I haven’t written a blog post about Bitcoin and the blockchain for quite a while, mostly because I spent most of my BTC energies in this First Monday article with Chris Marsden. This blog post will act in part as an introduction to the concepts for those not familiar with Read more…
My scepticism towards Bitcoin is well-documented. While I really like the idea of decentralized payment systems and cryptocurrencies, the current implementation of Bitcoin has too many question marks for my liking. While the BTC exchange rate has been going up recently, in part prompted by a bit of hype arising Read more…
On May 28 2015, federal district judge Katherine Forrest sentenced Ross Ulbricht to life in prison for his role as the creator and administrator of the notable dark net website Silk Road. The site was an anonymous online marketplace that could run using encrypted connections over the Tor network. The Read more…
After some bad news for the Bitcoin world, including the demise of its former largest exchange, may be reaching a mature stage. Bitcoin’s price continues to swing wildly, in the last 60 days the price has been in the range of $420-580 USD. Such currency instability has been one of Read more…
Bitcoin has continued to rise in price, if not in adoption. Other than small services here and there, commerce is justifiably sceptical about using it as a means of exchange. Where BTC has been generating news is in its price, and there it has shown that some people will invest Read more…
Consider the following scenarios: A person has all of their money taken from their bank account by fraudsters. An armed gang enters a bank and takes all of the cash stored there. A person has their credit card stolen and the thief goes on a shopping spree. A group of Read more…
As I am finishing writing this post, Bitcoin (BTC) is in the middle of a crash, or what some people call in technical terms, going completely bonkers. I have been unhealthily interested in bitcoins for more than a year, and I have been following it closely. This includes reading papers, Read more…
It feels like 2007 all over again. There seems to be a resurgence in articles and blog posts seriously discussing the subject of virtual property and the virtual economy, something that was very familiar in the tech press around the time of Second Life’s nadir. By the way, whatever happened Read more…
I have been reading an eye-opening paper by mathematicians Dorit Ron and Ami Shamir, looking at the entire transaction history of the Bitcoin network. For those unfamiliar with Bitcoin, it is a cryptographic currency that was created with the stated intention of generating a decentralised payment system for the Internet Read more…
Some readers may remember that some time ago I wrote a post about Bitcoin, an interesting online payment experiment in the shape of a cryptographic currency. My conclusion was that the currency was probably illegal in the U.S. and Europe, and left it at that. At the time Bitcoin’s star Read more…