Why Bitcoin is the banking industry’s newest, biggest threat

By Rosemary Westwood - Wednesday, January 2, 2013 at 11:58 AM - 0 Comments

Late last year, a radical banking experiment hit a major milestone in Europe, a continent with no shortage of financial drama. It had nothing to do with the euro, however, and everything to do with the “currency of the future”: Bitcoin.

The digital currency, still widely dismissed by many as Internet play money, gained an unprecedented foothold in the traditional banking world. In December, a Bitcoin currency exchange in France became the first to officially operate within the European financial system. Bitcoin-Central, and its parent company, Paymium, will offer their Bitcoin customers a legitimate French payment account through a partnership with the French financial firm Aqoba. Users will be able to buy euro-priced goods with a debit card attached to that account, and even have their salary paid into it. The account can then be used to buy Bitcoin-priced products online through Bitcoin-Central and, alternatively, trade in Bitcoins for euros. (One Bitcoin is currently worth around $13.) “Ever since we started Paymium, what we’re trying to do is explain the benefits of the technology to the banking industry,” says Paymium co-founder and CEO Pierre Noizat.

Banks and governments may be slow in listening, but there has been a dramatic growth in the number of Bitcoin users and retailers. WordPress, the ubiquitous blogging website, now accepts payment in Bitcoin. Bitcoin transactions in 2012 expanded to almost five million through September, more than double the number of transactions for all of 2011 and up from just 219 in 2009. It is now used to buy everything from cupcakes in San Francisco to limo rides in New York.

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Stakeout at 24 Sussex, Day — is it really only Day Four?

By kadyomalley - Monday, September 1, 2008 at 12:47 PM - 0 Comments

It feels so much longer, somehow.

Anyway, as has been the case for the last two Sussex summits, Colleague Wherry will have a full report on the Dion/Harper tete-a-tete later this afternoon, but ITQ will be there as well, attempting to photoblog the festivities via BlackBerry — ideally in real-ish time, but don’t hold your breath on that one, since the technology has proved stubbornly uncooperative on that front thus far.

We’re also going to try something a little different today — and please don’t roll your eyes the second that you read the rest of this sentence: Twittering. Yes, twittering. It’s come to this. I’ll be posting updates from outside the gates on my largely-underused-until-now twitter account, so you’re all invited to click over there to watch me try to limbo under the 140 word character limit. Alternately, if you too have a wildly underused twitter account, feel free to follow me.

I’ll probably have a lot more to say about the twitter technology – twitternology? – afterwards, since this will be the first time I’ve used it for anything more than roboposting recent ITQ entries. But If it isn’t a complete disaster, I suspect we may well try to incorporate twitterage into our coverage of the still-technically-purely-hypothetical election. Which will, at the very least, give us a whole new medium for snarky remarks and scintillating repartee with readers.

UPDATE – I just wanted to make sure y’all realize that you don’t *have* to add me to your twitter follow list to read today’s updates — if you have privacy concerns, or just don’t want to go through the bother of creating an account, you just have to hit refresh now and then and you’ll see the full feed.

Not that I don’t love having new followers — I kind of hate that term, by the way, what with how it makes it sound like I’m starting a cult – but it’s by no means mandatory. I don’t want to unintentionally alienate all those nontwitterers out there.