BITCOIN

Dell Largest Company to Date to Accept Bitcoin

If you’re a retailer, there’s really no reason not to accept Bitcoin at this point – Dell

Largest Bitcoin Accepting Companies (Annual Revenue)

1 – Dell (HQ = Texas) $57 billion

2 – Dish (HQ = Colorado) $13.9 billion

3 – Expedia (HQ = Seattle) $4.8 billion

4- Overstock (HQ = Salt Lake City) $1.7 billion

– Coindesk

Bitcoin Wallets

VC investor panel predicts there will be 15 to 50 million bitcoin wallets by next year #bitcoinchicago – Coindesk

http://Blockchain.info just said they have 2m users now #btcchicago – Paul Buitink

Blockchain Wallets Opened

Jan 2013 = 0.1 mill

July 2013 = 0.25mill

Nov 2013 = 0.5mill

Jan 2014 = 1 mill

July 2014 = 2mill

– Lee Banfield

Things Only Grow This Fast When Something Important is Happening

When Jeff Bezo’s was asked why he founded Amazon he said that he was working on Wall Street in the early 1990s when someone showed him how fast the internet was growing he knew that something very important was happening. Otherwise you just don’t get growth like that.

The number of internet hosts grew 10x from 1989 to 1993 – that’s roughly 2x a year. Bezos founded Amazon in 1994

Bitcoin adoption is growing faster than that – 3x (unique addresses used per day) to 685x (network hash rate) depending on which measure you choose – Nic Brisbourne

Investment Opportunity

“Bitcoin, at this moment, represents one of the greatest investment opportunities the world will ever witness” http://www.reddit.com/comments/2aqo04 – Roger Ver

ALTCOINS

CryptoNote Currencies

CryptoNote is an open-source technology that allows the creation of supposedly anonymous cryptocurrencies

Review of CryptoNote Whitepaper

A mathematician’s review (paid by the Monero team) of the CryptoNote whitepaper and tech. http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_review.pdf

– Kristov Atlas

CryptoNote Currency Market Caps

Bytecoin

1st July: $8,200,000

21st July: $3,900,000

-52%

Monero

1st July: $4,400,000

21st July: $6,500,000

+48%

Boolberry

1st July: $470,000

21st July: $260,000

-45%

duckNote

1st July: $67,000

21st July: $112,000

+67%

– Lee Banfield

EQUITIES

Tesla

Prediction: $35k Gen III Tesla (TSLA:NASDAQ) will become the best selling car in America within two years of launch – Jason Calacanis, Angel Investor

My proceeds from PayPal were $180m. I put $100m in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla & $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent – Elon Musk

Google

Google Glass was born three years ago at Google X, a secret lab whose best-known spawn is the company’s self-driving car.

It’s certainly a new chapter for Google (GOOG:NASDAQ). After making its name and fortune in search and software, the California titan is using Glass to leap into both the hardware and retail space.

“People say manufacturing is dead in America, but we wanted to hold our event here where planes flew and ships were built to show that this country can do it again, and Glass is an example of that,” says senior program manager Emily Ma.

“I had never thought about a wearable computer before this project,” says Google’s Isabelle Olsson, who leveraged years of industrial design experience to guide Glass. “But quickly our goals became clear. Create an object of desire. Light, simple, and then make the technology go away.”

Glass provides consumers with a “glancing experience” meant for quick updates and communications, and as such is a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, other devices. “You’ll keep your other screens, but this is something that adds an element of ease to our lives. In time, we’d love for people to think, ‘Why would I want dumb glasses? I want smart ones.'”

Texan Grant Heimbach, 28, rolled into Basecamp with orders from his Austin scientific-instrument company to hop the first plane home so staff engineers could start dissecting his prized purchase.

“We see this as a paradigm shift. It’s like the Wild West right now, like iPhone before anyone knew what it could really do. So we just want to be on the frontier.” – Marco della Cava

COMPANIES / PROJECTS

Open Transactions / Monetas

Open Transactions is an open source project. It’s a financial cryptography library. It’s been publicly available since 2010 and it does work. You can download the server, you can download the various clients, it runs, you can use it. It’s fully functional.

Monetas is a commercial software startup. It’s based on the Open Transactions technology. We’re building enterprise scale transaction processing systems. It will be released sometime later on this year, maybe towards the end of summer or fall – Chris Odem, Open Transactions

Uber

Bill Maris, the managing partner of Uber investor Google Ventures, said that Uber’s long-term market value could be “$200 billion or more,” about the market value of Toyota.

Uber board member and investor Bill Gurley has said that the company’s market opportunity is between $450 billion and $1.35 trillion per year and that Uber could be considered an alternative to private car ownership. Indeed, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the company’s vision is “Basically make car ownership a thing of the past.” – Matthew Feeney

Soylent

Soylent Now Accepting Bitcoin

Leap Motion, Boosted Boards, Soylent, and iOgrapher are the launch partners for Shopify’s announcement meaning that each have enabled the Coinbase integration following a recent private beta testing period. (It has to be said that bitcoin and Soylent seem like an anti-establishment match made in heaven.) – Michael Carney

Powdered Science

The smoothie-like substance, which began life as a crowdfunding sensation last year before attracting heavyweight investors like Andreessen Horowitz, is basically powdered science — human nutrition reduced to its most basic essentials. Soylent’s spokesperson told me that they don’t expect most people to adopt a 100 percent Soylent diet, even though you technically can: each day’s packet contains roughly 100 percent (give or take a few percentage points) of your daily FDA-recommended allowance of fat, potassium, carbohydrates, fiber, and a selection of 23 vitamins and minerals.

Soylent isn’t just a science experiment for Silicon Valley movers and shakers who don’t have time to eat: eking out maximum caloric bang for your buck with a nutritionally complete substance could eventually be a huge deal in impoverished areas of the world.

What’s it like to spend a month in the post-food era?

I lost about 12 pounds along the way with very little health drama. For the most part, I actually felt great.

It was nice recouping significant time otherwise spent looking for and eating food — perhaps an hour a day or more. Furthermore, if I was ordering Soylent month to month, I’d be paying $8.50 a day to get effectively all the nutrition and calories I needed to stay alive for the price of a standard New York City lunch.

Soylent is very open about its product — the details of the concoction, which have evolved over the past year to improve its taste, texture, and nutrition, are widely available. The company publishes both its official recipe and hosts a surprisingly active “DIY” forum where Soylent connoisseurs and food hackers of all persuasions trade tweaks, pro tips, and entirely new bult-from-scratch recipes – Chris Ziegler

PRIVACY / SECURITY

Oaths to authority are one of the most corrosive things that a person can agree to – Edward Snowden

Dropbox

Snowden says drop Dropbox, use SpiderOak. The former NSA contractor said Dropbox is “hostile to privacy” – Danny Yadron & Douglass Macmillan

Today I officially cancelled Dropbox. I’ve traded it for BitTorrentSync. – Jeff Kloy

State Propaganda

The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.”

The tools were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive. Previously disclosed documents have detailed JTRIG’s use of “fake victim blog posts,” “false flag operations,” “honey traps” and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users.

They also describe previously unknown tactics for manipulating and distorting online political discourse and disseminating state propaganda, as well as the apparent ability to actively monitor Skype users in real-time—raising further questions about the extent of Microsoft’s cooperation with spy agencies or potential vulnerabilities in its Skype’s encryption – Glenn Greenwald

PLACES

10 Reasons Bitcoin Startups Should Move to Austin

Leave behind NYC with its laws, rules, regulations and all those bureaucrats. Don’t miss out on one of the most important technological and societal shifts in human history because your zip code is in NYC.

* 1,000+ Startups (one of the largest concentrations outside Silicon Valley) including Dark Wallet, Cloud Hash, Cointerra

*5th Highest Concentration of Bitcoin Accepting Merchants in the World

* Google Fiber 1 Gig per Second Download

* >1,000 Local Bitcoin Meetup Members

* Advanced Bitcoin Mining Tech

* Home to the $1,000,000 Bitcoin Hackathon

* The BitAustin Startup Space

* Some of the Cheapest Electricty in the World for Cloud Miners

* No State Income Tax

* Housing is 4 Times Cheaper

– www.movetoaustin.io

THE SINGULARITY

The Future

Today feels like the future: I bought my first 3d printer and purchased it with bitcoin sent through an anonymizing mixer sent via Tor – Jacob Appelbaum

Life Expectancy

Human longevity is going to grow very rapidly. In the past 60 years in developed countries, the lifespan has been increasing about 1 year every 4, so people live 15 years longer and healthy than they did in 1940. I expect that this will keep going on or accelerate.

One reason to be optimistic is that we live twice as long as chimpanzees. They live about 40 years, we live about 80 years and it’s been only about 4 or 5 million years, not many genes have changed, so it could be that you can double the lifespan by just changing a few genes, and I expect that we’ll discover what those are pretty soon – Marvin Minsky, “The Father of AI”

After 10 Years in Space, This Probe is about to Catch a Comet

After a 4.3 billion-mile nonstop flight, Rosetta is about to reach its destination. The European Space Agency vehicle has spent a decade circling our solar system in pursuit of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Now the easy part: landing a smaller onboard probe on a speeding ice-and-rock comet for the first time ever – Adam Mann

NASA: ‘We’re Very, Very Close’ to Proving Existence of Alien Life

Scientists looking for signs of life in the universe — as well as another planet like our own — are a lot closer to their goal than people realize.

“We believe we’re very, very close in terms of technology and science to actually finding the other Earth and our chance to find signs of life on another world,” said Sara Seager, a MacArthur Fellow and professor of planetary science and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Finding Earth’s twin, that’s kind of the holy grail,” said John Grunsfeld, an astronaut who helped repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009 and is now an associate administrator at NASA.

Scientists have made stellar strides in the past few years alone.

“We already know that our galaxy has at least 100 billion planets, and we didn’t know that five years ago,” said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland – Suzanne Presto

Finding Alien life > Bitcoin – Jonathan Waller

Setting up aliens with their first Bitcoin wallet > finding alien life – John R. Meese

Is The Singularity Near?

The answer is yes, depending on what you mean by near, but it may well be within our lifetimes – Marvin Minsky, “The Father of AI”

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