Lifeboat Foundation

FEBRUARY 03/2014 UPDATES. By Mr.Andres Agostini at www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com

Maps showing which parts of the world would be flooded if all the world’s ice melted
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map

3-D printing takes shape
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/manufacturing/3-d_printing_…k-oth-1401

40 more maps that explain the world
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/01/13…the-world/

The Future of Space-Age Management
http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Continue reading “The Future Observatory” »

Pete Rizzo — CoinDesk

Readers who visit the Chicago Sun-Times today will notice something they aren’t likely to have seen before: a bitcoin paywall separating them from their content.

The Chicago Sun-Times is the ninth-largest newspaper in the United States, and the first major US publication to trial a bitcoin paywall.

Instead of paying for a subscription, as patrons of the The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times do, Chicago Sun-Times readers who visit the site on 1st February will be asked to donate bitcoin payments to the Taproot Foundation, or tweet about the nonprofit, in order to read articles.

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www.FUTURE-OBSERVATORY.blogspot.com JANUARY/30/2014 HEADLINES. By Mr. Andres Agostini

Cancer Researchers Identify New Drug to Inhibit Breast Cancer
http://guardianlv.com/2014/01/cancer-researchers-identify-ne…st-cancer/

Russia, US to join forces against space threats
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_01_29/Russia-US-to-join-f…eats-1145/

The rise of artificial intelligence
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-ne…317g3.html

Continue reading “Future Observatory” »

By Jerin Matthew — International Business Times

Non-profit journalistic organisation WikiLeaks has said that the bulk of its donation comes via digital currencies bitcoin and litecoin.

The organisation that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources, revealed the information in a tweet. However, it did not mention the percentage of funding in digital currencies.

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By Ryan Whitwam - ExtremeTech

The first thing to know about Bitcoin has nothing to do with how it works or what the current value of one is — of primary importance is the fanatical devotion Bitcoin users have to the mother of all cryptocurrencies. Many fans of Bitcoin promote the anonymous internet money at every turn, encouraging others to use it as a way to combat everything from government overreach to unethical banking practices. This is why cryptocurrencies are still a thing. Bitcoin enthusiasts scored a major victory when Overstock and Zynga started accepting Bitcoins recently, and that prompted one fan to start asking other internet companies what their plans were. Surprisingly, the one organization he got anywhere with was Google.

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Cory Doctorow — Boin Boing

Some Bitcoin enthusiasts have announced a new project called Bitcloud. The idea is something like the old Mojo Nation P2P architecture, in which individual Internet users perform tasks for each other — routing, storage, lookups, computation — in exchange for very small payments.

The Bitcloud protocol uses Bitcoin-style accounting to allocate those microtransfers, along with Bitcoin-style proof-of-work (they call it “proof-of-bandwidth”) and the authors suggest that the potential for profit by individual members will create enough capacity to replace a large number of centralized commercial services (“Youtube, Dropbox, Facebook, Spotify, ISPs”) with “distributed autonomous corporations,” that obviate the need for centralized control in order to supply anonymous, robust, free services to the public.

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By Gregory Wallace — CNN Money

Bitcoin just got another cheerleader.

The Sacramento Kings NBA team just became the first major professional sports franchise to accept Bitcoin, according to an announcement from payment processor BitPay.

Continue reading “NBA's Sacramento Kings cash in on Bitcoin” »

Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff

When a group of cryptographers launched Zerocoin last year, they hoped their cryptography project could upgrade Bitcoin to be as anonymous as its most privacy-focused users have always wanted it to be. Now, after six months of waiting in vain for their code to be adopted by the Bitcoin community, they’re taking a bolder approach: Creating their own cryptocurrency, with privacy baked in from the start.

At the Real World Crypto conference Monday in New York, Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green announced the next phase in the evolution of Zerocoin: creating an alternative cryptocurrency with an infrastructure independent of Bitcoin. The new coins, which Green says will go into circulation in May in some sort of beta program, will have their own exchange rate with existing currencies, their own “miners” producing new coins, and their own public ledger of transactions known as the “blockchain,” just as Bitcoin does. But unlike Bitcoin, Zerocoin is designed to be spent and received without revealing any trace of a user’s identity.

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