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Former US Mint Chief: Bitcoin a serious challenge to government money

(CoinDesk) Edmund C. Moy, the former director of the US Mint — the government
body responsible for producing the country’s physical coins, made waves
in the bitcoin community this week when he took to Twitter to voice his
enthusiasm for digital currencies.
Moy’s comments were issued in response to the most recent $2.6bn Credit Suisse settlement, in which the Switzerland-based banking giant pleaded guilty to helping clients evade taxes.
In light of this news, the 38th Director of the US Mint went so far as to suggest that digital currency could provide the answer to current problems in the financial system, writing:

However, Moy didn’t stop there. The former member of the Department of Homeland Security took to his blog on 23rd May to issue an entire post on how bitcoin is leading to “a revolution in payment systems”.

Moy wrote:

“Bitcoin,
and the ideas behind it, will be a disruptor to the traditional notions
of currency. In the end, currency will be better for it.”

The
full post lightheartedly addressed bitcoin and its strengths and
weaknesses, with Moy offering a perhaps surprisingly optimistic
assessment of how the technology will impact the global financial
marketplace.

Bitcoin removes government monopolies

Perhaps
most notably, Moy suggested that digital currencies can even help
prevent some of the more severe drawbacks associated with fiat
currencies. In particular, he predicts it will eliminate what he views
as the government monopoly on money, writing:

“It has a
low risk of collapse unlike a sovereign government’s currency (just ask
the Greeks or more broadly, the European Union).”

Moy acknowledged this as a positive, even if he realized the innovation would likely threaten his former employer.
He added: “You can mine your own bitcoins. No mint needed!”

Bitcoin an innovative means of exchange

Moy was also enthusiastic about bitcoin’s potential to offer a new way for global consumers to transact, stating:

“As
a medium of exchange, bitcoin offers several unique innovations to
currency: global nature, infinite divisibility and easy to carry.”

Calling
today’s transaction systems “archaic”, he argued that bitcoin’s ability
to divide effortlessly would allow for new methods of monetization via
micropayments, and that it could eliminate existing barriers to global
markets.

Bitcoin will be a safe store of value

Moy was equally positive about bitcoin as a store of value, saying that he believes bitcoin’s price will become more stable as it’s adopted by mainstream consumers.
However,
he took aim at critics of the idea who believe that government-backed
alternatives are perhaps more secure, saying that the US dollar is
driven mostly by market demand.
As an added benefit, he theorized
bitcoin could even allow governments the ability to dedicate more time
to monetary policy that could positively impact their economies should
it reach its full potential.
To read Moy’s full remarks, read his full post.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi

Marc Andreessen: In 20 years, we’ll talk about Bitcoin like we talk about the Internet today

(WashingtonPost) The investor and Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen thinks we’ll
all look back in 20 years and conclude that Bitcoin was as influential a
platform for innovation as the Internet itself was. He says that tech
companies think their meetings with President Obama on privacy are a
waste of time. And he calls net neutrality a “lose-lose.” In a
wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post this week,
 Andreessen
painted a picture of a future that’s distributed, messy and fraught
with tension. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Is there anything that Washington has built a wall against in terms of progress?

Well, the big thing right now for the tech industry is the Snowden
revelations, and the consequences of that for the American tech
industry. Specifically, in two areas: One is that the level of trust
that customers have [in] American tech companies has been seriously
damaged. And that is especially — but not exclusively — true outside the
United States. Every time another revelation comes out, like the one
this weekend about hijacking the routers on their way out of the country, or the one about hacking into the Internet companies’ backbone networks — every time one of these shoes drops, and apparently there is just an unlimited
number of shoes — every time one of these things happens, it’s a
serious blow to the credibility of these companies, especially outside
the U.S. And so there’s a really big, I mean very, very, very high level
of concern in the Valley that the American tech industry is in trouble
outside the U.S.

And then, two is this balkanization of the Internet that’s happening
now. As more revelations happen, more and more countries are saying:
“Okay, if we can’t trust the Internet, if the NSA is going to watch
everybody on the Internet all the time, we’re going to have to break off
and have our own Internet. Have our own firewalls, do what the Chinese
do, have our own private Internet or whatever the hell it’s going to
be.” This issue is being used as political cover for what these countries want to do anyway.

That brings us to, “Okay, how is the American government getting in
front of this?” And the answer is, “Not even a little bit.” The view in
the Valley is that the White House has hung the NSA out to dry. Just
like, “You’re on your own.” And there’s basically no effective
communication right now that I’m aware of between the American
government, especially the administration and American tech companies,
on like, “Okay, what happens now?”

There isn’t?

No.

Those meetings that occurred, that’s just for show?

Yeah, people come back, and they’re like, “Nothing happened.” The
Obama administration does not seem to have any real — they don’t seem to
have a plan. They seem to be in the mode of they kinda hope that it
goes away. And they hope that if they get face time with the execs they
can just mollify everybody and over time, the issue will just dissipate.
But I’m not aware of any substance that’s come out of those meetings.
I’m not aware of anybody who’s come back from those meetings saying:
“Okay, now there’s a plan. Now we know what’s going to happen.” It’s
been the opposite. It’s been people saying, “I don’t even know why I
went.”

Is there anything tech companies can do, whether on the Snowden stuff, or culturally?

These technologies escalate the power of government, but they also
escalate the power of business, and they also escalate the power of
individuals. So everyone’s been upgraded. And it’s a recalibration of
who can do what, and everybody can do new things, so everybody’s uneasy
about it. Governments are very worried about what citizens are going to
be able to do with these new technologies. Citizens are very worried
about what governments are going to do, and everybody’s worried about
what businesses are going to do. It’s this three-way dynamic that’s
playing out. And so for any of these individual issues, it’s not just
“What is one leg of this triangle going to be doing?” It’s, “What are all three of them going to be doing, and how will the tension resolve itself?”

Any thoughts on all these mergers that are being announced?

Not specifically on the mergers.

Or net neutrality?

So, I think the net neutrality issue is very difficult. I think it’s a
lose-lose. It’s a good idea in theory because it basically appeals to
this very powerful idea of permissionless innovation. But at the same
time, I think that a pure net neutrality view is difficult to sustain if
you also want to have continued investment in broadband networks. If
you’re a large telco right now, you spend on the order of $20 billion a
year on capex. You need to know how you’re going to get a return on that
investment. If you have these pure net neutrality rules where you can
never charge a company like Netflix anything, you’re not ever going to
get a return on continued network investment — which means you’ll stop
investing in the network. And I would not want to be sitting here 10 or
20 years from now with the same broadband speeds we’re getting today. So
the challenge, I think, is to accommodate both of those goals, which is
a very difficult thing to do. And I don’t envy the FCC and the
complexity of what they’re trying to do.

The ultimate answer would be if you had three or four or five
broadband providers to every house. And I think you actually have the
potential for that depending on how things play out from here. You’ve
got the cable companies; you’ve got the telcos. Google Fiber is
expanding very fast, and I think it’s going to be a very serious
nationwide and maybe ultimately worldwide effort. I think that’s going
to be a much bigger scale in five years.

So, you can imagine a world in which there are five competitors to
every home for broadband: telcos, cable, Google Fiber, mobile carriers
and unlicensed spectrum. In that world, net neutrality is a much less
central issue, because if you’ve got competition, if one of your
providers started to screw with you, you’d just switch to another one of
your providers.

There’s more and more integration between Bitcoin and the
financial services sector. But a lot of people who support Bitcoin
supported it because it was sort of disconnected from the infrastructure represented by government and everything else.

So we sort of have a theory on this, on where really disruptive
technologies come from. So the really new disruptive technologies come
from the fringe. This was true of PCs. Steve Jobs was, like, a
hippie. Internet came from the fringe. No big technology company thought
the Internet was going to be important, right up until basically 1995
or 1996.

Bitcoin is the classic instance of that. Bitcoin didn’t come from
Citibank; it didn’t come from the Federal Reserve; it didn’t come from
Visa. It came from the fringe. And now Bitcoin is in the early stages of
mainstreaming today. And the signs that it’s in the early stages of
mainstreaming are mainstream venture capital firms funding mainstream
startups, employing mainstream engineers to build services that’ll be
used by mainstream people. You’ve got big companies that are not yet
doing a lot with it, but are looking very seriously at it. So every big
bank has people that are trying to figure out what to do with Bitcoin;
every big e-commerce company has people that are trying to figure out
Bitcoin. You have mainstream regulators figuring it out; you’ve got
people at the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department and IRS that
are figuring it out. At the state level, people are engaged on it. And
so, it’s in the early stages of mainstreaming.

It’s already happening.

Anybody who thinks Bitcoin makes it easier to do transactions that aren’t
tracked by the government is 100 percent wrong. The transactions all
happen in public view. Anybody can look at the entire ledger and verify
who owns what. So if you’re a law enforcement agency or an intelligence
agency, this is a much easier way to track the flow of money than cash.
So I think actually law enforcement and intelligence agencies are going
to wind up being pro-Bitcoin, and libertarians are going to wind up
being anti-Bitcoin.

For [journalists], the big challenge has been explaining what
Bitcoin is to people. And I think we’ve always explained it as a
currency, but does that — now that people know about it in terms of a
currency, does that prevent them from [grasping Bitcoin’s full
potential]?

I have a lot of friends who are programmers. The programmers have always gone like, “Those [Bitcoin] guys are crazy.”

And then, almost 100 percent of the time, they sit down, read the paper,
read the code — it takes them a couple weeks — and they come out the
other side. And they’re like: “Oh my god, this is it. This is the big
breakthrough. This is the thing we’ve been waiting for. He solved all
the problems. Whoever he is should get the Nobel prize — he’s a genius.
This is the thing! This is the distributed trust network that the
Internet always needed and never had.”

So, one of the challenges is you take people who aren’t
professional programmers or mathematicians and then you expect them to
understand it from a standing start. And it’s daunting. And so then it
gets a word attached to it, like “currency” or whatever you want to call
it, and then people think that it is something it isn’t. And you have a
sense of this, but it’s a much deeper concept than currency. It’s the
idea of distributed trust.

So the business opportunity posed by this “distributed trust
network” — as an investor, what do you see that you could potentially —

Hundreds or thousands of applications and companies that could get built on top.

Is this, like, a billions-of-dollars kind of industry?

Yeah.

Trillions…?

Yeah! (Laughs, steeples his fingers Mr. Burns-style). Yeeeah… (Laughs) I have the haircut, I can do it.

Digital stocks. Digital equities. Digital fundraising for companies.
Digital bonds. Digital contracts, digital keys, digital title, who owns
what — digital title to your house, to your car. Like for example, you
get a digital title on a car, attached to a digital key, where you own
your car on the Bitcoin blockchain and on your smartphone. The key for
opening your car and starting your car is tied to that title. And if I
sell you my car, automatically you get title, and you get the key that
lets you operate the car, and it’s all digital, and it’s all unique, and
it can’t be cracked. You’ve got digital voting, digital contracts,
digital signatures. You’ve got unique pieces of digital content. If you
guys wanted to know exactly who had every piece of content you ever
made, you can track that. It’s this long list. And then every aspect of
financial services: insurance contracts, insurance derivatives, currency
exchange, remittance — on and on and on. It gives you a chance to
basically go after this very broad category of online business in a new
way. And, by the way, if we had had this technology 20 years ago, we
would’ve built it into the browser.

E-commerce would’ve gotten built on top of this, instead of getting
built on top of the credit card network. We knew we were missing this;
we just didn’t know what it was. There is no reason on earth for anybody
to be on the Internet today to be typing in a credit card number to buy
something. It’s insane, because — which is why you have all these
security problems, the Target hack and all this crazy…. And these high
fees, this high fraud rate. It doesn’t make sense online to have a
payment mechanism that requires you to hand over your credentials to
make a payment. That’s just an invitation to fraud and identity theft.
It’s just stupid.

But we didn’t have the better way of doing it. So we didn’t know what
else to do, and now we have the better way of doing it. Now, it’s going
to take time. We’re quite confident that when we’re sitting here in 20
years, we’ll be talking about Bitcoin the way we talk about the Internet
today. We just need time for it to play out.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi
25568078 BG2

Bitcoin used to buy $500,000 Kansas home

(KCTV) A new form of online currency is being used to buy nearly everything – including a $500,000 home in Olathe.
When Josh Zerlan went looking for a new home, he originally didn’t think about using a bitcoin to buy it.
“It’s like the internet in 1994. Nobody knew what to do with it, but
they knew it was pretty cool,” he said. “This seemed like a good test of
how far the currency has come.”
When Josh Zerlan went looking for a new home, he originally didn’t think about using a bitcoin to buy it.
Zerlan had already bought two cars, among other things, with them. So he wondered if he could purchase a house.
“It is a real hassle to transfer large sums of money and then the
banks take their cut. They take a fee, you end up paying quite a bit of
money. With bitcoin, you don’t have to pay any of those fees, and it is
an instant transfer,” he said.
Home sellers Tim and Virginia Hoelting admit the transaction was scary.
“We kind of tip-toed through it with Josh. We were real comfortable
with his knowledge of it, so we took the plunge,” Tim Hoelting said.
For those who don’t know what a bitcoin is, they are not alone.
Worldwide, it is estimated that only about 1.2 million consumers use
bitcoins, although more than 30,000 businesses currently take them
online.
And the bitcoin is growing. EBay is currently considering ways to start accepting it as payment through PayPal.
The MLS soccer franchise, the San Jose Earthquakes, accepts bitcoins to purchase tickets and beer at their home games.
Zerlan said it takes about six months to really understand how they work. He urges people to research them first.
“Once they understand it and start using it, it is amazing,” Zerlan said.
Zerlan said his bitcoins have made him feel right at home.
In December, one bitcoin was worth more than $1,100, today it is worth about $470, up from just $100 a year ago.
Bitcoin are volatile right now, so anyone interested in bitcoins are urged to research them first.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi
rsz bussss 600x400

Federal reserve advisory council sheds positive light on Bitcoin

Bitcoin regulation has consistently proved to be a touchy subject inside and out of the bitcoin community.
In February, much of the community rejoiced when Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen insisted that the regulatory entity had no authority to when it came to the digital currency.
On the other hand, other enthusiasts say that regulation exactly what bitcoin needs in order to get to the next level in terms of mainstream adoption; one of those being SecondMarket CEO, Barry Silbert. The bitcoin proponent and Bitcoin Investment Trust founder believes that regulation is necessary in order for Wall Street to increase its involvement in the digital currency landscape.

A recently obtained document from a Federal Reserve Advisory Committee meeting early this month has shed some light on this very topic, in return, revealing exactly how the Fed plans on reacting to the relatively new and emerging technology.

The Federal Advisory Council and Board of Governor’s record of meeting devoted a special section of the outline to bitcoin specifically. Among the key topics of concerns listed in respect to the digital currency were whether or not bitcoin has the potential to cause the “disruption of traditional channels of commerce with high potential for illicit use.” In respect to banking, the document also questions the possible “disintermediation of traditional payment networks, promoting shadow transacting.”

In the eyes of the Fed, indications point that the outlook is unanimous in that rather than posing as threat, bitcoin, with increased regulation, may hold promise:

Bitcoin does not present a threat to economic activity by disrupting traditional channels of commerce; rather, it could serve as a boon … Its global transmissibility opens new markets to merchants and service providers … Driving capital flows from the developed to the developing world should increase consumption.

The Federal Advisory Council (FAC) is comprised of twelve elite representatives of the banking industry. The committee meets four times a year, as required, to consult with and advise the Board on all matters within the Board’s jurisdiction. The overall rhetoric among the committee is that the board echoes the voice of Silbert in that the current financial institutions will play a key role in bitcoin’s future. The FAC ‘s conclusion was that, “should [bitcoin] adoption accelerate, banking could participate increasingly in bitcoin fund flows, especially as multicurrency accounts proliferate and reputational concerns subside.”

The FAC’s stance on bitcoin supports a reversal in the plethora of bad news encompassing the digital currency. Following easing tensions in China, the wildly successful Bitcoin2014 conference in Amsterdam, which delivered a surplus of positive news along with several major announcements, bitcoin has surged in value over that past several hours. Prices on Bitstamp rose from an opening of $448.34, while spiking as high as $500.00 mid-day as optimism surrounding the digital currency continues to influence bitcoin’s value.

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Satoshi
mining farm

Why Bitcoin miners are moving to tiny towns in Washington state

(Gizmodo.in) There’s not much in rural Washington, but there are lot of dams. And dams mean hydroelectric power. Following the lure of cheap electricity, Bitcoin miners and their power-hungry server farms are making out for sleepy little towns in the Pacific Northwest. Although Bitcoin is a digital currency, mining it still has a gigantic physical footprint. That’s because computers “mine” Bitcoin by solving a cryptographic equation. To mine more Bitcoin, you need more computing power. Or you can just have more computers. This is what a “multi-GPU mining rig”-basically a bunch of processors hacked together-looks like.
Powering up and cooling all those processors requires a lot of –you guessed it– electricity. Last year, Bitcoin miners were sucking up an estimated 1 million kilowatt-hours per day. That’s a hefty electric bill right there. But Washington has some of the lowest electricity rates in the country-less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour for industrial customers in certain area. The average U.S. household pays something more like 12 cents a kilowatt-hour.
Big tech companies running big data centers have been in on the state’s cheap electricity for a while now. Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Intuit all run data centers in Grant County, Washington. But Bitcoin mining’s reliance on intense computing power means even a small operation-relative to a behemoth like Microsoft, at least-needs a giant building full of servers. MegaBigPower, which has considered itself the largest Bitcoin-mining business in the U.S., has a Washington outpost.
Grant County says it has two Bitcoin mining companies operating, with five more to come. The engineers who first built Washington’s dams could not have possibly anticipated Bitcoin mania, yet those dams are now drawing some of the currency’s biggest backers. This is a modern gold rush, shaped by the electric infrastructure we built long ago.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi

MasterCard lobbyist adds Bitcoin to list of topics

(Bloomberg) When MasterCard Inc. paid a team of
lobbyists about $70,000 earlier this year to promote the bank-card network’s views, a new topic made their list: bitcoin.

Washington-based Peck Madigan Jones had five of its
lobbyists, including Jeff Peck, who leads the firm’s financial
services and capital markets practice, work on subjects
including “bitcoin and mobile payments” in the House of
Representatives and Senate during the first quarter, according
to a regulatory filing. Other topics the firm handled for
MasterCard included data breaches, interchange fees and gift
cards.

As big financial companies dismiss bitcoin’s prospects, the
document shows MasterCard is at least talking with lawmakers
about the virtual currency, which entrepreneurs pitch as a cheap
alternative to established payment systems. Investors in bitcoin
businesses are working to head off burdensome regulation and
capture some of the combined $61.3 billion in annual revenue
generated by the four largest U.S. credit-card networks.

“We were gathering information in connection with recent
congressional hearings to better understand the policy issues
around virtual and anonymous currencies,” said Jim Issokson, a
spokesman for Purchase, New York-based MasterCard.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi

Bitcoin Regulation Update – 03/07/14

(BitcoinMagazine) This
week saw the outing (or not) of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s alleged
inventor, who is said to have abruptly disappeared from the online
forums he was known to frequent in Bitcoin’s early days. Though the man
alleged to be Nakamoto, who was living under a different name in the
United States, denied involvement with Bitcoin, Newsweek, the
publication that broke the story, stands behind their work. The early
response from the online Bitcoin community could best be described as a
low grade form of moral outrage, combined with a dash of horror. What
seems to have upset Bitcoiners most is the fact that a media outlet was
able to identify and publicly name a person who clearly was not
interested in being identified, using little more than public
information and basic detective work. To the extent that the majority of
crypto enthusiasts value privacy, if not anonymity, the Satoshi
Nakamoto affair does not bode well.
Canada-based Bitcoin exchange Vault of Satoshi announced via Facebook on Thursday that it would discontinue
support for US customers due to an “increasingly hostile” regulatory
environment. The exchange, which connects users with others looking to
trade crypto currencies for fiat currencies, claimed to be facing
considerable difficulties complying with FinCEN’s anti-money laundering
rules, not the least of which was FinCEN’s policy disallowing the filing
of paper reports by money service businesses and the seeming
incompatibility of the online reporting system with foreign businesses.
The decision to abandon the US market entirely seems to be a fairly
drastic response to US law, which could rightly be described as overly
complicated. Vault of Satoshi is neither the first nor the only non-US
based company to face US regulatory requirements, so it isn’t clear why
it seems to be having unusual difficulty in this area.  The company’s
Bitcoin to US dollar volume on Friday stood at 280 coins as of 5:00 PM
CST, compared to 314 for Bitcoin to Canadian dollars. Under the new
policy, US traders will be unable to deposit or withdraw cash from the
exchange, but will be permitted to trade coins.
Yet another exchange, this time Canadian company Flexcoin, informed customers this week that it is insolvent
as the result of a hack induced theft and would have no choice but to
cease operations. The exchange lost an estimated $500,000 worth of coins
in its hot wallet, but a spokesman said that customer coins in cold
storage would be returned to their owners.  Flexcoin referred to its
terms of service, reminding its customers that they agreed not to hold
Flexcoin liable for theft, while informing everyone else that they were
out of luck. The operative verbiage states that “Flexcoin is not
responsible for insuring any bitcoins stored in the Flexcoin system.”
Whether this will be sufficient to ward off civil liability remains to
be seen.
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs service in the United Kingdom has reportedly dropped
a plan to apply value added taxes to mined bitcoins and Bitcoin
exchange transactions. However, the treasury maintained in a brief
delivered to British lawmakers that the 20% VAT still applies to goods
and services purchased with bitcoins, just the same as it would if those
same goods and services were purchased with Pounds. After a careful
review, HM Treasury was more likely to have discovered the near
impossibility of taxing Bitcoin at the point of exchange or the point of
creation, than to have determined that it falls outside the scope of
transactions subject to the tax.  Merchants, on the other hand, are
already accustomed to collecting VAT and equipped with the
infrastructure both to report it and to comply with the audit
requirements of the British government. The UK has developed a
reputation in the Bitcoin community of late for being comparatively
friendly to crypto currency from a regulatory standpoint and more
accessible than US regulators.
Vietnam’s Communist government has officially banned
all Bitcoin transactions. The Vietnamese central bank announced the
policy, citing Bitcoin’s alleged role in promoting money laundering and
other criminal activity. The bank did not specify how the ban would be
enforced or what the penalties for non-compliance would be. The
Vietnamese government maintains restrictive capital controls (ostensibly
to protect the Dong against speculators), that Bitcoin could be used to
subvert. Few exchanges offer the ability to convert from Bitcoin to the
Vietnamese Dong.  However, other currencies, such as the US dollar, are
in common use on Vietnam’s streets, especially in urban centers.
Japan has announced
that it will not attempt to regulate Bitcoin transactions carried out
within its borders on the grounds that bitcoins are not considered a
currency. However, Japanese banks will be prohibited from buying or
selling bitcoins. The Japanese government also clarified that it intends
to treat Bitcoin as a commodity and subject it to the applicable
taxation regime. Japan is the home of Mt. Gox, the collapsed Bitcoin
exchange which is currently the subject of a bankruptcy filing in that
country, along with at least one criminal probe and numerous civil
suits.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi
bitcoin bars nyc

Lawsky says New York will adapt money transfer rules for Bitcoin

 

(Bloomberg) New York state will adapt existing rules on money transmission to license digital currency firms, financial services Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky said in remarks prepared for a conference in Washington today.

We do not have to throw out all of our existing rules for money transmitters or banks, which have generally served consumers well when vigorously enforced,” Lawsky said in a statement delivered to a New America Foundation forum on Bitcoin. “Indeed, certain aspects of virtual currency could dovetail with existing regulations.

New York will “likely have to proceed with issuing some form of specially tailored BitLicense that adapts those rules to the world of virtual currency,” Lawsky said.

The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said in March that virtual currency businesses may be regulated as money transmitters. Since states license such companies, the decision set off a scramble by states to decide how to treat the embryonic industry.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi
coinmap 2014

Over 3,000 Bitcoin-friendly merchants are already registered at CoinMap

(BitcoinExaminer) Bitcoin’s amazing ride into the mainstream is not just happening online with the help of big retailers like Overstock or TigerDirect. There are now more than 3,000 brick-and-mortar merchants spread across the world that accept cryptocurrency, according to CoinMap.
The online map allows retailers to register once they start accepting BTC and the number of members has been growing exponentially. After the price peak registered in November of 2013, CoinMap went from almost 1,000 to 2,004 merchants.
coinmap 2014 bitcoin

 

And now the platform took another big leap, currently listing 3,003 physical retailers. This means that the number of businesses registered at CoinMap grew about 50 percent in less than two months.
The place with the biggest number of retailers is still the United States – with 1,294 businesses -, but Europe is giving America a run for its money with more than 1,200 companies and stores that already accept Bitcoin.
Cryptocurrency is even present in more secluded places like Iceland or Siberia, as you can see on the website.
According to the calculations made by the Redditor ‘LiveBeef’CoinMap’s next big jump should happen in March, when the platform could reach 4,000 merchants.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi
1293778

The Washington Post thinks Bitcoin will stabilize in the future

(Washington Post) The Bitcoin economy will prove to be stable in the future, according to the The Washington Post’s Timothy B. Lee, who illustrates this in four charts and in-depth analysis.
“This pattern suggests that the extreme price volatility that has bedeviled Bitcoin since its inception is likely to prove a temporary phenomenon,” wrote Lee. “Bitcoin prices become volatile when a wave of media attention attracts a swarm of new users. As the Bitcoin economy grows and matures, these growing pains will become less frequent and less severe.”

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi