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“I don’t see any value in [Bitcoin] unless you’re a drug dealer or a gambler,” Kaminsky says. “It’s a very small group [that uses bitcoins] that most merchants wouldn’t want to be associated with.”
But Holmquist says Bitcoin is already overcoming the bad reputation, with more consumers and merchants in the market accepting the currency for products that are legal to sell.
Harvey, the guitar seller, says, “the bitcoin economy is tiny, but growing at a rapid pace. As more users and vendors adopt the currency it becomes more useful, leading to increased adoption. The ball is in the court of any skeptic to explain how this growth will suddenly peter out.”
http://www.paymentssource.com/news/a-black-friday-for-bitcoin-draws-some-spending-lots-of-buzz-3012390-1.html?pg=1 |
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At WordPress.com, our mission is making publishing democratic — accessible and easy for anyone, anywhere. And while anyone can start a free blog here, not everyone can access upgrades (like going ad-free or enabling custom design) because of limits on traditional payment networks.
Today, that changes: you can now buy WordPress.com upgrades with bitcoins. This is huge news! Read the whole thing. A ringing endorsement. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin/ |
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A couple of us drove down from New Hampshire and set up a table at the Students for Liberty conference at Columbia University in New York City. They have lots of these conferences around the country and it's really easy to register for a free table. We had a great time, and talked to dozens of liberty-minded students about Bitcoin. Many of them had never heard of it before, some had and were confused, but all were very interested. We also spoke with a econ PhD student who's interested in writing an academic paper on Bitcoin, and the Executive Director of the Foundation for Economic Education who wants to publish a piece on Bitcoin.  We're taking some more people and hitting the SFL conferences in Boston and then Philadelphia over the next two weekends, and we'll be bringing our cards. If anybody wants cards, we're selling physical cards for cost, and you can download the designs for free. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119023.0 Do you live near any of these cities? You might be interested in setting up a table at a local SFL conference! Chicago North Carolina (Chapel Hill) Northern California (Berkeley) Boston Northwest (Seattle) http://studentsforliberty.org/upcoming-events/six-sfl-regional-conferences-all-over-the-world-this-saturday/ |
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My brother and I have been working on some Bitcoin marketing material for the upcoming Students for Liberty conferences in New York City and Boston. We're going to be manning a table there with the good folks from the Free State Project, to try and get the young ones interested in Bitcoin! We're putting the design work into the public domain and we'd love for people to download it and print their own. We'll also be selling printed material for you to order online. We've got a lot of exciting ideas we're working on, so stay tuned for more! Like what you see? You can help us cover the design and printing costs by shooting us some coins:  | 1G6M2CYpRyD6DpBppHhGCZVzLNkhACNDM1 |
Card download: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2102055/postcard_print.pdfPoster download: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2102055/poster_print.pdf  |
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Mark Warden, a New Hampshire State Representative, is the first incumbent politician to accept Bitcoin donations as he runs for re-election. A republican from just outside of Manchester, Rep. Warden spoke to PYMNTS.com about how the Bitcoin system appeals to him and the effect it’s had on his campaign.
“The idea behind Bitcoin was to have a currency that competes against the U.S. dollar, or Chinese yuan, or Japanese yen or euro, and gives people a choice. It’s something that ideally will not be subject to inflationary whims,” Warden says. There's also an audio interview. http://pymnts.com/briefing-room/issuers/virtual-currency/State-Rep-Views-Bitcoin-As-Legitimate-Currency-Competitor-/More about Mark Warden and Bitcoin here, here and here. |
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Many of those offering the bitcoin currency require users to spend less time and efforts registering than more traditional methods. Basically there’s less need for operators to collect so much personal information from the player. This has critics saying there is a better chance of underage players finding access to the gambling web sites. Many think the bitcoin currency is the way of the future and some say it will soon become a thing of the past. http://www.online-casinos.com/news/news0311605.asp |
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As posted earlier, New Hampshire State Representative Mark Warden is accepting campaign contributions in Bitcoin. His campaign's treasurer recently met with the New Hampshire Deputy Secretary of State regarding the Bitcoin contributions. After examining the information, the Deputy Secretary of State said that he did not see anything wrong with the contributions, nor the way they were handled, and that he would take no action. The stipulations fleshed out in the vetting process were that: 1. Donations be accompanied by the donor's name and address, and 2. Contributions are acceptable only from US citizens and permanent residents. According to Warden's campaign manager, Bitcoin contributions are considered in-kind donations and are assigned a market value when received. Those values are reported on campaign finance reports. I believe this is one of the first official rulings on the legal use of Bitcoin by a government authority. This is an encouraging sign, along with the statement by a spokesperson for the Finnish Central Bank, confirming that Bitcoin is perfectly legal. |
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Mark Warden, who is running for re-election as a New Hampshire State Representative, has been having strategy meetings about the Bitcoin contributions together with his team. I’m posting this here on behalf of his campaign. Thanks to the enthusiastic support of the Bitcoin community, the campaign has received over 100 BTC in contributions. This has now become an issue of public interest that the New Hampshire authorities will have to address. We think that's a good thing for Bitcoin. That being said, as etotheipi and others have pointed out, there are very strict State and Federal campaign finance laws that we must follow. The relevant laws here prohibit the following: 1. Contributing to the campaign on behalf of another individual. 2. Accepting an anonymous contribution of any amount. 3. Accepting any foreign contribution. Contributor must be a US citizen or a US resident. 4. Accepting contributions exceeding 1,000 USD, in aggregate, from any individual. In order to fully comply with these laws, pending advice from the New Hampshire authorities, Mark has decided on the following course of action: 1. Since most of the contributions to date have been anonymous, all previous contributions will be returned to the original contributing address on Monday, August 20th (today). Important: If you have contributed to the campaign and would not like us to send the funds back to the originating address (for instance, if you have a web wallet), please write us immediately at mark@markwarden.com. 2. If you are a US citizen or resident and would like to contribute no more than 1,000 USD of Bitcoins, we would be honored to accept your contribution. To comply with State and Federal laws, we will have to ask you for your full name and address. For now, please write the campaign at mark@markwarden.com. If you are contributing more than $100 of Bitcoins at current market price, please include your employer name and address and your job title. We hope to get the automated system up soon. We see this as a small but significant step, establishing the legality of accepting Bitcoins as political contributions. In doing so, we believe it is in everybody's best interest if we go above and beyond the call of duty and ensure that no one can question our transparency and adherence to the letter and spirit of the law. We apologize for the intrusion into your privacy, but this is the only way we can legally accept contributions. If you wish to not disclose your name and address, there are many other worthy causes, one of which is the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance which will use your contributions to fight for freedom of money in New Hampshire. If you have any questions, please PM me or contact the Mark Warden campaign. |
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New analysis of the anonymous online marketplace Silk Road suggests that purveyors of illegal drugs and other black-market goods are raking in the equivalent of nearly $2 million of Bitcoins per month, which is roughly 20 per cent of exchanges from Bitcoins to US dollars that take place on the online currency's main exchange, Mt. Gox.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/08/silk-road-bitcoin-illegal.html |
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Imagine a Bitcoin fork with the following modification: instead of a single difficulty target, there are two. Let’s call them the major difficulty and the minor difficulty, and let’s posit that the minor difficulty is 60 times easier than the major difficulty.
Miners can hash until they find one of the two targets. If a miner finds a minor difficulty, he broadcasts the block as usual. This is expected to happen approximately every ten seconds. These blocks will be very frothy, because there will likely be more valid blocks broadcast in a cluster of a few seconds. This doesn’t worry us too much (keep reading). Rewards will somehow be proportional to difficulty.
Approximately every ten minutes, a major block is found. Being just like any block, this is the authoritative chain of all the blocks that came before it, including the minor blocks. Since the difficulty is high, this will be the authoritative branch, unless another major block appears at the same time and competes with it. Assuming there's a clear winner, all historical frothiness is resolved, and frothiness begins anew for the next ten minutes.
The advantages of this system are:
* Higher resolution chronology. Bitcoin is a distributed record of chronology, and the original blockchain has a resolution of about 10 minutes. This one will have a resolution of about 10 seconds. This may not be extremely useful for standard transactions, but may be very important for some kinds of transactions, such as betting and stock trading.
* Minor blocks make 0/confirmation type double spending more difficult. Actual 0/confirmation attacks remain the same, but a vendor need only wait ten seconds for a minor block. Gaming the minor blocks would effectively require a 51% attack.
Disadvantages:
* The behavior of the system isn’t well understood. There will likely be many branches of minor blocks between the major blocks, which leads to wasted computing power and confusion. Minor blocks are not very authoritative until they’ve been buried under a major block.
My main motivation for this is as part of an alternate chain distributed betting system, but I haven’t seen it brought up before, and I realize there are probably some good reasons this can’t work. I’m looking forward to comments!
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The next New Hampshire Bitcoin Meetup is on Sunday, August 5, at 6:30pm at the Strange Brew Tavern in Manchester, NH. We do this every week, and we usually get about ten people. For those of you with Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/208856109243508/Massachusetts Bitcoiners are welcome, as well as anybody else in the area. Plenty of free parking. Feel free to PM me.  |
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In the shadow of the Euro Crisis, the people of the Greek city of Volos are taking their monetary future into their own hands.
Theodoros Mavridis and other Euro-strapped Greeks have founded a local currency system called TEM, an acronym for ‘Local Alternative Unit’ in Greek. Although Bitcoin isn't mentioned by name but only linked to, it really looks like the Greeks are looking for alternative money and Bitcoin could be a great fit. The link to Bitcoin is in the following paragraph: As it stands, TEM is still a complement to the formal economy and not a replacement. Unlike other alternate currency projects, TEM credits don’t quite qualify as true money. They’re of limited use for saving because of the upward limit on balances and the system also lacks a way to lend at interest. http://www.radicalsocialentreps.org/2012/07/open-source-currencies-on-the-rise-in-greece/ |
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I just found this piece I wrote over a year ago but never posted, and I figured it was worth posting now, since it's just as relevant.The Bitcoin EconomyBitcoin is the opening shot in a new jurisdiction. The Bitcoin Economy is thriving in a jurisdiction outside that of any government. The jurisdiction of the Bitcoin Economy is ruled by math and not by violent force. The rules are set by competing software projects, and evolve based on what works. Bitcoin says “thou shalt not double spend.” And what happens if you double spend? Nothing. You can’t. The rules are akin to the rules of physics, not the rule of kings. Today, the Bitcoin jurisdiction is a small island. There are few inhabitants, and we must leave the jurisdiction frequently and submit to governmental jurisdiction. As more of the economy is subsumed into the Bitcoin jurisdiction, it becomes a more powerful force, and government becomes weaker. For the Bitcoin project to succeed, we must find ways to move economies into this jurisdiction. We must also explore strategies to make the interface between the two jurisdictions safe and porous. Prediction markets can furnish the Bitcoin Economy with many of the functions of finance, without requiring an interface to the government jurisdiction. This greatly expands the scope of the Bitcoin Economy, and provides an essential infrastructure for the rest of the economy. The beauty of the prediction market, is that it confers almost all of the functions of finance to the Bitcoin economy, without requiring a departure from the Bitcoin jurisdiction. Gold prices can be tracked on a prediction market. This means that one can essentially trade gold without having to purchase gold. Gold is a physical substance that must be under government jurisdiction, and so purchasing gold would require crossing over to that jurisdiction. Betting on gold lets one stay safely within the Bitcoin jurisdiction, while accomplishing the same goal. This discovery of the market exchange rate is the hard part; the ownership transfer of BTC for gold is an easy problem and involves only two casual individuals in many cases. i2i (individual-to-individual, as opposed to business-to-business or business-to-consumer) describes the situation wherein large swaths of the economy are carried out by individuals trading with other individuals, rather than via large companies, corporations, and governments. The low transaction costs of the unregulated Bitcoin Economy make this more attainable, and it's an ideal interface between the Bitcoin jurisdiction and government jurisdictions. Individuals carrying out small, ad hoc trades make onerous targets for government crackdown. They are hard to find in time and space, are low profile even if caught, and each crackdown has almost zero effect on the system as a whole. Even making an example of such a transaction with disproportional punishment would carry large public relations risks, since the crime would be a non-violent, low value, and fairly obscure transgression. The defendant would also likely be sympathetic, with no criminal record, and with a large, upstanding support network to defend him and raise awareness. As large chunks of the economy migrate to i2i, governments lose control over those chunks, and it becomes difficult for them to enforce regulations and taxes on those chunks. This weakens governments further, making it increasingly difficult to maintain control while more and more of the economy migrates out of their jurisdictions. This is perhaps the greatest threat to authoritarian government that has ever materialized, and that's a pretty exciting thing to be a part of.
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Has anybody seen this description of Hocnet? It's billed as "A competitively decentralized internet." It seems to be a sort of p2p mesh network where nodes that provide services such as routing are rewarded with payment. Although there's been some discussion on how to do payment, Bitcoin figures prominently in the plans. I think the financial incentive to miners in Bitcoin is one of the major drivers of its success so far, so I believe that the same kind of financial incentive to mesh net operators could be a huge driver of mesh net deployment. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osU8vnuOW1eV3hdYMxg8hDh7E6kZLvf05uKvgYAE6SU/edit#heading=h.z59dueh145yuhttp://www.reddit.com/r/hocnet |
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I've whipped up a mod of Ubuntu Privacy Remix and I'd love to get help testing it and refining it. You can try it with an existing computer, it won't change your existing OS in any way. Or you can even try it with virtualization software like VirtualBox. It offers the following features: - Create a new encrypted offline Electrum wallet, with associated split keys, with one command. - The command takes care of deseeding the wallet, encrypting the seed file, and backing up the pass phrase into split keys. - Split keys are created with the ssss program. Once each key is copied to a separate usb drive, any two of the three drives will be sufficient to recover the pass phrase. - Decrypt seed file from either split keys or pass phrase, reseed wallet, and create offline transaction with one command. - All necessary software is already on the cd/usb image, there is no need to ever connect to the internet. The idea is to get a cheap netbook or old laptop, and boot with the cd or usb. All hard drives and internet access will be disabled at the kernel level. A wallet is created on this computer, and the secured files are transferred to a usb drive. The offline wallet can now be monitored from Electrum, Blockchain.info and other clients. To transfer any amount of Bitcoins from the wallet, the deseeded, and updated wallet file is copied back to the offline computer via usb, and a transaction is created offline. The transaction is transferred back to the online computer, and broadcast via Electrum or an online service. I didn't develop anything groundbreaking here. The heavy lifting is done by GPG, ssss, Electrum, and the UPR distro. I believe this mod adds some value though, because it was previously difficult to get everything working on UPR, especially without internet access. This makes it a bit more accessible. That being said, development is at an early stage, and error messages in particular need a lot of love. 
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Instructions:
Boot
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Boot computer with Bitpit CD or USB
Create Wallet
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Type the command: create-wallet.sh
Backup Wallet
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Copy the vault directory to a usb drive. This can be backed up on the cloud.
Copy each split key file in the split-keys directory to a separate usb drive. These are only needed if you forget your pass phrase.
Create Transaction
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Copy the vault directory back to the offline computer.
You only need to copy the split keys back if you've forgotten your pass phrase.
Run the command: tx.sh -- you'll be asked for the destination bitcoin address, the amount, and your pass phrase.
Copy the resulting file, tx.dat, to your online computer, and send.
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Project code: https://github.com/joshmh/bitpitDownload the iso image for burning on a CD or USB drive: https://www.dropbox.com/s/99utv37azpvjwfk/upr-10.04r2.iso |
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