This Week In Bitcoin 06/13/2016
TWIB the price continued to rise amidst mainstream media articles about the upcoming halving: on or around July 10th the reward for mining a block of transactions will decrease from 25 bitcoin to 12.5 bitcoin. July 10th will also mark the creation of 75% of all bitcoin, ever.
TWIB I recorded a conversation with notorious Miami bitcoiners Chris DeRose and Junseth. The podcasting duo have impressed me with skepticism and humour. Like me, they have shunned altcoins, scorned “permissioned ledgers”, and mocked hypothetical non-monetary uses of bitcoin (with the exception of notarization,) so it was a little surprising to learn how different some of their other views are from mine. DeRose and or Junseth expressed openness to fractionally-reserved bitcoin accounts, failed to see how the current monetary system increases inequality, and bemoaned the responsibility of owning bitcoin.
Owning bitcoin is powerful but comes with responsibility. To prevent loss and theft, I keep 99% of my bitcoin in cold storage (using bitaddress.org) encrypted with a password, half of which I store in a couple places, and the other half of which is copied and entrusted with two friends. Here’s a how-to video.
Derose and Junseth were also derisive about exploring bitcoin as life, claiming that, “I’m smelling my own farts.” The reason I started studying software in 2009 was Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants, which argues that technology is a new family of life. While Kelly’s thesis holds a grain of truth, it’s a stretch to call bicycles ‘alive;’ they often absorb energy, but don’t self-regulate like biological life. In contrast, bitcoin has feedback loops that keep it regulated and processing transactions every ten minutes, as well as an unprecedented hunger for energy. For more about bitcoin as life my essay: Is Bitcoin Alive?
TWIB Beautyon wrote a truthful and radical essay in response to Adam Ludwig’s speech to the Federal reserve. Beautyon destroys any sympathy for the idea of either “blockchain-without-bitcoin” or FedCoin.
“It is impossible for any single government or corporation to out innovate an Open Source software project with many developers working on the same system. Linux is the living proof of this; no one can come close to the amount of genius being poured into Linux. That is why it is every where, in billions of devices, and increasingly on desktop computers. Bitcoin domination, even as a universal financial backbone, is inevitable and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.”
TWIB researchers at Cornell proposed a new technique called Falcon, which would allow for faster relaying of blocks by miners. Falcon would reduce the head start enjoyed by miners who found the previous block, and thereby help keep mining decentralized. Read more at http://www.falcon-net.org/
TWIB The University of Calgary paid hackers $20,000 in bitcoin to decrypt their faculty email server and other computers that had been shut down for five days with a malware infection. Meanwhile, MIT Technology Review reported that 1/3 of IT workers in England are stockpiling bitcoin in case they need to pay a ransom.
Other links:
- Italian Banker Ferdinando Ametrano from Intesa Sanpaolo shows good understanding of what bitcoin is and is not in this presentation
- Founder of the Pirate Party Rick Falkvinge gives a passionate interview in which he discloses that he’s been all-in on bitcoin since 2011
