My friend Mary had asked me to talk a bit about Bitcoin. It turned out to be a more complex topic than I had realized. In this podcast I talk about what Bitcoin is, what are the advantages and disadvantages of it, and some of the more important aspects of it. I think the even more powerful aspects of Bitcoin is still to come. I’ll do another podcast about those…
Something I mentioned that I’d get back to but didn’t in the podcast was the ability to do multiple transactions with the same bitcoins. It is possible to game the system but you would have to have 51% of the processing power of the entire bitcoin mining capacity. This became a bit of an issue the other day when the largest group of bitcoin miners announced that they control 45% of the processing power of the whole network. They did come out and say that they had no plans of going over the 51% level. Makes sense that they wouldn’t want to wreck the system, after all, they would be in the position to lose the most if they called into question the integrity of the system.
I mentioned that fees are low because miners are rewarded in bit coins. It isn’t clear how that will change once you can no longer mine new bitcoins.
Here are some extra links to read up on Bitcoin:
Bitcoin wiki. Wikipedia is always a good place to start for an overview.
Bitcoin values in different currencies.
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution talking about the problems of Bitcoin competitors.
Horace Deidu of Asymco talking on The Critical path podcast about Bitcoin. A rambling, expansive talk on Bitcoin.
You can see all of my podcasts at bli.ms/u/eyes. You can subscribe using the RSS feed bli.ms/u/eyes/rss
You can also subscribe via app.net or email. I encourage you to join app.net in order to take advantage of all of the services it offers. It’s free!
Start receiving “Life as I see it podcast” Broadcast updates now:
Subscribe on App.net