http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-moran/bitcoin-bowl-and-the-disruption-of-fiat-currency_b_6380438.htmlThe Bitcoin Bowl is a perfect end to 2014, the year that "the future" happened. After all, 2014 was the year in which American retailers started selling 3D printers, the U.S. Navy began mounting lasers on its ships, humans landed robots on Mars and an asteroid, analysts began asking whether home based solar power could kill off American utilities, and state-sponsored hackers raided Hollywood. It's only appropriate that we'd end the year with the Bitcoin Bowl. And it's quintessentially American to celebrate a new and disruptive technology with a televised sporting event from a massive, air conditioned arena in the subtropics.
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http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/25/bitcoin-burning-man-and-the-gifting-economy/Bitcoin was a terrible investment this year, but that hasn’t stopped non-profits from asking for them anyway. Wikipedia, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Khan Academy and now even Burning Man will take those bitcoins off your hands in the form of a tax-deductible donation. While this won’t get you a golden ticket into the actual festival, gifting something without expecting anything in return is part of the spirit and culture of the annual festival in the Nevada desert.
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http://time.com/money/3645842/bitcoin-predictions-2014/Okay, you’d expect bitcoin fans to be a little overenthusiastic about the currency’s future, but some professional analysts also published extremely inflated predictions. In a December 2013 report, analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch assessed bitcoin’s maximum fair market value at $1,300 per coin, which at the time was framed as a cautionary estimate. (That number looks silly now, but the prediction appears to be for the life of bitcoin, so it may still come to pass.)
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http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/12/bitcoin-is-a-digital-money-ecosystem.htmlBitcoin is a collection of concepts and technologies that form the basis of a digital money ecosystem. Units of currency called bitcoins are used to store and transmit value among participants in the bitcoin network. Bitcoin users communicate with each other using the bitcoin protocol, primarily via the Internet; although, other transport networks can also be used. The bitcoin protocol stack, available as open source software, can be run on a wide range of computing devices, including laptops and smartphones, making the technology easily accessible.
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http://newsbtc.com/2014/12/24/bitcoin-partners-childfund-save-children/With their new BitPay donation page, ChildFund will enable donors to use bitcoin to help young people and their communities… 2014 has been a watershed year for bitcoin’s charitable uses. As this year closes and a new year begins, we hope that bitcoin users donate to ChildFund International and other groups making a global impact. There are 400 million children in the world currently being subjected to impoverished conditions, and ChildFund is aiming to do what it can for all of them. The organization currently helps children in 30 countries on four different continents, including North and South America, Asia and Africa.
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/12/24/hype-fades-bitcoin-puts-down-roots/9kFWD62AsJDYIbXz9Xc5sK/story.htmlEveryone is looking at this as the equivalent of the early days of the Web,” Allaire told me. He’s sure that in a few years, people will be spending Bitcoins as freely as we now count out $20 bills, or transmit text messages. With Bitcoin, buying and selling could become friction-free. Remember when personal messages needed a postage stamp and an envelope, and took three days to get there? Our financial transaction systems today are hardly better. When you buy something with a credit card, the merchant pays a fee of about 3 percent — which gets passed on to customers — and waits days to get his money. Or how about sending $500 to a relative in Acapulco? The first $7 of it goes to the Western Union money transfer service.
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http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/retail/at-espn-bitcoin-bowl-push-is-on-for-football-8212-and-cryptocurrency/2211278There are so many benefits to bitcoin," says Sonny Flynn, business manager at Alligator Attraction, home of Chompers the star reptile, who, it should be noted, doesn't care how you pay for his snacks. "It's hack-proof. There's no transaction fee. It's almost as if you are paying in cash." With the ESPN Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl at Tropicana Field on Friday, and thousands of football fans in town to watch the tilt between North Carolina State and Central Florida, some 100 bay area merchants will celebrate by accepting bitcoin — paperless digital currency that can be used in lieu of cash, checks or credit cards. (See our sidebar for a bitcoin tutorial.
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http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2014/12/60190-hong-kong-based-bitcoin-platform-kbbex-partners-taiwanese-bitcoin-platform-bitoex/Bitcoins global markets have entered into a brand new financial era. Bitcoin-related financial tools and its derivatives have attracted billions of investment funds from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The existing offline transactions (OTC) markets are insufficient to cope with the demand of our worldwide customers,” stated Patrick Lam, CEO of KBBEX. “It drives us to open a bitcoin exchange platform. KBBEX plans to launch its China platform whenever users can use onshore Renminbi to perform transactions in early 2015. Beside the business in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, we also have our business partners in Switzerland and Japan. We will keep working hard for expanding our network. We strongly believe that globalization is one of the keys to enhancing the development of bitcoin industry.
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http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-predictions-2014-pundits-fared/Whether they prognosticated over the entrails of dead animals or defunct bitcoin exchanges, actual data or emotional investment, the results were – perhaps unsurprisingly – often far off the mark. A large majority of bitcoin fortune-tellers focused on whether the price would go stratospheric or tank, but other more thoughtful commentators looked at other aspects of the digital currency ecosystem, such as venture investment, politics, or emergence of alternative currencies. Let's look at what the pundits predicted for bitcoin in 2014.
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http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/22/bitcoin-entrepreneur-sentenced-jailIn September, he pled guilty to the charges of money laundering, and asked forgiveness from the trial judge. “I screwed up,” he said. “The bitcoin community, they’re scared and there is no money laundering going on any more. They’re terrified. Bitcoin is my baby, it’s my whole world and my whole life, it’s what I was put on this Earth to do. I need to be out there. If your honor grants me that, I can be out there in the world, making sure that people don’t do the same stupid things that I did. Shrem was accused of running a scheme with Floridian Robert Faiella to sell bitcoins anonymously to users of the Silk Road website.
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http://www.cnbc.com/id/102288653 Around the world, mainstream banks afraid of fines and regulatory controls are shutting out firms that provide bitcoin-related services or even associate with the cryptocurrency. Any bitcoin business can tell you how hard it is to set up a U.K. bank account. A fully regulated bitcoin fund owned by Jersey-based Global Advisors has claimed that HSBC shut down its account recently. Director Danny Masters told CNBC that the excuse given was that his firm no longer met the "risk reward" profile of the bank and was a "potential money laundering risk."
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http://qz.com/316898/the-gold-rush-days-of-bitcoin-mining-are-over-and-not-because-of-the-price/For all the volatility in bitcoin pricing, 2014 may be looked back on as a year when bitcoin began to move past the proof-of-concept stage and toward a mainstream market. Some 6.6 million bitcoin wallets have been set up so far this year, according to Coindesk, a fivefold increase over 2013. And 75,000 merchants now accept the digital currency, including giants like Dell, Expedia and Overstock. But one area of the bitcoin economy is maturing much faster than the others, to the point where profits are increasingly harder to come by and consolidation and diversification are already happening: the mining of bitcoins. For years, bitcoins were mined largely by a far-flung network of desktop hobbyists. But increasingly, a smaller group of companies building large data centers set up for the sole task of mining new bitcoins.
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http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-crowdfunding-in-china-is-catching-on/Bitcoin crowdfunding in China What is most remarkable about this forum, however, is its fundraising process. On 16th November, Wu posted a proposal to raise 85 BTC in a WeChat group called 'Aisi Shuzi Huobi' (爱思数字货币 or 'love thinking digital currency'). Anyone who sent a bitcoin to a designated address would own 1/100 of the site, which had already already been online for two weeks by that point. Wu personally owns 15 shares and is responsible for the website’s day-to-day maintenance. Within hours, the fundraising target was reached. This is just one example of the newly-emerging Chinese bitcoin crowdfunding scene. A quick scan on the Internet reveals about a dozen such projects over the past year – with most taking place in the mining sector.
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http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-apps-bitcoin-speculators-need/What can we learn from looking at the system as a whole? 1.Without speculators, there would be no bitcoin. They provide miners, applications, and other participants with liquidity. If you have bought or sold bitcoin as a speculator, you have helped enable the emerging ecosystem of bitcoin apps. While speculative bubbles will swell and pop from time to time (see: 2013-2014), this does not change the underlying value of the network or the possibilities for the protocol. 2.Bitcoin-enabled apps and services are the main driver of underlying demand for bitcoin, and as a result, the main driver of the price of bitcoin, since the supply of bitcoin is fixed. But it will take time to see the effect. It is much faster and easier to place a buy/sell order than it is to build a bitcoin-enabled service. Still, 2014 saw the emergence of the first wave of these apps, enabled in large part by services like Chain, which significantly reduce the cycle time for building them. As these services grow, and more services come online, the price of bitcoin will steadily rise.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/12/21/why-bitcoins-erratic-price-doesnt-matter/Bitcoin is much more than just a currency. Investors from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are now pouring money and expertise into what they view as an adaptable technology platform. Software developers anywhere can use bitcoin’s open-source code to create specialized applications that let businesses undertake commercial exchanges without using middlemen. These applications threaten to make redundant many services provided by banks, foreign-exchange houses, escrow agents, clearing houses, notaries public and even lawyers.
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http://www.cnbc.com/id/102281056 The superintendent's office also eliminated the proposed requirement that licensees be required to obtain the addresses and transaction data for all parties to a transaction. Instead, relevant firms will only need to obtain that information for their own customers or account holders and, only whenever possible, for counterparties. Lawsky also eased up on rules for record-keeping, shortening the required time from 10 to seven years for firms to maintain transaction information.
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http://www.coindesk.com/major-japanese-rewards-scheme-now-pays-bitcoin/Points for tasks Customers using the site can earn a variety of rewards by performing tasks like shopping online, filling out consumer surveys and signing up for services. Rewards include points that can be spent at over 20 retailers and online or mobile services like iTunes, Amazon, LINE, and Rakuten, along with Suica and T-Point and ANA air miles. PointTown is currently offering rewards of 0.0211 BTC for 10,000 reward points up to 0.2422 BTC for 200,000 p0ints. A message onPointTown's explanatory page introduces customers to the concept of digital currency, explaining that it is not processed by banks and is most commonly used for remittances and cross-border transactions. The company also issues a warning that bitcoin's price can be volatile and that users should consider the risks.
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http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/18/btxdeals/The Bitcoin marketplace is the work of U.K. entrepreneur Nick Boardman, who was an early mover in electronics ecommerce in the U.K., founding the Rock brand laptop and e-tail business back in the 1990s. He’s now jumping on the early adopter Bitcoin bandwagon. Fancy a private charter from Biggin Hill in the U.K. to Nice in France? That’ll be just over 78 BTC at current exchange rates. What about a Dell 24 inch display? A mere 0.9437 BTC. How about a golf trolley for your clubs? 1.9714 BTC. True, there isn’t a whole let else on BTXDeals to spend your hard-mined BTC on as yet, with only around 100 SKUs at this nascent stage because they’ve all had to be manually uploaded by the company. But it’s expecting marketplace inventory to quickly step up in volume (if not variety) as vendors get access to a bulk upload tool.
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http://www.coindesk.com/98-5-torrentlocker-victims-refuse-pay-bitcoin-ransom/TorrentLocker (aka Win32 or Filecoder.DI) is a strain of bitcoin ransomware that works by encrypting users' files. Victims are requested to pay up to 4 BTC to decrypt their documents, though this figure can vary. The report, authored by Marc-Etienne M Léveillé for security firm ESET, found that only 570 out of 39,760 infected systems were given access to decryption software upon paying the full ransom. "In other words 1.44% of all infected users we have identified have paid the ransom to the cybercriminals," Léveillé writes, adding: "There are also 20 pages showing that bitcoins were sent but access to the decryption software wasn’t given because the full amount wasn’t paid."
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http://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-worse-investment-rouble-2014-292851The Currency That's Dropped Further Than the Rouble This Year: Bitcoin. According to Andrew Davies, a Newsweek business writer, it isn’t highly surprising the cryptocurrency has hit a rough patch as the novelty of bitcoin makes it highly sensitive to changes in the trading climate. “Right now people are feeling very worried and so are dumping holdings that they fear might fall sharply in value,” Davies says. “Bitcoin is a prime candidate for this treatment because its value depends always on what I call ‘the greater fool’ - i.e. someone who is willing to pay even more for it than you did in order to take it off your hands and give you a profit.” Davies adds.
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