Bitcoin Plaza

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Storj Crowdsale Conclusion

The initial Storj crowdsale has finally come to a close, and the Storj team is pleased with the results, having raised at least 910 BTC. Although they are still hard at work on furthering development, the funding raised for their decentralized cloud storage platform exceeded their expectations.

Storj, for the uninformed, is designed to allow users to store files over their peer-to-peer network. Using Metadisk, one can upload content to the network for distributed storage across its participating nodes; users either pay for this service in Storjcoin X–known as SJCX, the network’s native currency–or allow the network to store an equivalent amount of data on their own computer. This undercuts traditional corporate cloud storage services by an order of magnitude.

The Storj team promises to put the money from their crowdsale to good use. Some of it will be used to reimburse people for prior expenses paid out of pocket, and pay for salaries for full-time contributors as well as freelance work. The rest will go to further cloud storage development, research into decentralized technology, marketing and PR, community initiatives and projects, and legal counsel.

In addition to helping promote a decentralized Internet and earning Storjcoin X, crowdsale participants will receive early access to DriveShare. DriveShare is another cloud storage application, but its purpose is slightly different from Metadisk: primarily for those who just want to make SJCX and have plenty of hard drive space to spare, it allows users to rent it out to the network. As soon as the beta is live, contributors will be given access in the order in which they contributed, until it’s ready for full public release.

Transparency is very important to Storj, and they have released a full list of their team members upon request. They want to make sure all funding is properly allocated, so you can track all of the bitcoins they raised from the crowdsale at address 132aBrspLgL54cm9eQfGNFLGqXwBRQrugc, as well as the leftover Storjcoin X at 19KvumZgcs2owq9tF2obyg1SBmXDVdzNnW. Most of that will be used to reward users who contribute resources to the network.

Most SJCX has not yet been generated, but the developers plan to use a timelock transaction to ensure they cannot be arbitrarily spent. 75 million of those will be spent on community organization, such as elections. Another 75 million is reserved for platform developers working full-time or those seeking to earn development bounties. The rest will go to bounties encouraging the development of new apps on the Storj platform, and future crowdsales if necessary.

Going forward, the Storj team hopes to to make centralized services like DropBox a thing of the past, and are excited for the future. To get more news and updates as they come, you can subscribe to the Storj newsletter via their website, or register on their forums where there’s an active community to help you. You can email questions or comments to hello@storj.io

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Trezor, the Bitcoin Wallet Unicorn

In 2014 we saw the release of the first hardware Bitcoin wallets. Now the unicorn is real: offline coins that can be spent, using an Internet-connected and even malware-infected computer, all without risk of losing your money.

How is this possible? It’s important to first understand how bitcoins get stolen.

To say that someone’s bitcoins are “on her computer” is actually a misleading statement. What is stored on a Bitcoin-owner’s computer is actually the private key that corresponds to her Bitcoin address (the public key). When the owner wants to spend her funds, her wallet software combines her private and public keys to create a signature—the digital equivalent of signing the back of a check. This digital signature unlocks the funds and they’re now spendable.

This is why storing your private key in an Internet-connected laptop, desktop or phone—or with an online wallet service—always carries risk. It’s always possible that malicious software (“malware”) could enter your device through the Internet, enabling someone to discover your Bitcoin private key and spend your money.

Cold storage savings—that is, sending your bitcoins to a public address whose private key is not stored on any Internet-connected device—provided an answer to this problem. But it was inconvenient. You couldn’t spend from your savings without first importing the private key into Internet-connected software, defeating the whole purpose of cold storage. Could a “hot” wallet (spend-ready) and a secure wallet ever be one-and-the-same? This unicorn—cold storage you could spend from—was what we were all hoping for.

Hardware wallets appeared as the white winged creatures, and the most popular among them is the Trezor.

trezor size

The Trezor, which is not Internet-enabled, stores your private key. Using the USB cable provided, you connect it to your computer and create a wallet at MyTrezor.com. The Trezor device then generates a seed of 12, 18 or 24 random words (your choice) on its own small screen, which you write down and store away. These words never touch the Internet and can be used to recover your private key if your Trezor is ever lost, destroyed, or stolen.

You can also choose to enable PIN and/or passphrase protection, so that if your device were ever stolen, the thief would also have to know two additional pieces of private information to access your coins.

Worried that your computer could be infected with a keylogger (malware that records your keystrokes)? You’re still safe. If you choose to enable PIN protection, MyTrezor wallet will ask for your PIN before a transaction is sent. The 9-digit number pad is only displayed in cleartext (scrambled out of standard order) on your Trezor itself. Only question marks appear on your computer screen, which you click with your cursor.

You may be wondering: what if I want multiple private keys because I (duh) want to have more than one Bitcoin address? No problem. The Trezor is a deterministic wallet, which means that an unlimited number of public addresses are recoverable from the same, single seed.

The Trezor is the creation of Prague-based SatoshiLabs, which was founded in fall 2013. All the software for the Trezor is open-source and viewable on GitHub, and the device ships for free internationally. At the time of writing, a Trezor costs 0.32 BTC ($119 USD).

If you own or plan to own bitcoins, and if you’re worried about computer security (who isn’t?), consider shopping around for hardware wallets. Store your private keys offline while retaining the ability to spend your Bitcoin easily.

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Monday, October 13, 2014

Bitnation Core Dev Team Resigns, Speaks Out Before CrowdSale

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“The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin” is a Pièce de Résistance

As someone who spends one to two hours every day reading about Bitcoin, I assumed that the newly released documentary “The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin” wouldn’t have much to offer me. I assumed it would be some sort of primer for people who are unfamiliar with the technology.

Boy, was I wrong.

I wouldn’t have watched it, except that members of the Bitcoin subreddit kept posting rave reviews about it. One redditor even posted, “Just watched ‘The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin’. I immediately bought 5 Bitcoin during the credits.”

A film that stirs almost $2,000 worth of emotion in the soul of a crypto fan is enough to get me interested. So I headed on over to The Pirate Bay (which, to my delight, is going by “The Peace Bay” these days) and partook of a shared copy.

What I thought would be a primer was actually a rich chronicle of highlights of Bitcoin’s young history. But more than a yearbook, the film offered meaning for all of its stories, spoken by the people who lived them.

The documentary is narrated by Dan, a 35-year-old Bitcoin miner, father and computer programmer, as he travels the world for a year to record the history of Bitcoin firsthand. Dan attends Liberty Forum and PorcFest in New Hampshire, where almost every merchant accepts Bitcoin long before crypto fans were courted by the likes of Overstock. He takes us into the cozy Salt Lake City kitchen where Casascius Coins—arguably the most popular image of Bitcoin in the world—are made by hand.

We then visit San Francisco, where a shadow-faced “Mr. Bitcoin” explains how cryptocurrency and the Silk Road have removed much of the danger from his small-time drug trade. Dan visits Charlie Shrem, former CEO of BitInstant, right as his company triples its sales volumes. You can actually see the sweat on the brows of these young entrepreneurs as they fill a giant void in a trading world in which they only had one real competitor: Mt. Gox.

And speaking of Mt. Gox—want to see Mark Karpeles struggle to play piano? How about confront a guerilla journalist who wants his coins back? Or perhaps inside the “vault” where the coins held by Mt. Gox were said to be held? Then you’re in for a treat.

Next, watch Roger Ver single-handedly introduce Bitcoin to a grocer, convince him to accept it, set him up with BitPay and cryptographically purchase an iced tea from him all in one afternoon. See the grocer get a light in his eyes as it dawns on him what a future of decentralized money can mean for his business.

Eric Voorhoos in Panama, Vitalik Buterin camping, Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto during his now-famous “free lunch”: all these key players and more tell their stories in a filmed yearbook that could reasonably be called “Bitcoin’s First Five Years.”

Pièce de résistance is French for “piece of resistance” and is used to describe a highlight or main attraction. While this film is definitely that, there is also something more: resistance itself. Most individuals in the film, in one way or another, resist the paradigm that money must come from a monopoly. In doing so, they’ve created an infrastructure that has the potential to benefit all of humanity.

The film is available through a paywall on the film’s official site, and has also recently been uploaded to YouTube. After I finished viewing my shared copy, I went to the film’s site to donate my thanks to the producers. Unfortunately, they’ve posted no donation address anywhere that I can see.

And so perhaps while the makers of this film continue to promote the idea that money—that is, property—need not and should not be monopolized, they’ll also come to realize that ideas are not property, and that locking them behind “copyright laws” only slows the spread of information and—hence—innovation.

Now go pop some popcorn, gather your non-crypto friends ‘round (especially important), and enjoy this piece of literal resistance.

Update: Further hunting revealed that the film’s Twitter account, @BitcoinDoc, lists their donation address: 19xb2pAzyv7feFkBhbh3n3rtBJ9JPTufm. May we all one day contribute something of such value that people hunt down ways to give us money!

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