washingtonpost.com / By Timothy B. Lee / August 21 at 9:13 am
This has been a big year for Bitcoin. At the start of the year, interest in the virtual currency was largely limited to technology buffs. Then the price rose more than 10-fold, prompting regulators, investors and the general public to take a closer look.
To help policymakers get up to speed, the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, has published a new primer on the technical, economic and legal issues raised by the currency. Here are five of the most interesting observations that the authors, Jerry Brito and Andrea Castillo, make about Bitcoin:
Bitcoin isn’t exactly anonymous
It’s common to describe Bitcoin as anonymous currency, but Brito and Castillo argue that this is a misunderstanding of how Bitcoin works. True, you don’t have to provide identifying information to participate in the Bitcoin network. But records of every Bitcoin transaction are stored permanently on the network’s shared public transaction register.
READ MORE
This has been a big year for Bitcoin. At the start of the year, interest in the virtual currency was largely limited to technology buffs. Then the price rose more than 10-fold, prompting regulators, investors and the general public to take a closer look.
To help policymakers get up to speed, the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, has published a new primer on the technical, economic and legal issues raised by the currency. Here are five of the most interesting observations that the authors, Jerry Brito and Andrea Castillo, make about Bitcoin:
Bitcoin isn’t exactly anonymous
It’s common to describe Bitcoin as anonymous currency, but Brito and Castillo argue that this is a misunderstanding of how Bitcoin works. True, you don’t have to provide identifying information to participate in the Bitcoin network. But records of every Bitcoin transaction are stored permanently on the network’s shared public transaction register.
READ MORE
