Tag: cryptocurrency

After Endless Demonization Of Encryption, Police Find Paris Attackers Coordinated Via Unencrypted SMS

from the anonymous-sources-say dept

In the wake of the tragic events in Paris last week encryption has continued to be a useful bogeyman for those with a voracious appetite for surveillance expansion. Like clockwork, numerous reports were quickly circulated suggesting that the terrorists used incredibly sophisticated encryption techniques, despite no evidence by investigators that this was the case. These reports varied in the amount of hallucination involved, the New York Times even having to pull one such report offline. Other claims the attackers had used encrypted Playstation 4 communications also wound up being bunk. 

Yet, pushed by their sources in the government, the media quickly became a sound wall of noise suggesting that encryption was hampering the government's ability to stop these kinds of attacks. NBC was particularly breathless this week over the idea that ISIS was now running a 24 hour help desk aimed at helping its less technically proficient members understand encryption (even cults help each other use technology, who knew?). All of the reports had one central, underlying drum beat implication: Edward Snowden and encryption have made us less safe, and if you disagree the blood is on your hands. 

Yet, amazingly enough, as actual investigative details emerge, it appears that most of the communications between the attackers was conducted via unencrypted vanilla SMS:

"…News emerging from Paris — as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January — suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted. 

European media outlets are reporting that the location of a raid conducted on a suspected safe house Wednesday morning was extracted from a cellphone, apparently belonging to one of the attackers, found in the trash outside the Bataclan concert hall massacre. Le Monde reported that investigators were able to access the data on the phone, including a detailed map of the concert hall and an SMS messaging saying “we’re off; we’re starting.” Police were also able to trace the phone’s movements.

The reports note that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the "mastermind" of both the Paris attacks and a thwarted Belgium attack ten months ago, failed to use any encryption whatsoever (read: existing capabilities stopped the Belgium attacks and could have stopped the Paris attacks, but didn't). That's of course not to say batshit religious cults like ISIS don't use encryption, and won't do so going forward. Everybody uses encryption. But the point remains that to use a tragedy to vilify encryption, push for surveillance expansion, and pass backdoor laws that will make everybody less safe — is nearly as gruesome as the attacks themselves.

David

Cryptocurrency and the Cryptoconomy

 

A peculiar feature of Cryptocurrency — and a reason why so many people have a hard time wrapping their brains around it – is that it is both a payment system and an emerging monetary system.

Those two systems are usually separate.

The payment aspects of Cryptocurrency is the financial backbone of the cryptoconomy.

Cryptocurrency is uniquely suited to a digital age. Real property is exchanged, not just a promise to pay, and it is done person to person, without having to go through banks and large institutions. This is crucial for ending the plague of identity theft, forgeries and online fraud.

When you really think about this you'll come to understand what a profound change this really is.

The payment dimension might not seem that important in the United States, but when you broaden the perspective to global commerce, you can easily see it. There are huge swaths of the planet in which you cannot use credit cards at all. Even now, if you try to buy something on Amazon with a home address in one country and a delivery address in another, your transaction is likely to be refused. The anti-fraud measures have been necessary, but they have frustrated the development of the global marketplace. It was at this point that it finally struck me.

This is not a currency only for the rich tech world; it is a currency for the world’s poor, who are desperately trying to become part of the global division of labor. It allows anyone from anywhere to buy or sell anything securely, privately, and reliably.

It suddenly started making sense to me why Cryptocurrency is so wildly popular in Africa, Latin America, and the outer reaches of the Russian empire. But even domestically, it is clear that this market is expanding.

As of only a few weeks ago, you could pay for anything at hundreds of mainstream merchants with Cryptocurrency.

One example is BitPay uses a smartphone application called Gyft. You buy a gift card from Gyft with Cryptocurrency and the merchant scans the card. The operation takes under a minute.

I have been watching this happening, it’s fascinating. It was only a few months ago that people were saying, “Oh, this stuff can’t really be money because I can’t spend it at Target.” Well, now you can. Where are these doubters now? Are they taking back their previous rebuff?

The payment system benefits of Cryptocurrency are clear enough, but there is a much broader vision at work here, one that goes to the heart of the development of money itself. The basic premise is that humankind needs money to facilitate trade, and many goods have served that purpose.

At the dawn of modernity in the late Middle Ages, precious metals were universally seen as the best tools for this. But there was a problem with precious metals. Namely, they are really heavy and not very portable in daily use. Thus did banking institutions come along, and with them paper money.

Paper money dominated the world economy until the end of the gold standard in 1971. Since then money has taken a digital form and is backed solely by debt obligations.

The great innovation of Cryptocurrency was 20 years in coming.

There were many attempts to make a new currency, but they faltered repeatedly because of the problem of double spending. A currency should behave just like the real characteristics that gold and silver once had.

What about the deflationary implications of Cryptocurrency. The usual belief is that a currency rising in value is an incentive to hoarding and that makes business impossible. This not true, experience so far is that people spend Cryptocurrency more when the exchange rate value is rising.

As I build my cryptocommerce WordPress business site, I’ve found something curious about using Cryptocurrency. I'm beginning to think in terms of a new pricing system and sense a real change of entrepreneurial psychology.

The goal is simple: to build a better entrepreneurial process as a means to a better world. There is a beautiful idealism at work here, the kind of thing that people look for from charities and universities. Actually, the world of cryptocommerce on this level represents an embodiment of this idealism.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are succeeding, not by attacking the current financial system, nor by asking permissions from the regulators and gatekeepers. This new economy, the cryptoconomy, is simply the next economy and will not attempt to take over the current financial services system, nor wait for consumers to transfer fiat money into cryptocurrency wallets; rather it will emerge by creating its own wealth, via new types of services and businesses that extend beyond money transactions.

The implementation of Cryptocommerce is a next step in the evolution of global commerce and trade that is in process. History show that about every 40 years the monetary system changes. We are past due and I believe that cryptocurrency and cryptocommerce are next entrepreneurial environment to emerge into business dominance.

Add cryptocurrency to your business today.

David

The Cryptoconomy – WordPress, Carts and Currencies

We have entered the Cryptoconomy. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur please read on.

I started an  cryptocommerce site based on WordPress, the backbone of the entrepreneurs of Markethive. My site will take 6 cryptocurrencies. There may be more in the future.

What do I need for a cryptocommerce business?

I need WordPress, the shopping cart, the currencies and the payment gateway.

WordPress is easy however the shopping cart is unique. My discovery process led to only one cart that will do the job, Woocommerce, a highly rated and very extensible free shopping cart. Woocommerce works great for all standard sales of products and services but how does it work with crypto?

A further search in the WP plugins yielded GoUrl WooCommerce – Bitcoin Altcoin Payment Gateway Addon. The search keyword was “cryptocurrency”.

Official GoUrl.io Bitcoin Payment Gateway Plugin for WordPress. Provides Pay-Per-Product, Pay-Per-Download, Pay-Per-Membership, Pay-Per-View and bitcoin/altcoin payment gateways for – WooCommerce, WP eCommerce, Jigoshop, MarketPress, AppThemes, Paid Memberships Pro, bbPress, Give Donations, etc.

This payment gateway accepts Bitcoin, Litecoin, Paycoin, Dogecoin, Dash, Speedcoin, Reddcoin, Potcoin, Feathercoin, Vertcoin, Vericoin, Peercoin, MonetaryUnit payments online. No Chargebacks, Global, Secure. All in automatic mode.

So far so good, I've gotten the site up, the cart installed, the payment gateway, all major functions in place. However,there is one unwritten site requirement , the theme. Yes, I went to my old favorite themes and low an behold they showed an incompatibility in the admin panel.

The plugins didn't quite meet the functional requirements. Woocommerce requires compatible themes. A quick search in WP Themes and you discover several. Most of these themes require upgrading to the “Pro” version. They cost.  The price of an upgrade runs from $18.00 upward some are near $100.00. But, this is the cost of complete functionality.

I tried several but decided to work with one that I normally used (non-compatible), it seems to be working.

Now it looks good and it functions but we can't get paid, yet.

The payment gateway requires the entering of your wallet information for each cryptocurrency.

I chose the following 6 currencies: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Dash, Reddcoin, Peercoin. for my cryptocommerce business. There is a couple of reasons for this selection, these currencies are acceptable to the payment gateway and they are listed on the cryptocurrency exchanges.

These wallets are for the most part are the same. They look the same (derived from the bitcoin core) and they act the same. They are available to download in almost every flavor of operating system from their home websites.

bitcoin: https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet
litecoin: https://litecoin.org/
dogecoin: http://dogecoin.com/
dash: https://www.dashpay.io/downloads/
reddcoin: https://www.reddcoin.com/
peercoin: https://www.peercoin.net/

For my website, I chose to install part of my wallets on a Windows computer, the rest on the Ubuntu/linux OS.
The download and installation are of no real consideration, however, installation instructions are pretty scarce or not there at all. I went through each of them until I found one with instructions and followed those with each of the other wallets. The wallets can be set to activate on startup with Window but has to be called toactivated through the termeinal on linux.

There are three steps to installing and creating a wallet.

  • Download and install.
  • Synchronize with the network. Until your wallet is synchronized  with the currency's private network it doesn't work. This happens by default and it takes time.  My Dash wallet took about 20 hours to complete the synch'ing up, the bitcoin wallet took over 8 days and is still in process, so be patient and anticipate this. If you interrupt this, you will have to start over, however, the restart is not so severe as the wallet stores each block as it is synched and does essentially a review of what is stored on your harddrive.
  • Encrypting your wallet. After getting in-synch you are ready to encrypt your wallet. Care should be taken! The information you create for the encryption process is valuable.  It is your key to your wallet. If you lose this information you lose everything.

I use an online strong password generator to create a 16 character password then use an encrypted email service to send this information to an encrypted data vault in Iceland for safe keeping.

Strong password generator, http://passwordsgenerator.net/

Creating a cryptocommerce business website is just the same as a normal ecommerce site only different.  You take normal then add crypto.

Once I have all the wallets I can load the catalog.

As I work through this, I will blog about it.

Things to look forward to are; the loading of the products in the cart, normal currency and cryptocurrency, testing the clearing house, and exchanging the crypto for USD.

Follow along in the Markethive New Monies Group. https://markethive.com/group/newmonies

David