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JPMorgan Chase Building Bitcoin-Killer

By BRIAN COHEN

Thanksgiving day, while many of us were eating turkey, The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published JPMorgan Chase’s (Chase) patent application 20130317984, “Method and system for processing internet payments using the electronic funds transfer network.” The application was filed with the USPTO on August 5th, 2013.

Without mentioning Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies at all for that matter, Chase appears to be building a competing centralized network to Bitcoin. The application defines the problems that legacy banking has with online transactions and then provides a detailed explanation how Chase will address these problems with this new technology. The application states that Chase’s technology is a “new paradigm.” Moreover that it permits the creation of “virtual cash” (also referred to as “web cash”) with a “real-time digital exchange of value.”

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PayPal president David Marcus: Bitcoin is good, NFC is bad

The leader of the payments business looks to the future and says Bitcoin is a good idea — but not yet actually a currency. Tap-to-pay, meanwhile, is a dud.

PARIS — Online payments will look completely different in the next decade, and Bitcoin has a better chance at revolutionizing commerce than the NFC tap-to-pay technology, PayPal President David Marcus predicted Tuesday.

“I really like Bitcoin. I own bitcoins,” Marcus said at the LeWeb conference here. However, he believes people today don’t correctly understand what bitcoins actually are, and he’s not yet ready to let people link their bitcoin wallets with their PayPal accounts.

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First Tesla Model S Purchased With Bitcoin

If you’re not familiar with Bitcoin, you might want to change that. The electronic cryptocurrency is rapidly gaining acceptance around the globe, with many businesses–and even one university–accepting Bitcoins as readily as dollars. Now, a Tesla Model S has been purchased directly with Bitcoin.

The car, sold for an undisclosed sum of Bitcoin by Lamborghini Newport Beach in Costa Mesa, California, appears to have been a lightly used model, if only because it wasn’t sold directly by Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA].

ALSO SEE: 2015 Ford Mustang Preview: Official Photos And Video

Announced on the dealer’s blog, the sale marks the first Bitcoin purchase for Lamborghini Newport Beach–but it won’t likely be the last.

“Lamborghini Newport Beach is proud to announce that we are fully capable of accepting Bitcoin as legal tender for vehicles. We are excited to opening the door to this new currency,” the company wrote on its blog.

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Kentucky police chief to be paid in Bitcoin

December 4, 2013

Vicco, Ky., is about as small town as it gets, with a population that hovers around 330 people. That does not appear to have kept its residents, namely Police Chief Tony Vaughn, in the dark when it comes to Internet trends and emerging crypto-currencies.

The city commission on Monday approved a measure that would allow Vaughn to receive his salary entirely in Bitcoin, an alleged first in the US and yet another story bolstering the reputation of the unregulated virtual currency as a payment method that will one day, supporters hope, stabilize and become commonplace.

Vaughn’s pay, still set in US dollars, will receive standard federal and state deductions, the Hazard Herald reports, before being converted into Bitcoin based on current trading values at the time of pay and deposited into an account held by Vicco. The Bitcoins will then be transferred to Vaughn’s personal account. The city expects to be able to pay Vaughn this way as early as this month.

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Virgin’s space passengers can pay with Bitcoin

Good news, future space travelers: Now you can enter the void without bringing your wallet.

U.K. business magnate Richard Branson announced Friday that his commercial space travel venture, Virgin Galactic, will allow customers to pay for their flights with the digital currency Bitcoin.

“Virgin Galactic is a company looking into the future, so is Bitcoin. So it makes sense we would offer Bitcoin as a way to pay for your journey to space.” Branson wrote in a blog post.

“A lot of the people who have joined Bitcoin are tech-minded people, as are many of our current future astronauts.”

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The secret Hong Kong facility that uses boiling goo to mine Bitcoins

By Rich McCormick on

A single bitcoin is now worth over $1,000, but the process of mining for the digital currency — in which people devote computing power to facilitate global Bitcoin transactions and secure the currency’s network — is growing increasingly expensive. Serious miners have started to build dedicated facilities for the sole purpose of Bitcoin mining. Journalist Xiaogang Cao visited one such center in Hong Kong, the “secret mining facility” of ASICMINER, reportedly located in a Kwai Chung industrial building.

The mine is the size of a shipping container, and filled with 1-meter-high glass tanks in which banks of blades are immersed in roiling liquid. Each tank can hold 92 blades; the blades themselves are kept at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius or below by “open bath immersion” technology. Open bath immersion cools computer components by submersing them in liquid with a particularly low boiling point. The heat the components generate mining for coins boils the liquid, causing it to turn gaseous, rise up to a condenser at the top of the tank, and fall once again, removing heat from the components in the process. The ASICMINER open bath immersion system was reportedly built by Hong Kong-based company Allied Control, and operates at a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.02, which “would make it one of the most efficient designs in the world.”

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China’s Largest Bitcoin Exchange Seeks Recognition for Currency

BTC China, the nation’s largest Bitcoin exchange, has had low-level discussions with regulators seeking recognition of the digital currency that would allow it to be used to buy goods and services in the country.

The company has sought to discuss Bitcoin regulations with officials from agencies including the People’s Bank of China, the China Banking Regulatory Commission and the China Securities Regulatory Commission, BTC China Chief Executive Officer Bobby Lee said in a Nov. 29 interview in Shanghai. It’s not yet been able to arrange any high-level meetings, he said.

“They’ll ask us ‘how should you be regulated,’ and I’ll say ‘Hey, here’s what we’ve done proactively and here’s how we think you should regulate us,’” Lee said of the Shanghai-based company’s talks with regulators. Bitcoin is “not on the black list and it’s not on the white list. It’s in the gray area.”

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A College Kid Made Over $24,000 Yesterday Just By Waving This Sign On ESPN

A college student quickly made over $24,000 just by waving this sign on TV.

Here’s the deal: Yesterday on ESPN’s “College GameDay” (an ESPN college football show that’s filmed at a different college campus each week) some student held the above sign that has both the Bitcoin logo and a QR code.

A QR code is a visual representation of any kind of information (frequently a URL for a website). In this case, the code represented a Bitcoin wallet.

On Reddit, Bitcoin fans managed to enhance the QR code from the screen in order to identify his wallet, so that people could donate money to him.

Supermanagement!

Supermanagement! by Mr. Andres Agostini (Excerpt)

“…What distinguishes our age from every other is not the world-flattening impact of communications, not the economic ascendance of China and India, not the degradation of our climate, and not the resurgence of ancient religious animosities. Rather, it is a frantically accelerating pace of change…”

Read the entire piece at http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Is Bitcoin the Beginning of the End?

Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights

The following dystopian vision of the future was just shared with my by a friend:

…“What is a Citadel?” you might wonder. Well, by the time Bitcoin became worth 1,000 dollar, services began to emerge for the “Bitcoin rich” to protect themselves as well as their wealth. It started with expensive safes, then began to include bodyguards, and today, “earlies” (our term for early adapters), as well as those rich whose wealth survived the “transition” live in isolated gated cities called Citadels, where most work is automated. Most such Citadels are born out of the fortification used to protect places where Bitcoin mining machines are located. The company known as ASICminer to you is known to me as a city where Mr. Friedman rules as a king.

In my world, soon to be your world, most governments no longer exist, as Bitcoin transactions are done anonymously and thus most governments can enforce no taxation on their citizens. Most of the success of Bitcoin is due to the fact that Bitcoin turned out to be an effective method to hide your wealth from the government. Whereas people entering “rogue states” like Luxemberg, Monaco and Liechtenstein were followed by unmanned drones to ensure that governments know who is hiding wealth, no such option was available to stop people from hiding their money in Bitcoin.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timet…re_to_beg/

You should read the rest of the story. I think it goes pretty thoroughly into a scenario that isn’t discussed enough.

The “Bitcoin Circle Jerk” on reddit.com/r/bitcoin and bitcointalk.org often goes like this like: “imagine how goddamned rich we’ll all be when 1 bitcoin is worth 100, 000 dollars”!

The ugly flip side however, of us all being fabulously rich because we bought a bitcoin once, is that a lot of our friends and family get hideously poor.

Technological disruption always has winners and losers. Bitcoin is a big disruptoin, it has the potential to do to money what the internet did to music, possibly to a much further extent.

Although it’s a very important conversation to have, extrapolations like the story quoted above almost always fail to understand how other factors will mix in. While many foresaw some of the negative consequences of globalization, few people would have foreseen the emergence of the craft movement; including local food, makerspaces, DIY everything, etc.

In the bitcoin community, I’m heartened by the emergence of a culture of generosity. It shows up in the willingness that bitcoin companies have for helping one another. It also shows up in projects like Sean’s Outpost and in the tipping culture created by the reddit bitcoin tip bot and the bitcoin party bot.

I won’t pretend to think that I know where this is all headed. I’m not a prophet, and I’m always skeptical of the pundits who make bold claims about the future.

All I know is that change is coming.

This is why I’ve chosen to engage deeply with bitcoin, and why I’ve started Coin Forest. I’m an optimist, and I want to contribute to building this generosity I’ve seen.

The Garden of Earthly Delights Reversed
A slightly remixed version of Hieronymous Bosch’s vision

I’d love to think that the progression will be more like this reversal of Hieronymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”.

Frankly, it’s probably somewhere in the middle. But creating a better world requires the optimism to believe it’s possible.

The decision is whether you want to play a part in shaping the outcome or not.

-John Mardlin