Why Bitcoin Over Tor May Not Be a Good Idea
The growing use of bitcoin as a means of payment has come together with the need for greater security surrounding transactions on the blockchain. While bitcoin comes together with some levels of anonymity, given the permanent record that is the blockchain, the levels of anonymity provided by the bitcoin protocol are considered to be low. This encourages bitcoin users to look for higher levels of anonymity through what are called anonymizers. Tor is an example of an anonymizer. However according to a paper published by two researchers at the University of Luxembourg, Alex Biryukov and Ivan....
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Bitcoin has re-introduced the idea of money as a competitive good. It has done so in a meaningful way. This idea has been conspicuously missing from the economic debate for too long. I, for one, am pleased to welcome it back. We've always had competitive 'private' monies, centrally managed and lacking global reach. A current example would be the Brixton pound. These monies could never effectively compete with money by fiat decree. If these monies existed on the Internet, they were promptly shut down. If they existed outside the Internet, they could never scale to threatening levels. The....
From being referenced on The Simpsons and Jeopardy, bitcoin has undoubtedly garnered mainstream attention these past few months. And while it also seems like every major paper in the United States has talked about it, an overwhelming amount of Americans still have no idea what bitcoin is and does. According to a Bloomberg piece, 42 percent of those in America have some idea what bitcoin is - information gathered by a telephone survey conducted recently. The rest are unsure or just don't know. Others guessed it might even be an XBOX game, amazingly enough. But if we can - if only for a....
The world is still very confused about bitcoin. For example, some press are still writing the old stories about the phenomena as an investment: Man buys $27 worth of bitcoin, forgets about them, finds they're now worth $886,000. It makes for a good headline, but reinforces the view that bitcoin is just some basketcase currency, rather than a currency that should put into a basket of currencies. This will change. In fact, some banks are already starting to say bitcoin good, blockchain good, rather than bitcoin bad, blockchain good. On this note, there’s a really interesting commentary from....
Can you say landslide? That's the word that possibly most accurately describe's last week's poll. In that poll, we asked: "PayPal integrating digital currency: A good or bad thing?" We thought we might actually have a close race between "yes" and "no", but that wasn't the case at all. In total, there were about 700 votes cast, and a whopping 636 voters (90.86 percent) said that a digital currency integration into the PayPal platform would be considered a good thing. Only 64 people said that such an integration would be bad (9.14 percent). But why in the world would such a thing be....
When it comes to explaining bitcoin to a novice user, you will eventually run into the problem of finding a suitable bitcoin wallet for them to use. There are plenty of good wallets out there, but wouldn’t it be easier if they could use an exchange wallet to begin with? However, considering that several bitcoin exchanges have been hacked over the past few months, storing your coins in an exchange wallet might not seem like a good idea. Swedish Bitcoin exchange Safello hopes to change that.