It’s an alternative to paper currencies. It can be traded anywhere in the world. It has a limited supply. And it should be a secure haven if financial markets start to crash. That is a fairly accurate description of gold. It is also an accurate description of bitcoin, the digital currency that is gaining in popularity all the time.
But here’s a puzzle. The price of gold has been falling for most of this year, and it would be a brave investor who called this as the bottom of the market. And yet the price of bitcoins has been soaring. The goldbugs will tell you that the price of gold is being suppressed — it would be a lot higher if it was not being manipulated downwards. Others will argue that bitcoin is a faddish bubble, a nerd-ish equivalent of 17th century Dutch tulips. Its soaring price tells us nothing — except that people are as easily fooled as they always have been.
Click to Play
Bitcoin: Is the currency becoming more real?
Is bitcoin another flash in the pan? Or are the early investors onto something that will make them rich? WSJ's Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer.
The actual answer is more interesting. Clearly there is a demand for alternative currencies, and bitcoin is in many ways a better product for that market. The price divergence is an illustration of how bitcoin is edging gold GCG4 -0.35% out of the “alternative money” market — and that is hardly bullish for the precious yellow metal.
For the few people who have not yet heard of it, bitcoin is a purely digital currency, minted in limited quantities by a pre-determined algorithm. No one knows who invented it, and no one controls it. Right now, there are 11 million bitcoins in circulation, and the algorithm will eventually create around 21 million of them. And that will be the lot — production will stop, and there will be that amount of digital money available, and no more.
At the start of this year, you could pick up one of those bitcoins for $13. Looking back, that was the steal of the year. The virtual currency jumped to a record of $947 Tuesday on the trading exchange Mt. Gox.
The point about bitcoin is that it is designed to be all the things that gold was back when the precious metal was a currency. It has a limited supply. It is not controlled by governments or central banks. It is not anonymous, as some people occasionally claim, but it is a lot more private than money held in a bank account. It is a store of value.
2013年12月1日 星期日
Bitcoin Tops $1,000 for the First Time
The price of bitcoins topped $1,000 Wednesday on Mt. Gox, the second largest exchange by volume, marking the first time its price has hit four digits.
Bitcoin first hit $100 in April and quickly doubled that same month. The price has increased fivefold in the seven months since, but it has also experienced significant fluctuations amid uncertainty about the viability of the digital currency.
Bitcoin first hit $100 in April and quickly doubled that same month. The price has increased fivefold in the seven months since, but it has also experienced significant fluctuations amid uncertainty about the viability of the digital currency.
Tipping Point: Bitcoin Passes Value of an Ounce of Gold
On Friday the decentralised crypto-currency Bitcoin, which passed the $1,000 (£611, €735) mark earlier this week, was briefly worth more than an ounce of gold, which will be seen by many supporters of the currency as a symbolic tipping point in the rise of the digital currency.
Bitcoin today hit a high of $1,242 on Mt Gox, the world's biggest bitcoin exchange, beating the price of gold which was $1,241.98 at the time. At the time of publication, bitcoin's value on the exchange has dropped back to around $1,160 while an ounce of gold remains relatively steady at $1,247.
The mysterious currency, which is not governed or regulated by any central bank, has gained widespread media attention this year due to its surging value - along with multi-million dollar thefts of the digital coins - and its associations with the darker parts of the web.
Bitcoin today hit a high of $1,242 on Mt Gox, the world's biggest bitcoin exchange, beating the price of gold which was $1,241.98 at the time. At the time of publication, bitcoin's value on the exchange has dropped back to around $1,160 while an ounce of gold remains relatively steady at $1,247.
The mysterious currency, which is not governed or regulated by any central bank, has gained widespread media attention this year due to its surging value - along with multi-million dollar thefts of the digital coins - and its associations with the darker parts of the web.
When You Buy Pizza With Bitcoins, This Man Makes Money
Imagine selling lemonade on the street for £5. Imagine storing that hard-earned money in a jar and doing jack shit for a week. Suddenly, the money in your jar has grown to £50. Now imagine we're not talking about a couple of pounds, but millions. That’s sort of the situation Anthony Gallippi has found himself in.
He’s the CEO of BitPay, a company that makes it easier for pizza places, indie designers, and anarcho web providers to accept Bitcoin. Instead of having to pull out a credit card or log into Paypal and deposit money there, his software leads the consumer through an easy step-by-step interface that let’s them pay in the cryptocurrency. BitPay pays the merchant in euros, dollars or pound, while your bitcoins go to them.
But the value of those bitcoins has risen about a 1000 percent over the last month. So these are happy times for Gallippi and his company. He was kind enough to talk to us right at the start of the American holiday shopping season.
He’s the CEO of BitPay, a company that makes it easier for pizza places, indie designers, and anarcho web providers to accept Bitcoin. Instead of having to pull out a credit card or log into Paypal and deposit money there, his software leads the consumer through an easy step-by-step interface that let’s them pay in the cryptocurrency. BitPay pays the merchant in euros, dollars or pound, while your bitcoins go to them.
But the value of those bitcoins has risen about a 1000 percent over the last month. So these are happy times for Gallippi and his company. He was kind enough to talk to us right at the start of the American holiday shopping season.
Link between 'Satoshi' bitcoin account and the Silk Road dissolves
A research paper speculating Bitcoin’s creator may have transferred $60,000 to the Silk Road marketplace has been dispelled, as the account holder in question came forward on Tuesday, denying he is the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto.
Dustin Trammell, a security researcher who is CEO of the vulnerability marketplace ExploitHub, wrote in a blog post that the Israeli researchers failed in their analysis, which was subject to blistering criticism from the bitcoin community.
“I hope this puts to rest any further speculation regarding whether or not I am Satoshi Nakamoto and whether or not I have had any involvement with the Silk Road,” Trammell wrote. “I am not and have not.”
The paper was written by Adi Shamir and Dorit Ron of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Shamir is a noted cryptographer credited with co-creating the RSA encryption algorithm, which is widely used to protect corporate data.
In an email to IDG News Service, Shamir defended their work, writing that “we were extremely careful in our choice of words and repeatedly stressed that we have no proof.”
But later on Wednesday, Shamir wrote in an email that after reading Trammell’s blog post, the paper would be revised.
In four paragraphs at the end of their 13-page paper, Shamir and Ron described a 1,000-bitcoin transaction, worth around $60,000 at the time, sent in March. It came from a bitcoin account established just a week after the system launched in 2009, a so-called “founder” account.
Many of the early bitcoin accounts are believed to be controlled by the person who supposedly created Bitcoin, who used “Satoshi Nakamoto” as a pseudonym.
Their analysis claimed the virtual currency eventually ended up in another account belonging to DPR, short for “Dread Pirate Roberts,” who controlled the Silk Road marketplace. U.S. federal prosecutors allege DPR is 29-year-old Ross William Ulbricht, who faces murder-for-hire, narcotics trafficking and computer hacking charges.
Trammell wrote that he sent the 1,000 bitcoins to Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange, “for trading purposes.”
“Mt. Gox should be able to easily confirm that they indeed control this destination address,” he wrote.
Trammell’s explanation is “completely believable, and thus we no longer believe that the very early founder account we identified in the full bitcoin transaction graph belongs to Satoshi Nakamoto,” Shamir wrote. “We will revise our paper accordingly.”
Although the researchers hedged on the claim, their wording in the paper was strong enough to suggest that they might have spotted something stunning.
“The short path we found suggests (but does not prove) the existence of a surprising link between the two mysterious figures of the Bitcoin community, Satoshi Nakamoto and DPR.”
The paper touched off a firestorm of criticism on Reddit. By studying Bitcoin’s public ledger of transactions, called the “blockchain,” commentators quickly cast doubt on it.
“The paper is complete crap,” wrote Jeff Garzik, a software engineer who has extensive experience with Bitcoin, in an email to IDG.
Bitcoin’s blockchain is public and transparent, showing all transactions since the system was launched. But following the flow of bitcoins can get tricky, especially if “mixing” services are used, which create spider web-like transaction trails.
Dustin Trammell, a security researcher who is CEO of the vulnerability marketplace ExploitHub, wrote in a blog post that the Israeli researchers failed in their analysis, which was subject to blistering criticism from the bitcoin community.
“I hope this puts to rest any further speculation regarding whether or not I am Satoshi Nakamoto and whether or not I have had any involvement with the Silk Road,” Trammell wrote. “I am not and have not.”
The paper was written by Adi Shamir and Dorit Ron of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Shamir is a noted cryptographer credited with co-creating the RSA encryption algorithm, which is widely used to protect corporate data.
In an email to IDG News Service, Shamir defended their work, writing that “we were extremely careful in our choice of words and repeatedly stressed that we have no proof.”
But later on Wednesday, Shamir wrote in an email that after reading Trammell’s blog post, the paper would be revised.
In four paragraphs at the end of their 13-page paper, Shamir and Ron described a 1,000-bitcoin transaction, worth around $60,000 at the time, sent in March. It came from a bitcoin account established just a week after the system launched in 2009, a so-called “founder” account.
Many of the early bitcoin accounts are believed to be controlled by the person who supposedly created Bitcoin, who used “Satoshi Nakamoto” as a pseudonym.
Their analysis claimed the virtual currency eventually ended up in another account belonging to DPR, short for “Dread Pirate Roberts,” who controlled the Silk Road marketplace. U.S. federal prosecutors allege DPR is 29-year-old Ross William Ulbricht, who faces murder-for-hire, narcotics trafficking and computer hacking charges.
Trammell wrote that he sent the 1,000 bitcoins to Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange, “for trading purposes.”
“Mt. Gox should be able to easily confirm that they indeed control this destination address,” he wrote.
Trammell’s explanation is “completely believable, and thus we no longer believe that the very early founder account we identified in the full bitcoin transaction graph belongs to Satoshi Nakamoto,” Shamir wrote. “We will revise our paper accordingly.”
Although the researchers hedged on the claim, their wording in the paper was strong enough to suggest that they might have spotted something stunning.
“The short path we found suggests (but does not prove) the existence of a surprising link between the two mysterious figures of the Bitcoin community, Satoshi Nakamoto and DPR.”
The paper touched off a firestorm of criticism on Reddit. By studying Bitcoin’s public ledger of transactions, called the “blockchain,” commentators quickly cast doubt on it.
“The paper is complete crap,” wrote Jeff Garzik, a software engineer who has extensive experience with Bitcoin, in an email to IDG.
Bitcoin’s blockchain is public and transparent, showing all transactions since the system was launched. But following the flow of bitcoins can get tricky, especially if “mixing” services are used, which create spider web-like transaction trails.
Bitcoin keeps surging, taps new record atop $1,200
MADRID (MarketWatch) -- Bitcoin continued to push higher Friday, touching a new record of $1,242 before pulling back to around $1,183. The virtual currency took out Wednesday's $1,000 high on Thanksgiving Day. The run-up for bitcoin got new life after a congressional hearing earlier this month that effectively gave the currency an official blessing. The currency also elbowed into the holiday shopping season with its own Bitcoin Black Friday promotion involving hundreds of merchants.
Is Bitcoin About To Change The World?
The past weeks have seen a surprising meeting of minds between chairman of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, the Bank of England, the Olympic-rowing and Zuckerberg-bothering Winklevoss twins, and the US Department of Homeland Security. The connection? All have decided it's time to take Bitcoin seriously.
Until now, what pundits called in a rolling-eye fashion "the new peer-to-peer cryptocurrency" had been seen just as a digital form of gold, with all the associated speculation, stake-claiming and even "mining"; perfect for the digital wild west of the internet, but no use for real transactions.
Bitcoins are mined by computers solving fiendishly hard mathematical problems. The "coin" doesn't exist physically: it is a virtual currency that exists only as a computer file. No one computer controls the currency. A network keeps track of all transactions made using Bitcoins but it doesn't know what they were used for – just the ID of the computer "wallet" they move from and to.
Right now the currency is tricky to use, both in terms of the technological nous required to actually acquire Bitcoins, and finding somewhere to spend them. To get them, you have to first set up a wallet, probably online at a site such as Blockchain.info, and then pay someone hard currency to get them to transfer the coins into that wallet.
A Bitcoin payment address is a short string of random characters, and if used carefully, it's possible to make transactions anonymously. That's what made it the currency of choice for sites such as the Silk Road and Black Market Reloaded, which let users buy drugs anonymously over the internet. It also makes it very hard to tax transactions, despite the best efforts of countries such as Germany, which in August declared that Bitcoin was "private money" in which transactions should be taxed as normal.
It doesn't have all the advantages of cash, though the fact you can't forge it is a definite plus: Bitcoin is "peer-to-peer" and every coin "spent" is authenticated with the network. Thus you can't spend the same coin in two different places. (But nor can you spend it without an internet connection.) You don't have to spend whole Bitcoins: each one can be split into 100m pieces (each known as a satoshi), and spent separately.
Although most people have now vaguely heard of Bitcoin, you're unlikely to find someone outside the tech community who really understands it in detail, let alone accepts it as payment. Nobody knows who invented it; its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, hasn't come forward. He or she may not even be Japanese but certainly knows a lot about cryptography, economics and computing.
Until now, what pundits called in a rolling-eye fashion "the new peer-to-peer cryptocurrency" had been seen just as a digital form of gold, with all the associated speculation, stake-claiming and even "mining"; perfect for the digital wild west of the internet, but no use for real transactions.
Bitcoins are mined by computers solving fiendishly hard mathematical problems. The "coin" doesn't exist physically: it is a virtual currency that exists only as a computer file. No one computer controls the currency. A network keeps track of all transactions made using Bitcoins but it doesn't know what they were used for – just the ID of the computer "wallet" they move from and to.
Right now the currency is tricky to use, both in terms of the technological nous required to actually acquire Bitcoins, and finding somewhere to spend them. To get them, you have to first set up a wallet, probably online at a site such as Blockchain.info, and then pay someone hard currency to get them to transfer the coins into that wallet.
A Bitcoin payment address is a short string of random characters, and if used carefully, it's possible to make transactions anonymously. That's what made it the currency of choice for sites such as the Silk Road and Black Market Reloaded, which let users buy drugs anonymously over the internet. It also makes it very hard to tax transactions, despite the best efforts of countries such as Germany, which in August declared that Bitcoin was "private money" in which transactions should be taxed as normal.
It doesn't have all the advantages of cash, though the fact you can't forge it is a definite plus: Bitcoin is "peer-to-peer" and every coin "spent" is authenticated with the network. Thus you can't spend the same coin in two different places. (But nor can you spend it without an internet connection.) You don't have to spend whole Bitcoins: each one can be split into 100m pieces (each known as a satoshi), and spent separately.
Although most people have now vaguely heard of Bitcoin, you're unlikely to find someone outside the tech community who really understands it in detail, let alone accepts it as payment. Nobody knows who invented it; its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, hasn't come forward. He or she may not even be Japanese but certainly knows a lot about cryptography, economics and computing.
訂閱：
文章 (Atom)