I’ve touched on the idea before, but I thought it was time I made it explicit. I want to compare customer-not-present purchases using bitcoins and using credit cards. In particular: security. Consider a modern web site, accepting a credit card. You fill up your basket and press “buyâ€. You have to supply: Name Address Email… Read More »
This is part V in my “Bitcoin Explained†series. At the end of part IV we saw how a signature chain can be used to create an unstealable ownership record; but that a dishonest person in the chain can easily create multiple copies of a valid signature chain. 17283726152 17283726152 I will pay the owner…… Read More »
This is part IV in my “Bitcoin Explained†series. At the end of part III we saw that the Bitcoin network’s primary function is to act as a peer to peer timestamping system. That the blocks could, in principle, verify any data its operators wished. The catch of course is that those operators need an… Read More »
This is part II in my “Bitcoin Explained†series. The problem we left at the end of part I was that the construction of a valid chain of payload-storing blocks is trivial (for a computer) to create. For a financial system we want it to not be trivial, we want it to be incredibly hard… Read More »
Another in my tracking of bitcoin acceptance increases articles. This is a product unassociated with bitcoin; and yet look down there at the bottom of the page. We now take BITCOIN! Small steps. Small steps.
WHMCS, a client management company has been hacked. 1.7GB of data was stolen. The data leak comprises 500,000 usernames, passwords, IP addresses and in some instances credit card details. As I keep saying: the only financial information that would be stored in the company database when you pay via bitcoin is a magic number that… Read More »
At the Future of Money and Technology conference yesterday, the VP of American Express got an uncomfortable question (for him). His response caused amusement and tweetnoise. For the benefit of the search enginges.. Richard Nevins Q: What does Amex think about bitcoin? A: Next question. [cue laughter] Christian Lanng Q: What do American Express think… Read More »
Here’s the thing about spammers: they send millions of emails. They are able to do so because the marginal cost of sending is very small. I have heard it said that if they get one hit in a million, then they can be in profit. Some fools repeatedly suggest that a charge per email is… Read More »
From East of Eden: “Say, Carlton, how do you go about telegraphing money?†“Well, you bring me a hundred and two dollars and sixty cents and I send a wire telling the Valdosta operator to pay Adam one hundred dollars.†This particular bit of East of Eden (which is excellent, quite apart from this particular… Read More »
I heard about Bitcoins last year. Thought “could be interesting one dayâ€, checked the Debian repository for a version of the client (it wasn’t packaged yet), not finding it, I moved on. Then Slashdot mentioned that trading in Bitcoins had (temporarily) reached dollar parity. One Bitcoin was worth one dollar, but dropped back to about… Read More »