Friday, May 15, 2015
DCC Survey: 12% Of US Consumers ‘Likely’ To Use Bitcoin In 2015
Bitcoin Is ‘a Mechanism of Money Transfer Rather Than a Currency in and of Itself’
Thursday, May 14, 2015
‘We're Considering Not Lying Anymore, for Real’ — US Gov't on NSA Spying (Op-Ed)
Bitcoinist.net Launches Garza-Owned BTC.com, Plans to Create ‘Industry Portal’
Bitcoins by Money Order Opens Up Financial Services to the World's Underbanked
Swiss FINMA Warns of Bitcoin's Money Laundering Risk
Patched ‘Venom’ Bug Said to Be ‘Perfect’ for Stealing Bitcoin
Boost.VC Startup BitQuick Offers Quick and Easy Method to Buy Bitcoin
Trading roughly $450,000 every 30 days as of last month, Ohio-based BitQuick is a new peer-to-peer platform that intends on swiftly connecting digital currency buyers with sellers through over-the-counter (OTC) trades. The majority of the company’s user-base is from the United States, but there are also Taiwan and India branches.
It’s been a busy few months for BitQuick. The volume of trades on their website has increased by nearly five times since January 2015, and it was just chosen as a top-five startup on Boost.VC’s demo day, last week.
In comparison to conventional bitcoin exchanges, Jad Mubasalat, CEO of BitQuick tells Bitcoin Magazine, “When you look at the typical incumbents, like Coinbase and BitFinex, they require multiple business day delays and a bank transfer to be able to buy your first bitcoins”, which, admittedly, can be frustrating for those buying bitcoin to speculate, spend online, or perform cross border payments.
The delay factor of most big exchanges robs bitcoin of its novelty in instantaneous transfers without questions. “BitQuick, however, allows anyone to trade bitcoin instantly with cash, without any risk of fraud,” added Mubasalat. Unlike other OTC trading platforms such as Localbitcoins, Bitquick relies on BitGo’s P2SH multi-sig protection technology with a hefty insurance level of $250,000.
Troubled Beginnings
Like many other Bitcoin early adopters, Mubasalat’s experience dates back to managing an escrow service on Bitcointalk.org, where he had to learn about digital currency the hard way.
“I had the misfortune of being scammed for over 10 BTC and having my Mt. Gox account hacked and losing 20 BTC,” he said.
At the time, the Bitcoin community lacked an international mainstream, user-friendly escrow interface for digital currency trading. Only a few days after he got robbed, someone was offering to sell a prototype for a Bitcoin middle-man service on Bitcointalk, and Mubasalat swooped in.
“I checked it out and loved it so much that I offered to buy the platform before he launched it for $300.” After some tweaking here and there, BitQuick.co was officially launched in August 2013.
Traction came along naturally to BitQuick through word-of-mouth, but Mubasalat needed help managing the increased trade volume because he was still studying Biomedical Engineering at Ohio State University at the time.
“So I brought on Chad Davis in October, 2013,” Mubasalat said. “He was already my roommate then, and we had known each other since the sixth grade, so it made perfect sense!”
Three Simple Steps
- The user selects an order from the current order book, entering his or her email address and desired BTC to trade as well as his or her wallet info.
- The desired sum is paid in cash (physical bills) to the account shown on the confirmation page by going to any local branch of the seller’s bank and filling out a deposit slip, or sending a SEPA transfer (EU customers).
- Finally, a link is sent to the user’s email, where a proof-of-purchase receipt is uploaded.
Transfer times in the United States have a three-hour guarantee, with no registration required. At only 1 percent to 2 percent in fees, the two-man team is “working towards integrating new payment methods in addition to cash deposit in the United States.”
It’s not far-fetched to see them dominating the OTC market soon, at least in the western world.
A future for the Middle East
Although Bitquick.me was launched for a short while to cultivate a market in the Middle East, it was soon pulled due to a lack of demand. Mubasalat said that they “shut it down temporarily to focus on the United States platform.”
For the foreseeable future, bitcoin might not gain a large everyday usage in the Middle East until there is an emergence of basic Bitcoin infrastructure such as wallets and exchanges, he said, given that the Middle East is largely underbanked and has plenty of access to mobile technology.
In the meantime, Bitquick.co users can look forward to a Clef integration, which should be completed in the next few months to give users an alternate mode of authentication.
Peter Diamandis: Blockchain Technology will enable Extraordinary Transformation
Renowned futurist Peter Diamandis, the author of “Abundance – the Future is Better Than You Think” and “Bold – How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World,” has written a thoughtful post on Singularity HUB with 8 predictions for the next ten years. He is persuaded that we’ll see extraordinary transformation in the next decade and that blockchain technology will be one of the enablers.
“If you haven’t heard of the blockchain, I highly recommend you read up on it,” says Diamandis. “You might have heard of bitcoin, which is the decentralized (global), democratized, highly secure cryptocurrency based on the blockchain. But the real innovation is the blockchain itself, a protocol that allows for secure, direct (without a middleman), digital transfers of value and assets (think money, contracts, stocks, IP). Investors like Marc Andreesen have poured tens of millions into the development and believe this is as important of an opportunity as the creation of the Internet itself.”
Diamandis, who co-founded the XPrize and the Singularity University, believes that Bitcoin is a disruptive technology poised to have a big impact.
“At its core, bitcoin is a smart currency, designed by very forward-thinking engineers,” he wrote in Forbes in June 2014. “It eliminates the need for banks, gets rid of credit card fees, currency exchange fees, money transfer fees, and reduces the need for lawyers in transitions… all good things. Most importantly, it is an ‘exponential currency’ that will change the way we think about money. Much the same way email changed the way we thought of mail. (Can you remember life before email?)”
In the same article, Diamandis predicted that “Fall 2014 thru 2015 will like see the start of the Wall Street Phase [of Bitcoin]” – a prediction fully validated by current events – and then, “Finally will come the ‘Mass Global Consumer Adoption’ phase – this is where bitcoin becomes a major player in the global economy.” According to Diamandis, this phase is only a couple of years out.
Diamandis’ Singularity University, an educational center dedicated to world-changing applications of disruptive, exponentially accelerating technologies, is based at Moffett Federal Airfield, formerly operated by NASA. In November 2014, NASA announced that it would be leasing the airfield to Google for 60 years. Google is one of the corporate founders of Singularity University.
On June 2-3 in New York, Singularity University and CNBC will host the Exponential Finance 2015 conference, which will examine how rapidly accelerating technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, crowdfunding, digital currencies and robotics are rapidly disrupting businesses throughout the financial industry.
The conference program features an impressive set of high-profile speakers, including Blythe Masters, the former J.P. Morgan star who now leads digital currency startup Digital Asset Holdings. Masters’ presentation will be titled “Blockchain: the Financial Challenge of our time.” Brock Pierce, founder and Managing Partner of Crypto Currency Partners (CCP), and Abra CEO Bill Barhydt will also give talks related to digital currencies.
Another high profile speaker, Singularity University Networks & Computing Chair and former Chairman of the Board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Brad Templeton, is persuaded that bitcoin and other virtual currencies are significant in that they take some aspects of finance that were formerly in the hands of professionals and unlock them for the public at large. In a Big Think video interview, he explains why Bitcoin matters.
Drachmae: a Bitcoin-like Solution for Greece’s Troubled Economy
CNBC contributor Brian Kelly, the author of “The Bitcoin Big Bang: How Alternative Currencies Are About to Change the World,” proposes a quick and simple bitcoin-like solution for Greece’s troubled economy.
Since the January elections that brought the “anti-establishment” Syriza party to power, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has been trying to renegotiate the Greek debt with the European Union (EU), but the country remains strangled by foreign debt. Rumors of a possible “Grexit,” the exit of Greece from the EU, keep surfacing.
Writing on CNBC, Kelly notes that Greece could stay in the Eurozone and begin repaying its debt, but it needs a method to monetize state-owned assets while still maintaining ownership. Kelly is persuaded that a digital currency based on blockchain technology could provide the solution.
While Greece may not have the liquidity to satisfy its current obligations it does have enough illiquid assets to solve much of its financial problems. The Greek government could use blockchain technology to create a digital currency backed by Greece’s 86 billion euros in illiquid assets.
The government of Greece would place a portion of its assets into a trust, and create a digital currency backed by this basket of assets. The digital currency could then be used to repay creditors and pay government employees. Initial proceeds from the sale of the currency could be used to meet obligations to the European Union, while government employees could be paid in this parallel currency.
According to a Reuters report, the European Central Bank is working on an IOU-based secondary currency similar to the IOU’s used by California in 2009. Kelly notes that Greece’s Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis wrote a blog post in February proposing a similar IOU-based currency, which he dubbed Future Tax Coin (FT-Coin). Varoufakis is not impressed by bitcoin as a currency, but he is persuaded that its underlying technology could be put to effective use in troubled economies.
“[T]he technology of Bitcoin, if suitably adapted, can be employed profitably in the Eurozone as a weapon against deflation and a means of providing much needed leeway to fiscally stressed Eurozone member-states,” said Varoufakis. His post explained in detail how Greece could create an FT-Coin payment system with a Bitcoin-like algorithm to make it transparent, efficient and transactions-cost-free.
According to Kelly, an IOU currency issued by a government under financial stress is not a workable solution. Its acceptance would depend on the public confidence in the Greek government and its ability to collect future taxes, which can’t be taken for granted, and on the availability of easy ways for consumers to spend the new currency.
Kelly is persuaded that his alternative proposal – an opportunity for real-world implementation of block-chain technology – would work, and invites everyone to be a part of the solution by submitting proposals and commenting at drachmae.org. A wiki has been created where block-chain technology firms can submit and discuss all the technology that will be needed.
“The aim of this WIKI is to support a white paper and project think tank looking to see if a viable working real-life solution can be delivered to help Greece with their real-world problems,” says the drachmae wiki. “An open invite has been put out to the Crypto and wider technical community to understand how blockchain technology can be used to provide a working solution.”
On May 20, Kelly will host an online symposium where companies will have the opportunity to present their piece of the workable solution.
Coinify Expands to 34 European Countries
Coinify, a Danish bitcoin exchange and bitcoin payment processing platform is expanding its platform to all 36 EU member states under the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) including Monaco, Malta, Iceland and Croatia.
The SEPA project was initiated in February of 2014, with an aim to make cross-border Euro transfers equivalent to a domestic transfer in a country. Exact description of the project is “To improve the efficiency of cross-border payments and turn the fragmented national markets for euro payments into a single domestic one.”
Coinify plans to expand its services to the countries under the SEPA project to make it even cheaper for those needing to make cross-border remittances/transfers, with 0% transaction fees.
The Danish bitcoin startup completed an early multi-million seed funding led by SEED Capital, the largest tech-focused VC firm in the nation, hoping to be the leading bitcoin startup in Denmark’s cryptocurrency industry.
The investment from SEED Capital and Accelerance allowed Coinify to acquire one of the earliest European bitcoin exchange, Bitcoin Broker Bitcoin Nordic. Due to the acquisition, the bitcoin exchange of Bitcoin Nordic began to operate as a core service of Coinify, with the founder Lasse Birk Olesen appointed as the Chief Product Officer.
Coinify later acquired the intellectual properties and all merchant relationships of one of the largest payment solution providers and payment gateway developer within Europe, Bitcoin Internet Payment System. Kris Henriksen, founder of Bitcoin Internet Payment System, said the company will now focus on technological innovations.
Prior to the funding led by SEED Capital, Coinify was supporting more than 6,000 merchants and 7,000 just from Europe. Moreover, Coinify’s exchange satisfied over 7,000 European users.
With their bitcoin exchange and merchant services solidified, Coinify began to grow its platform and targeted markets including Sweden, the UK, Norway and Denmark and to establish their presence throughout the European region. Coinify specifically targeted Germany and the UK, due to the countries’ large e-commerce markets.
As of now, Coinify plans to seek for investments in the second half of 2015, as Chief Financial Officer Christian Larson stated “We expect to raise a significant amount to make sure that Europe will be playing a leading role in this new payment space. We believe that our strategy on providing the traditional payment service providers with dedicated service is our way in to the market.”
As Coinify expands its service to 36 European countries listed under SEPA, the bitcoin startup hopes to see an increase of trading volume in their exchange and to facilitate more individuals to send cross-border payments throughout Europe.
The World Table Launches a Quantified Reputation System
The World Table, a startup company in Orem, Utah, is building a quantified reputation system to aggregate reputation data and report trust scores for individuals and organizations. The system is built upon Open Reputation, an open source decentralized reputation platform under development, sponsored by The World Table, which maps identity and reputation onto the Internet-of-things (IoT).
The Open Reputation concept is open and flexible, able to accommodate diverse applications and usage patterns, from user reputation and “karma” in online discussion spaces to automatic reputation-based agreements between agents in IoT networks of independent connected devices. Open Reputation models a universe of relations between entities and agents, anything in the IoT, each of which has an identity and may have a reputation. The initial Open Reputation source code is expected to be available before the end of 2015.
“Everyone and everything [in the reputation web] will have at least a public pseudonymous identity, created at the moment of interaction with any other part of the web,” states the Open Reputation High Level Whitepaper. “Everyone and everything may also have an encrypted shareable reputation, reflecting each of its transactions with any other part of the web. Some will choose to aggregate and share more reputation. Others will choose less. And our trust will flow accordingly.”
The High Level Whitepaper mentions a wide range of use cases. Software companies could improve virus and spam detection, web content filtering and software updates, as well as Internet commenting, reviewing, sharing and advertising. Electronics companies could make fully autonomous systems that contract for their own maintenance and supplies. Social and financial qualifications could merge into a reputation economy that improves renting, sharing, purchasing, lending, insuring, interviewing and dating. Biotech firms could enhance big data projects with behavioral correlations. Governments could facilitate administration of voting and social services.
Identities, reputations, and relations persist in a decentralized public database anchored to a decentralized public ledger – the Open Reputation blockchain – both of which compensate participants via a cryptocurrency dubbed Cred. The Open Reputation platform uses a Byzantine agreement algorithm, detailed in the Open Reputation Low Level Whitepaper, to maintain consensus across hosts while supporting higher transaction rates than legacy blockchains. Cred tokens, which, according to the World Table team, will be exchangeable like other cryptocurrencies, will be paid by agents who perform transactions and earned by operators of computers that process the transactions and store related data.
The first product built on the Open Reputation platform will be a comment system for major media sites that will increase the quality of online engagement, boost ad revenues, and create brand lift.
“When our reputations are on the line, most of us choose to behave better – and that also happens to translate into more valuable web properties,” said World Table CTO and EVP of products Lincoln Cannon. The company’s pilot programs showed dramatic increases in “good” behavior when people understood that they were being assessed by their peers. The company describes this feedback model as “adding trust to the Internet.”
“With this announcement, we’re making it clear that a whole class of online interactions are due for a major upgrade,” said World Table CEO Bryan Hall. Patheos, one of the 200 largest content sites in the United States, is expected to begin testing the product in July. When fully deployed, The World Table comment system will be embedded in 20 million page views per month at Patheos alone.
“We’re creating an open-source platform so we can all see and understand how reputations are being formed from the data stream, and we’re using a blockchain architecture to ensure that trust is distributed,” added Cannon. “No central authority will have control over the information used to create your reputation.”
The World Table, which has raised approximately $700,000 to date, is about to launch a seed financing offering for an additional $1.3 million on Angel List.
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