Bitcoins.at

Jetzt wechselt er, der erste Bitcoin-Automat, der in den Vereinigten Staaten Anfang Oktober ausgeliefert worden ist. Das von dem Startup Lamassu aus New Hampshire gelieferte Gerät liest einen individuell erzeugten QR-Code ein, der mittels einer Wallet-Anwendung auf einem Mobilgerät und im Zusammenhang mit der eigenen Bitcoinadresse erzeugt wird. Danach kann man die umzutauschende Summe bar in das Gerät einstecken und erhält die gewechselten Bitcoins auf der angegebenen Adresse gut geschrieben.

Mit diesem Automaten ändert sich auch ein bisher vertrautes Geräuch beim Operieren mit Geld. Als Wechselmaschine in die virtuelle Welt rattert das Geld nicht unten aus dem Automaten, sondern wird auf einer speziellen Adresse gutgeschrieben.

Im Deutschsprachigen Raum sind derzeit noch keine Geräte verfügbar.

Für weitere Informationen siehe:

Heise

Lamassu

"The Internet is a big fan of the worst-possible-thing. Many people thought Twitter was the worst possible way for people to communicate, little more than discourse abbreviated into tiny little chunks; Facebook was a horrible way to experience human relationships, commodifying them into a list of friends whom one pokes. The Arab Spring changed the story somewhat. (BuzzFeed is another example—let them eat cat pictures.) One recipe for Internet success seems to be this: Start at the bottom, at the most awful, ridiculous, essential idea, and own it. Promote it breathlessly, until you’re acquired or you take over the world. Bitcoin is playing out in a similar way. It asks its users to forget about central banking in the same way Steve Jobs asked iPhone (AAPL) users to forget about the mouse."

Das schreibt Paul Ford in Bloomberg Businessweek in einem beachtlichen, kurzen Artikel im März 2013. Bitcoins sind inzwischen Teil der Internetgeschichte und möglicherweise ein wichtiger Bestandteil der digitalen Gesellschaft der Zukunft. Ford erzählt in wenigen Atemzügen die merkwürdige Präsenz von Bitcoins in der virtuellen Ökonomie bis zu deren ominösen Durchbruch an die mediale Öffentlichkeit. Der Rest ist Geschichte…

"I’ll admit to having run the Bitcoin mining software a few years ago for a week until I became convinced it was a poor use of limited computer resources. I had work to do. I expected Bitcoins to remain in the background with all of the other anarchist crypto-chatter that makes up an essential substratum of modern network thinking.

But Bitcoins didn’t go away. And I’m increasingly convinced there’s one thing that Bitcoins do that’s genuinely interesting. They decentralize trust. Trust is hard to earn; verifying transactions is a brutal problem, which is why PayPal locks down your account when there’s too much money flowing into it. Creating trust is traditionally the work of federal governments and branding agencies. Trust is also an easy thing to squander. Just close a beloved service, à la Google Reader. Or allow your banks to fail, causing an entire country to suddenly realize that the value of their deposits, the fundamental integrity of their financial selves, was arbitrary all along.

Along comes Bitcoin, a currency in which every transaction is stored by the entire network and every coin has its own story. There’s nothing to trust but math. Suddenly an idea that sounded terrible—a totally decentralized currency without a central authority, where semi-anonymous parties exchange meaningless tokens—becomes almost comforting, a source of power and authority.

That’s where Bitcoin thrives: where people would prefer to throw in their lot with anonymous strangers instead of the world economy. It’s gold-bug thinking reinvented for an age of fluid transparency and instantaneous transactions. And as such it’s an excellent indicator of anxiety. Where you see Bitcoins in action you find a weird and heady mix of speculative angst, a fear of being left behind, and people who appear to have lost faith in institutions, who feel most left behind. These are people who’ll trade in purely arbitrary tokens, willing to forgo the comfort of banking systems for the weight of mathematics and the Internet behind it.

Bitcoin isn’t tied to any commodity—besides trust. As a statement on the global economy, Bitcoin is hilarious. As a currency for the disenfranchised and distrustful, it’s as serious as can be." (Article: Bloomberg Businessweek, March 28, 2013, Paul Ford: Bitcoin may be the Global Economy's Last Safe Haven)

Im neuen Buch Eric Schmidts und Jared Cohens werfen beide einen kurzen Blick auf die strukturelle ökonomische Bedeutung, die virtuelle Währungen wie Bitcoins zukünftig einnehmen könnten:

"More effective communication across borders and languages will build trust and create opportunities for hardworking and talented individuals around the world. It will not be unusual for a French technology company to operate its sales team from Southeast Asia, while locating its human-resources people in Canada and its engineers in Israel. Bureaucratic obstacles that prevent this level of decentralized operation today, like visa restrictions and regulations around money transfers, will become either irrelevant or be circumvented as digital solutions are discovered. Perhaps a human-rights organization with staff living in a country under heavy diplomatic sanctions will pay its employees in mobile money credits, or in an entirely digital currency." ("The New Digital Age", Chap. 1)

Eine wichtige Entwicklung gibt es für beide Autoren allerdings im Auge zu behalten, nämlich die mögliche Ausbeutung der Eigenschaften virtueller Währungen für kriminellen Handlungen.

"If illegal activity is the primary concern for governments, the real challenge will be the combination of virtual currency with anonymous networks that hide the physical location of services. For example, criminals are already selling illegal drugs on the Tor network in exchange for Bitcoins (a virtual currency), avoiding cash and banks altogether. Copyright infringers will use the same networks." (Chap. 2)

"As the author and journalist Upton Sinclair once noted, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." We can now add the following thought: it is even more difficult to get a man to understand something when he is dealing with nonmonetary currencies." (Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, Chap. 14)