Bitcoins: The future of money?

[AnimeFan188]

Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopter Is Cryonically Freezing His Body to See the Future:

"Some bitcoin enthusiasts have used their cryptocurrency to travel around the
world. Others have spent it on a trip to space. But the very earliest user of bitcoin
(after its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto himself) has now spent his crypto coins on
the most ambitious mission yet: to visit the future.

Hal Finney, the renowned cryptographer, coder, and bitcoin pioneer, died
Thursday morning at the age of 58 after five years battling ALS. He will be
remembered for a remarkable career that included working as the number-two
developer on the groundbreaking encryption software PGP in the early 1990s,
creating one of the first “remailers” that presaged the anonymity software Tor,
and—more than a decade later—becoming one of the first programmers to work
on bitcoin’s open source code; in 2009, he received the very first bitcoin
transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto.1

Now Finney has become an early adopter of a far more science fictional
technology: human cryopreservation, the process of freezing human bodies so
that they can be revived decades or even centuries later."

See:

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/hal-finney/


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Creators of New Fed-Proof Bitcoin Marketplace Swear It’s Not for Drugs:

"When the recording industry smashed Napster with a $20 billion lawsuit more
than a decade ago, filesharing morphed into Bittorrent, a fully peer-to-peer
system with no central server for law enforcement to attack. Now the developers
behind one software project are trying to pull off a similar trick with the anarchic
model of bitcoin e-commerce pioneered by the billion-dollar Silk Road black
market. And just as with Bittorrent, their new system may be so decentralized
that not even its creators can control exactly how it will be used."

See:

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/openbazaar-not-for-drugs/

[MrTerrorist]

Is BitCoin still worth mining or it's value now worthless due to the scandals last year?

[AnimeFan188]

For Ransom, Bitcoin Replaces the Bag of Bills:

"In the old days, criminals liked their ransom payments in briefcases full of unmarked
bills.

These days, there’s a new preferred method for hostage takers: the virtual currency
Bitcoin.

In a modern day version of a mob shakedown, hackers around the world have
seized files on millions of computers, taken down public websites and even, in a few
cases, threatened physical harm. The victims — who have ranged from ordinary
computer users to financial firms and police departments — are told that their only
way out is through a Bitcoin payment that is sometimes more than $20,000.

One set of attackers, believed to be based in Russia and Ukraine, collected about
$16.5 million in Bitcoins in a little over a month, primarily from victims in the United
States, according to the security firm Sophos."

See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/bu...html?ref=world

[AnimeFan188]

Bitcoin an official commodity: US trade commission:

"Digital currencies have been granted the status of an official commodity by the United States Commodity
Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which said that bitcoin operators must immediately ensure that their
companies are legally registered under the applicable trading laws and regulations.

The decision, published on Thursday, means transactions made in cryptocurrencies must now comply with
CFTC regulations as well as the governing legislation, the Commodity Exchange Act. Under Section 4c of
the Act and Part 32 of the regulations, bitcoin operators in the US must now be registered as a Swap
Execution Facility or a Designated Contract Market."

See:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/bitcoin...de-commission/

[AnimeFan188]

Zcash, an Untraceable Bitcoin Alternative, Launches
in Alpha:

"Bitcoin may have become the currency of choice for the anonymity-
loving Internet underground. But it’s never been anonymous enough
for Zooko Wilcox. As he’ll remind anyone who’ll listen, the blockchain,
bitcoin’s very public ledger of all transactions in its crypto-economy,
means that unless bitcoin’s users funnel it through intermediaries or
special software, their transactions can easily be traced.

Today Wilcox and his startup Zcash are launching the first public alpha
release of the cryptography world’s best shot yet at perfectly
untraceable digital money. Using a mathematical sleight-of-hand
known as a “zero-knowledge proof,” Zcash (until recently known as
Zerocoin or Zerocash) offers the same anti-forgery assurances as
bitcoin: No one can counterfeit Zcash, or spend the same Zcash “coin”
twice. But thanks to its zero-knowledge feature, any spender or
receiver can also choose to keep their Zcash payment entirely secret."

See:

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/zcash-a...ches-in-alpha/

[AnimeFan188]

Bitcoin is over $9,000:

"Even as you recoup from attempting to explain Bitcoin to your family over the
Thanksgiving dinner table, the value of the cryptocurrency is growing at an increasingly
hefty pace. As of the time of this writing, the value of a single Bitcoin was above $9,143,
climbing nearly 6 points in the past 24 hours.

At a certain point, news of clearing these incremental price hurdles are going to get old,
but given the increasing speed in which Bitcoin prices are knocking through these
barriers and hitting all-time-highs, it seems relevant to chronicle the march towards
$10,000 at least."

See:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/26/bitcoin-is-over-9000/

[Thomppson]

Bitcoin costs more than $ 16,000 to date. It's constantly growing. I want to invest money in bitcoins. I think in the new year the price will fall and it will be time for investment. I read that the price of bitcoin will grow (proof: https://bitcoinbestbuy.com). I think this is a good investment of money. And what do you think?

[barcode120x]

Like many others, I joined on BTC late. I've bought a tiny share of BTC last week and I am gonna sit on it on hopes that it will bump up way more in the distant future. I'll invest little by little depending on the speed it continues to grow next year. As of now, I'd say it's getting stale between 16500 and 17800 per BTC.

Some of you may want to consider looking into other "alt-coins" as they are growing just as fast, if not faster. Unfortunately now, MANY people are looking to invest that a lot of the crypto sites that sell the coins are probably overwhelmed with all the account creations and verifications (most, if not all crypto sites require ID/proof of residence verification) that it may take a week, maybe more.

Most importantly, be smart when you invest in this. There are risks, there are benefits, read and choose for yourself. The best advice I came across was that invest expecting to lose the amount you invest in and move on.

[AnimeFan188]

Russia, N. Korea Eye Bitcoin for Money Laundering, Putting
It on a Crash Course with Regulators:

"A report out this week says that Russia is eying the currency as a means to bypass
harsh sanctions levied by the United States and European governments, while North
Koreans are suspected of trying to steal Bitcoins from South Korean cryptocurrency
exchanges. All this puts pressure on the U.S. government – and may ultimately hurt
the cryptocurrency’s value.

In September, cyber security company FireEye reported that a state-sponsored hacker
team — they suspect North Korea — had sent phishing emails to employees at South
Korean exchanges, with at least one success. Researcher Luke McNamara noted that
hackers target exchanges more than individual cryptocurrency accounts for the same
reasons banks attracted interstate bank robbers during the 1930s: regulations varied
from state to state, security varied from bank to bank, and, as gangster Willie Sutton
observed, banks are where the money is."

See:

http://www.defenseone.com/technology.../?oref=d-river