, contact email address, etc) that could help identify the address’s owner.
Now this isn’t to say that a determined individual couldn’t use Bitcoin in a way that preserves his privacy. But it would either require a high level of technical savvy or significant lifestyle changes. He could avoid working for traditional US employers and buying things from mainstream US businesses. But most users just don’t care about privacy enough to make those kinds of major lifestyle changes to get it.
Another approach would be to use technical means to obfuscate the flow of funds to and from his accounts. He could route all Bitcoin traffic through an anonymization service like Tor. He could create a large number of decoy accounts and have different people pay different accounts. There could even be Bitcoin “money laundering” services that accept money from you and pay you back in another account. But few people have the patience or technical know-how to do this effectively.
Moreover, people willing to go to that much trouble can obtain roughly the same degree of financial privacy using dollars. Most obviously, you can conduct transactions in cash, which is inherently resistant to government surveillance. For remote transactions, there are any number of offshore intermediaries in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and elsewhere that have been helping privacy-conscious Americans stay beyond the long arm of the law for decades. And all of these transactions have an important advantage over Bitcoin: they don’t produce public entries in a global distributed database.
In other words, Bitcoin’s alleged privacy benefits mostly reflect the fact that the government isn’t really trying to spy on Bitcoin users. It hasn’t built the kind of surveillance infrastructure the government has for tracking dollar-denominated transactions. And to be clear, I would rather that infrastructure not exist. But if Bitcoin becomes popular, the government will build precisely the same infrastructure for spying on the Bitcoin network. And when they do, it will become clear that for ordinary users, Bitcoin is, if anything, less surveillance-resistent than traditional cash. http://blogs.forbes.com/timothylee/2011/07/14/how-private-are-bitcoin-transactions/Another thread of interest Patching The Bitcoin Client To Make It More Anonymous http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=23354.0---- Thanks BusmasterDMA for noting the update just today Advanced Bitcoin Anonymity
Tom Lowenthal offers a solid critique of my last post:
If I have one Bitcoin account, and I use that for all incoming and outgoing payments, it’s very easy to keep track of my transactions. Anyone who has ever given me coins can now see exactly where I send how much money, forever. However, this is not the way that anyone really does or ever should use Bitcoin. It’s standard practice to use a new address for each incoming payment. This way, there’s no link between different inbound transactions. When making an outgoing payment, pick a selection of addresses whose balances add up to only slightly more than the sum you wish to pay. Pool those into a new address (with a little left-over in one of the original accounts), and send the whole payment from that new address.
I find this critique fairly persuasive. Though its validity depends somewhat on the type of privacy threats our hypothetical user is worried about. If you’re worried about the government easily capturing a comprehensive picture of your financial activities, the approach of using many different addresses could work quite well. If, on the other hand, you want to give money to a third party in a way that you can be sure the government will never be able to trace back to you, this technique might not work as well. For example, if the government wanted to track everyone who donated to a particular public Bitcoin address (say, one owned by Wikileaks), it can work its way backwards along the chain of transactions until it reaches someone (say, your employer) who it can force to disclose the donor’s identity.
Still, Tom makes a convincing case that I was understating Bitcoin’s privacy benefits. |
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 http://www.themarknews.com/articles/6018-a-bitcoin-for-your-thoughtsThanks Jerry for a nice interview style piece that covers Bitcoin itself and not all the side news stories that come from it. I am only going to pull a few questions and answers, see the link and read the whole piece, then pass the link along. THE MARK: How would you explain Bitcoin to someone without much tech knowledge?
JERRY BRITO: It's the world's first completely digital distributed currency. What that means is that it's like a dollar, or a euro, or a yen, except that it's not issued by any government – or anyone else, for that matter. We've had virtual currencies before – like Flooz, or Beanz, or e-gold, for instance. In each of those cases, there was some company that issued the currency. So if we both have an account with, let's say, Beanz, and I send you some Beanz, the Beanz corporation keeps a ledger where it subtracts Beanz from my account and adds them to yours. That's the way PayPal works, and that's the way the Bank of America works, with real dollars. What Bitcoin does is eliminate the need to have that intermediary, so that the ledger – where money is subtracted from me and given to you – is distributed among all the users. There's no central bank, and no central authority of any kind. THE MARK: What's the advantage of Bitcoin over hard currency?
BRITO: Here are the advantages, from my point of view. One, it's censorship-proof. .. one kind of overlooked thing about Bitcoin is that transaction costs are very low, so it could very well allow micropayments in a way that traditional payment processors haven't. So, right now, if I wanted to buy an article from The Mark News – let's say I wanted to pay five cents to read an article – with PayPal or Visa, payment processing might cost 50 cents. It wouldn't work; people wouldn’t buy into that. Bitcoin’s low transaction costs make it much more feasible for this sort of thing. THE MARK: What, in your view, is the biggest advantage of Bitcoin?
BRITO: I think this is really revolutionary because of the decentralization. That's the part of this that really gets me excited. Governments seek to regulate the internet through intermediaries. They don't regulate the end users. So take gambling, for example. Say you make internet gambling illegal, as we have in the United States. How do you enforce that? Do you go after the individual gamblers? No. Here in the U.S., what we do is go after the third-party payment processors – the Visas and Mastercards of the world – and we tell them they can't make those transactions. That way, we're sort of deputizing these folks that really have nothing to do with the transaction. The casino's overseas, so you can't regulate it. What would happen if you went after individual gamblers? What do you think? I like that term to describe Bitcoin, censorship proof, haven't seen that used on the forums yet. Also, Bitcoin Weekly ahead of the curve offering a micropayment model for articles (at the time of me posting only a 0.70 donation http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=28681.0 ). Full article is at http://www.themarknews.com/articles/6018-a-bitcoin-for-your-thoughts, check it out. |
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 Today at the Facebook news conference, +Ben Parr had the stones to ask Mark what he thought of Google+. (He was polite about it. I approve.) Zuckerberg responded by saying that lots of companies are going to build things like video chat, but FB competitors also have to build up their social graph first. Facebook's job is to just keep innovating. Perfectly reasonable response, and of course, he's exactly right--the challenge is to get the userbase, and make it easy for them to use. Done and done for Facebook. The integration looks great.
Some pundits are complaining that the technology is not new, but that's besides the point. Case in point: at MySpace we launched what Zuckerberg is announcing in 2007 (try googling "myspace skype partnership"), and MySpace also had one-on-one video chat back in 2004. The point is that people weren't really ready for it back then--now is the time, and FB has the userbase. The large userbase (750 million) paired with a simple integration of the arguably the best voice/video tech (Skype) is what makes this news.
Zuckerberg also pointed out in his response to the Hangout question, that one-on-one video chat will be the more common use case (Google+ has "Hangout" which allows 10 users to video chat at once). Again, perfectly reasonable, and probably right. Many sites have group video chat, Google+ is not the first, nor is Hangout a game-changer. What you need here is the userbase, which currently only Facebook has, and people will more likely talk one on one (like we do on the phone, duh).
The more interesting part of his announcement, I think, was the implicit response to Google+ in his intro leading up the Skype integration. What he said is that Groups on Facebook are actively used by half of the 750 million user base. And "Groups" is really Facebook's second attempt at "Friends Lists," which Zuckerberg admitted months ago, were not getting traction (people didn't want to do the work of putting people into lists).
The Facebook Groups feature is designed in a way so that users who do care to do the work, can. Someone invites you, and you're in the group without you having to take any action. (In fact, you have to do some work to get out of the Group!) Zuckerberg points out that this is how friend requests work as well--there's always a select few who do all the friending, and the rest of us just follow along, with a much easier "approval." Facebook's Groups were designed in a way to overcome the friend list problem. They've grown quickly, even if 95% of the userbase can't be bothered to make their own groups.
And if you think about it, that's the smart way Facebook has approached many things: build an app platform, and let the developer community do the heavy lifting. Create a translation platform, and let users translate Facebook in every language known to man. Create a Group feature, and let the 5% create the groups for the other 95%. It's like Mechanical Turk, but we're not getting paid. (Unless you're Zynga! ;-)
What remains to be seen, is which model will users prefer in the long run--Facebook "Groups"--which function more like an old-school Yahoo Group with a Forum built-in). Or Google+ "Circles"--which is more like an email distribution list-meets Twitter with better commenting. The two are actually very similar, but each probably does certain things better than the other. Thinking about what each model does better is probably the key to unlocking what "model" is going to "win.  ---- If anyone still wants in on the Google + train, just PM me an email address, so far I have got 15+ people in Google+ without charging one Bitcoin. And so far only one person has donated a Bitcoin and I feel bad about it cause I swear I say it is for free! But I will not feel bad about further donations lol Anyways, fucking cool as fuck that Tom is all over Googe+. I only know this because of Plato (also on +). Lots of cool shit going on, lots of random people here using+, good to see it  |
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Whoever thought of putting a wallet address signature is a fucking moran, there I said it, and spelled it wrong. I was browsing /r/Bitcoin/ and found this With Bitcoin being a pseudonymous currency, staring at blockexplorer transactions isn't particularly enlightening. Who transferred 1,500 BTC? Who actually owns address XYZXYZXYZXYZXYZXYZXYZXYZXYZXYZXYZ? What if there was a website that attached a physical/"real" identity to each address and their transactions, basically a Facebook of Bitcoin addresses?
A user would sign up, create their profile (personal or business) and then associate each of their address with their profile. Initially verifying an address would be something similar to what Paypal does for confirming outside bank accounts (ie send two small payments to the address and have user confirm the two small amounts).
An exploit would be to sign up multiple profiles and just keep all these small transactions, so maybe the service should charge a small initial fee to cover them?
Profiles could be private or public, so you could just use it to as an accounting website for all your addresses, or use it as a way to display trust and establish online reputation for a person or company and maybe even provide feedback on the transactions.
I think in the long run, it could enable "bitcorporations" to operate in an "open-source" manner by making their finances and accounting practices accessible and transparent. It would be a clear record of how much they spent equipment and operations, how much they paid their workers and how much they kept as profits.
This idea is still in it's infancy, so any and all suggestions/criticisms is welcome. Has this already been done before? Would you use/support such a website? Thanks for any and all help and fire away! EDIT:Formatting Now in theory a lot of the same concepts apply, including transparency, which on the forums here with so many things being exchanged in many different markets, there is a built in system of transactions we can all view. I know this would never work, but it's a damn interesting and fine idea. |
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We'll find out who the real mother is, I read this in the bible once. Starting from the root of all Bitcoin discussion, is those two things. It is either the tech side, or the other side.
Delete all other forums, get rid of off topic, stop Bitcoin.org from being the central location for Bitcoin talk.
Tech discussion (Development, Mining, Projects, Safety), Theory discussion (Economics, Politics, Bitcoin Promotion), and Newbies. Eliminate a marketplace taking place on the official Bitcoin.org forums, leave that for dedicated people (thus all the problems that come with a marketplace will be taken to where those situations rest).
Just a thought, not fully fleshed out.
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PM me with an email address.
Offer good only until 6:15pm, after that, no guarantees.
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I have been taunted by that squiggly red line correcting my spelling in my browser long enough. Am I the only one who has let this slide this long?
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From http://www.betabeat.com/2011/07/07/bitcoin-flamers-force-lawyer-to-drop-u-s-trademark-application-so-now-hes-trying-it-abroad/Found from http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ij8uk/bitcoin_flamers_force_lawyer_to_drop_us_trademark/Bitcoin enthusiasts were incensed at the application’s claim to ”first use” of the word Bitcoin in commerce on June 22, 2011, the date the application was filed. As evidence, Mr. Pascazi submitted a letter from Celine Pascazi offering to sell Bitcoins for $17.50, also dated June 22. Bitcoiners say the digital currency has been in circulation since as early as 2009.
Mr. Pascazi is aware that Bitcoin has existed for a while. But he was skeptical that its use in commerce could be proven in court, he said.
“My understanding is that they are anonymous and untraceable,” he said. “So how would one prove that a person-to-person transaction occurred?”
Bitcoin transactions are like cash transactions as far as a court is concerned, he said–a.k.a., “not strong compelling evidence.”
“Nonetheless, my client has decided to withdraw the application in the United States because apparently there will be some sort of, there are lots of people interested and alleging they can prove first-to-use and so forth. So strategically that will happen today and simultaneously applications will be made in civil law jurisdictions around the world where the doctrine is first to file,” he said.
That includes France, Italy, Spain, Japan and possibly China, he said.
“In the spirit of capitalism, if somebody sees an opportunity, my view is they should be allowed to seize it and if it never develops into anything, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he said. I suggest seeing the full article at http://www.betabeat.com/2011/07/07/bitcoin-flamers-force-lawyer-to-drop-u-s-trademark-application-so-now-hes-trying-it-abroad/ |
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Need a little help with a podcast I am putting together right now, so know in advance your audio will be used on a podcast (feel free to shout out or plug anything if you want, feel free to answer even if someone else replies here). I wanted to explain this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential to people. But dumbed down to just one minute, roughly. Explaining that in about a minute. I ended up finding this page http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ap.html, which also is too advanced for me. Thanks if you can help. You can reply here with a .wav or .mp3 or any audio format really, it doesn't matter, PM it to me, or just email it at bitcoinporn using the gmail and the .com |
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Edit for reddit - Whatever rules you see below, just reply to the post on reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ik0w9/a_contest_purely_to_promote_bitcoin_win_signed/ with who you have chosen. 2 Tweets per day, you can't use a choice someone has made just on reddit, so the choices used above are free to you, that is it, good luck. Welcome to the First Annual Unofficial Bitcoin.org Forums #BuyWithBitcoin ContestThis is super simple and has a nice prize for geeks, just make sure to read all the rules. But hey, we are Bitcoin users, we can handle a few extra lines in the fine print if it makes sense. This is quite a real contest and is for the pure promotion of Bitcoin, so read on. You must Tweet someone who has a Verified Twitter Account using the hashtag #BuyWithBitcoin with the catch that they have not been Tweeted yet. Make sure they have this  on their Twitter page. You can see a full listing of who has verified accounts here http://twitter.com/verified/lists, there is a lot to choose from. Be creative with who you choose and your Tweet, this will not earn you any bonus points, but have fun.  Right after you make this Tweet, reply back to this thread with a link to that Tweet or your page or the person you Tweeted so I can find the message and verify this is a real Tweet and an entry into this contest. 
Since you are not allowed to Tweet anyone who has been Tweeted yet, before you send a message, check the thread to make sure you don't accidentally pick someone over. Basically, I fucked it up for anyone who wanted to take @BillGates. Sorry. Only Two Tweets(Entries) per day!
Ends July 14th, 11:59PM EST. All Tweets after that do not count. BONUSIf anyone you Tweet replies back, automatic 10 bonus point entries, no joke. WinnerThe winner, determined by random.org by using your post number from the thread as your entry and if you have a second Tweet in the same post I will make sure the second entry is there. The prize, a Street Fighter comic book signed by Alvin Lee.  There is no CoA, it was signed at a table at a convention, it is real. He is easy to get a hold of and I'm sure could verify his signature if you were thinking of winning to get rid of it for whatever reason. If that is not your thing, maybe leave the Winning prize to the runner up and take this.. Runner Up Ten Batman POGS. Milk Caps. Little slices of heaven. From Skybox, hand picked to even have a double on purpose, that one kicks ass. Good luck
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Speed Bumps on the Road to Virtual CashMONEY is accumulated, traded and transferred online every day, but can there be a form of currency that exists only online and yet has real-world value? Gavin Andresen, who is the lead developer of the open-source software that operates the currency, said in an interview from his home in Amherst, Mass.: “I expected it to have lots of speed bumps along the way — but I didn’t expect there to be so many speed bumps in a row.” “I’ve sold 24 collars, 13 leashes and 1 pair of ‘Disco Knickers’ with Bitcoin over the last few months,” she wrote in an e-mail. “The first order I had was for 42 BTC, which was worth about $40 at the time, but now those coins would be worth around $680! Originally I had a fixed Bitcoin price, but now I do a conversion based on the exchange rate.” “This is a censorship-proof currency that allows transactions to happen,” he said. “Right now what are those sort of transactions? Gambling, buying drugs — that is what is going to jumpstart it.” Two page article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/business/media/04link.htmlI would not say this is necessarily a positive spin for Bitcoin, but the smarter reader I think can take a lot out of this piece.
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 Thank you reddit, I guess his channels rss feed must be down, I'll have to check my reader again, that is weird. Future isn't looking so good now that the word is out. I mean, couple this with the big news with Tradehill and well.. this. I hope no one is investing in mining equipment anymore unless they are using it for Minecrafting or whatever it is the kids do these days with beefy computers. |
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