Bitcoin

Help me answer Senate committee’s questions about Bitcoin

by on January 2, 2014 · 2 comments

Over a month ago I testified at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Bitcoin. I’ve been asked by the committee to submit answers to additional questions, and I thought I’d try to tap into the Bitcoin community’s wisdom by posting here the questions and my draft answers and inviting you to post in the comments any suggestions you might have. I’d especially appreciate examples of innovative uses of Bitcoin or interesting potential business cases. Thanks for your help! Continue reading →

SHARE: 2 comments

How Much Carbon Does It Take to Keep Ben Bernanke Alive?

by on December 17, 2013 · 0 comments

Everyone seems to be worried about Bitcoin’s carbon footprint lately. Last week, an article on Quartz claimed that Bitcoin miners are spending $17 million per day on electricity in order to reap $4.4 million worth of bitcoins. And Yesterday, Pando Daily ran a piece that ominously warned about Bitcoin’s carbon footprint.

One problem with both of these pieces is that they seem to rely on electricity consumption estimates from blockchain.info. While this site is great for getting stats about the Bitcoin network, it’s not such a great site for estimating electricity consumption. Blockchain.info clearly states that it is using an estimate of 650 Watts per gigahash [per second, I assume] in its electricity calculations. While this may have been a good estimate of the efficiency of the Bitcoin network when the page was first created, the network has become much more efficient since then. Archive.org shows that the 650W/GH/s figure was used on the earliest cached copy of the page, from December 2, 2011; yes, that is over two years ago. Continue reading →

SHARE: 0 comments

Using Bayes’s Rule to Think About a Bitcoin Bubble

by on December 13, 2013 · 0 comments

Is there a Bitcoin bubble? Jason Kuznicki thinks so and believes that he has conclusive proof. He blogs three graphs that show more or less that there is a lot of speculation in Bitcoin. But does speculation prove that there’s a bubble? Let’s use Bayes’s rule to think about this carefully.

Bayes’s rule is a mathematical tool for thinking about the incorporation of new evidence into subjective probabilities. Let’s suppose that there is some proposition A for which you have a prior belief. Somebody offers evidence B for or against A. How much should you change your belief in A based on evidence B?

Bayes’s rule boils the answer down to a simple mathematical form: Continue reading →

SHARE: 0 comments

Why would anyone use Bitcoin when PayPal or Visa work perfectly well?

by on December 4, 2013 · 4 comments

bitcoin transaction

A common question among smart Bitcoin skeptics is, “Why would one use Bitcoin when you can use dollars or euros, which are more common and more widely accepted?” It’s a fair question, and one I’ve tried to answer by pointing out that if Bitcoin were just a currency (except new and untested), then yes, there would be little reason why one should prefer it to dollars. The fact, however, is that Bitcoin is more than money, as I recently explained in Reason. Bitcoin is better thought of as a payments system, or as a distributed ledger, that (for technical reasons) happens to use a new currency called the bitcoin as the unit of account. As Tim Lee has pointed out, Bitcoin is therefore a platform for innovation, and it is this potential that makes it so valuable.

Eric Posner is one of these smart skeptics. Writing in Slate in April he rejected Bitcoin as a “fantasy” because he felt it didn’t make sense as a currency. Since then it’s been pointed out to him that Bitcoin is more than a currency, and today at the New Republic he asks the question, “Why would you use Bitcoin when you can use PayPal or Visa, which are more common and widely accepted?”

He answers his own question, in part, by acknowledging that Bitcoin is censorship-resistant. As he puts it, “If you live in a country with capital controls, you can avoid those[.]” So right there, it seems to me, is one good reason why one might want to use Bitcoin instead of PayPal or Visa. Another smart skeptic, Tyler Cowen, acknowledges this as well, even if only to suggest that the price of bitcoins will fall “if/when China fully liberalizes capital flows[.]”

Continue reading →

SHARE: 4 comments

Stop Saying Bitcoin Transactions Aren’t Reversible

by on December 4, 2013 · 0 comments

One of the criticisms leveled at Bitcoin by those people determined to hate it is that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible. If I buy goods from an anonymous counterparty online, what’s to stop them from taking my bitcoins and simply not sending me the goods? When I buy goods online using Visa or American Express, if the goods never arrive, or if they aren’t what was advertised, I can complain to the credit card company. The company will do a cursory investigation, and if they find that I was indeed likely ripped off, they will refund me my money. Credit card transactions are reversible, Bitcoin transactions are not. For this service (among others), credit card companies charge merchants a few percentage points on the transaction.

The problem with this account is that it’s not true: Baked into the Bitcoin protocol, there is support for what are known as “m-of-n” or “multisignature” transactions, transactions that require some number m out of some higher number n parties to sign off. Continue reading →

SHARE: 0 comments

The Great Disintermediation

by on December 2, 2013 · 1 comment

Yesterday at Forbes, William Pentland had an interesting piece on possible disintermediation in the electricity market.

In New York and New England, the price of electricity is a function of the cost of natural gas plus the cost of the poles and wires that carry electrons from remotely-sited power plants to end users. It is not unusual for customers to spend two dollars on poles and wires for every dollar they spend on electrons.

The poles and wires that once reduced the price of electricity for end users are now doing the opposite. To make matters worse, electricity supplied through the power grid is frequently less reliable than electricity generated onsite. In other words, rather than adding value in the form of enhanced reliability, the poles and wires diminish the reliability of electricity.

If two thirds of the cost of electricity is the distribution mechanism, then, as Pentland notes, there is a palpable opportunity to switch to at-home electricity generation. Some combination of solar power, batteries, and natural gas-fired backup generators could displace the grid entirely for some customers. And if I understand my electricity economics correctly, if a significant fraction of customers go off-grid, the fixed cost of maintaining the grid will be split over fewer remaining customers, making centrally-generated electricity even more expensive. The market for such electricity could quickly unravel. Continue reading →

SHARE: 1 comment

Are you totally sick of Bitcoin yet? No? OK, here’s a little more.

by on November 19, 2013 · 0 comments

“Selfie” was selected today as the word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary’s editors, beating both “twerking” and “bitcoin.” Bitcoin’s company in that word list makes me appreciate the fact that others may be as sick of hearing about Bitcoin as I am about twerking. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty important week for Bitcoin, an I wanted to highlight some of the work I’ve been doing.

Yesterday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the promises and challenges that virtual currencies hold for consumers and law enforcement respectively. I testified at that hearing and video of my testimony is below. You can also check out the written testimony, which is an updated version of the Bitcoin primer for policymakers I wrote with Andrea Castillo earlier this year. And ahead of the hearing I published an op-ed in The Guardian arguing that if the U.S. doesn’t foster a sane regulatory environment for Bitcoin, entrepreneurs will go to other jurisdictions that do.

All in all the hearing was hearteningly positive. The federal regulators and law enforcement representatives all agreed that Bitcoin is a lawful and legitimate payments system and that it holds great promise. They also agreed that plain old cash and centralized virtual currencies (contra Bitcoin’s decentralized design) are much greater magnets for money laundering, and that they needed no new laws or authority to deal with illegal uses of Bitcoin. I discuss the hearing and its implications on today’s Cato Daily Podcast with Caleb Brown.

Finally, I think there are lots of folks, especially in the wonkosphere, who think they know what Bitcoin is, but really don’t, and so the opinions they offer about its viability or significance are based on misunderstanding. For example, Neil Irwin at Wonkblog today wrote a 700-word post to suggest that what Bitcoin needs is a central bank. Now, if he’s trolling, kudos to him. But I really think he’s innocently ignorant of the fact that Bitcoin’s seminal design feature is that it is a decentralized payments system, and that the moment you add a central banker (which would in any case be impossible) you would no longer have Bitcoin, but Facebook Credits or Microsoft Points or airline miles.

So, if you think you have an inkling about what Bitcoin is, but you’re not too sure, or you don’t know why it’s so significant, please check out my cover story in the December issue of Reason, which was just made available online. Apart from explaining the basics, I go into detail about the little understood fact that Bitcoin is much more than just money. Value transmission is just the most obvious use case for Bitcoin, and thus the one that’s being built out first, but the Bitcoin platform is essentially a decentralized ledger, so it is also able to support property registrations, decentralized futures markets, and much more.

And truly finally, if you want to keep up with all the happenings in Bitcoin, including the Senate Banking Committee hearing later today, check out MostlyBitcoin.com, a site a built for myself but that I hope is useful to others that tracks Bitcoin stories in the mainstream media.

SHARE: 0 comments

Bitcoin is going mainstream. Here is why cypherpunks shouldn’t worry.

by on October 31, 2013 · 14 comments

Deep Web Time CoverToday is a bit of a banner day for Bitcoin. It was five years ago today that Bitcoin was first described in a paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. And today the New York Times has finally run a profile of the cryptocurrency in its “paper of record” pages. In addition, TIME’s cover story this week is about the “deep web” and how Tor and Bitcoin facilitate it.

The fact is that Bitcoin is inching its way into the mainstream. Indeed, the NYT’s headline is “Bitcoin Pursues the Mainstream,” and this month’s issue of WIRED includes an article titled, “Bitcoin’s Radical Days Are Over. Here’s How to Take It Mainstream.”

The radicals, however, are not taking this sitting down. Also today, Cody Wilson and Unsystem have launched a crowdfunding campaign to build an anonymizing wallet. In their explanatory video, they criticize the Bitcoin Foundation as “helping the United States” regulate Bitcon, presumably to hasten its mainstream adoption. “Their mission is a performance to both agree with, and maintain an independence from, regulatory power,” Wilson says. “But you can’t have it both ways.”

This is an internecine battle that I’ve observed in the Bitcoin community for years. That of the cypherpunks who see Bitcoin as an escape hatch from state control versus the entrepreneurs who are more interested in the network’s disruptive (and thus profitable) potential. While it might be a fool’s errand, I’d like to make the case that not only is the work of the two groups not in conflict, they actually benefit from each other.

I’ve been following Bitcoin since early 2011, and in April of that year I penned the first (yes) mainstream article about Bitcoin. It was in TIME.com, and it’s been credited with kicking off the first bubble. Since then my work has focused on the regulatory policy around Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, especially looking to educate policymakers about the workings and potential benefits of decentralized payments systems. Why am I so interested in this? My reasons are twofold and they track both the entrepreneurial and cypherpunk ideals, and yet I don’t think I’m bipolar.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 14 comments

Some quick thoughts on Silk Road’s demise and what it means for Bitcoin

by on October 2, 2013 · 0 comments

As you know doubt have heard, Silk Road has been shut down by the FBI and its alleged operator, Ross Ulbricht, has been arrested. I've been getting a lot of questions about this and what it means for Bitcoin. Here are some initial thoughts.

The price of Bitcoin is dropping. What does that mean? It means that speculators are speculating. That said, here's how I'm going to read it: If the main value of Bitcoin is that it can be used to buy drugs on Silk Road (as some contend), then we should see the value drop to zero is short order. If Bitcoin has other value, we should see it weather this jolt. One year ago a Bitcoin traded for about $14. As I type this, it's hovering at about $118 $127.

How did they catch the guy? Good question. I don't know the answer, but that won't stop me from speculating. I will point out two things. First is this from the criminal complaint against Ross Ulbricht:

During the course of this investigation, the FBI has located a number of computer servers, both in the United States and in multiple foreign countries, associated with the operation of Silk Road. In particular, the FBI has located in a certain foreign country the server used to host Silk Road's website (the "Silk Road Web Server"). Pursuant to a mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request, an image of the Silk Road Web Server was made on or about July 23, 2013, and produced thereafter to the FBI.

OK. So how did the FBI "locate" the servers that hosted the Silk Road Tor hidden service? The FBI has recently admitted that they have exploited vulnerabilities in Tor to identify users. Could it be that they exploited some vulnerability in this case? I look forward to finding out.

That said, here is another possibility. Also according to the criminal complaint (emphasis added),

On or about July 10, 2013, [Customs and Border Patrol] intercepted a package from the mail inbound from Canada as part of a routine border search. The package was found to contain nine counterfeit identity documents. Each of the counterfeit identification documents was in a different name yet all contained a photograph of the same person.

That person was Ulbricht and the package was addressed to him. Maybe it was from this lead that the FBI was able to begin the process of identifying the servers, once they had a suspect. If so, and if this indeed was a "routine" search, then the authorities got completely lucky!

Finally, I'll point out that Bitcoin was in no way involved in the identification of the suspect. In fact, in the criminal complaint the FBI argues that because the blockchain (Bitcoin's public ledger) is pseudonymous, that it is not useful in tracing transactions. I don't think that's quite right, but that's how the FBI sees it in this case. So, in this case at least, the privacy Bitcoin affords was not compromised in any way.

UPDATE: As I think about this some more, it's clear that the FBI was able to identify Ross Ulbricht because he posted his Gmail address to the Bitcoin Talk forum using the same username that first mentioned Silk Road ever. So, what are the chances that the CPB search that turned up the package of fake IDs bound for Ulbricht was routine? If it was routine, it was routine in the sense that packages to people on a watchlist might be routinely searched. I'm still not clear how the FBI got from identifying a possible suspect to locating the server for the Silk Road Tor hidden service.

How do you seize Bitcoins? I'm surprised by how many times I've been asked this question. It's amazing what it is that people seize upon in a story. < cough > I don't know how the authorities have carried out the seizure, but it's not to difficult to conceive how it could be done. Basically they would have to get the private keys to the suspect's Bitcoin addresses. (Think of it essentially like getting the password to an account.) They could either get that with his cooperation or if he had stored it somewhere now accessible to the authorities. Once they have the private keys, they would be able to transfer the bitcoins and I imagine that they would transfer them to a Bitcoin address that only they control.

UPDATE: So I got ahold of the seizure order and indeed I was correct that this is how the government will try to go about seizing the bitcoins. From the court order:

The United States is further authorized to seize any and all Bitcoins contained in wallet files residing on Silk Road servers, including those servers enumerate in the caption of this Complaint, pending the outcome of this civil proceeding, by transffering the full account balance in each Silk Road wallet to a public Bitcoin address controlled by the United States.

But to be clear, to seize bitcoins you do need to get the "password" that controls them. You can't just go to an intermediary and order that an account be frozen as you can do with traditional financial intermediaries like banks or PayPal.

I'll be tweeting and posting more as I learn more about what happened, but those are my initial thoughts. Shoot me any questions or thoughts you have. I'm at @jerrybrito on Twitter. And by the way, you can follow all the coverage of the Silk Road arrest and seizure on my site Mostly Bitcoin.

SHARE: 0 comments

Bitcoin: A Primer for Policymakers

by on August 26, 2013 · 0 comments

Last week, the Mercatus Center released “Bitcoin: A Primer for Policymakers” by yours truly and Andrea Castillo. In it we describe how the digital currency works and address many of the common misconceptions about it. We also analyze current laws and regulations that may already cover digital currencies and warn against preemptively placing regulatory restrictions on Bitcoin that could stifle the new technology before it has a chance to evolve. In addition, we give several recommendations about how to treat Bitcoin in future.

As I say in the video that accompanies the paper, Bitcoin is still very experimental and it might yet fail for any number of reasons. But, one of those reasons should not be that policymakers failed to understand it. Unfortunately, signs of misunderstanding abound, and that is why we wrote the primer.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 0 comments

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →