Bitcoin is a way to have programmable scarcity. The blockchain is the data structure that records the transfer of scarce objects.
The IRS issued guidance for virtual currencies on March 25, 2014 that stated virtual currencies, including Bitcoin, are to be treated as property for federal tax purposes. This requires capital gains on virtual currencies to be recorded and reported. The Bitcoin Foundation says this could lead to unrealistic reporting.
I want to help create the world's first global currency built on the Internet and built on open platforms and standards such as Bitcoin, and I want to build a financial services institution on top of that. That's what I'm doing with Circle.
In January 2013, one could buy a Bitcoin for about $13. By late November, one Bitcoin would have set a buyer back over $1100.
That's the last thing on Earth you should think about... There's just a whole lot of things that aren't going to work for you. Figure out what they are and avoid them like the plague. And one of them is bitcoin... It is total insanity.
One of the things that has plagued bitcoin is not bitcoin itself but the companies built on top of it.
Bitcore was introduced to give a trusted platform to spur further bitcoin innovation, allowing BitPay to focus on what they do best: acquire merchants.
Before I went to prison, there were not really many blockchain products. It was only bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not an actual physical coin, and if computers are shut down, you can't buy or sell them. That's why nothing will ever replace gold and silver coins themselves, and all investors should have them at home or in a safe deposit box.
With private chains, you can have a completely known universe of transaction processors. That appeals to financial institutions that are wary of the bitcoin blockchain.
Bitcoin is very ideologically fulfilling, it's my form of political activism, but it's also a huge business opportunity.
The history of Bitcoin trading is a bubble, a correction, consolidation, and another increase. It's happened four times, and it will happen again.
The next phase of the journey is to move from speculation to actual use cases - people getting into Bitcoin because they want to use it.
This Bitcoin currency is a voluntary decentralized currency, anonymous. It can't be shut down by anyone; there are no central servers.
The Internet's proven to be a pretty big deal for global society, and Bitcoin could basically be thought of as the Internet, applied to money.
Bitcoin is coming from a bunch of young computer nerds who saw this thing and thought it was neat. A lot of the early bitcoiners are 19-year-old kids, still living at home with their parents, and they don't have any business experience.
Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy.
With great ideas come great changes. Bitcoin's that.
Like the Internet, Bitcoin will change the way people interact and do business around the world.
With Bitcoin, no one has a monopoly of information.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a form of money that's a stable field that the government can't destroy and can't distort. Because its creation is governed by the laws of mathematics. It can't happen any faster or slower than a certain rate, and it all sort of self-adjusts.
In the aftermath of the oh-so-predictable crash, the Bitcoin fanatics have begun marshaling out excuse after excuse for why this non-investment investment lost so much of its value so fast. One was that hackers attacked some of the exchanges for Bitcoins and crippled it. Really? A hacker can wreck an entire market?
Isn't the purpose of bitcoin mining simply to get rich - or not, as the case may be? Well, at 21, we are less concerned with bitcoin as a financial instrument and more interested in bitcoin as a protocol - and particularly in the industrial uses of bitcoin enabled by embedded mining.
Bitcoin's got its issues. But it is not competing with perfection.
Though I don't personally believe that Bitcoin is true money, it should be perfectly legal, and there should be no restrictions on it; there should be no taxes on it.
Silicon Valley is a great place for Bitcoin, since everyone understands computers, and there are lots of libertarians running around.
Once people see Bitcoin and how it works, they realise this isn't just a flash in the pan.
We are very excited about the use of blockchain, whether it's Bitcoin or not, but we are as enthusiastic as ever about Bitcoin as a global currency and, really more importantly, Bitcoin as a global financial rail.
It is one thing to think gold has some marvelous store of value because man has no way of inventing more gold or getting it very easily, so it has the advantage of rarity. Believe me, man is capable of somehow creating more bitcoin... They tell you there are rules and they can't do it. Don't believe them.
Who would want one's children growing up buying things like bitcoin? I hope to God my family doesn't buy it. It's noxious poison.
You can hold your Bitcoin in Ripple. We want to be agnostic to any currency, whether that be a virtual currency, political currencies, or peer-to-peer currencies.
A token like ethereum has gone up 10 times faster than bitcoin, and it's fueling an ICO bubble no different then the dot-com IPOs of the late '90s.
Make no mistake - Ethereum would never have existed without Bitcoin as a forerunner. That said, I think Ethereum is ahead of Bitcoin in many ways and represents the bleeding edge of digital currency.
Assess Bitcoins? All you can do is examine the trading patterns, which do not provide a real analysis of any underlying economic value. The economics of investments are not solely based on supply and demand, and that is all that goes into Bitcoin prices.
In truth, the best Bitcoin can hope for is to be a second-rate version of gold, if that.
The Dwolla incident was to be expected. The government will go after sites that it thinks are supposed to register as money transmitters. Some Bitcoin companies will register as such, and some won't, but business will carry on regardless.