Tag Archives: bitcoin foundation

Jon Matonis – Must-see Presentations At Next Month’s Bitcoin 2013 Conference

Jon Matonis - Must-see Presentations At Next Month's Bitcoin 2013 Conference:

Bitcoin Foundation board member Jon Matonis (@JonMatonis) describes upcoming presentations at the Bitcoin 2013 Conference (May 17-19) in San Jose, CA.  Excerpts:

“The conference is attracting technologists, venture capitalists, bankers, traders, payments specialists, and financial regulators.”
-
“The agenda will be particularly interesting to those in the banking and payments fields.”
-
“BitPay co-founder and CEO, Anthony Gallippi, will explain how he’s been driving business adoption of Bitcoin.”
-
“Paymium’s co-founder and chief operating officer, Pierre Noizat, will talk about bridging the gab [between bitcoin and the traditional regulated banking infrastructure].”
-
“Rainey Reitman, the activism director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties law firm and advocacy center, will hold forth on the liberating aspects of Bitcoin.”
-
“Tuur Demeester, author of the financial newsletter MacroTrends, will talk about bitcoin’s emerging role as a separate asset class alongside precious metals, equities, and bonds.”
-
“Online payments industry veteran Peter Šurda about how nonpolitical cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could alter the future of fractional reserve banking.”

[Note: Though registration for the event continues online through May 15th, the deadline for the conference rates is April 26th.]

 - http://bit.ly/17IYUcR
 - http://www.Bitcoin2013.com
 - http://www.bitcoin2013.com/topics—schedule.html (PDF)

All News - Daily E-mail Subscription - Twitter: @BitcoinNews

Bitcoin Foundation General Counsel Patrick Murck on FinCEN’s Guidance

Bitcoin Foundation General Counsel Patrick Murck on FinCEN's Guidance:

Patrick Murck (@VirtuallyLaw), General counsel and board member of Bitcoin Fondation posted on FinCEN’s recent guidance regarding using and exchanging virtual currencies.   Excerpts:

“Upon an initial reading two things struck me:
FinCEN firmly believes that virtual currency in general, and bitcoin in particular, does not fall under the pre-paid access rules.
FinCEN seems intent on recreating and expanding the pre-paid access rules for virtual currency and bitcoin under the mantle of money transmission.”
-
“Under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), FinCEN can’t promulgate new rules without going through a notice and comment proceeding whereby the public may have their voices heard. If FinCEN would like to expand its statutory authority over “money transmitters” to include brand new categories such as ‘administrators’ and ‘exchangers’ of digital currency it must do so through proper rulemaking proceedings and not by fiat.”
-
“FinCEN’s guidance implies that every person who has ever had any virtual currency and has ever exchanged that virtual currency for real currency may now be considered a money transmitter under the Bank Secrecy Act. That is, of course, an untenable position.”
-
“This framework would wildly expand the reach of FinCEN and the BSA, and would be infeasable for many, if not most, members of the bitcoin community to comply with.  […] The BSA was never intended to apply this broadly and reach this far into people’s everyday lives.”

 - https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=152
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154672.0 (Further discussion of the topic)
 - http://1.usa.gov/117bnWj (FinCEN FIN-2013-G001)

All News - Daily E-mail Subscription - Twitter: @BitcoinNews

Gavin Andresen – Core Development Update #3

Gavin Andresen - Core Development Update #3:

Excerpts from the latest update from Bitcoin.org project lead Gavin Andresen (@GavinAndresen):

“If you are using bitcoind or Bitcoin-Qt and you haven’t upgraded yet, you should: the new release [v0.8] is much faster and is more gentle on your disk drives.”
-
“[Foundation member Saivann Carignan is] redesigning the bitcoin.org website. He has also been doing the hard work of getting rough consensus on what the design and content should be,”
-
“This week transaction volume reached the voluntary, easy-to-change, 250,000 bytes-per-block limit — and that caused some pain for people. […] At least a couple of the big pools have decided to increase the size of the blocks they create.”
-
“There is a non-voluntary, hard-to-change, 1,000,000-bytes-of-transactions-per-block limit that needs to be raised. […] I’m confident that raising the 1MB limit will be only slightly painful for most people– you’ll just have to upgrade old Bitcoin software.”

 - https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=135
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149668.0 (Further discussion of the scalability issue)

All News - Daily E-mail Subscription  - Twitter: @BItcoinNews

Bitcoin Magazine – The Two Bitcoin Conferences of 2013

Bitcoin Magazine - The Two Bitcoin Conferences of 2013:

Vitalik Buterin writes in Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) about the two major Bitcoin Conferences scheduled in 2013.  Excerpts:

“The first [conference], entitled “The Future of Payments”, will take place in San Jose, California on May 17-19, and the second, named “unSYSTEM”, will happen in Vienna on 1-3 November.”
-
“The two conferences have radically different themes. For the 2013 conference in San Jose, the Bitcoin Foundation is pushing back in the direction of a conference organized around Bitcoin specifically and the more pragmatic issues that Bitcoin is trying to solve.”
-
“The unSYSTEM conference in Vienna, on the other hand, is pushing even further in the direction of activism. Of the sixteen speakers now listed on the site, only three are notable purely because of their work around Bitcoin, and the majority have nothing to do with the currency.”
-
“Both conferences are expecting a larger number of attendees than either of the conferences that took place in 2011 and 2012, and meeting the faces behind the most popular projects and services in the Bitcoin community has always been a key attraction of these events.”

 - http://bitcoinmagazine.com/the-two-bitcoin-conferences-of-2013
 - http://twitter.com/BTCFoundation
 - http://twitter.com/UnsystemNet

All News - Daily E-mail Subscription - Twitter: @BitcoinNews

Bitcoin Foundation – Quarterly Update

Bitcoin Foundation - Quarterly Update:

Peter Vessenes (@Vessenes), Executive Director of the The Bitcoin Foundation (@BTCFoundation) provides the organization’s first Quarterly Update.  Excerpts:

“We’ve opened up a grant proposal process to anyone who wishes to apply for a grant that could further Bitcoin in some way. The deadline is February 15, 2013.”
-
“Announced our first conference, Bitcoin 2013: The Future of Payments, for May 17-19 in San Jose [CA].”
-
“Member Review - over 240 at last count.”
-
“2012 was the year of Bitcoin Angels, 2013 seems more likely to be a Venture year. I am also starting to hear from Hedge Fund managers.”
-
“We’re working to get a shark-tank style demo day for the Bitcoin 2013 conference.”
-
“As larger companies figure out Bitcoin and how they can be involved, I think we’ll start to see significant adoption and exciting announcements.”

 - https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=99

All News - Daily E-mail Subscription - Twitter: @BitcoinNews