BITCOIN

Transactions / Price / Volatility

* Average daily bitcoin transaction volume at all time high – Barry Silbert

* If bitcoin price had gone in a straight line from 1yr ago to now (~$200-325), story would be about the amazing ecosys dev we’ve seen in 2014 – Dan McArdle

* Consider that if data on startups and their equity were collected and indexed like DJIA, bitcoin, et al. the swings would look similar — and in some cases much more violent — than bitcoin – Here4Downvotes

“I Like Blockchain Technology, Just Not Bitcoin”

* Nearly 100% of the time I hear someone say “meh bitcoin, but blockchain!”—good sign person doesn’t understand either – Dan Romero

* “I like the Blockchain, just not Bitcoin” = “I like the internet, just not these pesky data-packets” – Dan McArdle

* What you are hearing is, “damn I wish I had bought Bitcoin 3 years ago…now I fear I have missed out – thus it MUST not be successful” – BitcoinBreak

* Stage 3 of Kübler-Ross model: bargaining. One may begin to say things like “blockchain technology.” Find acceptance: SNI Mempool Crash Course – Michael Goldstein

* Fact that people feel this is a reasonable position in 2014 is progress. Allow them the gradual climbdown to save face. Welcome them in. – Balaji S. Srinivasan

* 1: Bitcoin is stupid 2. Money laundering! Drugs! 3: Blockchain technology. 4: Well it’s too late to get in. 5: BTC accepted here – Michael Goldstein

* If 2013 was the year of “the other 6 billion”, 2014 is the year of “blockchain technology”. This hysteria, culminating with the Wall St Journal’s latest piece which goes so far as to just drop the name Bitcoin altogether in favour of Blockchain, is yet another attempt to do the impossible – stop Bitcoin – Cazalla

Bitcoin 2.0

Looking forward to Bitcoin 1.0 – Konrad S. Graf

There is no Bitcoin 2.0. Bitcoin is Bitcoin, and it’s version 0.x. Welcome to Stage n – Pete Dushenski

Worrying About Mainstream Adoption

Read through this essay by Nock and study it carefully: Isaiah’s Job

– Pierre Rochard

Sidechains

* Sidechains is one more step after altcoins to accept that there is One And Only Blockchain – Oleg Andreev

* Sidechains are no different than Mastercoin. Don’t trust wallet inspectors (The Wallet Inspector’s Promise) – Pete Dushenski

* A sidechannel attack on bitcoin development? – Justus Ranvier

*Coinbase accounts, bitcoin exchange accounts, etc. all operate in a legal and contractual context of obligations, unlike blockchains. Historical money substitutes often had legal or contractual status supporting an artificial circulating parity; blockchains have none. Sidecoins could become useful and valuable, with tradeoffs. Some might circulate at parity, but still could never BE bitcoin.

Bottom line. If it’s not on the Bitcoin blockchain, it’s not bitcoin; if it’s not bitcoin, it’s not bitcoin. Q.E.D. – Konrad S. Graf

* Anyone who owns bitcoin implicitly invested in Blockstream’s success, b/c it would significantly strengthen BTC, right? – twobitidiot

Odds of succeeding x benefit – odds of failure x cost = expected value. I think expected value is negative. – Pierre Rochard

ALTCOINS

Bitcoin vs. Govcoins

Took even Estonia 20+ yrs after web for e-citizenship. Govs slow; IMO Bitcoin gets huge first before govcoin – Balaji S. Srinivasan

Shopify’s 120,000 Merchants Can now Accept Payments in Litecoin and Dogecoin

“We’re always looking for new technologies that will help our merchants run their businesses and increase sales,” Shopify’s Louis Kearns, Product Director for Integrations, said in the release. “The partnership with GoCoin provides anyone on our platform with the option to accept multiple cryptocurrencies.”

Shopify has allowed Bitcoin payments for nearly a year, but GoCoin’s integration gives merchants flexibility with different cryptocurrency payment option – Armand Tanzarian

MINING

Wasteful Energy Consumption

Energy consumption by ASIC bitcoin mining is not wasteful, energy consumption by those who whine about it is – Pierre Rochard

Cloud Hashing

I have the honor to present you the Hashlets by GAWMiners! gawminers.com – Bitcoin Hashlets

No thanks, ‘cloud hashing’ is a terrible idea – Gavin Andresen

BTC Guild Shutting Down

Main Reasons for Closure:

1) Risk/cost of a successful attack against the pool.

BTC Guild has, to date, never been successfully hacked. However, I have seen a rise in attack attempts, and things like Heartbleed/Shellshock which show that efforts are being put into compromising common Linux services if possible.

2) US government/regulators

It is a scary landscape to continue operating in. I have no intention of leaving the US myself, and given the recent history of the US when it comes to online businesses, I don’t feel safe simply moving the business legal entity to another country while continuing to live in the US myself – TerreCiel

EQUITIES

Crypto Based IPOs

Last year there were a dozen crowd-sale pseudo-IPOs for the SEC to worry about. This year, hundreds. In a decade tens of thousands. Ooops.

SEC will quickly find itself chasing a Hydra of crypto based IPOs. Eventually SEC will have to accept disintermediation and globalization. It’s a new world and there are now 7.5 billion “accredited investors” whether the regulators like it or not. The old rules become irrelevant – Andreas Antonopoulos

Shanghai

The Shanghai stock market is the 2nd cheapest in the world (Russia #1), trading at around 8* earnings – Lee Banfield

COMPANIES / PROJECTS

OpenBazaar vs. Alibaba

* Decentralized market & currency exchange. Probably only one of the most significant projects on Earth – AnonyOdinn

* Decentralized marketplaces for the masses, using bitcoin, are more important than sidecoins, tokens & crowdfunding – Washington Sanchez

* Alibaba has made more money in the last 20 days than Amazon has made in the last 20 years – Bill Gross

* Alibaba’s market cap of $250bill is higher than Wal-Mart – Lee Banfield

The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute is devoted to promoting the ideas of the original cypherpunks and to providing the Bitcoin world with economic commentary from an Austrian perspective.

We have collected a lot of the cypherpunk writing, some classic cryptography papers, and then best including the complete works of Satoshi Nakamoto which are publicly available.

The cypherpunks were a group that interacted through an online mailing list in the 80s and 90s. They came up with most of the ideas for the systems which use cryptography to protect our freedoms online today. They were the first to theorize seriously about digital cash. Bitcoin grew out of the ideas of the cypherpunks and most of the works cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper are to cypherpunk literature. Many of them were libertarians and anarchists, and Bitcoin is the culmination of their thought. – Daniel Krawisz

Uber Issues Statement Calling Undercover Sting Operation a “Deplorable Charade.”

An undercover sting on Saturday resulted in the impoundment of five vehicles operating under the UberX service. If you’re wondering what a PPA undercover sting operation looks like, a plainclothes PPA investigator pulls out a smartphone and requests an UberX car just like you would and then delivers the bad news after the pickup occurs.

“I almost felt sorry for two of the drivers,” says a senior PPA official, explaining that the drivers seemed to think that what they were doing was perfectly legal. “They both had the same exact story that they were told it was legal and that everything would be fine.”

If the UberX drivers want their cars back, they will have to pay the PPA a fine of $1,000 plus towing costs, or they can request a hearing, which could occur as early as Monday.

“What they are doing is illegal,” says the PPA source. “And until somebody tells me otherwise, our guys will be on the street to enforce the law.” – Victor Fiorillo

Because “land of the free”.

Attacking a much loved service in such a blatant and thuggish way is a grave mistake from the complacent statists in question. Even the bad guys in Atlas Shrugged were more subtle.

It’s getting harder and harder for even the common man not to see the gun in the room.

Uber is important because, as with bitcoin, the emergence of a previously unthinkable free market solution begs important questions about the true nature of the state that otherwise wouldn’t be asked. – Lee Banfield

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Crashes

Friday’s accident took place tens of thousands of feet above the desert. As planned, SpaceShipTwo was carried aloft by a larger plane, WhiteKnightTwo, then dropped at about 50,000 feet. In a tourist flight, SpaceShipTwo’s rocket engines would take it to the 62-mile-high boundary defined as the edge of space. – Kenneth Chang & John Schwartz

I for one, am proud to be a Virgin Galactic client. I believe in the company, and know, without a doubt, that they will succeed.

I fully trust Virgin Galactic with my safety when my turn to fly on SpaceShipTwo materializes.

This is what exploring is all about. We risk our lives for what we believe in. This is the American way, the explorer’s way. I urge all of us to keep something in mind. We are on the verge of opening the space frontier, one of the greatest endeavors of our species – Peter Diamandis

PRIVACY

HD Wallets

Thanks to their use of HD wallets, each time you hit Receive in the AirBitz app, it generates a new receiving address. Privacy friendly! – Kristov Atlas

Snowden Taught Me to Smuggle Secrets Past Incredible Danger. Now I Teach You.

Until now, I haven’t written about my modest role in the Snowden leak, but with the release of Poitras’ documentary on him, “Citizenfour,” I feel comfortable connecting the dots. I think it’s helpful to show how privacy technologists can work with sources and journalists to make it possible for leaks to happen in a secure way. Securing those types of interactions is part of my job now that I work with Greenwald and Poitras at The Intercept, but there are common techniques and general principles from my interactions with Snowden that could serve as lessons to people outside this organization

The encryption technology we used — the standard among email users concerned with privacy — is known by two acronyms: GPG, for GNU Privacy Guard, or PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy.

Poitras created an anonymous email account, doing so with the Tor Browser that masks your identity on the web, and she created a new GPG key, just for communicating with Citizenfour. This was advisable because, if she were under surveillance by the NSA or any other intelligence agency, they might have compromised her known accounts, and she would prefer for there to be no trace of her true name in the correspondence with this secrecy-seeking stranger.

I tried to teach GPG to Greenwald but I had the same problem Snowden had encountered when he reached out in December, that Greenwald was busy and couldn’t focus on it. Several months later, however, I succeeded in getting Greenwald up to speed on using an encrypted chat system called Off-the-Record (OTR), which is much simpler than GPG. For the first time he was able to have encrypted communications on the internet.

Tails, the secure system Poitras asked me to get for Greenwald, is serious business. It’s a hardened operating system designed for people who need to be anonymous, and not a lot of people use it. The acronym stands for The Amnesic Incognito Live System. Before Poitras asked me to teach it to Greenwald, I had never used it. Crucially, everything you do in Tails is anonymous. All internet activity is routed through Tor, so by default your privacy is protected. And you run Tails directly off of a DVD or a USB stick — it is not installed on your hard drive. Since Tails operates completely independently from your hard drive and usual operating system, it offers a hefty dose of protection from malware and from anyone who might inspect your computer to look at what you’ve been doing.

It’s also a free software project, just like Tor, GPG, and OTR. That means the code is open source and can be peer reviewed, a level of transparency that makes the software resistant to backdoors, covert access points buried deep in the code.

After the dust settled, I sat down to write a simple tutorial for using the open source tools that allowed me, Poitras, Greenwald, and Snowden to communicate securely, and I ended up with a 30-page whitepaper called Encryption Works: How to Protect Your Privacy in the Age of NSA Surveillance.

I took the name from Snowden’s now-famous quote: “Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.” – Micah Lee

PLACES

The Philippines

“Maintain these reforms, continue on the path that you’re on, and I think the future is very bright for the Philippines. Can the Philippines be the next Asian miracle? Coming here, I think there is no question that is the case. – Jim Yong Kim

The outsourcing boom is fueling GDP growth that has averaged 6.3 percent since 2010 and hit 7.2 percent last year. Half of the population is 23.5 years old or younger, according to the CIA World Factbook in 2014. By comparison, the median age in Thailand is 36.2; in Japan, it’s 46.1

60,000 people work at 59 companies in Eastwood: More people are employed there than in any other Philippine development of its kind. About 25,000 residents, many of them call-center employees, live, work and play amid 500 commercial and retail shops. From elevated sections of Manila highways, drivers can see forests of construction cranes as new Eastwood-like developments proliferate, including McKinley Hill, with its Venetian canals, and Bonifacio Global City, which is modeled after Manhattan.

“There is a huge domino effect,” says John Corpus, a director of real estate firm CB Richard Ellis Philippines Inc., which because of the BPO boom plans to increase its workforce to 1,000 by the end of this year from 720 in mid-August. “Everything is growing.” – Yoolim Lee & Ian Sayson

THE SINGULARITY

“We asked for flying cars and all we got was the entire planet communicating instantly via pocket supercomputers” – Chris Dixon

Nanoparticles Inside Red Blood Cells

Google is working on a cancer-detecting pill in its latest effort to push the boundaries of technology.

Still in the experimental stage, the pill is packed with tiny magnetic particles, which can travel through a patient’s bloodstream, search for malignant cells and report their findings to a sensor on a wearable device.

As many as 2,000 of these microscopic “nanoparticles” could fit inside a single red blood cell to provide doctors with better insights about what is happening inside their patients.

Google believes the cancer-detecting nanoparticles can be coated with antibodies that bind with specific proteins or cells associated with various maladies. The particles would remain in the blood and report back continuously on what they find over time, said Andrew Conrad, head of life sciences at Google X, while a wearable sensor could track the particles by following their magnetic fields and collecting data on their movement through the body.

The goal is to get a fuller picture of the patient’s health than the snapshot that’s obtained when a doctor draws a single sample of blood for tests that aren’t comprehensive enough to spot the early stages of many forms of cancer – Brandon Bailey

Solar Reaching Price Parity in USA: Energy to be Plentiful with even Minor Innovation

After years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and variable subsidies, solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states — in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this week.

Gone are the days when solar panels were an exotic plaything of Earth-loving rich people. Solar is becoming mainstream, and prices will continue to drop as the technology improves and financing becomes more affordable, according to the report.

The reason solar-power generation will increasingly dominate: it’s a technology, not a fuel. As such, efficiency increases and prices fall as time goes on – Tom Randall

HP Moves into 3D Printing: The HP Multi Jet Fusion Printer

This is the biggest breakthrough in 3D printing in years, HP 3D Printing with Multi Jet Fusion Technology – Chris Dixon

An industrial machine that is 10 times faster and 50% cheaper than current systems.

There’s a lot of parallels between document printing and 3D printing, so our company’s been looking at HP for a long time, thinking it’s an excellent candidate to enter this market place,” said Terry Wohlers, president of research firm Wohlers Associates. Recently, Wohlers said he was given a demonstration of HP’s new Multi Jet Fusion printer and was “blown away” by the speed, quality, feature details of printed items and by the brilliant colors it produces.

Wohlers said that while 3D printing is still in its “early days” HP’s move will accelerate growth in ways never seen.

“HP’s new 3D printer, if people see that and they’re not blown away, then they don’t understand what it takes to build parts using conventional manufacturing,” Wohlers said. “It’s not only a game changer, it’s going to rewrite the rules in the 3D printing industry.” – Lucas Mearian

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