The outbreak has complicated tech upgrades, product development, logistics and business travel at crypto exchanges and other blockchain firms in China.
Microsoft has a history of funding and developing with open source systems, and has started a new project called ION, trying to make a universal, decentralized system secured by Bitcoin, for managing and proving identities available to the globe. What are the goals and mindset behind this project, and how is Microsoft planning for its future, and the future of the Bitcoin ecosystem? Find out in today's article by Colin Harper discussing the ION system with Daniel Buchner, the project lead!
Another of the constantly amazing content available thanks to the team at Bitcoin Magazine! Check out Colin's previous article getting into details of how the ION system will work. A huge thanks to the LTB Network for partnering with the show and helping to get the Audible of Bitcoin to everyone! Support the show by becoming a patron and get access to the Cryptoconomy Telegram Crew! patreon.com/thecryptconomy
During this NSFW episode of #ProofOfLove, Dr. Stephanie Murphy regales listeners with an uncomfy story about how medical students practice sensitive exams, somehow, leading co-hosts Tatiana Moroz and Lauren Kaszovitz into discussion about what to do with engagement or wedding rings if you break up, our thoughts on prenup agreements, and on faking orgasms.
You might be surprised where the ladies land on each of these topics. Tell us what you think!
Do you have a burning question, or a show idea for us? Please email us at tatiana@proofoflovecast.com!
Remember, this is a new show, so if you like it, please be sure to tell 3 friends! Leave a good review on Itunes, and be sure to follow us on our socials!
*You have been listening to Proof of Love. This show may contain adult content, language, and humor and is intended for mature audiences. If that's not you, please stop listening. Nothing you hear on Proof of Love is intended as financial advice, legal advice, therapy or really, anything other than entertainment. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you're hearing to us on an affiliate network, the ideas and views expressed on this show, are not necessarily of the those of the network you are listening on, or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on the show.
Bitcoin in the dumps along with the Dow, top miners are racing to the halving, and Microsoft kills crypto jackers. It's the Markets Daily Podcast from CoinDesk.
Welcome to episode 75 of‚The Bitcoin Game, sponsored by eToro. I'm Rob Mitchell.
I started podcasting in late 2014, and one of the greatest things to happen in those early episodes was landing an exclusive longform interview with Dr. Jochen "Johoe" Hoenicke, the 2014 Bitcoin Hero. Badass white hat Bitcoin hacker Johoe (at least that's what I call him) rescued insecure Bitcoin UTXOs from Blockchain.info wallets before they could be taken by less-scrupulous hackers. This was after his contributions to understanding the RNG issues with Android Bitcoin wallets in 2013. He also rescued insecure Bitcoin from one other platform, which he admits for the first time in this interview. Some months after this interview, Johoe responsibly published a side-channel attack on a TREZOR, which eventually led to Satoshi Labs hiring him as a TREZOR Cryptographer. Johoe's Bitcoin mempool stats site is yet another contribution he's made to the space.
This is the only audio (or video) interview with Johoe that I'm aware of, and it's worth a listen if you didn't catch it the first time. It's even educational, as Johoe explains concepts like how Bitcoin signatures work and what specifically went wrong with various wallets, in a way that's accessible for non-technical people like myself.
Hope you enjoy my first "rebroadcast" to celebrate 75!
Are you interested in getting into the cryptocurrency markets but don't know where to start building your portfolio? eToro has the answer for you. It's called CopyTrader. With CopyTrader, you can automatically copy every trade of eToro's top crypto traders at the exact price in real time. No need to study up on markets or develop your own strategies. Simply sign up and copy the trader of your choice. Any profits they make, you do too (proportional to your investment). With eToro, you get access to the world's most popular cryptocurrencies, with transparent trading fees, all in one easy-to-use app.
While much of a Bitcoiner's time is spent in the world of digital assets, sometimes it's nice to own a physical representation of the virtual things you care about. For just the price of a cup of coffee or two (at Starbucks), you can own the world-famous Bitcoin Keychain.
ICE’s recently-revealed “Cryptocurrency Intelligence Program” is deployed in all crypto-facing Homeland Security investigations, says the agent whose unit built the tool.
Alex Gladstein joins me to discuss the Orwellian future that wasn't - because bitcoin exists. We take a deep dive into the state of privacy in the world today, what it would look like in an Orwellian future without bitcoin and how bitcoin is changing the privacy game in favor of the individual.
The world's largest HR firm has begun using a combination of the Cypherium blockchain and Google Cloud to match talent to corporate needs more efficiently and securely.
Starting today, Coinbase supports Kyber Network (KNC) at Coinbase.com and in the Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now buy, sell, convert, send, receive, or store KNC. KNC will be available for customers in all Coinbase-supported regions, with the exception of New York State and the United Kingdom.
Kyber Network (KNC)
KNC is an Ethereum token used for paying fees on the Kyber Network, a protocol that aims to make swapping digital assets and cryptocurrencies simple and efficient. The Kyber protocol aggregates liquidity from a wide range of reserves, powering instant and secure token exchange in any decentralized application.
One of the most common requests we hear from customers is to be able to buy and sell more cryptocurrencies on Coinbase. Per the terms of our listing process, we anticipate supporting more assets that meet our standards over time. We are also investing in new tools to help people understand and explore cryptocurrencies. We launched informational asset pages (see KNC here), as well as a new section of the Coinbase website to answer common questions about crypto.
Bitcoin Magazine is the proud host of the Bitcoin 2020 conference being held in San Francisco on March 27th and 28th, 2020.
Welcome to Bitcoin 2020, a one-of-a-kind festival celebrating the dawn of a new technological paradigm and the counterculture behind it.
Bitcoin is about more than just money; it is a movement rooted in the controversial idea of freedom. Its first adopters were champions of liberty, privacy, sound money and cryptography, and it’s these very principles that have united a diverse and global community of cypherpunks, entrepreneurs, YouTube streamers, billionaires, mommy bloggers, athletes, pirates, mathematicians, makers, skateboarders and so many more… This group of misfits, rebels and pioneers represents a community spread across all ages, continents and identities.
I’ve described our vision for Bitcoin 2020 before: an annual gathering place for Bitcoiners to network, discover and inspire each other. We’ve replaced stuffy hotel lobbies with half pipes and beer gardens — this event is for the community, not Wall Street. When we meet in San Francisco, it will be to celebrate the technology that has given us so much hope for the future.
We at BTC Media and Bitcoin Magazine are honored to play our part in this grand experiment, and we take the responsibility of hosting this annual pilgrimage seriously (but not too seriously, clearly). We ask our attendees, speakers and sponsors to respect the ethos of the event, to maintain decorum (when applicable) and to treat each other kindly.
Our goal is to deliver the best Bitcoin-focused content in the most Bitcoin-friendly fashion — there are plenty of platforms for other topics. Each of our speakers has agreed to focus on non-forked, Nakamoto Consensus Bitcoin (BTC).
We know that you may have some questions about Bitcoin 2020, so we’ve preemptively answered a few of them below.
First and Foremost… Coronavirus
We are closely monitoring the situation as it evolves, and we are following all CDC guidance to make sure that we employ best practices. With that said, we are full-steam ahead to host Bitcoin 2020 on March 27 and 28 and are still on pace to sell out the event.
Here is a sample list of preventive measures that we will be taking to ensure the health and safety of attendees, in no particular order:
There will be hand sanitizer (proven to kill coronavirus) stations throughout the venue and we are working on providing sanitization swag as well
We have hired a professional commercial cleaning company to clean throughout the venue and wipe down common areas such as railings, stations, tables, etc.
We will have medical staff on site (which would have always been the case)
Our Chinese partners will be participating remotely (we have some creative ideas in the works here) unless they have international staff who can attend
It is in my nature to make a few jokes and lighten up any situation, but we are taking this very seriously and will provide updates should things change significantly. On to the fun stuff…
How Is Bitcoin 2020 Different Than Bitcoin 2019?
Bitcoin 2019 was the beta version of our biggest-ever Bitcoin conference. Bitcoin 2020 is 1.0.
Last year, we wanted to see whether this idea would even work. This year, we’re putting out a product that will blow you away. Bitcoin 2020 is on pace to sell out, with over 3,000 attendees.
Last year, we found that people had an appetite for more of a festival-style event, so this year we’re adding a block party, an SF Bitcoin week chock-full of activities and events, Whale Night (with a little poker fun), an official afterparty and a rooftop halfpipe that the one and only Tony Hawk will be demoing on with his friends. This year, we will be utilizing the entire venue, not just parts of it.
We also wanted to build on some of the successes of last year, so we’ve revamped the art gallery and given it some dedicated space, maxed out the swag store so that you can leave B20 as the ultimate Bitcoiner and expanded the Lightning Arcade so that you can play games and compete with friends (and maybe win some sats). We’ve even found some ways to gift you free sats so that your bitcoin wallets can leave the conference a little fatter than when they entered.
If you’re a creative type, we’ve pushed out some challenges you should think about taking on as well: Design your Bitcoin citadel, create a Bitcoin campaign ad, build a Bitcoin application or memeify a Bitcoin t-shirt. We want to unlock those golden ideas that are sitting in the heads of Bitcoin enthusiasts, and we’ve got some amazing prizes to help sweeten the deal (in case winning, itself, isn’t sweet enough).
Does Bitcoin (BTC) Need Its Own Dedicated Conference?
That’s a stupid question. Bitcoin is the single most interesting thing happening in the world today — of course it needs a conference! With so many brilliant people from all around the world working to turn their visions into realities, it’s important to find a time and place to come together and celebrate our progress. We created Bitcoin 2020 to serve as a platform for the community; a place where Bitcoiners can meet and exchange ideas with people not found on Twitter, make new friends, pitch investors, land jobs and spark ideas — there’s nothing else like it.
Finally, the rest of the world needs to know what Bitcoin is really about, as told by Bitcoiners (not “experts”). Bitcoin 2020 is a beachhead to broadcast our ideas and values to the wider world. There will be major announcements, cultural icons, cutting-edge activations and provocative ideas that are impossible to ignore.
Sounds Cool! Can I Shill My Favorite Shitcoin There?!
Hard no. Bitcoin 2020 is about the ideas, products, technology, culture and people behind Bitcoin, and only Bitcoin. This is not the place to talk about how scalable your next-gen perpetual motion protocol is compared to Bitcoin, how “smart” your permissioned database is or how Bitcoin is merely blockchain 1.0. The entire point of this conference is to showcase what can be built on Bitcoin and how vast its potential is.
Smart contracts are cool. DeFi is compelling. Stablecoins … meh. Pepe Cash and CryptoKitties are hilarious. Proof of existence is neat. Sidechains, CoinJoin, Layer 2, Layer 3, Layer 99, the list goes on. There are so many cool concepts that can be built on Bitcoin, and all are on topic as long as they’re being built on the Bitcoin (BTC) protocol and do not require a hard fork to become reality.
Love Ethereum? No Problem! Save it for Devcon. @Vitalik @FluffyPony @CharlesHoskinson @DanLarimer and @RogerVer are all invited and welcome to Bitcoin 2020, but they should come prepared to discuss BTC, and only BTC.
Can I Shill My Coin If I Sponsor With Lots and Lots of Money?
Sadly, no. As much as we’d love to turn your near-worthless coin into sweet, sweet sats, this event is only for projects with a product or service that utilizes Bitcoin or makes Bitcoin more useful. We’re not here to judge your token side hustle — we’re capitalists, after all… but we only care about what you’re doing for/with Bitcoin — anything else is off topic. Jealous and sobbing because we turned away your sponsorship inquiry this year? The fix is easy: Use that ICO money to do something great for Bitcoin, then tell us about that next year.
But Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision Cash Classic Is the Real Bitcoin!
This conference is about non-forked, Nakamoto Consensus Bitcoin (BTC). We can appreciate differences of opinion about Bitcoin forks, but there is only one Bitcoin. That’s what we’re here to discuss. BIPs that require hard forks are considered off topic. Bitcoin is BTC. Love it or hate it, but no point in debating it. /shrug
I Can’t Wait to Confront [Enter Name Here] About How Big of a Scam [Enter Company Here] Is and Force Them to Apologize to Twitter for [Enter BIP Here].
This is not Stalinist Russia. There will be no forced apologies, public lashings or reparations. While at Bitcoin 2020, if only for a moment, let the past be in the past; your savage attacks will pack just as much zing on Crypto Twitter after the fact. Very few people attending the conference will agree on 100 percent of things. After all, unified thought doesn’t make for a great marketplace of ideas. There are a handful of speakers and sponsors who I’m sure will be controversial — but all of them have committed to following our ethos, and we’re convinced they have something valuable to contribute to the conversation.
Maybe it will be while you’re listening to a thought-provoking panel, maybe while you’re battling it out in the Lightning Arcade, or maybe while you’re kicking it in the beer garden with some of your new Bitcoin friends, but at some point, if we do our job right and you come to the event ready to work collaboratively instead of hauling old baggage, you might just catch a fleeting glimpse of the magical world to come.
Venezuela is many years into a political and economic crisis. Rooted in the Hugo Chavez presidency and continued by Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela is a mafia dictatorship wearing the cloak of socialism.
Years of economic mismanagement and corruption has led to financial disaster in Venezuelan, comparatively worse than the Great Depression, Zimbabwe's 2008'"2009 hyperinflation crisis and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Hyperinflation led to significant growth in poverty, starvation and mass migration, with millions leaving the country. With the collapse of the currency, many Bitcoiners, including myself, asked whether Bitcoin could help. Could Bitcoin reduce the impact of hyperinflation? Could locals mine Bitcoin at low energy costs to earn an income? I visited Venezuela to find out.
In this interview, I talk to Javier Bastardo, a journalist for Cointelegraph, based in Caracas, Venezuela. We discuss Venezuela's political and economic situation, hyperinflation and the reality of Bitcoin adoption in the country.
Randy Brito is the founder of bitcoinvenezuela.com and the CEO of Locha Mesh. In 2012 he started publishing educational material about Bitcoin in Spanish and translated the interface of the Electrum Wallet. We are talking about the economical situation in Venezuela, how authorities extorted miners in 2015 and how people are using bitcoin today.
We talk about:
Started bitcoinvenezuela.com in 2012
Economic situation Venezuela
Spanish translator for electrum wallet 2012
Bitcoin is used to get money in and out of Venezuela
Most liquid currency in Venezuela in the moment
How people buy online in the US and get delivered to the border~ 300.000 people use bitcoin
People fled Venezuela with their families with the help of bitcoin
Bitcoin's recovery from four-week lows could be extended to $9,000. However, the risk of deeper declines will persist as long as prices are below $9,400.
We asked the Zcash Foundation's Josh Cincinnati about finding sustainable ways to fund the development of zcash, a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency some view as a public good.
Iranian general Saeed Mohammed is calling for the use of crypto to help Iran evade sanctions designed to isolate it from the global financial system, according to Coinit.ir.
Square reported bitcoin revenues of $178 million between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, 2019, with profits of $3 million, up 50 percent over the prior two quarters.
From 2012 to 2014, Bitcoin Magazine produced 22 print issues covering the burgeoning technology, its budding culture and potential impact. This week, Colin and Peter revisit some of those stories with updates, reflections and new commentary.
Crossing below the $9,000 price level is a new low for February 2020. Bitcoin has not traded below the $9,000 threshold since January 27, when it began a march to new highs in the $10,500 range.
Real disruption in financial services means creating new plumbing for transactions, not nicer apps on top of existing rails, says CoinDesk columnist Lex Sokolin.
Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to Brooke Pollack, Founder and Managing Partner of Hutt Capital. They discuss the differences between traditional VC funds and VC within blockchain, how Hutt Capital chooses investments and more.
Episode Highlights:
After a lot of work with investing and VC, Brooke steered Greenspring Associates into work with crypto and blockchain before eventually founding Hutt Capital.
In his work with very wealthy families as clients, Brooke had trouble convincing them to invest in Bitcoin and digital currencies because they prefer something tangible, so he needed to do a lot of educating.
Blockchain is growing its market share of VC deal activity.
There were over 600 blockchain deals in 2019.
Brooke thinks the tipping point for when larger firms will have to stop ignoring crypto is when they're forced to pay attention to the returns they see happening that they want to have a part of.
Hutt's goal is to provide diversified exposure to blockchain in a low-risk, low-volatility way.
They invest in startup funds and then use that revenue to directly invest in the best companies.
When deciding what to invest in, Brooke looks for insight from his network and the reputation of the companies.
Hutt has a global outlook.
In choosing what to invest in, in the blockchain space, you don't have the track record or long-term reputation to look at because most of these companies haven't existed for very long, and if they have, the market has changed massively in that time.
All of this decision making is done through relationship building, which can take years.
One of the biggest structural changes to venture funds has been the advent of hybrid funds that call themselves venture funds, but are actually just less liquid versions of hedge funds.
Most people will simply not invest in your first fund, so take a long view of those relationships.
It's hard to prove your qualifications to invest in this space without having done it.
Key Points:
There is a high level of self-educating that is required to enter into the blockchain space.Hutt Capital seeks to provide an entry point to blockchain investing that is low-risk and low-volatility.Choosing funds is all about relationship building.
Quotes:
'œI think it'll happen sooner than later. I think the education process a lot of these groups are going through over the next year or two will lead to meaningfully more institutional capital coming into the space.' '"Brooke Pollack
'œLooking at funds in this space versus general venture investing, you don't have the breadth of a track record to go off of' Most of these funds haven't been around for more than a couple of years.' '"Brooke Pollack
'œIt's hard to prove that you can be successful as an investor in this space if you have not yet been an investor in this space.' '"Brooke Pollack
Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom Shaughnessy owns tokens in ETH, BTC, XTZ, STX, SNX, RUNE, sUSD and HNT. Lets Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode. These sponsorships are for informational purposes only and are not a solicitation to use any product or service.
Speaking to CNBC the VC investor and serial Bitcoin proponent revealed that he had significantly added to his crypto holdings since last year. When quizzed about exactly how far his faith in Bitcoin extended, he responded It's a lot, it's a lot, a lot.
DISCLAIMER: This article should not be taken as is, and is not intended to provide, investment advice.
The new support also includes an integration with the Ethereum Name Service), allowing Coinbase Wallet users to send cryptocurrencies to .eth addresses.
The Malta Financial Services Authority released a statement on Tuesday, unveiling industry recommendations on security token offerings within the country.
A recent report from Silicon Valley-based Anchain AI wonders out loud whether funds were purposely pilfered by insiders, challenging FCoin’s official line claiming a data error was to blame.
On a special combo cast of The Tatiana Show and Hodlcast with Sasha Hodler, we sat down with Kenn Bosak at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami.
Video games already have extensive currency systems which sometimes bleed into physical assets. Everything from social media to dating has adopted gaming etiquette, or lack thereof.
While we debate the social impact of gaming and online interaction, Kenn Bosak praises the communal distribution and use of cryptocurrency along with the massive potential to distribute cryptocurrency among the gaming community.
About the Guests:
Kenn Bosak is a 31yo Cryptocurrency Maximalist. Living 100% off Crypto. 4yo Bitcoin Podcast host. Interviewing guests on a daily basis. Consultant to multiple blockchain projects. Sponsored by MonarchToken.io CryptoMining.Tools DiviProject.org & CoinFlip.Tech
*You have been listening to the Tatiana Show. This show may contain adult content, language, and humor and is intended for mature audiences. If that's not you, please stop listening. Nothing you hear on The Tatiana Show is intended as financial advice, legal advice, or really, anything other than entertainment. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you're hearing to us on an affiliate network, the ideas and views expressed on this show, are not necessarily of the those of the network you are listening on, or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on the show.
This is a sponsored article provided by Unchained Capital.
Unchained Capital is building the archetype of the future financial institution, form fit for the world of bitcoin. It leverages the strengths of the Bitcoin protocol to offer bitcoin-native financial services, championing the importance of private keys, the benefits of multisignature security and the value a financial partner can provide. Today, most individuals and businesses that hold bitcoin end up at two extremes, either choosing to independently self-custody or relying on a trusted third party as a full custodian. Unchained bridges the gap through collaborative custody, which is designed to combine the control of self-custody with the benefits of a managed financial service. In its view, there is no other way to deliver bitcoin-native financial services.
Collaborative custody allows clients to hold their own private keys, while Unchained participates in the security of Bitcoin by managing a single key in a 2-of-3 multisig quorum. Depending on the service, clients either maintain full control of assets, or distribute control to the extent necessary, dictated by the nature of the service demanded, such as a bitcoin-backed loan. With any bitcoin-related financial service, the most critical component is how the asset itself is secured and accessed. At Unchained, private keys in the hands of bitcoiners matter and everything else follows from that core principle. By eliminating many of the drawbacks of both self custody and third-party custody, Unchained delivers what it believes is the most secure foundation off of which to build all other financial services.
By Bitcoiners, for Bitcoiners
Discussing this philosophy with Bitcoin Magazine, the company’s two co-founders and current executives, Joe Kelly and Dhruv Bansal, emphasized their own personal journeys into bitcoin and how these have impacted the vision of Unchained Capital. What drew the two of them together, and later became a philosophy for the company as a whole, was a desire for personal independence and adaptability. That is what they believe is the promise of bitcoin.
“Bitcoin is a tool for helping people become independent, free citizens,” Kelly said, explaining how that belief has driven his professional life and the vision of Unchained Capital.
Bansal expressed a similar outlook, talking about his background in physics before meeting Kelly and deciding to build a business around bitcoin. He claimed that practice in hard sciences “is not just a skillset, it’s also a mindset,” giving him ample opportunity to gather a wide range of expertise and adaptability in other fields. He added that “that kind of playfulness and willingness not to be anchored has always helped the business,” and it helped him uncover the biggest “open secret” about bitcoin that serves as Unchained Capital’s raison d’être.
Unchained’s HODL Wave data science unveiled what many bitcoiners innately know: that bitcoin is primarily held over longer periods of time. The majority of bitcoiners are not day trading, they are using bitcoin to save for the long term. This data-driven analysis of the bitcoin market combined with personal experience drives Unchained’s roadmap.
Unchained Capital has assembled a team of bitcoiners working to solve problems that they identify as the most acute market needs, relying on their own experiences but also informed by those in the community. Based in Austin, Texas, a fast growing hot-bed of Bitcoin development and talent, Unchained Capital hosts the local Bitcoin developer meetup, which it views as a unique asset.
“It not only gives our own engineers an opportunity to learn and keep a close pulse on Bitcoin development, but we also benefit from input from some of the best minds in Bitcoin,” Kelly said, emphasizing the value that the Austin bitcoin community brings to Unchained.
HODLers of Last Resort
As bitcoiners, Kelly and Bansal are focused on building services that long-term bitcoiners need and that they themselves would use. It becomes the litmus test at Unchained. Bansal told us that the “open secret” at Unchained is that it “pays attention to early HODLers and seeks their input on the services they need most.” Building for the core bitcoin holder is the North Star, believing that the rest of the market will consistently gravitate toward the services demanded by the most knowledgeable of bitcoiners.
Unchained Capital sees a world in which bitcoin becomes the dominant global currency, and in its experience, the longer an individual holds bitcoin as a savings mechanism, the more likely each individual is to hold their own keys.
“Keys, it’s why we are all here,” Kelly said, elaborating on how his own experiences have informed the vision for bitcoin-native financial services.
If bitcoin is money, then many bitcoiners will increasingly need financial services. But bitcoin is not like any other form of money that has existed before it; bitcoin offers a distinct and unique pathway for individuals to retake their financial freedom and independence. Many believe that financial service providers will always be challenged to add long-term value to bitcoiners if the primary benefits inherent in bitcoin are not preserved and strengthened in the process. Bitcoin-native financial services are the only way, in the minds of Kelly and Bansal, to deliver consistent value to clients over the long term.
Everyone is swimming upstream (or against the tide) if the starting point is not putting keys in the hands of clients. At Unchained, this is what being bitcoin native means and it believes it delivers greater security for clients by building its financial services on top of client keys and ultimately through collaborative custody.
Collaborative Custody Is Bitcoin Native
In a collaborative custody approach, clients hold two keys (either Trezors or Ledgers today) and Unchained secures a third key, in dedicated 2-of-3 multisig vaults. In order to facilitate any transfer of bitcoin, clients must create valid signature(s) using their own keys. Unchained’s technology makes multisig easy to access for its clients, and as a trusted financial partner, its keys help secure client assets (but not control them). If a client ever loses a key or requests Unchained to countersign a transaction, Unchained will independently verify the identity and intent of a client prior to doing so. Security of client assets is collaborative. Clients maintain control but Unchained’s participation creates and diversifies redundancy in key management, adding to the ultimate security of client bitcoin in its view.
Bansal reiterated that most of the world’s bitcoin isn’t held on platforms like Coinbase but, instead, is owned by the bitcoiners themselves in private cold storage. Allowing people to access financial services while continuing to hold their own keys is “such a more natural fit to what banking needs to look like in bitcoin,” he explained, also expressing his view that it leads to greater security for each individual and the network as a whole.
The security that Unchained’s core custody solution offers is only one of several services offered on the platform. For individuals or companies that value financial controls over sovereignty, Unchained also offers a multi-institution custody solution in which clients only hold 1-of-3 keys, with Unchained holding a second key and an independent third-party key agent holding the third. No single party has unilateral control, but clients still authenticate transactions by creating bitcoin signatures. A similar model is also applied in Unchained’s bitcoin-backed lending service, which gives clients access to dollar liquidity without selling their bitcoin while still allowing each client to participate in the security of assets (which are never rehypothecated).
If financial services are to be bitcoin native, collaborative custody is the only path Unchained sees as viable or sustainable. Describing himself as a maximalist “with a small ‘m,’” Bansal claimed that the company’s bitcoin-only focus helps to meet the community where it is, based on the data and fundamentals. Kelly agreed, saying that bitcoin “has the most desirable qualities,” and that’s a big part of why Unchained is singularly focused on bitcoin and why it tailors its services to the strengths of the protocol.
Consistent with its vision, Unchained has invested in resources that help educate about bitcoin and has developed valuable open-source tools such as Caravan and Hermit designed to further its broad-based goal of elevating bitcoin security standards. If bitcoin is going to be the dominant global currency, Unchained is mission-driven to build for that future world. That means creating a company that can serve all bitcoiners, new and old. Unchained has something for everyone and as it expands its suite of financial services, keys and collaborative custody will be core to the future Unchained builds. Bitcoin native is Unchained Capital.
CoinJoin. Trustless mixing. Anonymity. Bitcoin Magazine’s September 2013 cover — all black with hints of golden fingerprints — needed only four words to announce a powerful new privacy tool. At a time when industry representatives like the Bitcoin Foundation were downplaying Bitcoin’s anonymity features, regulators in New York were developing the BitLicense and Silk Road was about to be shut down, two hackers working from a former textile factory in Catalonia had begun to fight back. Amir Taaki and Pablo Martin realized the first ever CoinJoin application, and Bitcoin Magazine’s Vitalik Buterin was quick to cover the development.
Just weeks prior to the publication of this fourteenth Bitcoin Magazine print edition, Bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell had posted what has perhaps come to be considered the unofficial CoinJoin announcement thread on the Bitcoin Forum. The developer had already published the idea in January 2013 in a more tongue-in-cheek stunt to trick blockchain analysis into thinking he was “taint rich,” asking forum users to mix their coins with his. But in his more serious August post, Maxwell introduced the name “CoinJoin,” while emphasizing the importance of tools like it.
“Traditional banking provides a fair amount of privacy by default. Your inlaws don’t see that you’re buying birth control that deprives them of grand children, your employer doesn’t learn about the non-profits you support with money from your paycheck, and thieves don’t see your latest purchases or how wealthy you are to help them target and scam you,” Maxwell wrote. “Poor privacy in Bitcoin can be a major practical disadvantage for both individuals and businesses.”
Bitcoin did have poor privacy. While Bitcoin addresses aren’t in themselves tied to real-world identities, blockchain analysis can often establish these links. A key tool for blockchain analysis is the multiple-input heuristic, a privacy leak even described by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin white paper. If a transaction sends coins from multiple addresses, Nakamoto wrote, these addresses must belong to the same owner. And if even one of these addresses can be tied to a real-world identity, for example because it was used to withdraw funds from an exchange, all of the other addresses can be as well.
Maxwell’s CoinJoin proposal helps fix this leak by combining multiple transactions into a single transaction. If Alice wants to pay for her birth control, and Bob wants to pay a nonprofit, they can merge this into a single transaction, sending both of their coins to both recipients at once. Ideally, this would make it unclear who bought the birth control and who paid the nonprofit. But at the very least, it breaks the multi-input heuristic. “Brain-dead automated analysis,” as Maxwell described it in his January post, would wrongly assume that all sending addresses belonged to the same person. If this assumption is broken often enough, the heuristic becomes useless altogether.
But by August, well over half a year after Maxwell first suggested the solution, the assumption wasn’t being broken often enough. This was in large part because it just wasn’t very easy to make CoinJoin transactions; it required command-line skills and deep technical knowledge of the Bitcoin protocol. What was needed, Maxwell reasoned, was a tool that would make such transactions easy.
“I know that making such a tool doesn’t fit into the get-rich-quick mold of many Bitcoin businesses, but the importance is self-apparent and the simplest versions of this don’t require very deep technical wizardry,” Maxwell concluded his post. “I think the ‘political’ risk of improving people’s privacy is a real one that you should carefully consider, but around these parts I see people sticking their names on some rather outrageously risky stuff. I’d hoped the ‘taint rich’ thread would be enough to inspire some community action, but perhaps this will be.”
To further incentivize development of a CoinJoin tool, Maxwell launched a multisignature escrow bounty fund. Shared between Bitcoin Core contributor Pieter Wuille, Bitcoin Forum administrator Theymos and himself, with at least two of their signatures needed, coins sent to the fund would be paid out to projects making CoinJoin a practical reality. Within a couple of days, the fund collected about 12 bitcoin, worth around $1,300 at the time.
Taaki, a regular on the Bitcoin Forum, found out about the bounty. If the British-Iranian Bitcoin developer was aware of the political risks mentioned by Maxwell, it certainly wasn’t going to stop him; he’d been living in anarchist squats throughout Europe for years and wasn’t exactly the type to shy away from authority. He asked fellow programmer Martin to take a look, and the two agreed that with the tools they had been developing — like the Bitcoin software library Libbitcoin — it shouldn’t be particularly difficult to build a CoinJoin application.
Indeed, hardly one day after the bounty was funded, the duo completed an early version of a CoinJoin mixing tool. Several users could contribute a fixed amount of bitcoin — 0.01 BTC — and create a transaction returning the same amount of funds back to each of them. As the CoinJoin would break the trail of ownership of any particular 0.01 BTC, all participants in the mix would gain privacy.
Martin, speaking with Bitcoin Magazine at the time:
“Making the tool was pretty easy for our skills. We could release after working for about eight hours together, next day we made a more stable and practical release. We leveraged a few great technologies: Python, Libbitcoin, SX, QT, Flask, Greenlets, Tor.”
But the simple CoinJoin tool was only the beginning. By late October, the duo teamed up with a small group of like-minded bitcoiners, including Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd and Cody Wilson, the guy who created the world’s first 3D-printable gun. United under the unSystem flag, a crypto-anarchist collective led by Taaki, the small group of developers started a crowdfunding project to realize a privacy-focused wallet with a CoinJoin mixer built in.
It would be called the Dark Wallet.
The project quickly raised over $50,000 from more than 1,000 donors around the world, enough for the team to get to work. In November, Taaki, Martin, Todd, Wilson and others (including Bitcoin Magazine’s founder and then-editor-in-chief Mihai Alisie) met in a cultural center in Milan to discuss the design of the new wallet. Joined by a group of programmers working under pseudonyms like tilthz, sem, veox and d3, the project got underway.
But it wasn’t without controversy. As Bitcoin was reaching new highs — trading over $1,000 per coin by the end of 2013 — the project was attracting attention from mainstream media and regulators alike. While startups were trying to rid Bitcoin of its “drug money” image, Taaki and Wilson were actively promoting their wallet as a money laundering tool. The name itself — Dark Wallet — was a reference to a warning by the FBI that strong encryption could make the internet “go dark,” making it impossible for the agency to track even the worst criminals.
This level of privacy is exactly what Taaki, Wilson and others were hoping to achieve, and they weren’t going to pretend otherwise.
“I would just be dishonest with myself if I try to play with words or cover up my intent,” Taaki told Bitcoin Magazine in an interview. “I want people to know what I think, and as many people as possible, because it’s not just about the technology we’re building. In fact, the technology by itself is worth nothing. What is important is the narrative, or the ideal that is being constructed through that narrative. Bitcoin is a decentralized and uncensored money with privacy features. As such, it has opened up a new front in the ongoing struggle for freedom.”
About six months after the crowdfund was started, on 2014’s May Day (May 1), unSystem released Dark Wallet’s first alpha software. The wallet was built as a user-friendly Chrome extension, offering several privacy tools. This included stealth addresses, a type of encrypted address that can be shared freely, where every payment to it is unlinkable through blockchain analysis. The wallet also used hierarchical deterministic wallets, preventing address reuse; such tricks weren’t as standard then as they are now.
And of course, Dark Wallet included a CoinJoin tool. A user could make a payment and have this payment CoinJoined with a transaction from another user, who was matching the amount but really just paying himself. As such, the paying user would gain privacy from having his transaction matched, while the other user would have his coins mixed. Future wallet upgrades would include the option to make CoinJoins with several users at the same time, and Tor would be integrated so users could hide their IP addresses from each other.
The Dark Wallet alpha release made a media splash. Not only Bitcoin news sites (like Bitcoin Magazine) covered the groundbreaking wallet software, but more mainstream publications like Forbes, Wired and BBC Click took notice as well. Taaki and Wilson even caught the attention of film makers: The duo was followed for the documentary “The New Radical,” while Taaki was also featured in “Deep Web.”
But it wasn’t just the media that took notice. The Islamic State (IS) seemed to show interest in the wallet as well: Although unverified, a document circulated over the internet encouraging IS fighters to take funding in bitcoin, and use Dark Wallet to hide their tracks. “This allows our brothers stuck outside of the [Islamic State territory] to avoid government taxes along with secretly fund the mujahideen with no legal danger upon them,” the document read.
It didn’t faze the unSystem crew.
“I think obviously terrorists will use [Dark Wallet],” Todd told BBC Click, “and the benefits certainly outweigh the risks. Equally, obviously, terrorists use the internet. Obviously terrorists use freedom of speech. We’ve accepted that is a trade-off we must make.”
Development of the wallet continued throughout 2014, until Dark Wallet alpha 8 was released in the first weeks of 2015. But funds had been drying up, as a second crowdfunding round wasn’t nearly as successful as the first one. Moreover, Taaki — now the face of the more radical edges of the Bitcoin space — had by then learned about a collectivist-anarchist political revolution based on libertarian ideals and local direct democracy in Rojava, the Kurdish part of Syria. A revolutionary at heart, he knew he had to go help. A couple of months later the open-source activist found himself strapped with an AK-47 in the north of the war-ridden country, fighting IS jihadis.
Out of money and with the project’s public face fighting a war in the Middle East, Martin — who had acted as the wallet’s lead developer — disappeared as well; even other unSystem coders didn’t know where he was for months on end. Dark Wallet stalled. But the project had by then served as a big inspiration for other privacy-focused developers. In a time when Bitcoin seemed to be going mainstream, the unSystem group had re-emphasized Bitcoin’s anti-establishment roots and realized a first-generation set of Bitcoin privacy tools.
Playing around with the Dark Wallet alpha release, Chris Belcher, a Bitcoin developer from London, found that very few users were offering their coins to be mixed. To solve this, he designed JoinMarket, a CoinJoin application much like the one in Dark Wallet, but with the added feature for users to financially incentivize one another to join in the mix. Around the same time, two pseudonymous developers launched the privacy-focused Samourai Wallet, which included stealth addresses and several other privacy tools. Just as bitcoiners were starting to realize that the Dark Wallet project had been abandoned, two new privacy projects were ready to carry on the baton.
Going full circle a few years later, Samourai Wallet and a newer wallet project by privacy researcher Adam Ficsór in mid-2017 announced they were working on a mixing tool inspired by Maxwell’s original CoinJoin post. Where both Dark Wallet and JoinMarket are geared toward making private payments, this new solution would let dozens of users mix their coins at the same time.
Today, about five years since Dark Wallet’s last release, Samourai Wallet’s CoinJoin tool “Whirlpool” and Ficsór’s Wasabi Wallet are mixing coins consistently throughout the day, while JoinMarket is offering privacy in payments. Moving forward, tricks like PayJoin, SNICKER and Knapsack mixing could further increase the potential of CoinJoin, while Schnorr signatures may even offer an economic incentive to use the privacy technique.
Meanwhile, Taaki has reunited with Martin. Having returned from Syria in 2016, and after having been under investigation by British police for a year, he is setting up an academy for activist programmers in Barcelona to realize projects furthering privacy and autonomy, inspired by the revolutionary movement in Rojava. A revival of Dark Wallet, Taaki hinted when speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, could be one of these projects.
Bitcoin has a media problem. Or, perhaps, the media has a Bitcoin problem.
Mainstream media has often framed Bitcoin with the same scandalous curiosity that may publicize a troubled former child star or a controversial tech startup. Most journalists have viewed it as a sideshow, a distraction that warrants only so much attention lest it detract from the supreme spectacle of the 21st century’s historic advancements in technology, business and finance. By some combination of apathy, lack of curiosity and ignorance, Bitcoin is often misrepresented or represented poorly in mainstream news outlets.
Let’s cut these career journalists some slack. After all, a traditional finance reporter may be daunted by this new and confusing world of decentralized digital currency. And fluent as they may be with the ever-evolving world, seasoned technology reporters may nonetheless view Bitcoin as a leviathan of the technically arcane.
Bitcoin is indeed a complex esoterica. So it’s little wonder that just four years after its creation (when Bitcoin was beginning to formally enter the international conscience), Vitalik Buterin opined in the seventh print volume of Bitcoin Magazine that “a significant amount of disinformation about Bitcoin continues to float around the internet.”
In an article called “Common Misconceptions About Bitcoin — A Guide for Journalists,” Buterin listed five prevalent misconceptions and attempted to set the record straight.
“Whether a given story is unfairly biased against Bitcoin, or even unfairly biased in its favor, it is important to work together to make sure that the truth always comes out — in the first case, not to needlessly scare potential Bitcoin adopters away, and in the second case, not to disappoint,” he wrote.
When writing for the February 2013 print issue, Buterin admitted that things had gotten better from Bitcoin’s earliest years. But over seven years since Buterin’s original article was published, we clearly have a long way to go until even rudimentary Bitcoin literacy becomes prevalent in the circles of traditional journalists.
No, Bitcoin Is Not a Company
I say “rudimentary” because, to this day, some of the most glaring misconceptions about Bitcoin are still the easiest to dismiss. It would be unreasonable for us to expect journalists whose beat is typically anything but Bitcoin to parse the differences in the block size debate or have a fluent understanding of the Lightning Network’s technical infrastructure.
But 11 years out from Bitcoin’s launch, it’s absurd to see the core tenet of Bitcoin’s architecture — its decentralization — so blatantly mischaracterized or outright ignored. Or, as one Motley Fool article from 2019 shows, Bitcoin is constantly contrasted with a corporate structure:
“Here’s the problem: Buying a cryptocurrency token (bitcoin or most any other) does not give investors any ownership in the underlying blockchain. If the underlying blockchain of a crypto token becomes the basis for innovation at a particular company or within an industry, its associated token isn’t necessarily going to benefit (and neither will token-holders),” the article reads.
When you buy bitcoin, you are not buying shares of a company, nor do you hold equity (as this excerpt laments); you are buying into a digital monetary system that exists outside of the current system. When you understand that Bitcoin is a monetary system (and thus also intrinsically a store of value, medium of exchange and a unit of account), the comparison to a corporation is as anathema to Bitcoin’s design as it is ignorant.
To be sure, this conversation has evolved. At least now, slightly more educated detractors know that Bitcoin is not “owned” by anyone and no corporation has de jure control over it. Altering their stance, many now argue that miners have de factocontrol of the network. Centralization of mining in China is a cause for concern, but what the alarmist viewpoints don’t take into account are the complex social and technical mechanisms that check and balance mining centralization.
As Kyle Torpey has espoused, ultimately investors hold the keys to the kingdom, and as “NO2X” showed us, so too do the node operators — something Satoshi intended from the start.
Blockchain, Not Beanie Babies
My next gripe with mainstream Bitcoin coverage is not one Buterin covered. In 2013, few altcoins existed, and the ICO boom, which Buterin’s Ethereum would ironically detonate, was a few years out.
But in the fallout of 2017’s market hysteria, as snake oil and utopian promises flowed like sour mana from the marketing teams of a new class of crypto-hucksters, the idea that the real innovation is “blockchain not Bitcoin” has ossified in the minds of many who follow the cryptocurrency scene with marginal interest.
“To answer why bitcoin has become so big,” one Guardian columnist pontificated in 2018, “we need to separate the usefulness of the underlying technology called ‘blockchain’ from the mania of people turning bitcoin into a big dumb lottery. Blockchain is simply a nifty software invention (which is open-source and free for anyone to use), whereas bitcoin is just one well-known way to use it.”
Imagine for a moment that people had said TCP/IP is just “one well-known way to use it” and that the real innovation was the internet, which must be co-opted to create a private, permissioned version of the real thing. People did this: the result was the intranet, a private version of the internet that is primarily used for private functions for businesses or other organizations today.
Hack, Hacks, Hacked
Of all Buterin’s observations in 2013, none ring so painfully true today as the ever-raging debate over Bitcoin’s security.
I have personally read numerous articles that misattribute an exchange’s servers being compromised to a security breach in Bitcoin’s core software.
“For a technology that’s supposed to be hyper secure, in practice, it’s often proven itself to be, well, not,” one Recode(Vox)article from 2019 states with snarky confidence. “Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have proven a prime target for hackers despite their characterization by proponents as super safe and impregnable.”
This is an egregious mischaracterization of Bitcoin’s design. And even though the author later on distinguishes between Bitcoin’s blockchain and Binance’s own security (with Binance’s 2019 hack as the timely subject of the coverage), the lede suggests that Bitcoin itself was hacked. For the average reader, who might not get past the headline or first paragraph, this could be enough to cement in their mind that Bitcoin’s technical structure is shot full of holes. Indeed, the blunderbuss reporting of the likes of Vox are the forces that shred this security in front of the readers’ very eyes; even if this damage is fictional, the shrapnel is very real for readers who don’t know better.
The Eternally Bursting Bubble
When the media frames bitcoin exchange hacks in this way, it has the same effect as when undereducated journalists harp on the virtues of blockchain technology or mistakenly frame Bitcoin as a centralized entity. The truth eludes all but the most critical observers, and non-Bitcoiners are left with rotten kernels of mistruths (or, in the worst cases, propaganda), which they accept as truisms: After all, didn’t the Guardian publish the story?
One of these aphorisms is the ever-looming Bitcoin obituary. I hardly need to cite any examples here, as this phenomenon is burned into any faithful Bitcoiner’s consciousness. If misconceptions about Bitcoin’s decentralization and its security are the head and neck of our collective albatross, then this is the sagging torso — it is constantly weighing us down.
Buterin wrote particularly about a myth in 2011 that bitcoin’s market price had fallen to $0.01. How prescient this gripe was would only become apparent following bitcoin’s meteoric race to $20,000. Ever since, the number of publications pronouncing Bitcoin dead has seemed to multiply; like a plague of cicadas, the death knells hum and rattle on with a pessimistic buzz.
Shy of transcending the $20,000 all-time high, we likely will not hear the end of these incessant wakes. Mainstream journalists tend to think that Icarus’s wings have dissolved and the boy is now dead. They ignore bitcoin setting local highs, so they believe that it is effectively dead or — as the New York Times’ Nathaniel Popper put it in yet another article extolling Bitcoin’s capacity to bankroll criminal activity — that bitcoin has “lost steam.”
Even as bitcoin reaches local highs in value — and as companies like Blockstream, Lightning Labs and others continue to push important protocol developments — the reports of Bitcoin’s untimely death pour in.
Another primary misconception stems from Bitcoin’s utility and its branding as “electronic cash.”
Detractors often cite that no one is using bitcoin as a medium of exchange and that few retailers accept it. A wellspring of online theory and thought is remolding our perceptions of Bitcoin, though. It’s not just a currency but an entire monetary system. It’s not just cash, but it’s digital gold, as well.
Much like the gift of the internet became much more than sending messages, Bitcoin has evolved into more than a currency — or rather, our perception of it has. The gold narrative, of course, is still subjective. Many people see gold as highly speculative and of little use, so selling them on the notion that Bitcoin is digital gold — and by extension, valuable — will be a harder sell still and will likely take some years to cement. Still, deriding bitcoin as useless because you can’t buy coffee with it is an absurd and myopic view.
Not least because bitcoin has proven its utility as a permissionless and censorship-resistant form of currency. These are the key characteristics of Bitcoin, and as Nic Carter trenchantly observes in “A Most Peaceful Revolution,” this is what Bitcoin is all about: All of Bitcoin’s utility and significance, all of its appeal and all of its potency take root in its primary function as a monetary system that is parallel to and exists to undermine the state.
Hence why so many journalists, as evidenced by Buterin’s final objection in the 2013 article that persists even now, fixate on bitcoin’s utility in illicit markets. Indeed, the Silk Road catapulted bitcoin and its price to hitherto-unseen significance in 2010 and 2011. Bitcoin is first and foremost useful for edge cases like this, sectors of the economy that are illegal and cannot operate without a permissionless and pseudonymous means of exchange.
These are also the most interesting use cases for Bitcoin. For many journalists, they are the most sensational and salacious, so they crowd headlines in hopes of driving clicks in an industry that lives or dies on website traffic and SEO placement. Perhaps we could again cut these journalists some slack; after all, many of them are covering Bitcoin on an ad hoc basis on the whims of their editors.
But the common insistence that Bitcoin is only good for terrorism, drugs and other illicit activities is tragically overplayed. Fewer than 1 percent of Bitcoin transactions can be attributed to illicit activity, according to research by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. Even so, stories of exchange hacks, ransomware and drug markets have outsized representation in mainstream media.
Again, perhaps we can chalk this one up to an era of broken incentives for online media, where sensationalism dominates both attention and content. From their bully pulpit, these outlets harangue and taunt Bitcoin proponents and whip their readers into their biased points of view.
But even so, it seems like statistics such as the one above should be hard enough evidence to snuff out this coverage; or at the least, journalists could include the illicit transactions that drive Bitcoin adoption in countries choked by despotism or international sanctions, such as Iran and Venezuela.
Another often-ignored statistic is that over 70 percent of bitcoin mining is sourced from renewable energy. In 2017, the world seemed to awaken to the trade-off of proof of work: More activity on the network equals more energy expended. This has led to the common refrain (now something of an inside joke among Bitcoiners) that Bitcoin will boil the oceans.
Hardly. Not only is the vast majority of bitcoin mined using renewable energy, but it consumes fewer kWh annually than Christmas lights or every idle device running in U.S. households yearly — not to mention that the carbon footprint is several magnitudes less than that of the global banking and finance industries.
Once again, we see a sensationalist narrative peddled with little regard for oppositional arguments or even hard statistics.
The Future of Bitcoin Misconceptions
Now, Bitcoin literacy among some journalists has improved since Buterin first covered these misconceptions in 2013. Bitcoin’s features, such as the 21 million hard cap, its decentralized node architecture and even the Lightning Network, are starting to take hold. But even so, misconceptions abound, some of which as evidenced in this article are almost as old as Bitcoin itself.
Uneducated reporting on Bitcoin eventually gave way to Bitcoin-specific media, of which Bitcoin Magazine was the seminal outlet. Until mainstream media acquaints itself more thoroughly with Bitcoin, we’ll be around to throw the FUD back in their faces and correct the record.
Some, as with their perceptions of gold, may never come to see the value that we do. Or, if they do, they may grudgingly succumb to the changing times as the old guard did with the advent of the internet.
No matter the scenario, Bitcoin needs a voice to right the fallacies preached by the mainstream. So, we’re not going anywhere.
