Bitcoin’s Collusion Problem | Bottom-up Yesterday I questioned whether we should expect demand for Bitcoins to be stable over the long run. Today I want to look at the supply side. A constrained supply of money is important to a currency’s stability. One of Bitcoin’s key selling points is that the number of Bitcoins issued will never exceed 21 million. But this promise isn’t credible. To understand why, we need to dig a little bit into how the protocol works. The Bitcoin peer-to-peer network can be thought of as a giant, shared accounting ledger. The system has a clever incentive system: each node is allowed to insert a fixed reward (currently 50 Bitcoins) for itself into the block it is working on. The limit is a social convention baked into the BitCoin software. If a group of nodes colluded to change the rules (say, awarding themselves 100 Bitcoins rather than 50 for “winning” a round), the result would be a “fork” of the Bitcoin network.
What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters Unlike other currencies, Bitcoin is underwritten not by a government, but by a clever cryptographic scheme. For now, little can be bought with bitcoins, and the new currency is still a long way from competing with the dollar. But this explainer lays out what Bitcoin is, why it matters, and what needs to happen for it to succeed. Where does Bitcoin come from? In 2008, a programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto—a name believed to be an alias—posted a paper outlining Bitcoin’s design to a cryptography e-mail list. “Satoshi’s a bit of a mysterious figure,” says Jeff Garzik, a member of that core team and founder of Bitcoin Watch, which tracks the Bitcoin economy. How does Bitcoin work? Nakamoto wanted people to be able to exchange money electronically securely without the need for a third party, such as a bank or a company like PayPal. The Basics A Bitcoin address looks something like this: 15VjRaDX9zpbA8LVnbrCAFzrVzN7ixHNsC. Transferring Bitcoins Those clients make two checks on a transaction.
Keynesian beauty contest A Keynesian beauty contest is a concept developed by John Maynard Keynes and introduced in Chapter 12 of his work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), to explain price fluctuations in equity markets. Overview[edit] Keynes described the action of rational agents in a market using an analogy based on a fictional newspaper contest, in which entrants are asked to choose the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs. Those who picked the most popular faces are then eligible for a prize. A naive strategy would be to choose the face that, in the opinion of the entrant, is the most beautiful. A more sophisticated contest entrant, wishing to maximize the chances of winning a prize, would think about what the majority perception of beauty is, and then make a selection based on some inference from his knowledge of public perceptions. National Public Radio's Planet Money tested the theory by having its listeners select the cutest of three animal videos. See also[edit]
U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors Abroad The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.” Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet. The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication. Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe. The Invisible Web Then there was Mr. Mr.
Tor (anonymity network) Tor (previously an acronym for The Onion Router)[4] is free software for enabling online anonymity and censorship resistance. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than five thousand relays[5] to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity, including "visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms", back to the user[6] and is intended to protect the personal privacy of users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored. An extract of a Top Secret appraisal by the NSA characterized Tor as "the King of high secure, low latency Internet anonymity" with "no contenders for the throne in waiting".[7] Alice's Tor client picks a random path to destination server Steven J.
R.I.P. Peter Falk – La dernière enquête du Lieutenant Columbo En exclusivité pour Objectif Liberté, voici la dernière enquête du lieutenant Columbo, Alias Peter Falk, décédé ce 24 juin 2011. Reposez en paix, lieutenant. Columbo, The last episode : « Eco Lumbo » Acte I, Scène 1 (vers 2015) Columbo - Sergent Wilson, qui est la victime ? Wilson - Eh bien, lieutenant, c’est l’économie mondiale. Columbo (au bord du vomissement) - Euh, non, occupez vous en, Wilson… Je lirai votre rapport. Wilson - Oui, l’enquête est trop facile. Columbo (pensif) – Oui, Wilson, continuez à chercher de ce côté-là… Ah, un instant, Wilson, qu’est-ce que c’est que ce papier, à côté de la victime ? Wilson - Euh… Attendez… Columbo - On dirait un billet de mille dollars… A peine de quoi s’acheter un plein d’essence aujourd’hui… Bon, faites analyser, Wilson. Wilson - OK, Lieutenant ! Acte II, scène 1Une riche maison d’une grande ville inconnue. Lord Keynes - Pardon, monsieur, mais je ne reçois pas les clochards. (Il ferme la porte. Columbo - Ah, ça… C’est comme ma femme, tiens.
Online Cash Bitcoin Could Challenge Governments, Banks Late last year, after WikiLeaks began releasing its trove of State Department cables, many individuals sought to show solidarity with the group by making a donation. They found, however, that many payment processors would not remit money to WikiLeaks, some say as a result of U.S. government pressure. PayPal even froze the group’s account so it couldn’t access funds already collected. “Hey, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal: It’s MY money,” media critic Jeff Jarvis tweeted at the time. Intermediaries as Choke Points Whether or not payment processors ought to be telling us how to spend our money online, the fact is they can. Online gambling and sports betting is perfectly legal in countries like the UK, Ireland and Australia, and a resident of the U.S. will have no problem reaching the websites of gaming sites from those countries. To transact online, you have to have an account with a third party like PayPal that you trust will follow your payment instructions. True Digital Cash
The Bitcoin Bubble | Bottom-up My friend Jerry Brito is one of the best-connected and most insightful observers of the Internet I know, so when he starts talking up an Internet trend , I pay attention. But after reading his case for Bitcoin, a new digital currency, I remain a skeptic. The article is worth reading in full, but here’s an important part of his case for Bitcoin: The web has also seen all-purpose digital currencies, from defunct dot-com bubble start-ups Flooz and Beenz, to the slightly more successful e-gold. Bitcoin is the first online currency to solve the so-called “double spending” problem without resorting to a third-party intermediary. It’s an intriguing concept, but the fundamental question about any currency is whether its value will be stable over time. The fundamental demand-side problem is that it’s not clear why anyone would want Bitcoins—which are, after all, just entries in a database—in the first place. But dollars have at least two advantages over Bitcoins.
LRB · John Lanchester · Once Greece goes… The economic crisis in Greece is the most important thing to have happened in Europe since the Balkan wars. That isn’t because Greece is economically central to the European order: at barely 3 per cent of Eurozone GDP, the Greek economy could vanish without trace and scarcely be missed by anyone else. The dangers posed by the imminent Greek default are all to do with how it happens. I speak of the Greek default as a sure thing because it is: the markets are pricing Greek government debt as if it has already defaulted. This in itself is a huge deal, because the euro was built on the assumption that no country in it would ever default, and as a result there is no precedent and, more important still, no mechanism for what is about to happen. This is, at the moment, the best-case scenario and the current plan A. There is a good moment in one of the otherwise terrible Star Trek movies, in which Spock quotes an ancient Vulcan proverb: ‘Only Nixon could go to China.’ 30 June
Cracking the Bitcoin: Digging Into a $131M USD Virtual Currency The $100M USD+ Bitcoin market is experiencing its first major inflationary event. There's great volatility, but since Friday's drop of 15 percent, the trend has been a reduction in value versus the USD. (Source: Mt. Gox) In some way Bitcoins are like traditional currency, in other ways, they bear more similarity to publicly traded stock. Bitcoin miners can make a tidy profit by pushing early adoption, but market volatility creates a level of risk. Bitcoin protects the users' anonymity with sufficient IP obfuscation. Bitcoins are an exciting development as they offer a unique new economic mechanism. Bitcoin slump shows signs of slowing; misinformation remains widespread Our piece on the Bitcoin market's "Black Friday" saw tremendous pickup, being carried or quoted by Business Insider, Spiegel (Germany's equivalent of The Wall Street Journal), and Slashdot (whose submitter did an admirable job explaining the piece), among others. I. The market on Sunday showed signs of recovery. II. III.