What external systems is Bitcoin commerce dependent on?


Whereas Block Explorer might be a useful tool, Bitcoin could survive without it.

Most important parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem, asides the main client that is, are the exchanges. They give the currency its value and without them, Bitcoin would become a fringe technology (no merchants would deal in it, as they couldn't pay their taxes with it.

Then we have the mining software and to a lesser degree the hardware (FPGA boards and the like). Should those be gone or less available it would be easier to launch a 51% attack on the network.

After that there are the mining pools. If they would disappear the miners would have a harder time earning a predictable wage. This dependancy has been mitigated with P2Pool though, so the impact is smaller than it was earlier.

After that the services are less essential. Losing the Bitcoin Forum, Wiki, SE, WeUseCoins or the like might make it harder for new people to get into Bitcoin, but wouldn't make it less...

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There are many benefits to using Bitcoin as a payment system. This article will discuss the advantages for buyers and merchants to using Bitcoin as a payment system, and it will also discuss escrow services, the future of Bitcoin in commerce, potential drawbacks, and a summary on the benefits.

Bitcoin offers many advantages over traditional banks. It allows sending payments internationally without concern for currency conversion, it allows transaction confirmation within 10 minutes typically, and transactions cannot be reversed once made. This side can be seen as a positive or negative.

There have been security improvements since its inception, which make it safer to store coins when large companies hold extreme amounts of funds, and also for buyers. The Bitcoin network and blockchain is very secure with a great deal of computing power working to secure it.

First, the benefits for merchants will be discussed.

Benefits for merchants

There are many...

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E-commerce is a growing trend all over the world, and competitors in this space have to stay on their toes at all times. Flipkart, the e-commerce leader in India, has unveiled its plans for going app-only, rather than making special deals accessible on its website or even in a mobile browser. Only time will tell whether or not more e-commerce giants will follow FlipKart’s example in the future.

Also read: Bitcoin and 2015: The Final Countdown

Going App-Only: Is it Even Beneficial to E-Commerce Right Now?

Mobile devices play an ever-important role in the lives of everyday consumers. Several e-commerce players are banking on mobile purchases for the future, as nearly every major brand has its own mobile app. As you would come to expect, most of these retailers offer exclusive deals within their mobile apps, which are not available anywhere else.

Even though these in-app perks sound very promising from a business perspective, there are a lot of...

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The is the most comprehensive analysis to date about the IRS tax guidance on virtual currencies like Bitcoin: What records to keep, what enforcement challenges you need to be aware of, and what ...

Investopedia explains the...

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Bitcoin Press Release: With over 18 months of development, The non-profit Nxt Foundation is pleased to announce many disruptive business and financial applications of Nxt’s blockchain technology: including trustless smart contracts, decentralized crowdfunding, a strong open source ethos and more.

Nxt is different. While there are many players in the cryptocurrency 2.0 field, Nxt has several key elements that set it apart from the others.

First and foremost, Nxt is a self-sufficient system. Many other projects depend on a blockchain implemented and maintained by an external party, usually Bitcoin. Nxt is a complete and self-contained system in itself. As any business owner knows, being dependent on a third party for an essential part of their business model introduces unnecessary risk.

This is why Nxt chose not to piggyback on an external blockchain over which it has no control, but has built all of its features onto its own blockchain. This also means that Nxt...

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You may have heard the term Bitcoin recently, maybe while surfing the Internet, from a friend or read about Bitcoins somewhere in the newspapers. So what is Bitcoin and how do they work? Who is a Bitcoin miner or what is Bitcoin mining? How is the Bitcoin investment market? This post tries to touch upon these questions in brief.

What Is Bitcoin

For those who do not know about Bitcoin, it is an electronic currency – not related or dependent on the currency of any country. Bitcoin (BTC) is a digital currency first described in a 2008 paper by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who called it an anonymous, peer-to-peer, electronic payments system. It uses the Blockchain Technology.

What makes this Cryptocurrency more volatile is that unlike printed coins and bills, there is no physical entity to back it. For example, in many countries, bills are printed only up to a certain ratio of total exchangeable gold (or any other precious) metal available in...

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That the block chain cannot be easily forked represents one of the central security mechanisms of Bitcoin. Given the choice between two block chains, a Bitcoin miner always chooses the longer one - that is to say, the one with the more complex hash. Thusly, it ensures that each user can only spend their bitcoins once, and that no user gets ripped off.

As a consequence of the block chain structure, there may at any time be many different sub-branches, and the possibility always exists of a transaction being over-written by the longest branch, if it has been recorded in a shorter one. The older a transaction is though, the lower its chances of being over-written, and the higher of becoming permanent. Although the block chain prevents one from spending more Bitcoins than one has, it means that transactions can be accidentally nullified.

A new block chain would leave the network...

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Find examples of how to build programs using Bitcoin.

The following guide aims to provide examples to help you start building Bitcoin-based applications. To make the best use of this document, you may want to install the current version of Bitcoin Core, either from source or from a pre-compiled executable.

Once installed, you’ll have access to three programs: bitcoind, bitcoin-qt, and bitcoin-cli.

bitcoin-qt provides a combination full Bitcoin peer and wallet frontend. From the Help menu, you can access a console where you can enter the RPC commands used throughout this document.

bitcoind is more useful for programming: it provides a full peer which you can interact with through RPCs to port 8332 (or 18332 for testnet).

bitcoin-cli allows you to send RPC commands to bitcoind from the command line. For example, bitcoin-cli help

All three programs get settings from bitcoin.conf in the Bitcoin application...

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Bitcoin: You may have heard of this crypto-currency, the preferred medium of exchange for libertarian techies around the world.

Bitcoin is disrupting:

Reliance upon central banks Capital control enforcement Government monetary policy Taxation of income

Designed by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto,’ an obvious pseudonym, at the beginning of 2009, Bitcoin is a virtual currency run outside the of any bank, corporate entity, or country jurisdiction. It is not considered currency – and is outside the governance of any regulatory body.


Is bitcoin money?

Bitcoin is not traditional fiat currency. However, it does share characteristics in that...

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Bitcoin is a digital currency (also called crypto-currency) that is not backed by any country's central bank or government. Bitcoins can be traded for goods or services with vendors who accept Bitcoins as payment.

Bitcoin-to-Bitcoin transactions are made by digitally exchanging anonymous, heavily encrypted hash codes across a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The P2P network monitors and verifies the transfer of Bitcoins between users. Each user's Bitcoins are stored in a program called a digital wallet, which also holds each address the user sends and receives Bitcoins from, as well as a private key known only to the user.

The Bitcoin network is designed to mathematically generate no more than 21 million Bitcoins and the network is set up to regulate itself to deal with inflation. Bitcoins can be spent by initiating a transfer request from a Bitcoin address in the customer's wallet to a Bitcoin address in the vendor's wallet. As of this writing, one Bitcoin (also called a...

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The situation is resolved by which side of the network resolves one of the two transactions into a block first.

So if you try and spend your bitcoins twice – once to a merchant and once back to another address under your control, then you will have a 50% chance roughly of regaining your money and getting the product for free if chance favours your address as being the bitcoin networks consensus .

This does depend though on which transaction gets propagated further into the network. For example if transaction A reaches ten mining nodes controlling 80% of the network hashing power first and the other transaction only reaches 20%, then transaction A will have an 80% chance of being included in the next block and be the confirmed transaction.

There are ways of safeguarding against this – whereby wallet operators keep strong links into mining nodes to propagate their transactions fed directly in – so another transaction spending the same output can’t...

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You are then directed to “Create Your Wallet” account page. Enter your Email and create an extremely secure password. IMPORTANT! This password will be for your account on bitgo.com, which shouldn’t match your e-mail password and should be a minimum of 10 characters long. Don't Forget Your Password, Write it down and keep it in a secure place or use a password manager (for example, free KeePass software or free LastPass)! Re-enter the password, read Terms of Service and check the box you agree to them. Press “CREATE BITCOIN WALLET”.

You will be sent an Email confirming your registration.

Open the Email message and click “Click Here to Verify” button.

A new tab will be open, informing about successful verification of your Email.

Enter the password (created in step 2) and press “Log In”

You will be offered to choose the option of 2-Step verification for the better protection of your account. As per recommendation of bitgo.com website it should be...

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Video transcript

But what I wanted to do in this video is talk about what a bitcoin is in more general terms and what differentiating characteristics they have compared to other approaches. So for starters, bitcoin is just an electronic payment system. By electronic payment system, I mean it's just a vehicle, a conduit, by which two parties can transact over the internet. I call these parties Alice and Bob. And let's say Alice for whatever reason wants to give money to Bob over the internet. And this may be because she owes Bob money, or maybe Bob is a merchant and Alice is buying something from Bob. Or maybe Bob is a not-for-profit, and Alice is making a donation to Bob. So there could be many reasons why Alice is trying to pay Bob over the internet in some capacity. Now, if Bob is willing to accept bitcoins, which are a form of electronic payments, then Alice can go ahead and send Bob some value in bitcoins. And really, a bitcoin transaction between Alice and Bob amounts...

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Triple Entry Accounting Work - in - Progress

Triple Entry Accounting

Ian Grigg
Systemics, Inc.


$Revision: 1.7 $
$Date: 2005/12/25 23:04:21 $

Abstract: The digitally signed receipt, an innovation from financial cryptography, presents a challenge to classical double entry bookkeeping. Rather than compete, the two melded together form a stronger system. Expanding the usage of accounting into the wider domain of digital cash gives 3 local entries for each of 3 roles, the result of which I call triple entry accounting.

This system creates bullet proof accounting systems for aggressive uses and users. It not only lowers costs by delivering reliable and supported accounting, it makes much stronger governance possible in a way that positively impacts on the future needs of corporate and public accounting.

This paper brings together financial cryptography innovations such as the Signed Receipt with...

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Retail Point of Sale (POS) systems, also known as POS software, have come a long way from being bolt-on applications for cash registers. Today, the cash register as the cornerstone piece of retail technology has been replaced by PCs, tablets and mobile devices. Watch the 60-second video below to see retail software functions and benefits in action.

Retail software vendors offer integrated software programs and POS systems for "mom-and-pop" stores to large retail chains, and everything in between. Retail software applications handle any combination of checkout, inventory control, customer management, e-commerce sales, merchandising and distribution. These systems help retailers automate the point of sale, improve inventory tracking and enable more effective management of customer data to grow profits and decrease store inefficiencies.

Continuously falling hardware and equipment costs, the emergence of mobile devices like iPads and new cloud-based POS offerings have led...

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