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| Yellen Brings Relief to Precious Metals Posted: 13 Nov 2013 06:00 PM PST Precious metals surged today after Janet Yellen, who is nominated to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, said that it is too early to consider stimulus reduction as the economy and labor market are performing "far short of their potential”. Yellen said:
Such comments suggest that the Fed will not scale down its monetary futures in the near future and this outlook helped precious metals. Gold bulls should not be too excited as the current bounce does not mean that the metal has left its downtrend. Yet potential for prolonged monetary accommodation may help gold (and other metals) in longer term. December futures for delivery of gold soared by $12.5 (0.99 percent) to $1,280.9 per troy ounce as of 1:56 GMT on COMEX today. Silver jumped as much as $0.24 (1.19 percent) to $20.69 per ounce. Spot price for platinum was up $5.58 (0.39 percent) to $1,442.43 per ounce and for palladium rose by $4.31 (0.59 percent) to $737.16 per ounce. (Visited 1 times, 1 visits today) |
| With Bitcoin Prices Rising Above $400, Mike Hearn Explains How to Scale Bitcoin to the Size of Visa Posted: 13 Nov 2013 11:48 AM PST Bitcoin prices are near another all time high set today of $429.89 on the Mt. Gox exchange. However, as the prices for bitcoin have risen fourfold over the past year, it's notable that minimum transaction fees have also risen fourfold in cost for sending bitcoin. A minimum fee of 0.0005 XBT was worth $0.05 at $100/XBT, but is now worth $0.20 at XBT value of $400. The network has gotten faster and bitcoin more widely adopted, but Bitcoin transactions have become more expensive for no good reason, according to Mike Hearn, a lead Bitcoin developer, in an interview with the Washington Post. This is due to an arbitrary minimum transaction fee of 0.005 XBT set by lead developer Gavin Andreson a year ago, rather than one at the request of miners or one which has been negotiated by users and miners. Author Timothy B. Lee's blog "The Switch: Where Technology and Policy Meet" posed the problem today that "Bitcoin needs to scale by a factor of 1000 to compete with Visa. Here's how to do it." I'd recommend reading the full interview for a nuts-and-bolts understanding of how the Bitcoin network infrastructure works, and how solutions might be applied to Bitcoin's exponential growth. In short, the 7 transactions per second limit is not a fundamental one, but the result of the 1MB cap imposed by the Bitcoin network on block size. Right now, the network is only up to about 1 transaction per second, but this cap will likely be removed soon anyway in one of the next upgrades in favour of allowing miners to reject ridiculously bloated blocks by default. So rather than any system-imposed restriction on how large a mined block could be, it's unlikely anyone will mine overly large blocks since the others would likely reject it. In addition, Hearn also explains how lightweight clients like Multibit, which are technically called Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) nodes because they only grab the most recent portion rather than the entire Blockchain, are not really a big concern for the Bitcoin infrastructure. Meanwhile, the ease of adopting bitcoin, without the extra burden of a ~10 gigabyte download, has really helped to grow the user base over the past year as the Bitcoin Foundation encouraged the use of Multibit and similar SPV clients. Hearn further concluded:
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