http://texty.org.ua/pg/article/newsmaker/read/55080/Antyradanska_nyva_Nezalezhna_Ukrajina_zbyraje_taki_vrozhaji

http://www.coindesk.com/5000-terminals-across-ukraine-now-offer-bitcoin-cash/

Ukrcoin – http://thebitcoinnews.co.uk/2014/04/25/the-ukra-coin-is-being-introduced-to-the-ukranian-population-as-secondary-currency/

Their BitcoinTalk thread has had no action since April, though: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=499818.80

KozakCoin – http://kozakcoin.org/

BitcoinTalk thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=503038.0

A general description is in the article … and if you need the items, then open the law. To Bitcoin until it inapplicable, but finally brings in the legal field of Ukraine quite ordinary things already – “e-commerce, electronic goods, electronic commerce, online store, and most importantly – electronic transactions”

Discussion: http://ain.ua/2014/06/03/519256

The Law itself: http://w1.c1.rada.gov.ua/pls/zweb2/webproc4_1?pf3511=47409

http://www.bitcoinua.org

Some British guys are behind this project. I think it’s in its early stages.

http://www.ukracoin.org/

Look at their gorgeous products: http://kozadereza.com.ua/

Who wants to start an import business in the US / Canada?

#Bitcoin листівкa Українська

.pdf | .doc

We need freedom in our money if we are to have freedom in our lives.

Thanks to Andriy, Lily, and Mykhailo for translating and formatting help!

It was 8.2 a few weeks ago.

:)

[youtube]kjvAL9z6XJY[/youtube]

A little too focused on mining, but not bad coverage for outsiders.

#bitcoin

A number of people have asked me this question, so I’m posting this guide to save myself some typing:

THREE IMPORTANT FACTS ABOUT BITCOIN

1- It’s decentralized. This is important because unlike other attempts at electronic currencies to rival fiat money, there is no business to shut down, no server to confiscate, and no person or small group of people to put in jail. That’s not to say Bitcoin is illegal. It is to say that so far, governments have been pretty good to finding reasons to shut down centralized competition to their currency monopolies (see Egold, Liberty Reserve, Bernard Von Nothaus).

2- It’s open source. There are no secrets in the protocol. A good computer programmer can look at the Bitcoin source code and see exactly how it works. Changes are adopted voluntarily. When a change isn’t backward compatible, there is a long period of debate and consensus building before its adoption. If there exists as-yet-undetected vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol, it can’t really be exploited without revealing it. The code will then be patched to fix it.

3- Bitcoins are divisible down to eight decimal places — a hundred million parts.

THREE VOCABULARY WORDS

Blockchain – This is the ledger of all Bitcoin transactions. ALL of them. Since bitcoin is decentralized, every user on the Bitcoin network needs to either download the blockchain or have access to a third party service which has downloaded it.

Block – Transactions aren’t written to the ledger one at a time. They are written in groups called Blocks. The network keeps adjusting such that a block will be written every ten minutes.

Bitcoin Mining – A lot of computer do a lot of math which helps ensure bitcoin transactions are honest. As an incentive for people to do this math, the protocol awards new bitcoins to computers which successfully do these math problems. Solving these problems takes the form of a competition. When a problem is solved, a new block is added to the blockchain. The rate of new Bitcoins is predictable and diminishing. The last new bitcoins will be generated in over a hundred years.

GETTING STARTED IN THREE (BIG) STEPS

STEP 1 of 3 – Set up a Bitcoin wallet.

Some (not all) of your choices:

Bitcoin-qt – This the standard wallet which downloads the entire blockchain.

Electrum – This is a light client which connects to a server that stores the blockchain. It has a cool recovery feature if your computer blows up.

Blockchain.info or Coinbase.com – These are web-based wallets. If you’re going to store any significant amount of bitcoins on web-based wallets, enable two-factor authentication. The website will offer instructions on how to do that.

For beginners, I recommend installing Electrum on a laptop or desktop computer. I’m not 100% certain, but if you prefer a mobile device, you may be limited to web-based wallets.

STEP 2 of 3 – Buy Bitcoins.

If you want to just test the waters, the easiest way to do this might be to find a real live person, either an acquaintance or through the Craigs-list-like service Localbitcoins.com. Some people will accept money transfers. Others will want to meet in person. Localbitcoins.com offers a cool escrow service to help.

For people who are either serious or very shy, use an exchange. Here are a few:
Vircurex.com (?)
Coinbase.com (US)
bitstamp.net (european)
bitcoin.de (european)
btc-e.com (Russian) (See What happened to BTC-E)

There are hundreds of them. Most will accept bank transfers. If you don’t want the hassle and expense of bank transfers there are other options.

Some exchanges are starting to accept credit cards. Some Bitcoin ATMs are going online, and other solutions are being developed for in-person cash purchases.

For beginners trying to test the waters, I recommend a friend. If you want to eventually make serious purchases, research exchanges, you’ll have to do so sooner or later.

STEP 3 of 3 – Learn to store your Bitcoins offline before making a serious purchase.

For beginners, I recommend doing this with the electrum client (see below).

FOR THE BITCOIN-QT CLIENT:

1) Make sure your computer is secure and virus free.
2) Install the client.
3) Look at the “receive Bitcoins” tab. Copy and paste those addresses (the long, alphanumeric numbers) into a text file and save it. Alternatively email them to yourself. Share any one of them when you want someone to send Bitcoins to your off-line wallet.
4) Send Bitcoins to those addresses. Confirm that you’ve received them, and close the Bitcoin client.
5) Find a file called ‘bitcoin.dat’ and back it up. You can also follow these steps for creating a paper backup. To simply make and electronic backup, copy the ‘bitcoin.dat’ file to a flashdrive (or to TWO flash drives), and put them in separate safe places.
6) Erase the ‘bitcoin.dat’ file.
7) DO NOT LOSE YOUR BACKUP!!!

To recover bitcoins from offline storage, copy the ‘bitcoin.dat’ file back it where you erased it from and open the client.

FOR THE ELECTRUM CLIENT:
(I recommend this for beginners, because there’s a built-in paper backup feature. There are other solutions, but this is the one I’m familiar with.)

1) Make sure your computer is secure and virus free.
2) Install the client. Make sure you copy down the randomly generated list of words. Put that list of words somewhere safe.
3) Go to the “receive” tab of your client. Copy and paste those addresses (the long, alphanumeric numbers) into a text file and save it. Alternatively email them to yourself. Share any one of them when you want someone to send Bitcoins to your off-line wallet.
4) Find the file named ‘electrum.dat’, and erase it.
5) DO NOT LOSE THE PAPER COPY OF THOSE WORDS!

To recover bitcoins from offline storage, run an Electrum client with a missing ‘electrum.dat’ file. Choose “recover” when it starts. Enter that list of words.

Pro tip: If you want to be super careful in erasing your electronic wallet data, find a tool to securely erase the bitcoin.dat or electrum.dat file. You can also open them in a text editor, edit them aggressively, and save them, prior to erasing.

Good luck!

The other place (besides medicine) where US bureaucracy is worse that Ukrainian bureaucracy is in buying cell phone service. Took me almost an hour. I needed an ID.

In Ukraine, it’s as simple as buy bubble gum. Money, sim card, done.

It’s as if they read my recent rant about grocery shopping. God bless capitalism.

INTRODUCTION

I was surprised to discover no readily available list of worldwide monetary supplies denominated in a common unit like dollars or ounces of gold but such a list is easily calculable from publically available data. Here, I use M2 data from the World Bank and the United Nations’ list of exchange rates. I repeated the calculation using M1 data from the Trading Economics data service.

A spreadsheet containing this analysis is available here.

So what do the numbers reveal and how do crypto currencies compare?

MOST VALUABLE M2 MONETARY SUPPLIES (in trillions of dollars)

MOST VALUABLE M1 MONETARY SUPPLES

 
 
One surprise (for my American mentality) is that dollars are not the biggest, nor second biggest monetary supply in terms of value. They are third or fourth biggest depending on whether one considers M2 or M1.

Please note, the data is imperfect: the M1 data is newer than the M2 data, but the difference in M2 versus M1 ranking also speaks to great differences in banking structure and practices in various countries.

The main difference between M2 and M1 is that M2 includes savings and money market accounts. The proportion of M2 to M1 varies widely between countries. Though the ratios may be off because some data is older than other data, in the United States, M2 is more than five times bigger than M1. In Luxembourg, it’s only 1.3 times bigger. In Saudi Arabia, it’s 1.5 times bigger.

COMPARING M2 WITH CYPTO CURRENCIES

As of the time of this writing (September 7th, 2013), all the Bitcoins in the world are worth about $1.39 Billion. That makes their supply slightly less valuable than the M2 monetary supplies of Chad, Guyana, Montenegro, but slightly more valuable than the M2 monetary supplies of Mauritania, the Maldives, Belize, El Salvador, Malawi and Tajikistan. Bitcoins are on the map!

All the Litecoins in the world are worth about $59 million dollars, which is a little better than half the value of the smallest M2 monetary supply reported by the World Bank, that of Sao Tome and Principe.

MEASURING VALUE PER NOTE

The methodology behind this last analysis is speculative, but interesting nonetheless. What if we measured the value-per-note of all mediums of exchange? What if we counted all the notes in the world (Dollars, Euros, Litecoins, Vietnamese Dongs, Yen, Rubles, Lira, etc), and then counted the value of all the notes. For any currency, we could then compare their percentage of world-wide notes to their percentage of value of all the monies.

For example, imagine a world in which only two mediums of exchange were used: Roman’s Rubles and Mises’s Marks. Imagine that a million of each circulated, but Mises’s Marks were three times as valuable as the Rubles.

It’s easy to quantify the difference. Mises’s Marks represent three quarters of the value and only half of the notes. This can be described by a factor of 1.5. Roman’s Rubles also represent half the notes, but only one quarter of the value. They can be given a factor of 0.5.

A real-world example would be comparing Vietnam’s money, the Dong to the Euro. Taken note for note, the Dong represents a quarter of all the money in circulation, but only 0.15% of the value (when considering M2). The Euro is almost the exact converse. Euros represent 0.15% of the notes, but a quarter of value of all mediums of exchange in this analysis.

What conclusions be gleaned from this data? Most interestingly, is this factor (percent of value divided by percent of notes) in any way measure trust?

Several methodological concerns come to mind:

1) Aggregating all mediums of exchange, including Tide, gold and pig tusks (used as a medium of exchange on Pentecost Island in Vanuatu) seems like the best approach. In this analysis, only M2 data and the two most valuable crypto currencies, Bitcoin and Litecoin, are considered.

2) How would gold be incorporated into this analysis, since there is no single obvious unit to represent a note? People trade in grams, ounces, bars, tonnes.

3) Should crypto currencies be compared with M2, M1, or not at all? The ranking of trust factors was similar for M2 data and M1 data.

4) Can value per note be a meaningful measure of trust or anything else? Perhaps monetary discipline? What correlations can be found with this ratio?

With these concerns in mind, here is a list of the most and least trust monies using M2 data:

MOST TRUSTED

 
China’s Renminbi: 21.2
Japanese Yen: 1.3

CLOSEST TO PROPORTIONAL TRUST

(% money supply = % value of money supply)

Sri Lankan Rupee 0.987
Icelandic Krona 1.090

LEAST TRUSTED

CONCLUSION

Though the Bitcoin economy may still be small, the fact of it being larger than many national monetary supplies — after only five years, no less — makes its dismissal by lingering critics downright silly. (Not that the “honey badger of money” cares much about its critics.) The value-per-note analysis is even more surprising. If indeed the relative trust of various currencies can be measured by comparing value-per-note, then Bitcoin is already the champion (precious metals not considered), and Litecoin is threatening to take second place.