but many people are speculating on them.

As a result of manic currency speculati on, its value against the dollar is highly erratic. This volatility makes it difficult for Bitcoins to make the leap to genuine curr ency, because businesses will be wary of accepting a currency whose value is so unpredictable. Over the last 72 hours, it has lost around 30 per cent of its val ue

Apparently there is already an entire trendy suburb in Berlin where you can more or less live on them already. The appeal of Bitcoin, to small businesses especially, is that it has the potent ial to be a much cheaper method of accepting payments than credit cards, which i mpose crippling fees. In some ways, Bitcoin is also less susceptible to fraud. I t s a long way off, but Bitcoin (or another digital currency) has many of the ingr edients to change the way we pay for things. It s hard to see this happening, though, because Bitcoin has been hijacked by spec ulators. People are moving their money in and out at a blinding rate. Traders ha ve turned their attention to it (Bank of America began publishing research last week). The millionaire Winklevoss twins better known as the Harvard rowers who c laim Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook are launching a fund for peop le to invest in Bitcoin. This has given the currency a sense of credibility, but also threatens to turn i t into a Ponzi scheme: its price fluctuates manically as the slightest hint of a ction or inaction from regulators, or comment from self-nominated experts, sends people rushing to buy and sell. Bitcoin s value seems built more upon chancers ho ping to buy low and sell high than on any real demand for it. This volatility threatens to kill Bitcoin s potential. If a small business risks l osing thousands overnight because of a huge swing in value, why would it adopt B itcoin as a payment method? Why would any citizen of a restrictive state use it to protect their money? The more Bitcoin wavers, the more its value as a tool diminishes. The profit see kers should take note, because if they kill any practical use for Bitcoin, deman d crumbles and the currency becomes nothing more than a house of cards one that is bound to topple.

2Bitcoin s value took a tumble this week after the People s Bank of China issued an official statement about its stance on the digital coin, knocking the cryptocurr ency s value down into the $800s after lofty $1200. the People s Bank of China and f our other ministries and agencies announced that banks and payment companies wer e prohibited from dealing with the coin, but that the country s citizens are still free to buy and sell it. me soon. The notice says that financial institutions and payment institutions can t start u sing bitcoin, or exchange it for RMB, or act as a middleperson for bitcoin payme nts. That means you won t be able to deposit bitcoin into a Chinese bank anytime s oon. It also forbids the development of a business like Bitpay, a popular servic e here that allows merchants to take cryptopayment and immediately convert it in to fiat. This is likely to slow the already tortoise-like development of a bitco in ecosystem for real goods there; no one in China will be buying a Tesla Model S with bitcoin anytime soon. China made it very clear that it doesn t consider Bitcoin a currency or legal tend er, and that it shouldn t be used to pay for real goods and services. Shortly afte r the statement came out, Baidu (a.k.a. China s Google) which was famously accepti ng bitcoin for its Jiasule security services, announced it would no longer accep

t the virtual currency as payment.

Cups and Cakes Bakery , SF foodler Wordpress The "Assassination Market" is a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymousl y contribute Bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official a ki nd of Kickstarter for political assassinations. Black Market Reloaded

In each transaction, the previous owner signs using the signing key related to his public key a hash of the transaction in which he received the bitcoins and the pu blic key of the next owner. This signature can then be added to the set of trans actions that constitutes the bitcoin; because each of these transactions referen ces the previous transaction (i.e., in sending bitcoins, the current owner must specify where they came from), the transactions form a chain. To verify the vali dity of a bitcoin, a user can check the validity of each of the signatures in th is chain.