Bitcoin

Bitcoin is an online peer-to-peer currency which has gained popularity in recent years. With increased general interest and now more and more companies accepting transactions in Bitcoin, so to has its value and is currently priced at $633 for 1 Bitcoin!

So what is Bitcoin?

The idea behind Bitcoin was to remove the need for a centralised banking system. The way this works is to have all transactions made public and then have the Bitcoin community validate transactions by donating computational power (and rewarded in Bitcoins). For further details see this blog:

http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/

So why is it interesting?

Usually companies and individuals keep all of their financial records private, but ALL transaction in Bitcoin are publicly available, so this provides a unique opportunity to study financial transactions. While the transactions are public, the owners of Bitcoin remain (relatively) anonymous, and so this has led to associations with criminal activities (e.g. on the silk road) from illegal drugs to hired hit-men. In addition to illegal activities using the currency, there have also been a number of illegal activities against the currency, such as high valued heists of the order of $100 million.

Oh, and of course its a big temporally evolving network.

If you're interested in working on this then add your name below. If there is interest, then we can have a "Bitcoin, beers and blackboard" session to throw some ideas around.

Interested:

Leto
Shai
Flavia (flamarquitti@gmail.com)
Jessica Santana jsant@stanford.edu
Stefan
Ana María
Brais (brais.alvarez@eui.eu)
James (jholdener@mitre.org)
George(qiaozhi827@gmail.com)
Sean Hayes (shaye004@ucr.edu)
Alberto (alberto.antonioni@unil.ch)
Matthew Ayres (matthew.ayres@growthandinnovation.com.au)

Meeting today (Jun 12) 6pm in the main conference room.

Resources: https://bitcoin.org/en/resources
http://blockchain.info/charts
http://blockexplorer.com/
http://bitcoincharts.com/

List of Bitcoin heists: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0

Some background on the origins of money that may perhaps be of interest:
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/debt-first-five-thousand-years