Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Federal Reserve Move Over For Bitcoin

Federal Reserve Move Over For Bitcoin


Move Over Federal Reserve Make Way For BitcoinNow, this really is sheer entertainment. The Chicago branch with the Federal Reserve has addressed the terrific monetary question of our day. A researcher has taken a detailed look in the prospects for market-based crypto-currency, using a particular concentrate on Bitcoin. It concludes that Bitcoin is not a viable replacement for the dollar. The report consists of some dark hints that need to it ever come to be so, it should most likely be crushed.

What’s funny and fascinating is usually to follow the pondering right here. What you learn may be the greatest act of Freudian projection I’ve ever seen in a Federal Reserve study.


“It is hard to visualize a world,” says the unimaginative study, “where the main currency is depending on an incredibly complex code understood only by a few and controlled by even fewer, with out accountability, arbitration, or recourse.”


Blink, blink. This really is the Fed speaking here. Talk about complex. When the Fed governor speaks in Congress, he (soon she) speaks in such a blithering array of econ-babble that nobody dare respond, for worry of seeming ignorant. It’s like the initially day of an Intro to Physics class. The professor asks if you can find inquiries, and every person sits in terror.


Within a half-century of this nonsense, only Ron Paul ever truly dared to ask severe questions of the Fed. The primary way the Fed avoids questions should be to blind people with crazy statistics and complicated evaluation. A single might say that the Fed’s management in the dollar is determined by “extremely complex code understood only by some.”


But no, this can be what the Fed says of Bitcoin, an open-source protocol that any one can download, examine, and critique, a currency which has its every single single transaction logged in a public ledger within the cloud. By no means in history has there been a more transparent income.


It gets far better. Right here is another example from the Fed “criticizing” Bitcoin. Recall that no government agency designed Bitcoin. It was an invention of one particular individual or team that wrote up the protocol to get a best cash and dumped it on an obscure Online forum. Eight months later, it obtained a industry value. Given that then, it has grown and grown and is now getting utilized all over the world. It has a marketplace capitalization of $4.5 billion, along with the exchange price towards the dollar shows ever rising value.


This has all been accomplished devoid of any third-party sponsorship or support from the state. That is a bit embarrassing for an agency that claims to become totally vital for the management of the U.S. monetary and global empire. We could by no means abolish this fantastic institution!


So how does the Fed account for Bitcoin? “Bitcoin is totally free of your energy in the state,” says the report, “but it really is also outdoors the protection with the state.”


Scary! The writer presumes that everyone believes the state has been guarding the dollar! Should you assume that 100 years ago, when the Fed was designed, $1 dollar was worth $1, nowadays it’s worth significantly less than 5 cents.


value-of-dollar-since-Fed-1913


In contrast, Bitcoin keeps going up in worth relative for the goods and services it buys. That’s a quite weird and unprecedented point. In other words, should you hold Bitcoin, you really see your wealth grow even devoid of investing. That is the way sound revenue works. It is actually what the Fed decries as “deflationary,” a word that only means it gets a lot more beneficial.


The Fed assures us that “throughout most of Western history, the state has involved itself in income. At a minimum, the state has utilized money as a coordinating device, generally supporting its worth by accepting it inside the payment of taxes.”


You feel getting taxed feels like being robbed. The Fed says no. You are being taxed so the dollar will continue to possess value. This can be a restatement of your “valor impositus” position in the Middle Ages – a terrific lie from kings that they’re the cause something is correct in regards to the world.


It gets even weirder. The report adds, “One principal function of revenue is always to free of charge a debtor from his or her obligations, tying revenue to an critical state function, the administration of justice.”


But actually, the impact of the Fed has been exactly the opposite. There’s no way that the government could have racked up a crazy and unpayable $17 trillion debt with no the Fed promising to print adequate money to bail out the method regardless of what. In truth, the whole explanation the Fed was designed within the 1st spot was to allow the government to go into debt devoid of facing market-based consequences.


In other words, the Fed has not freed us from debtor obligations, but rather imposed vast obligations on us and quite a few generations to come.


The Fed delivers one additional major criticism of Bitcoin. Right here again, the jaw drops. Prepare oneself for this broadside: Bitcoin has “a status of quasi-monopoly inside the realm of digital currencies by virtue of its first-mover benefit.”


Yes, a quasi-monopoly. Possibly that really should be thought of far better than the full-blown monopolistic cartel that the dollar represents. What’s subsequent? The Federal Trade Commission demands to acquire in there and break it up? That could be a very amusing factor to watch.


bitcoin-china-tankThere has in no way been a currency more resistant to handle by government than Bitcoin. It lives on a distributed network. The feds could take down a trillion copies from the ledger, but it could reside again provided that a single copy survived. It is exchanged individual to particular person, with no third-party involvement, producing it much more resistant.


Plus, the usage of cryptography to guarantee the integrity of transactions makes it almost not possible for outsiders to access the identity information behind transactions.


Certainly, that is the entire reason for the structure of Bitcoin. It was made to be state resistant. It was created to thrive with out the intervention of a central bank. It has no single point of failure. Therefore, certainly, it really is driving the elites just about bonkers.


But if this really is the top the Fed can do, the future is rather vibrant. I can’t assume of any significantly less plausible criticism than for the Fed to criticize Bitcoin – which the marketplace has been totally free to accept or reject – as a secretive, complicated, and cartelized program.


Meanwhile, Bitcoin is named the “honey badger” of currencies for a explanation. Its march proceeds regardless. The supposed bubble and bust of this final March is currently searching like increasing pains. Even if you purchased in the major, you’d have already seen a 50% return in your dollars.


Bitcoin will continue to be misunderstood, smeared, attacked, and denounced. But you know what? Bitcoin just doesn’t care. Each month that goes by, it gets additional well-liked, a lot more useful, far more accessible. Someday it could possibly be the new globe reserve currency, and it’s going to leave these stuffy researchers in Fed palaces crying into their morning cappuccinos.


Sincerely,


Jeffrey Tucker



Federal Reserve Move Over For Bitcoin

Monday, October 7, 2013

PBS Newshour: Bitcoin Gains Mainstream Interest After Initial ‘Outlier’ Appeal (Video)

PBS Newshour: Bitcoin Gains Mainstream Interest After Initial ‘Outlier’ Appeal (Video)



Bitcoin gains mainstream interest after initial

Bitcoin gains mainstream interest after initial ‘outlier’ appeal


Transcript


JUDY WOODRUFF: And to two stories from the world of technology, the first focusing on a digital currency that you may not have known about before it made national news this week.


Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, has been tracking its growth and explains.


It’s part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.


MAN: Bitcoins are digital coins you can send through the Internet.


PAUL SOLMAN
: The currency known as Bitcoin, which made headlines earlier this week when the FBI seized Silk Road, the popular online black marketplace for drugs and other contraband, payable in Bitcoin, that had done over a billion dollars worth of business in just the last two years.


But what makes this strictly computerized currency, created and maintained by a network of computers solving math problems, worth anything at all?


Silk Road used digital currency to sell drugs in plain sight


RICHARD SYLLA, economic historian: Money is a convention.


PAUL SOLMAN
: Economic historian Richard Sylla:


RICHARD SYLLA: I take paper money — paper itself isn’t worth much — because I know you will accept it when I want to buy something from you.


PAUL SOLMAN: And that’s it?


RICHARD SYLLA: That’s right. Money is what money does.


PAUL SOLMAN: And since, these days, in the world of libertarian high-techies, skepticism about government-issued paper money abounds, Bitcoin, a digital currency attached to no country at all, is becoming their alternative of choice.


CHARLES HOSKINSON, Invictus Innovations: I have lost a lot of faith. I mean, a lot of people have. If you look at when we started the Federal Reserve system in 1913 to today, over 90 percent of the value of your dollar has gone down.


PAUL SOLMAN: Charles Hoskinson’s lament has been a familiar one among Fed phobes in the past few years.


CHARLES HOSKINSON: I was a campaigner for Ron Paul back in 2008 and also in 2012. I met Ron Paul. He was a great guy, and I really believe firmly in his message.


PAUL SOLMAN: And the key part of his message that pertains here?


CHARLES HOSKINSON: Sound money. Sound money, the idea that your money needs to have rules that can’t be manipulated based upon political convenience.


PAUL SOLMAN: By contrast, says Hoskinson, Bitcoin is unmanipulable, apolitical.


MAN: Invented in ’09 by a fictitious person named Satoshi Nakamoto.


PAUL SOLMAN: A person or maybe group which has since vanished into cyberspace. Bitcoins were invented so as to have an upper limit — 21 million Bitcoin can be created, no more.


MAN: Bitcoins are generated all over the Internet by anybody running a free application called a Bitcoin miner.


PAUL SOLMAN: Bitcoins are generated, or mined, by computers, solving math problems that become ever more complex and time-consuming. The coins themselves? Strings of characters like a password or code, hence the name crypto-currency. Easy to break the code? Absolutely not, says mathematician Hoskinson.


CHARLES HOSKINSON: If that was the case, then we’d be in bigger problems, because all of our passwords would be vulnerable. People could break bank encryption. The secret communications the NSA uses and the government uses would all be decryptable.


PAUL SOLMAN: Of course, even seemingly indecipherable codes are sometimes broken, one reason why Bitcoin currency gives economic historian Richard Sylla pause.


RICHARD SYLLA: I’m like Warren Buffett. I don’t buy something if I don’t understand it. And for all I know, the person who created Bitcoins would be like King Henry VIII in Britain, who decided suddenly to double the amount of British money units around, and there was a big inflation.


PAUL SOLMAN: Well, Bitcoins are supposedly created in a way where that just can’t happen.


RICHARD SYLLA: That’s the argument they make. And, of course, that’s the great argument for gold and silver standards, that the supply is limited.


But I think it’s much easier to change the algorithms or something like that and double the amount of Bitcoins overnight than it is to actually come up with more gold and silver.


PAUL SOLMAN: No, mathematically impossible, counters the Bitcoin community. And how do Bitcoins actually work?


MAN: Bitcoins are transferred directly from person to person via the net without going through a bank or clearinghouse. This means that the fees are much lower. You can use them in every country. You can purchase video games, gifts, books, and alpaca socks.


PAUL SOLMAN: And, as we saw this week, you can also purchase heroin, high and consistent quality. Buy 10, get two bags free. The FBI has now seized the Silk Road site, calling it the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today.


So, first and foremost, does Bitcoin represent an unholy alliance of high-minded, freedom-minded high-techies and global criminals eager and able to capitalize on a totally free market? Look, says mathematician Charles Hoskinson, digital currencies are like any new technology.


CHARLES HOSKINSON: And just like the Internet can be used for bad things, like terrorist activity or child pornography, Bitcoin could be used for bad things, for example, funding rogue states like Iran or North Korea.


PAUL SOLMAN: Or dealing drugs, or laundering money. Yes, Bitcoin as a currency did initially appeal mainly to outliers, admits Kinnard Hockenhull, but it has begun to go mainstream, especially with investors.


KINNARD HOCKENHULL, Bitcoin entrepreneur: They think this is skyrocketing, I better get into it. But you also have people who want to use it to send money instantly over the Internet. And with Bitcoin, you can send money the same way you send an e-mail.


STEPHEN PAIR, BitPay: It’s money that’s designed for the Internet.


PAUL SOLMAN: Stephen Pair has co-founded BitPay, a Bitcoin payment processor.


STEPHEN PAIR: If you think about credit cards, they were designed in the 1950s, before the Internet existed, right? So this is the first time we have taken everything we know about cryptography and the Internet and security and designed a new payment system from the ground up.


PAUL SOLMAN: A system that bypasses the usual middlemen, making most non-cash transactions way cheaper.


JONATHAN MOHAN, Bitcoin entrepreneur: So, remittances.


PAUL SOLMAN: Like remittances, says Bitcoin promoter Jonathan Mohan, the money sent back home by workers in the developed world, now wired via a third party like Western Union.


JONATHAN MOHAN: If your family at home makes $100 in a year, it costs 40 bucks to send them that $100. And with Bitcoin, it would cost several cents.


PAUL SOLMAN: As illustrated by the small bubbles, some representing tiny transaction fees, on this real-time Bitcoin trade and transaction visualizer.


JONATHAN MOHAN: The vast majority of the planet don’t even own a bank account. And it’s my contention that — and a lot of people think this — that, just as in Africa, they didn’t go to phones. They went directly to cell phones, that, in the same sort of adoption curve, in these developing nations, you’re not going to see them start getting bank accounts. You’re going to see them just going straight to Bitcoins, because if you own a Bitcoin address, you have a bank account on your phone that you can interact on the global stage with.


PAUL SOLMAN: Meanwhile, other so-called crypto-currencies have been started, with different mathematical formulas and rules, trying to compete.


KINNARD HOCKENHULL: There’s PPCoin. There’s BBQcoin. There’s Litecoin. There’s Feathercoin. Primecoin is a very interesting one that looks for really large prime numbers.


PAUL SOLMAN: And all because, says historian Richard Sylla, who chairs the board of Wall Street’s Museum American of Finance, there’s so much skepticism about government and its money in and around the high-tech community these days.


RICHARD SYLLA: Bitcoins are sort of a modern version of gold, computerized, sexier than gold. You know, we think gold is pretty nice. It shines. It looks nice. But Bitcoins are — appeal to the more technologically savvy of people today.


PAUL SOLMAN: And since many of them have money, and crypto-currencies do have certain advantages, says Sylla, the Bitcoin story may be with us for quite awhile.


JUDY WOODRUFF: And a postscript to Paul’s report. The price of Bitcoins did indeed sink shortly after the FBI raid, dropping from $140 to nearly $120. But they have now rebounded back to almost $140, and some observers suggest the bust may have helped boost Bitcoin’s legitimacy by ending the Silk Road connection.



PBS Newshour: Bitcoin Gains Mainstream Interest After Initial ‘Outlier’ Appeal (Video)

Friday, October 4, 2013

Torrents Do More Good Then Media Claim"s

Torrents Do More Good Then Media Claim’s


Torrents Do More Good Then Media ClaimsFor years, the entertainment industry has argued that online piracy has devastated business for movies, music and gaming.


But a new policy brief from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) says that not only does piracy not hurt the creative industry but it is actually helping.


Millions of people across the globe illegally access copyrighted material on a daily basis. The most common method of digital pirating is through torrent sites, which let an individual download and upload content through a peer-to-peer file-sharing system.


Individuals in the U.S. who are found guilty of violating digital piracy laws can face severe legal penalties, including a felony record, five years in prison and $250,000 in penalties.


In the briefing, authors Bart Cammaerts, Robin Mansell and Bingchun Meng call on governments to re-evaluate their antipiracy laws to include data from studies beyond those directly sponsored by the entertainment industry itself.


“Contrary to the industry claims, the music industry is not in terminal decline, but still holding ground and showing healthy profits. Revenues from digital sales, subscription services, streaming and live performances compensate for the decline in revenues from the sale of CDs or records,” Cammaerts said in report carried by the site TorrrentFreak.


In a separate story, TorrentFreak says that independent data actually suggests that those who pirate content are also more likely to spend their money on film, music and gaming content.


A June 2013 study found that roughly 45 percent of all Americans pirate copyrighted content on a regular basis, including 70 percent of those under 30.


In the LSE report’s key messages, the authors say that evidence does not back up claims that individual cases of copyright infringement are affecting entertainment industry revenues, that antipiracy laws around the world are not achieving their desired impacts and that governments should update their policies to include more evidence from a diverse set of sources.


“Despite the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) claim that online piracy is devastating the movie industry, Hollywood achieved record-breaking global box office revenues of $35 billion in 2012, a 6% increase over 2011,” the report states.


And while music sales have faced steeper declines in recent years, the authors say those numbers have largely been balanced out by increased sales in live performance and other outlets.


“The music industry may be stagnating, but the drastic decline in revenues warned of by the lobby associations of record labels is not in evidence,” the authors write.


Interestingly, in the same Columbia University study, which found that nearly half of all U.S. Internet users pirate copyrighted material, nearly half of those individuals say they would willingly pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to multimedia content.


And the LSE study authors say that is one possible solution for the entertainment industry going forward as a way to bridge the gap between content providers and consumers.


“Within the creative industries there is a variety of views on the best way to benefit from online sharing practices, and how to innovate to generate revenue streams in ways that do not fit within the existing copyright enforcement regime,” the authors conclude.


“When both [the creative industries and citizens] can exploit the full potential of the Internet, this will maximize innovative content creation for the benefit of all stakeholders.”



Torrents Do More Good Then Media Claim"s

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Court Officially Declares Bitcoin A Real Currency

Court Officially Declares Bitcoin A Real Currency


bitcoin a real currency now

bitcoin a real currency now


A federal choose has for your to start with time dominated that Bitcoin can be a respectable forex, opening up the likelihood for the digital crypto-cash to soon be controlled by governmental overseers.


United states of america Magistrate Judge Amos Mazzant for the Jap District of Texas dominated Tuesday the US Securities and Exchange Commission can move forward that has a lawsuit versus the operator of a Bitcoin-based hedge fund since, regardless of current only around the digital realm, “Bitcoin is usually a currency or form of money.”


Trendon Shavers of Bitcoin Financial savings & Trust (BTCST) was accused last year of scamming customers out of roughly $4.5 million worth of the cryptocurrency through his online hedge-fund. Shavers promised investors a weekly return of 7 percent, according to the federal complaint, but shut-down his site after collecting upwards of 700,000 bitcoins. When the SEC charged Shavers last month with operating a Ponzi scheme, he fought back by saying Bitcoin is not actual forex and can’t be regulated.



Court Officially Declares Bitcoin A Real Currency