Community Directory

It's been close to a year since a federal jury sentenced 31-year-old Ross Ulbricht to two life prison convictions for running the Silk Road website under the name Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR). This week, the Ulbricht family attorneys have filed with higher courts to appeal all seven charges against him, submitting 170 pages of arguments.

The continent of Africa makes up 6% of the earth’s land surface, with 30 islands. Its area covers 415,873 square kilometers (258,411 miles). With over 1.1 billion inhabitants in 2014, the 55 countries of Africa represented 16% of the world’s population.

Africa's population is the youngest in the world. In 2012, the median age was 19.7, compared to a worldwide median of 30.4. According to the World Bank, the youth represent 60% of the country's unemployed. Here's how Bitcoin can help.

First Hour:

We talk with Evan Duffield about Dash Evolution, the Dash budget proposal, master nodes, X-11, and the new interface with Lamassu Bitcoin ATMs.

Second Hour:

We are somehow thrown into a debate with Bart Simpson (doh) about the validity of Bitcoin. It's like playing cards with your brother's kids. (That's a Lampoon Vacation reference.) Bart makes buzzword attacks on Bitcoin. The cartoon Bart and this Bart have the overuse of buzzwords very much in common.

Zasha, a local bitcoiner with a more rational skepticism, brings sanity to the conversation.

In the first forty minutes, we discuss Bitcoin with two local bitcoiners, Jered Reyes and Chris Guida.

Then Doug Casey joins us for the remainder of the show to talk gold, markets, and expatriation.

Tatiana and co-host, Joshua Scigala, welcome Luis Molina, founder of Fermat and CEO of BitDubai. Fermat is a P2P financial-application framework that allows stand-alone crypto wallets to evolve into any kind of trust-less financial application, and BitDubai is a network of developers, designers, and academics building the first implementation of Fermat. 

Free My Vunk is a movement to port game items and assets into the blockchain. The goal is to give control of hard-won, in-game rewards entirely to the players themselves. On the surface, this seems like a simple, maybe even mundane use case, but the significance a gamer may attach to a specific achievement can be a real source of economic value. We see this in phenomena like World of Warcraft gold mining and character sale.

South Africa is infamous for being one of the longest-running modern-day governments to legalise racial separation, called apartheid, in many facets of everyday life. Only in 1994 were black South Africans able to vote for the first time to change the leadership of the country. The African National Congress (ANC) party overwhelmingly won the election in 1994, and became the first democratically elected government South Africa had ever seen. The saddening realisation is that it has seemingly followed every other African liberation movement — it's the only post-apartheid government South Africa has ever had, and the political rot is bringing the country into ruin.

I've been thinking about the Bitcoin Foundation over the last few months. After I left as the first chairman of the education committee in late 2013, I dismissed the Foundation as a mostly inept attempt by some business interests in the community to gain an edge over their competitors.

So why my sudden interest, after my self-imposed exile?

Recently, Brazil’s government ordered WhatsApp to shut down its services within the country. WhatsApp is widely adopted by Brazilians. In a country with a population of around 200 million, there are about 100 million users, and the ruling caused a massive reaction against the decision. People immediately sought ways to get around the block through the use of VPN services, in order to keep using the messaging service. Many migrated to other apps, such as Telegram.

Will such events cause an eventual migration to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin?

It's the usual tropical season here in Chennai, India, but this year is not like any other. Rain brought floods and chaos, causing the city to float. The continuous rain for the past month has surpassed all the odds and brought a halt to the usual life. Too much rain, too little space The state of Tamil Nadu has received 485 mm of rain so far. The amount already exceeded the seasonal average of 438 mm. Through ChangeCup India and ChangeTip, Bitcoin comes to the aid of victims.