Square CEO Jack Dorsey Announces Bitcoin Support

This week Circle gets the center ring after coming out of its lengthy closed beta to throw open its doors to the unwashed masses. The company hopes to provide another portal for consumers to enter into the bitcoin economy and does so with easy purchase of bitcoins via bank account or credit card. Last week, Square came out with news that its new cash registers will be able to accept bitcoins at point of sale—which will certainly add to the number of brick and mortar outlets able to take bitcoin.

Reddit appears to be dabbling in the idea producing its own alt-coin as part of offering shares in the social media site to users. This would be part of a $50 million outside funding round and may or may not happen, but the news should still be interesting to the Bitcoin community.

Finally OpenBazaar’s beta has reached 2.0 and has released numerous bug fixes and functionality changes. As a distributed marketplace proof-of-concept, projects such as OpenBazaar could be a powerful service combined with a distributed currency such as bitcoin.

Circle exits open beta and opens doors to a global audience

The hard-to-get-an-invite Bitcoin consumer-operation Circle has finally left closed beta and opened its doors to the public.

Circle’s mission is to create a resource for consumers to buy and store Bitcoin that is intuitive, seamless, and easy to use. To do this, Circle provides a web wallet (for the storage of bitcoins) as well as a method for buying bitcoin with bank account or credit card. Circle describes this approach to bitcoin availability as frictionless—allowing users to turn funds into bitcoin in minutes (instead of days).

By giving more people the opportunity to buy into the bitcoin economy, it will mean a larger audience of consumers for the growing number of merchants signing up for services such as Coinbase (which would compete with Circle as a wallet) and BitPay as well as retailers such as TigerDirect and Newegg.

Circle’s current friction-point is the lack of mobile apps that allow easy bitcoin payments when on-the-go. The company is on record

Square’s new cash register will accept Bitcoin at point of sale

Square is already well known in commerce circles for producing solutions that allow merchants to accept credit cards in person with mobile devices—and now, Square is producing a point of sale register that will enable sellers to accept bitcoin.

The story ran in Wired, outlining a path that would bring Square into line with bitcoin acceptance.

Square CEO Jack Dorsey made this known last week when speaking to the CBC about Square’s thoughts on ApplePay. “We’re building a register so that sellers can accept a credit card, so they can accept cash, so they can accept a cheque, so they can accept Bitcoin and so they can accept any form of payment that comes across the counter including future ones.”

Bloomberg profile of Coinbase, long but good read

Anthony Effinger at Bloomberg has written a lengthy, but fairly informative, profile of the Bitcoin wallet and financial service Coinbase. In the story, Effinger provides a description of Fred Ehrsam and Brian Armstrong, co-founders of Coinbase and the story of how Coinbase and Bitcoin got to where the company and technology are at today.

As one of the best-known Bitcoin financial companies, Coinbase is an inherent part of Bitcoin’s ecology and it gains more partners it continues to pull the currency towards mass adoption. Amid the latest coup, Coinbase is one of three Bitcoin finance companies partnered with PayPal to enable bitcoin transactions.

The profile is more than just a foray into the exploits of Coinbase, it’s almost a walk through the garden of Bitcoin history. It includes sections on the history of Bitcoin heists, the fear of double-spending, early scams and concerns about the technology. It even speaks a little bit about Satoshi Nakamoto, the enigmatic Batman of Bitcoin’s early development.

Reddit proposes cryptocurrency IPO to raise funds

After the success of Bitcoin numerous other cryptocurrencies have risen up to act as a fundraising medium. Blockchain-based cryptocoin have all the hallmarks of a stock: tradable, divisible, and acting as a store/exchange of value. Reddit intends to continue this fine tradition with its own cryptocurrency as part of a $50 million round of outside funding.

The blog post linked above, written by Yishan Wong is the CEO of Reddit (aka /u/yishan), who, when asked in a Reddit thread about the “crypto IPO” mentioned the cryptocurrency angle:

“We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community,” writes Wong. “The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms.”

Wong mentions that the Reddit team has had a brief discussion with an ex-SEC lawyer about the project and nothing illegal could be found. However, Wong adds, there would still be dozens of things to do before this sort of plan could become viable for the social media outlet.

Wong emphasizes in his post that while this could become part of the funding plans it is still in its nascent stages and could totally fall through. He also notes that this contradicts something else he said in early August, when Wong said Reddit was only evaluating cryptocurrency and not interested in producing an altcoin. He explains that at the time this plan had not yet been conceived.

OpenBazaar launches beta version 2.0

OpenBazaar, an open source decentralized trading network that produces an Internet marketplace built upon nodes of every person participating, has completed its first beta version and now version 2.0 is available to the public. The project can be downloaded from GitHub and runs on MacOS, Windows, and Linux; but it is still highly technical and designed for expert users.

OpenBazaar functions by having a user install an application on their machine that connects them to the network. Once connected, the user can then post an advertisement for a trade, a la Craigslist or any other ecommerce site, with description, keywords, and price details. That ad is then distributed to the entire network of nodes via an index that all other users can search against using those keywords to find and offer to buy the product advertised.

When an agreement to purchase occurs, the OpenBazaar network produces a cryptographically signed contract between the two users and enlists a third party who acts as a notary. In the case of a dispute another third party can act as an arbiter, usually someone trusted by bother parties in the trade.

Once a contract is created, the system manages escrow by generating a miltisig address signed with the keys of the two participants. In the case of an ordinary transaction, the first key unlocks the address as proof that the item has shipped; and the second key unlocks the address as proof of receipt. The multisig system also allows an arbiter, mentioned above, to control a third key or a voting pool of trusted individuals to be formed around releasing or refunding the account.