TNW - Stefan Molyneux - Money, Power and Politics The Cryptocurrency Revolution. Everything We Are Told About Deflation Is A Lie. “The European Central Bank has given its strongest signal yet that it is prepared to embrace quantitative easing to prevent the euro zone from sliding into deflation or even a prolonged period of low inflation.”- ‘Draghi strengthens QE signal’, Financial Times, April 4, 2014.
Yes, heaven protect Europe’s embattled citizens and savers from a prolonged period of low inflation. How could they possibly survive it ? If history is any guide, probably quite well. As Chris Casey points out in his essay ‘Deflating the deflation myth’, the American economy during the 19th Century twice experienced deflationary periods of roughly 50 percent: Source: McCusker, John J. This during a period of “sustained and significant economic growth”. In their research article ‘Deflation and Depression: Is There an Empirical Link?’ In his 2008 essay ‘Deflation and Liberty’, Jörg Guido Hülsmann writes as follows: Let us be more explicit. Messrs Yellen, Draghi et al should be careful what they wish for.
How I created my own bitcoin-like currency—Fast Money—Commentary. Creating a market for my coin intrigued me, so I dusted off my Econ 101 book.
Buried in one chapter was a reference to Friedrich Hayek's book, "The Denationalization of Money," in which he advocated for the creation of privately-issued currencies. Hayek theorized that people would gravitate to the most stable currency and, in a flash of brilliance or insanity, I had my answer — create my very own central bank! If I could create the currency, I would be able to sell it on a digital-currency exchange and use the proceeds to place buy orders for the coin. I thought that by creating buy orders and slowly selling coins, I could establish a stable growth pattern. Bitcoin Exits Mt. Gox and Heads to Wall Street. No one can easily dismiss the significance of the spectacular bankruptcy of Tokyo-based Mt.
Gox, once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange and a company that helped build the virtual currency. Yet Mt. Gox’s half-billion-dollar loss had a remarkably small effect on the global Bitcoin economy. The collapse, for instance, did not seem to shake the Bitcoin faithful. “I think Bitcoin is interesting because it forces people to rethink what money is and how value moves around the world,” declares Barry Silbert, CEO of New York–based SecondMarket, which is planning to launch a Bitcoin exchange. Security At MtGox Much Worse Than Originally Imagined. Revelations of the mismanagement at the now-bankrupt Japanese bitcoin exchange keep surfacing.
When laying the puzzle as pieces keep coming, it becomes obvious that security at the billion-dollar vault was practically nonexistent. This adds to previous insights of economic and/or fraudulent mismanagement. An interesting blog post from Mark Karpeles resurfaced recently. Mr. Karpeles was the CEO of the now-imploded Japanese bitcoin exchange MtGox, nicknamed “Empty Gox” for its previously-rumored insolvency. Jacob Appelbaum, the world-class security researcher and one of the spokespeople for the anonymity service Tor that has saved many activist lives worldwide, tweeted sarcastically about the article: I think this is perhaps the most amusing technical blog post I've read in ages: Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) February 28, 2014 It gets worse. (UPDATE: As some have pointed out, this is no definite proof said home-cooked SSH server written in PHP was used as production code on Gox.
And Gox? Coinbase's Fred Ehrsam says you're thinking about Bitcoin all wrong. AUSTIN—Bitcoin is definitely a big topic of conversation here at South by Southwest, especially after Newsweek’s cover story on the identity of the mysterious Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto.
In fact, at Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam’s Monday discussion at SXSW, the first question interviewer Rolfe Winkler of the Wall Street Journal asked was “Is Dorian Nakamoto really Satoshi Nakamoto?” Ehrsam doesn’t know, but he kind of doubts it. But then when Winkler asked if it even matters, the answer was an emphatic no. And that, says Ehrsam, is the beauty of open source. That little matter out of the way, it was time to demystify Bitcoin for the masses—or at least try. Looking at Bitcoin as a network, you can make analogies to the early days of the Internet.
It’s also not accurate, Ehrsam continued, to speak of Bitcoin transactions as anonymous. “What if cash was invented today?” Roger Ver on Blockchain.info's Past, Present and Future. Last week, I sat down with Roger Ver for an exclusive, hour-long interview where we discussed his company Blockchain, his team, and his vision for the bitcoin industry.
We first connected after Ver came across a blog post of mine in which I dismissed Blockchain as “too understaffed and undercapitalized” to compete with the likes of Coinbase and Circle, long-term. The man, who many have started to refer to as “Bitcoin Jesus”, emailed me with some objections and let me know that Blockchain had tripled the size of its team in just over a month while continuing to lead the industry in web traffic, wallet users and bitcoins stored. Bitcoin: The Cryptoanarchists’ Answer to Cash.
Illustration: Harry Campbell There's nothing like a dollar bill for paying a stripper.
Anonymous, yet highly personal—wherever you use it, that dollar will fit the occasion. Should banks really be afraid of bitcoin and bitcoin startups? In addition to acquiring some bitcoin of my own, I recently started to invest in bitcoin related startups.
Since I’ve invested in a lot of tech startups over the years, and bitcoin startups are hot, this isn’t unusual. But something unusual is happening with bitcoin startups that is different from what I’ve seen in other tech startups. Namely, existing financial institutions (i.e. banks) in the USA are showing a hostility toward bitcoin startups in a way that I certainly haven’t seen in the twenty years I’ve been involved with hi-tech startups. Why I Lost Faith In Bitcoin As A Money Transfer Protocol. As 2013 came to an end, many reflected on last year’s biggest tech news — and Bitcoin was a serious contender.
But the main question remains: why are people interested in Bitcoin? This whole debate reappeared when Charlie Stross stated that “Bitcoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind — to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.” Now is the time to gamble on bitcoin - Quartz. If you’ve got money you can afford to lose and a penchant for gambling, there’s no better time than now to plow that cash into bitcoin, the alternative currency that plunged in value over the past two days after hitting astronomical highs.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that, in the long run, bitcoin is a viable alternative currency. Many sophisticated thinkers have, at great length, established that it isn’t. Michael Connell on writing the world’s first bitcoin comedy routine. “Loved your jokes. Here’s some bitcoins.” That short email was where it all started. Some stranger was sending me some bitcoin because he liked my routine about fiat currency. It was a short stand-up piece that I’d performed on an Australian TV show and then posted on YouTube. I bashed fiat pretty hard and it must’ve hit a chord because I got quite a few emails. Bitcoin Is Evil. Paul Kemp-Robertson: Bitcoin. Sweat. Tide. Meet the future of branded currency. The Bitcoin Meltdown Has Begun. Clark Moody Bitcoin was above $1,200 a few weeks ago. Today it's worth around $610. In Bitcoin World, a week can be the equivalent of a decade.
At the start of December, Bitcoin topped out at over $1,200 as e-currency evangelists trumpeted the endless possibilities to be unleashed, comparing it to the breakthroughs not achieved since the start of the internet revolution. Bitcoiners claimed market disruption would bring credit card companies and payment platforms such as Western Union to their knees. And from January to December 2013, markets obeyed with prices rising over 8,000 percent. Flawed DNA Since inception, Bitcoin has had a flawed DNA. For currency to be adopted as a medium of exchange there has to be trust in the ability to honor the underlying obligation and the ability for central banking policy to control inflation. Who’s Who in Bitcoin: Alt-Coin Advocate Dennison Bertram. Don’t be fooled by the US $100-plus exchange rate. Bitcoin is an experiment—a work in progress.
Even the core developers of Bitcoin admit that it is still in beta. After all, the concept of a peer-to-peer digital currency was introduced only a little more than four years ago, and we still have much to learn about how it works, what its vulnerabilities are, and what its true potential is. Bitcoin needs to scale by a factor of 1000 to compete with Visa. Here’s how to do it. Mike Hearn (Photo by Andy Artz) At the heart of Bitcoin is the blockchain, a global, shared record of every Bitcoin transaction that has ever occurred. It gets its name from the fact that every 10 minutes, on average, the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network adds a new "block" containing records of recent transactions.
The blockchain is shared among the numerous computers that participate in the transaction-clearing process known as "mining. " To avoid overloading those computers, Bitcoin software currently limits each block to one megabyte in size. The result: right now, the Bitcoin network is only capable of processing around 7 transactions per second. Bitcoin is poised to shake the world – are you paying attention? Bitcoin: an amazing story involving aliens, gold, and the ancient currency of Rai Stones. If you thought technology was already disruptive enough, here’s the news. We’re just getting started. The Roman Rallying sequence in the Top Gear Middle East Special is an exhilarating example of the old world rubbing up against the new.
As Jeremy Clarkson and Co charge around the sacred Jordan hippodrome in their battered sports cars, they inevitably start to kick up a lot of ancient dust. Bitcoin is going mainstream. Here is why cypherpunks shouldn’t worry. Imagining a world without the dollar. Imagine you woke up tomorrow and the dollar had vanished. Yes, you can buy drugs with bitcoins. You can also buy them with cash. (1) Bitcoin: How would you explain to a five-year-old what bitcoin is. George Ought to Help - Transferring Bitcoins to a secure offline wallet using Armory. Bitcoin Volatility: There are no bubbles, only tsunamis to come. Let's have some fun with shameless speculation; where do you see the bitcoin exchange rate going in the near future? Anyone attempt to explain why the exchange rate for coins has increased so much recently? Money Laundering Is Financial Thoughtcrime. When people hear the term money laundering today, they envision the most evil of acts, in which gangsters process satchels of cash through a fabricated company to show it as business revenue.
Words and semantics are very important in this post-9/11 world, and as far as creating a negative connotation, that parlance has been extremely effective. At its essence, money laundering is the act of concealing money or assets from the state to prevent its loss through taxation, judgment enforcement, or blatant confiscation. However, as the late J. Orlin Grabbe wrote: "Anyone who has studied the evolution of money-laundering statutes in the U.S. and elsewhere will realize that the 'crime' of money laundering boils down to a single, basic prohibited act: Doing something and not telling the government about it. " Protecting one's wealth is interwoven with the history of trade and banking which has existed since the dawn of commerce. My Answer To A VC's Bitcoin Question.
Bitcoin: Understated benefits and overstated risks - The Hill's Congress Blog. The Federal Government's Reaction To Bitcoin Is An Acknowledgement Of The Dollar's Vulnerability. FT-thoughts. On bitcoin data spam, and evil data. Q&A: Bitcoin developer talks regulation, open source and the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto. Will Bitcoin Spark a Wave as Big as the Internet? - Michael Terpin. In Share It's not often that you run across something that Bill Gates calls "a techno tour de force" and Warren Buffet's partner Charley Munger calls "rat poison" -- in the same interview. Imagine a financial service that blows away Paypal for speed and efficiency in transferring funds (at a third of the fees if exchanged into dollars -- and generally no fees if purchasing goods or services directly). Imagine a technology that solves the long-standing ecommerce problem of micro-transactions by being divisible down to eight decimal points, and that has no problems with chargebacks or fraud (like cash, it can be stolen, but unlike cash it's then rendered worthless).
Imagine an asset that's at once currency and commodity, that even though it's digital can be mined like gold, and that has risen in value more than 10x since January and is up more than two million percent (this is not a typo -- it went from half a penny to today's valuation of $122.93) in the past three years. BTC Global S.A. Investigations and observations - Home - Hyper-monetization: Questioning the "Bitcoin bubble" bubble. Bitcoin 2013: On the verge of something or nothing. Game over, Bitcoin. Long live human-based currencies! Why won’t Bitcoin die? The Top 3 Things I Learned at the Bitcoin Conference. fZyX3Od.jpg 1,269×964 pixels. 78 percent of Bitcoin currency stashed under digital mattress, study finds. Liberty City Ventures Launches $15 Million Fund To Invest In Bitcoin And Other Digital Currency Startups. BLOGDIAL » Blog Archive » Bitcoin is not a threat, it is a boon. This 1998 Paul Krugman Column Perfectly Explains The Design Flaw At The Heart Of Bitcoin.
The bitcoin bubble explained: Understanding the mathematics of the inevitable bitcoin crash. Pay Another Way: Bitcoin. What's Your Bitcoin Strategy? WordPress Now Accepts Bitcoin Across The Planet. An Illustrated History Of Bitcoin Crashes. Bitcoin, Ven and the End of Currency. Bitcoin buzz stays high — even after bubble. Bitcoin investing: I made $152 by speculating in digital currency. Take that, suckers.
One good reason to accept Bitcoins: It screws credit card companies. The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Price Breaks All Time High. Lightning Fast, Dirt Cheap: Bitcoin Shows What Banking Could Be. Bitcoin 2012 London: Mike Hearn. Bitcoin 2012 London: Juri Mattila (legal aspects of Bitcoin) Everything no one wants me to say about Bitcoin. Why the Fed is more likely to adopt bitcoin technology than kill it off. The Antisocial Network of Bitcoins. Beyond The Bitcoin Bubble. Bitcoin is money, Bitcoin is a bubble.
As Bitcoin virtual currency soars, bubble fears do too. Is Bitcoin Legal. These Startups Are Betting Everything on Bitcoin. Biting into the Bitcoin. Bitcoin: The Encryption Standard. Bitcoin Really Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State. Dan Kaminsky Highlights Flaws Bitcoin. Exchange rates: Inside the Bitcoin economy. What Bitcoin Is Teaching Us. As Big Investors Emerge, Bitcoin Gets Ready for Its Close-Up. » The bitcoin bubble: Why speculative bitcoin buy-ins now point to a disastrous bitcoin crash Alex Jones. BTC-TC: BTC Trading Corp. The Logic Problems That Will Eventually Pop the Bitcoin Bubble. Will Bitcoin Be A Facebook Or A Myspace? Either Way, It's A Revolution.
Building a Better Bitcoin - Justin Fox. Bitcoin's Bottom Billion - Why the Developing World May Be Bitcoin's Biggest Customer - The Nyaruka Blog. Bitcoin's Biggest Problem: It's a Den of Thieves - The Nyaruka Blog. Everything no one wants me to say about Bitcoin. Seeking Alpha. Bitcoin: Alive and here to stay? Or slowly fading away? Are Bitcoins Safer Than Cyprus? Welcome to Forbes. The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency — Money & Banking.