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Bitcoin: A licence to print money or useless virtual currency? →
“Bitcoin is unique in that it’s the first digital currency that doesn’t need a central bank to monitor transactions,” explains Jeff Garzik, a member of the core team of four developers who maintain Bitcoin’s immense security software. “Previous attempts like Beenz and Flooz all needed that monitoring because of ‘double-spending’.”
David Birch, director of Consult Hyperion, a consultancy firm specialising in electronic transactions, explains the concept of double-spending: “Digital products are non-rivalrous. That is to say, if you have a copy of an MP3 album, for example, and I take a copy, there’s still enough for everyone else who wants one.” Good news for music fans. Not such good news if you’re trying to create a brand new online global currency. “What makes money work is that there’s a limited supply. If you use a quid at the pub today, you can’t go out and spend that same quid for a full English in the morning.” It’s for this reason that a third party has always been needed to guarantee that the correct amount is taken from the payer’s account and added to the payee’s. Bitcoin solved the tricky double-spending dilemma by sharing the database of transactions across a peer-to-peer network.
“It’s shared trust technology and we have over 100,000 computers on the internet collectively working to verify every single Bitcoin transaction,” Garzik boasts. “This means that Bitcoin’s verification network is more powerful than the world’s largest supercomputers. In fact, there’s more technology dedicated to securing Bitcoin than you will find on the analysis of nuclear tests.”
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The Shadow Superpower - Forget China: the $10 trillion global black market is the world's fastest growing economy -- and its future. →
With only a mobile phone and a promise of money from his uncle, David Obi did something the Nigerian government has been trying to do for decades: He figured out how to bring electricity to the masses in Africa’s most populous country.
It wasn’t a matter of technology. David is not an inventor or an engineer, and his insights into his country’s electrical problems had nothing to do with fancy photovoltaics or turbines to harness the harmattan or any other alternative sources of energy. Instead, 7,000 miles from home, using a language he could hardly speak, he did what traders have always done: made a deal. He contracted with a Chinese firm near Guangzhou to produce small diesel-powered generators under his uncle’s brand name, Aakoo, and shipped them home to Nigeria, where power is often scarce. David’s deal, struck four years ago, was not massive — but it made a solid profit and put him on a strong footing for success as a transnational merchant. Like almost all the transactions between Nigerian traders and Chinese manufacturers, it was also sub rosa: under the radar, outside of the view or control of government, part of the unheralded alternative economic universe of System D.
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Bitcoin: A Harbor in a Currency Storm for Belarus and Ukraine →
Two countries that have recently faced massive currency devaluation, of a magnitude that would have significantly impacted the standard of living of its populations, are Belarus and Ukraine.
Over a period of three months in late 2008, in the wake of the global financial crisis, Ukraine’s currency, the hryvnia, was devalued by 38.4%. This wasn’t the first time Ukraine had seen its currency crumble, with an even more significant devaluation happening in 1998, on the order of 69%.
More recently, on May 23rd of this year, the Belarus ruble was devalued by 56% in an effort by the country to address its overwhelming sovereign debt.
Is it any wonder then, when we look at the list of the top 15 Bitcoin-using countries, and divide the number of connected clients over the last 24 hours by the number of Internet users in each country, we get this?
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Battered by Economic Crisis, Greeks Turn to Barter Networks →
Part alternative currency, part barter system, part open-air market, the Volos network has grown exponentially in the past year, from 50 to 400 members. It is one of several such groups cropping up around the country, as Greeks squeezed by large wage cuts, tax increases and growing fears about whether they will continue to use the euro have looked for creative ways to cope with a radically changing economic landscape.
“Ever since the crisis there’s been a boom in such networks all over Greece,” said George Stathakis, a professor of political economy and vice chancellor of the University of Crete. In spite of the large public sector in Greece, which employs one in five workers, the country’s social services often are not up to the task of helping people in need, he added. “There are so many huge gaps that have to be filled by new kinds of networks,” he said.
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Public Computing and the Next Gang-of-Four →
The “Gang of Four” theory is one of the most interesting features of the modern consumer IT industry. In an article in TechCrunch in May, Eric Schonfeld sketched out the basic idea:
Every technology era has its four horsemen driving growth and innovation. In the 1990s it was Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, and Dell. Today, there is a new “gang of four,” as Google chairman Eric Schmidt puts it. They are Google (of course), Apple, Amazon and Facebook, and they are behind the consumer revolution on the Internet today.
Is the Gang of Four phenomenon real? In what way? Under what conditions do such gangs appear? When do membership shifts occur in the gang? Can we find the same dynamic in the brick-and-mortar world?
When you apply the Gang-of-Four theory and attempt to predict the future, you get an interesting conclusion: the next epoch of computing, dominated by a new Gang of Four, will be public computing. So the progression goes: personal computing, social computing, public computing. Too glib? Try my arguments on for size and decide for yourself.
-Venkatesh Rao, from his The Electronic Leviathan blog on Forbes.com
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A Complete Guide To The Ponzi Scheme That Is Suburban America →
Suburban America is a Ponzi scheme.
A report out today from Strong Towns makes this bold claim.
It argues that the mass migration from cities to suburban areas following World War II has seen two cycles of growth and maintenance. The first cycle was paid for outright, the second is heavily financed, and the third cycle is poised at the brink of an abyss.
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P2P Foundation deploying alternative currency system for #OccupyWallStreet participants →
Features:
Offers/Wants » Gifting
People post what they want or what they offer. This supports a gifting culture. Posts can be recorded as ‘fulfilled,’ resulting in a recording of the transaction, but no currency changes hands.
Mutual Credits » Circular Barter
People create their own IOUs with each other and record them in the system. Each person is asked to maintain an average balance around 0 to achieve maximum system stability.
User Points » Reserve Notes
The General Assembly can print ‘notes’ to reward people who perform tasks. Those notes can be redeemed through a general store (online), affiliated stores (online/offline) and through media (offline.)
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Battered by Economic Crisis, Greeks Turn to Barter Networks →
VOLOS, Greece — The first time he bought eggs, milk and jam at an outdoor market using not euros but an informal barter currency, Theodoros Mavridis, an unemployed electrician, was thrilled.
The barter network in Volos has grown to 400 members.
“I felt liberated, I felt free for the first time,” Mr. Mavridis said in a recent interview at a cafe in this port city in central Greece. “I instinctively reached into my pocket, but there was no need to.”
Mr. Mavridis is a co-founder of a growing network here in Volos that uses a so-called Local Alternative Unit, or TEM in Greek, to exchange goods and services — language classes, baby-sitting, computer support, home-cooked meals — and to receive discounts at some local businesses.
Part alternative currency, part barter system, part open-air market, the Volos network has grown exponentially in the past year, from 50 to 400 members. It is one of several such groups cropping up around the country, as Greeks squeezed by large wage cuts, tax increases and growing fears about whether they will continue to use the euro have looked for creative ways to cope with a radically changing economic landscape.
Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times
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Bitcoins: The Taxless Currency (TurboTax Blog) →
“In today’s economy, the value of the dollar is weaker than ever and the thought of a digital currency is becoming more of a reality with the recent introduction of bitcoins. Bitcoins can be compared to cash, but cash is limited to physical exchange, where as bitcoins can be sent throughout the Internet. Today there are more than 6.3 million bitcoins in existence and this number continues to grow. So, how are bitcoins used and how have they become a currency that can be used like dollars, but is tax avoidable? Let’s explore.”
