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4 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged bitcoin
</title>
5 <description>Entries tagged bitcoin
</description>
6 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
</link>
10 <title>Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money
</title>
11 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
</link>
12 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
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13 <pubDate>Fri,
10 Dec
2010 08:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
15 <p
>With this weeks lawless
16 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
2010/
12/
06/wikileaks/index.html
">governmental
17 attacks
</a
> on Wikileak and
18 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/
2010/
12/
06/war_on_speech
">free
19 speech
</a
>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
20 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
22 <a href=
"http://webmink.com/
2010/
12/
06/now-accepting-bitcoin/
">Simon
23 Phipps on bitcoin
</a
> reminded me about a project that a friend of
24 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon
's example, and get
25 involved with
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">BitCoin
</a
>. I got
26 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
27 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
28 for helping me remember BitCoin.
</p
>
30 <p
>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
31 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
32 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
33 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
34 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
35 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets
2.9
36 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
37 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
38 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
578157">will get the package into
39 Debian
</a
> soon.
</p
>
41 <p
>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
42 There are
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/trade
">companies accepting
43 bitcoins
</a
> when selling services and goods, and there are even
44 currency
"stock
" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
45 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
46 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
48 <a href=
"https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
">some for free
</a
> (
0.05
49 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
50 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/
">BitcoinWatch
</a
> to keep an eye
51 on the current exchange rates.
</p
>
53 <p
>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
54 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
55 donations to the address
56 <b
>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</b
>. Thank you!
</p
>
61 <title>Some thoughts on BitCoins
</title>
62 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html
</link>
63 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html
</guid>
64 <pubDate>Sat,
11 Dec
2010 15:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
66 <p
>As I continue to explore
67 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">BitCoin
</a
>, I
've starting to wonder
68 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
69 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.
</p
>
71 <p
>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
72 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
73 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
74 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
75 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
76 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
77 all transactions. There I can see that my address
78 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
>
79 have received
16.06 Bitcoin, the
80 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3</a
>
81 address of Simon Phipps have received
181.97 BitCoin and the address
82 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
</A
>
83 of EFF have received
2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
84 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
85 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
86 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
87 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I
'm told
88 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
89 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
90 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.
</p
>
92 <p
>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
93 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
94 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
95 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
96 If the Skolelinux foundation
97 (
<a href=
"http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">SLX
98 Debian Labs
</a
>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
99 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
100 Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
101 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
102 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
103 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
104 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.
</p
>
106 <p
>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
107 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
108 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
109 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
110 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
111 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
112 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
113 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
114 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
115 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
116 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I
'm sure they
117 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
118 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
119 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
120 currencies.
</p
>
122 <p
>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
123 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
124 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
125 to see which one get the next lump of cash. The
"winner
" get
50
126 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
127 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
128 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
129 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the
50
131 <a href=
"http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/
">BitCoin Pool
</a
>
132 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
133 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
134 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
projects / homepage.git / blob