Bitcoin Plaza

Monday, March 9, 2015

Talk about Tipping: This Week on Decentral Talk Live

This week on Decentral Talk Live, hosts Ethan Wilding and Anthony Di Iorio have a new slate of guests covering topics like tipping, the ways companies get financing and pay employees in the bitcoin space, and the latest developments at Kraken.

We’ll start with Justin Maxwell of Tibdit who will answer the questions: What’s a “tib” and what’s a “dit”? And how will Tibdit help to level the playing field, by making the internet more of a meritocracy for content providers?

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Similarly, Toronto-based http://cryptiv.com/ seeks to make tipping and microtransactions through its online wallet simple and fun. This crypto-agnostic system is designed to work across various social media platforms. Founder Mat Cybula drops in to Decentral Talk Live to chat about the potential cultural impact that social tipping could play in supporting content creators.

Finding the right system for paying employees is a challenge for all companies from the smallest start-up to the largest multinational. Adding digital currencies into the mix might seem like just one more headache. But is it really? David Shin from Paywise tackles the ins and outs of salary packaging and outsourced administration services on this episode of Decentral Talk Live.

Getting the money to start your new business venture is another financial challenge for new companies. Seedcoin is the world’s first seed-stage Bitcoin and Blockchain start-up virtual incubator. Eddy Travia discusses the ways that new Bitcoin and blockchain businesses can get the support they need to get off the ground. The objective of Seedcoin is “to invest in the creative entrepreneurs of the Bitcoin and Blockchain space and help them develop future services, products and applications” that will re-shape the way people manage and exchange financial and intellectual assets.

Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken, will also stop by to talk about the latest news from Kraken, the cryptocurrency exchange based in Japan. Last November, Kraken was tasked with assisting authorities in their investigation of Mt.Gox and with helping to redistribute recovered assets to its creditors.

Decentral Talk Live is a daily talk show hosted by Anthony Di Iorio and Ethan Wilding, along with a rotating panel of guest hosts. It airs on decentral.tv, Monday through Friday, at 3:00 pm, EST.

Dumb vs. Smart: Which Network is Better for Bitcoin

Nowadays, we deal with computer networks all the time. We chat and talk on networks. We get in-formation on networks and we spend our free time on networks. Perhaps we even get our food from networks.

Threshold Signatures: The New Standard for Wallet Security?

A group of researchers from Princeton University, Stanford University and the City University of New York, have announced a new ECDSA threshold signature scheme that is particularly well-suited for securing Bitcoin wallets.

Threshold signatures can be thought of as “stealth multi-signatures.” The new Bitcoin security scheme is detailed in a research paper titled “Securing Bitcoin wallets via a new DSA/ECDSA threshold signature scheme.”

The announcement follows three previous posts by Steven Goldfeder on the Freedom to Tinker blog, hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Goldfeder is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton, interested in cryptography, security, privacy and decentralized digital currencies.

Bitcoin wallets often are attacked by increasingly sophisticated cyber thieves. Coupled with the irreversibility of bitcoin transactions, that poses important security problems that decrease user confidence in Bitcoin and could prevent the digital currency from going mainstream if no robust and simple solution is found.

The researchers note that the Bitcoin ecosystem needs a breakthrough in security.

Banks use two or multi-factor authentication schemes: the user’s password – which may have been compromised by hackers – isn’t enough to initiate a transaction, but the user must provide at least one more authentication, often by replying to an email or using a smartphone authentication app or equivalent stand-alone device. Today, reputable Bitcoin services such as Circle and Bitstamp use two-factor authentication to provide security, but users must say goodbye to anonymity and provide proof of identity.

Even more secure three-factor authentication methods that include biometrics are emerging.

DIY-minded and privacy-conscious Bitcoin users can run their own wallet and “be their own bank,” but running a wallet has proved to be too much of a security risk. As soon as hackers gain access to the wallet, they can instantly and irreversibly take the money and run.

Cold storage – keeping the main bitcoin wallet on a device that is not connected to the Internet, and moving only the funds needed for daily expenses to online storage – often is seen as too much of a hassle.

Therefore, most security-conscious bitcoin users rely on external services, at the cost of compromising their anonymity and the “DIY spirit” of Bitcoin.

Multi-signature (multisig) wallets offer a solution. A multisig transaction, for example a 2-of-3 transaction, requires the agreement of the required number of authorized signatories, in this case two out of three. However, the paper shows that multisig transactions present significant usability problems, and serious anonymity and confidentiality drawbacks.

“Bitcoin currently lacks support for the sophisticated internal control systems deployed by modern businesses to deter fraud,” say the authors of the paper. “To address this problem, we present the first threshold signature scheme compatible with Bitcoin’s ECDSA signatures and show how distributed Bitcoin wallets can be built using this primitive.”

In a threshold signature scheme, the ability to construct a signature is distributed among different devices (for example a computer and a smartphone), and each device receives a share of the private signing key. For individuals, threshold signatures allow for two-factor security, or splitting the ability to sign between two devices so that a single compromised device won’t put the money at risk. For businesses, threshold signatures allow for the realization of access control policies that prevent both insiders and outsiders from stealing corporate funds.

The researchers built a prototype implementation of a two-factor secure wallet, a desktop client and an Android app, and released open source code on Github. A video shows how the system works: a user initiates a transaction on the computer, and the computer then begins the threshold signing protocol with the phone. The phone will show the user the transaction details and will proceed with the transaction only with the user’s explicit approval. The computer and phone use QR codes to initially pair, and for all subsequent sessions they communicate over the local Wifi network.

If threshold signature schemes become common, private bitcoin wallets will support the same multi-factor authentication offered by major wallet providers, while continuing to offer a high degree of anonymity.

Recognizing Women in Bitcoin – The Week in Review from Decentral.TV

Sunday was International Women’s Day, when the Bitcoin community is joined with others around the world to promote awareness of women’s issues by launching its first Bitcoin Women’s Day.

Like International Women’s Day, “Bitcoin Women’s Day is not just for women,” says Sarah Boone Martin of the Digital Currency Council. The issues that women are concerned about – equal access to healthcare, to financial systems, to the world economy, to employment, to education; a sustainable environment, personal safety, security and autonomy – these are all issues that are important to the Bitcoin community as a whole.

The purpose of Bitcoin Women’s Day can be broken down into three key goals: first, to celebrate the accomplishments of women in the space; second, to raise awareness of issues and barriers they face both within and outside of that space; and third, to promote Bitcoin as a means of addressing some of the issues that women face around the world.

Leading up to Bitcoin Women’s Day, decentral.tv aired episodes that addressed some of these concerns.

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On Tuesday’s episode, Tatiana Moroz discussed her role in helping to found the Women’s Crypto Association. She noted that there are few women in venture capital, which influences how projects are funded.

“Men value things differently than women. More diversity in the venture capital space will lead to more diversity in the products that are created and the companies that are born,” she said. Moroz encouraged more women to join the Women’s Crypto Association.

“There are a lot of great women in the space,” she said, but noted that they don’t necessarily get the invitations to speak at events. “We’d like to have more of a ‘best practices’ for conferences,” Moroz said. “We don’t want anything particularly special. We want it to be noticed that we are also contributing.”

She objected to the way that many conferences relegate women speakers to a “Women in Bitcoin” type of panel.

“That’s not enough,” says Moroz. “Lots of women have experience in a variety of different topics. Offering them actual speaking engagements rather than just a panel on women is a better direction for us to go in.”

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Decentral Talk Live also featured a conversation with Connie Gallippi, whose BitGive Foundation is the first charity to receive 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. The type of projects that BitGive work on include Save the Children, which now accepts bitcoin directly; the Water Project, which brings clean and safe water to sub-Saharan Africa; and Medic Mobile, which uses mobile phones and open source software to improve healthcare in the developing world.

Gallippi recently has been to Africa to see a well that BitGive funded entirely through bitcoin donations. In co-operation with BitPesa, a short video is being produced that chronicles the Water Projects’ bitcoin-funded well and looks at the future social impact of bitcoin in developing countries.

“The technology is there but we just need to build out the infrastructure and user base,” says Gallippi.

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The week ended with an interview with Anne Connelly, director of marketing and fundraising for Dignitas International, a charity that aims to transform healthcare for the most vulnerable. Dignitas delivers frontline care in Malawi, conducts research and develops practical solutions and advocates for better health policy and practice.

Connelly recently succeeded in convincing her boss that bitcoin could be a valuable addition to their fundraising goals.

It wasn’t easy. She had to overcome the organization’s fears of the unknown, not to mention bitcoin’s notorious volatility.

Connelly had to “come up with a better way of thinking about it,” and finally, through her repeated efforts, she was able to convince Dignitas to accept bitcoin donations in the same way that it accepts stock donations.

“It’s about sharing the knowledge about what we do in the Bitcoin community now” she says, “and hopefully in the future there will be some more donations.”

Donations help the foundation keep babies HIV-free, keep young people with HIV/AIDS on treatment and boost maternal health.

All three of these women have been instrumental in raising awareness about bitcoin and the way it can have a positive impact on society – as well as the ways in which women are making a difference in the Bitcoin space.

Decentral Talk Live airs daily, Monday to Friday, at 3:00 pm EST on decentral.tv.

Bitcoin As a Hedge Against Economic Uncertainty (Op-Ed)

Even though we may make the argument bitcoin is a poor store of wealth, as some have recently contested, could it simultaneously be a valid hedge against economic uncertainty?

Win Five Bitcoins with CoinTelegraph and Share The Bitcoin

With a service based around the idea earning Bitcoins by telling new people about the world of digital currency, Share The Bitcoin has been expanding the user base of Bitcoin itself since its arrival

MAR 9 DIGEST: uTorrent pulls Litecoin miner, 10,000 Spanish ATMs accept Bitcoin

µTorrent has pulled a controversial LiteCoin mining program from its latest update to the popular torrenting client in face of strong protests. 10,000 Spanish ATMs will now pay out Euros in exchange f

Utah Bitcoin Bill Passes Senate Reading, 2 Votes Away from Law

A bill aimed at getting the state of Utah to accept bitcoin for states services passes its first reading in the Senate. The bill has now passed its first Senate reading having already passed through t

Bitcoin Price Analysis: Final (CoinTelegraph Says Good Bye to Tone Vays)

Bitcoin Price Analysis: Week of Mar 9

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Weekend Roundup: Shopping with Bitcoins on the Mastercard Network, First Publicly Traded BTC Exchange

Weekend Roundup from CoinTelegraph

'Governance 2.0' Moves Forward via Bitnation, Blocknet, Horizon Partnership

In the chatter about the “decentralization of all the things,” one hears about many exciting ideas: self-owning cars, peer-to-peer lending networks, and even mesh nets. The demands for replacements of

Saturday, March 7, 2015

First Annual Bitcoin Women’s Day Gets Overwhelming Response

March 8 is synonymous around the world as International Women’s Day, and as of 2015 cryptocurrency now has its own version, Bitcoin Women’s Day, with sponsorship from major players including BitPay an