bitcoin in asia

Interview: Niall Ferguson On Bitcoin And Financial Evolution

15/12/2020 by Idelto Editor

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On this episode of Bitcoin Magazine’s “Bitcoin In Asia,” Niall Ferguson joins host John Riggins for a wide-ranging conversation about Bitcoin and the evolution of finance.

Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is also the author of 15 books, including “The Ascent of Money” and writes a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion.

In this episode, Ferguson discussed his recent Bloomberg piece “Bitcoin Is Winning the Covid-19 Monetary Revolution” and discussed the history of financial evolution, including how the current iteration of that evolution is playing out between China and the U.S. and how he views Bitcoin in that context. He also discussed the qualities that make Bitcoin a significant advance and the broader importance of decentralization and sovereignty.

Learn more about Ferguson through his website and Twitter account.

The post Interview: Niall Ferguson On Bitcoin And Financial Evolution appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Video: Bitcoin Hardware And Security With Cobo’s Lixin Liu

30/11/2020 by Idelto Editor

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This episode of Bitcoin Magazine’s Bitcoin In Asia featured Lixin Liu, the head of hardware at Cobo and the creator of the Cobo Vault, out of Shanghai.

Lixin’s background in hardware and international product development, most recently in robotics with Hover Camera, made him the preferred choice of F2Pool and Cobo Founder Discus Fish when he decided to get into the Bitcoin hardware and security game.

Lixin and I discussed building out Bitcoin hardware from the ground up and why it is valuable to the Bitcoin network to have increasing competition in the hardware product space, the difference between what Chinese miners and Western retail users want in hardware products, trends he is seeing in institutional custody interest in Asia and more.

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Video: Coordinating Bitcoin Upgrades With Poolin’s Alejandro De La Torre

24/11/2020 by Idelto Editor

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The guest for this episode of Bitcoin In Asia is Alejandro De La Torre, vice president at Poolin. De La Torre and Poolin have launched taprootactivation.com to improve on the communication and transparency of the Taproot activation process. Bitcoin Magazine’s Aaron van Wirdum covered the initiative here, and in this Interview, De La Torre and host John Riggins explored additional context around it.

De La Torre has been in the Bitcoin data and mining space since 2014 when he founded SendChat, later acquired by wallet and data service Blocktrail, where he led business development until the company was acquired by Bitmain. Inside of Bitmain, De La Torre co-founded BTC.com and led its European office during the SegWit upgrade process. Now, back with former BTC.com colleagues at Poolin, De La Torre leads its global business development initiatives.

Poolin operates out of Beijing and is currently the second-largest pool in terms of Bitcoin hash power. Their services have expanded over the past year to include facilitating additional financial services products for their miner customers, and they have partnered with BlockFi and Three Arrows Capital, among others, for those expanded services.

In addition to discussing taprootactivation.com, De La Torre talked about lessons learned during the SegWit and blocksize debates, Bitcoin upgrade activations and the changing competitive landscape in the Bitcoin mining pool business.

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Video: Nick Szabo, Adam Back And David Chaum On The History Of Bitcoin

20/11/2020 by Idelto Editor

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In this episode of Bitcoin Magazine’s Bitcoin In Asia, some of the godfathers of Bitcoin — Nick Szabo, Adam Back and David Chaum — discuss the history of the technology with host John Riggins. This episode was recorded during a live panel from Seoul at Korea Blockchain Week and is laid out as a history of the ideas and events that led to Bitcoin from their first-person accounts. It also features their current thoughts on the latest experiments in Bitcoin and what excites them about its future.

Szabo is a computer scientist, cryptographer, the designer of BitGold and a smart contracts pioneer. Back is an applied cryptographer with a computer science PhD in distributed systems, the inventor of Hashcash and cofounder and CEO of Blockstream. Chaum is best known for his fundamental innovations in cryptography, including privacy technology and secure election systems, as well as digital cash, and is currently leading Elixxir and Praxxis. Both Back and Chaum are cited in the Bitcoin white paper, while Szabo’s influence has been mentioned by Satoshi on Bitcointalk.org.

From the cryptography and cypherpunk movements to David’s DigiCash, Adam’s Hashcash proof-of-work, Nick’s BitGold and more, their contributions were foundational to the development of Bitcoin, and it was fascinating to have them together and playing off of each other in a discussion of that history.

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Video: Fresh Competition Is Shaping The Bitcoin Mining Hardware And Pool Landscape

19/10/2020 by Idelto Editor

Always a sector to watch, the Bitcoin mining space is host to several narratives that are worth a closer look today, as fresh capital and competition enter the market. Among these are the geographic distribution of hash power, mining hardware hierarchy and mining pool offerings.

On this episode of Bitcoin Magazine’s “Bitcoin In Asia,” Nishant Sharma, a long-time bitcoin mining industry insider in China who is now a founder and partner of BlocksBridge Consulting — a communications strategy and advisory firm focused on the bitcoin mining sector that serves some of its largest companies — helped break down these narratives with some additional historical context.

Sharma explained how the negative news around flooding in Sichuan has been overblown and mining dominance from China is not changing anytime soon. He also discussed why the decentralization of mining geographically is still a real event, with North America and Russia as growing markets. He also laid out the landscape of mining pool competition: how it has developed and experienced incredible turnover over the years and what new competition and products are shaping its future.

The mining hardware space has experienced less turnover, with Bitmain taking a dominant position early, and Sharma handicapped MicroBT’s rise and the factors at play for hardware moving forward, including the significance of Digital Currency Group entity Foundry’s partnership with MicroBT and the entrance of additional institutional capital.

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