Friday, August 21, 2015
AUG 21 DIGEST: Mark Karpeles Re-Arrested in Japan; World Wide Web Consortium to Launch Web Payments Working Group
Mike Tyson’s Bitcoin ATM Goes Live
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Bitmain Announces Launch of BM1385 Chip for Future Antminer S7 Bitcoin Miner with Increased Power and Efficiency
Bitmain, the bitcoin mining ASIC provider, announced today that it has launched its fourth-generation ASIC, the BM1385. This chip, the company claims, can generate a 45 percent increase in hashrate while needing 50 percent less electricity than its former chip, the BM1384.
“The problem at the heart of designing chips for bitcoin mining is the careful balance of performance with electrical consumption. With lower power consumption, miners have lower electricity bills, or they can increase their hashrate without increasing their power expense,” said the Bitmain chip designer in a statement.
According to the company, the BM1385 can attain 32.5 gigahash per second at a power consumption of 0.216 watts/gigahash-second using 0.66V. This chip was built on the 28-nanometer process of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC); the company felt that it could outperform chips that were built on 14 and 16 nanometer process nodes that didn’t have full custom design techniques.
Full custom design is an arduous process whereby the engineers have to lay each individual transistor inside the chip. However, while the creation process is more intensive and involves higher risk of failure at tape-out, the finished chips are able to do far more with less electricity.
“We anticipate that before we release our full-custom 16 nanometer chip, the BM1385 will continue to be the industry standard for the bitcoin mining industry,” said Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu.
Bitmain has grown very aggressive with releasing its previous chips. Its BMI1380, which was used in the AntMiner S1, was released in Q4 2013. Its BM1382 and BM1384 came out in Q2 and Q4 of 2014 respectively. This is the fourth chip in two years that Bitmain has released. When Bitmain announces the launch of its AntMiner S7, it will use this BM1385 chip.
Jacob is a product manager working in the industrial news space as well as a freelance writer covering finance. He found bitcoin randomly, fell in love with its potential, and has been addicted to it ever since. He runs a weekly newsletter about Bitcoin at CryptoBrief.com.
Donald Trump Vows to Clamp Down on Mexican Remittances
Factom Launches Release Candidate 2 in Preparation for Beta
On July 6, 2015, Bitcoin Magazine reported that the Factom Foundation had launched Release Candidate 1 (RC1), a crucial step for launching the Factom network. Over the ensuing 5 weeks, community developers and programmers have been testing and debugging the network in order to reach all the goals set out in Factom’s Milestone 1.
Today in a blog post, Factom has announced the launch of the Release Candidate 2 (RC2) version of the Factom Beta. Again, it is asking for developer input as it works toward its next milestone: Factom Genesis.
According to Factom’s post, RC2 includes the following:
- Better Factom block syncing & downloading
- Tested for high numbers of entries
- Improved server to client messaging and error handling
- Some limited code refactoring and reorganization
Once Milestone 1 is achieved, funding from the software sale will be released. At this point, holders of Factoids will be able to utilize their tokens on the network and to exchange them on Cryptsy and ShapeShift.
To celebrate the network’s progress, Factom will be hosting a launch party in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, September 1, featuring speeches from Peter Kirby and Paul Snow which will be broadcast to the community, along with a Q&A on Zapchain.
Earlier this year, Tatiana Moroz caught up with Tiana Laurence, chief marketing officer at Factom, to learn more about the project.
Bank of England: Bitcoin is “Harder Money” than Gold Due to Deflation
During a presentation on digital currencies entitled “Old Money, New Money,” Andy Haldane, Chief Economist and the Executive Director of Monetary Analysis and Statistics of the Bank of England and his team stated that “Digital currencies are ‘harder money’ than a gold standard” because “sustained adoption [of bitcoin] would see ongoing deflation.”
Haldane began by explaining the basics of bitcoin and its “advantages and disadvantages” as a peer to peer payment system. Haldane and his team described bitcoin in 4 main aspects:
- Distributed: greater resilience, no central control, a coordination problem
- Pseudonymous (and possibly anonymous)
- Push-only (no ‘direct debits’): payments are final and cannot be imposed
- Individually cheap, but socially expensive (but this could be fixed)
Haldane continued to expound that bitcoin could disrupt the traditional financial industry, due to the world’s severely underbanked regions and the surge of increase in smart phone usages.
2 million UK adults do not have bank accounts and 2.5 billion people in the world have no access to financial services, said Haldane. However, given the estimate that 80% of the world’s population will own a smartphone within 5 years, Haldane believes that many could turn toward digital currency to store their savings.
Despite his positive comments and presentation on bitcoin, Haldane brought a closure to his talk by saying, “The least interesting thing about Bitcoin, and other distributed ledger systems, is that they are digital. Digital currencies are important for how they deploy the available technology in a new way.”
Photo Katie Chan / Wikimedia (CC)
Bitcoin Product of the Week: MunchPak Delivers Delicious Snacks for Bitcoin
The Bitcoin product of the week series from Bitcoin Magazine highlights some of the cool, interesting, or funny things you can buy with bitcoin. What should we cover next week? Let us know at hello@bitcoinmagazine.com.
The Bitcoin Magazine team recently had the opportunity to review MunchPak, a monthly subscription service that curates snack foods from all over the world and ships them to your doorstep – all for bitcoin. Whether you’re a junk food aficionado, an explorer of exotic tastes, or simply bored with your usual snacking options, the MunchPak is designed to entertain and satisfy an adventurous palette.
Our one box included twelve random treats from all around the globe – which meant that we often had to guess at what was it was we were given.
For example, the Sweet Potato Shaped Snacks from Korea turned out to be a sweet and crunchy Korean cookie snack reminiscent of French Toast Crunch in flavor.
This candy had the chewy texture of lime-flavored Starburst, but with a thin layer of creme filling on the inside. We’re not sure what it was called or where it came from, but it was definitely a hit.
Other staff favorites included the Japanese soda pop candies and the chocolate-filled cookies (probably – someone ate them all before we had a chance to try them!) The only snack we unanimously disliked was an allegedly mango-flavored gummy, shaped like a turkey leg and covered in cayenne pepper.
MunchPak boxes come in three different sizes (Mini, Original and Family Pak) and are customizable. There is an option to send them as a gift, which could be a fun treat for students going away to college.
Boxes ship worldwide within 72 hours (with free shipping within the US), though they can take around 5 business days to arrive once they ship, depending on customs. MunchPak accepts payment by PayPal, credit card or bitcoin.
World Wide Web Creator Tim Berners-Lee Leads W3C to Establish Online Payment Standards Including Bitcoin
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) started review of a draft Web Payments Working Group Charter. The Web Payments Working Group will launch by the end of September after the end of the review on September 15, start working on an overall Web payments architecture, and prepare key topics for discussion at the next Technical Plenary/Advisory Committee meeting (TPAC 2015) in October.
The W3C, led by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, is an international body that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. The Web Payments Interest Group acts as the overall coordinator at W3C of a vision for Web Payments.
“The Web Payments Working Group is not creating any new digital payment schemes, but rather integrating existing and emerging schemes more efficiently and securely into Web applications,” states the W3C announcement. “A standardized message flow should make it easier to automate payments, which will improve the overall security and user experience of making payments on the Web.”
The Web Payments Interest Group recently updated its Web Payments Use Cases 1.0 working draft. The Group also published a FAQ with more information about the anticipated benefits of the future standards, a diagram illustrating the high-level message flow, and some examples of different Web payment approaches.
The W3C Web Payments documentation makes only sparse references to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, which are only mentioned as possible options alongside other online payment means such as Google Wallet, Apple Pay, PayPal and iDEAL, a payment method that enables consumers to pay online through their own banks. The Use Cases draft includes a short section dedicated to cryptocurrency payments with bitcoin and ripple, with a scenario that outlines an ideal payment experience using bitcoin, or a bitcoin-like cryptocurrency.
Internet pioneers such as Ted Nelson, Marc Andreessen and Berners-Lee himself thought that the Internet should have a built-in framework for micropayments. Berners-Lee tried to include micropayments in Web protocols, but the idea hasn’t been implemented so far.
“In the late 1990s Berners-Lee tried to develop a micropayments system for the Web through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),” reported Walter Isaacson in his 2014 book “The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.” The idea was to devise a way to embed in a Web page the information needed to handle a small payment, which would allow different electronic wallet services to be created by banks or entrepreneurs. “It was never implemented, partly because of the changing complexity of banking regulations,” noted Isaacson.
The preparatory work of the Web Payments Interest Group and the forthcoming work of the Web Payments Working Group can be seen as gradual steps to implement Berners-Lee’s vision. However, it’s surprising that the official W3C documents produced to date make only incidental mentions of bitcoin, which is the only form of Internet money and “Internet native” payment system that exists, works, effectively implements one-click Internet payments, and is rapidly gaining recognition and partial acceptance from the financial system.
Isaacson reports that Andreessen mentioned bitcoin as a good model for standard Internet payment systems. “If I had a time machine and could go back to 1993, one thing I’d do for sure would be to build in bitcoin or some similar form of cryptocurrency,” Andreessen said.
A possible explanation for the more timid approach of the W3C is that the organization prefers to distance itself from the more controversial aspects of bitcoin, including the possibility of private and semi-anonymous transactions, and wait for “sanitized” versions of bitcoin.
Photo Southbank Centre / Flickr (CC)
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the 3 Categories Where Bitcoin is Most Useful
There are many reasons why someone may become interested in Bitcoin. Some are mesmerized by the technology’s pseudonymous creator, while others simply like the idea of having a completely open payment network for the entire globe. Although it’s easy to become captivated by what Bitcoin has to offer, it is difficult for many individuals to fully understand the specific areas of daily life where Bitcoin may be useful.
Coinbase has been one of the main drivers behind the adoption of Bitcoin in the mainstream, and CEO Brian Armstrong sees three areas where Bitcoin can be most useful right now. For Armstrong, disrupting traditional financial services, bringing digital financial services to people who don’t already have them, and enabling completely new Internet applications are the three areas where the cryptocurrency can be the most useful right now. The Coinbase CEO expanded on these thoughts in a recent episode of the a16z Podcast with Wall Street Journal Columnist Christopher Mims.
Disrupting Traditional Financial Services
Armstrong’s first area of focus when discussing Bitcoin’s usefulness had to do with traditional financial services. Although many Bitcoin businesses have decided to focus on the developing world or industries that operate in a legal gray area, Armstrong also sees value in using Bitcoin to disrupt the financial services that people already use in the developed world:
“One of them is . . . distributing traditional financial services and products. In [one] case, remittance. It might allow it to be faster or cheaper, right? Other examples of traditional financial products it might disrupt would be things like credit card payments where now those fees are less, or instead of going to get a loan at a bank, you might be able to get a peer-to-peer loan through something like BTCJam, which is a startup out there.”
Bringing Financial Services to the Developing World
Armstrong’s second area of focus was the developing world where there is more than a bit of cell phone penetration but a lack of access to traditional bank accounts. The Coinbase CEO believes that Bitcoin can bring financial services to people in the developing world who otherwise would have no access to digital commerce:
“The second major category in my mind would be developing world use cases where people don’t actually have financial services today. These are the unbanked of the world, and there’s something like two to three billion people in the world who have a cell phone but do not have a bank account or credit card. So, they’re living, essentially, with cash or they’re using some kind of primitive digital currency — like a lot of people actually send cell phone minutes or cell phone credit. They can SMS it to each other in the developing world.”
Armstrong expanded on how something like cell phone minutes could be seen as a precursor to a digital currency such as Bitcoin:
“There’s actually some places where you can go in the Philippines and buy dinner with cell phone minutes and things like that. You text it to the person across the counter, and so those are all early precursors of digital currency – types of digital currency that people are using there. We think that a whole generation of kids and people in the developing world will actually grow up, and their first ‘bank account’ will actually be a digital currency wallet on their cell phone.”
Enabling New Internet Applications
Armstrong’s third area of usefulness is perhaps the most interesting. With Bitcoin, certain Internet applications that did not make sense in the past are now possible:
“The third one would be what I call brand new Internet applications that are uniquely enabled by Bitcoin. By that I mean it’s not disrupting the traditional financial services industry or something like that. It’s actually creating something [where] the only way it works is with Bitcoin. These are very small today, but I think in the future some of these will end up being multi-billion dollar companies and systems. Some of these are things like distributed crowdfunding, like the Lighthouse project is an example of that. There are prediction markets where you can use the wisdom of crowds to predict the outcome of certain events.”
Armstrong also explained that many of these new applications made possible through Bitcoin usually have something to do with microtransactions:
“A lot of them have to do with microtransactions, actually, which is something Bitcoin uniquely enables. So, there are things like tipping on the Internet with things like ChangeTip. These are examples of, kind of, very new use cases that are uniquely enabled by Bitcoin, which are not big yet but could actually grow — more of like a greenfields idea.”
When you combine these three areas of usefulness for Bitcoin, it’s easy to see why so many people are bullish on the technology’s potential rate of adoption. As Armstrong alluded to later in the conversation, it is these sorts of use cases that attack pain points in people’s financial lives that will drive more adoption over the long term.
Photo TechCrunch / Flickr (CC)
AUG 20 DIGEST: Bank of England Says Digital Currency is ‘Harder Money’ than Gold; Nigeria’s Bank Calls for Bitcoin Regulation
Bitcoin XT Fork Can 'Blacklist' Tor Exits, May Reveal Users’ IP Addresses
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
An Open Letter: To Argentina’s New 26-Year-Old Head of Banco Nacion (Op-Ed)
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