Bitcoin in the News : 2016-10 More++

After the previous post, Bitcoin in the News : 2016-10 'Trust Disrupted', what other bitcoin stories were noteworthy last month? The most mentioned was a concept called 'Bitcoin Unlimited'.

• 2016-10-14: ‘Bitcoin Unlimited’ Hopes to Save Bitcoin from Itself (motherboard.vice.com) • 'Bitcoin Unlimited, an alternative to the popular Bitcoin Core client that has been at the epicenter of the block size debate, is taking a more brazen approach compared to the slow process of community deliberation. Bitcoin Unlimited allows miners to decide the size of blocks they create and the upper limit of blocks they’re willing to process on their own and independent of any hard-coded limit.'
  
  
• 2016-10-20: ViaBTC Rises: How A Mysterious Miner Could Decide Bitcoin's Future (coindesk.com) • 'In recent weeks, China's ViaBTC became one of the first providers of mining software to switch its client from the official version provided by Bitcoin Core to an option provided by Bitcoin Unlimited, a rival development group that supports alternative methods of scaling that is focused on creating a more variable bitcoin block size. But unlike Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Unlimited does not have support for that developer group's signature scaling solution, Segregated Witness, a planned technical fix that would effectively make bitcoin's block size about 1.8 times larger than it is today by changing how information is counted toward this total. Further, because the rules for Segregated Witness require 95% of bitcoin's hashing power to approve the transition, ViaBTC could effectively block its wider release.'

We've already seen 'Segregated Witness' on this blog. I last mentioned it in 2015 Hong Kong Conference (April 2016), including a link to an explanatory video. It was back last month.

• 2016-10-28: Bitcoin Begins Segregated Witness Era, What Happens Now? (cointelegraph.com) • 'October 27, 2016. Segregated Witness (or SegWit) was added to Bitcoin Core. Will that day be the official end of the two-year-old “Block Size Debate?” will yesterday be the first step towards a mainstream-ready global decentralized digital currency? Whether you know it or not, Bitcoin has officially stepped into a new era of expansion and usability with the release of Bitcoin Core 0.13.1. Here, we’ll give you a cliffnotes version of what happens next and if we are even ready for SegWit.'
  
  
• 2016-10-31: Bitcoin is closing in on its 2016 peak. A handful of theories attempt to explain the rally • No.3 of 4: 'A solution to bitcoin's "civil war" is at hand; A long awaited update to the bitcoin core, the software that governs the cryptocurrency, includes a "soft fork" solution to the problem of limited transaction capacity on the bitcoin network. The solution is called "segregated witness" and it allows bitcoin miners and others running the core software to up transaction capacity without running the existential risk of a "hard fork" that would split the currency’s blockchain.'

It looks to me like two competing technological solutions -- code-named 'Bitcoin Unlimited' and 'Segregated Witness' -- are operational and that only one of them will eventually survive. Another example of competing solutions is occurring at the macro-economics level.

• 2016-10-04: Bill Gross Says Bitcoin, Blockchain May Counter Central Banks (bloomberg.com w/ video) • 'New financial technologies such as bitcoin may become increasingly attractive to investors as a protection against central bank low- and negative-interest-rate policies that threaten capitalism, according to billionaire bond manager Bill Gross. Policies by the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan and European Central Bank are destroying historical business models that foster savings, investment and economic growth, Gross, who runs the $1.5 billion Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, said in an October investment outlook released Tuesday. He said that as investors lose faith in the system, they will increasingly seek havens.'
  
  
• 2016-10-12: Central banks consider Bitcoin’s technology, if not Bitcoin (cnbc.com; reprinting Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times) • 'Bitcoin was created by libertarian-minded programmers with a deep suspicion of central banks and the national currencies they issue. Yet it is central banks that are doing some of the most ambitious work of late in trying to harness the technology introduced by Bitcoin. '
  
  
• 2016-10-19: The European Central Bank Wants Tighter Control over Bitcoin (cryptocoinsnews.com) • 'The European Central Bank (ECB) has proposed a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council stating that ‘virtual currencies do not qualify as currencies from a Union perspective,’ and wants digital currencies to be explicitly defined as not legal currencies or money.'

As long as I'm on the concept of 'competing solutions', there's also a political aspect.

• 2016-10-18: Review: "The Politics of Bitcoin" Offers a Flawed and Misleading Partisan View (bitcoinmagazine.com) • 'David Golumbia, an assistant professor in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, an aspiring political pundit, and the author of the recently published book, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, denounces Bitcoin in a recent blog post titled Trump, Clinton, and the Electoral Politics of Bitcoin. "[What] concerns me about Bitcoin is how it contributes to the spread of deeply right-wing ideas in economics and political philosophy without those right-wing associations being made at all explicit."'
  
  
• 2016-10-30: Making Sense of Hillary Clinton's Bitcoin Rejection (coindesk.com) • 'For Hillary Clinton's campaign, accepting bitcoin was "too libertarian". That's what we learned last week when it was revealed senior campaign aides for the US presidential candidate considered taking bitcoin campaign donations, but dismissed the idea.'

Given the result of the U.S. election that took place this past week, what Hillary Clinton thinks about bitcoin is no longer relevant. What President-elect Donald J. Trump thinks must be extremely relevant (if he thinks about it at all), and I expect to see something about that in next month's news post. If not, I'll examine the subject myself. Another subject I would like to examine is mentioned in my final link.

• 2016-10-12: Is Bitcoin Doomed? (newsweek.com) • 'Cyber security experts say bitcoin will disappear when the first quantum computer appears.'

That could be the most important message in this current post. Since I know little about quantum computing, I'll digress for the next few posts to spend time on it.