Regulators & Bitcoin
New York’s BitLicense was a particular hot topic for the weekend. Bruce Fenton told the audience at TNABC that current regulators aren’t our friends. Some of the specific regulations regarding New York’s BitLicense seem a bit excessive. Lawsky has said that the regulations are to weed out bad actors, but such measures can weed out even good actors.
Fenton called Lawsky’s hearing and TV appearances a masquerade. Regulations haven’t really the community’s expectations. Although that may be the case the governors that elect the regulators are so citizens can call them and express their opinions.
Bitcoin Adoption
Cloudhashing President Lukas Gilkey talked about his first time acquiring bitcoin and sketchy the situation felt. Gilkey even brought a friend for “the deal” for safety. In a year, although bitcoin has become easier to acquire it is not at the level of mass adoption.
Open Source
Bitpay’s Tony Gallippi presented its open source initiatives such as Bitcore, a javascript library, Insight, a blockchain explorer, BitAuth, for passwordless authentication, and Copay, a multisignature wallet.
Bitpay also that Copay will operate peer-to-peer have decentralized key generation, and they will also offer HD wallets. Bitpay illustrated that none of the top 100 bitcoin wallets use multisig but Gallippi believes 10% of all the bitcoins will be by next year.
Bitpay will also be at CES and have a 40 by 50 ft booth right in the middle of the conference. To compare, last year they had a 20×20 booth and year before a 10×10 booth.
Bitpay’s St. Petersburg Bitcoin Bowl is also seeking sponsorships next month, a bitcoin presale tickets available in September and in October a general sale; although the teams playing will not even be announced until December.
Trading Value
Vitalik Buterin talked about the advantages of having an off-blockchain project since it will not overcrowd the Bitcoin network. Vitalik noted that Satoshi even mentioned new projects would utilize their own blockchain.
Vitalik stated that cryptocurrency 1.0 projects promote a singular currency but 2.0 projects will promote the trade of a multitude of items of value, gift cards, phone credit and maybe even Chuckie Cheese tokens.