Bitcoin Plaza

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Multisig Support Set to Become a New Standard

The immense security benefits of multisig transactions have become especially relevant as bitcoins—like all valuable things—are prominent targets of theft. Where users choosing the convenience of web

While Price Falters, Bitcoin’s Institutional Acceptance Grows

It’s been a lackluster year for the price of bitcoins. In a few days, fans of the fledgling digital currency will come face to face with a reality that few would have thought possible at this point la

Monday, November 3, 2014

Lawsky’s ‘Temporary BitLicense’ proposal for NY start-ups

The creator of the controversial BitLicense legislation has sought to make its effect more palatable for New York start-ups by offering them a form of temporary coverage.

Bitalo.com Puts Massive 100BTC Bounty On Hacker

Bitalo.com has been DDoS'd attacked by the same hacker that attacked Nitrogensports, now they are putting up possibly the biggest Bitcoin bounty ever to find his identity.

The New Frostwire

Remember FrostWire (BitTorrent client)? They’ve completely transformed their platform and are integrating Bitcoin into their system.

While at a Bitcoin conference I met Angel Leon, a project lead for FrostWire. Bitcoin, he mentioned to me, has caused a resurgence of excitement in the open-source movement.

Angel is also working hard on the OpenBazaar Project.

I asked him some questions about everything from Bitcoin, to FrostWire, and OpenBazaar.

Kevin Cruz: How did you come to begin working on open-source projects and why do you enjoy it?

Ever since I was into school I couldn’t understand why so many people in campus would be so adamant to not show their code, it wasn’t as if they were developing top secret super important technology, I thought we’d learn more from each other if we shared.

But it wasn’t until I joined LimeWire in 2005 when I truly began to learn what the Open Source process really meant. From there I moved onto other projects, such as FrostWire, and everything I do, if it can be opened, it will be.

How does the vision behind Frostwire relate to the idea of bitcoin?

Bitcoin is the missing key for many projects, not just FrostWire. In our case, we see tremendous opportunities to enable content creators to monetize the content they share with those who can pay what they can, and while they do that, we believe no third party should be involved in taking a cut of the transaction.

We believe that there’s great value to be added to industries that deal with Intellectual Property if you onboard content creators worldwide without any friction and better yet, if they can transact with their fans/customers directly and efficiently like you can with Bitcoin.

How has Frostwire changed more recently?

FrostWire is now 9 years old, it went from being a LimeWire fork into a project of its own. FrostWire is the result of integrating a multitude of Open Source projects; it’s basically a file downloader with built in search capabilities, along with a full featured media player powered by MPlayer.

FrostWire downloads files from cloud services and from the BitTorrent network. For this purpose we’ve been using the Vuze/Azureus BitTorrent engine, but as of FrostWire 6 (currently in alpha) we’ve removed Azureus completely and we’re now using libtorrent.

We were born a Java project, and integrating things like libtorrent in the product have made us create new technology for the java community.

For FrostWire 6 we created a full featured libtorrent wrapper API for Java called frostwire-jlibtorrent. http://ift.tt/1DSIWgn Our commercial proof of concept for this library will be the release of FrostWire 6, a full featured end user BitTorrent client, now lighter and faster than ever thanks to this “engine” replacing decision.

We hope this library will enable other projects, certainly in the enterprise/cloud sector which is heavily serviced by Java technologies, to take a closer look at what the BitTorrent technologies are able to do. Once mature, this will be a powerful library to build products that can benefit from decentralized file sharing.

During those 9 years something interesting happened along the way, and it was the birth of Android. When we got on Android we were the first peer to peer file sharing client ever published on the “Android Market” (as I believe it was called at the time), back then we had implemented a new p2p protocol which we had called “metafrost”. The protocol mimicked the Gnutella Protocol and at the time it was an experiment that was catching exponential attention from Android users that could browse each other’s shared files. However, this didn’t go well with the federal government which had concerns about our default settings for a file sharing app, and they ended up not just auditing our Android app, but also putting very strict rules on how the desktop app was to behave.

This led to the hard decision of removing Gnutella support from FrostWire and transforming it into a BitTorrent/Cloud downloader.

We’ll soon be releasing an Android version that also enjoys the power of our new frostwire-jlibtorrent client, and we believe this new version should be able to run very well even in very modest hardware equipped Android devices (just by looking at our initial tests and comparing things like memory usage, threads used, battery consumption)

How did you come to join OpenBazaar?

I’ve joined OpenBazaar simply because of the daily anxiety of not having it. I believe OpenBazaar needs to exist. The world of e-commerce is made up of a bunch of walled gardens that don’t talk to each other. Thanks to Bitcoin this can finally change as the payment medium is no longer owned/controlled by a central organization not willing to open up in anyway.

My goal with OpenBazaar is to have a standard Smart Contract Protocol that any ecommerce related app/service can use. What this means for FrostWire is still uncertain as the protocol is still far from having an implementation that we can look at and say “we can actually do this, and that”, but it is in my gut that this protocol will enable us to work on a decentralized music store, a decentralized music store that allows not just for the “Pay what you can” business model, but also the more traditional “Pay for this track” model, while not ripping artists off 30% plus what labels steal from them after that.

I think this will be very healthy for the music industry as a whole, especially as technology has allowed for very specific niches to discover the music they actually care about (long tails). If we can pull it for music, I’m sure we’ll be able to empower content creators working with film, books, software, etc. to list, and sell their products be it on FrostWire, or on some other OpenBazaar based product.

Another interesting thing we started doing recently with FrostWire and Bitcoin to grow our developer team was the addition of tip4commit to our repo. We’re converting all fiat donations into Bitcoin and distributing these to the following projects:

http://ift.tt/1DSITBl

http://ift.tt/1wYS6rv

http://ift.tt/1DSIWgt

http://ift.tt/1DSIWgn

As a result, the first week we started getting translators from Russia, Croatia, Greece, [and] China to help us with out of date translation files. As of last week we started getting our first contributions to frostwire-android (someone from Azerbaijan) and the beauty of it is that, once the projects are funded, the bitcoins are out of our control. And once a new contribution is merged, the contributor will receive bitcoins almost immediately to their wallet.

We’re now seeing 2-4 daily contributions to the projects and making new friends all over the planet.

Digital Revolution in the Granite State

New Hampshire – the first colony to sever ties from Great Britain – is once again leading the revolution. Along with its centuries-long “Live Free or Die” culture, New Hampshire is becoming a Mecca for digital currency enthusiasts. In just the last few years, Bitcoin experts and entrepreneurs have been eagerly coming to New Hampshire to spread their message. Many Bitcoin users are members of the Free State Project: a cooperative organization encouraging liberty-lovers to migrate to New Hampshire. Members of the Free State Project range from Democrat and Republican Party members to crypto-anarchists, and many in between. As Bitcoin represents an incredible technological advance in the direction of liberty, it should come as no surprise that early Bitcoin movers are invested ideologically as well as financially.

Here are some examples indicating Bitcoin’s growing popularity in the Granite State:

Manchester, New Hampshire, is home to the longest-running weekly Bitcoin meetup in the world (soon to hit 121 weeks). Most meetups number 15 to 25 attendees, with a diverse crowd of families, young professionals, teachers, couriers, programmers, inventors, businessmen and more. They gather to eat and drink, hang out, and especially discuss Bitcoin news, altcoin projects, price speculation, new applications for Bitcoin, and more.

New Hampshire Bitcoin businesses are growing rapidly. The owners and founders of Lamassu, maker of the popular Bitcoin machine, live and work in Manchester. Restaurants, law offices, barber shops, painters, a martial arts studio and many more businesses accept Bitcoin in New Hampshire. According to Coinmap and Wikipedia statistics, there exists one Bitcoin-accepting merchant for every 44,000 of its residents. This is 4.3 times more dense than neighboring Massachusetts, 4.8 times more dense than the state of New York, 2.5 times more dense than Texas, 2.9 times more dense than California, and 2.6 times more dense than Florida.

The Free State Project, which has been accepting Bitcoin since 2011, holds two annual events: Liberty Forum, which is held in the winter, and the Porcupine Freedom Festival (Porcfest), which is held in the summer. Both Liberty Forum and Porcfest are Bitcoin-heavy, featuring large displays of Bitcoin companies such as Blockchain.info, and inviting speakers such as Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, and Erik Voorhees and the Coinapult team. Bruce Fenton, Roger Ver, and Erik Voorhees are all signers of the Free State Project, having pledged to move to New Hampshire once a critical mass of fellow libertarians have signed on as well.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency feature prominently in New Hampshire-based radio, including Free Talk Live, Rebel Love Show, Neocash Radio, and local media like Shire Dude.

In addition to instances of purely societal growth, New Hampshire politics itself is becoming changed by Bitcoin. Mark Warden, a realtor and New Hampshire state representative, is among the first of the elected officials to solicit and receive Bitcoin donations for political campaigns. After the election, his team subsequently educated the Secretary of State’s office on Bitcoin, including handling it and accounting for it in campaign finance matters. Upcoming candidates in the 2014 election cycle are joining the Bitcoin train, including State House candidates Shem Kellogg and Andre Rosa, among others.

In the gubernatorial race, it’s Andrew Hemingway that is ahead of the curve. In an interview on Follow the Coin, Hemingway explains his position:

…New Hampshire is a state where we have the opportunity to create the exact opposite situation [regarding] things happening in New York. To do that, we need a governor who understands cryptocurrency, who understands the entire technology framework that’s involved around the blockchain, and the potentials there. And to make sure we keep government out of the way, and to stop government from crushing innovation, which it is prone to do. So I am running on a pro-innovation platform and a pro-technology platform; …we’re very forward looking. I think New Hampshire is a state that has a great potential for the crypto market. I’m running for governor to try to push that.

Hemingway has also expressed ideas regarding utilizing blockchain technology within the State apparatus. Paying public contracts or collecting micro-transactional fees could become vastly easier and more transparent with Bitcoin or with a similar decentralized digital currency. An anonymous New Hampshire driver earned a few minutes of fame on reddit for being the first person to pay a parking ticket in Bitcoin through the use of Brawker.

As Bitcoin use becomes contested or prohibited in other areas of the world, various States will respond accordingly. Some States – culturally or economically tied to a superpower – will fall in line behind a major decision regarding legality. Others will break from the norm, hoping to attract real innovative value from what the rest of the world has shunned. Certain countries of Europe such as Switzerland have acted this way with regards to privacy and digital freedom; places like Hong Kong or Singapore are seen as oases of economic freedom.

Despite whatever obstacles states place upon Bitcoin use, it will continue to grow. It becomes stronger as more people become familiar with Bitcoin and begin preferring it. While Bitcoin demonstrates that geographical proximity is not required for money to emerge, having a concentrated mass of Bitcoin users accomplishes two related goals: 1) Establish local trade patterns with others using Bitcoin, thus experiencing firsthand living a fiat-free world, and; 2) Acculturate the surrounding members of mass society, such as enshrining Bitcoin protection into law and accelerating merchant adoption. Eventually, as Bitcoin becomes more popular in New Hampshire, it will begin to make inroads in people’s economic lives. They will see Bitcoin down the street and in the newspaper, they will see goods quoted in terms of it, they will hear friends or family talk about it. Over time, this becomes the “new language” for commerce. As Bitcoin begins to shake up the world, it is important for there to be locations and groups of people familiar and accepting of Bitcoin rather than those that choose to fight it. New Hampshire is beginning to look like that place.

Newly Launched BTMs: Saudi Arabia and Indonesia Get Their First Machines

CoinTelegraph has partnered with Coin ATM Radar, which regularly updates a helpful and navigable Bitcoin ATM map, to get the most comprehensive data about new BTMs as they go online.

BitcoinPriceLive and H16 join the CoinTelegraph Media Group

It is with great pleasure that CoinTelegraph is able to announce not one but two further additions to the CoinTelegraph Media Group, expanding its reach into the most diverse areas of the Bitcoin indu

German 'Bitcoin Brothers' Unveils Bitcoin Mining Supercomputers

German Bitcoin mining supercomputer manufacturer Bitcoin Brothers announces 6 petahash supercomputers built on the first 3D 16nm FinFET ASICs.

Bitcoin Analysis: Week of Nov 2 (Intro to Stochastics)

The week of November 2nd Bitcoin Analysis by Tone Vays.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

How to Get your Store Ready for Bitcoin Black Friday

This year, Black Friday falls on November 28 and on this date we could see another spike in Bitcoin shopping similar to last year’s event, which was partially responsible for the historic run-up in pr

An Inside Look at Bitstash’s New 3-Tier Hardware Wallet: Interview with CTO, Trevor Murphy

Bitstash aims to deliver wallet solutions with two major selling points - one being flawless security, and the other being its ease of use as the device is designed so that even your grandmother can u