The weekend’s bitcoin unsupported rumour was that China is to support the currency … allegedly. If you thought parts of the bitcoin community were susceptible to swallowing rumors, this latest incident just took it up a notch. A user on reddit posted a link — and summary — of a documentary on bitcoin from CCTV, […]
A team of university students in Germany aims to make the first-ever feature-length documentary about bitcoins funded entirely by bitcoins.
A regular look at the hottest, most controversial and thought-provoking events in the world of digital currency through the eyes of skepticism and wonder.
The value of Bitcoins is down almost a third on yesterday’s exchange values. Since then rates have recovered slightly but remain extremely volatile.
The US-based bitcoin business CoinLab has taken the Mt. Gox exchange to court alleging the Japan-headquartered company did not fulfill an agreement signed in November 2012.
Cryptography expert Zulfikar Ramzan hosts a new series of educational bitcoin videos at Khan Academy.
Yet another bitcoin exchange has had the plug pulled on its bank account. Unlike Bitfloor, however, Canadian exchange Virtex is still operational ...
A leading venture capitalist says bitcoin offers the financial tech release valve Silicon Valley has been looking for.
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Bitcoin took an important step closer to broader consumer adoption last week, when it became supported by the HTML 5 standard. This means one-click support for bitcoin payments could make its way into popular browsers before long. HTML is the language used to describe what a webpage looks like to a web browser. Version 5, […]
Tyler Moore, a computer scientist at Southern Methodist University, discusses research he conducted with Nicolas Christin that found a high risk of failure among bitcoin exchanges. (Click here to read more about the study.)
Who’s your average bitcoin user? Chances are he’s young, male, geeky and smart. That’s according to demographic research from Quantcast, which measures the habits of digital media audiences online. Quantcast tracks 100 million websites around the world that have been tagged by their owners. It tracks behavior over time using cookies, and infers demographic information […]
Bitcoin’s value is likely to remain volatile, which will limit the digital currency’s usefulness, according to a select group of economics professors across the US. The IGM Economic Experts Panel — 38 academics from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of California-Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — tackles a […]
Bitcoinfilm.org has released its first short documentary: a look at the bitcoin market in Argentina, where currency controls and inflation running in the double-digits has been hitting would-be savers hard. “There is much potential in bitcoins and too few people know about it,” the Bitcoinfilm.org website states. “We want to make several small documentaries and […]
Wall Street analyst says VCs could help boost bitcoin's legitimacy and protect it from over-regulation by urging its use by charitable organizations.
What did WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange tell Google’s previous CEO Eric Schmidt about bitcoins? Assange, the whistle-blowing media organization’s publisher, met with then-CEO Schmidt and Jared Cohen, advisor to former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in June 2011. The meeting was arranged at the request of Schmidt and Cohen, who were working on “The New […]
Could the non-government-supported, non-central-bank-backed bitcoin actually have been created by a government agency? The question has been buzzing in recent days after Paul Graham, co-founder of the tech incubator Y Combinator, explored some possibilities in a blog post: “I’ve long suspected bitcoin was created by a government,” Graham writes. “Bulletproof protocols usually require peer review, […]
So how big an impact are bitcoins really having on the global economy? The latest market stats show the digital currency continues to show a growing influence on “real” money. Among some recent stats: As of April 2013, more than 11 million bitcoins have been mined so far; The market cap for bitcoins now exceeds […]
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are proposing a cryptographic extension to bitcoin that could enable fully anonymous transactions on the network. The extension, called Zerocoin, works – as NewScientist explains it – by “allowing bitcoin users to leave their coins floating on the network for someone else to redeem, on the condition that they can […]
This week the price of a Bitcoin soared to more than $260 – albeit for a short period of time. This was helped by a surge in media interest. This week has seen the number of articles on Bitcoin and virtual currency explode to an all time high. Journalists appear to be enjoying another internet […]
What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a digital currency that uses an open-source, peer-to-peer protocol to conduct, verify and record transactions. It is a decentralized form of currency not backed by any government or financial institution, or pegged to the value of any hard commodity such as gold. Bitcoins are digitally generated according to an algorithm […]
What determines the value of a bitcoin? You might as well ask, “What determines the value of a dollar?” (Or a euro or a yen … or even gold.) The basic economics of supply and demand helps to account for much of the value of anything: if more people want something than the market is […]
As bitcoins become more widely recognized and used, would-be bitcoin users have a growing number of ways in which they can acquire the digital currency. In the earliest days, An Introduction to Bitcoins notes, converting a local currency into bitcoins often required a face-to-face encounter with other fans in the same area. Mining new bitcoins […]
The bitcoin economy has become a lively and ever-more crowded place since the first batch of 50 bitcoins – the “genesis block” – was computed into existence on Jan. 3, 2009. But one quiet corner remains: the spot set aside for bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. As the bitcoin currency approaches its fifth birthday, no […]
