Category Archives: News
Brigham Young University Housing Starts Accepting Bitcoin
Two off-campus housing facilities at Brigham Young University have begun accepting Bitcoin as payment for rent. The two houses are Mountain Pines (for women) and The Nauvoo House.
The official announcement on the housing websites is rather understated, simply saying “We Accept Bitcoin! Please contact us if you would like to make a payment using Bitcoin,” but this is a big step forward for the alternative currency.
First, this is a demonstration of mainstream adoption in Bitcoin. There is nothing more critical than paying your rent and this is a big endorsement that the currency can be trusted.
Second, this gives college students the opportunity to drive faster adoption of Bitcoin. Facebook started out as a social network for Harvard students, followed by all campuses, and eventually the world. Perhaps Bitcoin’s rise to ubiquity will be ignited by its usage on college campuses as well.
Mt. Gox Makes New Appeal to Bitcoin Community to Share Stories
Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox has published a new appeal to the Bitcoin community. After a successful ad campaign promoting the positive adoption of Bitcoin during the G8 Summit in June, Mt.Gox’s parent company Tibanne is developing a grassroots campaign to show how Bitcoin affects real people and small businesses.
They are accepting crowd-sourced submissions by Wednesday, August 7.
Here is the official appeal from Mt.Gox:
Dear Bitcoiners,
Thanks so much for your support of our previous ad for the G8 Summit in June. We were able to get Bitcoin in front of a lot of influential people from around the globe and received a lot of amazing feedback.Right now our parent company Tibanne is working on another campaign to promote Bitcoin by showing how real people and businesses are using Bitcoin to improve their lives. The campaign will be launched in a major print ad and website.
It’s short timing, but we’re appealing to merchants and individuals in the Bitcoin community interested in sharing their experiences with Bitcoin as part of this campaign. We’ll feature selected people and businesses in the ad as well as on the site, and of course link back to you.
What we need:
- Picture of you if you’re an individual, and you and your business if you’re an owner
- A quick quote about how Bitcoin has influenced you or your business
- We’ll need you to sign a release as well, so we’ll send that to you when you get in touchThe deadline for submission is August 7th 2013 (Wednesday) EOD. If anyone would like more information or has any questions, please don’t hesitate to post them here or send us an email at stories@tibanne.com
Thanks so much for your help, and we’re looking forward to getting your stories out to the world.
Top Bitcoin News Last Week: Inside Bitcoins Conference, Thailand, MasterCoin
Bitcoin News
A roundup of the top Bitcoin news from July 29 to August 4.
Monday, July 29
Tuesday, July 30
- Inside Bitcoins NYC Keynote: Is Bitcoin the New Financial Order?
- Finding Business Model Opportunities in Bitcoin – Inside Bitcoins NYC
- Building Bitcoin into the Core Architecture of the Web – Inside Bitcoins NYC
- Inside Bitcoins NYC Recap – Bitcoin Future is Bright, But Uncertain
Thursday, August 1
Friday, August 2
Coin Forest Wants to the Be the Groupon for Bitcoin
Group Deals with Bitcoin on Coin Forest
It seems like every week there are new companies springing up that are taking proven business models and applying Bitcoin. Bitcoin has several advantages to these businesses: instant transactions, very low fees, and fully digital.
We sat down with the co-founder John Mardlin and Business Development Manager Brandon Gains of Coin Forest, a group-buying site that specializes in deals for Bitcoin, to learn more about their new business.
On Bitcoin: What is Coin Forest and how did you get started?
Brandon Gains: Coin Forest is a Bitcoin-only business that offers special group-buying discounts to the bitcoin community. Coin Forest is a boot-strapped startup out of Victoria, British Columbia.
John Mardlin: Coin Forest is like Groupon for Bitcoiners. Though the main difference is that we care about our community, and our primary motive isn’t profit.
I got started just by finding out about Bitcoin from an acquaintance while I was visiting San Francisco. It wasn’t the best timing really, I put about $1k into BTC at $140 in early April. We know what happened after that.
I got to thinking about how little the price of Bitcoin is really tied to it’s utility as a means of exchanging real goods and services. I also got to thinking about how effective of a differentiator the currency could be.
At the same time, I was working at PMRobot.com, a project management tool in a really crowded market. The whole SaaS space is so crowded, I thought there might be some opportunity for a group buying site focusing on B2B SaaS.
At some point, all those disjoint thoughts just kind of coalesced into the idea that looks a lot like what Coin Forest is right now.
On Bitcoin: Why the focus on Bitcoin?
John Mardlin: Bitcoin is the whole point! My dream was never to run a daily deals website, but I am very motivated to help expand the reach of the bitcoin economy, and I think this is the perfect model to do it. I wrote about why that is here: http://blog.coinforest.
This quote is the first time someone has really effectively put my vision into their own words: http://www.reddit.com/
Brandon Gains: We want to grow the bitcoin economy. Many people have heard about bitcoin but don’t see a reason to buy it unless they are investing. By providing short-term discounts we can create a temporary situation where the only way to get a certain item at a certain price is with bitcoin. We want to be the reason many people get their first bitcoin.
On Bitcoin: Who do you think should use your site?
Brandon Gains: We think our site’s deals will be targeted towards anyone interested in buying: bitcoin related goods/services, 3D printing services, equipment for makers, online education, tools and services for building software, and services for startups/online businesses.
John Mardlin: We want to provide products that will appeal to any bitcoiners, not all of the time, but at least some of the time. As we progress, we’ll discover what people are the most interested in.
Aside from helping people get deals though, we really want to be the place that people go when they want to use bitcoin to buy a particular companies products. My dream is that we can get enough people together, pledging to purchase a major companies product if they begin to accept bitcoin. This would likely be someone like github, or 23andMe, shapeways, autodesk, atlassian, adafruit…. any tech savvy company that’s shown itself to be a leading innovator.
On Bitcoin: How fast can you scale, considering there are only 11 million Bitcoin in distribution? Whats your long-term view?
John Mardlin: You might look at it like that… or you might see it as one of very few companies providing a service to an economy worth 1 billion dollars. We don’t expect to bump up against the limits of the bitcoin economy, we expect to grow by helping it grow.
Brandon Gains: We feel that bitcoin has started a global movement towards a decentralized economy and we believe that cryptocurrencies are the future of global currency; even if bitcoin falters in a few years there are several promising alt-currencies there to take it’s place. We feel that we can scale up the company quickly once we prove the success of our first deals. We will be able to attract bigger and bigger companies to start accepting bitcoin-only deals.
MasterCoin Proposal to Make Bitcoin More Stable and Secure
Complete MasterCoin Specification Released
J.R. Willett, aka dacoinminster, is a Seattle-based software engineer and Bitcoin expert. Like many in the Bitcoin community, he sees a future where Bitcoin is adopted by the mainstream for a wide variety of purposes. To achieve that goal, Willett believes that there’s more work to be done around the Bitcoin protocol.
After 2 years of research and discovery, Willett has released a complete specification for building a protocol layer on top of Bitcoin, similar to how HTTP runs on top of TCP/IP. He calls the new protocol MasterCoin.
The coins of the new layer have
• Additional security features to make your money much harder to steal
• Built-in support for distributed betting (no need to trust a website to coordinate bets)
• Capability to hold a stable user-defined value, such as an ounce of gold or U.S. Dollar, with no need to trust a person promising to back up that value
The name of the new protocol layer is “MasterCoin” and it is 100% message-based, meaning that it encodes all its protocol data as hidden messages in the block chain which have special meanings, such as placing a bet, or transferring MasterCoins to another address.
Once you own MasterCoins, you have the building blocks for creating GoldCoin, USDCoin, EuroCoin, and any other real-world asset. These child currencies will then be “meta stable” (holding their values as long as they remain sufficiently backed by MasterCoins held in escrow). Their target values are maintained by protocol actions which control the available supply.
Here is the complete MasterCoin specification.
Willett is inviting early adopters to purchase MasterCoins by sending Bitcoins to the Exodus Address: 1EXoDusjGwvnjZUyKkxZ4UHEf77z6A5S4P. These funds will be used for development of software implementing the MasterCoin protocol.
For more information, read or join the discussion at bitcointalk and Reddit.
Below is a video of J.R. Willett speaking on a Bitcoin expert panel in May 2013.
CC image by zcopley
