Lifeboat Foundation

by Steve Dent — Engadget

If you recently installed or updated uTorrent on your PC, you may have have picked up an unwanted passenger: a bitcoin miner called Epic Scale. If you don’t pay attention, that piece of code can be inadvertently installed with the latest uTorrent build (version 3.4.2). It can then use your computer as part of a bitcoin farm (Litecoin, to be exact) to generate revenue for third parties. Users first reported the situation on uTorrent’s forums, and it was quickly confirmed by a senior support manager. He said that the app “cannot be installed without permission,” but one user claimed that there was “never a warning about it,” even though he opted out of other bundled software.
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Quoted: “At the event, CEO Bill Barhydt said: “Our mission with Abra is to turn every smartphone into a teller that processes withdrawals. This is not just another bitcoin app. The wallet is a full-fledged digital asset management system, and you don’t have to understand it.”

Use of the application is straightforward and relies on a network of people around the world who act as tellers, charging small fees to help people transfer money abroad. A user can deposit funds into his or her account using a debit card or by meeting up with a teller in person and handing them cash. Then those funds can be instantly — the power of Bitcoin — transferred anywhere in the world. The person receiving the money has only to find a teller, show that he or she is the recipient of the funds, and exchange the digital cash (denominated in USD) back for their local currency.”

Read the article here > https://bitcoinmagazine.com/19490/abra-announced-launch-fest…d-bitcoin/

by Wanda Carruthers — Bitcoin Magazine

Speakers from the top companies in the Bitcoin industry will present a full-day mini-conference of Bitcoin-related content during the SXSW 2015 Interactive Festival. The event will take place Monday, March 16, at SXSW’s Startup Village in the Austin Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Downtown in Austin, Texas.

The event will feature five sessions focusing on topics about the Bitcoin industry, with information from basic to advanced. Good and bad myths will be addressed, and speakers will share their vision for a future with Bitcoin.

The hour-long sessions for the day are titled “What is Bitcoin?,” “Bitcoin 2.0,” “A Future with Bitcoin,” “Impact on Developing World,” and “Real World Applications.” Read more

Quoted: “Blockchains are thus an intriguing model for coordinating the full transactional load of any large-scale system, whether the whole of different forms of human activity (social systems) or any other system too like a brain. In a brain there are quadrillions of transactions that could perhaps be handled in the universal transactional system architecture of a blockchain, like with Blockchain Thinking models.”

Read the IEET brief here > http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/swan20150217

by John Biggs — TechCrunch

Bitcoin mining is not a pretty business. It requires lots of specialized servers that are essentially unusable for normal computing and lots of cooling. But when you bring thousands of miners together in the same room, things really get ugly.

Motherboard has some fascinating footage of a bitcoin mine in Liaoning Province, China. The mine, set up in an unused factory, is a snakes’ nest of wires and high-powered fans, a sort of high-tech server farm that is so resource-intensive that it has to be optimized to a fault.
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The recently concluded Bitcoin & the Blockchain Summit in San Francisco on January 27 came up as a vivid source of both anxiety and inspiration. As speakers tackled Bitcoin’s technological limits and possible drawbacks that can be caused by impending regulations, Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopoulos lifted up everyone’s hope by discussing how bitcoins will eventually survive and flourish. He managed to do so with no graphics or presentations to prove his claim, just his utmost confidence and conviction that it really will no matter what.

On the currency being weak

There have been statements about Bitcoin’s technology surviving, but not the currency itself. Antonopoulos, however, argues that Bitcoin’s technology, network, and currency are interdependent with each other, which means that one element won’t work without the other. He said: “A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.”

On why Bitcoin works

Continue reading “Bitcoin’s Unique Features Lighten Up its Ambiguous Future” »

Pete Rizzo — CoinDesk

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss aren’t shy about issuing bold predictions for Gemini, their recently revealed bitcoin exchange project.

Calling it the “NASDAQ or Google of bitcoin”, the president and CEO, respectively, believe Gemini will be the fully regulated, fully compliant and fully banked institution the US bitcoin ecosystem needs to develop to its full potential.

In a new interview with CoinDesk, the brothers – prominent bitcoin investors and two of the largest-known holders of bitcoin – opened up about Gemini, discussing why they feel the exchange can become the market leader in what has been an increasingly active part of the bitcoin space.

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Quartz

Bitcoin’s ideological foe is becoming its saving grace.

To many Bitcoin enthusiasts, the decentralized currency’s allure was that it was designed to exist beyond the reach of government regulation. Free from central banks, its value wasn’t tied to government policies or geopolitical factors.

But now it seems the very regulation its creator or creators (since we don’t actually know who first minted Bitcoin) guarded against is what’s now buoying the cryptocurrency’s price. Read more

Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has had its moments of strength and weakness. The technology behind bitcoins, however, is a different story. While skeptics don’t expect a lot from Bitcoin as an alternative currency because of its volatility, they do have high hopes for the technological innovation that powers it, believing that it can be further developed to create something much powerful than Bitcoin itself.

To those who know Bitcoin as a great way of transacting online, but don’t completely understand its dynamics, it’s time to get acquainted with the cryptocurrency’s mathematical wonders that make anonymous, faster, and cheaper transactions of moving funds on the internet possible.

Most of us know that Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, but hashing serves a different function and purpose from that of digital signatures. Hashing actually provides proof that a message has not been changed because running the same hash always generates similar result.

Any message, regardless of the size can go into a hash function where the algorithm breaks it down, combines the parts, and “digests” it until it makes a fixed-length outcome called “digest”. However, a good hashing algorithm possesses some critical characteristics, in which the same message always produces the same result, as mentioned above, and it only works in one direction.

Continue reading “The Mathematical Wonders behind Bitcoin” »