Bitcoin News
Daily diary of what's happening with Bitcoin.
The latest article by columnist and Bitcoin Foundation board member Jon Matonis (@JonMatonis) is on how Bitcoin is the only real disruptive technology in the payments space but is disruptive in a way that others might be missing. Excerpts:
“We are witnessing something unique in money and payments. For those that do invest and successfully navigate the potential traps, the reward is a first-mover advantage for a new international monetary unit.”
-
”Here’s the important part. Disruption in the unit of account is the way to disrupt the payments space.”
-
“With a nonpolitical monetary unit, many new possibilities become apparent structurally that would not have been contemplated before, such as: peer-to-peer mobile applications that don’t require permission from legacy transaction carriers; global remittances that don’t require high-fee currency conversion; merchant categories that are no longer disallowed due to fraud and chargeback risk; and merchant reach into countries that are not even on the map for Visa, MasterCard or PayPal.”
-
“Disruptive technology disrupts. That is its mission. It annihilates any substandard process or product in its path and it originates outside of the established paradigm. You don’t see it coming.”
-
“A payments startup that ignores Bitcoin in its strategic plan is like a publisher ignoring the Web in 1999. Certainly, innovators can design routes around Bitcoin and established players can dismiss it as insignificant, but that won’t make the elephant go away.”
- http://bit.ly/17tznX5
- http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=191021.0 (Further discussion of the article)
All News - Daily E-mail Subscription - Twitter: @BitcoinNews
Bitcoin Money blog (@BitcoinMoney) gives a monthly wrapup on Bitcoin for the month of January, 2013. Excerpts:
“The closing price of $20.41 USD was up nearly seven dollars from the 2012 year-end close resulting in more than a 51% increase for the month — Bitcoin’s largest monthly gain since December 2011. The one-year gain, calculated from the January 2012 close of $5.48 is whopping 272%.”
-
“The 111,100 bitcoins issued which Bitcoin miners took in during the month is valued at $1.72 million using the average daily valuation for the month of $15.49. Miners had been suffering ever since the block reward subsidy “halving” that occurred in November last year.”
-
“A dollar’s worth of ASIC hardware performs hashing at the rate that is nearly two orders of magnitude over what a dollar’s worth of GPU hardware does so we are likely just a couple months (or less) away from seeing the end of any GPU mining that is profitable.”
-
“Certainly greater demand occurring due to Bitcoin gaining traction as a payments and money transfer system is partly responsible for a higher valuation but there appeared to be no massive jump that would account for the need for an additional $75 million worth of the currency. Thus a significant portion of the rise can only be attributed to speculative interest.”
-
“Most bitcoin market exchanges provide feeds with trading results in real-time and many volume records were broken in January.”
-
“Early in January Bitcoin Foundation executive director Peter Vessenes published his Quarterly Update in which he describes an increasing level of interest from investors and shared his prediction that in 2013 there would be Bitcoin ‘liquidity problems’ (price increases).”
-
“Bitcoin remains an experimental currency. As the software gets poked and prodded, new vulnerabilities are discovered. Some vulnerabilities will result in funds being lost.”
-
“When a SatoshiDICE, BitInstant, CoinBase, or BitPay (all angel- and venture capital-backed Bitcoin-related startups) hits a home run, every person holding a bitcoin likely sees a rising valuation as a result due to increased demand for the currency from that Bitcoin startup’s success story.”
-
“Without Wall Street’s participation there are few affordable methods to take a short position or to perform price hedging. Without this relief valve, wild volatility occurs as the market tries to discover Bitcoin’s price.”
- http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/42429739154
All News - Daily E-mail Subscription - Twitter: @BitcoinNews
GoWest (@GoWestBTC) labels the partly-finished 20Mission (@20Mission) tech space in San Francisco as “Bitcon’s Hogwarts”. Excerpts from his post:
“Jared Kenna, formerly of TradeHill, and Jonathan Ryan Owens of RingCoin have teamed up to launch 20Mission, a huge 41-room tech space project in the heart of San Francisco.”
“[It is hoped that] the space will produce a wide array of successful projects, most of which will be focused on Bitcoin-related businesses, though the space isn’t being advertised as ‘Bitcoin-only’.”
- http://bit.ly/JWTB0G (Bitcoin Trader post)
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFqWI-bvR2Q
- http://20Mission.com
One of the first U.S.-based Bitcoin exchanges, ExchB, has closed. The notice on the exchange’s site is quick to reassure its customers that all funds are available for immediate withdrawal. The reason for the closure was stated simply as:
“The cost in time and money of running ExchB and the funds required to take it to the next level will exceed our available resources”.
A post on the Bitcoin Money blog includes further details.
- http://www.exchb.com
- http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/11572143889
A pair of Seattle entrepreneurs have created CoinLab — a bitcoin-specific technology incubator located at their co-working space in Seattle named StartupLab. GeekWire writes:
“’There isn’t really anywhere that’s the Place for Bitcoin, and that’s what we hope to be’, Vessenes said this week”.
“CoinLab already has its first project, dubbed Bitsent, for sending Bitcoin via text message. Their sites promises a lot more in the works”.
- http://bit.ly/mRAz1x (GeekWire article)
- http://www.coinlab.com/
Matthew Lynley (@logicalmoron) writes on the yet another exchange that has launched recently. His post in VentureBeat reads:
“Camp BX will let its users short-sell Bitcoins, which will help stabilize the volatility for the young currency. Today, an 8 percent swing in the value of the Bitcoin throughout the day is pretty typical”.
“The number of Bitcoins available to users is algorithmically limited — meaning the number of new Bitcoins introduced into the economy decreases over time [and even] smaller moves in the market are able to cause greater swings in the value of the Bitcoin”.
- http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/07/camp-bx-bitcoin
- http://www.campbx.com
Ryan make his case for why now is the best time to get started on a Bitcoin startup or to incorporate Bitcoin into your existing business:
1.)“Bitcoin will probably succeed in some form or another”.
2.)“If it succeeds, it will probably be huge. I am not aware of a recent technology so widely useful except for the web, the internet or computing itself”.
3.)“There is almost no competition. You can straightforwardly monopolize any segment of the bitcoin economy by [being the first to create] a really solid business.”
4.)“It has never been easier to start so small and get so big. Businesses that already sell products or services can simply start accepting bitcoin”.
“By next year, all the easiest, obvious businesses will be taken”.
- http://astrohacker.com/ahc/time-is-now-for-bitcoin-entrepreneurship
