Newsletter #71

4 - 10 April 2015

This week is a full-featured weekly with loads of really great reading material for your weekend. You should absolutely take read Tim Swanson's 66 page report on distributed ledgers.

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Latest News

The Bitcoin Foundation board of directors is currently divided on a proposal that would see it split into two separate entities.

Young, single, gay: Anthony Watson didn't feel happy in the Portland area that Nike calls home. Now he's headed to Los Angeles.

BitQuick, a peer-to-peer cash-for-bitcoin startup aims to challenge LocalBitcoins by offering consumer protection starting with the US before expanding worldwide.

Market

In a recent paper, Donier and Bouchaud found that the market is prone to crash specifically when buy orders are scarce, and estimated how much a typical-size sell order should move the price when matched with such buy orders. Using this method, they were able to predict the size of the biggest 14 single-day drops in bitcoin value between January and April 2013 to a high degree of accuracy.

A presentation by Russ Harben on Bitcoin Sidechains (that you can give to your mom) given at the Arizona Bitcoin Meetup on February 4, 2015.

Ecosystem

The founders of bitcoin alternative LEOCoin have been previously linked to a suspected pyramid scheme, raising questions about their latest venture.

Stellar Introduced their first white paper and new open-source codebase for a decentralized worldwide payment protocol.

Q&A with the NEM community leaders, Lon Wong and Makoto.

The smart contracts are here. Controllable, repeatable and free to use, they permit design that addresses many of the commercial problems Bitcoin doesn’t – and will upturn a number of sectors, including crypto, as they advance.

Legal

Boost VC CEO Adam Draper has launched a petition seeking a number of changes to New York’s proposed BitLicense framework.

Learn

Tim Swanson published a 66 page report exploring the various distributed blockchain ledger. This is a highly comprehensive read to explore all the blockchain ideas beyond Bitcoin and whether they hold any value and use case.

Preston Byrne, co-founder of Eris Industries offers his opinion after reading Tim's report above.

Mike Hearn discusses double spending against merchants in Bitcoin, analyses a couple of real cases and describes several proposed schemes to make it harder.