“Draper Fisher Jurvetson Founding Partner Tim Draper discusses his tech investment ideas on Bloomberg Television’s ‘In The Loop.'”
“Many think it’s the future of bitcoin, and for a good reason. In short, multisignature transactions are unique in that they allow for more than one private key to control a wallet address. At present, most users deal with one public address, and one public. The issue with that is that it becomes incredibly easy to lose access to funds should the private key become compromised. BitPay’s Bitcore team recently announced that a multisignature wallet, dubbed Cosign, was in development. It’s since been re-named to Copay, and all six of the software’s developers have come together in Tucuman, Argentina to create a prototype.”
“Alex Wilhelm is a bitcoin miner, one of thousands who use computers to solve complex math problems and get their hands on the digital currency. The expatriate living in Tokyo has 30 remote-controlled servers mining virtual gold in an old brick building in the Austrian countryside. His father is donating the electricity, which comes from a water-driven turbine that survived a World War II bombing raid and once powered the entire village of Tattendorf, where Wilhelm grew up. While the operation is modest as mining farms go, it illustrates a basic point: the race to uncover cyber cash has become so energy intensive that power bills now make it mostly unprofitable.”
“The Obama and Paul Ryan budgets both seek the same thing: MORE federal spending. I DO NOT CONSENT! Every penny you spend is taken BY FORCE. And all of it funds chaos, NOT government. You create resentment by stationing troops in 150+ countries. You aid corrupt dictators. Your foreign policy inspires terrorism. Your drug war destabilizes our southern neighbors and creates the world’s largest prison population. Your regulations kill job-creation and ruin lives. Your interventions in health care and education improves neither, but make both more expensive. Stop meddling abroad. Stop meddling at home. Reduce the harm you do — CUT SPENDING!”
https://secure.downsizedc.org/blog/will-the-congressional-budget-hurt-people-in-your-name
“Stefan Molyneux and David Seaman talk about making the present incomprehensible to the future, the elimination of fiat currency, using Bitcoin to end war, and why you can’t buy votes with Bitcoin.”
“The first machine that can be accessed directly by consumers was finally unveiled at an invite-only event in Colorado last week. Billed as the first marijuana vending machine in America, the ZaZZZ unit is perhaps more accurately described as the first machine that will not be placed behind a sales counter. It offers a number of novel compliance features, including a driver’s license reader and a camera that captures video of users. ZaZZZ machines also have another notable feature: they accept only a limited number of payment options including the ZaZZZ Card, cash, and perhaps most notably, bitcoin.”
http://www.coindesk.com/new-colorado-marijuana-vending-machines-accept-bitcoin/
“U.S. investors seeking to revive Mt. Gox have launched a last-ditch effort to convince a Japanese bankruptcy court to support their proposal after the failed bitcoin exchange announced it would abandon a rehabilitation plan and instead move to liquidate its assets. As part of this effort, the investor group has launched a website, savegox.com, to explain its proposal and create a mechanism for Mt. Gox’s 127,000 creditors to express their support for it. The group’s proposed new exchange would be led by John Betts, who built electronic trading platforms at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley in New York.”
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304810904579507980740114154
“Messrs Yellen, Draghi et al should be careful what they wish for. Inflation targeting is hardly a precise science. Achieving an entirely arbitrary 2% inflation level is bad enough for savers on fixed incomes when deposit rates are close enough to zero as to make no difference, but markets have a tendency to overshoot. Most government bond markets are clearly overbought – but in a QE world given fresh impetus by the looming arrival of the ECB, overbought markets can become even more overbought. When we don’t claim to understand the underlying dynamics (political) or the final destination (though we have our own fears), it’s much better simply not to play.”
http://www.cobdencentre.org/2014/04/everything-we-are-told-about-deflation-is-a-lie/
“Here’s a guy you want to bet on– Li Ka-Shing. Li is reportedly the richest person in Asia with a net worth well in excess of $30 billion, much of which he made being a shrewd property investor. Li Ka-Shing was investing in mainland China back in the early 90s, way back before it became the trendy thing to do. Now, Li wants out of China. All of it. Since August of last year, he’s dumped billions of dollars worth of his Chinese holdings. The latest is the $928 million sale of the Pacific Place shopping center in Beijing– this deal was inked just days ago. So what does he see that nobody else seems to be paying much attention to? Simple. China’s credit crunch.”
http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/the-richest-man-in-asia-is-selling-everything-in-china-14208/
“The US Sentencing Commission (USSC) voted unanimously Thursday to reduce sentences for most federal drug trafficking defendants. The move comes as the federal prison population continues to increase, driven in large part by drug offenders, even as prison populations in the states are on the decline. USSC said the changes would affect about 70% of federal drug trafficking defendants and would result in an average sentence decrease of 11 months. That means the average federal drug trafficking sentence will drop from just over five years to just over four years. There are currently more than 216,000 federal prisoners. Slightly more than half are doing time for drug offenses.”
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2014/apr/11/ussc_cuts_drug_sentences