Thursday, July 20, 2017

Blockchains as public record

: Uncategorized: Written by : 03-20-2014

Public records have been the business of Lexis Nexis, TLO, and the like for a long time. Public records are just that, public; As such they should be available to the public at or below cost. Storing any and all public records on a blockchain would almost surely require a bill and / or act of congress. This would almost certainly result in a reduction in expenses for small businesses. Small employers spend between ten and a few hundred dollars per background check. Every person in the United States should have access to any and all public records at will, …continue reading

Why we cannot, and should not save Mt. Gox

: Bitcoin: Written by : 02-25-2014

A recent document has surfaced suggesting that Mt. Gox is indeed insolvent and that they plan on reaching out to the bitcoin community to help rectify their recent problems. While this may seem like a genuine way to help bolster the already struggling price of bitcoin (At the time of writing the winkdex is at $512.95) it is a ploy that we must not follow through on. The volatility and risk associated with Mt. Gox has been built into their price for months. The only risk that Gox every truly posed to the bitcoin community was re-enabling bitcoin withdrawals, which …continue reading

Bitcoin Black Friday

: Bitcoin: Written by : 02-11-2014

Mt. Gox announced Friday that they were disabling BTC withdrawals. Markets reacted instantly, sinking approximately $200 USD/BTC. Combined with the June 20th

Bitcoin Network Growth is Finally Slowing

: Bitcoin: Written by : 02-05-2014

Image from http://bitcoin.sepa.be The graph says it all. Bitcoin network growth is finally slowing. With the introduction, and mass shipping, of 28nm chips from both KNC Miner and CoinTerra it appears that bitcoin growth has finally started to slow. This is where things get interesting. Now that rapid acceleration in growth has stopped this game of technical chicken is more about capital than anything else. There are a small number of individuals worldwide who will be able to amass enough hashing power and begin to corner the market. This isn’t a bad thing for bitcoin, per se, but rather a …continue reading

Social Alts

: AltCoins, Social Media: Written by : 01-05-2014

I’ve had this idea floating around for a while. I can’t figure out if it is brilliant, or naive. We have many encryption technologies that work with multiple signers and multiple keys. Why can’t we host our own distributed (eg, unmonitored) social network? All we need is a blockchain like protocol coupled with third party sites that provide access to differing types of data of public but encrypted data. HN Discussion

Bitcoin ASIC Supplier Shootout

: Bitcoin: Written by : 12-21-2013

I’ve been mining crypto-currencies for about 6 months now; mostly Bitcoin, Litecoin and Namecoin in that order. We were [relatively] early in the asics market and the biggest thing stopping us from being wildly successful has been scams and late ship dates. This is based purely on my personal experiences and nothing more so take it with a grain of salt. The order is based on how long we have been running gear from this supplier: WTCR – Some of the first gear we purchased was Block Erupter Blades. WTCR was awesome to deal with (Thanks Sean!), they ship extremely …continue reading

Why bitcoin will survive the firey hell that fiat cannot

: Bitcoin, Payments: Written by : 12-20-2013

The other night I read a post on hacker news that just seems overly angry at the success of the bitcoin community. Bitcoin cannot, should not, and will not die in a fiery hell. There are a lot of reasons for this, and despite recent volatility there are lots of reasons why bitcoin is great. It’s a new system, new systems tend to attract lots of hate and loathing from those who are uninitiated. In the case of the author I’m referencing I think he’s just plain jealous of those of us who are winning I’m not sure why (s)he …continue reading

Bitcoin Bolsters Banks

: Bitcoin, Payments: Written by : 12-15-2013

There seem to be a lot of people thinking that banks should be “scared” of bitcoin, or that bitcoin will replace modern banking. This is simply not the case. To quote the FDIC “8.2 percent of US households are unbanked. This represents 1 in 12 households in the nation, or nearly 10 million in total.” An additional 10% or 14 million households are considered underbanked. It is this unbanked and underbanked population that stands to gain the most from technologies like bitcoin. The pros for the unbanked population are clear, while the gains for the underbanked population are a little …continue reading

GNUWorks

: Networks: Written by : 11-30-2013

We all know about networks, the biggest and most common being the internet.  I have spent many an afternoon dreaming about what the creators of the internet would think of the network infrastructure we have in place today. On a basic level I think they would be largely disappointed by the correlation between information and cost. We have created very capable encryption systems and very capable high speed wireless modems and data connections. With the combination of these two we should be able to bootstrap our own global multimesh networks, with one obvious caveat, oceans. Let’s skip ahead a little. …continue reading

Facebook is not your friend, stop liking it.

: Social Media: Written by : 11-28-2013

I’ve worked with a number of companies that had access to droves of facebook data.  I started working with Boomerang back when they were gtrot, about the same time the graph api became available. There were lots of problems, in the form of broken features and missing documentation. More than anything I remember having all of my worst fears realized when I saw the trove of data we had access to. We knew a lot about our users, and coincidentally a lot about my friends. Luckily we were the “good guys” in this case, and we never misused data. Back …continue reading