Bitcoin

How The Bitcoin Protocol Works

bitcoin-codeAn increasing number of businesses and consumers are now considering bitcoin, a new type of currency that offers a potential global-encompassing digital payment method. With this growing acceptance, it’s important to learn the essential components of this platform designed to change how we buy and sell products and services. My own company — a time tracking and invoicing platform — is using it, and I’d like to share what we’ve learned.

Personally, I find this technology beneficial, and hope that others will join the growing community.Bitcoin is one of the pioneers of the peer-to-peer electronic cash system, introducing what is known as blockchain protocol to oversee the system. Here’s essentially how it works.

Source: How The Bitcoin Protocol Works – Forbes

Mediachain: Protect Digital Content With a Bitcoin-Based Metadata Protocol

Mine Labs, a New York-based blockchain startup has announced the development of Mediachain, a Bitcoin blockchain-based decentralized metadata protocol which relies on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to protect and ensure the rights to creative digital works.

Since early 2015, emerging blockchain startups have begun to focus on the development of blockchain-based identity and authentication systems to assist artists, freelancers and digital content providers to protect their work from being plagiarised.

To encrypt and store digital rights on the Bitcoin blockchain, most of these blockchain startups have either encoded an ID into the Bitcoin blockchain using OP_RETURN or CoinSpark to reference centrally hosted data or used a custom-built blockchain to attach metadata directly to transactions.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

Three Things the Music Industry Should Learn from Bitcoin about Disruption

The music industry is about to change.

Everyone knows it.

Applied blockchain cryptography and new virtual reality systems are about to change digital entertainment more radically than what portable digital music players and streaming content platforms have in the last 20 years. I’ve been involved in the tech industry since the late 90’s.

I saw, participated in, and profited from the tech bubble of the first decade of this century, mostly as a developer. I’ve been involved with Bitcoin and blockchain development since 2013. I have been on the vanguard of the disruption as it rippled through the financial sector, and for the last two years I’ve been working with various entities within the music industry to educate and prepare them for the coming of blockchain cryptography.

From the sum total of those experiences, I think there’s three things of which the music industry should take note on the eve of its own disruption

Source: ZapChain

Artists Turn to Bitcoin for Inspiration, Not Personal Finance

When it comes to bitcoin’s use as money, word-of-mouth has been its biggest asset.

The journey from Internet obscurity to interest from financial incumbents has been a long one, but it started with passionate users, willing to discuss its benefits with friends, and those friends, intrigued by the idea, began to explore – and spend – the currency themselves.

Bitcoin, because of its peer-to-peer design, thrives on connection.

As this conversation goes viral, talk of digital currencies is spreading across the globe, and one community that has been drawn to bitcoin (and the blockchain) is artists. To date, this includes big-name festival staple Imogen Heap and rappers-turned-venture capitalists Nas and 50 Cent, among others.

Source: CoinDesk

Bitcoin’s Database Now Powers Monegraph, a Digital Art Marketplace

Digital artwork, from digital music to fine art, has been a growing area for a while now.

If a work is infinitely reproducible at no cost, however, how can a collector establish that they have an original or one of an edition? Monegraph takes advantage of the bitcoin database, the block chain, to log each transfer of a work (just as the database does for bitcoin), so that it really is set in stone who owns a digital piece at each moment.“It’s not about stopping piracy.

It’s about facilitating legitimate commerce,” Kevin McCoy, co-founder and CEO of Monegraph, told the Observer in an interview before the night’s presentations. He pointed to iTunes as an example of a marketplace for digital music.

He said people might have their complaints about how Apple did it, but it was a way for people to know they were purchasing authorized work. There hadn’t been a good way to do that before.

Once there was, people did it.

Source: Observer

Bitcoin and the Future of User Monetizable Data

big_data_analytics_thinkstock_470971869-100439197-primary.idgeWeb searches, page visits, online purchases, tweets, SMS messages, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, GPS coordinates – this is the data that makes up our digital lives.

For the past decade consumers have sacrificed their privacy, building giant banks of data for companies without any upside exposure to the value that they have created. Thanks to the Bitcoin Protocol and the 21 Bitcoin Computer this no longer has to be the case.

Billions of photos are shared every day by hundreds of millions of people using smartphones. Between the rapid development of high quality camera phones and the decreased cost for cloud storage, sharing photos from all around the world has become effectively free.

Building a library of stock photos once required an army of photographers working around the globe; now this naturally occurs over social networks such as Instagram.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

Microsoft Moving Beyond Bitcoin To Create Blockchain Marketplace On Azure Cloud

At the end of 2014, Microsoft announced plans to integrate the cryptocurrency bitcoin — at the time experiencing an unprecedented surge in value — into its Windows and Xbox payments system. The news caused the price of bitcoin to surge, but the initiative never really gained widespread support. Microsoft is now looking beyond bitcoin, however, and trying to create a marketplace for the blockchain, the distributed ledger technology on which bitcoin is built.

While bitcoin may have grabbed the headlines with its wildly fluctuating value and its mysterious creator, known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, it is blockchain that is seen as the real innovation. On Monday, IBM announced it would put major resources into helping its customers to develop apps built on the blockchain, and Microsoft is also eager to gain an advantage over competitors by building what it calls a “certified blockchain marketplace” on its Azure cloud platform.

Source: IBT

Bitcoin for Rockstars

There is an incredibly boring problem in the music industry for which Bitcoin offers a potentially fascinating solution. In fact, I think this might be one of the coolest and most immediately worthwhile applications of distributed ledger and payment network technologies such as Bitcoin.

Source: Backchannel

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