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6 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Entries Tagged bitcoin
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14 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen
</a>
21 <h3>Entries tagged "bitcoin".
</h3>
25 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html">The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin
</a>
31 <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
32 <a href=
"http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
33 a report (PDF)
</a> about virtual currencies and
34 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin
</a>. It is interesting to
35 see how a member of the bitcoin community
36 <a href=
"http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
37 the report
</a>. As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
38 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
39 competition. My thoughts go to the
40 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment
</a> with
41 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
42 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in
1933. A successful
43 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
44 powerful forces to work against it.
</p>
46 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
47 that the community already seem to have
48 <a href=
"http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
49 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme
</a>. Not very surprising, given
50 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other. I guess
51 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
52 wealth is available.
</p>
58 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>.
63 <div class=
"padding"></div>
67 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins
</a>
73 <p>As I continue to explore
74 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>, I've starting to wonder
75 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
76 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.
</p>
78 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
79 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
80 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
81 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
82 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
83 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
84 all transactions. There I can see that my address
85 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a>
86 have received
16.06 Bitcoin, the
87 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3</a>
88 address of Simon Phipps have received
181.97 BitCoin and the address
89 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
</A>
90 of EFF have received
2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
91 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
92 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
93 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
94 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
95 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
96 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
97 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.
</p>
99 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
100 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
101 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
102 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
103 If the Skolelinux foundation
104 (
<a href=
"http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
105 Debian Labs
</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
106 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
107 Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
108 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
109 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
110 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
111 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.
</p>
113 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
114 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
115 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
116 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
117 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
118 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
119 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
120 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
121 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
122 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
123 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
124 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
125 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
126 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
129 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
130 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
131 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
132 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get
50
133 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
134 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
135 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
136 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the
50
138 <a href=
"http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool
</a>
139 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
140 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
141 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
144 <p>Update
2010-
12-
15: Found an
<a
145 href=
"http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
146 criticism
</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
147 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
148 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.
</p>
154 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>.
159 <div class=
"padding"></div>
163 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money
</a>
169 <p>With this weeks lawless
170 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
171 attacks
</a> on Wikileak and
172 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
173 speech
</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
174 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
176 <a href=
"http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
177 Phipps on bitcoin
</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
178 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
179 involved with
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>. I got
180 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
181 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
182 for helping me remember BitCoin.
</p>
184 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
185 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
186 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
187 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
188 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
189 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets
2.9
190 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
191 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
192 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
195 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
196 There are
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
197 bitcoins
</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
198 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
199 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
200 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
202 <a href=
"https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free
</a> (
0.05
203 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
204 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch
</a> to keep an eye
205 on the current exchange rates.
</p>
207 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
208 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
209 donations to the address
210 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</b>. Thank you!
</p>
216 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>.
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