Check out BitSim, a Zero Footprint Platform that works by interposing an ultra thin chip between the SIM card and any SMS-capable phone. What does it do? Bitcoin, smart contracts, all encrypted over SMS without carrier permission.
Providing NFC and fully-encrypted Bitcoin transactions over SMS, even a smart-contract-capable JVM runtime, BitSIM is a stealthy technology injection that routes around the carrier monopolies.
Gamechanger.
Late in 2014 I decided to contribute a submission to the Senate Committee on Digital Currency. Inspired by Futurist and Entrepreneur, Mark Pesce, who shared his opening statements from the November hearing on his blog, I decided to publish mine here. Feedback most welcome!
Dear Dr Dermody,
Re: Senate Economics Reference Committee Inquiry into digital currency.
I write in response to your letter dated 14 October 2014 inviting a submission to the Inquiry into Digital Currency. I appreciate the opportunity to provide comments on digital currency.
Currently I’m a full-time software engineer working at Atlassian, Australia’s most successful and fastest growing software company. I have worked there for about nine years and have seen the company expand globally, opening three offices this year alone. What was only twenty-something people in a single room in 2005 now expects to hire over 600 staff in the next 12 months, most of them in engineering roles like myself.
Researching Bitcoin since late 2011, I have developed software, written many articles, spoken at Bitcoin conferences in Australia and New Zealand and consulted to Bitcoin businesses. I am deeply engaged with the Bitcoin community globally and I coordinate a Bitcoin meetup group in Sydney. It has taken me a considerable amount of time to arrive at my current understanding of Bitcoin and its potential. Like most, my initial thoughts were that it must be a scam or at best another hopeless dream like the previous two decades of unsuccessful digital currency projects I witnessed.
Back in 1981 at eight years old, as I began computer programming, I realised the personal computer would change the world dramatically. I tried to convince everyone around me that the computer revolution was coming but nobody seemed to believe that the fledgling hobbyist devices of that time would ever exceed their obvious awkward limitations to become essential for everybody, everyday nor that they could be a creative tool for artists and musicians. Computers were then only considered the domain of big business or big science.
When commercial internet hit Australia in 1991 I recognised a new stage in the computer revolution. This was no chaotic, unpredictable populace on the rampage. This revolution was like the scientific revolution; a quiet yet transformative increase in human capability. The media at the time focused on “Internet the Drama” after all, the instructions to build bombs were available to anyone and the publication of illicit material was no longer effectively blocked by ratings imposed or refused by The Classification Board. In the two decades since then we have seen over two billion people join this global communications and information system and doing so costs far less than a textbook.
Bitcoin is a third stage in this computer revolution. It’s still in its infancy but is growing fast and many of us are working to accelerate this. In 2014 the speed of innovation in Financial Technology (FinTech) is very high, much higher than that of smart phones or the internet itself when it was new. The fact that Bitcoin is fully decentralised crucially enables accelerated growth whereas centralised coordination adds friction and cost to innovation.
The digital revolution has disrupted many industries, but none quite so big and powerful as financial services. We should all expect incumbents to attempt to protect their privileged market dominance. Banks, credit card companies, money transmitter businesses to name a few, all these companies will come to realise they ultimately need to drastically change their businesses or they will suffer on the bottom line. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan recently identified Bitcoin as a significant competitor. Payments systems trade journals discuss the oncoming “margin squeeze” due to both tech giants like Google and Apple and from platforms like Bitcoin.
You will hear that Bitcoin is a fantastic opportunity as I detail below, however Bitcoin is also clearly identified as a threat. What is not always clear, however, is who it is a threat to and how that threat arises from some open source computer code.
Bitcoin is not suitable for crime in comparison to cash. Bitcoin is not as good for terrorism, money laundering or tax evasion as cash. Bitcoin is fully traceable - “an auditor’s dream”. In fact the extreme transparency of Bitcoin has many privacy activists quite worried. The fact that the global ledger of all Bitcoin transactions is publicly accessible means investigative police work is better supported by Bitcoin than by cash.
The transparency of this ledger offers many benefits from transparent accounting in charities to reduced opportunity for undetected corruption and embezzlement both in government and private corporations.
The main threat Bitcoin represents is disintermediation - cutting out the middlemen - just as going digital has done in so many sectors: media, publishing, communications, music, film. Just ask Kodak.
Incumbents will resist change. They will fight against Bitcoin. They will fight for what is best not for Australia, but for themselves.
Bitcoin is competition for legacy financial services companies because it automates many of the manual processes through which they provide value. This technology does it far cheaper by eliminating third party risk. Bitcoin cuts these third parties out of many kinds of transaction and it minimises their role in others.
The biggest unknown with Bitcoin is the positive potential. Who given a time machine could resist the opportunity to travel back only a decade or so to a world still skeptical of “the internet fad” and buy some stock in a startup called Google, now one of the worlds largest companies?
Just as we couldn’t imagine Google before the web, we can’t imagine the value that will come from the underlying technology of Bitcoin. This blockchain technology is not merely a new version of what came before. It is a totally new capability and nobody knows exactly where it is capable of taking us.
Over the past few years I have gradually become less skeptical and more bullish about Bitcoin. I now recognise Bitcoin represents a new software technology category. Money is just the first example of its capability, like email was the first “killer app” of the internet. The best is yet to come.
Australia has a unique opportunity to take advantage of digital currencies and blockchain technology. Our remoteness from trading partners is a diminished limitation in this internet age. We have solid education and access to the fastest growing markets in Asia. We are willing early adopters of technology, have a sophisticated financial services workforce and a stable economic and political base, not to mention the weather and lifestyle!
If Australia fumbles digital currency technology, we will have no excuses, noone to blame but ourselves.
Australian FinTech startups begin with this natural advantage and digital economy companies worldwide already identify Australia as a potential base of operations. They also see a healthy economy and a rich, accessible market opportunity. Lack of regulatory certainty is a commonly cited risk factor and many jurisdictions seek to attract that business while the sector is still small. London, Singapore, Isle of Man, Jersey, Panama and many others have clearly recognised the opportunity and this is reflected in their appropriate regulatory response to Bitcoin. Australia can do this.
If Australia provides an appropriate regulatory environment that encourages early stage innovation, Aussies who have had to leave to build their businesses will be encouraged back to Australia where they’d rather be, as will highly skilled foreign operators, both of whom are essential to building practical skills in our workforce that high technology relies upon. The controversial backlash against tertiary education within startup culture is predicated on a truth that technological leadership is primarily coming from agile innovators and not the hallowed halls of prestigious educational institutions.
Financial services are regulated around the world with a few important goals. We cannot expect to take existing regulation of financial services, and merely copy and paste for Bitcoin. The ideal path forward is to keep these goals in mind when learning about the differences and similarities of Bitcoin and traditional financial services.
One regulatory goal, consumer protection, is crucial whenever a business takes custodial control of a consumer’s money. Bitcoin enables this, and the infamous failure of MTGox shows only that when a company has custodial control of its customers’ money (both fiat currency and bitcoin), the custodian’s incompetence, negligence or criminal intent can result in massive losses of customer funds. In fact, without functional consumer protection, this outcome is seemingly inevitable, just as we see in the case of even more expensive high profile bank failures .
The regulations for consumer protection ought not be a blanket rule smothering businesses that do not have custodial control of customer funds.
Bitcoin offers new options not commonly found in legacy banking. What follows is an example of one Bitcoin feature, how it offers a superior service and how this service should be considered when designing regulation.
Bitcoin transactions are authorised through digital signatures. Rather than signing with a pen, under the hood, digital signatures are made with secret codes called keys. A cryptographic key is created randomly and is numerically unique. This is the basis of all modern cryptography and digital signatures used for authentication in everything from bus tickets to nuclear missile launch silos.
Bitcoin keys can be stored on your mobile phone or laptop, in dedicated secure devices, even printed on paper. The terminology is confusing, but a private key functions just like car keys. You need the car key to drive your car. In the case of Bitcoin, this is a mathematically enforced rule with no chance of “hotwiring” like in the movies. You must possess the private key in order to sign a transaction. Bitcoin’s multiple signature scenario, like a joint bank account, requires more than one signature to execute transactions.
Multisignature features added to Bitcoin in the past few years enable a financial services company to provide risk assessment services for electronic payments in much the same way as credit card companies actively monitor their customers’ transactions today. Those transactions that fail to match the customer’s legitimate pattern trigger an alarm. However, credit card companies also execute the transaction on their payment network and have full access to customer funds and identity, so in this case the credit card provider is playing multiple roles: payment network, risk assessor, identity manager, and credit facility. The credit card company competes against other companies who offer the same bundled product. It’s a job lot.
Credit card companies can offer their demonstrated expertise in risk assessment to Bitcoin users in a signatory role for transactions initiated by the customer. In this scenario the customer would always maintain control of the funds through their control of two out of a possible three keys while the risk assessor would hold one. In this example of multisignature transactions, two out of three signatures are necessary and sufficient to complete a transaction.
In this scenario the customer would hold one key in their “wallet”10 and the other, say, in a safe or bank deposit box. The customer alone has full control of their funds. They play this role and assume responsibility for theft or loss. The customer would sign transactions with their main key only and the risk assessment service would respond by signing with their key unless there seemed to be a problem. Just as credit card companies call customers to check suspicious transactions, so could they do this with Bitcoin.
It’s worth noting that many variations on this theme are possible and the development of these would be encouraged in an environment of open competition among innovators as opposed to one full of onerous regulatory barriers to entry and a few slowmoving, monolithic oligarchs. The risk assessment service could also allow the customer to set daily spending limits. The number of keys required to complete a transaction does not have to just be twoofthree; it could be sevenoften or fifteenoftwenty etc. with multiple parties involved such as in the joint bank account of a couple, parents monitoring kids’ pocket money or corporate treasury management.
The primary difference between this kind of multisignature transaction and credit card companies’ current operation is that no kind of operational failure (security breaches, malfeasance etc.) within the credit card company can ever result in loss or theft of the customer’s Bitcoin funds. The company has no custodial control of those funds. As long as Bitcoin works at all, it’s just not possible. Consequently, that impossibility no longer needs to be insured against, remediated, mitigated or regulated. This is the precise origin of the cost and efficiency benefits. The extent of the risk assessor’s power is to either sign a transaction or to not sign it. Such a service would be offered for a small fee to the customer who gains protection from the theft and abuse of their main key.
The third key, kept in the customer’s safe, is reserved for when the customer wishes to recover from either loss of the first key (although keys should be backed up) or more importantly, in the event of any failure of the service provider’s operations or business. In this example, consumer protection is clearly superior even while being cheaper.
So on the matter of consumer protection, while it is crucial to regulate those businesses who maintain custodial control of customer funds in exactly the same way as traditional financial services companies currently are, that regulation cannot equally apply where there is no custodial control. Clearly a riskassessing signatory should not be subjected to expensive compliance with regulations to prevent them from doing that which is made mathematically impossible by Bitcoin.
There are many important consequences for maintaining this distinction in any financial services regulation that covers service providers involved in Bitcoin multisignature transactions:
Bitcoin is programmable money. While multi-signature transactions have received a detailed treatment in this submission, this is only one of the many capabilities Bitcoin enables. Also, the multi-signature features of Bitcoin provide many other examples which demonstrate dramatic improvements in efficiency and security. Some of the consequences of those include:
The list goes on.
In order to appreciate the full range of possibility, research and development must continue, and importantly, small businesses must be allowed to innovate so that products can be tested in the market.
Knee-jerk reactions to regulation fuelled by headlines and hysteria will obviously endanger innovation in Australia and push FinTech companies off-shore. We have seen this happen since the ATO preliminary ruling on the applicability of GST to Bitcoin as a taxable supply failed to recognise Bitcoin as money under the GST Act.
Globalisation is no more prominent than in internet-based businesses. Their operations can very easily relocate, as can their profits.
Ultimately, if Bitcoin is what we think it is, we will need legislation that is not confined by the misguided question of whether Bitcoin is a commodity or a currency. This is like asking if the internet is a telephone or a postal service. Bitcoin has properties of currency and commodity simultaneously and yet it’s a square peg that fits in neither of those two round holes.
Further, Bitcoin the currency is only one of many examples of this particular kind of “digital bearer instrument”. The full menagerie of equity classes from the exotic to the mundane can now be created in pure software thanks to the groundbreaking innovation of blockchains and distributed consensus networks. Thousands of companies and probably tens of thousands of software projects are already seeking to build these.
Counterparty is one such project that builds on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain and enables anybody (not just programmers) to create “equity tokens” with a few clicks of the mouse and a small fee in bitcoin. The economic parameters (issuance schedule, total monetary supply, inflation curve etc) as well as the ultimate meaning and value of the token are established by its creator. All such tokens can be traded freely without the involvement of the original creator. Typical examples are crowdfunding tokens issued by musicians, loyalty points or novel cryptocurrencies such as GenerCoin where each token is assetbacked by 10,000 BTUs of renewable energy, redeemable at any time from its issuers.
The important lesson here is not whether all these financial novelties will hold a value. It’s probable that many of these projects will fail. What’s important to recognise is that we are at the beginning of a FinTech Renaissance and we should choose wisely how we respond to a rare opportunity.
As software technology is a high growth area with an open-ended future, Australia has an opportunity to go beyond the heavy primary industry of the past, being subject to fluctuating commodity prices, selling dirt. Australia’s failure to nurture the tech sector has already seen many high growth Australian startups seek venture capital in the USA where valuations reflect a more sophisticated and informed investor community. The fact that these investors are typically co-located at the epicentre of software technology, Silicon Valley, is clearly a reflection of the cooperation and communication between R&D, business and finance. Why do so many Aussie innovators have to go to Silicon Valley to realise their potential? Why do they list on the NASDAQ instead of the ASX? What needs to change?
Upon his capture in 1934, the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton was asked by FBI agents, “Why do you rob banks, Willie?” Sutton, who believed the question to be rhetorical, replied, dryly, “Because that’s where the money is.” – The Selected Works of William Bradford
Information security is universally poor in 2014. No organisations demonstrate an ability to secure valuable data, such as their own customers identities and credit card numbers or their state secrets. Those that have not been hacked are expected by most information security professionals to be hacked before long. While it is built using time-tested cryptographic technology, the same stuff that secures military and banking systems around the world, the Bitcoin network is a more secure system.
How can this be?
Individual Bitcoin holders such as myself are not harder to hack than a large merchant’s database. We are likely much easier to target for theft. The major difference is that a large merchant database of sixty million credit card numbers, such as US retailer, Target, lost in a recent high profile breach, Target was a target sixty million times sweeter to any attacker than a single individual, yet the security systems at Target are not sixty million times stronger. Even if they are six times stronger, that’s still a million more reasons for an attacker to target them rather than me.
This situation is commonly referred to as the Piñata Effect because all the goodies are collected into one tempting target, like the cardboard donkey full of goodies at kids parties.
This model of information security is broken by design. It cannot be improved by merely adding more layers of colourful paper to the donkey. Bitcoin’s distributed network has a fundamentally different design.
Bitcoin’s security model is new; we have never had a system that is both secure and decentralised. These two attributes were always assumed to be at odds until a famous long-standing problem in computer science, The Byzantine Generals Problem, was solved in Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. This problem defined the task of ensuring accurate communication through and among untrusted parties about the true state of - in this case - a transaction ledger. Centralised cryptocurrencies have been around for decades and never reached maturity since the central party was too easy to shut down or too hard to trust. Bitcoin does away with a trusted central coordinator entirely.
Surprisingly, the fact that Bitcoin’s creator is not identified is not considered any kind of danger to Bitcoin’s security because Satoshi is not a trusted party in Bitcoin. Nobody is. The software that he or she created is open source, meaning there are no trade secrets and the nuts and bolts are open to public scrutiny. Since it was handed over to others in 2010, most of the code has been rewritten in a continual process of upgrading and improving it in public through open collaboration.
Satoshi has no control of Bitcoin, no more than any other network participant.
Financial services’ security models have traditionally relied upon limiting access and carefully vetting any parties before they may connect. Bitcoin is the opposite. It has been designed with the full expectation that there is zero trust between the participants and that they will tend to act in their own self interest. This turns out to be a reliable assumption and removing the need to trust participants enables opening the network to everyone.
Bitcoin’s security is based on the opposite approach compared to traditional information security which is a dysfunctional mess. Rather than protecting the system from attack by limiting access, Bitcoin has been consciously battle-hardened, exposed to continuous attack since its creation. Like an organism evolved in a hostile environment, the only system able to survive is one maximally tested against the widest possible range of threats. This makes Bitcoin antifragile – the more it is attacked, the stronger becomes.
So how do we know Bitcoin is secure? Because there are several billion dollars of value at stake which the network has protected for years without coddling, without controlling access and without relying on the secrecy of knowledge about its inner workings. While individuals’ computers and various entrusted companies’ systems have been hacked (as in the world of credit cards), Hackers are continuously trying to crack the Bitcoin network security and they have not made any progress.
Yes. Bitcoin is money. It was designed to be money and is well-suited as money. The only problems with Bitcoin as a money are due to its immaturity in the market – ease of user interfaces and the temporary consequences of supply and demand.
Much of the regulatory discussion in Australia has been focused on the question of whether Bitcoin qualifies as money. Different legislation has been interpreted reaching conflicting conclusions. Many of the arguments in favour and against compare the defining features of Bitcoin using existing examples of designated money such as currency issued by a sovereign nation when interpreting the GST Act and various other legislation. One strategy commonly used is to attempt to determine whether Bitcoin is used primarily in the way that currency is defined and typically intended to be used. While that seems reasonable, there is a problem with this approach.
The question of whether Bitcoin is money has therefore become predicated on “how people are using it”. If people use it to buy things, that’s evidence it is money. If people don’t, but instead they buy and hold it for an investment, this is supposed to be a vote against it being money. Much criticism from economists gets stuck on this question.
So why is this a problem?
There is very little disagreement, even among Bitcoin’s greatest detractors that it is a fantastically capable and disruptive technology, a giant leap forward which will make a great impact on the world. There is also a common understanding that Bitcoin has been deliberately designed to be money by careful study of the desirable properties of a money.
If Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that is expected to deliver massive value as a money, then we should not be surprised that attracts heavy speculative investment in advance of realising this goal. Bitcoin doesn’t pay dividends so the entire investment thesis (frequently misunderstood as a Ponzi scheme) is that there is a great future value when the technology realises its goal as a money, but the catch-22 is that it cannot become an acceptable money until it is first blessed by regulators as such.
Of course it’s not really a catch-22 because a growing number of people are proceeding to use it as money without such a blessing, especially online, especially in distressed economies like Argentina’s and especially in more sympathetic jurisdictions. But there is currently enough speculative investment in the world economy that is desperately seeking returns and this both causes and results in that infamously volatile exponential early stage growth curve that high-tech high-risk investors crave.
In other words, the fact that Bitcoin is a dramatic leap forward in potential as a digital currency makes it seem to be such a good investment that it allegedly disqualifies itself from realising that fundamental purpose - the very purpose that drives the future value.
In my opinion, this means that the disruptive technology aspect should be weighed when determining the true definition of Bitcoin because its very suitability as a better kind of money is expected to force an initial surge in speculation. Foreign exchange markets perform price discovery on currency pairs based ultimately on the relative utility of each currency. In the case where apparent utility is a dramatic rising trend, so would speculators push the price up (at least over timeframes long enough to smooth out high-frequency and speculative trading based on technical analysis alone). This doesn’t detract from the evidence that the currency is money, on the contrary, it’s part of the signal of its suitability as exactly that.
One more practical matter is relevant to the question of Bitcoin as money. According to the legislation, if it is accepted as money by a sovereign nation, this recursively implies that Australia ought to treat it as such. While this is a sensible reaction to the introduction of a fiat currency, its circular logic is ill-suited for a modern country that is financially and technology literate like Australia. Doubly so when tackling the introduction of a new system with so many fundamental improvements over existing money that it stretches the boundaries of the definition. Allowing our interpretation of the intent of the legislation to become stuck on this is a toxic anachronism.
I’m no economist or finance expert. My passion is disruptive technologies that have a democratic potential, like the personal computer, like the internet, like Bitcoin. Let’s consider the world where Australia’s Osborne computer company didn’t go bankrupt in 1985, where instead it thrived on the world stage, where the export success of the Microbee wasn’t cut short by the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh, and where we didn’t let our country’s internet infrastructure lag so far behind our needs that the only way forward was an out-scaled and politicised NBN catch-up project. Let’s consider that world and its economic and financial impact on 21st Century Australia.
Let’s not repeat these mistakes with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is going to change the world, it’s going to change Australia. It’s going to change us all. The question is whether we can anticipate that change and embrace it, whether we can lead that change, whether we will drive it or whether we will again be a passenger, trailing behind.
My own plan is to drive that change through Bitcoin and blockchain technology and I would love to do it from Australia.
Sincerely,
Chris Mountford
Apparently Bitcoin will “bite the dust” due to a critical flaw and Professor of Finance and Economics, Kevin Dowd has taken it upon himself to explain it to us all from behind a conspicuously oversized lectern:
Thankfully, due to a critical flaw in Professor Dowd’s understanding of bitcoin, his conclusion is unsupported by his argument.
The premise is that mining must centralise absolutely into what economists call a “perfect monopoly”. Some economists say there is no such thing:
There’s no such thing as a natural monopoly. It’s a fabricated economic fiction. The Myth of Natural Monopoly
— Justus Ranvier @JustusRanvier
But let’s not argue about economics, there’s a much less subjective problem with his bitcoin dust biting thesis.
Mining pools do not really hold the control. They do centralise the issuance, and this is a well publicised and significant challenge for bitcoin, but mining pools have no intrinsic competitive advantages. The value of the pool is held almost entirely in the fact that so many other miners are in that pool. Pool switching is trivial and can be fully automated.
If the host of a great party somehow wrecks the vibe by playing unfashionable music or having their parents unexpectedly return home, partygoers may all decide to take the party elsewhere. The partygoers have the power.
Professor Dowd’s argument is that the pool can, will and what’s more inevitably must threaten the entire profit pipeline (willingly or under coercion) and the miners are yet to realise this. Further, the miners are supposedly powerless to act in response to this certain future he so clearly predicts. Surely if there is any warning to miners, the expected risk of loss should cause agitation by the least risk averse to advocate for significant portions to join the second biggest mining pool. Like the partygoers, the miners have the power, they are the life of the party.
That’s not just a good theory, this is in fact what has happened.
The fact is, pool owner abuse (such as 51% attacks) can be instantly responded to as miners can so easily switch pools. This is all also assuming that there are no other solutions to mining centralisation developed between now and the predicted cataclysm.
Mining centralisation is an extensively debated topic and there are many technical solutions proposed. As Professor Dowd emphasises gleefully to the crowd, the timeframes of past developments in bitcoin are short, so why should he not expect the rapid innovation to continue? Hmmm… maybe he’s angling for a job as a core developer!
There are many other crucial errors but I think this is enough already. I do give the Professor points for making a bold prediction though – and so politely – if only he gave us some dates we would have a prediction we can work with. Since it seems Professor Dowd has consulted bitcoin enthusiasts, one wishes he had corrected these fundamental errors before delivering his prediction.
I can’t comment on the accuracy of the Ghostbusters reference, on this matter I will defer to the Professor.
One of the signals that Bitcoin growth is strong is that I’m increasingly invited to speak on Bitcoin at events and the Q&A panel is proving to be a popular event format. Caroline McLaren organised this event, Bitcoin: The Future of Money which was held at funky high-tech lounge The Porter in Sydney Australia in July 2014.
Panelists include myself, Chris Mountford, as well as Pantellis Roussakis and Chris Guzowski, CEO of ABA Technologies, an Australian “Bitcoin ATM” company. I enjoy both the panel format and making prepared presentations.
My upcoming speaking events include a lecture to a Masters programme on Innovation at the University of Technology, Sydney in October and at Bitcoin South in New Zealand in November.
If you would like me to speak at your event, please email me: chris@blockzombie.com
Any questions? Ask them in a comment here or on Twitter @blockzombie and I will do my best to answer.
If you are still struggling to understand Bitcoin, put aside the time to watch this lesson from the master.
There seems to be universal agreement that Andreas M. Antonopoulos is the most capable spokesperson and most engaging advocate for Bitcoin and blockchain technology in the world, on both the broad societal and economic matters that concern everyone, and in the narrow technical specialities of the underlying cryptography and computer science.
However, even though his reputation has been publicly proven through dozens if not hundreds of stunning speeches, this performance has gobsmacked even the dyed-in-the-wool fans. Andreas delivers a submission to the Canadian Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce which is both razor sharp and crystal clear, even beyond the impassioned and inspiring speeches upon which his lofty reputation has been built.
The session includes a fairly deep and engaging Q&A component as the senators ask detailed questions that will appear to a Bitcoin-savvy audience to be both familiar and insightful and there are plenty of expertly rendered explanations for the notoriously tricky queries we Bitcoiners regularly hear.
Andreas you’re an inspiration and I look forward to buying you a beer at the next opportunity!
In a detailed paper, Hass McCook has published his research into the relative sustainability of Bitcoin, printed money, credit cards denominated in fiat currency and industrial gold mining. While it’s understood that running Bitcoin mining hardware consumes significant electricity for the hobbyist, just how this stacks up when compared to the true costs of these other money systems may surprise you.
In this video I briefly chat to Hass at one of the weekly Bitcoin Meetups held at Spooning Goats, Sydney’s coolest place to buy craft beer and meat pies with Bitcoin. We then catch him at CryptoCon 2014 delivering a summary of his research results to enthusiastic attendees.
For those who want to read further into the details, read his original research paper or you might like Hass’ article series on Coindesk on the Economic and Environmental Costs of Bitcoin Mining.
Sydney startup incubator and Co-working space Tank Stream Labs kindly hosted a recent panel discussion on Bitcoin and the Rise of Cryptocurrency.
The spark talking point is the following broad question.
How will the rise of crypto-currencies, such as bitcoin, unify the global financial system?
Just a quick note to remind you all that The Rise of Cryptocurrencies, an event in the Future of Money series is on TONIGHT 21st of August 2014.
Tickets are free but there are not many more available so if you would like to come to learn and discuss Bitcoin and the prospects for this and related financial technology, this is your chance!
Bitcoin Professionals meetup is a monthly session organised by Reuben Bramanathan and Jason Williams in the Sydney offices of law firm McCullough Robertson.
Each month there are presenters and this month I delivered a Bitcoin 101 talk to help everyone who is new to the space get a broad picture of how this groundbreaking technology can be integrated with our views and expectations of our world.
Please take a moment to share your thoughts in a comment and to redistribute to your friends:
The video of my talk may be shared under the Creative Commons with Attribution License.
Following my talk at the Bitcoin Professionals Meetup this week, I was invited in to the studios at Bondi Beach Radio to go into a little more detail and chat about some of the interesting side topics to the current state of Bitcoin.
Theqse was kind enough to publish a recording of this interview for anyone who missed it.
http://youtu.be/EIt3zhEQnqs
You can catch Theqse broadcasting live from Bondi Beach every week, pumping out ambient tunes and interesting interviews on sustainability and related topics, streaming on the internet to the world: http://bondibeachradio.com.au/