Tag Archives: payments

Legal Firm Riddell Williams Hires Bitcoin Experts to Lead Payments Practice

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Bitcoin Legal Experts Join Seattle Firm

Two of the leading legal professionals in the Bitcoin industry have joined Seattle-based Riddell Williams to co-chair the Payments practice area and provide expert services to Bitcoin companies. Pictured below are Daniel Friedberg and Ryan Straus, who each have contributed to the emerging Bitcoin business ecosystem.

Riddell Williams Bitcoin Lawyers

Friedberg has spoken at industry conferences including Bitcoin London and Bitcoin 2013, and has been quoted in major publications such as Fox Business, Tech Cocktail, and Business Insider. Friedberg has also published his work on the Bitcoin Foundation blog.

Strauss spoke at Bitcoin 2013, and published his writing in American Banker. He was also quoted in The Hill’s regulation blog.

Collectively, they represent some of the major players in the Bitcoin space for Riddell Williams, including exchanges, service companies, wallets, miners, investors, and merchants.

“We provide advice and help our clients implement compliance programs. We also directly interface with both Federal and state regulators to clarify issues,” said Friedberg in an interview with On Bitcoin. “Regulation of financial services business is inevitable and expected. We generally view the regulatory developments as positive steps towards acceptance. It is far better that we are moving towards a regime of regulation than prohibition,” he added.

Friedberg and Straus joined Riddell Williams and co-chair the Payments practice. “Riddell Williams understand the importance of this emerging payment system,” Straus explained. “Bitcoin is a natural fit for our payments group. Clients in emerging markets such as Bitcoin require the highest level of legal knowledge and service in order to make the right decisions.”

Riddell Williams is a Seattle law firm with over 60 lawyers that was founded in 1906 that has a specialty in financial services. Learn more at www.riddellwilliams.com.

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Brigham Young University Housing Starts Accepting Bitcoin

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Bitcoin BYU Housing

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.

 

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Building Bitcoin into the Core Architecture of the Web – Inside Bitcoins NYC

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Bitcoin Web Payments Manu Sporny Inside Bitcoins NYC

How to get Bitcoin into the hands of 2.4 billion people not using it today

Bitcoin has plenty of room to grow. With a market cap of roughly $1 billion USD, Bitcoin represents but a fraction of the United States’ $16.3 trillion USD money supply. Manu Sporny, founder of Digital Bazaar, is one of the people actively seeking to close the gap.

At the Inside Bitcoins NYC conference, Manu Sporny shared his answer to accelerate growth and provided a vision of adding 2.4 billion people to the Bitcoin ecosystem within the next five years.

Where might one find a market that large that can be on-boarded that quickly? To Sporny, the answer lies in the 2.4 billion people with access to the web and in the sheer global dominance of four popular web browsers: IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

The challenge that naturally follows is how to integrate Bitcoin into the browser. Sporny is tackling this challenge by pushing for new W3C standards for the browser that will allow for more simplified transactions over the web.

The argument is that exchanging funds over the Web is far more complicated than it needs to be. While we can exchange massive quantities of data nearly instantaneously, financial transactions are slowed due to the speed of old money, credit card numbers, waiting for block chain verifications, PCI compliance and the like.

Exploring a Bitcoin Web Payments Solution

Sporny articulated two paths to easier and faster financial transactions.

The first is PaySwarm, a currency-agnostic standard for Web Payments. PaySwarm, being commercialized through a system called Meritora, is the first open, universal standard for payments on the Web, allowing users to execute zero-click payments of USD, Euro, Bitcoins or any other currency of their choosing.

The second option described by Sporny is the WebPayment API, another standard for browser-based payments being developed by Mozilla. The API would enable one-click purchase directly from the browser.

Sporny is very bullish on Bitcoin and with the potential creation of new W3C standards that will spur Bitcoin use, it’s now “time for entrepreneurs to get in on the ground floor.”

 

Authored by Michael Smouha and Ronan Murphy, Contributors to On Bitcoin

CC image by jurvetson

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Top Bitcoin News Last Week: Ponzi Scheme, Gambling, Payments, and More

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Bitcoin Ponzi Scheme

Bitcoin News

A roundup of the top Bitcoin news from July 22 to July 28.

Tuesday, July 23

Wednesday, July 24

Saturday, July 27

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Work in Silicon Valley? Pay with Bitcoin at Coupa Café in Palo Alto

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Coupa Cafe Bitcoin

Coupa Café Starts Accepting Bitcoin

If you work in Silicon Valley, you know of Coupa Café. It’s a coffee shop in Palo Alto where the typical patrons are tech startup entrepreneurs coding away on a Macbook Air while they sip a latte.

Now this trendy coffee shop is becoming a payments pioneer by accepting Bitcoin at the register.

“It’s like when the Internet first started in the ’90s,” said Mike Landau in an interview with Palo Alto Online. Landau is a Facebook software engineer who helped build the technology that enables Coupa Café to accept Bitcoins.

“Bitcoin does two things,” Landau explained. “One is, it’s a currency. But it’s also a medium of transaction. You can imagine it being kind of like PayPal, but completely open source and decentralized. There’s no one company that’s in charge.”

Coupa Café’s cash register rings up a sale in both dollars and Bitcoin. Customers who want to pay in Bitcoin can use an app called Blockchain to scan the cafe’s QR code and send BTC for payment.

Blockchain Bitcoin Payments

 

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