A reoccurring news item for bitcoin in 2014 related to one of two predominant use cases for bitcoin – the purchase of illegal goods and services and the sites that emerged to cater to its patrons. (The other use case, of course, is hoarding in the hopes that the value will increase.) Silk Road 2.0 launched in November 2013 and in February of 2014, was hacked and stripped of roughly $2.6 million worth of currency. That led to the arrest and sentencing of Charlie Shrem who would later in 2014 be found guilty of money laundering over $1 million dollars to the Silk Road to make illegal purchases.

I hadn’t had time to thoroughly delve into the protocol and your excellent writeup is the exact piece by piece, what/why I needed. The why’s” are extremely important to people who might want to build on top of the protocol as it helps them understand what they should or shouldn’t modify.

Eventually the company plans to sell the terminal — or potentially lease it — but it’s still working out the details. In any case, it will likely be a while before Pey starts charging for its system. In the meantime, it’s building a beta ecosystem where the company can test and tweak until it’s ready to roll out a finished product. Already the company is working on a next generation version of the terminal built on Raspberry Pi.

yes. It’s a race. Whoever finds the hash that is smaller than the currently defined difficulty, they will gain the reward for the block. The difficulty is adapted every two weeks or so to reflect the changing (now growing) power of the network.

I know the following will be somewhat controversial, but work through with me on what is bitcoins (related web site) I hope will be a helpful way to think about money in general. The current structure of Bitcoin carries the same inherent flaw that gold does (and to some extent the euro, too): in a world of ever-increasing abundance, gold is massively deflationary and provides unreasonable rents” to those who hold it. Even given that inherent flaw, it has been the most stable store of value for millennia.