But does matter at selling 

MOST internet entrepreneurs dream of transforming an industry. On January 13th, one who may have done just that went on trial in federal court in Manhattan, accused of drug-trafficking, money-laundering and operating a criminal enterprise. Ross Ulbricht, a 30-year-old Texan physics graduate, is accused of being “Dread Pirate Roberts”, the founder and administrator of the Silk Road. This was the first website to make it possible to buy and sell illegal drugs online openly and with relative anonymity. His trial will raise questions not only about the extent and nature of cybercrime, but also about the limits of government snooping necessary to prevent it.

The Silk Road was shut down by the FBI at the end of 2013. It worked by combining two new technologies: Tor, which allows people to host websites without revealing where they are based, and bitcoin, a decentralised online currency which offers a close digital alternative to a bag of unmarked banknotes. On the site, buyers and sellers could trade with remarkable discretion. Over two years, deals generated 9.5m bitcoin in sales (worth $1.8 billion today, though the exchange rate has fluctuated wildly) and over 600,000 bitcoin in commission. That is enough booty to make Blackbeard throw away his cutlass and pick up a mouse.

The prosecution has already produced evidence that Mr Ulbricht was Dread Pirate Roberts. They argue that he left a digital trail, administering the Silk Road through unencrypted connections and using his personal e-mail address to look for technical help. More sensationally, they allege that he not only set up the site, but sought to defend it violently. As the Dread Pirate, Mr Ulbricht is accused of paying for the assassinations of several people who threatened the site, including one former employee. None of these murders seems to have happened, but they prevented Mr Ulbricht from being granted bail after his arrest in 2013.

Mr Ulbricht says he was framed: the real Dread Pirates remain at large. His lawyers also claim that the FBI may have used illegal methods to identify and seize the Icelandic server on which the Silk Road was hosted, and from which much of the evidence comes. The FBI says the site contained a vulnerability which revealed where it really was, despite Tor. But several technical specialists think this implausible. Sadly for Mr Ulbricht, it may not matter much. In a ruling in October, a judge concluded that since he has not admitted any legal interest in the Silk Road server, he is unable to claim under the Fourth Amendment that it was illegally searched, and so the evidence from the server is admissible however it was found. This, the judge admitted, “might appear to place Ulbricht in a catch-22”. If he admits to an interest in the server, he would weaken his defence at his trial; if he doesn’t, he has no chance of getting the evidence against him dismissed.

Mr Ulbricht’s defence, which has been generously funded by online donations, is thus likely to focus on the strength of the evidence linking him to the online activities of Dread Pirate Roberts. Nonetheless, cyber-criminals—as well as other users of the dark web—will be watching closely. Since the Silk Road was taken offline, several similar market-places have been started, and many closed by the authorities. But it is still far from clear whether police forces can crack the anonymity given by technology such as Tor, or how deeply they can legitimately snoop on the web to uncloak the hosts of criminal networks.

SOURCE: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21639525-one-dread-pirate-trial-what-about-others-bitcoin-buccaneers

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min increment: 0.02 BTC
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Price going up i guess 216.94$ 22.37%

The fact that bitcoin is endowed with a somewhat volatile nature does not come as a surprise to cryptocurrency enthusiasts, who saw it soar beyond $1,000 in late 2013, only to see it diminish in value again throughout 2014, and drop a further 40% at the beginning of this year.

What happened in the early hours of yesterday, however, caused shockwaves far beyond the bitcoin community. The price crashed from $224 at midnight to around $175 (a drop of almost 22%) in just a matter of hours, before rebounding again.

Unsurprisingly, the drop in value has set off a whirlwind of conversation about the future of bitcoin, both from within and outside the community.

Twitter was awash with comments throughout the whole of yesterday, as bitcoiners and commentators pondered the causes and potential ramifications of the drop.

The mainstream media has also reacted, acknowledging the extreme price movements and predicting the potential effect on the cryptocurrency's future with varying degrees of level-headedness or hysteria.

So, what did they say? CoinDesk has rounded some up of the top headlines from yesterday.

The moderate view

Unsurprisingly, there was no real consensus across publications. While some prophesied that the future of bitcoin was bleak, others took more measured views.

The New York Times ran with, "As Bitcoin's Price Slides, Signs of a Squeeze", in which Sydney Ember commented that confidence was dwindling, and stating that "some mining companies have started to flash the warning signs."

As the price of bitcoin drops, and difficulty stays relatively high, mining companies are left to assess their dwindling profit margins.

Mashable's Seth Fiegerman explained that CEX.io, which runs a cloud mining service, had been "forced to suspend operations due to the declining prices presumably cutting into profit margins".

The Guardian's piece, titled "Bitcoin price plunge sparks new crash fears", distinguishes between what is currently happening from what occurred in the summer of 2011 and 2013:

READ MORE AT http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-price-drop-headlines/

The price of Bitcoin has taken bit of a dive over the last couple of days, shedding over 20 percent of its value in the last 24 hours. The sell-off, like other sell-offs and rallies before it, draws a lot of attention and questions about what it means for the future of the technology. Here’s why I don’t focus on price much.

Bitcoin is best thought of as a 5- to 10-year project, and we’re at the very early stages. An (admittedly imperfect) analogy is the early Web.

Like the early Web, Bitcoin is an open platform that no one owns, and on top of which anyone can build without having to get anyone else’s permission. And just like the early Web, success requires investors, entrepreneurs, and developers to build out the infrastructure and applications that will make it useful to average users.

The World Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee; he published a paper proposing it in March of 1989. The following year he worked to implement the idea in code, making the first website in December of 1990. The first popular Web browser didn’t come until 1993 when Marc Andreessen and the team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic. The following year Andreessen started Netscape and released the Netscape Navigator browser in 1994.

Those of us old enough to remember using Navigator to browse the Web over a Winsock connection on a 56k baud modem can attest that it was not the amazing experience we take for granted today. In fact, if you couldn’t see that the technology would evolve, you would have concluded that it was practically useless. For one thing, there was no easy way to find things on the Web. Well, we didn’t get Google until 1998.

Google is now the most visited website on the planet. Second to it is Facebook, and for many people the Web is virtually synonymous with social networking. Yet Facebook was not founded until 2004–a full 14 years after the Web was first conceived.

So here’s the parallel: Bitcoin was conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto and proposed in a paper published in 2008. He worked on implementing the idea into code, mining the first block of the blockchain in January of 2009. So, if we take the Web as a parallel, we’re at the stage in Bitcoin were we would hope to see a Mosaic level development, not a Facebook.

In other words, it’s early days. The Googles and Facebooks of Bitcoin–the killer apps that will make the technology indispensable for ordinary users–may not come for another 5 years.

Unlike the early Web, though, Bitcoin has a price ticker people look at daily, and so they wring their hands. Every dip and spike in the price gets a lot of attention and spells either doom or “irrational exuberance.” But as Marc Andreessen has pointed out, “the price of domain names didn’t determine the usefulness of the Internet.”

With a longer time horizon in mind, you can put the short-term drops and rallies in price of Bitcoin in perspective. So don’t worry so much.

SOURCE: http://www.wired.com/2015/01/price-bitcoin-doesnt-matter-right-now/

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Price will go to 0$ and will never rise again sob thats end.Then bitcoin will be available for free.After that we will use LTC or DRK.

LOL

Its almost dead as it compared to 1000$ at one stage

Only the people who believe in Bitcoin will buy more.

>

it will go to zero and will never come up and that the end then we have to use litecoin or darkcoin.Then litecoin prices will be dumped and then we use darkcoin and same goes on

Yeah definitely 200$ is not a valuable price as it was at 1000$ at one stage

why?

ADDED SOME MORE WORK

Added thread on Bitlanders: http://www.bitlanders.com/blogs/bitfreebiescom-get-free-bitcoins-official-thread/2526020

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