|
|
|
|
| SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY |
|
|
|
Will Bitcoins rule the future?
5,300-year-old iceman never cleaned his teeth |
|
|
Will
Bitcoins rule the future? RECENTLY,
at the Cleveland Arms pub in a genteel side street near Paddington
Station, London, UK, a dozen people met to talk revolution. It wasn’t
the first — and it certainly won’t be the last — revolution
plotted over pints of beer and bags of crisps.
But this gathering of the London Bitcoiners Group marked the point at which something changed. The point at which one hacker’s dream — to create a new type of virtual currency to replace sterling, dollars and euros and lay waste to existing financial structures — began to come spectacularly true. Trader and Bitcoin enthusiast Jonathan Harrison was there. “Cryptocurrencies will create a global revolution in finance,” he enthuses. “Governments will lose control of the money supply and the power that comes with it.” The Bitcoin story is packed with delicious twists of subterfuge and intrigue. It began in 2009 when pseudonymous hacker “Satoshi Nakamoto” developed the idea. Other digital currencies have been tried, such as e-gold, Litecoin, Ripple and Linden Dollars in the computer game “Second Life”, but nothing has captured the imagination like Bitcoin, which can be spent directly in some places or traded for other currencies. Hackers from around the world supported the open-source software that allows Bitcoin to exist, unlike other currencies, without a central bank able to manipulate its value by printing more notes in tough times. The economic crisis in Cyprus shot Bitcoin into the mainstream. Internet entrepreneur Jeff Berwick aims to open the world’s first Bitcoin ATM in Cyprus within weeks. March saw frenetic Googling sessions by people all over the world desperate to discover how this digital, encrypted “crypto” currency works. The answer is more simple than you’d imagine — a fixed amount of 21 million Bitcoins are being slowly released or “mined” until 2030. Each has a unique numerical code and they can exist as a physical coin the size of a 2p piece printed with a holographic number, in online “wallets” or even in bonkers “brain wallets”, where you memorise set codes. Popular sites to trade them include Blockchain.info and Localbitcoins.com. With a stream of recent cash crises of confidence, the price of Bitcoin has risen dramatically. When the online trader Mt. Gox started tracking Bitcoin in July 2010, one was worth 3p. Now one is worth £64. Bitcoin is the world’s fastest growing currency — but is this a Bitcoin bubble? The market for it has topped the symbolic $1bn mark — it’s now worth more than the currency stock of 20 separate countries, including The Seychelles, Liberia and The Gambia. Amir Taaki was also at the Cleveland Arms. He’s one of the main developers of Bitcoin — he also lost out on $5,00,000 by flogging a batch of Bitcoins, when they were worth peanuts. But he’s sanguine. “500k is only enough to improve a single life,” he joshes. Taaki, 25 and buzzing with optimism, is more interested in changing the world. “Last September, my bank accounts were closed and I was blacklisted. I’ve been depending on Bitcoin, travelling the world without using money changers or banks.” Taaki believes that Bitcoin “is the currency of the resistance; informal markets of people, not corporations. It’s a true global free market”. Bitcoin’s advocates, such as renegade business broadcaster Max Keiser, posit that governments could lose control of individual state economies and people could live outside conventional financial and taxation systems. Banks could shut. In a capitalist society, where everything has a fixed price, the cost of resistance could be high: Bitcoin’s Young Turks seem set on a collision course with some powerful people who have a lot to lose. “These people — states and established financial institutions — will move against Bitcoin because Bitcoin strikes at the root of current power structures,” reckons Frank Braun, a German tech consultant and privacy advocate who appears in public wearing a surgical mask and dark glasses. “The latest FinCEN regulation is a prime example of that.” FinCEN is America’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — a bureau of the US Treasury, which aims to counter money laundering. Last month it issued new guidelines to regulate “virtual currency” trading. It could be the thin end of the wedge. The White House has a score to settle: when the US piled pressure on Wikileaks in 2010 and 2011, it was to Taaki’s “currency of the resistance” that the group turned when their conventional methods of banking were blocked. “Within a day their VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Swiss bank and Amazon accounts were closed,” points out Taaki. “Wikileaks was unable to continue soliciting donations — except through Bitcoin. It was their lifeline.” Rebecca Burn-Callandar, editor of Managementtoday.co.uk, has other worries. “A brave new currency unregulated by markets, banks or governments is dangerous. Bitcoin is the province of hackers and the technorati now, but the real risks come when ordinary people — hammered by low interest rates and the whims of government — become entranced by it.” Yet, there is something about Bitcoin, something which increasingly entrances those from both ends of the political spectrum. “From anti-capitalists to hardcore capitalists, people are all trying to give Bitcoin their spin,” notes Frank Braun. “I just talked to a guy in his 60s from a high-inflation country who put all his retirement money into Bitcoin and gold.” The media seems fixated on Bitcoin being the currency of choice on the mystical Silk Road — the Amazon of recreational drugs. But what’s more intriguing is how Bitcoin will change the way we use money to buy and sell everything else. A new economic system could evolve. Is The City rattled? “City traders have mixed feelings,” says mischievous City Boy author Geraint Anderson. “On the one hand they’ll be quaking in their boots about a rapidly-growing currency they currently can’t manipulate, trade or make commission from. On the other, they’ll welcome any innovation that will facilitate the acquisition of high-quality cocaine after the market shuts.” Bitcoins: How to pocket them What you need: To start collecting bitcoins, you need a digital wallet downloaded from weusecoins.com, which will store your money for you. How to get digital coins: Mining for new bitcoins is competitive and requires specialist hardware, so most bitcoin users get their coins from online currency exchanges. MtGox is the most popular, allowing you to trade bitcoins in exchange for sterling. Bonus Programmes such as Bitvisitor offer coins in exchange for taking surveys or visiting websites. How to get physical coins: Coins and bills can be bought using digital bitcoins on casascius.com or bitbills.com. Both sites take a small production mark-up. How to spend them: There are plenty of participating online merchants. Coindl.com sells music, ebooks and other digital goods and bitmit.net is the ebay of the bitcoins world. A limited number of independent restaurants and B&Bs even accept the currency — bitcointravel.com can point you in the right direction. —
The Independent |
||
|
5,300-year-old iceman never cleaned his teeth A 5,300-year-old iceman — dubbed Otzi — whose remains were found frozen in the Italian Alps, probably never cleaned his teeth, and suffered from bad breath as a result, researchers have said. Researchers were stunned by the poor condition of Otzi’s teeth, and found he suffered from several major cavities as well as a damaged front tooth probably caused by an accident, the Daily Mail reported. The mummy was found in September 1991 in the Otztal Alps, near the Similaun mountain and Hauslabjoch on the border between Austria and Italy. Hence the name Otzi. Experts said he had an astoundingly large number of oral diseases and dentition problems that are still widespread today. “Otzi suffered from heavy dental abrasions, had several carious lesions — some severe — and had mechanical trauma to one of his front teeth which was probably due to an accident,” Frank Ruhli, head of the study, told the daily. Dentist Roger Seiler from the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich now examined Otzi's teeth based on the latest computer tomography data. While Otzi is scarcely likely to have cleaned his teeth, his abrasive diet contributed significantly to a process of self-cleaning, they said. The iceman suffered from tooth decay because of eating more starchy foods such as bread and cereal porridge which were consumed more commonly in the Neolithic period because of the rise of agriculture, the researchers said. His accident-related dental damage and his other injuries testify to his troubled life at that time, the team believes. Otzi is the oldest “wet” mummy in the world. Since its discovery in 1991, numerous scientific examinations have taken place. In 2007, Otzi’s cause of death was determined as probably stemming from internal bleeding. — IANS
|
||
|
Trends CAPE CANAVERAL,
Florida: US President Barack Obama wants NASA to start work on finding a small asteroid that could be shifted into an orbit near the moon and used by astronauts as a stepping-stone for an eventual mission to Mars, agency officials said. The project, which envisions that astronauts could visit such an asteroid as early as 2021, is included in Obama’s $17.7-billion spending plan for the US space agency for the 2014 fiscal year. Russian-American crew taking short cut to space station MOSCOW/CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: Two Russian cosmonauts and a US astronaut took a short cut to the International Space Station on Thursday, arriving at the orbital outpost less than six hours after their Soyuz capsule blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The express route, used for the first time to fly a crew to the station, shaved about 45 hours off the usual ride, allowing NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin to get a jumpstart on their planned 5.5-month mission. PALERMO,
Italy: The Sicilian regional government in Italy has revoked permission for the US to build a military satellite station on the island, its governor said , after protests by residents who said it could pose a health risk. The planned ground station is part of the Mobile User Objective System, an ultra high-frequency satellite network aimed at significantly boosting communications capacity for the US military and its allies.
— Reuters |
