Bitcoin is by default and by nature a currency which shows no respect for borders. One of the less popularized advantages of Bitcoin is that, through the power of encryption, immutable transactions are possible, as well as the ability to withhold funds from seizure. In the nations which are currently producing the most refugees, Bitcoins digitization is another great aspect of it people are less likely to steal what they cannot see. A private key can be written and stored virtually anywhere. For all intents and purposes, Bitcoin is precisely the currency you would want if your world were torn apart by war and famine, provided you had some way to turn it into usable goods.

AirBNB recently entered the political conversation by launching its #WeAccept campaign. The decentralized rental service made a stern political statement, despite having a bright and positive message, with the following commercial:

The sentiments expressed were not long ago what would be considered an All-American attitude. We urge the hungry, the tired, the broken to reach our shores and thrive in the land of the opportunity. For decades gone past, people from all corners of the globe have been able to do as much. Bitcoins resistance to regulatory jurisdiction, at the code level, is less of a political decision than it is a security matter. For it is obvious that if the state can compromise a Bitcoin transaction, someone else can, as well.

But as long as AirBNB is advertising an internationalist message, perhaps it should also adopt an internationally immutable payment method. AirBNB could increase its own take of fees placed on providers, and attract users who may struggle to provide other forms of digital payment. CEO Brian Chesky recently asked Twitter followers:

He then came back and said:

Multiple users had suggested Bitcoin. With things that can require later pull transactions such as rental services, the cryptocurrency has certain limitations that must be worked out within the solution in question.

Its not possible, for instance, to bill a persons Bitcoin wallet for funds previously authorized. The Bitcoin holder must choose to push the funds to the requestor. In implementation, this could mean that Bitcoin users would be required to pay more than the amount of the actual rental via AirBNB, and have the remainder of funds returned to them upon successful closing of the transaction.

But this writer is not here to talk about the technical implementation of Bitcoin for AirBNB. I am here to talk about the philosophical reasons for adopting Bitcoin, and potentially for refusing certain other payment methods which have shown themselves to be diametrically opposed to the views expressed by AirBNB. Credit card companies have willingly shut down freedom-fighting organizations like WikiLeaks as part of the banking blockade. Indeed, this episode in recent history was one of the most attention-bringing for Bitcoin, and one of Satoshis last memos expressed concern about

Credit card companies have willingly shut down freedom-fighting organizations like WikiLeaks as part of the banking blockade. Indeed, this episode in recent history was one of the most attention-bringing for Bitcoin, and one of Satoshis last memos expressed concern about overflow government persecution:

I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.

While the WikiLeaks project deferred to Satoshi at the time, they did later accept Bitcoin when it was flourishing. AirBNB accepting Bitcoin in order to protect the privacy of its users, as well as the peace of mind of its socially conscious board, seems an obvious plus for both parties. Chesky says the company has long considered the idea, but there is no time like the present. Intermingling the idea of a universal currency for a united race of humans would be a plus, but its unlikely anyone expects as much of the company.

Intermingling the idea of a universal currency for a united race of humans would be a plus, but its unlikely anyone expects as much of the company.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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Airbnb and Bitcoin: An Obvious Match - CryptoCoinsNews

Tech-savvy Chinese bitcoin traders may have just seen their good days come to a halt as China's central banks continue to place sharperscrutiny over the virtual currency market.

Under pressure to clamp down on capital outflow and prop up the Chinese currency, the People's Bank of China warned nine bitcoin trading exchanges at a meeting in Beijing on Wednesday that it will shut down venues that violate foreign exchange management, money laundering, and other regulatory rules. The warning is followed by some of China's biggest bitcoin exchanges announcing that they would prevent customer withdrawals of the cryptocurrency.

Three of China's biggest bitcoin exchanges OkCoin, Huobi and BTCC, which had accounted for more than 90 percent of the global bitcoin market in January, had respectively suspended withdrawals or subjected all bitcoin withdrawals to a 72-hour review. The disruption is likely to temporarily constrain volumes further after already shrinking trading volumes since the government started clamping down in January.

Analytics platform Sosobtc showed the number of bitcoins traded on the three exchanges slid from 13.6 million on Jan. 6 to just over 120,000 on Feb. 9. but as an analyst pointed out, the exchange volumes might be misleading.

"Prior to January 24 those exchanges didn't charge a trading fee and the volume was largely compared to exchanges that were charging a trading fee. Without a trading fee, I could sit there and trade 1,000 BTC back and forth with myself all day and generate massive volume but it isn't economically meaningful," said Spencer Bogart, a bitcoin analyst at Needham & Co., one of the few Wall Street investment banks that covers bitcoin.

"Exacerbating this effect was the fact that these exchanges also provided leverage for trading. Starting on January 24, in response to concerns from the PBOC, the Chinese exchanges began charging a trading fee and stopped offering leverage. In that sense it's a one-time shock that has normalized trading volumes and not an ongoing 'downward spiral'," said Bogart.

But the announcement is notable and Bogart said he expects that "volume will fall significantly until withdrawals are re-enabled and confidence in the exchanges and regulators returns."

China has been the leading venue for bitcoin trading. Bitcoin prices have soared to near-record highs since last year even as the Chinese currency maintains a sharp depreciation streak against the dollar. But bitcoin's meteoric 120% gain in 2016 is also coincided with China's ever-widening capital outflow.

According to an outlook report fromthe Institute of International Finance on Thursday,China is expected to have around $1 trillion of resident outflows, including errors and omissions, and $560 billion of net capital outflows in 2017. In the past, the Chinese government has resorted to several measures to stanch the money outflows, which includesrequiring citizens to report overseas transfers over $10,000, discouraging Chinese companies from making overseas acquisitions andbarring individuals from moving more than $50,000 out of the country each year.

However, none of these measures have managed to bring any pronounced improvements to the problem so far, which is lately evidence by China's currency reserves hitting down below the $3 trillion mark. A lot of this is said to have come from Chinese investors' resort to using bitcoin as a way to move money out of the country.

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Bitcoin Trading Comes Under Threat of Chinese Government - TheStreet.com

February 8, 2017

Researchers from North Carolina State University, Boston University and George Mason University have developed a Bitcoin-compatible system that could make it significantly more difficult for observers to identify or track the parties involved in any given Bitcoin transaction.

Bitcoin was initially conceived as a way for people to exchange money anonymously. But then it was discovered that anyone could track all Bitcoin transactions and often identify the parties involved.

Bitcoin operates by giving each user a unique public key, which is a string of numbers. Users can transmit money in the form of digital bitcoins from one public key to another. This is made possible by a system that ensures a user has enough bitcoins in his or her account to make the transfer. The use of the public keys gave users a sense of anonymity, even though all of the transactions were visible on the public Bitcoin blockchain which lists all transactions. Over time, experts and private companies have developed highly effective methods of de-anonymizing those public keys.

Now researchers have developed a system called TumbleBit, which is a computer protocol that runs on top of Bitcoin.

TumbleBit takes advantage of an existing concept called "mixing service." The idea works like this: instead of Party A paying Party B directly, many different Parties A pay an intermdiary "tumbler," which then pays the Parties B. The more parties are involved, the harder it is to determine which Party A paid which Party B.

"However, this still has a security flaw," says Alessandra Scafuro, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing TumbleBit. "Namely, if an outside observer can compromise the tumbler, it could figure out who was paying whom."

To address this, TumbleBit takes a three-phased approach.

In the first phase, called escrow, the Parties A notify the tumbler that they would like to make a payment, and the Parties B notify the tumbler that they would like to be paid. This is all done on the public blockchain.

For the second phase, the researchers have put cryptographic tools into place that allow the tumbler to pay the correct parties without actually knowing which parties are involved. Phase two does not appear on the blockchain.

In the third phase, called cashout, all of the transactions are conducted simultaneously, making it more difficult to identify which parties are involved in any specific transaction. Phase three does appear in the public blockchain.

"We tested TumbleBit with 800 Bitcoin users, and found that the second phase only took seconds to complete," Scafuro says.

"One limitation of TumbleBit is that, right now, the system is designed to work with a fixed denomination - so paying amounts larger than that denomination require making multiple payments," Scafuro says. "That's something we're working on."

The paper, "TumbleBit: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub," will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, being held Feb. 26 to March 1 in San Diego, Calif.

Explore further: Finally, interesting uses for the blockchain that go beyond bitcoin

More information: "TumbleBit: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub," DOI: 10.14722/ndss.2017.23086

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(The upside is that it will still hide individual payments - so at least that part is anonymized)

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New system makes it harder to track Bitcoin transactions - Phys.org - Phys.Org

Last year, Brendan Eich, former CEO of the Mozilla corporation and designer the Javascript programming language, launched Brave, a Web browser that blocks advertisements by default. Now Eich is rolling out a new Bitcoin payment platform, integrated right into the browser, that he hopes will provide an alternative revenue stream for publishers. He views it asa replacementthe one Brave takes away, which he argues is dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse.

As of September, people using Brave have the option of creating a wallet in the browser, loading it with bitcoins, and sending small payments to publishers based on the anonymized metering of their Web traffic. For now, Brave plays a central role in facilitating the transactions, although it has sought to do so in a way that protects the privacy of Brave users.

When you create a wallet with Brave, you actually share it with a company called BitGo, meaning that you and BitGo each own one key for the wallet, both of which need to be present in order for a payment to go through. After loading bitcoins into this wallet, you specify the total amount of money you would like to spend on your Web browsing. Then, after a month goes by (measured by the days you actually spend using the Brave browser), bitcoin transactionssigned by both you and BitGo trigger the disbursement of that money into a Brave settlement wallet.

Before a website operatorcan collect the funds, itmust go through a verification process with Brave to prove that itsrunning a legitimate business. In return for providing this service, Brave takes five percent of all the donations that come through.

In order to attract people who dont already own bitcoins, or who may not even know what Bitcoin is, Eich and the Brave designers have made the digital currency as invisible as possible in the Brave Payments experience. We try not to put Bitcoin all up in your face, says Eich.

To that end, people have the option of funding their wallets with a credit or debit card. The payment actually goes to Coinbase, the largest Bitcoin exchange in the U.S.But when the money lands in your wallet, it is denominated in Dollars. Eich says you can expect, in the coming months,to be able to pay with Stripe as well.

Although Bitcoin is invisible in the user experience, it is essential to the privacy of the system. According to Eich, the users Brave client is the only place where browsing history gets stored. Normally, sending transactions across the bitcoin network to escrow accounts for known websites would give away information about who is visiting which websites, because every transaction is recorded in a public ledger. However, Brave uses a cryptographic protocol called Anonize(which puts to work zero-knowledge proofs similar to the ones that shield transactions in the digital currency Zcash). Anonize hides the correlation between browsing history and the payments that are received.

We dont want to be a tracker. We dont want that data. Its better that we cant have it than that we could have it and promise to be good,says Eich.

The Brave Payment systemalso leverages a feature of Bitcoin called multi-signature transactions to ensure that Brave cannot misusethe funds in browser wallets. We use this feature to avoid custody of funds. Each user has effective custody of their Brave user wallets funds for the purpose of microdonating to their top publishers, says Eich. The transparency of the Bitcoin blockchain further means that anyone can audit the flow of funds to keep Brave accountable.

Because of the programmability of Bitcoin, it is also possible that Brave could use it in the future to design a fully decentralized version of the browser in which escrow accounts automatically verifywebsites and disbursefunds, rather than relying on Brave to manually intervene.

By adding payments to the Brave browser, Eich is not just giving people a way to donate totheir favorite websites in return for the revenue theyve lost to ad blocking technology. It is the first step in a grandiose plan to completely reformulate the funding architecture of the Web and perhaps even save online publishers.

When Eich describes the online marketing ecosystem, he makes it sound like a dark sewer writhing with parasites and disease. Dip a foot down into the muck and leeches latch on to slurp up every drop of attention they can get. Peel them off, and little poison darts are left to fester under the skin. There are the cookies and tracker pixels that keep tabs on your every move. If youre really lucky, youll catch a bad case of malware while youre down there.

No self-respecting publisher would send their readers down into this dangerous world. And yet they do, because for every victim they offer, the parasites send back a fraction of the blood they suck.

But this isnt going to work forever, says Eich. Part of the blame goes to ad blockers, which saw a 30 percent increase in adoption rates over 2016, according to a report by Business Insider. But there is also the problem of third parties, which carve off so much of the advertising revenue pie that very little actually makes its way to publishers.

The system is not stable. It suffers from these rent seeking parasites, says Eich. Publishers are under stress. I cant name names, but there are a lot of publishers that say they see 18 months to some event where they have to be parceled out to some private equity or sold. And these are big U.S. brands. These are not small online publishers. Obviously the New York Times has Carlos Slim as benefactor and the Washington Post has Jeff Bezos. But not all of them are so fortunate.

If, as Eich says, the entire industry is in a death spiral, when it finally croaks, he wants Braves direct payment model to have matured into a viable alternative.

In December, Coindesk, one of the most prominent Bitcoin news websites, announced that it been verified with Brave Payments as a preferred customer. Obviously, our readership maps entirely with the early adopters for something like a Bitcoin enabled Web browser. So, it made a lot of sense for us. And Ive actually been pleasently surprised at how much weve seen come through, says Ryan Selkis, the managing director of CoinDesk.

But will Brave be as popular among people who are not naturally inclined to enthusiastically latch on to any slightly Bitcoin-related innovation? Since February, Brave has verified 120 publishers. And 37,000 new Brave Payment wallets have been created, holding an average balance of around 8 Dollars, according to the head of communications at Brave.

IEEE Spectrums general technology blog, featuring news, analysis, and opinions about engineering, consumer electronics, and technology and society, from the editorial staff and freelance contributors.

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Can Brave's Bitcoin Payment Platform Save Online Publishing? - IEEE Spectrum