Bitbrief #2

~ fredericsuares

News

  • SR DPR bitcoins Auction – December 4th
  • https://gigaom.com/2014/11/17/feds-to-auction-50000-bitcoins-from-dread-pirate-roberts/
    • The price went down at last auction, market supposedly got manipulated to bring the price down so the bidders would be able to pay less. Price went up right after if I remember correctly. The price went down at last auction, market supposedly got manipulated to bring the price down so the bidders would be able to pay less. Price went up right after if I remember correctly. Well, sort of. That was back in the mid to high 500s, as I recall, and it went down some, then went up some, and then went down a lot more.
    • Tim Draper, auction winner of the original SR coins, also won the first 2000 coin batch from this latest auction. Remember, winning an auction means you’re paying more than anyone, so Draper probably paid above market value. However, it’s not easy to get that many coins that fast and doing so on an exchange would quickly raise the price.
  • Blockchain 2.0 capabilities achieved on Bitcoin without Ethereum
  • https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/counterparty-recreates-ethereum-bitcoin/
  • https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/gavin-andresen-outlines-bitcoin-2-0-without-ethereum/
    • “Bitcoin already provides a global currency and distributed ledger– there is no need to re-invent those wheels. Combining real-world information with Bitcoin is where things start to get really interesting.”
    • Counterparty is a trustless settlement engine [Bitcoin is a trustless payment engine]. It aims to disintermediate stock and commodities exchanges, prediction markets, derivatives, options and futures. Counterparty puts Wall Street on the blockchain without the middleman.
      • What Counterparty does is it extends the functionality of Bitcoin beyond that of a mere payment protocol, and into the much larger realm of general peer-to-peer finance, trade, and smart contracts.
    • Overstock CEO, Patrick Byrne, has hired two Counterparty developers to develop project ‘Medici’, a decentralized stock exchange.
    • Money is only one use of a blockchain, bitcoin only allows money-token transmission and certain programming hooks for good security reasons. Counterparty builds on the security of bitcoin using those programming hooks to anchor itself to the more secure chain [thereby becoming as safe as Bitcoin]. It enables arbitrary token transfers and arbitrary code, letting programmers use a blockchain for anything they want to.
    • However, the Ethereum team has said they efficiently build a Counterparty clone within their own software… We’ll see how things shape up.

Specific use cases

  • Blocktech – Applied blockchains to empower individuals and harness collective effort
    • blocktech.com
    • The most interesting thing they are working on, and possibly their only decentralized application at the moment, is Alexandria:
      • Alexandria preserves the integrity of the historical record. It taps into collective, on-the-ground reporting by scraping Twitter as events unfold and prevents after the fact censorship by archiving the information a blockchain. Alexandria’s visual word cloud and timeline slider illuminate surprising connections. It’s history written by everyone, not just the victors.
    • So this will probably decentralize the history books and the news, further than the internet has already decentralized these topics.
  • Micropayments
  • http://www.coindesk.com/tipping-point-bitcoin-micropayments/
    • “I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is: How do we make people pay for music?” she said during that TED talk. “What if we started asking: How do we let people pay for music?”
    • If it’s easier and faster to raise lots of money in tiny donations from many people, politicians have less incentive to rely so heavily on a few, powerful donors—and more reason to raise it from the voters themselves.
  • Coinjar has been popping up all over the internet lately, as a perfect example

Regulation

Resources

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