Bitcoin coverage roundup: June 12th

1) Looks like bitcoin survived it's first major correction as an old-timer cashed out. This is a good thing. It makes the market stronger, and lets us pick up bitcoins for a deal. To those yelling 'bubble', lets maintain perspective: this correction only undid 4-days worth of growth.



2) More Bitcoin/Silk-road scaremongering. DEA has yet to say anything definitive



3) IMF is hacked. Maybe someone should tell them about bitcoin.

4) Ripple / RainDrop looks really cool (hat tip: bitcoin sun). Need to learn more.

Bitcoin Browser Extensions

For Chrome

1) Bitcoin Ticker





2) Mt. Gox Peek





For Firefox

1) Bitcoin Prices

Gambling with your bitcoins

Is so much fun.

And so easy

The Bitcoin Show - Episode 2

Discusses TradeHill.com



They need to fix the audio...

I love this shirt!

If only they'd accept payment in BTC

New Bitcoin Exchanges

With the assault on Bitcoin imminent, redundancy in exchanges is critical.

1) Canada gets its first exchange! https://www.cavirtex.com/ (other resources for Canadians)

2) Another new exchange: https://www.tradehill.com (register now and get a 10% lifetime discount on commission)

3) Gavin Andersen (technical lead) on ABC Australia

4) Mt.Gox Day trading platform

5) Not earning enough mining? Earn BTC for cracking hashes.

The First Volley in the Attack on Bitcoin

Here's Reuters:

Democratic Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Joe Manchin of West Virginia wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder and Drug Enforcement Administration head Michele Leonhart in a letter that expressed concerns about the underground website "Silk Road" and the use of Bitcoins to make purchases there.

Watch Charles Schumer's press conference here.

Here's a Fox affiliate:

Both of Missouri's U.S. senators tell Fox 2 they are joining other federal lawmakers who want a drug-dealing web site shut down.

I assume that's Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill? I can't find anything else on them weighing in.

We do know that the CIA is at least aware of bitcoin too..

Some reactions to this warning shot, and some advice:

You probably have a little more time before the attacks come (maybe a couple of months?) to acquire bitcoin with cash – and there are profits in speculation to be made until then but, when the raids come, expect a sharp correction before exchange values move on to new highs over a longer period of time. What you do not want to do is be involved as an “exchange service” conducting exchanges in and out of national currencies and you definitely do not want to have your money sitting in the exchanger’s account when they are raided and shut down.

Of course, having many reliable exchanges is the key (think many torrent search sites). Here's a brand new one.

Ways to check the BTC price

bitcoincharts.com is so passe.

1) http://bitcoinprices.org/

2) MtGox Live

3) Realtime market data

Bitcoin coverage roundup: June 5th

1) Senator Charles Schumer (Dem) and Senator Joe Manchin (Dem) are asking federal authorities to take down the silk road. Good luck, they're going to need it.

2) An interview with Nefario, founder of Bitcoin Global. He lays out why shutting down sites like the silk road wont be so easy (and will get progressively more difficult)

CryptoCloud is to be a cloud based computing platform (ala. Amazon AWS) that is hidden in cypherspace (inside the darknets I2P or Tor) so that their location cannot become known. This will allow anyone to easily start any kind of project that if it were illegal in whatever jurisdiction, will be able to run with impunity on CryptoCloud. So services such as Torrent sites, copies of the original Napster, and even directly selling copyrighted materials will be allowed (actually the policy as it stands is that pretty much anything will be allowed).

3) A Bitcoin billboard!

Bitcoin for Canadians

UPDATE: June 23rd.

There's now the canadian exchange cavirtex.com which was accepting CAD via interac e-mail, but no more till they're out of beta.

There's also a google-group discussion about an alternative:
-----------------

1) Join us on IRC (check out the quickstart guide, if needed)

2) Join the bitcoin-canada meetup group!

3) How to securely trade bitcoins using Interac email transfers and clearcoin.

4) Checkout the RFC for a Canadian bitcoin exchange. Tell us what you think!

Happy 1:10USD Day Bitcoin

Hooray!

In honour of this momentous occasion, I give you (surprise, surprise) assorted links!

1) Buy drugs with bitcoin! (currently not accepting new members)

2) 7 Linux Shells Using Built-in Tools

3) Today I discovered reddit.tv. Not sure what to make of it yet

4) But it did lead to the discovery of Satarii, which is pretty cool.

China has discovered bitcoin

A large number of Google searches for 'bitcoin' are now coming from China.



Bitcoin: Not just for paranoid white dudes any more. I see this as significant.

The Bitcoin Economy Continues to Mature

With an options market, a credit union, and a venture capital firm.

And then there'a also a fairly mature bitcoin classified site.

More from pirate party founder, Falkvinge: Why I’m Putting All My Savings Into Bitcoin

Bitcoin coverage roundup: May 27th

1) Rick Falkvinge's (founder of the first Pirate Party; @Falkvinge) article: The Information Policy Case For Flat Tax And Basic Income

2) The Atlantic: Bitcoin, Digital Currency of the Future?

3) MIT Technology review: What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters

4) Spend BTCs on Amazon with no transaction fees!

5) A Browser-based GPU miner!

Reactions to Bitcoin

Bitcoin's competitive advantage

One of bitcoin's biggest competitive advantages, IMO, is it's ability to cut through inefficient regulations. The general public might actually see (in terms of prices of consumer goods) just exactly how inefficient these 'legitimate' institutions are.

Take California's Bill 2789 (HT: The monetary future):

What the law accomplishes sounds mundane enough: it requires money transmitters--companies that act like banks, but aren't, such as PayPal--to get licenses. As usual, however, the devil is in the details. Previously, California corporations were only required to get money transmitter licenses for international funds transfers, and domestic transfers were unregulated. Now both kinds of transfers are regulated. Also, the price of each license is a little bit steep: half a million dollars and change.

Half a million dollars? For a license to transmit money? Bitcoin will do it anonymously, for free. It get's worse:

Oh, and if you want to do business nationwide, you'll need 43 more of those licenses from almost every state. The forms and requirements are different everywhere, most states want your fingerprints to do a criminal background check (the exact same criminal background check, it turns out), and the price varies wildly from a measly $10,000 to $1,000,000+ per state. Want the forms? Good luck finding them; some states don't post them on-line.

Things like this alot of times are the major cost of doing buisness.

At the very least it set's a minimum on the size of transactions that are viable. Also, it's the consumer who ends up bearing most of this burden of which the poor, as with most regulation, bears the brunt.

Not anymore.

Now ordinary people can raise microbounties!

Latest Bitcoin Coverage: May 17, 2011

1. Wired: Peer-to-peer currency Bitcoin sidesteps financial institutions
2. launch.is: Is Bitcoin the Wikileaks of Monetary Policy?

Bitcoin and Technical Analysis

In the spirit of keeping the TA people accountable, I feel the need to point this prediction out.

And the outcome:



Although, its unclear what the timeframe in the prediction is, bitcoin certainly isn't following that red line...

I don't know much about technical analysis, but I'm skeptical. I'm willing to admit it might have some predictive value, but I would need to be convinced it outperforms other models.

My preferred way to backup a bitcoin wallet

I encrypt it and email it to myself. In the email, I put decryption instructions (minus the passphrase, of course)

What I wanted was cross-platform decryption instructions, so that in a pinch, I could get my wallet from anywhere (Mac, PC (with cygwin) or Linux) and use it.

Here's what I've come up with, courtesy of lifehacker.

WARNING: If you haven't done this before, you should probably have a read through here first to get an idea of what exactly it is your backing up.

Then, shutdown your bitcoin client, and make a copy the wallet.dat and place it in a new, working folder.

Let's take the MD5 hash now, before we mess with it


> md5sum wallet.dat
f802a7fa2c7119cf15385b282443eb0f wallet.dat


Now, think of a passphrase, and encrypt.


> openssl des3 -salt -in wallet.dat -out wallet.dat.des-ede3-cbc

enter des-ede3-cbc encryption password:


Now rename the wallet.dat file to a backup before decrypting:


mv wallet.dat wallet.dat.orig


And decrypt:


> openssl des3 -d -salt -in wallet.dat.des-ede3-cbc -out wallet.dat

enter des-ede3-cbc encryption password:


Finally, check the MD5 of the newly decrypted wallet.dat:


> md5sum wallet.dat
f802a7fa2c7119cf15385b282443eb0f wallet.dat


What's New in the World of Bitcoin

1) Looks like the price has yet to stabilize after its first major correction. Google trends will continue to be informative, I believe. If the search volume stabilizes or rises, I predict the first major correction is soon over. If it falls, there's more to come.

2) The first issue of the Bitcoin Sun is out! (On twitter @TheBitcoinSun)

Contents (amongst other things):

- Unfairness and Pizza: The Key of Bitcoin’s Success?
- From Alice to Bob: A not so simple introduction to bitcoin’s inner workings.

3) Bitcoin Price/Difficulty, over time. (HT: @obinine) Would love to autocorrelate these 2!