Lifeboat Foundation

by John Biggs — TechCrunch

Bitcoin mining is not a pretty business. It requires lots of specialized servers that are essentially unusable for normal computing and lots of cooling. But when you bring thousands of miners together in the same room, things really get ugly.

Motherboard has some fascinating footage of a bitcoin mine in Liaoning Province, China. The mine, set up in an unused factory, is a snakes’ nest of wires and high-powered fans, a sort of high-tech server farm that is so resource-intensive that it has to be optimized to a fault.
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The recently concluded Bitcoin & the Blockchain Summit in San Francisco on January 27 came up as a vivid source of both anxiety and inspiration. As speakers tackled Bitcoin’s technological limits and possible drawbacks that can be caused by impending regulations, Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopoulos lifted up everyone’s hope by discussing how bitcoins will eventually survive and flourish. He managed to do so with no graphics or presentations to prove his claim, just his utmost confidence and conviction that it really will no matter what.

On the currency being weak

There have been statements about Bitcoin’s technology surviving, but not the currency itself. Antonopoulos, however, argues that Bitcoin’s technology, network, and currency are interdependent with each other, which means that one element won’t work without the other. He said: “A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.”

On why Bitcoin works

Continue reading “Bitcoin’s Unique Features Lighten Up its Ambiguous Future” »

Pete Rizzo — CoinDesk

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss aren’t shy about issuing bold predictions for Gemini, their recently revealed bitcoin exchange project.

Calling it the “NASDAQ or Google of bitcoin”, the president and CEO, respectively, believe Gemini will be the fully regulated, fully compliant and fully banked institution the US bitcoin ecosystem needs to develop to its full potential.

In a new interview with CoinDesk, the brothers – prominent bitcoin investors and two of the largest-known holders of bitcoin – opened up about Gemini, discussing why they feel the exchange can become the market leader in what has been an increasingly active part of the bitcoin space.

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Quartz

Bitcoin’s ideological foe is becoming its saving grace.

To many Bitcoin enthusiasts, the decentralized currency’s allure was that it was designed to exist beyond the reach of government regulation. Free from central banks, its value wasn’t tied to government policies or geopolitical factors.

But now it seems the very regulation its creator or creators (since we don’t actually know who first minted Bitcoin) guarded against is what’s now buoying the cryptocurrency’s price. Read more

Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has had its moments of strength and weakness. The technology behind bitcoins, however, is a different story. While skeptics don’t expect a lot from Bitcoin as an alternative currency because of its volatility, they do have high hopes for the technological innovation that powers it, believing that it can be further developed to create something much powerful than Bitcoin itself.

To those who know Bitcoin as a great way of transacting online, but don’t completely understand its dynamics, it’s time to get acquainted with the cryptocurrency’s mathematical wonders that make anonymous, faster, and cheaper transactions of moving funds on the internet possible.

Most of us know that Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, but hashing serves a different function and purpose from that of digital signatures. Hashing actually provides proof that a message has not been changed because running the same hash always generates similar result.

Any message, regardless of the size can go into a hash function where the algorithm breaks it down, combines the parts, and “digests” it until it makes a fixed-length outcome called “digest”. However, a good hashing algorithm possesses some critical characteristics, in which the same message always produces the same result, as mentioned above, and it only works in one direction.

Continue reading “The Mathematical Wonders behind Bitcoin” »

by David Z Morris — Aeon

It is January 2014 and at least 400 people are packed into a conference hall in Miami Beach. High-profile journalists stand against the walls. Powerful venture capitalists crouch in the aisles. Banking and finance gurus crane their necks from the back of the room. They’re waiting for one of the most anticipated presentations of the 2014 North American Bitcoin Conference. A massive surge in interest from the media has just pushed the price of a single Bitcoin to around $900, up nearly 800 per cent in three months. Bitcoin Miami is the largest ever conference of its kind. In this moment, the possibilities for Bitcoin seem limitless.

What appears to be a teenage boy mounts the stage. The crowd goes quiet. In fact, Vitalik Buterin – all acne-splotched face, spidery fingers and shining eyes – is just a few days shy of 20. He surveys the audience nervously for a moment, then kicks off his presentation by lauding the benefits of the Bitcoin payment network – its speed, security, economy and autonomy.

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Armstrong and the Winklevoss twins have promising visions in securing Bitcoin exchange.

Bitcoin exchange Coinbase has brought innovation to the next level by opening the first ever licensed US Bitcoin exchange. Backed by $106 million from the New York Stock Exchange, banks, and venture-capital firms, Coinbase’s newly launched US exchange, said to be named Lunar, will provide greater security features; so as not to repeat the mistakes of Mt. Gox and Bitstamp, the former of which declared bankruptcy last year while the latter has sustained hacking attacks and is now back in the game.

Coinbase has already acquired licenses from 50% of the states in the country, which includes New York. The remaining 50% is still in the works and is necessary to complete to be able to provide full nationwide services. Also, Coinbase does not only look at expanding nationwide, it also looks at expanding worldwide in offering their Bitcoin-related services.

Of this plan, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said: “Our goal is to become the world’s largest exchange”.

Continue reading “Coinbase releases first licensed US Bitcoin exchange; Winklevoss twins gear up to do the same” »

Quoted: “Looking at the misinformation, speculation, and confusion about bitcoin and blockchain technology: it’s the same conversation we had 20 years ago with the Internet. In the early 90s, the only way you could check your email was through a command line prompt. Then, web browsers were developed, small websites were created, and…well, as you can see, a lot has changed since. It’s looking as though bitcoin is just the first app to use blockchain technology, just like email was the first app to use the Internet.”

Read the article, and learn about the January 27, 2015, conference, here > http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/01/bitcoin-is-just-the-first-a…ology.html

Quoted: “We’re not there yet, but in less than 10 years, I believe that the technology behind bitcoin will transform the accounting profession entirely. What is this technology? The blockchain. Let me set the scene by going over a few bitcoin related concepts before explaining why I think that the accounting profession will undergo a major disruption in the coming years.”

Read the article here > http://www.techvibes.com/blog/how-technology-behind-bitcoin-…;01-22