Bitcoin News

The Bitcoin Revolution Hits TechCrunch Disrupt Next Week ... Sep 4, 2013 ... Once a consuming hobby for a coterie of anarcho-libertarians and and others predicting an econo-apocalypse, Bitcoin started crossing over ... techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/bitcoin-panel-techcrunch-disrupt/

Inside Bitcoin, The Programmable Currency For Our Digital Future ... 2 days ago ... Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Balaji Srinivasan of genomics startup Counsyl, and Cameron and Tyler ... techcrunch.com/2013/09/10/disrupt-sf-13-bitcoin-panel/

Germany Recognizes Bitcoin As “Private Money”, Sales Tax Coming ... Aug 19, 2013 ... After a parliamentary inquiry, Germany has clarified its position on Bitcoin. The federal ministry of finance recognized Bitcoins as “units of ... techcrunch.com/2013/08/19/germany-recognizes-bitcoin-as-private-money-sales-tax-coming-soon/

RoboCoin, The First $20,000 Bitcoin ATM, Now Available For Pre ... Aug 28, 2013 ... RoboCoin, a kiosk that allows you to trade Bitcoin for other currencies, is now available for pre-order and should be shipping for "Fall 2013. techcrunch.com/2013/08/28/robocoin-the-first-20000-bitcoin-atm-now-available-for-pre-order/

Two Booms, Two Busts: How Bitcoin Is Following In The NASDAQ's ... 1 day ago ... Yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt we hosted a panel discussing Bitcoin (a recap can be found here). During the course of that discussion, ... techcrunch.com/2013/09/11/two-booms-two-busts-how-bitcoin-is-following-in-the-nasdaqs-footsteps/

Bitcoin Ticker Available On Bloomberg Terminal For Employees ... Aug 9, 2013 ... Bitcoin is now officially mainstream. According to BTC Geek, Bloomberg terminal users can now look up Bitcoin's pricing history. Data comes ... techcrunch.com/2013/08/09/bitcoin-ticker-available-on-bloomberg-terminal/

Bitcoin | TechCrunch Aug 31, 2013 ... Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Balaji Srinivasan of genomics startup Counsyl, and Cameron and Tyler ... techcrunch.com/tag/bitcoin/

New York's Financial Services Subpoenas BitcoinFirms To “Root ... Aug 13, 2013 ... Twenty-two Bitcoin companies received a letter from New York's top banking regulator to determine whether they respect the current financial ... techcrunch.com/2013/08/13/new-yorks-financial-services-subpoenas-bitcoin-firms-to-root-out-illegal-activity/

Bitcoin Clampdown Continues As Federal Judge Says It's A Currency Aug 7, 2013 ... Wikipedia calls Bitcoin a cryptocurrency (a currency that relies on cryptography), but now it's official. A federal judge in Texas has declared that ... techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/bitcoin-clampdown-continues-as-federal-judge-says-its-a-currency/

Bitcoin | CrunchBase Profile Bitcoin is a digital currency, a protocol, and open-source software and enables instant worldwide peer to peer transactions for little. www.crunchbase.com/company/bitcoin

VCs Confident In Bitcoin's Bright Future, Despite So Many Unknowns Jul 2, 2013 ... VC interest in Bitcoin is undoubtedly riding high right now. A few big names have even made some pretty big bets. But there's still plenty of ... techcrunch.com/2013/07/02/vcs-and-bitcoins/

With PayPal-Like Ambitions For Bitcoin, BitPay Raises $2M Led By ... May 16, 2013 ... BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in ... techcrunch.com/2013/05/16/an-offer-you-cant-refuse-bitcoin-startup-bitpay-raises-2m-led-by-founders-fund-the-vc-run-by-the-paypal-mafia/

How To Build A Raspberry Pi-Based Bitcoin Mining Rig | TechCrunch Aug 13, 2013 ... While you won't get rich running a single Raspberry Pi Bitcoin Rig, you can probably make back your initial investment in this ingenious little ... techcrunch.com/2013/08/13/how-to-build-a-raspberry-pi-based-bitcoin-mining-rig/

Bitcoin ATM Makers Open Pre-Orders & Fund Initial Run Of 15 ... Aug 16, 2013 ... Bitcoin startup Lamassu Bitcoin Ventures, the makers of a Bitcoin ATM which promises to eat your paper (fiat) money and spit Bitcoins into your ... techcrunch.com/2013/08/16/bitcoin-atm-funds-first-run/

Survey: Quarter Of US Consumers Has Heard OfBitcoin — And ... Jun 28, 2013 ... A survey of more than 22000 U.S. consumers aimed at probing Bitcoinawareness and levels of trust has found around a quarter of consumers ... techcrunch.com/2013/06/28/bitcoin-awareness-and-trust/

Bitmonet Monetizes Your Blog Through The Power OfBitcoin ... Aug 30, 2013 ... Bitmonet - think "Bitcoin Monetization" rather than "Bitcoin Impressionist Painter" - is a platform for creation microtransaction-based pa.. techcrunch.com/2013/08/30/bitmonet-monetizes-your-blog-through-the-power-of-bitcoin/

Coinchat Is A Chatroom Where Talking Sense Earns You Bitcoin ... Aug 31, 2013 ... Coinchat is a Bitcoin-incentivised browser-based chatroom where you can shoot the breeze with strangers online and earn Bitcoin in the ... techcrunch.com/2013/08/31/coinchat/

Calculating The Long-Term Value Of A Bitcoin | TechCrunch Jun 2, 2013 ... Editor's note: Joshua Seims is an angel investor and entrepreneur based in San Francisco. He is currently building a company that provides ... techcrunch.com/2013/06/02/calculating-the-long-term-value-of-a-bitcoin/

Want To Get Bitcoins? This ATM Will Turn Your Banknotes Into ... Jul 2, 2013 ... Converting the cash in your wallet to Bitcoin is one of the biggest hurdles to getting some skin in the digital crypto currency game. Time was ... techcrunch.com/2013/07/02/bitcoin-atm/

The DEA Seized Bitcoins In A Silk Road Drug Raid | TechCrunch Jun 27, 2013 ... In the underground world of the deep web there are few places as nefarious as Silk Road. The site, hidden on the Tor network has long been ... techcrunch.com/2013/06/27/the-dea-seized-bitcoins-in-a-silk-road-drug-raid/

Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 A Day In Power Consumption Alone

RYAN LAWLER

Saturday, April 13th, 2013

119 Comments

There’s a gold rush going on these days, or a Bitcoin rush, at least. Driven by the recent swings in the value of a Bitcoin, more and more people are learning about and becoming interested in the currency. While they could just buy Bitcoins at the current market rate, others are looking to try their luck at mining Bitcoins. And like prospectors who traveled west during the Gold Rush of the 19th century, many Bitcoin miners will find that they spend more on chasing the Bitcoin dream than they’ll ever hope to win back.

As explained here, Bitcoins are “mined” by unlocking blocks of data that “produce a particular pattern when the Bitcoin ‘hash’ algorithm is applied to the data.” It seems simple enough, but the cost of Bitcoin mining is greater than one might expect. The more Bitcoins are mined, the more difficult it becomes to find the next block. Unless the miner is using the latest specially-designed mining rigs, the computers used often sport high-end graphics cards (since the GPUs are more efficient than CPUs for mining application). And running those computers requires a lot of power.

Blockchain.info, which tracks Bitcoin-related data, estimates that miners are using 1,005.59 megawatt hours of electrical consumption each day in their pursuit of new blocks of Bitcoins. That ends up costing about $150,000 in power costs each day to mine the currency. [Hat tip toBloomberg for reporting on the data.]

That may sound like a lot, but miners on average are making money. According to Blockchain, miners are generating $470,000 in Bitcoin-related revenue per day. In fact, due to the recent interest in the virtual currency and its popularity, operating margins for Bitcoin miners are close to record highs.

While it might be easy to look at those numbers and think it’s NBD to just like, extract value out of thin air, Bitcoin mining isn’t as lucrative as it seems. Regular users hoping to use their regular computers to mine shouldn’t expect to just start making money by setting aside a few compute cycles to dig up Bitcoins. That’s generally reserved for special mining computers that do nothing BUT mine for Bitcoins using custom encryption processors.

As Biggs points out in his article, “While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual Bitcoins are worth.” That’s been confirmed by my colleague Matt Burns, who wrote in our internal message board that “after mining for a few days, the energy required to run my computer at full tilt was far greater than the Bitcoins I mined.”

Even if you do choose to pool your resources to mine, it’s a fairly complicated process, even for tech-savvy users. Check out the aforementioned article by Biggs for how he connected his home PCs into a Bitcoin-mining pool.

The alternative is to just buy specialty hardware designed to do nothing but mine for Bitcoins. Like any other investment, the return isn’t assured, and likely will be based on how Bitcoin market takes shape as time goes on. But right now, as with most gold rushes throughout history, it’s those who are supplying the miners that are finding the real riches.

Inside Bitcoin, The Programmable Currency For Our Digital Future

ALEX WILHELM

Tuesday, September 10th, 2013

41 Comments

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Balaji Srinivasan of genomics startup Counsyl, and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss took to the stage to discuss all things Bitcoin with TechCrunch’s own Kim-Mai Cutler.

Bitcoin is a topic that most don’t fully grok. That’s because when it comes up, blockchains, mining, algorithms and other sorts of words crops up. Don’t worry: Bitcoin is just “programmable currency,” as Ravikant put it. Essentially, think of Bitcoin as a form of currency that is digital, flexible and all but off the grid.

This means that Bitcoin can fit into places where normal currency has never managed to squeeze into. It opens new horizons. Srinivasan posited the following example as indicative of what Bitcoin can become: Imagine it’s a few years in the future, and you are driving down the road in an Uber, built by Tesla and auto-driven by Google software. You are in a hurry, so you decide to accelerate and pass the other cars. Your vehicle could then interface with the other cars, and pay them a sliver of Bitcoin to let you pass. You get where you are going faster, and everyone is happy. Programmable currency.

“People think about Bitcoin incorrectly,” said Ravikant. ”They think about it as currency or about gold or hoarding, speculation, about how much money do you make. When really what it is is an API for programmable cash transactions. For the first time, the hackers in the audience have access to a protocol that allows them to program escrow and notaries and payouts and dividends… This idea of programmable, universal cash is what is really, really fascinating.”

Bitcoin has other advantages, as Srinivasan also noted: You can cross the border with $1 billion in Bitcoin in just your head, and no one can sniff it out. No number of meddling TSA agents or cash-sniffing dogs can stop you.

SECURITY, RISK, AND REGULATION

The main risk with Bitcoin, according to the panel, is governmental regulation leading to the demise of the currency as a whole. The Winklevoss twins were not opposed to regulation, provided that it remains fair, but Bitcoin, in its bid to wrest some control of the financial world from nation-states, could hit stiff regulatory headwinds. Who wants to give up power?

That said, Bitcoin, it was agreed, will have something of a binary outcome: Worth something, or worth nothing. So unmoored from other financial instruments as it is — which is usually considered to be to its credit, not debit — Bitcoin is inherently more risky than other forms of investment. That freedom and flexibility, however, is the ball game.

But provided that Bitcoin does become the de facto programmable currency of the Internet, transaction volume and sheer interest alone will keep its value above zero.

Turning to more fundamental security and the theft-related risks that continue to affect the cryptocurrent (or at least its reputation), Srinivasan was bullish, describing Bitcoin as safer than gold — in other words: “You’ve got to break into a bank and then break a password.” Ravikant rowed back on that a little, pointing out that the security of your Bitcoin savings is of course only as robust as your password. “If you use a bad password, your Bitcoin will get stolen,” he said.

Ravikant also discussed the overall security of the Bitcoin protocol/blockchain. His view? “It’s probably easier and cheaper to counterfeit hundred-dollar bills than it is to counterfeit Bitcoin.”

HOW TO INVEST IN BITCOIN: BUILD OR BUY?

There are three ways to invest in Bitcoin, according to the group: Directly into the currency; into mining new Bitcoin; or setting up exchanges to help others trade in Bitcoin.

The first is the purest play into betting that a sheer price increase per coin is coming. The second is a wager that the efficiency of your computing setup can make the process worth your investment. And the final is a wager that more can be made selling shovels to gold miners than from mining gold yourself.

This becomes more interesting when one’s portfolio increases in size: If you had, say, $1 billion to invest into Bitcoin — a ludicrous sum given that all Bitcoin is currently worth around $1.5 billion — it would probably pay off most handsomely to invest in each segment: Mining to ensure new supply, as well as direct purchase to ensure a meaningful stake and in exchanges to ensure market liquidity. The market as a whole is doing that in pieces, surely, but perhaps not as quickly as it would like.

Why is that? As Ravikant noted, investing into Bitcoin is hard for certain classes of investors. Venture capitalists, for example, can’t use LP funds to buy currencies. That’s not what the money was provided for. So, cynically, the panel joked, we have venture capitalists buying Bitcoin with their own money that are also using LP cash to invest into companies that are helping to build and grow Bitcoin (exchanges). Thus their former bet might be born of the latter. Nice work if you can get it.

The average person can only mine or buy, but if you have the proper sums, the possibilities are interesting.

WHERE IS THE PRICE GOING?

Bitcoin is interesting because there is a hard cap of how many there can be: (roughly) 21 million. Therefore we can estimate the total value of all Bitcoin possible by simple multiplication: 21 million times Bitcoin price equals the entire ecosystem value.

Not all Bitcoins are yet mined. But let’s assume for now that they are. Srinivasan noted that, at a price of $1,000 per coin, there are about $21 billion in total Bitcoin value. At $100,000 per coin, Bitcoin is worth more than all gold. $1 million per coin, and Bitcoin is equal to the United States GDP. Staggering sums.

Bitcoin’s current price is $133. It’s been higher, it’s been lower. Buying into Bitcoin now is a bet that it will rise again. That will likely hinge on the ability of the currency to become functional in a number of settings. Can it be integrated?

The panel agreed: For now, Bitcoin remains too hard to purchase and use. The twins have a partial solution, in that they want to launch a tracking fund for Bitcoin to allow retail investors to have their slice of the currency sans the need to grok the technical fundamentals. Albeit they’ve run into some, you guessed it, regulatory headaches.

TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas contributed to this article

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Coming Soon to America: Bitcoin ATMs

You could be buying the digital currency on an Atlanta street by year’s end

By Denver Nicks @DenverNicksSept. 12, 20131 Comment

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Bitcoins, the online currency built on cryptography and beloved by libertarians, could be available for purchase through specialized ATMs in the United States this year.

At least two firms have plans to ship out Bitcoin ATMs to American cities in the coming months. Robocoin, the Las Vegas-based firm rolling out the world’s first Bitcoin ATMs in Canada this fall, plans to ship 12 to 15 of the units by the end of the year. “We are working on deals right now in the U.S. that should deliver in December or January. Los Angeles, Florida, NYC, Austin, to name a few,” Robocoin CEO Jordan Kelley told TIME in an email.

Bitcoins are “mined” by solving algorithms that require an enormous amount of computing power. There is no central authority, like the U.S. Federal Reserve, governing the production and exchange of the currency. People can easily transfer coins, a Bitcoin transaction can’t be rescinded, and, crucially, it is largely anonymous. Bitcoin is kind of like cash for the Internet.

So what, you may wonder, is the point of an ATM for a digital currency? Think of it more like a vending machine or currency exchange counter: Rather than just offering withdrawals or deposits, the Bitcoin ATM allows a user to buy Bitcoins in exchange for cash. The machines also offer some real-world convenience—like traditional ATMs, you can take dollars from the ATM by trading in your Bitcoins.

The Silk Road, an online black market exchange for contraband goods, like illicit drugs, operates on Bitcoin, and law enforcement officials have expressed concern about the use of the currency to facilitate this and other illegal activity, including money laundering. The Bitcoin ATM may not raise those concerns because it actually rolls back some of the anonymity that, in part, made the currency famous. Robocoin’s systems will request a government issued ID from the user, use facial recognition software to match a photo of them taken at the machine to that on the license, and use a palm scanner to further authenticate the user’s identity.

And there are many fully lawful applications for the currency—the website Bitcoin.Travel features a map of places where Bitcoins can be spent a brick-and-mortar establishments like a vacation villa in South Carolina, a liquor store in Oklahoma and a law office in San Diego. “The reason people want to own bitcoin is because of the underlying principles of bitcoin, not necessarily to maintain anonymity,” Kelley told TIME. “It’s a truly democratic programmable money, a currency that is not owned by a central authority, but owned by the people.”

Nonetheless, according to Kelley, regulatory compliance hurdles in the United States are significant, and more stringent than in other countries. Registering as a “Money Service Business” with the federal government, according to Kelley, is fairly straightforward, but the patchwork of licensing regulations unique to each U.S. state is where things get more complicated.

Another firm, Lamassu, told TIME it has 15 bitcoin ATMs shipping out over the next several weeks to 13 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, China, Brazil, France, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, and the U.S. “The first US machines will be in Atlanta, GA,” Lamassu CEO Zach Harvey told TIME in an email. “The ones shipping in November will be on the west coast. There is a lot of interest from entrepreneurs in California, but due to California’s extreme financial regulatory requirements, they may choose to set up in Washington or other states. Same goes for New York.”

 by Taboola

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Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/09/12/coming-soon-to-america-bitcoin-atms/#ixzz2eixLzay3