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1,308,740,160 | 2011-06-22 10:56:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [0, 962, 1179, 1222]} | {"Bitcoin": [37]} | Compromised account leads to massive Bitcoin sell off, EFF reconsiders use of currency | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2011-06-22-compromised-account-leads-to-massive-bitcoin-sell-off-eff-recon.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | Bitcoin, for those not aware, is a completely digital currency -- one where exchanges between individuals are largely anonymous and secured through cryptography, and one that has seen its hype-meter go off the charts in recent months. That, inevitably, has had some people waiting for a fall, and it took a big one this week. While things have since bounced back, the value of the currency on the so-called Mt. Gox exchange dropped from around $17.50 to justone centin a matter of moments during the early hours of June 20th -- a drop that's since been attributed to a compromised account. Thanks to a daily withdrawal limit, however, that apparently only resulted in $1,000 actually being stolen, and a claims process has now been set up for those affected.While not directly related to the sell off, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (orEFF) also dealt a bit of a blow to the upstart currency this week, when it announced that it would no longer be accepting Bitcoin donations. According to the organization, that's both because it doesn't "fully understand the complex legal issues involved with creating a new currency system," and because it doesn't want its acceptance of Bitcoins misconstrued as an endorsement of Bitcoin. Head on past the break for an account of the aforementioned plunge as it happened.[Thanks, Zigmar; image:Wikipedia] |
1,383,348,600 | 2013-11-01 23:30:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [0, 305]} | {} | 10 Stories From the Web to Know About This Week | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-stories-know-week-233000192.html | Entrepreneur | http://www.entrepreneur.com/ | Bitcoin launches ATMS, quantifying innovation, Marissa Mayer's no telecommuting policy gets vindicated, Latinas take over, marketers can’t decide if Facebook ads work, Steve Blank gets fired, Twitpics come out… This week's notable news and tantalizing tidbits for entrepreneurs:
1.Say 'Hello' to Robocoin:Bitcoin recently took a giant leap into the realm of legitimacy and real-world application with the debut of its first ATM. Dubbed Robocoin, the machine allows currency to be exchanged for bitcoins, and vice-versa. (Wired)
2.The chemistry of success:Graduate student Kiriti Rambhatla offers a new way to quantify innovation within a company. Don't worry, there's not much math. (Forbes)
3.Yahoo gets vindicated:The roar from critics has been quashed by data, as CEO Marissa Mayer's unpopular no telecommuting policy proves successful. Productivity and employee engagement are up. (Fast Company)
Related:Say What? Yahoo's Marissa Mayer Buys a Funeral Home
4.The right way to outsource:Outsourcing is a great way to keep startup costs down. Here is a smart guide to finding the right people for your small-business needs. (The Guardian)
5.Steve Blank's first job in Silicon Valley:Steve Blank, father of the Lean Startup movement, recalls his first job in Silicon Valley and what he learned getting fired and rehired in the same day. (LinkedIn Today)
6.Google's Spotlight Stories:Teaming up with Motorola, Google is creating a new interactive program that puts users at the center of an animated featurette… literally at the center of a 360 degree virtual reality movie, viewable with a Moto X smartphone. (Wired)
7.Does Facebook advertising work?Professional marketers are torn when it comes to agreeing on the effectiveness and value of Facebook advertising. Two recent third-party surveys convey this conundrum with contradicting data. (Businessweek)
Related:Is Facebook Really a Failure to Marketers?
8.Twitpics see the light:Twitter updated its website and mobile apps to incorporate photo and video previews in tweet streams. Coming at a critical time before an expected $1.3 billion IPO next week, the micro-blogging giant is surely looking to create new revenue streams and lure advertisers. (SF Gate)
9.Latina-owned businesses explode:In the last decade, Hispanic Americans have been starting and growing new businesses at twice the rate of the general population, according to a new study by researcher Geoscape and the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. A large part of that growth has come from Latinas. (Huffington Post)
Related:7 Tips for Women Who Want to Own a Franchise
10.Scammers cometh:Randy Shain, founder ofBackTrack Reportsand investigative due diligence expert, predicts that with the SEC’s decision to allow the solicitation of capital from unaccredited investors will come a new wave of scammers. (Venture Beat) |
1,383,492,766 | 2013-11-03 15:32:46+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [258, 477, 558, 638, 846, 986, 1159, 1398, 1417, 1606, 1994, 2070, 2322, 2507, 2537, 2630, 2823, 2874, 3033, 3187, 3256, 3703, 3900, 4280, 4368, 4496, 4779, 4964, 5245, 5443, 5528, 5720, 6374, 6685, 6715, 7500, 7674, 7802, 8129, 8361]} | {"Bitcoin": [35]} | Chip designers see dollar signs in Bitcoin miners | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chip-designers-see-dollar-signs-153246355.html | Reuters | http://www.reuters.com/ | By Noel Randewich SUNNYVALE, California (Reuters) - Tucked away in an air conditioned data center in Silicon Valley is a hodgepodge of black boxes, circuit boards and cooling fans owned by 27-year-old Aaron Jackson-Wilde, a modern-day prospector looking for Bitcoins. Since discovering the digital currency a few months ago, Jackson-Wilde has paid about $2,000 for his "rigs," which are powered by specialized computer chips. They are designed to help operate and maintain the Bitcoin network - and, in return, generate a small reward in a process known as "Bitcoin mining." A form of electronic money independent of traditional banking, Bitcoins started circulating in 2009 and have since become the most prominent of several fledgling digital currencies. While they quickly gained a reputation for facilitating drug deals and money laundering, Bitcoins have of late garnered attention from investors, such as venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The volume of transactions using Bitcoins today remains miniscule, but enthusiasts believe the peer-to-peer currency will play a major role in e-commerce and could eventually become as ubiquitous as email. Bitcoin mining is based on a unique feature of the digital currency. Unlike traditional currencies, where a central bank decides how much money to print based on goals like controlling inflation, no central authority governs the supply of Bitcoins. Instead, Bitcoin transactions are tracked by a network of computers that solve complex mathematical problems to validate transactions and prevent counterfeit. The system automatically generates new Bitcoins as the math problems are solved and rewards them to the computer operators. In a key twist that keeps inflation in check, the difficulty of the cryptographic math that leads to newly minted coins grows as more computers join the network. That has led some technology professionals to target a new market in souped-up computers and specialized chips aimed at the growing ranks of Bitcoin "miners." Story continues Consider Ravi Iyengar, who first heard of Bitcoins about six months ago. Since then he has quit his job as a senior chip architect at Samsung Electronics and raised $1.5 million to launch CoinTerra. He says he has already pre-sold more than $5 million worth of the hardware he has designed for Bitcoin mining. "I've been in arms races throughout my career - AMD, ARM, Intel," said Iyengar, referring to prominent semiconductor companies, "but none of them match the intensity of Bitcoin mining. Each month in Bitcoin mining is like a year." PERISHABLE SILICON Little is known about exactly who started Bitcoin, but the concept was introduced in a 2008 paper written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Since then, Satoshi Nakamoto has become sort of a patron saint among advocates pushing for Bitcoins as an alternative to national currencies. Bitcoin is not backed by physical assets, is not run by any person or group, and its value depends on people's confidence in the currency. The dollar price of Bitcoins has spiked over the past year as more people became aware of the currency and speculators jumped into the market, which remains highly volatile. Bitcoin recently broke $200, compared to $12 a year ago. The goal of Bitcoin miners is to pull in more than what they spend on their rigs - some cost over $20,000 - and the electricity they need to keep the machines running 24 hours a day. That is no easy feat. In the past three months, miners added so much gear with drastically improved chips that processing power on the network jumped from 289 terahashes per second to more than 4,000 terahashes per second, according to The Genesis Block, a blog that collects Bitcoin data. In reaction, the network drove up the difficulty of verifying each cryptographic block of transaction data, making it even harder to break even on investments in costly mining gear. "Bitcoin makes silicon perishable," said Andreas Antonopoulos, a digital currency entrepreneur in San Francisco. "Your mining rig rots away in front of your eyes every day you have it." It has become so hard to make a profit that comparisons to the 19th century California gold rush, when money was often made selling shovels to naive prospectors, have become a running joke among Bitcoin miners. "It's the guys who sell the equipment who are making the money, not the Bitcoin miners," said Jackson-Wilde, a manager at a company that makes motorcycle batteries. CoinTerra believes spending on new Bitcoin mining chips could easily hit $100 million a year for the next three years, assuming no change in prices. While that is peanuts for large semiconductor companies like Intel Corp and Qualcomm Inc, it is a lucrative market for a handful of small developers. About 11.9 million Bitcoins, worth $2.4 billion at recent prices, have been minted since the currency began circulating. Based on recent activity, the network is on track to create around 1.4 million new Bitcoins annually over the next three years, the equivalent of more than $280 million a year at recent exchange rates. Reflecting growing competition, Jackson-Wilde says his gear - which features model names like Erupter, Jalapeno and Spartan - now pulls in a tiny fraction of the Bitcoins it used to, but he expects another $10,000 worth of next-generation equipment to put him in the black. Despite the expenditures, he considers himself a hobbyist committed to supporting the Bitcoin network rather than a serious digital-currency investor. "Buying and selling Bitcoins is enticing, but it's not as enticing as being part of it and actually having hardware," he said. HOBBY STATE Mining with a simple laptop PC was easy back in 2009, when the fledgling Bitcoin network was a fraction of its current size. But within a year, hobbyists found that graphics chips, often referred to as GPUs and widely used by PC gamers, could provide a major boost in mining output. Miners cobbled together dozens of graphics chips in their garages and basements, surrounded by fans to keep the electronics from overheating. Then in 2010, entrepreneurs caught wind. Jeff Ownby and a handful of colleagues had just formed Butterfly Labs with the goal of using off-the-shelf programmable chips, known as FPGAs, to help banks run complex financial risk simulations. "As we were starting down the road planning this, we read about Bitcoin and said 'Wow, this is exactly what we're trying to do here,'" Ownby said. "It was pretty much in a hobby state, so we thought this might be something." Butterfly Labs and other startups optimized FPGAs, which are more typically used in factories and telecommunications gear, to work efficiently on the Bitcoin network. In 2012, the Bitcoin arms race escalated again when Butterfly Labs and rivals, all with little or no semiconductor engineering experience, started designing chips from the ground up. Custom chips, known as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), are normally made by companies focused on high-volume products like televisions - not startups making small batches of digital mining devices. "They're the Wild West," said John Cheng, head of California based-Custom Silicon Solutions, which helped Butterfly Labs design and manufacture its ASIC. "There's a certain rhythm you're used to in the chip business. It's usually two or three years before your ramp, but these guys wanted to ramp in six months." Butterfly Labs said on Thursday it recently took a downpayment for new mining gear in Bitcoins equivalent to $1 million, the largest-ever transaction in the digital currency. It identified the customer as HashTrade, a company selling contracts for cloud-based Bitcoin mining run in data centers. David Johnston, executive director of BitAngels, an investment group, says consolidation in Bitcoin mining is well underway. "Mining has been going through these different generations and going up a learning curve, from amateurs running CPUs and GPUs to new professionally funded companies with experienced chip designers taking it to the state of the art," Johnston said. Still, there remain plenty of oddities in the Bitcoin mining business. Johnston cited ASICMiner, which both sells mining rigs and runs its own mining operations, as one of the largest and most respected operators. The company has even sold stock to online investors who paid in Bitcoins. ASICMiner recently had a market value equivalent to $50 million, according to data on the BitFunder online exchange. But few know where the company is located, or even who is in charge. The chief executive communicates through web forums under the pseudonym "Friedcat." (Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Tiffany Wu and Tim Dobbyn) |
1,383,493,864 | 2013-11-03 15:51:04+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [258, 477, 558, 638, 846, 986, 1159, 1398, 1417, 1606, 1994, 2070, 2322, 2507, 2537, 2630, 2823, 2874, 3033, 3187, 3256, 3703, 3900, 4280, 4368, 4496, 4779, 4964, 5245, 5443, 5528, 5720, 6374, 6685, 6715, 7500, 7674, 7802, 8129, 8361]} | {"Bitcoin": [35]} | Chip designers see dollar signs in Bitcoin miners | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chip-designers-see-dollar-signs-150217901.html | Reuters | https://www.reuters.com/ | By Noel Randewich SUNNYVALE, California (Reuters) - Tucked away in an air conditioned data centre in Silicon Valley is a hodgepodge of black boxes, circuit boards and cooling fans owned by 27-year-old Aaron Jackson-Wilde, a modern-day prospector looking for Bitcoins. Since discovering the digital currency a few months ago, Jackson-Wilde has paid about $2,000 for his "rigs," which are powered by specialized computer chips. They are designed to help operate and maintain the Bitcoin network - and, in return, generate a small reward in a process known as "Bitcoin mining." A form of electronic money independent of traditional banking, Bitcoins started circulating in 2009 and have since become the most prominent of several fledgling digital currencies. While they quickly gained a reputation for facilitating drug deals and money laundering, Bitcoins have of late garnered attention from investors, such as venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The volume of transactions using Bitcoins today remains miniscule, but enthusiasts believe the peer-to-peer currency will play a major role in e-commerce and could eventually become as ubiquitous as email. Bitcoin mining is based on a unique feature of the digital currency. Unlike traditional currencies, where a central bank decides how much money to print based on goals like controlling inflation, no central authority governs the supply of Bitcoins. Instead, Bitcoin transactions are tracked by a network of computers that solve complex mathematical problems to validate transactions and prevent counterfeit. The system automatically generates new Bitcoins as the math problems are solved and rewards them to the computer operators. In a key twist that keeps inflation in check, the difficulty of the cryptographic math that leads to newly minted coins grows as more computers join the network. That has led some technology professionals to target a new market in souped-up computers and specialized chips aimed at the growing ranks of Bitcoin "miners." Story continues Consider Ravi Iyengar, who first heard of Bitcoins about six months ago. Since then he has quit his job as a senior chip architect at Samsung Electronics and raised $1.5 million to launch CoinTerra. He says he has already pre-sold more than $5 million worth of the hardware he has designed for Bitcoin mining. "I've been in arms races throughout my career - AMD, ARM, Intel," said Iyengar, referring to prominent semiconductor companies, "but none of them match the intensity of Bitcoin mining. Each month in Bitcoin mining is like a year." PERISHABLE SILICON Little is known about exactly who started Bitcoin, but the concept was introduced in a 2008 paper written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Since then, Satoshi Nakamoto has become sort of a patron saint among advocates pushing for Bitcoins as an alternative to national currencies. Bitcoin is not backed by physical assets, is not run by any person or group, and its value depends on people's confidence in the currency. The dollar price of Bitcoins has spiked over the past year as more people became aware of the currency and speculators jumped into the market, which remains highly volatile. Bitcoin recently broke $200, compared to $12 a year ago. The goal of Bitcoin miners is to pull in more than what they spend on their rigs - some cost over $20,000 - and the electricity they need to keep the machines running 24 hours a day. That is no easy feat. In the past three months, miners added so much gear with drastically improved chips that processing power on the network jumped from 289 terahashes per second to more than 4,000 terahashes per second, according to The Genesis Block, a blog that collects Bitcoin data. In reaction, the network drove up the difficulty of verifying each cryptographic block of transaction data, making it even harder to break even on investments in costly mining gear. "Bitcoin makes silicon perishable," said Andreas Antonopoulos, a digital currency entrepreneur in San Francisco. "Your mining rig rots away in front of your eyes every day you have it." It has become so hard to make a profit that comparisons to the 19th century California gold rush, when money was often made selling shovels to naive prospectors, have become a running joke among Bitcoin miners. "It's the guys who sell the equipment who are making the money, not the Bitcoin miners," said Jackson-Wilde, a manager at a company that makes motorcycle batteries. CoinTerra believes spending on new Bitcoin mining chips could easily hit $100 million a year for the next three years, assuming no change in prices. While that is peanuts for large semiconductor companies like Intel Corp and Qualcomm Inc, it is a lucrative market for a handful of small developers. About 11.9 million Bitcoins, worth $2.4 billion at recent prices, have been minted since the currency began circulating. Based on recent activity, the network is on track to create around 1.4 million new Bitcoins annually over the next three years, the equivalent of more than $280 million a year at recent exchange rates. Reflecting growing competition, Jackson-Wilde says his gear - which features model names like Erupter, Jalapeno and Spartan - now pulls in a tiny fraction of the Bitcoins it used to, but he expects another $10,000 worth of next-generation equipment to put him in the black. Despite the expenditures, he considers himself a hobbyist committed to supporting the Bitcoin network rather than a serious digital-currency investor. "Buying and selling Bitcoins is enticing, but it's not as enticing as being part of it and actually having hardware," he said. HOBBY STATE Mining with a simple laptop PC was easy back in 2009, when the fledgling Bitcoin network was a fraction of its current size. But within a year, hobbyists found that graphics chips, often referred to as GPUs and widely used by PC gamers, could provide a major boost in mining output. Miners cobbled together dozens of graphics chips in their garages and basements, surrounded by fans to keep the electronics from overheating. Then in 2010, entrepreneurs caught wind. Jeff Ownby and a handful of colleagues had just formed Butterfly Labs with the goal of using off-the-shelf programmable chips, known as FPGAs, to help banks run complex financial risk simulations. "As we were starting down the road planning this, we read about Bitcoin and said 'Wow, this is exactly what we're trying to do here,'" Ownby said. "It was pretty much in a hobby state, so we thought this might be something." Butterfly Labs and other startups optimized FPGAs, which are more typically used in factories and telecommunications gear, to work efficiently on the Bitcoin network. In 2012, the Bitcoin arms race escalated again when Butterfly Labs and rivals, all with little or no semiconductor engineering experience, started designing chips from the ground up. Custom chips, known as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), are normally made by companies focused on high-volume products like televisions - not startups making small batches of digital mining devices. "They're the Wild West," said John Cheng, head of California based-Custom Silicon Solutions, which helped Butterfly Labs design and manufacture its ASIC. "There's a certain rhythm you're used to in the chip business. It's usually two or three years before your ramp, but these guys wanted to ramp in six months." Butterfly Labs said on Thursday it recently took a downpayment for new mining gear in Bitcoins equivalent to $1 million, the largest-ever transaction in the digital currency. It identified the customer as HashTrade, a company selling contracts for cloud-based Bitcoin mining run in data centres. David Johnston, executive director of BitAngels, an investment group, says consolidation in Bitcoin mining is well underway. "Mining has been going through these different generations and going up a learning curve, from amateurs running CPUs and GPUs to new professionally funded companies with experienced chip designers taking it to the state of the art," Johnston said. Still, there remain plenty of oddities in the Bitcoin mining business. Johnston cited ASICMiner, which both sells mining rigs and runs its own mining operations, as one of the largest and most respected operators. The company has even sold stock to online investors who paid in Bitcoins. ASICMiner recently had a market value equivalent to $50 million, according to data on the BitFunder online exchange. But few know where the company is located, or even who is in charge. The chief executive communicates through web forums under the pseudonym "Friedcat." (Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Tiffany Wu and Tim Dobbyn) |
1,383,495,589 | 2013-11-03 16:19:49+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [258, 477, 558, 638, 846, 986, 1159, 1398, 1417, 1606, 1994, 2054, 2306, 2491, 2521, 2614, 2807, 2858, 3017, 3171, 3240, 3687, 3884, 4264, 4352, 4480, 4763, 4948, 5229, 5427, 5512, 5704, 6358, 6669, 6699, 7484, 7658, 7786, 8113, 8345]} | {"Bitcoin": [35]} | Chip designers see dollar signs in Bitcoin miners | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chip-designers-see-dollar-signs-bitcoin-miners-153246474--finance.html | Reuters | https://www.reuters.com/ | By Noel Randewich SUNNYVALE, California (Reuters) - Tucked away in an air conditioned data center in Silicon Valley is a hodgepodge of black boxes, circuit boards and cooling fans owned by 27-year-old Aaron Jackson-Wilde, a modern-day prospector looking for Bitcoins. Since discovering the digital currency a few months ago, Jackson-Wilde has paid about $2,000 for his "rigs," which are powered by specialized computer chips. They are designed to help operate and maintain the Bitcoin network - and, in return, generate a small reward in a process known as "Bitcoin mining." A form of electronic money independent of traditional banking, Bitcoins started circulating in 2009 and have since become the most prominent of several fledgling digital currencies. While they quickly gained a reputation for facilitating drug deals and money laundering, Bitcoins have of late garnered attention from investors, such as venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The volume of transactions using Bitcoins today remains miniscule, but enthusiasts believe the peer-to-peer currency will play a major role in e-commerce and could eventually become as ubiquitous as email. Bitcoin mining is based on a unique feature of the digital currency. Unlike traditional currencies, where a central bank decides how much money to print based on goals like controlling inflation, no central authority governs the supply of Bitcoins. Instead, Bitcoin transactions are tracked by a network of computers that solve complex mathematical problems to validate transactions and prevent counterfeit. The system automatically generates new Bitcoins as the math problems are solved and rewards them to the computer operators. In a key twist that keeps inflation in check, the difficulty of the cryptographic math that leads to newly minted coins grows as more computers join the network. That has led some technology professionals to target a new market in souped-up computers and specialized chips aimed at the growing ranks of Bitcoin "miners." Consider Ravi Iyengar, who first heard of Bitcoins about six months ago. Since then he has quit his job as a senior chip architect at Samsung Electronics and raised $1.5 million to launch CoinTerra. He says he has already pre-sold more than $5 million worth of the hardware he has designed for Bitcoin mining. "I've been in arms races throughout my career - AMD, ARM, Intel," said Iyengar, referring to prominent semiconductor companies, "but none of them match the intensity of Bitcoin mining. Each month in Bitcoin mining is like a year." PERISHABLE SILICON Little is known about exactly who started Bitcoin, but the concept was introduced in a 2008 paper written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Since then, Satoshi Nakamoto has become sort of a patron saint among advocates pushing for Bitcoins as an alternative to national currencies. Bitcoin is not backed by physical assets, is not run by any person or group, and its value depends on people's confidence in the currency. The dollar price of Bitcoins has spiked over the past year as more people became aware of the currency and speculators jumped into the market, which remains highly volatile. Bitcoin recently broke $200, compared to $12 a year ago. The goal of Bitcoin miners is to pull in more than what they spend on their rigs - some cost over $20,000 - and the electricity they need to keep the machines running 24 hours a day. That is no easy feat. In the past three months, miners added so much gear with drastically improved chips that processing power on the network jumped from 289 terahashes per second to more than 4,000 terahashes per second, according to The Genesis Block, a blog that collects Bitcoin data. In reaction, the network drove up the difficulty of verifying each cryptographic block of transaction data, making it even harder to break even on investments in costly mining gear. "Bitcoin makes silicon perishable," said Andreas Antonopoulos, a digital currency entrepreneur in San Francisco. "Your mining rig rots away in front of your eyes every day you have it." It has become so hard to make a profit that comparisons to the 19th century California gold rush, when money was often made selling shovels to naive prospectors, have become a running joke among Bitcoin miners. "It's the guys who sell the equipment who are making the money, not the Bitcoin miners," said Jackson-Wilde, a manager at a company that makes motorcycle batteries. CoinTerra believes spending on new Bitcoin mining chips could easily hit $100 million a year for the next three years, assuming no change in prices. While that is peanuts for large semiconductor companies like Intel Corp and Qualcomm Inc, it is a lucrative market for a handful of small developers. About 11.9 million Bitcoins, worth $2.4 billion at recent prices, have been minted since the currency began circulating. Based on recent activity, the network is on track to create around 1.4 million new Bitcoins annually over the next three years, the equivalent of more than $280 million a year at recent exchange rates. Reflecting growing competition, Jackson-Wilde says his gear - which features model names like Erupter, Jalapeno and Spartan - now pulls in a tiny fraction of the Bitcoins it used to, but he expects another $10,000 worth of next-generation equipment to put him in the black. Despite the expenditures, he considers himself a hobbyist committed to supporting the Bitcoin network rather than a serious digital-currency investor. "Buying and selling Bitcoins is enticing, but it's not as enticing as being part of it and actually having hardware," he said. HOBBY STATE Mining with a simple laptop PC was easy back in 2009, when the fledgling Bitcoin network was a fraction of its current size. But within a year, hobbyists found that graphics chips, often referred to as GPUs and widely used by PC gamers, could provide a major boost in mining output. Miners cobbled together dozens of graphics chips in their garages and basements, surrounded by fans to keep the electronics from overheating. Then in 2010, entrepreneurs caught wind. Jeff Ownby and a handful of colleagues had just formed Butterfly Labs with the goal of using off-the-shelf programmable chips, known as FPGAs, to help banks run complex financial risk simulations. "As we were starting down the road planning this, we read about Bitcoin and said 'Wow, this is exactly what we're trying to do here,'" Ownby said. "It was pretty much in a hobby state, so we thought this might be something." Butterfly Labs and other startups optimized FPGAs, which are more typically used in factories and telecommunications gear, to work efficiently on the Bitcoin network. In 2012, the Bitcoin arms race escalated again when Butterfly Labs and rivals, all with little or no semiconductor engineering experience, started designing chips from the ground up. Custom chips, known as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), are normally made by companies focused on high-volume products like televisions - not startups making small batches of digital mining devices. "They're the Wild West," said John Cheng, head of California based-Custom Silicon Solutions, which helped Butterfly Labs design and manufacture its ASIC. "There's a certain rhythm you're used to in the chip business. It's usually two or three years before your ramp, but these guys wanted to ramp in six months." Butterfly Labs said on Thursday it recently took a downpayment for new mining gear in Bitcoins equivalent to $1 million, the largest-ever transaction in the digital currency. It identified the customer as HashTrade, a company selling contracts for cloud-based Bitcoin mining run in data centers. David Johnston, executive director of BitAngels, an investment group, says consolidation in Bitcoin mining is well underway. "Mining has been going through these different generations and going up a learning curve, from amateurs running CPUs and GPUs to new professionally funded companies with experienced chip designers taking it to the state of the art," Johnston said. Still, there remain plenty of oddities in the Bitcoin mining business. Johnston cited ASICMiner, which both sells mining rigs and runs its own mining operations, as one of the largest and most respected operators. The company has even sold stock to online investors who paid in Bitcoins. ASICMiner recently had a market value equivalent to $50 million, according to data on the BitFunder online exchange. But few know where the company is located, or even who is in charge. The chief executive communicates through web forums under the pseudonym "Friedcat." (Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Tiffany Wu and Tim Dobbyn) |
1,383,503,007 | 2013-11-03 18:23:27+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [258, 477, 558, 638, 846, 986, 1159, 1398, 1417, 1606, 1994, 2070, 2322, 2538, 2568, 2661, 2854, 2905, 3064, 3218, 3287, 3734, 3931, 4311, 4399, 4527, 4832, 5017, 5298, 5496, 5581, 5773, 6427, 6738, 6768, 7553, 7727, 7855, 8182, 8414]} | {"Bitcoin": [35]} | Chip designers see dollar signs in Bitcoin miners | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chip-designers-see-dollar-signs-151156223.html | Reuters | https://www.reuters.com/ | By Noel Randewich SUNNYVALE, California (Reuters) - Tucked away in an air conditioned data center in Silicon Valley is a hodgepodge of black boxes, circuit boards and cooling fans owned by 27-year-old Aaron Jackson-Wilde, a modern-day prospector looking for Bitcoins. Since discovering the digital currency a few months ago, Jackson-Wilde has paid about $2,000 for his "rigs," which are powered by specialized computer chips. They are designed to help operate and maintain the Bitcoin network - and, in return, generate a small reward in a process known as "Bitcoin mining." A form of electronic money independent of traditional banking, Bitcoins started circulating in 2009 and have since become the most prominent of several fledgling digital currencies. While they quickly gained a reputation for facilitating drug deals and money laundering, Bitcoins have of late garnered attention from investors, such as venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The volume of transactions using Bitcoins today remains miniscule, but enthusiasts believe the peer-to-peer currency will play a major role in e-commerce and could eventually become as ubiquitous as email. Bitcoin mining is based on a unique feature of the digital currency. Unlike traditional currencies, where a central bank decides how much money to print based on goals like controlling inflation, no central authority governs the supply of Bitcoins. Instead, Bitcoin transactions are tracked by a network of computers that solve complex mathematical problems to validate transactions and prevent counterfeit. The system automatically generates new Bitcoins as the math problems are solved and rewards them to the computer operators. In a key twist that keeps inflation in check, the difficulty of the cryptographic math that leads to newly minted coins grows as more computers join the network. That has led some technology professionals to target a new market in souped-up computers and specialized chips aimed at the growing ranks of Bitcoin "miners." Story continues Consider Ravi Iyengar, who first heard of Bitcoins about six months ago. Since then he has quit his job as a senior chip architect at Samsung Electronics and raised $1.5 million to launch CoinTerra. He says he has already pre-sold more than $5 million worth of the hardware he has designed for Bitcoin mining. "I've been in arms races throughout my career - AMD (NYS:AMD), ARM (LSE:ARM), Intel (NSQ:INTC)," said Iyengar, referring to prominent semiconductor companies, "but none of them match the intensity of Bitcoin mining. Each month in Bitcoin mining is like a year." PERISHABLE SILICON Little is known about exactly who started Bitcoin, but the concept was introduced in a 2008 paper written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Since then, Satoshi Nakamoto has become sort of a patron saint among advocates pushing for Bitcoins as an alternative to national currencies. Bitcoin is not backed by physical assets, is not run by any person or group, and its value depends on people's confidence in the currency. The dollar price of Bitcoins has spiked over the past year as more people became aware of the currency and speculators jumped into the market, which remains highly volatile. Bitcoin recently broke $200, compared to $12 a year ago. The goal of Bitcoin miners is to pull in more than what they spend on their rigs - some cost over $20,000 - and the electricity they need to keep the machines running 24 hours a day. That is no easy feat. In the past three months, miners added so much gear with drastically improved chips that processing power on the network jumped from 289 terahashes per second to more than 4,000 terahashes per second, according to The Genesis Block, a blog that collects Bitcoin data. In reaction, the network drove up the difficulty of verifying each cryptographic block of transaction data, making it even harder to break even on investments in costly mining gear. "Bitcoin makes silicon perishable," said Andreas Antonopoulos, a digital currency entrepreneur in San Francisco. "Your mining rig rots away in front of your eyes every day you have it." It has become so hard to make a profit that comparisons to the 19th century California gold rush, when money was often made selling shovels to naive prospectors, have become a running joke among Bitcoin miners. "It's the guys who sell the equipment who are making the money, not the Bitcoin miners," said Jackson-Wilde, a manager at a company that makes motorcycle batteries. CoinTerra believes spending on new Bitcoin mining chips could easily hit $100 million a year for the next three years, assuming no change in prices. While that is peanuts for large semiconductor companies like Intel Corp (NSQ:INTC) and Qualcomm Inc (NSQ:QCOM), it is a lucrative market for a handful of small developers. About 11.9 million Bitcoins, worth $2.4 billion at recent prices, have been minted since the currency began circulating. Based on recent activity, the network is on track to create around 1.4 million new Bitcoins annually over the next three years, the equivalent of more than $280 million a year at recent exchange rates. Reflecting growing competition, Jackson-Wilde says his gear - which features model names like Erupter, Jalapeno and Spartan - now pulls in a tiny fraction of the Bitcoins it used to, but he expects another $10,000 worth of next-generation equipment to put him in the black. Despite the expenditures, he considers himself a hobbyist committed to supporting the Bitcoin network rather than a serious digital-currency investor. "Buying and selling Bitcoins is enticing, but it's not as enticing as being part of it and actually having hardware," he said. HOBBY STATE Mining with a simple laptop PC was easy back in 2009, when the fledgling Bitcoin network was a fraction of its current size. But within a year, hobbyists found that graphics chips, often referred to as GPUs and widely used by PC gamers, could provide a major boost in mining output. Miners cobbled together dozens of graphics chips in their garages and basements, surrounded by fans to keep the electronics from overheating. Then in 2010, entrepreneurs caught wind. Jeff Ownby and a handful of colleagues had just formed Butterfly Labs with the goal of using off-the-shelf programmable chips, known as FPGAs, to help banks run complex financial risk simulations. "As we were starting down the road planning this, we read about Bitcoin and said 'Wow, this is exactly what we're trying to do here,'" Ownby said. "It was pretty much in a hobby state, so we thought this might be something." Butterfly Labs and other startups optimized FPGAs, which are more typically used in factories and telecommunications gear, to work efficiently on the Bitcoin network. In 2012, the Bitcoin arms race escalated again when Butterfly Labs and rivals, all with little or no semiconductor engineering experience, started designing chips from the ground up. Custom chips, known as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), are normally made by companies focused on high-volume products like televisions - not startups making small batches of digital mining devices. "They're the Wild West," said John Cheng, head of California based-Custom Silicon Solutions, which helped Butterfly Labs design and manufacture its ASIC. "There's a certain rhythm you're used to in the chip business. It's usually two or three years before your ramp, but these guys wanted to ramp in six months." Butterfly Labs said on Thursday it recently took a downpayment for new mining gear in Bitcoins equivalent to $1 million, the largest-ever transaction in the digital currency. It identified the customer as HashTrade, a company selling contracts for cloud-based Bitcoin mining run in data centers. David Johnston, executive director of BitAngels, an investment group, says consolidation in Bitcoin mining is well underway. "Mining has been going through these different generations and going up a learning curve, from amateurs running CPUs and GPUs to new professionally funded companies with experienced chip designers taking it to the state of the art," Johnston said. Still, there remain plenty of oddities in the Bitcoin mining business. Johnston cited ASICMiner, which both sells mining rigs and runs its own mining operations, as one of the largest and most respected operators. The company has even sold stock to online investors who paid in Bitcoins. ASICMiner recently had a market value equivalent to $50 million, according to data on the BitFunder online exchange. But few know where the company is located, or even who is in charge. The chief executive communicates through web forums under the pseudonym "Friedcat." (Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Tiffany Wu and Tim Dobbyn) |
1,383,581,100 | 2013-11-04 16:05:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [3695]} | {} | Here's What China's Renminbi Will Look Like In 2020 | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-chinas-renminbi-look-2020-160503473.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)
China has been making moves to replace its trade in dollars with trade in the renminbi.
The Chinese trade in renminbi is going to be worth nearly 30% of their international trade by 2020, according to a research note by Standard Chartered's Becky Liu and her team. This is projected to be worth $3 trillion.
That's $3 trillion that could otherwise be denominated in dollars. And this has implications for the U.S. monetary system, which boasts the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Being the reserve currency has huge advantages.
Since international trade is currently denominated in dollars, there is a constant, ensured demand for dollars. This is one of the reasons the Fed is able to issue large amounts of debt and carry out programs like quantitative easing — buying government issued bonds to lower long-term rates when short-term rates are zero.
This demand for the dollar has also helped keep interest rates and inflation in the U.S. economy low, which makes it an attractive destination for international borrowers.
The push to replace the dollar trade has come, in part, as a result of volatility in the dollar. Political instability in the form of the debt limit and the potential for U.S. debt default, as well as the uncertainty coming from the Fed's taper talks has driven volatility in the greenback.
In order to side-step this volatility, countries have been taking steps to make themselves less dependent on the dollar. Last month,Europe and China signed a €45 billion currency swap dealthat allowed them to settle trades in local currencies in order to sidestep the dollar.India has also made an agreement with Iranto settle trades in rupees.
Currently, the trade in China's renminbi is extremely restricted. Its value trades within a narrow band of the dollar and converting money to and from renminbi isn't easy. This is because the Chinese government is worried about speculative attacks on the currency.
"We expect China’s capital account to be basically open by 2020," writes Liu. "Direct investment will flow much more easily than today, with only large deals subject to approval requirements."
"We think the Renminbi will be a basically freely floating currency, the capital account will be more or less open, and SHIBOR (or a similar rate) will operate as China’s equivalent of the federal funds target rate."
As the onshore renminbi market expands (CNY),the offshore Renminbi (CNH)debt market is expected to grow at 30% a year, and to be worth $500 billion by 2020.
One particularlyblistering editorial in Xinhua, China's official news agency, reflects how the Chinese feel about the U.S. dollar:
" Most recently, the cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising debt ceiling has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized.
... The developing and emerging market economies need to have more say in major international financial institutions including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, so that they could better reflect the transformations of the global economic and political landscape.
What may also be included as a key part of an effective reform is the introduction of a new international reserve currency that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar, so that the international community could permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States."
But China still has some way to go before it can become a truly international currency.
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1,328,119,352 | 2012-02-01 18:02:32+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [18, 195, 1871, 2827, 3683]} | {"Bitcoin": [0]} | Bitcoin May Be The Currency Of The Future | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-may-currency-future-180232983.html | Investopedia | http://www.investopedia.com/ | Have you heard of Bitcoin? If you're a fan of the NBC legal drama The Good Wife , then you may have learned of it for the first time there. But if you're like most, you probably didn't know that Bitcoin existed or even what it is. You know of the dollar, the euro and the peso as ways to buy items and get paid for your service, but these fiat currencies as they are called may someday be replaced by a virtual currency that is only in digital form. So, how does it work? History The mechanics behind digital currency appear complicated, but the major problem facing it is easy to understand. What would keep you from using it more than once? Assuming your digital currency was placed in your digital wallet, why couldn't you send it out to multiple people at the same time? With traditional currency, there is a physical exchange and unless you have exceptional resources that allow you to counterfeit, you can only use it once until you earn it back. Because of that, digital currency has to be encrypted and just like with a credit card, there has to be some kind of clearing facility that keeps track of when a currency is used and who owns it. The early digital currencies were based around this idea, but having one central place seemed like a recipe for corruption to the creators. So they made the clearing house a process that happened on computers all over the world instead of just one place. They also didn't want the value of the currency to be controlled by a central bank, the way traditional currencies are controlled. The bitcoin system releases a set amount on a certain schedule. In order to earn bitcoins, they have to be mined, much like gold but in a digital format. A complicated cryptographic puzzle has to be solved in order to activate the bitcoin, and the first person to solve it was the successful miner of the bitcoin block and now owns it. Bitcoins started with pennies in value in April of 2010, but quickly rose thereafter. As the value rose, more bitcoin miners set up powerful systems to unlock the new bitcoin codes. As bitcoins gained popularity in 2011 the price rose beyond parity, and after Forbes ran a piece describing bitcoins, the exchange rate hit a peak of $29.57 to purchase one bitcoin. People who had held bitcoins from the beginning were millionaires in less than one year. The Problems As bitcoins rose in popularity, problems developed. This was not a mainstream currency with mainstream businesses adopting it. Who would want to accept payment in a currency without a guaranteed value? Next, people without advanced computer skills weren't interested in the hassle of mining or digital wallets, so the system has never reached beyond a relatively small amount of technologically savvy group of people. Then, a series of online attacks sent the currency plummeting in value. Bitcoins were stolen from exchanges and in one instance, hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of bitcoins were mistakenly deleted. The current value sits around $6, but with demand faltering and less merchants excited about this 21st century currency, some believe that bitcoins may have a shorter life than previously thought. One of the ideas behind digital currency is to remove the market effects of traditional currency, but quite the opposite happened. As the popularity rose, currency speculators were able to manipulate the price making this currency even more volatile than commodities like gold and silver, and much more volatile than the dollar. There's also the problem of trustworthiness. Although traditional or fiat currencies may not be based on an underlying asset like gold, they have an implied value due to their universal adoption. Bitcoins aren't backed by a hard asset or a large government, so there is no guarantee that bitcoins will hold any value in the future. The Bottom Line Those who try to develop digital currency will face many of the same problems that have plagued paper currencies for generations. Because currency is not only a means to buy and sell but also an investment product, the currency may have to be regulated in some form. Although popular venture capitalist Fred Wilson believes that a digital currency not controlled by governments will make a large scale emergence in his lifetime, he still isn't sure if that's a good thing or not. More From Investopedia Are $1 Coins A Better Option Than $1 Bills? 6 Currencies With A Bright Future How The Triffin Dilemma Affects Currencies |
1,383,613,800 | 2013-11-05 01:10:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [581]} | {} | The Future Of China's Capital Markets In One Big Slide | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/future-chinas-capital-markets-one-011000614.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | One of the reasons the renminbi hasn't become a truly international currency is because of the nation's capital controls.
This refers to restrictions on the flow of capital in the form of (cash, stock, foreign direct investment and so on). But in a new Standard Chartered report titled"The Renminbi’s 2020 odyssey,"Becky Liu and her team write that they expect "China’s capital account to be basically open by 2020."
In one slide they show how the "various lines" will be opened up between now and 2020:
Standard Chartered
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1,383,615,840 | 2013-11-05 01:44:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [122, 159, 986, 1162]} | {"Bitcoin": [17]} | Researchers Say 'Bitcoin Is Broken' And Could Collapse | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/researchers-bitcoin-broken-could-collapse-014448102.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Emin Gün Sirer/Twitter
Two computer science researchers at Cornell Universitysay they've uncovered a fundamental flaw in Bitcointhat is so bad, it could kill Bitcoin.
The problem is with how people "mine" bitcoins. Mining is how bitcoins are created. Most people don't mine bitcoins anymore. They buy them or take them as payment. But some people are in the business of mining coins with special bitcoin-mining computers. Even so, it is so difficult and time consuming for a computer to create new bitcoins that some miners have banded together in pools, using multiple computers that work together.
The problem with mining was found byEmin Gün Sirer,an associate professor at Cornell's Computer Science Dept., andIttay Eyal,a Cornell computer science researcher.
They say that when too many miners gang together, they can obtain more than "their fair share" of bitcoins and this can lead to a monopoly over the whole system. They write:
... the problem is intrinsic to the entire way Bitcoin works ... a minority group of miners can obtain revenues in excess of their fair share, and grow in number until they reach a majority. When this point is reached, the Bitcoin ... the currency .. is no longer decentralized; the controlling entity can determine who participates in mining and which transactions are committed, and can even roll back transactions at will.
Their solution, these researchers say, is to change how bitcoin mining works so a single pool of miners can never control more than 25% of the available mining power.
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1,383,653,400 | 2013-11-05 12:10:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [955, 993]} | {} | 10 Tech Things You Need To Know This Morning | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-tech-things-know-morning-120946839.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | AP
Good morning!
Here's what's happening in tech:
1. AOL's third quarter earnings are being reported this morning.Here's a live blog where you can follow along.
2. Apple is building a new 700-employee manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona to make components for various Apple products.
3. Silicon Valley has a serious arrogance problem.
4. Justin Bieber invested $1.1 million in a social network for teenagers, "Shots of Me."
5. Here's a video of LG's new flexible phone, the G Flex, flexing.
6. 8% of US adults get their news on Twitter, according to a new report.About 30% get news on Facebook. The difference is, Twitter's news consumers are "younger, more mobile and more educated."
7. The former creative director of Buzzfeed is bootstrapping a startup, Rather.Rather helps you eliminate every annoying post on your Facebook and Twitter streams.
8. Two computer science researchers at Cornell University say they've uncovered a fundamental flaw in Bitcoin that is so bad, it could kill Bitcoin.
9. Troy Carter's claim to fame, aside from his investments in startups like Dropbox and Uber, is that he's Lady Gaga's manager.But no more.Lady Gaga has dropped him over "creative differences,"according to Hollywood Reporter.
10. Gigaom's Om Malik has written a good, long piece about his history with Twitter and the company's future.
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1,383,740,880 | 2013-11-06 12:28:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [11, 112, 137, 451, 486, 813, 976, 1020, 1084, 1330, 1874, 2099, 2212], "BTC": [608]} | {"Bitcoin": [33]} | Wall Street Analyst Explains Why Bitcoin Is Back From The Dead And Surging To All-Time Highs | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-hits-time-high-analyst-122856963.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Overnight, Bitcoin hit a new all-time high of $270, surpassing the peak price of $266 seen at the height of the Bitcoin mania in April.
"Bitcoin is making a new high this week, breaking through the spiky bubble levels of April in a pretty controlled and orderly manner," writes ConvergEx Group chief market strategist Nick Colas in a note to clients this morning. "What gives?"
bitcoin.clarkmoody.com
In the note, Colas touches offers a few points on Bitcoin's second wind:
The biggest Bitcoin exchange is now in China, displacing Japanese, American and European sources of demand. That enterprise is called BTC China, and its CEO Bobby Lee hails from Yahoo! and Walmart China. Oh, and he graduated from Stanford with a degree in Computer Science. In short, an apparently pretty clever fellow.
Our sources in the Bitcoin community also agree that Second Market, the New York-based business best known for trading pre-IPO company stock, has become a major player in demand for Bitcoin. Earlier this year they started the Bitcoin Investment Trust, an open-ended product to buy and hold Bitcoins. There’s no way to know how much Second Market has purchased on behalf of its clients, but it must be a popular offering – the banner ad on their site for the trust occupied the top third of their front page.
It’s not all been roses for Bitcoin, even in this recent run-up. Back in September computer science researchers from UC – San Diego showed that it was actually fairly easy to track individual transactions in the bitcoin transaction ledger. Just this week, academics at Cornell proposed that bitcoin could eventually be co-opted by a handful of "Miners" who could hijack the system.
Colas also chalks up part of the currency's resilience — why it's seemingly "minted on Teflon" — to its limited supply.
"In the 4-ish minutes it has taken you to read this far, the most new Bitcoins that might have been issued is 25, or $6,250," he writes. "In the same timeframe, the Federal Reserve has pushed another $7.8 million into the financial system with Quantitative Easing."
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1,383,742,213 | 2013-11-06 12:50:13+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [13, 254, 311, 469, 531, 822, 973, 1150, 1239, 1271, 1437]} | {"Bitcoin": [7]} | Why Do Bitcoins Keep Rising in Value? | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-bitcoins-keep-rising-value-125013354.html | 24/7 Wall St. | http://247wallst.com | The world of Bitcoin and virtual currencies is a strange one. Imagine an open source currency with a digital life and no real nation behind it. Then imagine that the price of the currency would double yet again in just over a month. This is the story of Bitcoin, and it feels a bit like deja vu all over again. Bitcoin prices have effectively doubled since the beginning of October. The price had been stable for months but then rose from around $125 to $265 recently. Bitcoin's prior high had been $266, but the Mt.Gox shows that Bitcoin's new high is $270. At last look, the last trade was down at $263.11 ALSO READ: Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2014 The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a couple of Senate committees will hold hearings regarding policy on virtual currencies in the weeks ahead. Policing Bitcoin and virtual currencies generally comes with a reference of being able to be untracked for criminal activities. A recent driver of the value of Bitcoin may simply be nothing more than more retailers accepting it at the same time that investors are interested again. If you will recall, we even recently highlighted a new Bitcoin trust from SecondMarket. In July we pointed out that the only thing as dumb as a Bitcoin ETF would be a gun ETF. Bitcoin's rise in value is even on the heels of a summer Ponzi scheme warning from the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. As reminder, there are accused flaws in Bitcoin. The market value of all bitcoins are currently close to $3 billion. Here is the one-month chart from the Mt.Gox website: |
1,383,777,720 | 2013-11-06 22:42:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [22, 885, 1036, 1894, 1990, 2073, 2206, 2246, 2665, 2753, 2836, 3138, 3200, 3243]} | {"Bitcoin": [0]} | Bitcoin Is A Joke | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-total-joke-224200448.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | REUTERS/Eliana Aponte
Bitcoin is back in the news, as the digital currency has surged to new all-time highs in recent weeks.
A few weeks ago, it was just above $100. Today it's over $260.
This surge has promptedTimothy B Lee at The Washington Postto ask whether those who have called it a bubble in the past should retract and admit that they were wrong.
Well I'm not totally sure if I've called it a bubble, but I have spoken negatively of it, and I'll say that I still think it's a joke, and probably in a bubble.
Now first of all, I find the premise of Lee's post to be hilarious. The currency has been surging several percent every day lately, and that's evidence that it'snotin a bubble?
Before going on, I want to be clear that saying something is a bubble is not saying it will go down. It could go to $500 or $1000 or $10,000. That's the nature of manias.
But make no mistake, Bitcoin is not the currency of the future. It has no intrinsic value.
Now this idea of "intrinsic value" when it comes to currency bothers people, and Bitcoin Bugs will immediately ask why the U.S. dollar has intrinsic value. There's an answer to that. The U.S. Dollar has intrinsic value because the U.S. government which sets the laws of doing business in the United States says it has intrinsic value. If you want to conduct commerce in the United States you have to pay taxes, and there's only one currency you're allowed to pay taxes in: U.S. dollars. There's no getting around this fact. Furthermore, if you want to use the banking system at all, there's no choice but to use U.S. dollars, because that's the currency of the Fed which is behind the whole thing.
On top of all these laws requiring the U.S. dollar to be used, the United States has a gigantic military that can force people around the world to use dollars (if it came to that) so yes, there's a lot of real-world value behind greenbacks.
Bitcoin? Nada. There's nothing keeping it being a thing. If people lose faith in it, it's over. Bitcoin is fiat currency in the most literal sense of the word.
But it gets worse. Bitcoin is mostly just a speculative vehicle. Yes, there are PR stunts about bars and other shops accepting bitcoins. And there is a Bitcoin ATM for some reason. But mostly Bitcoin is a speculative vehicle. And really, you'd be insane to actually conduct a sizable amount of commerce in bitcoins. That's because the price swings so wildly, that the next day, there's a good chance that one of the parties will have gotten royally screwed. Either the purchaser of the good will have ended up totally blowing a huge opportunity (by not holding longer) or the seller will be totally screwed (if Bitcoin instantly plunges). The very volatility that excited people to want to play the Bitcoin game is death when it comes to real transactions in the real world.
Again, Bitcoin might go up a lot more before it ultimately ends. That's the nature of bubbles. The dotcom bubble crashed a bunch of times on its way up. Then one day it ended. The same will happen with this.
In the meantime, have fun speculating!
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1,383,788,944 | 2013-11-07 01:49:04+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [437, 1531, 1728, 2528, 2616, 2713]} | {} | New Silk Road drug bazaar opens a month after FBI bust | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/silk-road-drug-bazaar-opens-month-fbi-bust-014904895.html | Reuters | https://www.reuters.com/ | By Noel Randewich SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A new anonymous Internet marketplace for illegal drugs debuted on Wednesday, with the same name and appearance as the Silk Road website shut down by U.S. law enforcement authorities a month ago. Like its predecessor, the new Silk Road listed hundreds of advertisements for marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and other illegal drugs available for purchase from independent sellers using the anonymous Bitcoin digital currency. On October 1, the Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down the original Silk Road and arrested its alleged mastermind, Ross William Ulbricht, 29, known online as "Dread Pirate Roberts," in San Francisco. "It took the FBI two-and-a-half years to do what they did ... but four weeks of temporary silence is all they got," a site administrator wrote, also using the "Dread Pirate Roberts" moniker. The FBI declined to comment on the new version of the Silk Road. For more than two years, the original site acted like an eBay of vice, allowing users to buy and sell illegal goods and services on the assumption that they were safe from the law. Deliveries were made through the mail in discrete packages. U.S. authorities also say Ulbricht had tried to call out a hit on a user who had threatened to expose the identities of thousands of Silk Road users. Ulbricht's lawyer on Wednesday said his client would plead not guilty to drug trafficking, hacking and money laundering charges. The charges against Ulbricht said his website generated sales of more than 9.5 million Bitcoins, roughly equivalent to $1.2 billion. The new website improves on technology from the previous Silk Road meant to keep identities secret, including measures to keep users from losing their Bitcoins in case the site shuts down, according to the new Dread Pirate Roberts. Senator Tom Carper, a top lawmaker on the Homeland Security committee, who plans to hold a hearing on digital currencies this month, said the new Silk Road site shows that government needs to adapt to fast-moving technology. "Rather than play 'whack-a-mole' with the latest website, currency, or other method criminals are using in an effort to evade the law, we need to develop thoughtful, nimble and sensible federal policies that protect the public without stifling innovation and economic growth," Carper said in a statement. A week after authorities shut down the Silk Road, British police said they arrested four men accused of being significant users of the site. Two weeks ago, federal prosecutors said 144,336 Bitcoins were discovered on Ulbricht's confiscated computer, adding to more than 30,000 Bitcoins previously seized. With the digital currency trading at an all-time on Wednesday, those Bitcoins were worth close to $50 million, according to the Mt Gox trading website. Like the original Silk Road, users access the new site using a no-cost, anti-surveillance service known as the Tor network instead of traditional web browsers. The relaunched Silk Road will soon hire staff to handle marketing for the site, the administrator mentioned in his post. "The Silk Road has risen once more. ... Open communication with your old suppliers and customers, let this wonderful news be taken to all corners of the Tor Network and beyond," the person wrote. (Additional reporting by Emily Flitter in New York and Brett Wolf in St. Louis; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz and Lisa Shumaker) |
1,383,830,411 | 2013-11-07 13:20:11+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [17, 203, 490, 633, 797, 830, 1034, 1630, 1888, 1935, 2122, 2164, 2198]} | {"Bitcoin": [0]} | Bitcoin Foundation Responds To — But Doesn't Deny — Cornell Study's Claim It Could Collapse | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-foundation-responds-doesnt-deny-132011632.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Shutterstock
The Bitcoin Foundation — a sort of non-profit industry lobby group for the online crypto-currency — has welcomed an academic paperpublished by researchers at Cornell University which claims Bitcoin could collapseif "selfish" owners begin colluding with each other. But the foundation did not specifically deny its claims.
Ina blog post, foundation board member Gavin Andresen says:
Let me start with how fantastic it is that we’re seeing more academic interest and research in Bitcoin-the-system. In the coming months, I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more research claiming to have found ways of making various pieces of Bitcoin better. Some of it will even turn out to be both practical and correct.
He doesn't specifically knock down the Cornell paper's central claim, which is that Bitcoin "miners," who create new Bitcoins by crunching code which churns out the currency according to a set formula that prevents inflation, could collapse the system by colluding until one group of collaborators owns a majority of all Bitcoins. Andresen does express doubts about the study:
... I’m not going to write about the specific claims in the paper; lots of smart people are, or soon will be, thinking really hard about the issues raised and whether or not the researcher’s model matches reality. However, it is good to note that in my initial review, I believe the paper’s assertion of a fundamental flaw is based on some over-simplified assumptions about how the bitcoin mining market works.
What's interesting about the foundation's forthcoming response — or lack thereof — is how it will advance the debate overwhether Bitcoin is a reliable non-sovereign internet currency, or merely the ultimate example of a fiat currency (that only exists because people believe in it) caught in a speculative bubble. Because if the Cornell researchers are right, and the people minting new Bitcoins can control the market for them, then Bitcoin is essentially worthless, because who would want to make transactions in a currency whose value was decided by a single entity?
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1,383,837,287 | 2013-11-07 15:14:47+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [307, 664, 956, 1678, 2192, 2541, 3472, 3574]} | {"Bitcoin": [29]} | GoCoin Opens for Business as Bitcoin's First Truly International Payment Processing Service, Receives $550,000 From Leading Angels | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gocoin-opens-business-bitcoins-first-151447428.html | Marketwired | http://www.marketwired.com/ | SINGAPORE and SANTA MONICA, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 7, 2013) - GoCoin (www.gocoin.com) today announced that it has raised a seed round of over $550,000 in funding to bring to market the first truly open and international platform to facilitate the purchase of goods and services across the world bought with Bitcoin, the increasingly popular digital currency. The seed funding comes from an impressive list of connected, global investors from Silicon Valley, Silicon Beach, Asia and Europe, including former Facebook and Amazon executive Owen Van Natta and Ooma founder Andrew Frame.
GoCoin will begin its expansion as the first true payment processing service for Bitcoin with an initial focus on Asian and South American countries, where the challenges of accepting credit cards and purchasing goods and services online between even neighboring countries can be especially difficult. In terms of market verticals, GoCoin will initially focus on providing Bitcoin payment processing for e-commerce, digital content and interactive/social gaming companies.
Co-founder Steve Beauregard will serve as GoCoin's CEO, and gaming pioneer Brock Pierce will serve as chairman of the board. Over the past few months, the GoCoin team has been quietly developing its technology with engineers in Singapore, Argentina and the U.S. The company is currently in testing with its first merchants in private beta and plans to officially launch publicly in November.
"As digital currency becomes more pervasive, it's imperative that software developers have advanced tools to fully integrate a scalable digital currency payment system across the globe. Merchants should be able to accept not just Bitcoin, but also other digital currencies as those emerge. GoCoin is both easy to implement and inexpensive to operate," said Steve Beauregard. "Our team of seasoned e-commerce veterans has designed GoCoin so high-volume merchants with complex back-end requirements can securely accept digital currency payments without fear of their internal systems being compromised."
"The future of currency is digital and the old payment systems used today were not designed for the Internet," said Pierce. "GoCoin will help Bitcoin go far beyond merchant acceptance; it will simplify cross-border commercial transactions."
The list of participating investors in GoCoin includes, but is not limited to:
• Owen Van Natta, former COO/CRO of Facebook and a seven-year Amazon executive
• Andrew Frame, founder and CEO of Ooma
• BitAngels, the first nationwide angel network for Bitcoin startups
• Stephens Investment Management
• Mikael Pawlo, CEO of Mr Green & Co AB and co-founder of Maltese online casino Mr Green LTD, through his investment company, Derzhava Holdings LTD
• Jonathan Congdon, co-founder and President at Beachbody LLC (marketers of P90X and other fitness brands)
• Ruvento Ventures, a Singapore/Russian venture capital firm
• Ronnie Wee, Managing Partner, IncuVest Pte. Ltd, a Singapore VC firm
• Gary Stiffelman, Partner at Los Angeles entertainment law firm Ziffen Brittenham LLP
• Demarest Ventures
• David Neuman, Owner, Blackrock Productions; former President, Current TV; former Media & Chief Programming Officer, CNN; former President, Walt Disney Television and Touchstone Television
For more information about the GoCoin payment gateway, please visithttp://www.gocoin.com.
About GoCoinThe GoCoin payment gateway makes it easier than ever for online and retail merchants to accept Bitcoin as a payment method. GoCoin enables international merchants to reap the benefits of accepting Bitcoin, while taking away the perceived risk of accepting digital currency. Founded in July 2013, GoCoin is headquartered in Singapore with offices in Santa Monica, California. For more information, please visithttp://www.gocoin.com. |
1,383,856,140 | 2013-11-07 20:29:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1817]} | {} | These Insects Have Been Having Sex For 165 Million Years | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/scientists-found-oldest-fossil-record-202958968.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | One sexual position has been good enough for the froghopper for 165 million years. Scientists have discovered the oldest fossil record of insect copulation.
You can see the fossil below. The male is on the right and the female is on the left.
Li S, Shih C, Wang C, Pang H, Ren D
Fossil records of mating insects are very rare, so scientists don't know much about the evolution of mating, but this fossil suggests that the froghopper has used the same method since the middle of the Jurassic period.
Dong Ren and his team from Capital Normal University discovered the fossil in northeast China and the study waspublished in PLoS Oneon Nov. 6.
Even though the insects in the fossil look like they are in a belly-to-belly position, the scientists can't rule out that they were actually using the side-to-side position that modern species of froghoppers use. The imperfect nature of fossil records makes it difficult for the scientists to determine the exact orientation of the froghoppers. Either way, the scientists say in the paper that both positions use the same kind of abdomen and genitalia twisting.
Below is a picture of a modern froghopper species mating:
Li S, Shih C, Wang C, Pang H, Ren D
Froghoppers get their name because they live in forests and hop around like frogs on leaves and shrubs. Froghoppers belong to a family of insects called Cercopoidea that includes about 3,000 species. The earliest fossil record of the modern froghopper dates back to the Paleocene age — about 60 million years ago. Scientists believe these modern insects evolved from those shown in the fossil.
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1,383,859,620 | 2013-11-07 21:27:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [9412]} | {} | Groupon Whiffs On Earnings, Stock Crashes ... Then Stages An Amazing Comeback | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live-groupon-earnings-205000377.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | AP
Groupon CEO Eric Lefkofsky
Grouponearnings are out!
The stock is down in after-hours trading after the company missed analyst estimates on revenue and gave worse than expected guidance.
An immediate 10% after-hour drop followed a 5% drop during the day. Since September the stock has been falling.
But, after the company's earnings call the stock made a comeback and was up ~1.5%.
The stock's turnaround seems to be thanks toa new planto allow more sellers on the platform.
In addition to announcing earnings, Groupon announced that it acquired Ticket Monster, an e-commerce company from Korea.
Here are the big numbers versus expectations:
• Revenues: $595 million versus $615.69 million expected .
• Earnings per share: $0.02 versus $0.01 expected.
• Guidance: Q4 EPS $0.00 to $0.02 versus $0.06 expected.
• Guidance: Q4 Revenue: $690-$740 million versus $723.68 million expected.
Groupon's core daily deals business — those emails you get every day — suffered another decline. Here is the daily deals revenue over time:
Groupon / BI
Here's the full earnings release:
Groupon Announces Third Quarter 2013 Results and Agreement to Acquire Ticket Monster
• Gross billings of $1.34 billion
• Revenue of $595.1 million
• GAAP operating income of $13.8 million; $39.2 million excluding stock compensation costs
• GAAP loss per share of $0.00; earnings per share of $0.02 excluding stock compensation costs
CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Groupon, Inc. (GRPN) today announced financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2013.
"Our Local business showed continued strength in the quarter, particularly in North America," said Eric Lefkofsky, CEO of Groupon. "Mobile adoption continued to increase in Q3, reflected in our record 9 million app downloads. We're pleased with our progress, but we still have work to do as we transform the business from our daily deal email roots to a full ecommerce marketplace."
"We're also excited to announce today that we've signed an agreement to acquire Ticket Monster, one of the leading ecommerce companies in Korea," added Lefkofsky. "Ticket Monster has been successful building a mobile commerce business in one of the largest markets in the world. It will serve as the cornerstone of our Asian business, bringing scale and ecommerce expertise to that region."
Third Quarter 2013 Summary
Gross billings, which reflect the total dollar value of customer purchases of goods and services, excluding any applicable taxes and net of estimated refunds, increased 10% globally to $1.34 billion in the third quarter 2013, compared with$1.22 billion in the third quarter 2012. North America growth of 20% and EMEA growth of 12% was offset by a 13% decline in Rest of World.
Revenue increased 5% to $595.1 million in the third quarter 2013, compared with $568.6 million in the third quarter 2012. North America revenue growth of 24% was offset by a 21% decline in EMEA and a 4% decline in Rest of World.
Gross profit was $359.6 million in the third quarter 2013, compared with $386.8 million in the third quarter 2012.
Operating income was $13.8 million in the third quarter 2013, compared with $25.4 million in the third quarter 2012. Operating income decreased $13.6 million compared with the second quarter 2013.
Operating income excluding stock compensation and acquisition-related costs, net, a non-GAAP financial measure, was$39.2 million in the third quarter 2013, compared with $50.5 million in the third quarter 2012. Operating income excluding stock compensation and acquisition-related costs, net, decreased $19.9 million compared with the second quarter 2013.
Revenue and operating profit in the third quarter 2012 included a one-time increase of $18.5 million related to breakage, or income related to unredeemed Groupons internationally, resulting from a tax ruling in Germany.
Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, was $62.3 million in the third quarter 2013, compared with $65.8 million in the third quarter 2012.
Third quarter 2013 net loss attributable to common stockholders was $2.6 million, or $0.00 per share, including stock compensation and acquisition-related costs, net, of $25.3 million ($17.0 million net of tax). Earnings per share excluding stock compensation and acquisition-related costs, net of tax, a non-GAAP financial measure, was $0.02 per share.
Operating cash flow for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2013 was $105.9 million. Free cash flow, a non-GAAP financial measure, was negative $27.0 million in the third quarter 2013, bringing free cash flow for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2013 to $22.3 million.
At the end of the quarter, Groupon had $1.1 billion in cash and cash equivalents.
Definitions and reconciliations of all non-GAAP financial measures are included below in the section titled "Non-GAAP Financial Measures" and in the accompanying tables.
Third Quarter Operating Highlights
• Global units:Consolidated units, defined as vouchers and products sold before cancellations and refunds, increased 9% year-over-year to 46 million. North America units increased 19%, EMEA units increased 1%, and Rest of World units were flat year-over-year.
• Active deals:At the end of the third quarter 2013, active deals in North America were estimated to be more than 65,000 on average, compared with more than 54,000 at the end of the second quarter 2013.
• Active customers:Active customers, or customers that have purchased a Groupon within the last twelve months, grew 10% year-over-year, to 43.5 million as of September 30, 2013, comprising 19.9 million in North America, 14.0 million in EMEA, and 9.6 million in Rest of World.
• Customer spend:Third quarter 2013 trailing twelve month billings per average active customer was $137, compared with $138 in the second quarter 2013.
• Mobile:In September 2013, North America achieved a milestone, with more than half of transactions completed on mobile devices. This contributed to the more than 40% of transactions completed on mobile devices in the month globally. More than 60 million people have now downloaded Groupon mobile apps worldwide, with more than 9 million people downloading them in the third quarter alone.
• Marketplace:The rollout of Groupon's marketplace ("Pull") continues to gain traction. In September 2013, approximately 6% of total traffic in North America was related to search activity, with customers that search spending over 25% more than those that do not.
Share Repurchase Program
During the third quarter of 2013, Groupon repurchased 770,900 shares of Class A common stock under its share repurchase authorization at an average price of $11.67 per share, for an aggregate purchase price of $9.0 million. Up to approximately $291 million of Class A common stock remains available for repurchase under the August 2013 share repurchase authorization. The program, which is intended to offset dilution from employee stock grants, terminates in August 2015.
Acquisition of Ticket Monster
Groupon also announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Ticket Monster, a Korean ecommerce company, for aggregate consideration of $260 million, including at least $100 million in cash, and up to $160 million in Groupon Class A common stock, with the final cash and stock allocation to be determined upon close.
Ticket Monster is a leading ecommerce company in South Korea, and a subsidiary of LivingSocial, Inc. Founded in 2010, the Company serves millions of customers with a broad range of product, local and travel offers, and is one of the fastest growing ecommerce companies in the region. Ticket Monster has more than $800 million of annualized billings.
"Ticket Monster is a great fit for Groupon. The team shares our vision, already leveraging a truly mobile marketplace as well as one that has little reliance on email," said Lefkofsky. "Ticket Monster is one of Korea's most recognized and trusted brands, and we're thrilled to have them join the family."
The transaction is currently expected to close in the first half of 2014, subject to regulatory approval by the Korean Fair Trade Commission and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.
Outlook
In the fourth quarter 2013, Groupon anticipates normal seasonal strength and strong holiday sales interest, in addition to email headwinds and further investment in marketing initiatives to drive adoption of the Pull marketplace. As a result, for the fourth quarter 2013, the Company expects revenue of between $690 million and $740 million, operating income excluding stock compensation and acquisition-related expenses of between $40 million and $60 million, and earnings per share excluding stock compensation and acquisition-related expenses, net of tax, of between $0.00 and$0.02. Stock compensation is expected to be approximately $30 million, or approximately $20 million net of tax.
As a result, Groupon now expects full year 2013 GAAP operating income of between $72 million and $92 million.
This outlook includes costs related to the acquisition of Ticket Monster. It does not assume any additional impact of this or other acquisitions or investments, or material changes in foreign exchange rates.
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1,383,865,234 | 2013-11-07 23:00:34+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1831]} | {} | Two tied to online drug market plead guilty to U.S. drug charges | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/two-tied-online-drug-market-plead-guilty-u-230126995.html | Reuters | https://www.reuters.com/ | By Aruna Viswanatha WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two men tied to an illegal online drug marketplace pleaded guilty to drug charges, U.S. prosecutors said on Thursday, a day after the alleged mastermind of the website indicated he would plead not guilty. An administrator of the Silk Road website, Curtis Green, pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute cocaine, and a vendor, Jacob Theodore George IV, pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute drugs including heroin, said Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland. "People who believe they can commit crimes anonymously using the Internet should reconsider," Rosenstein said in a statement. A lawyer for Green declined comment, and a lawyer for George did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The pleas came amid a crackdown by U.S. authorities on the use of virtual currencies for illegal activity. Last month, Ross William Ulbricht, who prosecutors say operated the Silk Road website, was arrested and FBI agents shut the website down. On Wednesday a lawyer for Ulbricht, who remains in custody, said his client would plead not guilty to drug trafficking, hacking and money laundering charges. A new website with the Silk Road name and appearance has opened for business. 'FLUSH' AND 'CHRONICPAIN' The Silk Road website, which was used to anonymously buy or sell illegal drugs, also offered guns and assassins for sale, and tutorials on hacking ATM machines, prosecutors said. Green, 47, who is also known as "Flush" and "chronicpain," was responsible for responding to complaints from buyers and sellers on Silk Road, mediating their disputes, and investigating any law enforcement activity on the website, according to prosecutors. Green helped an undercover agent find a buyer for one kilogram (2.2 lbs) of cocaine for around $27,000 in virtual Bitcoin currency, prosecutors said, and acted as a go-between on the deal. An undercover postal inspector delivered the drugs to Green at his home in Utah, officials said. George, a 32-year-old Maryland resident, was the first vendor selling illegal drugs on Silk Road to be arrested, officials said. He pleaded guilty on Wednesday, the government said. Green faces up to 40 years in prison and George faces up to 20 years. (Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Paul Simao) |
1,383,865,286 | 2013-11-07 23:01:26+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1831]} | {} | Two tied to online drug market plead guilty to U.S. drug charges | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/two-tied-online-drug-market-230034387.html | Reuters | http://www.reuters.com/ | By Aruna Viswanatha
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two men tied to an illegal online drug marketplace pleaded guilty to drug charges, U.S. prosecutors said on Thursday, a day after the alleged mastermind of the website indicated he would plead not guilty.
An administrator of the Silk Road website, Curtis Green, pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute cocaine, and a vendor, Jacob Theodore George IV, pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute drugs including heroin, said Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland.
"People who believe they can commit crimes anonymously using the Internet should reconsider," Rosenstein said in a statement.
A lawyer for Green declined comment, and a lawyer for George did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The pleas came amid a crackdown by U.S. authorities on the use of virtual currencies for illegal activity. Last month, Ross William Ulbricht, who prosecutors say operated the Silk Road website, was arrested and FBI agents shut the website down.
On Wednesday a lawyer for Ulbricht, who remains in custody, said his client would plead not guilty to drug trafficking, hacking and money laundering charges.
A new website with the Silk Road name and appearance has opened for business.
'FLUSH' AND 'CHRONICPAIN'
The Silk Road website, which was used to anonymously buy or sell illegal drugs, also offered guns and assassins for sale, and tutorials on hacking ATM machines, prosecutors said.
Green, 47, who is also known as "Flush" and "chronicpain," was responsible for responding to complaints from buyers and sellers on Silk Road, mediating their disputes, and investigating any law enforcement activity on the website, according to prosecutors.
Green helped an undercover agent find a buyer for one kilogram (2.2 lbs) of cocaine for around $27,000 in virtual Bitcoin currency, prosecutors said, and acted as a go-between on the deal.
An undercover postal inspector delivered the drugs to Green at his home in Utah, officials said.
George, a 32-year-old Maryland resident, was the first vendor selling illegal drugs on Silk Road to be arrested, officials said.
He pleaded guilty on Wednesday, the government said.
Green faces up to 40 years in prison and George faces up to 20 years.
(Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Paul Simao) |
1,383,866,760 | 2013-11-07 23:26:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1825]} | {} | Google Is Banning All Chrome Add-Ons That Don't Come From Its Chrome Web Store | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-banning-chrome-add-ons-232651167.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Photo Illustration By Steve Kovach
In the name of fighting bad guy hackers,Google on Thursday saidit will not allow its Windows Chrome browser to run any add-ons unless they are downloaded from its ownChrome Web store.
Unsanctioned add-ons will bebanned beginning in January.
Add-ons, which are also called extensions, are little apps that add extra functions to the browser. For instance, they can let you post stuff from the Web to your social media accounts or create to-do lists, etc.
Sometimes a cloud service will offer an add-on and let you install it right from its own web page. If that add-on isn't also in the Chrome Web store, this will be forbidden. However, enterprise departments will still be able to install add-ons through their own enterprise tools, Google said.
This comes on top of a new feature Google added last weekthat will let you reset your browsercompletely, including wiping out all add-ons you've downloaded. That way, if you think you've downloaded an evil one, you can get rid of it.
There's been some jaded comments across the Internet about the banned add-ons. Some people are saying thatGoogle will ban add-ons it doesn't like, like ones that let people download YouTube videos. We'll see.
PC World's Brad Chacos also points out thatGoogle doesn't store add-ons for free.
Developers who want to include their Chrome Web Storehave to pay a $5 registration fee—and if your Chrome Web Store-hosted app or extension generates income, Google will takea 5 percent cut of the revenue.
Still, many PC users could find that they like the trade-off: less choice for more security.
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1,383,881,526 | 2013-11-08 03:32:06+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1029]} | {} | Man pleads guilty to playing key drug site role | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/man-pleads-guilty-playing-key-210407940.html | Associated Press | https://apnews.com/ | BALTIMORE (AP) -- A Utah man pleaded guilty to a drug conspiracy charge Thursday for his role in an online black market known as the Silk Road that authorities say processed more than $1 billion worth of illicit business. The guilty plea from Curtis Clark Green, 47, comes one month after federal authorities shut down the drug-dealing website, which conducted business with tough-to-track digital currency and sought to protect the anonymity of its users by operating on an encrypted network. Green, whose lawyer identified the defendant as being from Spanish Fork, Utah, declined to comment after the plea hearing. His attorney also declined comment. Dressed in a white shirt and tie, and gripping a cane as he entered the courtroom, Green answered standard 'yes' or 'no' questions from the judge but made no detailed statement about the allegations. The website allowed users to anonymously browse through nearly 13,000 listings under categories like "Cannabis," ''Psychedelics" and "Stimulants" before making purchases using Bitcoin, a form of online currency. It offered various illegal services along with drugs, and as of July, had nearly 1 million registered users from around the world, according to court papers. A so-called hidden site, Silk Road used an online tool to mask the location of its servers and generated an estimated $1.2 billion since it started in 2011, authorities say. It was shut down when authorities arrested Ross William Ulbricht, a college-educated San Francisco man they allege masterminded the operation while hiding behind the alias of "Dread Pirate Roberts," an apparent reference to a main character in "The Princess Bride," the 1987 comedy film based on a novel of the same name. He was arrested in a branch of San Francisco's public library, where authorities say he was chatting online with a cooperating witness. Ulbricht, 29, who is also charged in Maryland in a failed murder-for-hire plot, was ordered held after a court appearance this week in New York. His lawyer said that his client is innocent and is not the person who used the "Dread Pirate Roberts" alias. Story continues The investigation was launched in 2011 in Baltimore, where agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations formed the "Marco Polo" task force — with representatives from other law enforcement agencies — to target Silk Road and its administrators. William Winter, the office's special agent in charge, said in a statement that his agents will continue to pursue crimes committed by users of "networks and digital currency designed to provide anonymity." Green, who used the aliases of "Flush" and "chronicpain," acknowledged as part of his guilty plea that he served as an administrator for the website. The position gave him access to the details of financial transactions conducted through the black market bazaar and also made him responsible for fielding questions and complaints from buyers and sellers and determining whether law enforcement officials were secretly poking around the site, the authorities said. Prosecutors say he also served as a middleman between a drug buyer who operated on Silk Road and an undercover agent who posed as a cocaine smuggler able to deal large quantities of the drug. The agent contacted Ulbricht, who directed Green and other website administrators to find dealers willing to purchase a high volume of drugs, authorities say. Green admitted helping the undercover agent hook up with a particular buyer who was active on the site; the vendor and undercover agent negotiated a cocaine deal for roughly $27,000, and Green agreed to have the package sent to him, according to prosecutors. He was arrested in January after the one-kilogram package was delivered to his house by an undercover U.S. Postal Service inspector. He faces up to 40 years in prison at his sentencing in February. His court appearance followed a similar plea Tuesday from Jacob George IV, an Edgewood, Md., man who admitted selling drugs via Silk Road. |
1,383,920,640 | 2013-11-08 14:24:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [84, 108, 343, 378, 1159, 1314, 1441, 1694, 1880, 2009, 2081, 2189, 2234, 2340, 2391]} | {"Bitcoin": [31]} | 18-Year-Old Reports $1 Million Bitcoin Theft From 'Bank' He Controlled — And Says He Can't Call The Cops | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/18-old-reports-1-million-142458461.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Instagram/grace_m_allen
An 18-year-old Australian says that he has had$1 million in Bitcoin stolen from the Bitcoin "bank" he was running, but he cannot go to the police because he worries that giving authorities the keys to investigate the case is the same as giving them control of the money itself, according to ABC Australia.
The man ran aBitcoin bank called Tradefortress.
Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed if the receiving party doesn't agree to the refund.ABC noted:
The bitcoin transaction trail is designed to be anonymous, which has led to speculation this was an inside job and that TradeFortress took the coins for himself.
But when asked by the ABC's AM he strenuously denied those accusations, and said that despite his $1 million loss he is unlikely to report the theft to the police.
"The police don't have access to any more information than any user does when it comes to bitcoin. Some say it gives them control of their money," TradeFortress said.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Tradefortress operated out of computers located in this apartment building in Hornsby, New South Wales:
Google Street View
It is possible to steal Bitcoin — an online currency that uses an uncrackable cryptography to make itself permanent — but it is difficult to hide the money afterward.Wired notes:
Bitcoin trades are public: all transactions are shared in a publicly available file called the Blockchain that’s posted to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network.
That public ledger makes it pretty tough for big-time criminals to launder money through the network. At least that’s what researchers at the University of California and George Mason University found when they studied the Bitcoin network by developing sophisticated tools to track how money was moving around it.
Meiklejohn and her fellow researchers tried some of those services out — sites with names like Bitcoin Laundry and Bitmix — and they report some pretty rough experiences. One service didn’t work. It simply returned the same Bitcoins, un-laundered.
Another service stole their money.
Nonetheless, Bitcoin theft is common enough to be a phenomenon with a history.Here is a site dedicated to tracking major Bitcoin thefts.
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1,384,123,320 | 2013-11-10 22:42:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [55, 164, 592, 650, 737, 824, 891, 1133, 1574, 1723, 1785, 1828]} | {"Bitcoin": [18, 60]} | If You Believe In Bitcoin, You Should Never Buy Anything In Bitcoin | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/believe-bitcoin-never-buy-anything-224208387.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | REUTERS/Stephen Lam
A chain of block erupters used for Bitcoin mining is pictured at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California, October 28, 2013.
Many Bitcoin believers think that the digital currency will one day become the pre-eminent currency of the internet. They basically see it becoming the internet's version of gold in that it's naturally scarce, independent, virtually impossible to manipulate, and crucially suited for a digital world when money ought to be able to be moved seamlessly and at no cost.
Well here's a tip: If you think that this is true, then never use Bitcoin in a transaction.
As more people have gotten into Bitcoin, the price has gone way up.
Virtually everyone who has ever bought anything in Bitcoin has been a huge loser, who would have been better suited just holding onto the Bitcoins instead.
Remember the pizza that was purchased for $25 in Bitcoins years back? Had the person not bought that pizza, it would be worth nearly $3 million. That purchase was a catastrophic decision, as that was probably the most expensive pizza of all time.
Of course this presents a Catch-22. How can Bitcoin become a real currency if it's not used in transactions? And why would anyone use it in transactions if becoming a real currency offers so much more price appreciation? This contradiction is a core problem, and it's a reason why it's probably doomed to fail (real currencies don't have this issue, since central banks prevent rapid price appreciation, and they mandate that the currency be used).
But really, if you're thinking that Bitcoin is going to be huge, it'd be insane and irresponsible to buy anything with it.
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1,384,123,320 | 2013-11-10 22:42:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [55, 164, 592, 650, 737, 824, 891, 1133, 1574, 1723, 1785, 1828]} | {"Bitcoin": [18, 60]} | If You Believe In Bitcoin, You Should Never Buy Anything In Bitcoin | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/finance.yahoo.com/news/believe-bitcoin-never-buy-anything-224208387.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | REUTERS/Stephen Lam
A chain of block erupters used for Bitcoin mining is pictured at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California, October 28, 2013.
Many Bitcoin believers think that the digital currency will one day become the pre-eminent currency of the internet. They basically see it becoming the internet's version of gold in that it's naturally scarce, independent, virtually impossible to manipulate, and crucially suited for a digital world when money ought to be able to be moved seamlessly and at no cost.
Well here's a tip: If you think that this is true, then never use Bitcoin in a transaction.
As more people have gotten into Bitcoin, the price has gone way up.
Virtually everyone who has ever bought anything in Bitcoin has been a huge loser, who would have been better suited just holding onto the Bitcoins instead.
Remember the pizza that was purchased for $25 in Bitcoins years back? Had the person not bought that pizza, it would be worth nearly $3 million. That purchase was a catastrophic decision, as that was probably the most expensive pizza of all time.
Of course this presents a Catch-22. How can Bitcoin become a real currency if it's not used in transactions? And why would anyone use it in transactions if becoming a real currency offers so much more price appreciation? This contradiction is a core problem, and it's a reason why it's probably doomed to fail (real currencies don't have this issue, since central banks prevent rapid price appreciation, and they mandate that the currency be used).
But really, if you're thinking that Bitcoin is going to be huge, it'd be insane and irresponsible to buy anything with it.
More From Business Insider
• Wall Street Analyst Explains Why Bitcoin Is Back From The Dead And Surging To All-Time Highs
• Bitcoin Is Going On An Astronomical Tear
• Bitcoin Is Going Totally Ballistic |
1,384,236,570 | 2013-11-12 06:09:30+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1261]} | {} | PRESS DIGEST- New York Times business news - Nov 12 | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/press-digest-york-times-business-060930848.html | Reuters | http://www.reuters.com/ | Nov 12 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories on the New York Times business pages. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. * Some major health insurers are so worried about the Obama administration's ability to fix its troubled health care website that they are pushing the government to create a shortcut that would allow them to enroll people entitled to subsidies directly rather than through the federal system. () * The new video game consoles from Sony and Microsoft about to hit store shelves are almost certain to be hot holiday gifts this year. The uncertainty for the games business is: What happens after Santa leaves? Sales of a new generation of consoles could be dented by tablets, smartphones and Facebook, which offer games at lower prices. () * Sunday was a bad day for Fantex, the fledgling company promoting initial public offerings of National Football League stars, as its first two prospects were sidelined. () * Liquidators seeking to recover money for investors in two hedge funds filed a lawsuit on Monday against Standard & Poor's, Fitch and Moody's. () * A new trial expected to start this week will determine how much Samsung has to pay for an important suit it lost against Apple. () * Bitcoin's emergence has brought a field of competitors. Already, dozens of ideas are jockeying for the market. The online payment system viewed by many insiders as having the best chance of supplanting bitcoin is Ripple. Ripple holds out the promise not just of a new currency, but also of a novel method to send money around the world. () * The Justice Department's prosecution of SAC Capital Advisors raises the question of who the victims of a violation are. () * After several years of lackluster performance, the hedge fund industry is increasingly turning to self-help programs, sometimes referred to as "mindware" products, to try to improve its game. () * Several ideas about using financial instruments and a for-profit approach in the world of non-profits are now taking hold. () |
1,384,258,326 | 2013-11-12 12:12:06+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [4655]} | {} | China's Leadership Wants The Markets To Play A Bigger Role In The Economy | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-leadership-wants-markets-play-121206215.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
The Great Hall of the People, where the Chinese Communist Party plenum is being held, is seen behinds red flags in Tiananmen square in Beijing November 12, 2013.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's ruling party pledged to let markets play a "decisive" role in allocating resources as it unveiled a reform agenda for the next decade on Tuesday, looking to overhaul the world's second-largest economy to drive future growth.
China aims to achieve "decisive results" in its reform push by 2020, with economic changes a central focus of overall reforms, the ruling Communist Party said in a communiqué released by state media at the end of a four-day closed-door meeting of the party's 205-member Central Committee.
"The core issue is to straighten out the relationship between government and the market, allowing the market to play a decisive role in allocating resources and improving the government's role ," the party said in its statement.
It added that it would set up a central leading team for "comprehensively deepening reform," responsible for "designing reform on an overall basis, arranging and co-ordinating reform, pushing forward reform as a whole, and supervising the implementation of reform plans".
In previous policy statements, the Communist Party had often described markets as playing a "basic" role in allocating resources, Xinhua news agency said, meaning the new language amounts to an upgrading of its role in the party philosophy.
"They are looking to break away from government control, allowing the markets to take the lead. In the past, prices and investment decisions were predominantly made by the government," said Dong Tao, Asia ex-Japan chief regional economist with Credit Suisse in Hong Kong.
"This is a revolutionary philosophy, by Chinese standards."
CAUTIOUS ON STATE-OWNED ENTERPRISES
Still, the party did not issue any bold reform plans for the country's state-owned enterprises (SOEs), saying that while both state firms and the private sector were important and it would encourage private enterprise, the dominance of the "public sector" in the economy would be maintained.
While the statement was short on details, it is expected to kick off specific measures by state agencies over the coming years to reduce the role of the state in the economy.
Historically, such third plenary sessions of a newly installed Central Committee have acted as a springboard for key economic reforms, and this one will also serve as a first test of the new leadership's commitment to reform.
Among the issues singled out for reform, the party said it would work to deepen fiscal and tax reform, establish a unified land market in cities and the countryside, set up a sustainable social security system, and give farmers more property rights - all seen as necessary for putting the world's second-largest economy on a more sustainable footing.
President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang must unleash new growth drivers as the economy, after three decades of breakneck expansion, begins to sputter, burdened by industrial overcapacity, piles of debt and eroding competitiveness.
Out of a long list of areas that the meeting was expected to tackle, most analysts have singled out a push towards a greater role of markets in the financial sector and reforms to public finances as those most likely to get immediate attention.
As part of that, Beijing is expected to push forward with capital account convertibility, and the 2020 target date for making significant strides on reform could set off expectations that the government will be looking to achieve breakthroughs on freeing up the closely managed yuan by then.
Few China watchers had expected Xi and Li to take on powerful state monopolies, judging that the political costs of doing so were just too high. Many economists argue that other reforms will have only limited success if the big state-owned firms' stranglehold on key markets and financing is not tackled.
But instead, the focus will be on indirect steps to limit the power of state behemoths and open up space for nimbler, private and foreign rivals - opening up key markets to private and foreign investment and deregulation tested in free trade zones.
Some reforms could face stiff resistance from powerful interest groups such as local governments or state-owned monopolies, people involved in reform discussions have said.
(Reporting by Beijing newsroom; Writing by Jason Subler and Tomasz Janowski; Editing by Neil Fullick)
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1,384,261,200 | 2013-11-12 13:00:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [781, 1234, 1262, 1271, 1395, 1657, 1698, 1866]} | {"Bitcoin": [23, 82]} | Alix Announces Initial Bitcoin Mining Exploration Transaction / Implementation of Bitcoin Exchange | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alix-announces-initial-bitcoin-mining-130000977.html | Marketwired | http://www.marketwired.com/ | VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Nov. 12, 2013) -ALIX RESOURCES CORP. ("Alix" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:AIX)(FRANKFURT:37N) (ARXRF-US CLEARING SYMBOL)is pleased to announce that it has entered into an innovative and creative service plan with Ridge Resources Ltd. for upcoming exploratory work on its Windy Property located 15 kilometers north of Cassiar, British Columbia (see news release, November 7, 2013). Pursuant to the plan, Alix will pay Ridge for its services in bitcoins on an ongoing basis and will continue to explore this avenue for funding future endeavours with other service providers.
To explore this model of payment more fully with its other service providers, Alix has also entered into an agreement with a private software vendor to license a Bitcoin exchange to be administered by Alix. Management anticipates that the exchange will be launched in early January 2014.
President and CEO Michael England states, "The growth of popularity in the bitcoin space as an alternate method of payment has led Alix to step into this very exciting market. This transaction is the first of its kind within the Canadian junior mining sector and positions Alix as a participant at an early stage in the global Bitcoin marketplace."
About Bitcoin:
Bitcoin is a distributed, peer-to-peer digital currency that functions without the intermediation of any central authority. Bitcoin payment processing fees are substantially lower than those of credit cards or money transfers, and while the exchange rate is highly volatile, on average bitcoins have appreciated rapidly in relation to other currencies. Notable recent events include:
• Bitcoin market cap at an all time high
• Bitcoin price broke 52-week highs in recent weeks
• World's first bitcoin ATM recently unveiled in Vancouver, BC
For more information regarding bitcoin please visitwww.Bitcoin.org.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD
Michael England, President
Forward-Looking Statement:
Some statements in this news release contain forward-looking information that involves inherent risk and uncertainty affecting the business of Alix Resources Corp. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. |
1,384,261,560 | 2013-11-12 13:06:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [678, 1544, 2426, 3094]} | {} | Ripple Labs Announces $3.5 Million Investment Round | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ripple-labs-announces-3-5-130600163.html | Marketwired | http://www.marketwired.com/ | SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 12, 2013) -Ripple Labs, developer of theRippleprotocol, announced that it has secured $3.5 million in additional funding from Core Innovation Capital, Venture 51, Camp One Ventures, IDG Capital Partners, and a number of unnamed individuals. Ripple is a decentralized, open source payment protocol powering a new global value web.
Ripple Labs will use the new funds to continue building developer and consumer tools that enhance and contribute to the Ripple ecosystem. This latest investment build on previous rounds of seed funding from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, IDG Capital Partners, FF Angel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, The Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, and Vast Ventures.
"Ripple removes friction from even the most basic of payment transactions, leveling the playing field for underserved individuals and emerging markets around the globe," said Arjan Schütte, founder and managing partner of Core Innovation Capital, a venture fund for FinTech companies serving the Emerging Middle Class. "We are investing in a veteran leadership team with a vision for using one of the most disruptive innovations in financial services to do good and empower individuals through financial inclusion."
Ripple enables fast, secure and nearly free transactions of any size, in any currency, around the world, with no chargebacks for merchants. As a distributed multi-currency exchange, Ripple pathways allow users to send money in one currency and receive it in another, including dollars, yen, euros or even Bitcoins. The Ripple payment system can be used for a wide range of applications, including merchant payments, money transfers, or remittances.
"Similar to the way in which email and other technologies drove the creation of a new global information web where anyone can communicate instantly and for free, Ripple is changing the way the world transacts with the first global value web," said Ripple Labs CEO Chris Larsen. "Ripple powers instant, affordable and secure transactions in any currency, making it as easy to move money as it is to send an email."
For more information about Ripple, please visithttp://www.ripple.com.
About Ripple Labs
Ripple Labs developed the Ripple protocol, which makes transacting as easy as emailing. The San Francisco-based startup is funded by Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, IDG Capital Partners, FF Angel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, The Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and Vast Ventures.
The software company's team of 30 is comprised of world-famous cryptographers, security experts, distributed network developers, Silicon Valley and Wall Street veterans. They contribute code to and promote the Ripple protocol, create SDKs and build free consumer apps. The team shepherds a movement to evolve finance so that payment systems are open, secure, constructive and globally inclusive.
About Ripple
Ripple is an open-source, distributed payment protocol. It enables free and instant payments to merchants, consumers and developers with no chargebacks and in any currency -- including dollars, yen, euros, and even Bitcoin. Ripple has the potential to transform payments to work like communications -- global, distributed, instant and free. Ripple is currently in beta. For more information about Ripple, please visithttp://www.ripple.com. |
1,384,275,146 | 2013-11-12 16:52:26+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [441]} | {"Bitcoin": [0]} | Bitcoin online exchange in Czech Republic hacked | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-online-exchange-czech-republic-165202215.html | Associated Press | https://apnews.com/ | PRAGUE (AP) -- An online exchange that trades the digital currency bitcoin in the Czech Republic says it has been attacked by hackers. The website Bitcash.cz says its security system was broken and bitcoins from its clients were stolen late Monday. It said in a statement Tuesday it has filed a legal complaint against the unknown hackers. It is not clear what amount of bitcoins disappeared and how many clients were affected by the theft. Bitcoin is a cryptography-based digital currency that advocates say is counterfeit-proof. Its price traded as high as $385 Tuesday afternoon. |
1,384,280,760 | 2013-11-12 18:26:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [179, 1119, 3485]} | {"Bitcoin": [18]} | Observations: Can Bitcoin Break Out? | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/observations-bitcoin-break-182600765.html | Moody's | https://www.moodys.com/ | Techies around the world were all atwitter last week—not just about Twitter's initial public offering, but also about a new record value of $395 for the digital currency bitcoin.
Bitcoin prices have spiked before. Earlier this year, the virtual currency hit a high of $230 after bank depositors in Cyprus were hit with taxes to bail out failing banks before crashing to $50. With one prominent blogger predicting last week that the value of a bitcoin could hit $1 million, the frenzy is starting to look like a modern-day tulip mania.
It's too soon to tell if the bitcoin is a passing technological fancy or could one day become a viable currency. So far the cyberscrip, which changes hands with no names attached, has been popular with techies, libertarians, and underworld types looking to elude governments.
Open-source sensation
Fueled by the cooperative spirit of the open-source computer movement, bitcoins took off after the 2008 financial crisis. The currency's creator, who uses the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, envisioned a means of exchange immune to the political or economic fortunes of any single country.
Bitcoins are backed neither by hard assets nor by governmental promises, like most conventional currencies. Buyers of bitcoins join a virtual network that collectively monitors itself. Each time a bitcoin is bought or sold, the transaction is added to a universal ledger, creating an audit trail visible to those on the network.
Here's the part techies love: Before a transaction can be recorded, a difficult math problem must be solved that requires pricey supercomputing time. The first programmer (a "miner" in bitcoin parlance) to answer the tricky question, which is essential to the validation process, broadcasts it to the other network members, who in turn verify it and post the bitcoin transaction. The winning team receives new bitcoins as a reward.
Monetary home brewing
However, this laborious, time-consuming process of confirming bitcoin's anonymous transactions—the ledger updates every 10 minutes—makes it unlikely that the virtual currency will ever be more than the monetary equivalent of home brewing: a niche hobby with limited mass appeal.
Currently, about 11.8 million bitcoin units exist in the virtual world, with a total value of $4.6 billion at the current dollar exchange rate. Trades take place online, and bitcoins are also accepted as payment by some online businesses such as the U.S. dating site OKCupid and the Chinese search engine Baidu.
Some adherents of the libertarian economic school see bitcoin as a realization of the belief that money can and should be managed by the private sector, rather than by governments as it is almost universally today. Most mainstream economists disagree: Chicago Fed economist François Velde recently called the bitcoin network an "automaton" that can't offer the stable store of value necessary for any successful currency.
China showing support
There's no doubt that bitcoin values are volatile, and thus ill-suited for ordinary commerce. Last week's spike in bitcoin prices is the latest twist in a lurid international tale featuring dealers in a range of black-market goods from drugs to body parts, with the FBI in pursuit.
Supporting players include the Chinese government, which has been promoting the digital currency on state-run TV. China renewed calls during last month's debt-ceiling standoff in Washington for nations to dethrone the dollar as the world's leading reserve currency. Bitcoin is hardly ready for reserve-currency status, but the Chinese support is telling.
The bitcoin thriller also includes a cameo appearance by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, famous as early investors in Facebook. The Winklevoss twins hold a bitcoin stake now worth about $46 million and have filed with the U.S. government to set up an exchange to trade the virtual currency. Cameron Winklevoss told a conference in New York Tuesday that he sees the capitalization of bitcoin hitting $400 billion.
Regulation looms
The most successful bitcoin exchange to date is called Mt. Gox, based in Japan. But Mt. Gox ran afoul of U.S. authorities for transmitting money without a license and had $5 million of its assets seized earlier this year. That forced Mt. Gox to temporarily suspend U.S. dollar withdrawals this summer, providing an opening for other bitcoin exchanges. Mt. Gox has since filed with the U.S. Treasury to formally become a currency exchange.
Regulatory issues aren't the only obstacle confronting bitcoin. Researchers at Cornell last week outlined a doomsday scenario under which a small group of programmers could take over the network and manipulate transactions to their own benefit. The researchers proposed a number of changes to bitcoin's operations to prevent such a takeover.
Even if those reforms aren't adopted, governments may force change. Last week's runup in the value of bitcoin was accompanied by reports from regional Fed banks predicting the cyberscrip will soon face increasing regulatory supervision. The U.S. Senate has also begun to ask how the government oversees virtual currencies.
This summer, Fed Chairwoman-designate Janet Yellen told a conference in Shanghai that bitcoin is subject to the same U.S. regulations as PayPal and other online payment systems. She may elaborate further during her Senate confirmation hearings Thursday.
Monica Gagnieris an Economics Writer at Moody's Analytics.More from Dismal Scientist:
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1,384,350,605 | 2013-11-13 13:50:05+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [594]} | {} | Analyst predicts 2014 A7 Apple TV, future in set-top boxes | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analyst-predicts-2014-a7-apple-135005186.html | Gigaom | http://gigaom.com/ | This year has seen many product refreshes for Apple (a aapl) — including the super high-end Mac Pro — but the Apple TV system has been suspiciously absent from the proceedings. But it’s coming soon, if an analyst reportspotlighted by 9to5Macis on target. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that in 2014, Apple TV will use an A7 chip, but that the long-term goal is a set-top box in 2015 or 2016. Both products are reasonably predictable — the A7 upgrade is an easy one to make, and Apple already has patents for a set-top box in place — so it’s worth keeping in mind.
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1,384,358,395 | 2013-11-13 15:59:55+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1971]} | {} | The Messy, Messy Relationship Between Income (and Race) and Obesity | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/messy-messy-relationship-between-income-155955371.html | The Atlantic | http://www.theatlantic.com/ | The irony of obesity is that, according to conventional wisdom, it's a disease for poor people in rich countries.Around the world, the countries with the highest estimated obesity rates include the U.S., the UK, Australia, Canada, Finland, Argentina, Chile and Mexico—except for the last two, all wealthy countries with GDP per capita above $30,000.
But within the U.S., the relationship between obesity and income is more complicated, according to a newPew Research Survey.
Pew looked at obesity rates by race along three earnings groups—130% of the poverty level; 130%-349% of poverty level; more than 350% of poverty level (poverty calculationshere). Here are the results...
Poorer women are the most likely to be obese among all ethnicities. But there are a few counter-intuitive surprises here. The richest men were, overall, more likely to be obese than the poorest groups. The groups with the lowest rates of obesity were rich white women and poor black men. Obesityriseswith income for black and Hispanic men, but itfallswith income for black and Hispanic women. The relationship is clearly more complicated than "a disease for poor people in a rich country."
As the House pushes a bill to cut food stamps by $40 billion, there's been greater attention paid to the relationship between food stamps, poverty, and obesity. The debate can be crudely summed up as: Are we paying poor people to become obese. The evidence suggests the answer is no. "There’sno clear evidencethatfood stampscontribute to obesity for most of the program's participants," Olga Kazanwrote, and a 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture'sreviewfound that food stamps didn't increase obesity among children or men, butadult womenare "2 to 5 percent more likely to become obese if they received food stamps for more than a year."
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1,332,444,236 | 2012-03-22 19:23:56+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [554, 692, 968, 1049, 2029, 2182, 2301, 2360]} | {"Bitcoin": [56]} | Should Africa Adopt a Shared Currency? And Should It Be Bitcoin? | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/africa-adopt-shared-currency-bitcoin-192356678.html | The Atlantic | http://www.theatlantic.com/ | Dekstop/Flickr
Iwrote on Mondayabout Sweden's move toward an ever-more-cashless society: The country is pointing the way -- with other European and North American countries following its lead -- toward ever-more-digital financial transactions.
Rüdiger Koch, a German software developer, wants to expand the cash-reduction trend to Africa. But he wants to take things a step further, too: Koch -- who is also a consultant to the bitcoin exchangeIntersango-- argues that Africa should adopt aeuro-style shared currency. And thatthat currency should be the Bitcoin.
AnarticleinTechnology Reviewexplores the validity of Kock's arguments. "In the United States and Europe," Tom Simonite reports, "Bitcoin's meteoric rise was mostly driven by speculators; hardly anyone used the currency to actually pay for goods and services." The currency's exchange value has plummeted -- from $30 last summer to around $5 right now. In February, Tradehill -- the largest exchange where Bitcoins could be traded for dollars --closed, citing "increasing regulation."
A Bitcoin economy might have better luck in Africa, though, Koch argues. The countries of Africa, after all, tend to differ from the U.S. and those of Europe in two significant ways: First, their centralized banking systems are (generally) weak. Despite quick growth in nations like Kenya and Nigeria, cash transactions are still standard -- "particularly," Simonite notes, "in rural areas where there are no ATMs and few people have bank accounts."
Second, mobile phones are on the rise in Africa. The number of mobile subscribershas grown almost 20 percentyear-over-year for the past five years, theGSM Associationreports, leading to expectations thatthere will be more than 735 million subscriberson the African continent by the end of 2012. "It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development," The Guardian's Killian Foxwrote last year, "but Africa is at the center of a mobile revolution."
So people are already carrying the tools that could facilitate Bitcoin-based exchanges, Koch notes. From there -- and particularly as prices for the phones that use Google's Android software continue to drop -- "the Bitcoin community," Koch argues, could create open-source technology that builds on mobile operating systems to create Bitcoin-based apps. Koch imagines "a design similar to the Bitcoin for Android app, which allows one person to transfer bitcoins to another by using a phone to snap a photo of a 2D bar code or QR code on the screen of another phone" -- creating a society and an economy in which "people could exchange money when they meet on the street."
Or, well, "money."
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1,384,376,940 | 2013-11-13 21:09:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [181, 368, 411, 826, 944]} | {"Bitcoin": [37]} | Here's Why The Winklevoss Twins LOVE Bitcoin | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-winklevoss-twins-love-210918757.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Michael Seto
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, famous for rattling legal sabers against Facebook, garnered some attention whenthey claimed to own 1% of all Bitcoins, the anonymous digital currency, earlier this year.
Speaking to Business Insider's executive editor Joe Weisenthal at IGNITION 2013, the twins laid out the reasons why they love Bitcoin.
In response to the criticism that Bitcoin is purely speculative, either Cameron or Tyler (we didn't catch which one) said that " people speculate in dollars too. This idea that people aren't betting when they hang on to a dollar is incorrect."
They also love the currency's transparency, explaining that "there is nothing predictable or transparent about the US dollar. No one has any idea what the Federal Reserve's going to do, how they operate."
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is fixed at 21 million coins that will come out incrementally and predictably over time.
"Bitcoin brings the promise of email to the finance sector. Now it's instant and effectively free to send money anywhere," the twins said.
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1,384,376,940 | 2013-11-13 21:09:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [181, 368, 411, 826, 944]} | {"Bitcoin": [37]} | Here's Why The Winklevoss Twins LOVE Bitcoin | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-winklevoss-twins-love-210918757.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Michael Seto
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, famous for rattling legal sabers against Facebook, garnered some attention whenthey claimed to own 1% of all Bitcoins, the anonymous digital currency, earlier this year.
Speaking to Business Insider's executive editor Joe Weisenthal at IGNITION 2013, the twins laid out the reasons why they love Bitcoin.
In response to the criticism that Bitcoin is purely speculative, either Cameron or Tyler (we didn't catch which one) said that " people speculate in dollars too. This idea that people aren't betting when they hang on to a dollar is incorrect."
They also love the currency's transparency, explaining that "there is nothing predictable or transparent about the US dollar. No one has any idea what the Federal Reserve's going to do, how they operate."
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is fixed at 21 million coins that will come out incrementally and predictably over time.
"Bitcoin brings the promise of email to the finance sector. Now it's instant and effectively free to send money anywhere," the twins said.
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1,384,437,634 | 2013-11-14 14:00:34+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [219, 1877, 2151]} | {"Bitcoin": [24]} | Alix Provides Update on Bitcoin Exchange and Golden Zone Property | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alix-provides-bitcoin-exchange-golden-140034067.html | Marketwired | http://www.marketwired.com/ | VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Nov 14, 2013) -ALIX RESOURCES CORP. ("Alix" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:AIX)(FRANKFURT:37N) (ARXRF-US CLEARING SYMBOL)is pleased to provide an update regarding its planned Bitcoin exchange launch anticipated in Q1 2014 (see news release, November 12, 2013). Completion of the advanced platform is anticipated shortly with a beta version to begin real time testing in December 2013. With bitcoin usage recently exceeding all-time highs, Alix will provide users with a secure, reliable and powerful trading platform to the Canadian bitcoin market.
Alix is also pleased to announce it has incurred sufficient expenditures to earn 51% of the Golden Zone gold property, located in the Chulitna mineral belt of Alaska. A NI43-101 resource estimate for the Golden Zone property reports 10,264,327 tonnes (11,294,000 tons) of measured, indicated and inferred material averaging 1.44 g/T Au and containing 431,389 ounces of gold, 2,214,517 ounces of silver and 6,081 tonnes (6,689 ton; 13,378,000 lbs) of copper (see news release, January 5th2012).
Michael England, CEO & Director states, "This is a very exciting time for Alix, both with having earned 51% of Golden Zone and also with the fast approaching launch of our bitcoin exchange. While mineral exploration continues to be our main focus, we are confident that increasing shareholder value and financing our projects will be possible through the bitcoin exchange."
There are currently two bitcoin exchanges in Canada. Alix will join this competitive market and is confident in utilizing the following principles to create a valuable product for its users.
• Security
The exchange will utilize industry standard practices such as DDOS protection, cold storage & two-factor authentication to ensure that all exchange activity and information is well secured.
• Over-Compliance
While Bitcoin is not heavily regulated in Canada, Alix plans to take a proactive approach to ensure all regulatory and financial requirements are met. Coming from the public sector, Alix is already very familiar with strict compliance requirements.
For more information regarding Bitcoin & Alix's involvement, please visit:www.AlixResources.com/bitcoin
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD
Michael England, President
Forward-Looking Statement:
Some statements in this news release contain forward-looking information that involves inherent risk and uncertainty affecting the business of Alix Resources Corp. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. |
1,384,491,660 | 2013-11-15 05:01:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [15, 69, 181, 269, 462, 542, 602, 800, 866, 917, 1285, 1319, 1697, 1831, 1983]} | {"Bitcoin": [18, 51]} | Buy Anything With Bitcoin Anywhere Online With New Bitcoin Proxy Buying Service Bitsumo | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/buy-anything-bitcoin-anywhere-online-050100449.html | null | https://guce.yahoo.com/terms?locale=en-US | Anyone can use Bitcoin to buy anything online with recently launched Bitcoin service Bitsumo.com.
November 3rd, 2013 /MarketersMedia/ -- In early 2013Bitsumo.comwas launched; a new Bitcoin proxy buying service which enables anyone worldwide to buy anything online with Bitcoin. Bitsumo imposes no restrictions on the order value, or quantity and they work 24/7 guaranteeing to process all orders within 24 hours. The Bitsumo platform acts as a middleman between Bitcoiners and online merchants worldwide. Using Bitsumo`s service instead of a Bitcoin exchange to purchase goods and services online with Bitcoin has a number of key benefits: no additional risk for users, no waiting for transactions, no banking fees, no extra paper work and no loss in purchasing power. With the recent surging of the Bitcoin to USD exchange rate Bitsumo is a welcome addition to the Bitcoin ecosystem; enabling consumers to use their Bitcoin to buy anything online worldwide.
The purchasing process forBitsumo users has been designed by the team to be as easy for the end user as possible. The customer submits an order and Bitsumo calculates the total price including fees and shipping. Bitsumo then sends the buyer a BitPay payment link: the user then enters their shipping information and sends the Bitcoin payment to the designated Bitcoin wallet address. Bitsumo then purchases the item on behalf of the user with the customer`s shipping information, and sends the customer their receipt and tracking number. With Bitsumo`s 24 hour order processing guarantee and the 24/7 availability of their staff, the platform`s dedication to their customers` needs is obvious.
Concurrent with the rapid value increase of Bitcoin over the last two weeks many innovative new services are appearing to serve the community. Bitsumo is one such platform. With Bitcoin showing no signs of slowing, a service as dedicated to serving its customers as much as Bitsumo no doubt has a big role to play in the thriving Bitcoin ecosystem of the future.
Visithttps://bitsumo.com/for more information.
Contact InfoName: Bitsumo SupportEmail: support@bitsumo.com
###This announcement is sourced from MarketersMedia[Link].
This announcement is distributed by Thomson Reuters on behalf of Thomson Reuters clients.The owner of this announcement warrants that:(i) the releases contained herein are protected by copyright and other applicable laws; and(ii) they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of theinformation contained therein.Source: MarketersMedia via Thomson Reuters ONEHUG#1743468 |
1,384,538,400 | 2013-11-15 18:00:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [115, 600, 970, 1131, 1324, 1646, 1971, 2381, 2944]} | {"Bitcoin": [38, 93]} | KnCMiner Sells $3M of Top-of-the-Line Bitcoin Digital Mining Machines in Record Four Days of Bitcoin Trading Frenzy | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kncminer-sells-3m-top-line-180000309.html | Marketwired | http://www.marketwired.com/ | STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN--(Marketwired - Nov 15, 2013) - KnCMiner (www.KnCMiner.com/), a manufacturer of state-of-the-art Bitcoin mining machines, today disclosed that active orders and pre-orders for its Saturn and Jupiter rigs are now officially sold out, with demand meeting the company's initially scheduled production of 5,000 units. KnCMiner's sales were capped by a frenetic period of sales in just four days -- from Nov. 7 to 10, 2013 -- during which the company accepted $3 million in orders for all of its November supply. Over the same period of time, the value of popular digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin saw an increase by nearly 27 percent, from $264 USD to $336 USD, while reaching a peak value of $395 and trading volume of 14,000 over that time.
"While we have seen a significant increase in demand for our line of machines from the last quarter to this one, what happened in the last four days has been unprecedented for us, maybe unprecedented anywhere in the Bitcoin mining industry. In four short days, we pushed $3 million of equipment out the door," said KnCMiner CEO Andreas Kennemar. "The increased activity around Bitcoin in just half a week undoubtedly had a sizable impact on our sales. We're now focusing on doing everything we can to meet the demand we expect we will continue to receive, especially as Bitcoin's popularity continues to soar."
Subsequent to selling out its production supply for November in just a matter of days, KnCMiner also sold out a $600,000 supply of upgrade modules inunderfive minutesto existing customers who already have rigs. KnCMiner has produced almost $29 million in total global sales of its Bitcoin mining rigs to 120 different countries in the company's seven short months of existence since April 2013, rapidly going from market entry to market leader. The company will soon begin taking pre-orders again to meet this historic demand by miners who are participating in the new "digital gold rush."
KnCMiner offers Bitcoin mining hardware that is faster and more efficient at producing the virtual cryptocurrency, at competitive prices, while keeping energy costs lower and mining areas cooler. KnCMiner has partnered with the biggest names in supercomputing, including a recent partnership with Alchip Technologies, to deliver rigs that can hash faster and more efficiently than any others on the market. KnCMiner's line of Bitcoin speciality machines, including the popular Jupiter and Saturn models, contain proprietary technology with custom-engineered ASIC that provide the highest production performance on the market with energy-saving features that are unique to the product line.
For more details about KnCMiner, and specific lines of machines such as the Jupiter and Saturn, please visitwww.KnCMiner.com.
About KnCMinerKnCMiner is a Swedish company founded in 2013 as a joint venture between ORSoC AB and Kennemar & Cole AB. KnCMiner produces a popular line of machines to help Bitcoin producers mine the digital cryptocurrency more effectively and more efficiently at overall lower cost. For more information, please visitwww.KnCMiner.com. |
1,384,552,800 | 2013-11-15 22:00:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [339, 688, 1030, 1045, 2092, 2128, 2233, 2507, 2885, 3003, 3136, 3285, 3363, 3421, 3548, 4168, 4476, 4614, 4778]} | {} | Battle of the Beasties | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/battle-beasties-220000558.html | Morningstar | http://www.morningstar.com/ | The FinalistsYesterday, Morningstar's researchers debated which fund had the most intimidating discussion of risk factors in its prospectus. They realized almost immediately that the winner would be an exchange-traded fund, as, try as they might, conventional mutual funds can't match ETFs for bizarre.
Their two finalists were Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust and ProShares Ultra VIX Short-Term Futures ETF (UVXY).
It's an inspired duo. I'll go one step further. These are the industry's strangest funds, period. Not just for their risk factors, but also for their investment complexity and for the wackiness of their performance.
Investment ComplexityBoth funds score stunningly well here.
The Bitcoin Trust holds "a digital commodity based on an open source cryptographic protocol existing on the online, end-user-to-end-user network hosting the public transaction ledger, known as the 'Blockchain,' and the source code comprising the basis for the cryptographic and algorithmic protocols governing the issuance of and transactions in Bitcoins (the 'Bitcoin Network')."
For its part, the ProShares fund seeks to double the daily performance of an index that indirectly measures the collective expectation for the level of stock-market volatility over the next month. Per Wikipedia, VIX "is calculated as the square root of the par variance swap for a 30-day term initiated today. Note that the VIC is the volatility of a variance swap and not that of a volatility swap." Noted.
There you have it. Two funds, each as natural as Donald Trump's hair and about as complicated. One fund rises and falls based upon the value of a currency that is supported neither by a tangible asset nor an entity that can raise revenue, and the other rises twice and falls twice based on the performance of an index that was built by mathematicians. A derivative of a derivative, versus a derivative of a derivative of a derivative.
Verdict: Narrow victory for ProShares. The ProShares fund goes one derivative further, and it's leveraged at that. Although for fancy math, its "kernel-smoothed estimator" can't touch Bitcoin's code creators.
PerformanceBitcoins' spot price over the trailing 12 months:
The total return of the ProShares fund:
Verdict: Draw. Bitcoin prices are up well over 1,000% for the period, including a week with a 65% loss. Impressive. The 93% decline suffered by the ProShares fund is just as good, however. For this competition, riches to rags counts the same as rags to riches.
ProspectusTwo tree-killers. Bitcoin ETF's prospectus numbers 95 pages. The ProShares fund's prospectus is even longer, at 138 pages, as it shares the territory with a nonleveraged version of the VIX index fund. (I attempted to print the full prospectuses from each fund, but near the end of the ProShares job, after 40 minutes of laboring, the printer froze in protest.)
Discussion of risk factors for the Bitcoin Trust runs 18 pages. Included is the following:
The loss or destruction of a private key required to access a Bitcoin may be irreversible. The Trust's loss of access to its private keys or its experience of a data loss relating to the Trust's Bitcoins could adversely affect an investment in the Shares.
If a malicious actor or botnet obtains control in excess of the processing power on the Bitcoin Network, such actor or botnet could manipulate the source code of the Bitcoin Network or the Blockchain …
The acceptance of the Bitcoin Network software patches or upgrades by a significant, but not overwhelming, percentage of the users and miners in the Bitcoin Network could result in a fork in the Blockchain, resulting in the operation of two separate networks until such time as the forked Blockchains are merged.
ProShares once again wins the paper battle, checking in with a 22-page risk disclosure. But can it beat the botnets?
Due to the compounding of daily returns, the Geared Fund's returns over periods longer than a single day will likely differ in amount and possibly even direction from the two times (2x) the index return for the period
The use of leveraged positions could result in the total loss of an investor's investment.
Verdict: Decisive victory for Bitcoin. Having an index fund that might go to zero, and that can move in the opposite of its intended direction, is a brilliant accomplishment for ProShares. Full credit for crazy. However, that disclosure is sadly standard, holding true of many other leveraged daily ETFS as well. Whereas the kookiness of Bitcoin's ETF is a special sort of kookiness.
A narrow loss, a draw, and a decisive victory in the three equal-weighted sections make the Bitcoin Trust the overall winner. Before conducting this exercise, I had thought that I might need the Winklevoss connection to break a tie, but not so. Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust wins the award as the fund industry's nuttiest fund even without help from its parents.
Completing the StoryFrom a fund-industry trade publication about outflows from domestic large-growth stock funds*, even as stock fund sales overall are booming:
* The article says "large-cap" but the author must mean "large-growth," because that's in the headline and because domestic large-blend and large-value funds have positive net sales.
What could help domestic large-cap funds bounce back with higher flows is to sustain good performance, according to [Lipper Analytic's Jeff] Tjornehoj. He points out that year-to-date, domestic large-cap funds have a 24.5% return, which is only a handful of percentage points off the 29.5% that small-caps have gained for the year.
Tjornehoj notes that investors' wariness of domestic large-caps grew after the strategies had been marketed as products that could hedge against wild market swings, but then got hit just as hard as small-cap funds during the financial crisis. He adds that the fund industry also began pushing retail alternatives and bonds, causing investors to move away from domestic products in general.
"Investors can have long memories and [the financial crisis] occurred at a very challenging time," Tjornehoj says. "The retirement for the first wave of baby boomers was coming up and their portfolios got crushed."
True enough, in its way. Also true, however, is that of the category's $19 billion in outflows this year, $12 billion have come from a single fund, American Funds Growth Fund of America (AGTHX). In addition, $5 billion has gone into large-growth ETFs. So, aside from the redemptions that are occurring at Capital Research, and including ETFs, category sales are about flat for the year. Still disappointing given the rebound in stock fund sales, but better than portrayed.
John Rekenthaler has been researching the fund industry since 1988. He is now a columnist for Morningstar.com and a member of Morningstar's investment research department. John is quick to point out that while Morningstar typically agrees with the views of the Rekenthaler Report, his views are his own. |
1,384,560,797 | 2013-11-16 00:13:17+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1348]} | {} | UK investigates huge spam attack on bank customers' computers | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uk-investigates-huge-spam-attack-001317100.html | Reuters | https://www.reuters.com/ | REUTERS - Cybercrime investigators are looking into a barrage of spam sent to millions of British banking customers designed to freeze their computers and demand a ransom, Britain's National Crime Agency said on Friday. The agency, which began operating only last month, said its National Cyber Crime Unit had become "aware of a mass email spamming event which is ongoing, where people are receiving emails that appear to be from banks and other financial institutions." The agency said it considered the attack a "significant risk." It added that while the spam emails may be sent out to "tens of millions of UK customers," they appear to be targeted mainly at small and medium-sized businesses. The spam carries an attachment that appears to be correspondence related to the text of the email - such as a voice mail or fax or details of a purported suspicious transaction or invoice seeking payment, the agency said. In reality, the agency said, the attachment injects a malicious program - malware - into the computer, which opens it as well as the local network to which the machine is connected. Once triggered, a program called "Cryptolocker" that the crime agency described as "ransomware," proceeds to encrypt the files on the user's machine and the local network. Once encrypted, the computer displays a message demanding the payment of 2 Bitcoins - an electronic currency currently worth 536 pounds, or about $865 - in return for the key to unlock the encryption. The UK crime agency said it advised users not to pay the ransom and warned that even if it were paid, there was no guarantee the encryption key would be turned over. The spam attack was reported just as UK financial institutions were conducting a large-scale cybersecurity exercise, code-named "Walking Shark 2," The exercise was being coordinated by the British Treasury and the Bank of England. (Reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by Alistair Bell and Peter Cooney) |
1,384,695,480 | 2013-11-17 13:38:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [66, 173, 194, 238, 421, 510, 572, 916, 1060, 1106, 1150, 1259, 1508, 1594, 1668, 1964, 2226, 2347, 2426, 2467, 2579, 2652, 3136, 3377, 3845, 3894, 3934, 4050, 4107, 4410, 4619, 4709, 4887, 4927, 5522, 5571, 5777, 5822, 5877], "BTC": [2529, 2706]} | {"Bitcoin": [3, 55]} | If Bitcoin Is So Secure, Why Have There Been Dozens of Bitcoin Bank Robberies And Millions In Losses? | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-secure-why-dozens-bitcoin-133850174.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Michael Karshis / Flickr, CC
One of the most powerful myths about Bitcoin — the encrypted, independent online currency that's become a huge trend in recent months — is that Bitcoin is "secure."
Bitcoin.org, the semi-official voice of the Bitcoin community, says "the whole system is protected by heavily peer-reviewed cryptographic algorithms like those used for online banking. No organization or individual can control Bitcoin, andthe network remains secure even if not all of its users can be trusted."
But Bitcoin is not secure.
There have been dozens of robberies of Bitcoin banks and exchanges, and millions of dollars have been lost.
To put that in perspective, if robbers were routinely walking into brick-and-mortar banks and taking millions of dollars, with zero consequences and no arrests, it would make huge headlines every day. The media would be on high alert for the next heist.
But on the Internet, Bitcoin thefts worth hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars happen on a weekly basis and no one cares.
Here are a few recent examples of Bitcoin robberies, and then we'll explain why Bitcoin is not 100% "secure."
• The Chinese BitcoinGBL went offline earlier this month, taking $4.1 million in users' accounts with it.
• In Australia, aBitcoin exchange run by an 18-year-old user named "Tradefortress,"claims to have lost $1 million of his users' money.
• Also in November, a Czech exchange,Bitcash.cz, declared that hackers had made offwith an undisclosed amount stored in its users' Bitcoin wallets.
• In September,Bitfloor announced that it had lost $250,000in hacked Bitcoins.
• Last year$228,845 was stolen from a trading platform known as Bitcoinica.
YouTube / Renee Pinnell
Ross Ulbricht
Perhaps the biggest heist was pulled off by the U.S. government. After Ross Ulbricht, the alleged "Dread Pirate Roberts" who ran the online drugs market Silk Road was arrested by the FBI, authorities reported they hadseized nearly $29 million in Bitcoinscontrolled by him. Techdirt later noted thatsome of the money may have belonged to users who did business on his site, and not all the business transacted there was illegal.
Don't hold you breath for refunds.
Here's a website devoted to listing dozens ofBitcoin robberies through 2012. In 2011, Ars Technica reported on this description ofwhat it is like to be the victim of Bitcoin theft:
The user known as "allinvain" is a long-time contributor to the Bitcoin forums. He says he's been mining Bitcoins for over a year, and had amassed a fortune of 25,000 BTC. This was a modest sum a few months ago, when Bitcoins were worth pennies, but over the last two months the value of a Bitcoin skyrocketed to around $20, which means 25,000 BTC would have been worth half a million dollars. "I remember watching the price like a hawk," he wrote.
And then disaster struck. "I just woke up to see a very large chunk of my bitcoin balance gone," he wrote. "Needles [sic] to say I feel like I have lost faith in bitcoin." He speculated that a Windows security flaw may have allowed the culprit to gain access to his digital wallet. "I feel like killing myself now," he said.
Bitcoin is vulnerable in the same way any other online asset is vulnerable: Passwords can be stolen or guessed, accounts can be hacked. Most of the thefts involve hacking into users' accounts.Bitfloor's description of how it lost $250,000in Bitcoin is typical. A hacker found an unencrypted copy of the coded keys to users' wallets:
Last night, a few of our servers were compromised. As a result, the attacker gained accesses to an unencrypted backup of the wallet keys (the actual keys live in an encrypted area). Using these keys they were able to transfer the coins. This attack took the vast majority of the coins BitFloor was holding on hand. As a result, I have paused all exchange operations.
In fact, Bitcoin defenders say this is exactly the point. Bitcoin isn't insecure — you are!
Here'sBitcoin.org's answer to that very question on security:
Although these events are unfortunate, none of them involve Bitcoin itself being hacked, nor imply inherent flaws in Bitcoin; just like a bank robbery doesn't mean that the dollar is compromised. However, it is accurate to say that a complete set of good practices and intuitive security solutions is needed to give users better protection of their money, and to reduce the general risk of theft and loss.
The idea that Bitcoin is "secure" even though it can be stolen is a bit like saying that gold is "secure," even if it is being spirited away by gangsters. They can'tdestroythe gold, after all.
What they really mean is that Bitcoins themselves cannot be copied or faked, like counterfeit bills. Anyone receiving a Bitcoin can be confident that it is real and valuable.
Loco Steve / Flickr, CC
But that aspect of its security — the permanence of the value in the transaction — turns out to be Bitcoin's biggest security flaw. Once a Bitcoin transaction has been approved by both sides, it cannot be reversed without the permission of the receipient. So when hackers engineer the transaction, the cash is gone forever.
That'snotwhat happens with traditional currency. In the U.S., if your bank is robbed or even if the bank goes out of business, the FDIC backs up the lost deposits and replaces your money,up to $250,000 per bank.
And then there isthis new theory from Cornell Universitywhich posits that there is an incentive in the system for users to cooperate and hoard their coins until they control a majority of available Bitcoins. At that point, the currency collapses.
Bitcoin is only as "secure" as the fallible, ill-intentioned users who open accounts, create passwords and covet their fellows' wallets.
Which is to say, not especially secure.
More From Business Insider
• Bitcoin Hits $600
• Here's The Argument That Bitcoin Is Collapsing Before Our Very Eyes
• BERNANKE: Bitcoin 'May Hold Long-Term Promise' |
1,384,788,900 | 2013-11-18 15:35:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [11, 283, 543, 724, 2371, 2455, 2465]} | {"Bitcoin": [25]} | Here's The Argument That Bitcoin Is Collapsing Before Our Very Eyes | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-argument-bitcoin-collapsing-very-153531558.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Clarkmoody
Bitcoin is surging day after day, and believers in the virtual currency are feeling a sense of increasing vindication.
Further cementing the meme that bitcoins are becoming "for real" are today's hearings in the Senate about their use.
But maybe instead of becoming real, Bitcoin is collapsing before our very eyes.
That's the provocative thesisput forth by Izabella Kaminska of FT Alphaville.
When she looks at the above, she doesn't see mass adoption: She sees a gigantic short-squeeze caused by a state of crisis in the world of Bitcoin.
Among her points:
• The price started surging after the Silk Road bust, and a number of bitcoins went dark, creating an extreme shortage and a challenge for anyone who had Bitcoin liabilities.
• There's been arash of bitcoin thefts.
• There's been a computer virus spreading, demanding people fork over bitcoins.
• And finally she adds, there's been some major breakthroughs this year in the "mining" of bitcoins (bitcoins are mined by setting your computer to solve math problems), which has crushed the margins for traditional miners, pushing them out of the market.
All of this creates a situation where the traditional players in the market are totally scrambling to either buy obtain bitcoins (because of the shortage) or have been pushed out of mining.
On this last point, she writes:
To keep conventional miners incentivised to stay in the mining operation — at least until everyone transfers to the new technology — the price has to go up instead. However, as the chart above shows, prices are not yet high enough to keep conventional miners in the game. The consequences of that, we would imagine, are that the mining peer network may have been greatly reduced, creating something of a cartel-like effect, due to the lack of competition.
The super spike suggests the market is now evolving to somehow attract back conventional miners so as to defend the decentralised market from the destablising effects of miner concentration — more easily done now that there is a supply deficit which is potentially choking the system. This can only be done, however, with higher prices and/or the roll-out of the new technology.
Kaminska is one of the smartest thinkers in the game on this stuff.Go read her full post, and then read all of the other posts she's written about the subject.
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• The Bitcoin Insanity Continues — Prices Top $450
• New York Will Be Holding Hearings On Bitcoin
• Bitcoin Prices Are Going Insane |
1,384,795,200 | 2013-11-18 17:20:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1663]} | {} | Marmots on a Plane and Other Intriguing Things | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/marmots-plane-other-intriguing-things-172000158.html | The Atlantic | http://www.theatlantic.com/ | 1.NASA launches theMars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission today.
"Mars is a complicated system, just as complicated as the Earth in its own way. You can't hope, with a single spacecraft, to study all aspects and to learn everything there is to know about it. With MAVEN, we're exploring the single biggest unexplored piece of Mars so far."
2.IBM's call center research and optimization services.
"This text-analysis tool takes information from call center agent records, identifies customer concerns, provides early warning capabilities and mines data for trends and patterns."
3.The strange dilemmas posed by emotional support animals for nervous airplane passengers.
"Delta says it allows rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, birds and marmots."
4.On OutKast's southern futurism.
"Rap had seen afro-futurist eccentrics before, but since hard-core hit in ’94, no one but Kool Keith had dressed so flamboyantly... Andre had reached that rarefied level of 'I don't give a fuck' that Kanye West has frantically sought since his first Givenchy kilt. His clothes weren’t a bug-out costume or artistic pose; they felt as creatively surreal as the music. No one on earth or Alpha Centauri could have convincingly pulled them off."
5.To understand Apple's success, think about the pace of the under-the-hood optimizations they've made in the iPad Mini.
"Just one year ago, those were the compromises Apple was forced to make. They could shrink the year old iPad 2 into the Mini form factor, or go retina and A6X with a thicker and heavier battery. This year, there are no compromises, there is noor."
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1,384,795,200 | 2013-11-18 17:20:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [45, 162, 5123, 5133]} | {"Bitcoin": [10]} | BERNANKE: Bitcoin 'May Hold Long-Term Promise' | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bernanke-bitcoin-may-hold-long-172034587.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | REUTERS/ Tim Chong
The beautiful thing about Bitcoin, digital currency enthusiasts will tell you, is that it doesn't have a central bank.
So with eyes on today's Bitcoin Senate hearing, where does the world's most powerful central banker stand on the elusive cryptocurrency?
Now we know. Ahead of the meeting, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernankehas released a letterto help guide the senate . Quartz's Zachary Seward called it a "cautious blessing," with Bernanke acknowledging the Fed doesn't have the authority to supervise virtual currencies, but that they " may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.”
Here's Bernanke'sfull letter(via Quartz):
Dear Senators:Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding virtual currencies. As you noted, virtual currencies have been receiving increased attention from U.S. authorities over the past several months.
Historically, virtual currencies have been viewed as a form of “electronic money” or area of payment system technology that has been evolving over the past 20 years. Over time, these types of innovations have received attention from Congress as well as U.S. regulators. For example, in 1995, the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings on “the future of money” at which early versions of virtual currencies and other innovations were discussed. Vice Chairman Alan Blinder’s testimony at that time made the key point that while these types of innovations may pose risks related to law enforcement and supervisory matters, there are also areas in which they may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.
Although the Federal Reserve generally monitors developments in virtual currencies and other payments system innovations, it does not necessarily have authority to directly supervise or regulate these innovations or the entities that provide them to the market. In general, the Federal Reserve would only have authority to regulate a virtual currency product if it is issued by, or cleared or settled through, a banking organization that we supervise. Given the Federal Reserve”s authority and the manner in which virtual currencies have developed, the Federal Reserve has focused primarily on a supervised banking organization’s role in the products’ sale and distribution, as well as the applicable regulations, such as Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) /anti-money laundering (AML) requirements.
Policies, Procedures, Guidance or Advisories
In March 2013, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued guidance to clarify that an administrator or exchanger of virtual currency is generally considered a money transmitter under definitions and therefore subject to BSA requirements?’ The Federal Reserve’s supervisory expectations and guidance related to compliance for bank transactions using virtual currencies have been incorporated into the Electronic Cash section of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) Examination Manual. The overall objective of the guidance and examination procedures provided in this section is to assess the adequacy of a bank’s systems to manage the risks associated with electronic cash and management’s ability to implement effective monitoring and reporting systems. The section further lists applicable risk factors and risk mitigation steps for banks to consider. The Federal Reserve supervision staff has on–going initiatives with the FFIEC member agencies to identify additional areas of concern that require heightened attention by the banking organizations we supervise.
Ongoing Coordination
In May 2013, the US. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) named Liberty Reserve S.A. as a financial institution of primary money laundering concern under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Section 31l).4 ‘According to the announcement, Liberty Reserve, a web–based money transfer system or “virtual currency,” was specifically designed and frequently used to facilitate money laundering in cyber space. This action also marked the first use of Section 311 authorities against a virtual currency provider.
The statutory language of Section 311 requires Treasury to consult with the Federal Reserve Board when these special measures are being developed and proposed. Therefore, Federal Reserve Board staff participated in coordination and consultation efforts leading up to the designation of the virtual currency provider, Liberty Reserve, under Section 311.
Specific Plans or Strategies
As noted above, the Federal Reserve plans to work with other FFIEC member agencies on electronic cash and related issues such as virtual currencies, as needed, for banking organizations. The Federal Reserve will continue to monitor developments as part of its broad interest in the safety and efficiency of the payment system. We also stand ready to cooperate with other agencies in fulfilling their mandates, as appropriate.
I hope you find this information helpful.
Sincerely,
[Ben Bernanke]
More From Business Insider
• New York Will Be Holding Hearings On Bitcoin
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• Dectaper Is Coming |
1,384,798,188 | 2013-11-18 18:09:48+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [29, 731, 848, 858, 1563, 2457, 2649, 2791, 2945]} | {"Bitcoin": [0]} | Bitcoin surges to new high ahead of U.S. government hearing | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-surges-high-ahead-u-180948207.html | Reuters | http://www.reuters.com/ | NEW YORK, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Bitcoin surged over 27 percent to a new high of US$675 on Monday ahead of a U.S. government hearing on possible regulation of the digital currency.
While not an official seal of approval, the hearing is giving some legitimacy to a payment mechanism that has been associated with illegal activities even as it gains acceptance by the general public and investment community.
Witnesses at the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing include officials from the Secret Service and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the Justice Department's Criminal Division.
"The government is taking a very thoughtful and balanced approach to bitcoin and bitcoin regulation," said Barry Silbert, founder of the Bitcoin Investment Trust, launched in late September and valued at US$22.8 million on Friday. It holds around 53,000 Bitcoins.
Bitcoin traded as high as US$675 on Monday on Tokyo-based exchange Mt. Gox, the best-known operator of a bitcoin digital marketplace. That was a rise of 27.7 percent from Sunday's close. It last changed hands at US$672.
The digital currency, which trades 24 hours a day, every day, has risen around 404 percent in the last two months.
Association with drugs, money laundering, murder for hire and other illegal activities has not stymied interest in bitcoin, the digital currency not backed by any government or central bank and until recently a niche alternative currency touted by computer geeks and anti-government advocates.
The currency, whose supply is limited, is "mined" by solving math problems. Bitcoin transactions are tracked by a network of computers that validate transactions and prevent counterfeit.
In October, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down Silk Road, an online marketplace used to buy and sell illegal drugs, and seized $3.6 million in bitcoins.
"Lawmakers are rightfully concerned about the illegal aspects of bitcoin but the fact that they're giving bitcoin the time of day helps cement its legitimacy," said Christopher Vecchio, currency analyst at DailyFX.
But it may also be government interest itself that is prompting the currency's huge moves of recent weeks, he said.
"If investors feel that bitcoin is truly legitimate but foresee supply constraints due to exchanges closing or new regulations hitting the market, there is a sense of urgency developing to obtain bitcoins now, 'while you can,'" said Vecchio.
Irrespective of the reason for the move, Bitcoin Investment Trust's Silbert at least is optimistic about the long-term outlook for the digital currency.
"Everyone is uncomfortable that the price has moved so quickly," Silbert said. "Bitcoin in its short history has gone through a series of bubbles and busts. But after every bust a new price base has formed."
Shares in the Bitcoin Investment Trust had a net asset value of $42.44 on Friday, up from $12.88 when the fund launched on September 25. Each share is 0.1 percent of a Bitcoin. |
1,384,805,459 | 2013-11-18 20:10:59+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [449, 7423, 7663]} | {} | Analysis: As market bubbles form, investors may want to take cover | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-market-bubbles-form-investors-201059603.html | Reuters | http://www.reuters.com/ | By Steven C. Johnson
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Five years of rapid-fire money printing at the U.S. Federal Reserve and easy money policies at other central banks have left trillions of dollars sloshing around the world financial system, and some of it is ending up in some rather odd places.
The froth can be seen in everything from Pakistan's stock market to thoroughbred racehorses, rare paintings and gemstones, taxi licenses and the digital currency Bitcoin.
"When it gets like this, just pick your asset - a painting, a bottle of wine, whatever. It's almost always a sign that there's too much money floating around," said Howard Simons, a strategist at Bianco Research in Chicago.
Certainly, the risks don't look as great as they did in 2005-2007, when real estate prices in the U.S. and other countries skyrocketed, then collapsed, triggering the financial crisis. The most inflated prices are in smaller pockets of the markets than they were back then, so there is less systemic risk.
But if a series of smaller financial market bubbles deflate or even burst there will still be a lot of agony, investment strategists warn.
When the Fed does pull back from stimulating the economy by cutting back its quantitative easing program of bond buying - which is expected in the first half of 2014 - there could be some shocks for markets to withstand, said Win Thin, an emerging market strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman. "That could lead to some painful adjustments."
One toxic corner of the markets can infect stronger assets as investors seek to raise cash to cope with a plunge. "What I learned in the last two bear markets is that it doesn't matter if you own the crappy asset," said Simons. "If someone else does and starts panic selling, it takes your good stuff down too."
And a further bond market selloff, following the reversal this summer, could not only hurt investors but threaten a downturn - as mortgage rates and other borrowing costs climb.
ETERNAL BULLS
There is evidence of possible excess in many areas.
Getting into a taxi cab these days may no longer come with a menu of can't-miss stock tips from the driver but the cab's owner probably paid a steep price for the right to the license. At a New York auction last week, taxi medallions sold for more than $1 million, about double the prices paid five years ago.
As for U.S. stocks, it's hard to find many bearish investors despite - or because of - the 26 percent gain in the S&P 500 index this year and the 166 percent rise since 2009.
In Europe, it often feels as if the continent-wide debt crisis that threatened the euro never happened. Price-to-earnings ratios have soared to 2007 levels even as earnings momentum has sputtered. Over the last month, short-selling has dropped to a seven-year low and top performers in the STOXX Europe 600 index are shares that were once heavily shorted.
As hedge fund manager David Einhorn put it in a letter to investors in October: "When 'high short interest' becomes a viable stock-picking strategy and conventional valuation methods no longer apply for many stocks, we can't help but feel a sense of déjà vu," he said in reference to the dotcom stocks bubble and bust in 1998-2001.
IPO FEVER AT COMPANIES
That particular bubble turned investors, especially retail investors, into addicts for the latest stock offerings. And things are looking a bit frothy again. So far, 199 U.S. companies have gone public this year, the highest number since 2007, and some of the first-day gains have been huge.
Such a race to list is a sign that things are nearing a top, says Peter Atwater, president of Financial Insyghts, an investment advisory firm in Mendenhall, Pennsylvania.
While the broader U.S. market does not look particularly pricey - the S&P's forward P/E ratio of 15 is about bang in line with the long-run average - individual stocks certainly do.
Look no further than some of the biggest names coming to market in recent years, such as the social media star Twitter or electric car maker Tesla Motors.
At current market prices, after almost doubling on its first day of trading, the micro-blogging site is valued at almost $24 billion despite being unprofitable. Tesla is trading at a P/E ratio of around 80 based on expected 2014 earnings.
Even the retailer Container Store Group Inc, which sells things to put things in, saw its shares double on its stock market debut on November 1.
Stephen Massocca, managing director at Wedbush Equity Management, said, "nobody in their right mind would make an all cash offer at current levels for a lot of these companies."
AND ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD
Even professional athletes are getting in on the action.
Arian Foster, a National Football League player with the Houston Texans, was the asset for a planned IPO based on 20 percent of his future earnings, which he had sold to San Francisco-based Fantex. The firm would then sell stocks based on Foster's economic performance.
"I thought it was a joke," said Daniel Morgan, senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust Co. "They're not robots, they wear down. What's the life of an average guy in the NFL, four years?"
Fantex, though, had to postpone the Foster IPO after the running back suffered a season-ending injury, underlining just how risky an investment it would have been.
IT'S THE BOND MARKET, STUPID
By suppressing interest rates, central banks have yield-starved investors falling over themselves to lend money to companies with less-than-stellar credit records, as well as looking for some of those exotic investments.
Quite a few investors, frightened that super-low interest rates will start rising next year, have bought up floating-rate loans. The only problem: many have no covenants, which usually limit the amount of debt a borrower can take on and let lenders have a say in the business if things start to go sour.
"People don't realize they're taking a lot of credit risk," said AllianceBernstein portfolio manager Gershon Distenfeld.
Meanwhile, high-yield bond issuers - companies with weak balance sheets and sub-investment grade ratings - are paying on average 5.8 percent to borrow, near record lows.
Default rates at around 2.5 percent are well below historical averages but Martin Fridson, head of FridsonVision, said recently he expects those default rates to spike to 8.4 percent between 2016-2020, which could cause a lot of forced selling.
POCKET MONEY
Perhaps one of the best ways to measure froth is to watch what the super-rich do with their pocket change. Lately, they seem to have developed an insatiable taste for fine art - a painting by Francis Bacon set a new high water mark when it fetched more than $142 million last week in New York. In Geneva, "Pink Star," a flawless pink diamond the size of a plum, sold for a cool $83 million, a record for a gemstone.
Even the market for thoroughbred racehorses is roaring away. In Europe, a one-year-old horse that had never been raced sold this year for 5 million pounds ($8.1 million), a record price.
"Most of the people involved in it are extremely rich, and lately they've had the money to spend," said Alastair Donald, a horse-buying expert at UK racehorse agent SackvilleDonald.
"There are ways of making money with racehorses, but mostly, it's a luxury, it's fun. It's about buying a dream."
CURRENCY FOR CRIMINALS?
Association with drugs, money laundering and other illegal activities has not tarnished the virtual shine of Bitcoin, the digital currency not backed by any government or central bank.
The currency, whose supply has been carefully controlled, on Monday soared above $600 from below $80 in early July. Societe Generale strategist Sebastien Galy said Bitcoin is an example of "how far and aggressively greed can push a deeply inelastic market."
And the casino approach isn't restricted to developed markets by any means. Pakistan is nobody's idea of a safe and predictable investment destination but one wouldn't know it from the nation's stock market. Pakistani stocks have nearly doubled since the start of 2012 and are well above their levels even before the financial crisis.
It's another instance of the reach for yield driving political risk considerations out the window, says GFT Forex managing partner Boris Schlossberg. "The Fed's QE," he said, "is having a spillover effect all over the world."
Consequences of the likely withdrawal of that support is the biggest issue for 2014. The risk is that even investors who have identified bubbles will wait too long to exit.
(Reporting by Steven C. Johnson and Luke Swiderski in New York, Blaise Robinson in Paris and Francesco Canepa in London; Editing by Martin Howell and Tim Dobbyn) |
1,384,806,600 | 2013-11-18 20:30:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [1242, 1665, 1833, 1978, 2119]} | {} | Cryptogenic Bullion - The Virtual Commodity Blurring the Lines Between Currency and Big Data | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cryptogenic-bullion-virtual-commodity-blurring-203000438.html | ACCESSWIRE | https://www.accesswire.com/ | The lead project developer of Cryptogenic Bullion (CB), Mercury Stills, recently unveiled details of his major project, MADEsparq Project. A white paper has been published on the CB website. From the white paper, "This new paradigm, named the MADEsparq Project, aims to blur the defining lines between currency, technology, and data by using the CB block chain to mediate the mapping of data to create, and add value, to content and unstructured and semi-structured data." The MADEsparq Project website, MADEsparq.org , is under construction but will begin to offer some of the functionality mentioned in the white paper by mid-January. Moreover, the client software will have an open alpha release by the middle of next month. "The project is meant to intricately involve the inherent random structure of the Cryptogenic Bullion block chain and spark new ways of categorizing and collaborating about data, regardless of your interest or level of expertise. It's an open-source, open-collaboration project, so it made sense to have the alpha release be open as well," said Stills. It's that intricate relationship between CB and the growing number of participants using the CB network and block chain (ie. the public ledger system similar to Bitcoin) to mediate all the data categorizations and mappings, from a variety of knowledge-domains, that creates intrinsic value for the virtual commodity. "I honestly think this paradigm I'm trying to create will change everyone's perspective on the possibilities of virtual currencies. We can do so much with them, not just as a form of transferring value. And that, in turn, will help accelerate mass adoption of CB and Bitcoin." The MADEsparq Project supports only the virtual commodity, Cryptogenic Bullion. But other virtual currencies and commodities might be supported. "Eventually, Bitcoin will be supported, but not until we're in beta development." Cryptogenic Bullion's price at the time of this writing is about 0.0017 per Bitcoin or $0.92 and trades on various virtual currency exchanges, and its total market value is about $900K, which is miniscule compared to Bitcoin's $7 billion market value. "Cryptogenic Bullion was released less than five months ago and we're just now announcing our first major project. It's obviously an amazing time for participants to get a stake in the currency and to try to be independent from the corporate banking sector, while also pursuing one's own dreams. There's dozens of global currencies backed by centralized and often corrupt governments. Now, the people are taking all finance matters into their own hands. Soon there will be a vast system of virtual currencies and commodities, many with their own niche, akin to our current global system of fiat currencies. Decentralized, peer-to-peer virtual currency networks will change the way the world works for the better." Story continues For more information about Cryptogenic Bullion visit http://cryptogenicbullion.org/ . Contact Info: Name: Mercury Stills Email: info@CryptogenicBullion.org |
1,384,808,400 | 2013-11-18 21:00:00+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [55, 473]} | {} | STOCKS FALL, BITCOIN GOES INSANE: Here's What You Need To Know | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stocks-fall-bitcoin-goes-insane-210003832.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | REUTERS/Stephen Lam
A chain of block erupters used for Bitcoin mining is pictured at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California, October 28, 2013.
At one point in the morning, we sawDow 16,000 and S&P 1,800. But that rally was short-lived.
First, the scoreboard:
• Dow: 15,976.0 , +14.3, +0.0 %
• S&P 500: 1,791.5, -6.6, -0.3%
• NASDAQ: 3,949.0, -36.9, -0.9%
And now the top stories:
• Stocks hit new all-time intraday highs today before retreating.
• However, Bitcoin really stole the show today,exploding all the way to around $675, up from a$500 levelyesterday. The U.S.Senate is hearing testimonies about the viabilityof such digital currencies today. " ... while these types of innovations may pose risks related to law enforcement and supervisory matters, there are also areas in which they may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system ,"said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in a letter.
• TheNAHB's homebuilder confidence indexwas unchanged at 54 in November from an October level that was revised down from 55. "The recent improvements in home builder sentiment have outpaced housing starts compared with past trends," noted Barclays' Cooper Howes. "As a result, we expect that a stronger rebound in construction activity would be required to push sentiment significantly above its current level."
• Shares ofTesla tankedfor no obvious reason.
• Don't Miss:14 US Cities Where Foreclosures Are A Big Problem »
More From Business Insider
• STOCKS RALLY TO NEW ALL-TIME HIGH: Here's What You Need To Know
• STOCKS HIT NEW ALL-TIME HIGHS: Here's What You Need To Know
• STOCKS FALL: Here's What You Need To Know |
1,384,809,172 | 2013-11-18 21:12:52+00:00 | {"Bitcoin": [9, 216, 999, 1046, 1130]} | {"Bitcoin": [27, 69]} | One Of The World's Largest Bitcoin Businesses Temporarily Ran Out of Bitcoins To Sell | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-worlds-largest-bitcoin-businesses-211252101.html | Business Insider | http://www.businessinsider.com/ | Coinbase
Bitcoin had an insane day, rising more than $140, on volumes of close to 1 million transactions.
As a result, Coinbase, which acts as the market-making intermediary for hundreds of retail outlets who accept Bitcoin, reached its buying limit.
Here's the message the site left to clients an hour agoas transcribed by ycominbator:
Due to higher than normal buy volumes, we are unable to provide exact price quotes right now.
Instead of pausing buys entirely, we decided to give people the option to purchase bitcoin at the market price in a few days. Once your USD funds arrive, we will exchange them to bitcoin at the market price at approximately Friday Nov 22, 2013 at 07:56AM PST.
Note that you can cancel your order at any time up until your bitcoin arrive from the transfer history page.
The market price of bitcoin changes frequently. Below are some recent prices to give you an idea. These do not guarantee what the price will be in a few days."
Insanity.
More From Business Insider
• Bitcoin Just Hit $500 For The First Time
• The Bitcoin Insanity Continues — Prices Top $450
• New York Will Be Holding Hearings On Bitcoin |
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Bitcoin news scrapped from Yahoo Finance.
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time_unix the UNIX timestamp of the news (UTC)
date_time UTC date and time
text_matches the news articles are matched with keywords "BTC", "bitcoin", "crypto", "cryptocurrencies", "cryptocurrency". The list is the posititions the keywords appeared.
title_matches keyword matches in title
url the Yahoo Finance URL that the article from
source the source if the news is cited from other source, not originally from Yahoo Finane
source_url the outer source cited
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