Tech Feed News Talks Bitcoin Regulation at Bitcoin 2013

Interviews include Buttercoin, Gavin Andresen, Patrick Murck (general counsel, Bitcoin Foundation), and Dan Friedberg (lawyer).

Did Open Transactions Just Become a Legitimate Challenger to Ripple?

Last week, OpenCoin Inc. chief cryptographer David Schwartz was interviewed on the "Let's Talk Bitcoin" show. If you listen from 17:44, you'll hear his opinion on Open Transactions:

"In Open Transactions, nodes have to actively perform transactions, so you can't as easily have a public state of the network. So because the state of the [Ripple] network is public, if I want to make a payment to you, I can look at the exchange offers, I can look at the available liquidity in the network, and I can very easily find the cheapest path to make a payment to you.

In Open Transactions, I would have to go around to different servers and get quotes, and then the transactions can't really be atomic, they're working on it but they're not quite there yet, so if part of the transaction succeeds, and the second half fails, I can wind up with something that I was going to trade to pay you, but now I can't trade it, so I wind up with some asset that may be completely valueless... payments are atomic in Ripple, meaning the entire payment either succeeds or fails."

Today, Open Transactions developer FellowTraveler claims to have found "the Holy Grail," which is to use Bitmessage to allow for discovery across federated servers, server-to-server wiring of funds, escrow based conversion of currencies across federated OT servers, and the ability to send any currency p2p, all of this done without the issuance of credit or using a "pre-mined" currency.

Well, I am not a developer, so, the question is, have they done it? Is it now just a matter of who brings their product to market first?

The Bitcoin Trader Goes to San Jose!

Wow, what a weekend. To be honest, I wasn't sure exactly what (or when) I was going to write about the conference, because it really was a personal experience more than anything else.

That being said, IT WAS A HELLUVA WEEKEND!!

I didn't take any notes, at all. Except for the couple-dozen tweets I sent out over the course of three days (hope you were following!), and the dozen-or-so business cards I collected, I'm relying strictly on memory here.

Bitcoin News Bits - May 13th, 2013

I get quite a few emails from people looking to promote their products, services, events, and sites. Unfortunately I don't have the time to get back to everyone in a prompt manner, but I can assure you that all of your emails are read and I always take the time to check out your sites.

Here are the latest and greatest:

Pocket Rockets Casino - A new Bitcoin poker room (there are actually a bunch of new ones as of late) just opened up, called "Pocket Rockets Casino." They went live on April 16th. It's a great browser-based poker experience that just needs some players to get the ball rolling, which is usually the first big struggle for any poker site. They appear to be running some decent promotions to get bums in the seats, so be sure to check them out!

I was offered $550 to say that "Ripple is a Scam."

I received an interesting message in my bitcointalk.org inbox today. It said that a user going by the name of 'TradeFortress' was paying forum members 5 BTC to edit their posts in this thread to say that, "Ripple is a scam."

This is the exact text he wanted each user to post:

"Ripple is a scam! Ripple is a get rich quick scheme for it's creators, a private for-profit company. It is NOT open source. It is CENTRALIZED, akin to PayPal rather than Bitcoin. For more info, visit RippleScam.org."

Ironically, in the earlier days of Bitcoin (2010, 2011, and well into 2012), the same accusations were spread about Bitcoin. Bitcoin was a "Ponzi-scheme," "pyramid scheme," "scam," etc. The same Bitcoin supporters that fought these accusations tooth and nail are now saying the same thing about Ripple.