Peer2Politics

Since we love our cryptocurrencies, today we decided to publish this awesome infographic about two of the biggest and most famous digital coins in the world: Bitcoin and its “relative” Litecoin. While one is better at some things and the other wins in other fields, they are both extremely important to the world of cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin has attracted a lot of news and high-profile investors in recent weeks, while the media still focuses on how early buyers have made money and how authorities are onto its role in online narcotic sales. Less attention has been paid, however, to the underlying long-term potential of Bitcoin as a catalyst for innovation in global financial services by decoupling transactions from the networks previously required to ensure their execution and enforcement.

The world's oldest profession met the world's youngest currency as escort agency Passion VIP announced it now accepts payment for its adult companionship services in bitcoin.

Cody Wilson is a twenty-five-year-old former law student at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the inventor of the Liberator, a gun made almost entirely from plastic pieces created with a 3-D printer; he uploaded to the Internet a blueprint that anyone could use to print such a gun.

 
"As with most major tech discoveries someone with money figures out a way to control it – we're seeing that now with alternative currencies, like Bitcoin.

In the past year, Bitcoin has flummoxed its critics and exhilarated its followers. Since January, the exchange rate per bitcoin has skyrocketed, venture capitalists have been spotted skulking through the halls of Bitcoin conferences, and each month there has been an increase in the number of businesses that have added Bitcoin as a payment option. Manu Sporny, chairman of the Web Payments Community Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), spoke at a Bitcoin conference in New York City in late July to put this tiny economy into perspective and to offer some advice. As of August, he said, there would be an estimated 1.6 million active Bitcoin addresses—diddly-squat when you consider the 2.75 billion people plugged into the Internet globally. The lesson? Push to get Bitcoin integrated into Web browsers.

Throughout the world, central banks have woken up to the fact that their wholesale interbank clearing and settlement systems can be bypassed by mobile-to-mobile payments. If that is the case, bitcoin and the electronic platforms that effect the payments and have a float (the amount that sits with the holder, interest-free) will have the capacity to print money.

A story out of Pensacola is making national headlines.Some homeless people have found an unconventional way to make money. It's called Bit Coin and pretty much it's virtual money.

Reuben Grinberg, a recent Yale Law School graduate now in private practice in New York City, discusses his paper, published in the Hastings Science & Technology Law Journal entitled, Bitcoin: An Innovative Alternative Digital Currency.

The bitcoin system could become an equalizer for the country’s homeless, a place where the stigma of living on the streets isn’t as pronounced.