Crypto Currency

CoinDesk reports that New York City Councilman Mark Levine believes accepting bitcoin for fines and other city payments can save the city millions of dollars.

I love seeing large companies, those household names like Lionsgate Movies, embracing Bitcoin. Lionsgate will partner with GoCoin to accept bitcoin for online orders.

Entrepreneur interviews Wences Casares, CEO of Xapo, about bitcoin and his personal journey from being a skeptic a few years ago to running a company providing secure bitcoin wallets. "I truly believe bitcoin is the best hope for the 5 billion people who don’t have bank accounts to take part in the global economy.” is a powerful statement about the future.

Peter Van Valkenburgh has a thought provoking opinion piece over at Wired that suggests Bitcoin technology may be the gateway to true neutrality on the internet. His idea is to have many more internet providers and a solution that will switch to the best provider at any time, even if that might be your neighbor's WIFI or the Starbucks across the road. The faster connection is more important than the provider – radical! Obviously this can't start tomorrow because most of us don't have multiple vendors in our area to choose from. I think we have two: Comcast and AT&T. We've tried both and neither are fast enough for our home office so the idea of a faster internet with better encryption is optimistic and exiting. 

Exciting news for Coinbase – the first US regulated Bitcoin exchange – as they get another first. The first company that the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) has ever invested in since they were founded in 1817. Yes you read that right. For the first time in almost 200 years the NYSE has invested in a company. They are part of a $75 million round of funding for Coinbase. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The testnet is extremely useful for assisting in the development of Bitcoin software. You can grab some test coins from this faucet and avoid spending the time and money trading for actual Bitcoins to get started building and testing software. Getting a test environment up and running smoothly in Windows might not be immediately obvious so we will discuss the particularities of Windows 7 and fix a minor annoyance here.

Andreas Antonopoulos delivered an inspiring speech at the recent O'Reilly conference in San Francisco. I like where he emphasizes that the coin and the technology are inseparable:

BitoEx, to supply bitcoins in more than 5000 convenience stores in Taiwan! I would predict that this will create a stronger, local Bitcoin economy. From the Bittell article:

December was a record month for the sheer number of Bitcoin transactions. Just over 100,000 separate transactions prove that enthusiasm for crypto-currency, and specifically for Bitcoin, is growing.