The Future of Money Timeline. Bitcoin me: How to make your own digital currency. By Alex Hern, The Guardian Posted: 01/07/2014 07:53:40 AM PST1 Comment|Updated: 3 months ago Bitcoin may have become a thing of fascination for the media very recently, but the digital currency actually celebrated its fifth birthday this month as its value hovered at around $1,000 per coin.
Bitcoin me: How to make your own digital currency. How To Create Your Own Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Mania: How To Create Your Very Own Crypto-Currency, For Free. Bitcoin Mania: How To Create Your Very Own Crypto-Currency, For Free. Making Your Own Cryptocurrency Has Never Been Easier. Image via flickr/BTC Keychain This fall, Bitcoin became the toast of the Beltway.
Far from its cryptoanarchist origins, US Senators, encouraged by Bitcoin investment and currency speculation, praised the fledgling cryptocurrency as a technological breakthrough. The government was already well behind the techno-evolutionary curve. For several years, amateur and professional entrepreneurs have been testing the various ways Bitcoin can be used.
One such innovation is Mastercoin, a programmable layer on the Bitcoin block chain that recently announced $5 million (4,700 BTC) in investor funding. So, what is a "programmable layer of Bitcoin? " I recently spoke to Dominik Zynis, head of communications for the Mastercoin Foundation, who explained other potential uses of the service. Motherboard: What was the initial idea behind Mastercoin? Bitcoin me: How to make your own digital currency. Bitcoin may have become a thing of fascination for the media very recently, but the digital currency actually celebrated its fifth birthday this month as its value hovered at around $1,000 per coin.
Transhumanism and the History of BitCoin. Peter Rothman January 8, 2014 What has Transhumanism got to do with the history of BitCoin?
Actually quite a bit. One of the leading developers the core mathematical ideas that make BitCoin possible today is Dr. Ralph Merkle. Dr. Nine Bitcoin alternatives for future currency investments. Bitcoin’s recent meteoric rise in value to over $1,000 has shone the spotlight on alternative currencies, but bitcoin is not the only new digital currency vying for relevancy in 2013.
Like bitcoins most of these currencies are mined by computers solving hard mathematical problems. The "coins" do not exist physically, of course, as the currencies are virtual existing only as computer files. As they are based on peer-to-peer protocols, no one computer controls the currencies, but networks keep track of all transactions made using these digital currencies, but they do not know what the coins were actually used for – just the ID of the computer "wallet" they move from and to. Now Accepting Bitcoin: Everything Ever. Photo via Twitter/@ClubAlpaca Here are some things you can now do with bitcoin that you couldn't a few weeks ago: Put yourself through college; buy a $5 foot-long (or I should say 0.04 BTC foot-long) sub; help elect a congressman; get your teeth cleaned; do your holiday shopping; lift your breasts; go to space.
Etc, etc. Bitcoin Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About the Future of Money. Illustration: WIRED The price of a bitcoin topped $900 last week, an enormous surge in value that arrived amidst Congressional hearings where top U.S. financial regulators took a surprisingly rosy view of digital currency.
In Bitcoin's Orbit: Rival Virtual Currencies Vie for Acceptance. For many people, bitcoin seems like something from the day after tomorrow.
For Lawrence Blankenship, it’s already a thing of the past. A software engineer from Springfield, Mo., Mr. Blankenship is putting his money on PeerCoin, one of the biggest of the virtual currencies that are being promoted as alternatives to bitcoin. With mounting interest from prominent investors and growing acceptance from regulators, bitcoin — either the new gold or the next Dutch tulip craze, depending on who is being asked — is at the center of the virtual money universe.
Yet there are dozens of digital alternatives, like PeerCoin, Litecoin and anoncoin, whose backers point to advantages they say their currency has over bitcoin. PeerCoin, according to Mr. Render Unto Caesar, but Who Backs the Bitcoin? Reed Saxon/Associated PressRichard Branson accepts bitcoin as payment on flights on Virgin Galactic, which offers commercial spaceflights.
How can bitcoin be anything but a passing fad? It seems you can’t open a newspaper or read a website these days without hearing about the super-yet-mysterious virtual currency known as bitcoin. Everyone’s talking about it. Here’s who (probably) did that massive $150,000,000 Bitcoin transaction. One of the unique things about Bitcoin is that every transaction on its network is publicly available for anyone to examine.
Any time a user sends a payment to another user, that transaction is reflected in the "blockchain," a global, permanent ledger of Bitcoin transactions. You can examine every Bitcoin transaction that has ever occurred at a site called blockchain.info. And that site says that a truly massive Bitcoin transaction occurred yesterday: Those long strings of seemingly random letters and numbers are Bitcoin addresses.
Each is associated with a secret encryption key that allows the owner of that address to transmit the bitcoins to another address. Bitcoin demand in China spurs BTCChina exchange to rapid growth. eSports company settles bitcoin botnet case for $1 million. Online gaming company E-Sports Entertainment has agreed to pay $1 million to the State of New Jersey to resolve a bitcoin mining case. The settlement is designed to resolve allegations that the company infected thousands of PCs with malicious code. According to a formal complaint, the state alleges that the code "enabled E-Sports to monitor users' computers even when they were not signed onto or using E-Sports services.
E-Sports also created a botnet -- a network of computers running malicious software -- using its customers' computers. "The botnet used the computing resources of users' computers to mine for bitcoins, a virtual form of currency. It is estimated that, during a single two-week period, E-Sports took control of approximately 14,000 computers in New Jersey and across the nation, and generated approximately $3,500 (around £2,60) by mining for bitcoins. " Here's How You'll Make and Save Money in the Future. I've actually thought about the automated future a lot (I'm setting a story in a post-scarcity society, largely due to automation... and mining the sun), and I use Wall-E for examples.
Wall-E is, by the way, one of the best movies about future economics EVER - its all there under the surface of the cute robot love story. OK - automation (and other factors) reduces labor/production costs to zero, and in the transition almost the entire human population is out of work. However, it is also faced with goods and services that cost nothing to produce. At this point we diverge. Robo-consumers just don't make sense, there's no reason to increase production costs to create or pay robots just to buy things - it doesn't satisfy anyone's' needs - producer, consumer, or even the robots. PayPal tests mobile payments using your face for verification. PayPal is rolling out a new trial for British consumers to see if they really can leave their wallets at home.
Recently kicking off in London borough Richmond upon Thames, the test includes 12 different merchants set up to accept PayPal payments, according to the company. Using the PayPal app for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone, shoppers can see nearby participating merchants highlighted on their mobile phones. They can then "check into" a certain store by clicking on its name and pay for an item by sliding an animated pin down the screen. The person's name and photo then pops up on the store's payment system.