Lift12: Adrienne Jeffries, Story of Bitcoin [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Adrienne Jeffries’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

lift12 1100316.jpg

People buying drugs online with an anonymous currency called Bitcoin.

The technology is the regulator. It’s in the code. A P2P electronic cash system.

Creator: Satoshi — fake name. Disappeared at some point.

Run a bitcoin miner on your computer. As the total number of bitcoins increased, it now takes several days to make a bitcoin. This is one of the ways it regulates itself. Total number is fixed. Every purchase goes through the system. Can’t use the same bitcoin twice. steph-note: this is going fast, have trouble following the story

At some point the bitcoin became really expensive, peaking at 33$ to the bitcoin.

At some point Adrienne decided she wanted some bitcoins. Bought some at the shop around the corner and stored them at mybitcoin.com. 4 days later the website was gone. People were angry!

“We got hacked, sorry we’re shutting down, refunding half of everyone’s deposits.”

First of a series of bad things that happened to bitcoin. Hacks, exchange flash crash…

Lots of “bitcoin dead” articles. Is it fools’ gold?

Anonymity vs. security, decentralization vs. usability, independence vs. legality.

It’s in beta! Might have problems reaching a massive scale. Trough of disillusionment.

Lead developer: we need to make bitcoin boring (all the drama and coverage was making the price jumping all around).

Now: price is lower, more stable, volume of trade is higher.

Other challenges, competition: bitcoin forks, dwolla, facebook credits.

Adrienne thinks bitcoin remains too hard to use to be popular in the mainstream.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *