Posts tagged cryptocurrency
Every six hours, at his home in the high desert outside Kingman, Arizona, midway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, Brian Goss downloads the latest blocks from the bitcoin blockchain via satellite. He receives the transmission through a dish he installed this January; it arrives with messages, too—tweets, blogs, odes to Satoshi—sent by bitcoiners around the world. Goss rebroadcasts them from a radio device perched on his roof, in case the neighbors care to tune in. There’s nothing wrong with Goss’ terrestrial internet connection, he assures me—Kingman is not that remote. But if bitcoin is truly digital gold, as he believes, contingencies are important. If the internet goes down, how else will you access your cache?
via https://www.wired.com/story/cypherpunks-bitcoin-ham-radio/
Curated list of cryptocurrencies forgotten by this world.
via http://deadcoins.com/
“Any cryptocurrency—even Bitcoin—can be a shitcoin, if you build sufficiently asinine startups on top of it 💩”
–isis agora lovecruft
In a world which is rapidly being decentralized — there also needs to be a decentralized way to ensure adequate payment for those who provide us with the infrastructure. We have found a way to get there and now we will present an evolutionary path towards it. For the last month we have been examining existing technology and its potential, to perform POC (Proof Of Concept) experiments — with the goal of understanding how to build a decentralized VPN service and how to provide monetization to people running this network — VPN node operators.
via https://medium.com/mysterium-network/building-decentralized-value-exchange-into-decentralized-vpn–382e6a2cc7
Nearly all of the most valuable companies throughout history were valuable through their strong network effects. If there is one motif in American economic history it is network effects. Every railroad made the railroad network more valuable, every telephone made the telephone network more valuable, and every Internet user made the Internet network more valuable. But no hedge fund has ever harnessed network effects. Negative network effects are too pervasive in finance, and they are the reason that there is no one hedge fund monopoly managing all the money in the world. For perspective, Bridgewater, the biggest hedge fund in the world, manages less than 1% of the total actively managed money. Facebook, on the other hand, with its powerful network effects, has a 70% market share in social networking. The most valuable hedge fund in the 21st century will be the first hedge fund to bring network effects to capital allocation.
via https://medium.com/numerai/a-new-cryptocurrency-for-coordinating-artificial-intelligence-on-numerai–9251a131419a
In this post I sketch a proposal for a digital currency that works unlike other *coins that have recently become available. I’m calling it Strangecoin, both to highlight its uniqueness as a currency and as a reference to the strange attractor, a special kind of nonlinear system.
http://digitalinterface.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/strangecoin-proposal-for-nonlinear.html
The cryptocurrency craze spun into a new realm of ridiculous with Kanyecoin, Dogecoin, Ron Paul Coin and the bounty of other clone-coins that sprung up to ride the Bitcoin wave. But the latest altcoin to enter the market, Auroracoin, wants to take the futurist trend back to its cryptoanarchist roots. The altcoin was designed specifically for Iceland, and the creator plans to give every citizen of the Nordic country a digital handful of Auroracoins to kickstart their use. Auroracoin is the brainchild of cryptocurrency enthusiast Baldur Friggjar Odinsson, and he’ll be the one distributing pre-mined coins to the entire population of Iceland at midnight on March 25 in a countrywide “airdrop.” Each Icelandic citizen—all 330,000 of them—will receive 31.8 AUC through a digital transaction. Citizens all have a national ID number available through a public database, which will be used to verify their identity.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-one-month-everyone-in-iceland-will-own-cryptocurrency
Primecoin is the first scientific computing cryptocurrency, a project derived from Bitcoin but with novel non-hashcash proof-of-work that mines prime numbers.
https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/wiki
The key idea in Zerocoin is that each coin commits to (read: encrypts) a random serial number. These coins are easy to create – all you need to do is pick the serial number and run a fast commitment algorithm to wrap this up in a coin. The commitment works like encryption, in that the resulting coin completely hides the serial number . At the same time this coin ‘binds’ you to the number you’ve chosen. The serial number is secret, and it stays with you.
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-making-bitcoin-anonymous.html