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!

DIY links

1) DIY boats

2) DIY badass eco-house

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 culture that is Japan

From the BBC:

A group of more than 200 Japanese pensioners are volunteering to tackle the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power station.

Further down:

"I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live," he says.

"Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer."

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

On writers and grammar

Most writers paragraph for effect, punctuate on impulse, and let split infinitives and comma slices fall where they may. Omnivorous reading substitutes for systematic study. Syntactic nomenclature is a thing they learn only if, somehow trapped into teaching others the craft, they find themselves in need of terms to describe the errors of their students.

Dwight V. Swain, Techniques of the selling writer, ch 2; pg 22.

Assorted Links

1) Buy newegg hardware with bitcoins! (or newegg-like hardware)

2) Future HTC Andorid devices will come with an unlocked bootloader!

3) D-wave gets its first customer

4) Palestinians can now travel to Egypt. Hopefully trade will begin soon.

5) A very cool DIY XBMC project.

Tyler Cowen, America's Hottest Economist

That's the title of the Bloomberg's Buisnessweek's coverage of Tyler Cowen. And if you're not already reading his blog marginalrevolution, you should be.

From the article:

In his posts, Cowen often serves as a kind of agony aunt for intellectuals. On May 9 a reader asked about the best books on American history and culture written by foreigners. Cowen suggested Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand and linked to a two-year-old list of fiction in the Wall Street Journal. In the same week he summarized a book on the origins of World War I, recommended the Chinese food in the basement of the Golden Mall in Queens, N.Y., and asked his readers to name the best pop album that never caught on. Cowen blogs like he reads: prolifically and about pretty much everything.

Further on:

He begins his analyses by assuming that if a market, or a person, behaves in a certain way, moral failure is the least likely explanation.

I consider Cowen to be my most influential living person that I've never met.

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!

Assorted Links

1) /r/bitcoin has a new logo! Happy to have been part of the bitcoin bounty.

2) SickBeard seems to be a pretty sick way to dowload TV automatically.

4) Crypto-cat: easy, encrypted, browser-based chat. Perfect to use with tails.

3) Netflix releases an Android client!

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?

More reasons to love YouTube: 2 great videos

Two great YouTube Videos. The first one (RSA Animate - The Empathic Civilisation) is serious, but though provoking.



The second one is hilarious!