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Man this is a great story and and some great advertisement for Bitcoin. From homeless to multi millionaire.Seems this time the luck is with the right one. Definitely a must read for all of us!! https://empireherald.com/homeless-man-finds-30000-bitcoins-on-hard-drive-in-new-york-dumpster/ New York – Carl Pattersfield, a 51 year old homeless veteran, has turned his life of rags to riches after finding 30,000 Bitcoins on a hard drive found in a dumpster.
In August, Carl Pattersfield, who is homeless, was digging through a couple of dumpsters near 10th Ave and West 35th St. in New York City, in search of anything he could find to sell or eat. During his search, he spotted a MacBook Pro, which was heavily damaged, along with a 1 TB external hard drive. Looking for a place to sleep for the night, Pattersfield tucked the computer and hard drive away in his storage cart and proceeded down West 34th St. and 9th Ave.
When Pattersfield, 51, approached a diner on the corner of West 34th and 9th Ave, a young couple was standing in front of the dinner on their laptop. Mya Xu, 19, offered Pattersfield $10 dollars but he asked the couple to check out the computer he found. The decision to turn down money in exchange for inspecting a computer and hard drive found in the dumpster would forever change Pattersfield’s life.
“I thought it was weird for a homeless guy to turn down money, said Xu. My boyfriend and I thought he had mental issues but he pulled out a broken Macbook and a hard drive. He asked us if we knew anything about it. He was honest and told us that he found it in a dumpster and wanted to know if he could get any money for it somewhere. I told him probably not because it is broken but he should check anyway. He then asked me if I didn’t mind checking the external hard drive. I plugged it into my computer and there was a folder labeled “Bitcoin”. I opened it and there was a text file with a “master key” and a bitcoin address. When I opened it in MultiBit HD, I realized that this homeless man found 30,000 Bitcoins,” added Mya Xu.
Pattersfield told authorities about the broken laptop he had found in the trash. Authorities told him that because it was broken and found in the trash, the original owner intentionally got rid of the laptop and therefore has no claim to it.
“I really hope this man can find some relief after this; c’mon he’s a veteran and deserves much better than being homeless,” said Officer Vargas.
After posting his story on Reddit, Pattersfield has sold 10 coins already, which was enough to get him a temporary place to live until he figures out his next move.
The young woman who helped him, was offered 1000 Bitcoins but turned it down because she felt as though “it was the right thing to do”.
The estimated value of Pattersfield’s lucky discovery based on the current price of Bitcoin is $20,609,400
Mya Xu is a college student who rescues injured and abandoned animals. Any donation of bitcoin to her would be appreciated for her kindness.
Mya Xu Bitcoin Address: 1NRMXniayw6e3GVbj129TKgohd84CBj7zX |
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http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/06/06/bitcoins-rallying-again-but-isnt-getting-much-attention-anymore/Even as investors move back into bitcoin, the virtual currency has lost its place in the global spotlight.
Bitcoin is a hot investment following an eight-month rally during which the virtual currency has gained about 130%, but it’s no longer the hot topic it once was.
The volume of media articles and blogs mentioning bitcoin worldwide tanked in 2014 and has failed to recover even as the value of the virtual currency started rising again at the end of last year, according to Factiva, a media database owned by Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
While there was a sudden surge of articles in May due to the revelations of a self proclaimed founder of bitcoin, that soon subsided.
The media’s faded interest reflects that most of the investment interest in bitcoin comes from China. A search of Chinese articles shows that media interest in bitcoin there has risen with the currency’s value.
Two Chinese bitcoin exchanges, Huobi and OKCoin, now account for 92% of all global trade in this currency. Analysts say that fears about a sudden devaluation of the yuan and stories of scams in peer-to-peer lending platforms have led some Chinese investors to look at bitcoin.
But the rest of the world appears to have lost interest.
That’s not great for the long-term use of bitcoin and the fans who want to see it become a widely-used medium of exchange. With the currency currently dependent on notoriously-fickle Chinese retail investors, they would surely swap a gain in global popularity over a short-term rally in value.
Right now, the virtual currency just seems to have lost its “cool.”
You gotta have to love the mainstream media right?!  So it's only china now who shows interest and the rest of world gives a sh** regarding this article. Bitcoin dead again? 
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https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/05/16/announcing-the-thunder-network-alpha-release/At Blockchain, we’re on a mission to create an open, accessible, and equitable financial future. Since our inception, we have focused on building products that make it easy for everyday people to use bitcoin to store and transfer value all over the world. We make Bitcoin usable and useful. We’ve been able to do that because we develop with a user-focused mandate. A faster, cheaper, and more functional network would deliver real value to our users, so we were excited by the growth of research into payment channel technology on the bitcoin network and innovative uses of this technology. We were particularly interested in the idea of using smart contracts to build what are basically super-charged payments networks, as outlined in a white paper by the lightning.network team. Last year, we hired a talented engineer, Mats Jerratsch, who had been pioneering innovation in this vertical to work with our engineering team and lead research and development on a network based around these ideas. Lightning networks have been purely conceptual, research based, and only in test nets and labs – until now. Today, we release the alpha version of our Thunder Network, the first usable implementation of the Lightning network for off chain bitcoin payments that settles back to the main bitcoin blockchain. We used it internally a few days ago. Click here to learn all about Transaction 0 between Mats and me. Thunder has the potential to facilitate secure, trustless, and instant payments. It has the ability to unleash the power of microtransactions, to allow the bitcoin network to handle heavy loads, and to increase user privacy. In this Alpha version, we prove that it can be done. From a feature perspective, there is both a node and a wallet (with GUI) present. Even more importantly: Settlement to the bitcoin blockchain Scale: According to our tests so far, we can achieve better-than-Visa scale (100,000 TPS) with only a few thousand nodes on the network Extremely cheap payments: fees will develop naturally, due to the free market in an open and permissionless network and will fundamentally be lower than on-chain payments Encryption and Authentication: All communications between all nodes and wallets are encrypted using AES-CTR and take place only after completing authentication. Seed Peers and automatically provide them with network topology using a basic gossip protocol similar to the one used in the bitcoin network, which allows complex routes over multiple hops Payment Channels can be opened and closed at will, with transactions settling onto the bitcoin blockchain Payment Debate: Across the route each hop will renegotiate a new status with the next hop, as a payment makes its way through the network with cryptography in place to prevent fraud Relaying Payments: TN will relay payments over multiple nodes in the network automatically, using encrypted routing. No one knows who made a payment, allowing for more privacy Settle payments automatically, no manual intervention needed. The settlement will ripple back through the network to provide proof-of-payment Instant Payments that are irrevocable the moment you see them Until both CSV and SegWit are implemented on the bitcoin blockchain, transactions are not enforceable at the bitcoin protocol level. So, the current Thunder prototype is best suited for transactions among a trusted network of users. Try this amongst your dev team or amongst your trusted internet friends, but don’t use it for real payments. Remember: this is alpha testing software. So why release this now? We believe it is critical to get something in the hands of users as soon as possible to gain feedback that will enable us to be ready when the network is. So review it, test it out, open an issue on GitHub, or send us an email. If you want to work on tech like this full time, head here and apply to join our team. We encourage you to find out more at:
www.blockchain.com/thunderhttps://github.com/blockchain/thunderLightning Network, Thunder Network.What next? Flash Network? 
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Bank-backed blockchain consortium R3 is rumoured to be facing unrest among its membership as it seeks $200 million in funding to develop a utility-based service using distributed ledger technology. R3 has secured the backing of more than 40 of the largest financial institutions in the world for developing state of the art commercial applications for the market. In April, the consortium revealed its development plans for Corda, a distributed ledger platform "designed from the ground up to record, manage and synchronise financial agreements between regulated financial institution".
According to a report in efinancialnews, R3 is now seeking $200 million in capital from its members in exchange for equity stakes in the proposed utility.
While the utility will be spun off, R3's blockchain development lab will remain under private ownership and any commercial applications developed therein would not be owned by the utility and its backers.
The proposals have not gone down well with the core membership, who want a bigger return on their intellectual capital investment and support for projects emerging from the lab.
One industry insider described the stand-off as an "implosion at R3", adding "the big banks are apoplectic with the high handed approach and are busy ‘considering their options’."
R3 has yet to comment publicly on the negotiations.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-upW2vOaQeoJ:https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/28884/blockchain-consortium-r3-facing-unrest-over-capital-raise+&cd=11&hl=enhttp://www.bitcoinerrorlog.com/2016/05/13/r3cev-articles-mysteriously-disappear/ |
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https://decentralize.today/bitcoin-2016-there-has-been-an-awakening-164b42d38927#.ra5rc8p19This is the follow up to my previous post, which has been quoted widely in the press and research reports as one of the first articles to predict the sideways and downward move in the Bitcoin price over the past 2 years, along with identifying the “headwinds” that would keep the price in check. Now, I believe it’s time for an update, and a review of those fundamentals. At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price is hovering around $450, exactly the same price as when I penned the previous post on this topic.
fter reading my first post, entitled Finding Equilibrium in March 2014, one could argue that I was a bit bearish on Bitcoin — believing that it would trade sideways and down, until certain fundamentals were in place. At that point, most people inside the Bitcoin community expected Bitcoin to retest its previous high of c. $1255 in 2013 and easily break $2k. In fact, when I surveyed the audience at CoinSummit in 2014, barely anyone would take the contrarian view. I did. And this was coming from the same person who correctly predicted that Bitcoin would hit $1,000+, just the year before.
To summarize my previous post, I argued the following:
1. Bitcoin is not a currency, but a commodity (it has since been declared as such by numerous bodies, including the CFTC).
2. Mainstream consumer adoption was lagging (and it still is to a large extent)
3. “Smart Contracts” will be a particularly important use case for Bitcoin
Merchant adoption was outpacing consumer demand
4. Lack of trust with exchanges and limited ability to purchase Bitcoin
5. Loss of momentum (Bitcoin was on the way down, not up)
6. Miner margins were being squeezed (forcing more coins to be sold)
How 25 months makes a difference in the world of technology! If we examine the points above, the following changes are clearly visible:
1. Merchant adoption has slowed (as a %) and consumers are catching up — mainly early adopters, but the delta between the two
has virtually reversed.
2. Smart contracts have become the latest buzzword, along with “Blockchain” and other chains such as Ethereum. My new startup,
Civic, is now using Blockchain technology to create a secure personal identity platform for consumers, for example.
3. Miners margins are looking a lot more more healthy, from the lows of $200 last year.
4. Bitcoin is on the way up, not down, creating upward price momentum.
5. There is a strong trust in exchanges and platforms for purchasing Bitcoin, such as Bitstamp, which recently got EU regulatory
approval, Coinbase, Kraken, Circle, BitX and others.
So, purely upon the basis of my previous arguments against the price rising, I believe the headwinds that were holding back Bitcoin, will take the price up to the $1000+ mark, this year.
However, as the title to this post suggests, there has been an awakening. I’ve casually been speaking about some tailwinds for about a year now and some of these ideas have been gaining momentum, so I wanted to summarize them here into 3 categories:
Industrial use cases are coming to the fore
Venture capital has been pouring into Blockchain and Bitcoin startups at an unprecedented rate, now topping over $1bn. These startups, such as Chronicled & Stem (disclosure, I’m an investor in both), are building out solutions which utilize Blockchain technologies in industries, where prior solutions were either not possible or financially viable.
The banking sector is investing heavily in what they call “Blockchain”, but specifically avoiding using Bitcoin. I personally think the tide will turn on this point, as soon as one of these projects get compromised, from a security perspective. That said, many foreign banks are investigating and using the Bitcoin Blockchain for innovating around their processes. I think we have to accept that we will live in a world where there is a “chain of chains”, all interlinked in some way. Bitcoin may not rule the finance world chains but it may act as an intermediary platform for settling across chains.
The coming short squeeze
The most important driver of the pending price surge, IMHO, is going to be what I term as the “Mother&*!er of all short squeezes”. A short squeeze is basically what happens when people that are short (selling) an asset discover that the price has risen and they need to buy (cover) to ensure they do not make further losses.
In the Bitcoin world, this happens under a number of scenarios:
1. Traders/speculators who have taken a view that the Bitcoin price will go lower, would borrow coins via exchanges such as
Bitfinex and sell those coins into the market, waiting for the price to drop to buy them back cheaper, repay the exchange and
make a profit.
2. Miners who want to lock in profits. These ordinarily would be called “hedging”, because they produce enough coins per day that
they are able to pay out of their future production, HOWEVER, halving day is approaching. Halving day is the day that a certain
block number is reached and the rewards per block is halved (to 12.5BTC per block, from the current 25). This is expected to be
in early July 2016. The problem this has for miners, is that if they are trying to lock in their profits right now by borrowing and
selling coins, which they intend to repay AFTER halving day, unless they have spare coins lying around, they will be forced to buy
coins on the open market if they cannot produce enough coins through their mining operations. It’s the same as selling crops in
the futures market and then being hit by a storm that wipes out half of your fields. The only way, technically, that this doesn’t
happen, is if the price doubles on halving day (it won’t).
Because Bitcoin trades at the margin (which means that only a percentage of the total coins issued are traded), there is less liquidity and extreme changes like a 50% drop in the rewards per block will have a more marked impact on the price than one would expect, triggering a short squeeze.
One would argue that the market has already factored this in, but it hasn’t. The reason is that the hash rate will fluctuate very rapidly over the halving day period and that is going to cause a lot of volatility for miners and traders. Also, the true deflationary rate of Bitcoin is not known, as I will now explain.
Real inflation vs Nominal inflation in Bitcoin
Bitcoin was created as “deflationary” currency. The total supply is 21m units and it will never be changed. There are about 15.5m coins in circulation and about 3600 new coins minted per day, so roughly 100,000/coins per month, which amounts to nominal inflation (relative to actual coins issued) of around 8%/year. This will arguably drop to 4% after halving day. Or will it?
If we assume that 4m coins will not move anytime soon, then the active circulation of BTC is closer to 12m coins (based upon coins in issue today). Assuming that we are minting 100k/coins per month, then real inflation is at 10%, not 8%. So, if halving day takes effect, then real inflation drops to around 5%/year.
Based upon research by John Ratcliff, I’d like to construct a new view of the real inflation rate of Bitcoin. For various reasons, it appears that 25% of bitcoins are not in active circulation (lost, cold storage, Satoshi, etc), even if we assume Craig Wright is Satoshi (which would mean his coins won’t move until 2020). All numbers are rounded.
In 2014, Bitcoin nominal inflation was 10.3% and real inflation was 15.1%
In 2015, Bitcoin nominal inflation was 9.3% and real inflation was 10.1%
In 2016, Bitcoin inflation will be 6.4% and real inflation will be 8.7%
In 2017, Bitcoin inflation will be 4% and real inflation will be 5.3%
Inflation in Bitcoin has an interestingly different application than inflation in the real world, in that prices aren’t going up because governments are printing money. Prices are going up because of scarcity (supply/demand). If you note that real “inflation” is dropping nearly 2/3 in around just 3 years, it means that for the current volume of Bitcoin buying to be satisfied, Bitcoin will need to find a new, and higher equilibrium point/clearing price. I don’t think these calculations have been adequately factored into the market price…
Bitcoin as a strategic global asset will trigger an “arms race”
Currently, the market cap of Bitcoin ($7bn) is simply too small to facilitate a large buy of Bitcoins from any governmental organization. If Bitcoin started to surge globally, and as a result of strategic interests from any one government, if other governments decided to own a piece of the limited 21m coins in issue, I believe this would trigger something akin to a digital commodity race. Imagine if China started buying up large amounts of Bitcoin — would the rest of the world governments stand idly by and watch? I don’t think so — so my prediction here is that by 2017, governments will become the largest buyers of Bitcoin, pushing the price up to new highs.
It’s always easy to make outlandish predictions. My goal for this post was to outline what I think the tailwinds are behind Bitcoin. I don’t know if the price is going to $1000 or $10,000 — but I do know that it is going up. If I was forced to predict, I would say that it would hit $1000+ in 2016 and $3000+ in 2017. Looking forward to seeing how this all plays out!
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-focused-investment-firm-brings-on-western-union-lawrence-summers-1461855562Bitcoin-Focused Investment Firm Brings On Western Union, Lawrence Summers
Digital Currency Group, an investment firm focused on bitcoin and blockchain startups, is adding a new group of investors and advisers, bringing on Western Union Co. and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.
The moves, which also include an expansion of the board of the six-month-old firm, are expected to be announced Thursday.
The actions aim to strengthen the investment company as it shifts its focus from the virtual currency bitcoin to its underlying technology, blockchain.
The amount raised in the round wasn’t disclosed. In addition to money-transfer company Western Union, the firm’s new investors include HCM International Co., an investment subsidiary of Foxconn Ltd.; Gibraltar Investments, the venture arm of Prudential Financial Inc. ; and OMERS Ventures, the investment arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System.
The firm had an earlier investment round, also for an undisclosed amount, that included MasterCard, Bain Capital and New York Life.
Digital Currency Group also named two new board members: Glenn Hutchins, a co-founder of the private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners, and Lawrence Lenihan, who founded FirstMark Capital and now runs a firm called Resonance. Along with founder Barry Silbert, the firm now has a three-person board.
Additionally, it added Mr. Summers and bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen as senior advisers. Barry why GA? You're losing credit man!
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/business/dealbook/bitcoin-start-up-gets-an-electronic-money-license-in-britain.html?_r=0The British government has pushed through its first licensing of a virtual currency company, underscoring its desire to make London a hub for the development of financial technology.
The Financial Conduct Authority, Britain’s top financial regulator, has granted an electronic money license to Circle, a company based in Boston that uses Bitcoin, the virtual currency, to enable consumers to make payments to other consumers using a mobile app, or “social payments” as the company puts it.
The regulator helped Circle get the license by putting it in the government’s Innovation Hub, which is one of several initiatives Britain has undertaken to encourage experimentation in the financial industry.
The license makes it possible for Circle to establish a banking relationship with Barclays, the British bank. It is the first time that a large global bank has agreed to work with a Bitcoin company, though Circle has attracted investments from others.
The British economic secretary to the treasury, Harriett Baldwin, said in an email that the license and Barclays’ relationship with Circle “prove our decision to introduce the most progressive, forward-looking regulatory regime is paying off and cements our status as the world’s fintech capital.”
Circle, which was founded in 2013, already allows customers in the United States to easily send payments to one another and buy and sell Bitcoin, and customers in Britain will now be able to do the same.
But Circle has long aimed to use Bitcoin as a back-end network to make it easier and cheaper to move money between national currencies. The Bitcoin technology, which first emerged in 2009, has been promoted as a way to quickly and cheaply move money across national borders without using traditional money-transmitting services such as Western Union.
Circle is set up so that its customers can hold their money in national currencies to avoid the volatile price of Bitcoin. When a customer wants to move money, he or she can buy Bitcoin for the short period of time required to send the money or simply move dollars or pounds from a linked bank account.
The British license will allow Circle customers to instantly transfer money between dollars and British pounds — and soon enough, between those currencies and euros, given that the e-money license is valid across the European Union.
“For the first time any consumer in the U.S. and the U.K. will be able to beam sterling and dollars back and forth, instantly for free,” said Jeremy Allaire, the co-founder of Circle. “That’s just never been possible.”
It is a difficult moment for the virtual currency. The developers who maintain the basic Bitcoin software have been divided over updates to the software. That has caused a schism in the Bitcoin community and slowed down transactions.
Some companies have been looking at other virtual currencies, such as Ethereum, as an alternative way to transfer money using what is known as a blockchain, the database concept that Bitcoin introduced. Mr. Allaire said that Ethereum was not yet ready for global use in the same way as Bitcoin, but that it could be in the future.
“We are not wedded to one blockchain as the right one,” he said.
In the United States, Circle has not managed to take Bitcoin mainstream, but it has gotten Bitcoin some key seals of approval. Back in 2013, it got funding from the major venture capital firms Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners. And last year, Circle became the first company to get a so-called BitLicense from New York state’s top financial regulator, the Department of Financial Services.
The New York agency had been the only regulatory body to devise a licensing system for virtual currency companies, trying to confront the fraud and crime that have plagued the technology.
But the British government has taken several steps to emphasize its interest in attracting virtual currency start-ups, among other types of financial technology, to London.
The British chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, publicly purchased virtual currency from a Bitcoin A.T.M. in 2014 at an event where he announced the government’s desire to work with virtual currency companies.
The moves appear to be, at least in part, a way to draw new businesses to London as many parts of the financial industry have struggled with lagging revenue.
Several executives at Barclays have previously discussed the bank’s interest in Bitcoin and the blockchain technology. The bank has labs in London dedicated to experimenting with the technology. Seems the mainstream media is jumping on that deal and Bitcoin finally get some positive news after all that FUD the last few monhs.
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/edf0652e-fb3c-11e5-b3f6-11d5706b613b.html#axzz4526IZmv3
Barclays is linking up with Circle Internet Financial, a US mobile payment start-up backed by Goldman Sachs that uses bitcoin to transfer central bank currencies, as digital money increasingly moves into mainstream finance.
It is the first time a European bank has allowed a digital currency company to use its infrastructure — enabling it to transfer sterling and euros — according to the two companies.
Boston-based Circle, which is valued at $250m, is expanding into Europe after launching a dollar transfer service for US users late last year.
From Wednesday the payment app — which transfers dollars by first converting them to bitcoin — will also be able to transmit sterling between users of the app by linking to their debit cards.
The tie-up with Barclays means Circle will be able to move sterling across the blockchain — a public ledger where bitcoin transactions are verified and recorded.
Users will be able to exchange sterling and dollars immediately and free of charge.
The move was welcomed by the UK Treasury, with economic secretary Harriet Baldwin saying that Circle’s partnership and UK launch were “major milestones”.
Jeremy Allaire, chief executive and founder of Circle, said the app would add euros “in coming months”, and had plans to add Asian currencies in the future.
Barclays said it was interested in “accelerating positive uses of blockchain”.
Using the blockchain means that money can be exchanged without using a bank clearing system.
Mr Allaire said the financial services industry did not fully realise the potential of the open-source blockchain, concentrating instead on developing its own closed versions based on similar technology.
As interest in Bitcoin increases, US officials are looking into how to regulate, rather than shut down, the virtual currency
However, Mr Allaire said that blockchain would sooner disrupt the mobile payments industry, calling it a “blank slate” for innovators.
“Payments are the next thing to be commoditised as a free service,” he said.
Alongside Goldman Sachs, the company is backed by Jim Breyer’s Breyer Capital, Oak Investment Partners, Accel Partners and General Catalyst.
Circle launched its first product, a mobile app for storing and transferring bitcoin, in late 2014 and says it has attracted customers in the “six figures” across 100 countries
That's some really interesting news! However I still wouldn't use them!!
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That commentay by George Gilder sums it up! http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/05/the-fed-is-a-god-that-has-failed-george-gilder-commentary.html
Why does Wall Street keep recovering after recessions but the economy seemingly never does?
The reason, as I document in my book, "The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does" is that Washington and the Federal Reserve together have created a closed loop economy where the Fed creates money for the government and the S&P 500 and Main Street is left out.
The Fed decides what money is worth and who receives it and how much. The Fed prices it at zero interest rates, allegedly to stimulate economic growth. But whenever something is free, it's distributed by queue, and only the privileged, connected people in the front of the line get any, not the innovators who create growth and opportunity for Main Street. Trump voters are wrong if they blame Mexico and China, but they are right about one big thing: The economy is rigged against them.
The Fed takeover of the economy has turned Main Street into Mean Street; it has gelded Silicon Valley, reducing our most creative entrepreneurs to climate cranks obsequiously petitioning in Washington.
Almost two-thirds of jobs created between 2002 and 2010 came from 23 million small businesses, according to the Small Business Administration. But venture capital investment in 2014 of $48 billion is just one-third of the 2000 total (in 2015 dollars), according to the National Venture Capital Association. There were half as many IPOs in 2015 as in 2000, and they were mostly focused on a few large deals. Back in 1999, there were seven times more IPOs than mergers and acquisitions for tech companies. Today merger and acquisitions outnumber IPOs by almost 36 to 1.
The Fed regulations and money manipulations have displaced an open market of IPOs by an exclusive game of horse trading among "qualified investors" who get rich and leave Main Street out, and fail to create new jobs.
And Wall Street? The once powerful engine of capitalism has been nationalized by the Obama bureaucracies feeding on fines and fees. We've had a covert socialist coup in Washington and it must be reversed or the free enterprise engine of growth and opportunity is in jeopardy.
The Fed began as a necessary "lender of last resort" during financial crises. But today, the Fed regulates the entire financial sector, from hedge funds to pawn shops. It issues and values the money by manipulating interest rates and manipulating money. Today the Fed serves the Washington bureaucracy and a few banks that are growing bigger. Through these banks, it effectively can regulate the entire economy.
What the Fed cannot do is becoming increasingly obvious: magically manipulate growth, which is the product of learning, into being. The Fed won its vast new powers because both Democrats and Republicans wanted an alibi. Rather than legislatively reform this administrative state that is smothering our economy, we prefer to have the Fed just issue money to paper it all over.
This process reached a pinnacle during the Obama Administration when the Fed balance sheet rose fivefold.
Like all command economies, the Fed is failing to spur growth. This failure has become so obvious that leading economists such as Ken Rogoff of Harvard and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers now advocate the abolition of cash, so that interest rates can go below zero, meaning that through the Federal Reserve, the government can steal your savings without your representatives in Congress having to take political responsibility for levying a tax.
The first step to economic growth is recognizing the Federal Reserve is a god that has failed. Manipulating money cannot command growth and opportunity but it can suffocate innovation and entrepreneurship, which is always unexpected, and not well-connected in Washington.
What we are doing now is having money's value determined by international currency trading. Ten banks control 77 percent of all currency trading. When currency value is more varied and volatile than the economic activity that it measures, the horizons of economic activity shrink until today the famous "flash boys" trade by the second rather than investing for the future.
Currency trading is by far the biggest industry in the world economy. It is a runaway scandal of money. The banks make money off it. But the rest of us don't even get a measuring stick that's valid to gauge our savings, assure our retirements, or expand investment in business.
This is the first recovery in decades when small business jobs are actually shrinking. All the expansion is coming from the closed loop economy between the Fed, the bureaucracies and the big banks.
Declaring that the government monopoly on money is the source of all monetary evil, Friedrich Hayek, the great Austrian economist, predicted that capitalism would be saved by monetary competition from the private sector, which today can come from bitcoin and a new tie to gold. As the great British scholar Matt Ridley explained: "The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality, too."
The first step to a new prosperity is to give up the god that failed and break the government monopoly on money.
We don't have to have a formal gold standard: A combination of bitcoin for the internet and treating gold in tax terms as currency, not an investment, would go a long way to restoring money as a measure of learning and growth, and jump-starting growth.
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According to co creator Joseph Poon, a functional version of Lightning Network should be ready this summer. That is some great news imo. Even if this should be delayed it shows the guys are working really hard on it and it's not just some theoretical construct like some here have always claimed. So SegWit is right around the corner, Lightning is on the way as well and Halving is coming closer.Bullish? 
http://coinjournal.net/lightning-network-should-be-ready-this-summer/“We are currently testing Lightning against SegNet. Tadge Dryja and Olaoluwa Osuntokun have been integrating Segregated Witness in our software. In fact, I believe Tadge was the first person to make a witness block larger than 1MB on SegNet 3 when testing the mempool.”
“A basic, functional version of Lightning Network should be ready when the Segregated Witness soft-fork goes live on Bitcoin, presuming it gets merged and activated this Summer. Hopefully it gets in this Summer, as this will enable entirely new decentralized use cases for Bitcoin which were not possible before on any financial system due to custodial risk underwriting.” |
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/03/29/uncertainty-in-bitcoin-doesnt-extend-to-startups/#3719d769649fAs I know many hate that forbes is blocking readers who are not willing to disable their adblocker. I was that kind to copy & paste the article in here. It's a wall of text with mostly blocksize debate and Coinbase on focus. The most interesting part is the one I marked at the end with bold letters. I would really like to know who these big names are. Infighting in the Bitcoin community has made headlines in recent months.
Political disputes between individual developers have been exposed. Programmers have split off into new competing teams. At times, the network has strained to process a flood of transactions. And the community’s inability to agree on how to increase the network capacity has periodically generated news.
“Bitcoin has almost been a victim of its own success,” said Adam White, vice president of business development at Coinbase, over coffee in New York City’s Union Square, describing how transaction volume is reaching the network’s limits.
And yet, while some large, well-funded startups in the space, including Coinbase, have publicly disagreed with decisions made by the core developers over how to increase network capacity, the drama and uncertainty over the future direction of the technology has not only not affected their business or partnerships, but it has also ironically demonstrated the advantages of using a trusted brand even with a currency that initially became popular precisely because its users wanted to bypass third parties.
An Ecosystem in Bloom
The community has now grown far beyond the initial group of enthusiasts who fueled its early growth — technophiles, libertarians, profit-seeking “miners,” who maintain the network in exchange for new bitcoin, and, to be frank, criminals who used it to pay for illegal goods online — to include several new constituencies quite different from the original vested parties.
The Bitcoin ecosystem now includes millions of everyday people investing or transacting who are essentially represented by the startups that have created user-friendly apps and websites. “Startups play a pretty integral role in the sense that we represent most of the end-users. If you look at users of Bitcoin on the network, most of them are represented by one of the major Bitcoin companies,” says Peter Smith, chief executive of Blockchain, adding that five or six companies, including Coinbase and Blockchain, represent about 80% of transaction volume on the network. Numerous startups are also using Bitcoin to enable their users to more easily send remittances, cross-border payments and peer-to-peer payments, as well as make mobile in-app purchases.
In addition to venture capitalists who have so far invested $1.1 billion into the space, Bitcoin has attracted Wall Street investors such as hedge funds, mutual fund managers, family offices and ultra high-net worth individuals who have invested in the currency or related investment vehicles, as well as financial advisors serving Main Street investors who are putting such securities into their retirement accounts. One investment available to them is GBTC, a publicly traded security invested in Bitcoin, that is supposed to trade at one-tenth of a Bitcoin, but is usually priced higher than that due to scarcity and the demand for tax-advantaged exposure to Bitcoin in accounts such as IRAs. Additionally, ARK Invest’s ETF Web X.0 includes a small percentage of digital currencies. And investors in Bitcoin can track the price on the New York Stock Exchange Bitcoin Index, NYXBT. By and large, many of these investors are betting on the potential for Bitcoin to become a major payment rail, which should further increase the demand for the currency, thereby boosting its price.
Coinbase’s diverse business shows just how broad Bitcoin’s appeal is now. Founded in 2012, it is one of the earliest, largest and most well-funded startups in the space, with $106 million total raised from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and the New York Stock Exchange. Serving as an easy, safe way to obtain Bitcoin, it helped bridge the gap between the tech-savvy early adopters who are comfortable dealing with the Bitcoin software directly and the financially savvy early adopters who do not necessary want to handle the technology themselves but are eager to invest or use the currency and want a reputable company they trust to manage their Bitcoin. With 3.5 million users, it and other startups such as Blockchain, which has 6.6 million wallet holders and $30.5 million in venture investment, represent the large and growing group of Bitcoin investors and consumers who are not necessarily interested in the technology, but in either making a speculative investment with the currency or in moving money anywhere in the world within roughly 10 minutes.
Coinbase has brought everyday consumers and Wall Street professionals to Bitcoin with a range of products, services and partnerships. White says customers of Coinbase.com, the retail site for novice users, “usually say, I heard a lot about this, I want to buy some Bitcoin.” Coinbase Exchange is an institutional exchange with advanced trading orders such as a recently added a stop order feature that allows customers to buy or sell Bitcoin when the price exceeds a certain threshold. “We see more institutional traders like hedge funds, programmatic or algo traders — people who are looking at Bitcoin as just a new asset class,” says White, “They say, I trade all these other asset classes. Why shouldn’t I be trading this?” Currently, 80% of Coinbase’s customers buy bitcoin as an investment, and 20% transact with it, though that balance is currently shifting more toward transactions. Additionally, the company offers merchant processing services for companies such as Overstock.com and Dell, as well as a developer platform that helps programmers and startups create Bitcoin apps. An example of Coinbase’s efforts to make Bitcoin more mainstream is a recent announcement by partner and investor USAA, a financial services company serving members of the military, that it is now possible for all 11 million members to check their Coinbase balances within their web and mobile accounts, as they would traditional investments such as real estate.
Despite Conflict, Partnerships Proceed
All this consumer activity has brought the average number of Bitcoin transactions close to what the network can handle at any one time. Transactions on the Bitcoin network are processed in batches called blocks, with a new one making its way through the network roughly every 10 minutes. Currently, each block has a limit of 1 MB. As Bitcoin’s popularity has grown, the blocks have now become, on average, 70% full, with some blocks hitting the limit, causing delays that, during the worst network congestion periods, have left some transactions stalled for more than 48 hours. Small block sizes also pose a risk to the network, because it makes the cost of a spam attack really cheap. As Smith puts it, “if the glass is 80% full, you only need a little bit of water to make the last run over, so the cost of filling up the glass is really cheap.”
A number of developers and other leaders in the community, including Smith and the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, have advocated for increasing the block size to 2 MB to resolve these problems, at least temporarily. But development of the Bitcoin protocol is primarily in the hands of a group of core developers, who also consult with the miners who keep the network running. While they would eventually like to increase the number of transactions per block, they prefer to first make an improvement to the protocol that would not change the block size but is still projected to effectively allow 1.6 MB of transactions through in one block. They are concerned that moving up to 2 MB blocks might cause some miners to drop out, making the network more centralized, and therefore more susceptible to various attacks.
“There’s no real big need to push developers. They should do it as they always did it — clean and stable,” says Jonas Schnelli, one of the five core developers who can make changes to the protocol official. “And they should not be pushed by market needs, in my opinion.” He describes market pressures as, “they want to have maximum 10 minutes confirmation [time] to pay for a coffee,” and doesn’t see any urgency: “First, there’s still plenty of space left in blocks. … On the other hand, should the market really decide what quality the developers bring out? If you want to see Bitcoin survive the next 20 or 30 years,” he says, “I strongly advise to let developers do the work they did until now, which is very high-quality of software.”
Facing developers whose prerogatives differ from their own, startups have begun to take more public stances on the direction of the protocol. “Prior to about six months ago, Coinbase’s methodology for operating was heads down,” says White. “What we were going to do is be more focused on executing and building more products that people love than anyone else. We almost purposely didn’t take a vocal stake inside the Bitcoin community.” However, over the last six months, Armstrong has made public his opinion on a number of issues related to the direction and governance of the protocol through a series of posts on Medium. Blockchain and Coinbase have also thrown in their lot with a new group of developers calling themselves Classic, as opposed to the original team of developers now called Core. “We feel this friction occurring where decisions can’t get made — that there are a lot of questions around how consensus is going to be created,” says White. “Coinbase is saying it’s our job as one of the most well-funded and largest Bitcoin companies to step up and help unblock that logjam.”
Compounding the sense of urgency is the fact that, due to a rule in the Bitcoin software, in July, miners will begin to receive only half the number of bitcoin that they are currently awarded when they process a block of transactions for the network. Some fear this so-called block halving will decrease the miners’ profitability, causing some to drop out, thereby decreasing the security of the network, which in turn could create a downward spiral that depresses the value of the currency, causing more people to flee Bitcoin.
The risks of not accommodating the increased transaction volume quickly enough became apparent in early March when a spike in transactions caused extreme network delays. Ironically, the situation ended up demonstrating the benefits of some centralization, albeit of a different kind — not of the mining network but of third-party Bitcoin services.
Several startups said that the network congestion enabled them to improve their services. Coinbase developed an algorithm that optimized fees paid to miners to ensure that its users’ transactions would go through in a timely fashion — at negligible cost to the company. “Internally, we worked to optimize around how to batch and process transactions so we were using kind of — machine learning is a stretch — but an algorithm that would look at the way the transaction is being processed, and whether it’s a period of high activity or low activity, and from that, intelligently attach miners’ fees or transaction fees to these users’ events,” said White. “That’s a way for us to make sure that our users get their transactions in blocks without overpaying.”
Stephen Pair of BitPay, a Bitcoin merchant processing company that also offers a personal wallet called Copay, says, the spikes in transaction volume have allowed it to improve the wallet: “It’s actually been very instructive and useful for us to have 1 MB block size limit and then to have the network bump up against it, because then we can observe how the system behaves and where the issues are, and improve the software to better cope with that. Because even when you go to 2 MB blocks, at some point you’ll hit that limit.”
In contrast, people with so-called user-controlled wallets who handle the software themselves were more prone to experiencing long delays.
Smith says, “When you think about who a small block impacts, it’s not really the Blockchain.infos and Coinbases of the world. We have a big engineering team, a lot of money, we can develop systems to get around this problem. We can also quite frankly pay the miners to confirm our transactions ahead of everybody else’s through special negotiated contracts with the miners, because we’re a bulk purchaser of block space” — though the company has not done that. “So you could say that this throttling of the network that Core is currently doing is a great thing for us. It gives us an opportunity to consolidate the market. But I firmly believe that it’s bad for Bitcoin, and is bad for our users,” he says.
The seeming turmoil within Bitcoin hasn’t spooked Coinbase’s partner financial institutions. “It actually hasn’t been that large of an issue — surprisingly almost,” White says. “From the outside in, these large financial institutions have great insight into what Bitcoin and blockchain are doing, but are not so in the weeds that they’re tracking the block size debate and scaling issues.” Many of them continue to see potential in the technology and the currency. White says, “A couple big-name partnerships — without giving away too much — will signal that Bitcoin is really a legitimate, paradigm-shifting technology that’s not going to go away.”
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http://andolfatto.blogspot.de/2016/03/is-bitcoin-safe-asset.htmlDavid Andolfatto, vice president and research director of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank might be known to a few from former articles in crypto media. In his newest blog post he is speaking about Bitcoin and it's potential being the next global great safe asset. It's a wall of text but definitely worth a read. Check out the comment section as well. [...] Cash and gold are "simple" objects. The fact that they pay no interest makes them even simpler. In particular, there's no need to spend time investigating the reliability of a dividend paid by "barren" asset--everyone can agree right away that the dividend is zero. This type of informational symmetry appears to be in high demand in times of financial uncertainty (when nobody knows for sure what other people know about the securities they're selling.) Of course, the situation is somewhat more complicated when counterparties (intermediaries) are involved, but this is true of any asset.
This brings me to Bitcoin. I think that Bitcoin could be the world's next great safe asset. At least, it certainly seems to have all the properties that are desired in a safe asset.
Importantly, it is a "simple" asset. It's simple in the sense that it's a pure fiat object--the monetary objects (called bitcoin) constitute no legal claim against anything of intrinsic value. Bitcoin is simply a record-keeping technology (and economists have known for a long time that money is memory). It pays no interest. Possession corresponds to ownership (unless counterparties are involved). The ledger has proven itself secure (not a guarantee that is can never be compromised, of course)
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/03/13/central-banks-beat-bitcoin-at-own-game-with-rival-supercurrency/The proto-currency known as RSCoin has vastly greater scope than Bitcoin, used for peer-to-peer transactions by libertarians across the world, and beyond the control of any political authority.
The RSCoin is deemed more likely to gain to mass acceptance than Bitcoin since the ledger would remain exclusively in the hands of the central bank, with the 'trust' factor of state authority.
Bitcoin is inherently limited, a niche for aficionados and the ideological heir's of the 19th Century 'free banking' movement. Its code restricts it to a limit of 21 billion Bitcoins, and it can handle only seven transactions per second. "It is a Peter Pan system, and it doesn't really grow up," said Dr Danezis.
The whole article is pure awesomeness! Read it and laugh or cry, whatever you want.
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Well, let's hope this becomes true!! http://www.nasdaq.com/article/xbt-provider-sees-growing-bitcoin-demand-private-blockchain-hype-will-translate-to-higher-bitcoin-prices-at-a-later-stage-cm587320[...]Bitcoin ETNs and instruments, including the Bitcoin Tracker Euro and GrayScale Investment's GBTC, have performed exceptionally well against major reserve currencies and global asset classes since mid 2015. Currently, a share of GBTC is being traded at $57.40, and since a share of GBTC guarantees investors about one tenth of a bitcoin, investors are purchasing Bitcoin using GBTC at an average price of $602.71 per coin. That is a premium almost 40 percent higher than the actual price of Bitcoin.
[...]As the XBT Provider plans for global expansion, the team is looking forward to securing larger investments from institutional clients, and hoping to achieve new milestones throughout 2016.
"We do have alternative investment hedge funds and insurance companies as investors and predict larger investments from more institutions in 2016, as more asset managers start to feel comfortable with Bitcoin," a team statement said.
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http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2016/02/22/my-view-on-the-.htmlDefinitely worth to read! No it's a must. SO READ IT!!!!It's a wall of text so take your time. I've picked out my personal highlights. [...]I'm worried about the current situation of Bitcoin and the Blockchain.
Partially driven by the overinvestment in the space, and partially by the fact that Bitcoin is much more about money than the Internet ever was, it is experiencing a crisis that didn't really have any parallels in the early days of the Internet. Nonetheless, the formation of the Internet offers some important lessons -- most importantly, on the question of the talent and knowledge pool. In those early days, and at some layers maybe even still today, there were only a very small number of people who had the background, brain type and personality to understand some of the core elements that made the Internet work. I remember when there were only a handful of people in the world who really understood Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and we had to hunt them down and share then with our "competitors" when we were setting up PSINet in Japan.
It's very similar today with Bitcoin and the Blockchain. There are a small number of people who understand cryptography, systems, networks and code and are capable of understanding the Bitcoin software code. Most of them are working on Bitcoin, while some are working on Ethereum and other "related" systems and a few more are scattered around the world in other places. It's a community including some who have been around since the 90s, before the Internet, going to crazy conferences like the Financial Cryptography conference. Like any free and open-source software community on the Internet, it's a bunch of people who know each other and mostly, though not always, respect each other, but which fundamentally holds a near monopoly on talent.
Unfortunately, the wild growth of Bitcoin and now "the Blockchain" has caught this community off guard from a governance perspective, leaving the core developers of Bitcoin unable to interface effectively with the commercial interests whose businesses depend on scaling the technology. When asked "can you scale this?" They said, "we'll do the best we can." That wasn't good enough for many, especially those who don't understand the architecture or the nature of what is going on inside of Bitcoin.
Many companies that are used to making decisions around less complicated systems -- like building a website or buying and running Enterprise Resource Planning systems -- felt they could either just hire other engineers who would listen to the customer needs better or became so annoyed with the, "we can't promise but we'll try" attitude of the core developers that they lowered their standards and went with whomever would promise to meet their demands.
The future of Bitcoin, decentralized ledgers and other Blockchain-like projects depends on this community. Many people call them "Bitcoin Core" as if they are some sort of company you can fire or a random set of developers with skills that you can just train others to acquire. They're not. They're more like artists, scientists and precision engineers who have built a shared culture and language. To look for another group of people to do what they do would be like asking web designers to launch a space shuttle. You can't FIRE a community and, statistically speaking, the people working on the Bitcoin ARE the community.
If you try to build "something like Bitcoin but better!" it will probably turn out insecure, underwhelming, and will go against the the fundamental principles that give Bitcoin the potential to be as impactful to banking, law and society as the Internet has been to media, communication, and commerce.
[...]I fear that we'll build something that at the application layer looks like what Bitcoin and the Blockchain promised, but under the hood is just the same old transaction system with no interoperability, no distributed system, no trustless networks, no extensibility, no open innovation, nothing except maybe a bit of efficiency increased from new technology.
[...]Lastly, but most importantly, we're burning out those developers who we most need to be focused on the code and the architecture. Many are dropping out or threatening to drop out. Many are completely discouraged and depleted by the public debate. Even if you believe that we will eventually have a new generation of financial cryptographers, you can't train them without this community. We have many smart people on all sides of this debate and I think that most of them are doing what they are doing with good intentions. However, those of us on the sidelines fanning the flames, making uninformed and provocative statements and fundamentally disrespecting and undervaluing the contribution of the Bitcoin community to the past, present and future of this possibly world-changing innovation, are doing harm.
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https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/700870021753384960At least a few haven't lost their humor. Really hilarious! Samson is having lot's of imagination. Awesome!
2016-02-20 01:34:04 UTC
9:30 AM: Roundtable meeting begins.
2016-02-20 01:37:35 UTC
9:37 AM: A piercing evil chill permeates the meeting room. The doors swing open. Adam Back slowly walks in. Flowers in vase wilt and die.
2016-02-20 01:42:17 UTC
9:42 AM: Satoshi Nakamoto arrives.
2016-02-20 01:51:04 UTC
9:50 AM: Kang outlines the rules. 1) You do not talk about the roundtable. 2) You DO NOT talk about the roundtable.
2016-02-20 01:53:04 UTC
9:52 AM: 3) If someone says "stop," goes limp, or taps out, the discussion is over. 4) Discussions will go on as long as they have to.
2016-02-20 01:59:29 UTC
9:59 AM: Core devs gather in dark corner and begin the chanting the Song of Bitcoin Destruction.
2016-02-20 02:02:48 UTC
10:02 AM: Peter Todd's head swings wildly from side to side as the cacophony of voices incanting "1 MB" reaches a pitched crescendo.
2016-02-20 02:08:26 UTC
10:08 AM: Brian Armstrong burned in effigy.
2016-02-20 02:30:09 UTC
10:30 AM: Alex Petrov asks Core if they will consider a HF. Adam listens as he slowly takes a sip of blood from his Chalice of Lightning.
2016-02-20 02:35 UTC
10:31 AM: Adam's eyes glow an evil red hue. Lights flicker. His terrifying voice resonates through the room: YOU DARE QUESTION THE STREAM?
2016-02-20 02:39 UTC
10:32 AM: Alex falls to his knees paralyzed with fear. Wang Chun and I rush to his side and help him back to his seat. He may never recover.
2016-02-20 03:37 UTC
11:37 AM: Coffee break. Matt Corallo consumes the life essence of another Smurf. His ghostly white hair regains the familiar blue tint.
2016-02-20 04:38 UTC
12:37 PM: We hit an impasse on particularly difficult technical issue. Group decides to consult reddit. Turns out cryptoboy3 had the answer.
2016-02-20 05:25 UTC
1:25 PM: Lunch break. Happy Meals arrive. Blockstream generously donates several pitchers of Kool-Aid.
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