Forwarded from a friend who has an account:

International Bitcoin Exchange Buttercoin Raises $1M to Revamp Remittance
Lora Kolodny
August 19, 2013
(c) 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Four-employee financial tech startup Buttercoin has raised $1 million in seed funding to scale its international bitcoin exchange, co-founder and Chief Executive Cedric Dahl told VentureWire.

Buttercoin's investors include Google Ventures, Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, Floodgate and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Bitcoin is a virtual currency introduced in 2009 that recently gained regulatory scrutiny and legitimacy in the U.S. Federal regulators have placed bitcoin exchanges under the same requirements as traditional money-transmission businesses, and a Texas judge this month recognized bitcoins as a legal currency.

On August 16, Bitcoins were selling on the largest existing exchange, Mt. Gox, for $108 to $112. Buttercoin will compete with Mt. Gox and a range of money-transmission businesses, like Xoom Corp ., PayPal and others.

Currently participating in the Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Buttercoin, which is operated by Digital Currencies FinTech Co., partners with banks, credit unions and licensed financial services businesses around the world to offer remittance through bitcoins.

Here's how it works: People who want to send money to another country log onto a bitcoin exchange on a financial services firm website, "powered by" Buttercoin. They use their local currency to buy bitcoins, which they can then send instantaneously across borders.

Switching from one currency to another through bitcoin, the financial services firm may gain some value from arbitrage, but that part would remain invisible to the consumer sending the money, Mr. Dahl said.

"The benefit to a financial service company that becomes our partner is that [Buttercoin] gives them access to fee-free, bitcoin buying and selling," he said, adding that the company charges the end-user a 0.1% fee per transaction to use the service and splits that fee with its partner.

At this point, Buttercoin has not struck any partnerships with banks but has inked several deals with remittance companies in India, Canada, Brazil and Hong Kong.

Seed investor Mr. Ohanian said that Buttercoin eliminates foreign exchange risk for financial services firms. Based on this feature alone, he says, Buttercoin has the potential to massively disrupt the international remittance industry.

Mr. Dahl says he wants to ultimately help hardworking immigrants transfer money back home to their families overseas, without giving up a high proportion to entities like PayPal or Western Union .

The market for remittances hit $513 billion in 2011, according to data from the World Bank .

Venture investors have been increasingly interested in bitcoin businesses. Union Square Ventures invested in Coinbase, a startup that allows people to store bitcoins in a digital wallet and transact with merchants who accept the currency. Bit Angels, an angel network and incubator focused on early-stage bitcoin and virtual currency startups, raised 53,620 bitcoin in order to fund virtual currency startups.

Boost VC launched a specialized fund and incubator program to back and support Bitcoin startups. Lightspeed Venture Partners , Rothenberg Ventures, the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and Ben Davenport all invested in the fund.

http://buttercoin.net

Write to Lora Kolodny at lora.kolodny@wsj.com. Follow her on twatter at @lorakolodny

I think the big "goldbugs" get it, that they are both complementary and for different reasons. Glad to see that it is sinking in, and it may be why governments are so nervous. They're about to face some real competition for a change.

Thanks for reading it for me, I hate to give HuffPo any clicks for their mediocre articles. Most of them tend to be "linkbait" anyway.

I am involved in bitcoin for that very reason, that the disruptive nature of it will finally allow the "little guy" to clawback some freedom that we lost a long time ago.

Well, we aren't crazy because Google is trying to do the same thing:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/googles-project-loon-flying-internet-coming-to-homes-in-california/

What I want is an open-sourced version that doesn't rely on Google services, obviously. Anybody want to 'catch' one and tear it apart? (Hah, Joking... but if you work at google, consider opening up the project.)

This problem deserves solving.

More like - MasterCoin's biggest flaw isn't necessarily in its current feature set, but rather in the blockchain exploitation that it relies on.

There are no 'contents' I could see, its just a question, and you have "credits" upon you can call on people to answer the question.


What an irritating site. I'm going to throw away the registration that came with this, seeing how it produces zero informative content.

It is a heady thought isn't it, combining the need for ubiquitous communications with existing and nearly-in-production technologies to make a physical comms/delivery network.

Seriously, if DPR put a small fraction of his funds into developing such a thing, it would be nearly unstoppable. The real challenge is the design of the physicals, do you go with quality, or just easily replaceable parts? If I can print out most of a drone, do I really care about anything else than it will last for 'n' number of flight hours?

Even better if the flexible solar materials come to production, then you're talking about integrating the cells right into the lifting envelope, using thin films. The only real bulk would come from what your payload is, and the support infrastructure including energy storage.

"Cracking" hydrogen from available water is an excellent idea, and if you could get the efficiency up there - maybe even use that for the motors themselves, retaining power just for periodical hydrogen extraction and transmitter power.

Hell, what about parasitic induction using a conductor and existing RF/Microwave signals? Is it enough to run some minor circuitry while keeping the solar generated power just for 'cracking' hydrogen?

I really wish I had a research space to work on this stuff, along with a 3D printer and a good materials scientist and a electrical/physical engineer.

Solar plus a small lifting envelope would help as well. Have to consider the design challenges though, the energy density needed to run a decent transmitter would be one of the harder parts. We really need graphene and its related technologies sooner rather than later.

Are you pulling a joke, or are you a complete asshole?

Honestly, the internet is full of fucking idiots.

Spot on, the entire 21 million bitcoins existed the moment they were defined as an upper limit in the Bitcoin implementation.

The miners are just getting the keys to all these 'rooms' in a rather large building - if you need a physical metaphor. Eventually these bozos will get it, they're not used to thinking hard about abstract problems.

I prefer to see it as a way to disrupt ossified power networks from gaining more power, and even reversing the effect of decades of corruption around the world.

Bitcoin, its a bullshit-buster, the 'scrubbing bubbles' from the internet ready to swarm down and turn that corpulent paid off politician into a gleaming skeleton of irrelevance.

Governments around the world will have to deal with the new force of Bitcoin, and more importantly, a currency that doesn't allow their dirty tricks anymore. That is the real struggle, years of pulling the wool over the eyes of every citizen is being thrown bare. If you can't compete, you'll try to kill it, and when that doesn't work - you either will adapt or fade away.

Here's to the fuckers fading away, because they've already shown (most of them) that they can't adapt.

While I think that gold will never disappear as a tradeable intermediary, it is pretty silly to argue that the every infrastructure system we rely on will somehow go 'away', leaving gold as king.

Things aren't that simple. In serbia and croatia, when conflict turned entire cities into shell-pocked hellholes, they were trading with cans of food, candles, sex, whatever they could use. There wasn't a miser in the main square chuckling with his gold stash as everyone demanded to trade in gold coins.

That is the biggest disconnect I see with the gold grabbers versus bitcoiners, we can complement each other, but the gold-heads just want their specie to be the 'king', and that often requires the entire world to turn into a complete flaming pile of garbage first.

It's just anchoring bias taken to an extreme.

That is a non-trivial bit of hardware, and the price reflects that

I'm thinking as a first effort to get consumer-grade hardware into the mix, then start adding 'heavy lifters' like that one to help it scale.

At your next board meeting, tell Erik Voorhees that we already know he's involved.

We'll be watching

I'm still researching this, but on this page there's a bit at the bottom on what hardware will support CJDNS:

https://wiki.projectmeshnet.org/Getting_started#Install_it

The main references for this effort besides the Hyperboria page are:

https://projectmeshnet.org/ -- Project Meshnet home page, links to a wiki and guides

Link to some "Meshlocals" that are already in operation that you could peer to:

https://wiki.projectmeshnet.org/List_of_Mesh_Locals

Ideally we'd create one that is intended to be just for Bitcoin and secure communications with low bandwidth needs.

There is a list of public peers as well, but they're probably already overloaded with other connections.

https://wiki.projectmeshnet.org/Public_peers

And this is precisely why I think we need to get our mining pools on meshnets - now.

Good catch, you're absolutely correct.

I think we need to prepare, because the hammer might be a bit bigger than just a few packetshapers and policy changes.

Seriously, the mining pools need to be on meshnets, even if we have to use the commercial internet as temporary bridges to others.

My guess is whoever is backing the wallet to pay out the prizes is also pretty strict on keeping this local. An Android .apk is easy to send around, and most users can install it by tapping on the attachment in email, or from a german-based website.

Anyway, I think this thing is actually real - but it remains to be seen if the popularity is manufactured or indeed a 'craze' in the BTC-friendly neighborhood of that German town.

We have to do something, even if it means a hybrid approach where the commercial internet is used for bridging smaller meshnets together. There are thousands of flights to other countries every day, and even if we resort to "Data Couriers" making drops of the blockchain to other countries on flash drives, it is still worth it.

Every day that passes without any kind of contingency plan is a day wasted. We really collectively need to get off our asses and get something together, instead of focusing on the next-and-greatest mining tech, or convincing a shop owner to use bitcoin.

Bitcoin will get seriously 'effed with, and soon -- we really need to be in front of this.