February 3,2015- In This Issue:

 

Facebook, Spotify, Uber, Airbnb Can Now Accept Bitcoin after BitPay Deal

Facebook, Spotify, and Airbnb are among thousands of merchants who may accept Bitcoin after Bitpay's integration with giant payment processor Adyen.

 

Payment processing giant Adyen has announced the integration of popular Bitcoin processing platform BitPay into its checkout services. Merchants using Ayden's services will now be able to accept Bitcoin through a single preference check without any further modification of their own site's back-end.

 

Making the announcement early on February 3 to the International Business Times, BitPay will be hoping to see conversions among some of Adyen's 3,500 merchants globally including, Groupon, Evernote, Facebook, Spotify, Uber, Vodafone, Booking.com, Yelp, AirBnB, KLM, Abercrombie & Fitch, Soundcloud, Ryanair, etc.

 

 Core Bitcoin coder and BitPay employee Jeff Garzik is reported to have been working behind the scenes for the last month on integrating BitPay's APIs into the Adyen platform. It means Bitcoin has taken another step towards being an easy, and more obvious, payment option for merchants to accept through their existing online systems.

 

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Bitcoin Demystified: Math vs. Government

First of all, there is a network of 'nodes'.

 

Individuals have incentives (such as mining rewards or collecting transaction fees) to contribute their computing resources and join as nodes on the network. These nodes are really just servers - computers plugged into the Internet - which are running Bitcoin software. A node might be a teenager keeping her computer on running Bitcoin software in her basement while she's at school, or someone running software in the cloud. Anyone can be a node. Every time a new transaction is made with Bitcoin, all of the nodes in the network record the transaction in their ledgers. The nodes are in constant

 

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LinkedIn Founder Talks Bitcoin's Future at San Francisco Conference


 

LinkedIn founder and Greylock Partners investor Reid Hoffman issued new remarks about bitcoin this week at O'Reilly Media's 'Bitcoin & the Blockchain: Realities, Risks, Rewards' event held in San Francisco's Marina District.

 

The conference brought together a collection of entrepreneurs, investors and cryptocurrency enthusiasts for a one-day schedule, though it was perhaps Hoffman's talk that was most anticipated.

 

During his on-stage discussion session with Xapo CEO Wences Casares, Hoffman took a professorial tone in evaluating where he believes the ecosystem is headed, though it may not be as definitive as enthusiasts would hope. 

 

He said:

"The interesting question about bitcoin is, is it the first or last cryptocurrency? It all comes down to network effects."

Hoffman noted that bitcoin does have a community behind it, which makes him believe it may have a lasting influence. As an investor, Hoffman notably backed bitcoin infrastructure startup Blockstream and its recent $21m funding round, suggesting he may be confident in its future.

 

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Does Bitcoin still matter?

Bitcoin has a marketing problem.

Talk of the digital currency has petered since its introduction in 2009, and much of what remains hasn't been good for P.R. Discussions about Bitcoin can sound like inscrutable technobabble to non-adherents (most people fall into this category), and the system has been dogged by hacking and fraud, making a concept that is hard to wrap your head around also hard to get behind.

 

But the establishment in late January of the first regulated U.S.-based Bitcoin exchange, by Coinbase, a major broker, may help legitimize the Bitcoin and protect investors. The second such exchange is in the works, fronted by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two of the largest-known holders of Bitcoin currency.

 

"Bitcoin has a sales job to getting people to trust it, which is ironic because it was set up to be a trustless system," said Paul Vigna, who co-wrote with Michael J. Casey "The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order," released Jan. 27. "It is sort of opaque and hard to understand and esoteric because it is so new."

 

In their book, Vigna and Casey explore the various avenues of potential for a software-based monetary system that lets people anywhere in the world exchange value without banks or other institutions intermediating (or meddling).

 

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