Pretty much any new cryptocurrency can be a time bomb - there is no way to predict its exchange rate or find out how committed its developers are, let alone figuring out if there are any backdoors in
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
How to invest in altcoins without losing everything
Pretty much any new cryptocurrency can be a time bomb - there is no way to predict its exchange rate or find out how committed its developers are, let alone figuring out if there are any backdoors in
IMF and World Bank Both See Potential in Blockchain Technology
The IMF and the World Bank at annual meeting discussed the impact of diverges in emerging economies in a context of low growth, and the current geopolitical issues around the world, the subjects of di
Bitcoin Software Developers Do Not Need ‘BitLicense’
The New York “BitLicense” proposal is most certainly controversial at the very least. There are of course many people who feel that Bitcoin should not be regulated at all and others who feel that curr
‘We Plan to Use These Machines as Remittance Portals to Undercut Western Union and Others Dramatically’ - Cailen Sullivan, CEO ZenBox
his week, we had the opportunity to talk with Cailen Sullivan, CEO and co-founder of ZenBox, the largest BTM (Bitcoin automatic teller machine) operator and distributor in the world. We asked Cailen h
Family-Owned Shot Bar Testing the Frontiers of Bitcoin Acceptance in Latvia
SPOT Kafe is the kind of bar for which Riga is famous among Erasmus students and backpackers. Its menu of shots is a page long, it has a karaoke night on Wednesdays, and there is a special reserved si
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Russia and China Partner across Finance; Apple and Others Threatened by Ban
In the wake of continued sanctions, Russia is turning to China to provide new financial possibilities, with signing a currency swap deal worth 150 billion Yuan (US$24.5 billion) and other measures.
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
New Bitcoin Merchants: Beer Gardens, Dash Cams and More
New places accepting bitcoin: Beer Gardens, Dash Cams and More
Coinage Launches First Order Book Exchange in the Philippines; Pakistan Gets Its First Bitcoin Exchange
Pakistani Bitcoin exchange Urbudit launched on October 11, with the ultimate goal of bringing the digital currency to the locals. At around the same time, the Philippines got its first enterprise-grad
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.
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.
247exchange CEO Alexey Maximenko: ‘Belize is an Attractive Place for Investments, Bitcoin Startups’
Alexey Maximenko is a Russian native entrepreneur, former IT-specialist and system administrator, who co-founded the first and only digital currency exchanger incorporated in Belize, 247exchange. In h
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