Thanks to the couple of sources who sent these in:

• A Challenge to the Bitcoin Community by George Selgin (he wants to see if someone can engineer bitcoin ahead of time to be “flexible” — which is arbitrary — to be inflated or deflated when necessary to purportedly “better” manage the economy; or in other words wealth =/= money)
• Bitcoin: Overview An introduction to the mechanics of bitcoins and an overview of how transactions take place from Khan Academy
• My Official Withdrawal from the BitcoinATM Project by Jeff Berwick (no lawsuit?)
• Bitcoin’s hyperdeflationary recession? by John Paul Koning
• Infamous marketplace Silk Road brought down by DDoS attack from Wired
• IRS Takes A Bite Out Of Bitcoin from Forbes (wonder how many filed 1099’s last month…)
• Massive Bitcoin Business Partnership Devolves Into $75 Million Lawsuit from Gawker
• Collected Quotations Of The Dread Pirate Roberts, Founder Of Underground Drug Site Silk Road And Radical Libertarian from Forbes (hardcore Rothbardian ancap, who will play him in the movie?)
• Drugs, porn, and counterfeits: the market for illegal goods is booming online from The Verge (for the record, i am not endorsing any specific cryptocurrency, darknet or trafficking illicit wares)
• How porn links and Ben Bernanke snuck into Bitcoin’s code from CNN (wonder when they’ll track down the perps or if it was AGITPROP)
• Let’s Cut Through the Bitcoin Hype: A Hacker-Entrepreneur’s Take from Wired

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Some odds and ends of BTC today:

• Chris Dixon Plans On Investing In More Bitcoin Startups, Says More Entrepreneurs Are Getting Involved from TechCrunch (good luck… how many will be able to get fully funded before FinCEN hammer comes down?)
• IAm Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile, AMA from Reddit (briefly mentions bitcoin)
• Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin by Miers et. al. (the newly published academic paper behind the concept)
• Bitcoin believers hoping their faith will pay off from Boston Globe (how many are betting the farm?)
• Living On Bitcoin For A Week: The Journey Begins by Kashmir Hill (reminds me of DotComGuy from back in 2000 as well as the more recent dude, Benjamin Robbins, who only used the Samsung Note this past year and didn’t touch a laptop or tablet during that time)
• BitCoin Is Gold 2.0: Venture Capitalist from CNBC
• One Bitcoin by the numbers: Is there still profit to be made? from ExtremeTech (the CPU is irrelevant, you could use a single core chip from 10 years ago without impacting performance)
• E-Sports League Stuffed Bitcoin Mining Code Inside Client Software from Slashdot (doubt this is the first or last time this will occur)
• Digital cash replacement from Royal Canadian Mint in the works from Toronto Star (one of the criticisms of cryptocurrencies is that they lack any “inherent” value — what then are these digitized money substitutes?  if you do not think they are valuable, feel free to send them to me…  See also: The value of cryptocurrencies)

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Thanks to Vijay, Koen, Jeff and others for the links.

• PayPal Sees $20 Billion in Mobile Transactions: Video from Bloomberg (discusses BTC at 2:50 into video)
• Ron Paul on Gold: No One Knows Value; I’m Buying from Bloomberg (discusses BTC at 6:12 in)
• Bitcoin by George Selgin (his opinion about BTC, professor and author of Good Money)
• Speaking On Liberty: Jeffrey Tucker – The Rise of Digital Currency from Liberty Minded
• Just lost 160 BTC from address managed with blockchain.info MyWallet from reddit (happened to a friend as well)
• Crypto St – Advanced Trading Platform (beta)
• AMD destroys Nvidia at Bitcoin mining, can the gap ever be bridged? from ExtremeTech (but there is now a CUDAminer for LTC)
• Fincen’s New Regulations Are Choking Bitcoin Entrepreneurs from American Banker (foreboding, not cranks either. see follow-up comments at btc talk too)
• Bitcoin takes a big step into the mainstream with support from Expensify from CITE World (3rd party converter)
• Obama’s Fmr. Chief Economic Advisor On Bitcoin’s Usefulness: “Hahahaha. ROTFL” from TechCrunch
• Inside the Race to Build the World’s Fastest Bitcoin Miner from Wired (how powerful?  see user 67117 on BTC Guild — it is ASICMiner)
• Bitcoin: world’s fastest growing currency migrates off the internet from The Guardian (in berlin)
• Virtual currencies threaten to go viral from Financial Times (very stilted, loaded title)
• Bitcoin’s real-world problem: Virtual currency facing bank backlash in Canada from The Windsor Star (probably combination of FinCEN/FATCA)
• I Survived the Bitcoin Bubble from Slate (same guy who bought $1k a few weeks ago)
• TransferWise closes down: Notice to Bitcoin users (because of FinCEN report and potential prosecution, the hammer will come down soon on other money exchangers in North America)
• Study: 45 percent of Bitcoin exchanges end up closing from ArsTechnica (some due to facilitating Silk Road exchanges, get out before prosecution hammer)
• Could Bitcoin Be the Money of the Future? by Detlev Schlichter (author of Paper Money Collapse)

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Thanks to Vijay, Ben, Jeff and others:

• What did Satoshi say on economics and money? from reddit (after reading a few hundred posts it is pretty clear that Satoshi probably lived abroad many years and may in fact be a Japanese-American [or Canadian].  from a professional perspective, after having worked in and out of the EFL industry for several years it is pretty easy to tell if a writer is a native speaker or not.  also, i recently asked a Japanese-American friend to look over the posts, that was his opinion as well)
• A simple solution to credit card fraud, part 4: A primer on elliptic curves from Rondam Ramblings (couple months old, but good info about crypto)
• BTCs from Foseti (slightly optimistic take on whether cryptocurrency’s will end up complying with future regulations)
• Aaron Lasher on Bitcoin Security, Interviewed by Jeffrey Tucker
• The Pirate Bay Now Accepts Bitcoin Donations from TorrentFreak
• FR33 Aid to use bitcoin for donations from The Picket Line
• A poll was conducted of global profs by Chicago Booth School of Business — “A bitcoin’s value derives solely from the belief that others will want to use it for trade, which implies that its purchasing power is likely to fluctuate over time to a degree that will limit its usefulness.” (see results here)
• Largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, ‘throttles’ trading to tame price swings from ComputerWorld

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Thanks to Vijay, Jeff, Bryan and Aaron for a few of these links:

• WikiLeaks publishes five-hour conversation between Eric Schmidt and Julian Assange from The Verge (Assange is very articulate in terms of the ramifications of Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies)
• Which Makes More Money: Mining Bitcoins or Writing About Mining Bitcoins? from The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the Twenty-First Century
• Why Bitcoin is Here to Stay: Q&A with Jerry Brito from Reason
• Bitcoin bubble re-inflates from CNNMoney
• Eight Bitcoin inventions that will change the world from Real Virtual Currency
• Is Bitcoin Mining a Real-World Environmental Problem? from Slashdot (compared with fiat currencies that require cutting down forests, smelting metals and creating inks… doubtful)
• Bitcoins in Argentina from Bitcoinfilm (documentary about BTC exchange with Argentinian pesos)
• Bitcoin Dreams Endure to Savers Crushed by CPI: Argentina Credit from Bloomberg
• The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius from Bitslog (see more discussion here, analysis suggests someone has 1 million BTC)
• Bitcoin Plunge from The Colbert Report
• Bitcoin Explained by Niko Carvalho

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Many thanks to Keegan, SK and Vijay for some of the links.

• Six Reasons Why Chinese People Will Drive the Next Bull Market in Bitcoin from Quartz (total BS, in China very few of the exchanges are available without a VPN and 99% of the population doesn’t have a VPN).
• How I would manipulate the Bitcoin exchange market – and how a “Discrete Double Auction” could stop me from 24/7 Bitcoin Launchpad (put your tinfoil hat on, i think it is botnet owners who DDOS and then after the exchange crashes put in buy/sell orders first)
• Bitcoin From an Austro-Libertarian Perspective, Part I by Robert Murphy and Silas Barta (I went to college with Silas and am also friends with Robert; look forward to rest of series)
• Exchange rates — Inside the Bitcoin economy from The Economist
• Ask HN: Why would a government have created bitcoin? by Paul Graham (doubtful, i think “Satoshi” whoever he is, or whomever they are, really enjoyed Cryptonomicon and were inspired by the real history of how PGP was released…)
• OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase! from Coinbase
• Coinsetter to bring leverage and shorting to bitcoin with $500,000 funding round from Coinsetter (clever way to hedge/short, rumored to go live in 1-2 months)
• This Pizza Cost $750,000 from Motherboard (wonder if there will be an echo boom in an alt currency like terracoins.  doubt “ripple” can quantify (e.g. social capital) something that the chinese have been doing in their heads for millenia (guanxi))
• Ounce.me (how much does an ounce of pizza cost in different digital currencies)
• Marc Hochstein on bitcoin from Surprisingly Free (the GMU group/Mercatus podcast)
• Python Code to Connect to Mt. Gox API by Raffael Danielli (worked with Raffael at American Chamber last year, great guy, very clever)

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Got an email last night from an expat in China asking if there were any domestic BTC exchanges.

My response was that the largest one is BTCChina — but if you’re on the mainland you cannot access the site unless you have a VPN.

There are also a few Chinese-language BTC community sites, like Bitecoin and Bitcoin talk forum, but again you also need a VPN to access them.

A few news stories that I bumped into during the day:

• Porsche Sells For 300 Bitcoins In Latest Sign The Virtual Currency Is Going Kablooey from HuffingtonPost
• Bitcoin Home! from Forsalebyowner.ca — interesting, but then you’d be in Canada
• The Man Who Gave His Life To Bitcoin from BuzzFeed

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