Category Archives: News
Inside Bitcoins Conference Kicks Off With Excitement in Las Vegas
In a packed room at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, seemingly everyone who knows anything about Bitcoin is attending the Inside Bitcoins conference.
Read: Inside Bitcoins Conference Leads the Way to the Future of Money
Jared Kenna, founder and CEO of Tradehill, took the stage to keynote the conference and presented a look back at the major milestones for Bitcoin over the last few years.
In an entertaining presentation, Kenna described some of the “early” milestones, looking back less than one year ago. Here are the highlights:
- In February, Bitcoin digital wallet Coinbase generated $1 million when Bitcoin was worth $22 per coin.
- In March, FinCEN issued guidance describing Bitcoin as money transmission, pushing the regulation to the states. Coinbase passed 50,000 users in the same month and the price rose to $100.
- In April, Bitcoin cloud wallet provider Blockchain.info broke 200,000 users. The price rose to $260 and then crashed to $70.
- In May, gift card provider Gyft launched a service that brought Bitcoin to 50,000 brick and mortar stores. Coinbase acquired its 100,000th customer. Seattle startup CoinLab sued Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox for $75 million
- In June, the Bitcoin foundation received a cease and desist letter from California, and responded.
- In July, the Winklevoss twins announce their plans to launch a Bitcoin fund.
- In August, Mt.Gox had millions of dollars seized, knocking the exchange and paving the way for BTC China to take a leadership position among Bitcoin exchanges.
- In September, Coinbase grew to 250.000 users and Mt.Gox continued to lose market share.
- In October, international drug marketplace Silk Road was shut down and its owner arrested. Bitcoin broke $200 for the second time.
- In November, Coinbase and Blockchain.info both grew to 500,000 customers. The price of Bitcoin climbed from $200 to $1200. And the U.S. Senate held hearings on the digital currency.
- In December, Roger Ver donated 1000 Bitcoin to charity. Switzerland is preparing to vote on Bitcoin as a currency. The price hit a new floor of $580 and then grew again.
Stay tuned for news from the rest of the conference!
Bitcoin Week: China Banks, Price, Simpsons, Bitcoin Lost, Black Friday
Bitcoin Week
Here is a roundup of the top Bitcoin news from last week.
The People’s Bank of China published a notice about Bitcoin which sparked a huge sell-off and the price tumbling.
Bitcoin Black Friday results showed a very positive outcome for the first event.
The Simpsons referenced Bitcoin. Krusty the Clown went broke trading the crypto currency.
An Australian Bitcoin exchange raised funding.
We dug deep into the Blockchain to determine that there may be 2 million Bitcoin lost forever, and explained why.
And much more!
We’ll be at Inside Bitcoins Las Vegas this week. Send us a tweet if you’ll be there too!
All News
Monday, December 2
Wednesday, December 5
Thursday, December 6
Friday, December 7
- Bitcoin Having a Huge Sell Off, Here’s Why
- Bitcoin Spoilage: 2 Million Bitcoin Likely Lost on Old Hard Drives
Sunday, December 9
Simpsons Bitcoin: Krusty the Clown Goes Broke on Bitcoin
Even the popular TV show The Simpsons has Bitcoin fever.
In tonight’s episode, Krusty the Clown told Lisa how he went broke by having “bad luck at the ponies and worse luck in the Bitcoin market.”
Here’s the clip
Bitcoin Spoilage: 2 Million Bitcoin Likely Lost on Old Hard Drives
Up to 30% of the Bitcoin Economy May Be Unrecoverable
Early mining rewards may be lost forever.
For the first few years of Bitcoin, 2009-2010, mining was a relatively simple computational task. Miners could use idle CPU cycles and generate Bitcoin. The value of the digital currency was low, less than $0.05, and mining was a hobby for computer geeks.
Back then, the reward for mining a block was 50 Bitcoin. Every 2 years the mining reward halves; today it is 25 Bitcoin.
Since the blockchain, or distributed ledger of Bitcoin transactions, is public, one can determine the exact balance of every address. However it’s important to note that because an individual can have many Bitcoin addresses and there is no personally identifiable information, it is not possible to determine how much Bitcoin any single owner has.
But here’s the revealing data, first published by Reddit user rutkdn: there are 38,399 addresses with exactly 50 BTC.
The logical conclusion is that each of these was an address setup by a miner in the first 2 years of the digital currency. The reward was paid into that address and no currency was ever added to it.
When you sum it up, there are 1.9 million Bitcoin in these addresses, or about $2 billion of value ($1.4 billion after last night’s sell off). And it’s highly likely that this money is unrecoverable. That’s 16% of the total number of Bitcoin available today.
In the early days, all Bitcoin were stored on personal hard drives and mining was performed using desktop software. Again, 50 BTC at the time was worth very little, maybe up to $1 or $2. So why would any miner go through the trouble of backing up their Bitcoin wallets when they could easily mine more the next day?
Many did not, and when those hard drives crashed or computers were thrown away, a lot of Bitcoin went to spoilage.
Related: You May Have a Fortune on Your Hard Drive: Recovering Lost Bitcoin
Here are some testimonials from Reddit by miners who lost Bitcoin this way.
One miner wrote:
Mine went back to Sony when hdd failed under warranty. Never bothered to save them – clicking and adding that weird path to the backup of my documents didn’t seem worth it. Back then even if I wanted to sell or buy, I’d have to navigate IRC or do cash-in-mail. They were practically worthless, except for the educational value.
Another miner added:
When I first heard about bitcoin, right at the end of 2009- I was mining ~400-700 a day for a week or two. plain old AMD tower
I never actually spent any bitcoin in exchange for products at the time nor managed to exchange them – All deleted years ago,hard drive gone, kaput, send to trash and god knows where right now.
it’s so easy in retrospect to say you would of just mined for a few days and held those coins for 4 years and be rich. You’d have to have some crazy self control and strange level of foresight to hold onto them. once you got wallet balance them what would you do with it? There was nothing you could buy with them, no exchanges just a few guys on IRC.
there was no economy, it wasn’t seen as a get rich scheme nor an investment. it was just a test of niche beta software with a tiny community of hackers and libertarians.
So, 16% of the total Bitcoin economy is stored in these early miner addresses. What about other losses? Well, it’s reasonable to assume that early Bitcoin owners who accumulated Bitcoin via trade may also have been susceptible to loss due to hard drive failure or file corruption. Maybe even 30% of the today’s Bitcoin economy will never be recovered.
Will increased scarcity make your Bitcoin more valuable?
CC image by Images_of_Money
Bitcoin Having a Huge Sell Off, Here’s Why
Today was a tough day for Bitcoin. Here’s what happened.
The People’s Bank of China issued a notice restricting banks from handling Bitcoin. Baidu also stopped accepting Bitcoin.
There was a big sell-off that made the price fall from $1100 to $650 in an hour or two. Some people sold in a panic, accelerating the drop.
Others bought on the way down. Seems to have bottomed out in the low $600s and holding but we’ll see.
Many investors predict Bitcoin will climb back to $2000 by year end/ early next year, maybe more.
