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.
2013年12月1日 星期日
Did Satoshi Nakamoto transfer 1,000 bitcoins to the Silk Road?
Two computer scientists in Israel say a bitcoin transaction now worth more than $1 million suggests a possible link between a creator of the virtual currency and Ross William Ulbricht, the 29-year-old accused of running the Silk Road underground online marketplace.
The 1,000-bitcoin transfer was found during an analysis of the movement of the Silk Road’s bitcoins, according to a forthcoming research paper written by Adi Shamir and Dorit Ron of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
The finding suggests a partnership or investment in the Silk Road on the part of someone involved very early on in Bitcoin “but this is pure speculation,” the researchers wrote.
The amount was transferred on March 20 from an account established just a week after the bitcoin network launched in January 2009. Early bitcoin accounts are believed to be controlled by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for the person or group of people who created Bitcoin.
The receiving account has been linked to “DPR,” short for “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the operator of the Silk Road who authorities alleged is Ulbricht. The bitcoins were worth about $60,000 at the time, but the price of bitcoin has since surged.
“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,” they wrote.
Nakamoto’s real identity has never been uncovered despite attempts to figure out who has the cryptography and mathematical skills to create such a system. He stopped writing posts on a bitcoin forum in 2010.
The 1,000-bitcoin transfer was found during an analysis of the movement of the Silk Road’s bitcoins, according to a forthcoming research paper written by Adi Shamir and Dorit Ron of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
The finding suggests a partnership or investment in the Silk Road on the part of someone involved very early on in Bitcoin “but this is pure speculation,” the researchers wrote.
The amount was transferred on March 20 from an account established just a week after the bitcoin network launched in January 2009. Early bitcoin accounts are believed to be controlled by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for the person or group of people who created Bitcoin.
The receiving account has been linked to “DPR,” short for “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the operator of the Silk Road who authorities alleged is Ulbricht. The bitcoins were worth about $60,000 at the time, but the price of bitcoin has since surged.
“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,” they wrote.
Nakamoto’s real identity has never been uncovered despite attempts to figure out who has the cryptography and mathematical skills to create such a system. He stopped writing posts on a bitcoin forum in 2010.
Carter: Bitcoins need to be better than real money in order to survive
It has been a rough couple of months for bitcoins.
In October, the U.S. government shut down the Silk Road website, where bitcoins were being used to purchase illegal drugs. Then in early November a researcher at Cornell University published a paper asserting that the virtual currency is broken -- that is, that the system of difficult algorithms that one must solve to obtain bitcoins might be successfully exploited by a group of sufficiently clever and selfish bitcoin miners.
Next came the U.S. Senate hearings aimed at discovering whether these so-called crypto-currencies are a tool for drug dealers and money launderers to do business beyond official scrutiny. And now, just in time for the holiday shopping season, comes the disclosure that the Bitcoin Internet Payment System -- or BIPS -- has been hacked. Customers lost the equivalent of about $1 million in bitcoins.
CARTOONS: Jimmy Margulies' cartoons | Cartoon Roundup
Hacking BIPS isn't like stealing from a virtual bank run by an Australian teenager. According to its website, BIPS is "the premier bitcoin service provider," helping to facilitate bitcoin use even in the brick-and-mortar world.
Bitcoins are mined by solving algorithms that were posted on the Internet five years ago by a programmer or group of programmers using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Successful miners earn a certain number of bitcoins. The rate of bitcoin distribution automatically slows over time, so that the currency cannot be inflated. In fact, the total number of bitcoins is capped at 21 million.
Bitcoins may or may not be money -- economists differ on whether they are in sufficiently widespread use to constitute a medium of exchange -- but they are plainly a valuable asset. Like other assets, they will have value as long as people want them.
And right now, bitcoins are hot. Very hot. The bitcoin market has shrugged off this bad news, recently hitting a high of more than $1,000 -- a considerable feat given that less than a year ago, a single bitcoin was worth about $13. One of the reasons digital thieves risk breaking into virtual vaults is that the value of bitcoins keeps rising.
Certainly bitcoins have captured the imagination of the news media. Consider the excitement over the first bitcoin ATM, installed in a Vancouver coffee shop, or the front-page Wall Street Journal story about a couple who traveled the world using only bitcoins.
At the same time, there have been lurid stories about how easily drug dealers and money launderers can manipulate the anonymity of the bitcoin for their own purposes. Yet the U.S. government's takedown of Silk Road suggests that hiding in the bitcoin system isn't as easy as it looks. "It is not in fact anonymous," says Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman. "It is not immune from investigation."
If bitcoins are to have a future, the selling point can't be anonymity -- a characteristic sure to draw increasing government scrutiny. The selling points will have to be security and convenience.
The concepts are not unrelated. A principal knock on bitcoins has been the claim that they are inherently insecure. The principal defense has been that they are as secure as "real" currency. Both can be lost or stolen. And, as bitcoin supporters like to point out, most of the cases of hacking involve individuals who have followed poor password security procedures -- the sort of carelessness that would cause you equal trouble with your dollar-denominated online banking account.
The trouble for the crypto-currencies is that being as safe as other forms of currency isn't enough. Precisely because bitcoins are new and feel peculiar to a world raised on the notion that governments control the supply of money, bitcoins will probably enter widespread use only when their advocates can credibly argue that the virtual currency has advantages other than anonymity over the real thing.
As people come to believe that bitcoins are secure, they will be more willing to use them, and the demand will stimulate a supply of sellers of goods and services who will accept them. Once acceptance becomes sufficiently widespread, the debate over whether bitcoins are money will be over.
Maybe the crypto-currencies are a fad or a bubble. Maybe governments and financial institutions, furious about the competition, will take steps to destroy them.
In October, the U.S. government shut down the Silk Road website, where bitcoins were being used to purchase illegal drugs. Then in early November a researcher at Cornell University published a paper asserting that the virtual currency is broken -- that is, that the system of difficult algorithms that one must solve to obtain bitcoins might be successfully exploited by a group of sufficiently clever and selfish bitcoin miners.
Next came the U.S. Senate hearings aimed at discovering whether these so-called crypto-currencies are a tool for drug dealers and money launderers to do business beyond official scrutiny. And now, just in time for the holiday shopping season, comes the disclosure that the Bitcoin Internet Payment System -- or BIPS -- has been hacked. Customers lost the equivalent of about $1 million in bitcoins.
CARTOONS: Jimmy Margulies' cartoons | Cartoon Roundup
Hacking BIPS isn't like stealing from a virtual bank run by an Australian teenager. According to its website, BIPS is "the premier bitcoin service provider," helping to facilitate bitcoin use even in the brick-and-mortar world.
Bitcoins are mined by solving algorithms that were posted on the Internet five years ago by a programmer or group of programmers using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Successful miners earn a certain number of bitcoins. The rate of bitcoin distribution automatically slows over time, so that the currency cannot be inflated. In fact, the total number of bitcoins is capped at 21 million.
Bitcoins may or may not be money -- economists differ on whether they are in sufficiently widespread use to constitute a medium of exchange -- but they are plainly a valuable asset. Like other assets, they will have value as long as people want them.
And right now, bitcoins are hot. Very hot. The bitcoin market has shrugged off this bad news, recently hitting a high of more than $1,000 -- a considerable feat given that less than a year ago, a single bitcoin was worth about $13. One of the reasons digital thieves risk breaking into virtual vaults is that the value of bitcoins keeps rising.
Certainly bitcoins have captured the imagination of the news media. Consider the excitement over the first bitcoin ATM, installed in a Vancouver coffee shop, or the front-page Wall Street Journal story about a couple who traveled the world using only bitcoins.
At the same time, there have been lurid stories about how easily drug dealers and money launderers can manipulate the anonymity of the bitcoin for their own purposes. Yet the U.S. government's takedown of Silk Road suggests that hiding in the bitcoin system isn't as easy as it looks. "It is not in fact anonymous," says Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman. "It is not immune from investigation."
If bitcoins are to have a future, the selling point can't be anonymity -- a characteristic sure to draw increasing government scrutiny. The selling points will have to be security and convenience.
The concepts are not unrelated. A principal knock on bitcoins has been the claim that they are inherently insecure. The principal defense has been that they are as secure as "real" currency. Both can be lost or stolen. And, as bitcoin supporters like to point out, most of the cases of hacking involve individuals who have followed poor password security procedures -- the sort of carelessness that would cause you equal trouble with your dollar-denominated online banking account.
The trouble for the crypto-currencies is that being as safe as other forms of currency isn't enough. Precisely because bitcoins are new and feel peculiar to a world raised on the notion that governments control the supply of money, bitcoins will probably enter widespread use only when their advocates can credibly argue that the virtual currency has advantages other than anonymity over the real thing.
As people come to believe that bitcoins are secure, they will be more willing to use them, and the demand will stimulate a supply of sellers of goods and services who will accept them. Once acceptance becomes sufficiently widespread, the debate over whether bitcoins are money will be over.
Maybe the crypto-currencies are a fad or a bubble. Maybe governments and financial institutions, furious about the competition, will take steps to destroy them.
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