Oh lordy! It appears some NY based dimwit has attempted to trademark Bitcoin (Application for June 22nd 2011, which is surprising given that I’ve been using them for months before then). But the affair took a comical turn when the guy demonstrated his own idiocy in an interview:
“My understanding is that they are anonymous and untraceable,” the trademark troll said. “So how would one prove that a person-to-person transaction occurred?”
Okay, here’s how
Transactions are totally transparent and can be viewed through blockexplorer.com by simply entering a bitcoin address or block hash. You can see the Bitcoins as they move from address to address and each transaction is fully transparent.
To prove ownership of a particular Bitcoin address the alleged owner only has to transfer an agreed amount (say 0.12345) to someone who takes part in the test. The transaction will show up in bitcoin block explorer for all to see, thereby proving this person and is in possession of the originating address.
Oh yeah - and all transactions are all dated too and the entire history of any particular part can be traced and NONE of this information can be falsified or forged because they are backed by ridiculous amount of processing time!
Best #Bitcoin cartoon image evar! By Rasmus Rasmussen, featured in todays New York Observer. Lulz for Internet culture!
Bitcoin GPU Mining Statistics
I know there has been some interested in #Bitcoin mining, so I wanted to publish here the stats from our little network over the last few days. We joined this bitcoin mining pool, configured all machines to run the Python OpenCL miner (poclm_py2exe). (See the News Lobster tutorial on how to setup GPU mining, and be sure to install the latest video drivers for your cards too!). Here are the stats of our three machines involved:
Total network capacity is somewhere just above 80,000 khash/s and in 24 hours we can expect to generate around 0.12 BTC with this pool (which at the time of writing is valued at about £1.50).
I should say these computers are not designed to be mining rigs, just our own personal computers and that all the SHA-1 crypto-busting does take quite a considerable toll on the GPU. On the plus side, we might just have found an alternative way of heating the house Lol
This is certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme, but if you have some processing time going spare on a PC that is already likely to be on (e.g. a web server or something similar) then you might be able to make a little this way. I feel it also important to point out that Bitcoin is inherently deflationary, so £1.50 today is likely to be worth more than £3 next month.
Gavin Andresen and Amir Taaki discuss the Bitcoin live on This Week In - Startups. A fantastic hour-long video exploring the nature of the new Bitcoin and the implication this may have.
This comes at an interesting time when Bitcoin has reached it’s highest value to date - topping 6$ per Bitcoin last night, and Paypal has recently begun freezing the accounts of some of the Paypal - Bitcoin conversion websites. It will not stop the community, and will only serve to drive people away to other Bitcoin services as this is the only Internet payment method that protects your privacy.
Bitcoin Plugins for e-Commerce Software
Wow! People have already written Bitcoin plugins/modules for some of the more popular open source e-Commerce packages already:
