Pierre Omidyar also started a Qntra back in October. His failed.

We find via Conde Nast's1 Wired that something something Racket something something soft launch something something closed. Their glee is hardly concealed, but it will be short lived. Everyone in your school failing the same exam you marginally passed once does not really mean all that much ; there's other schools out there. The better parts : Continue reading


  1. Also owners of Reddit, and generally a stronghold of all that is evil in the world. Check out The Awl's recent leak of their upcoming three-rule-binder for office drones to get an idea. Golden bits in there like

    Please. WIRED is no longer a pirate ship. It's the home of world-changing journalism.

    and

    And it's increasingly a place where we, and our New York colleagues and owners, host artists, founders, CEOs, and advertisers.

    Obama's "close down the world, mulatto in chief's coming for a visit" is slowly but surely trickling down through the entire stack of utterly corrupt, government-sponsored, government-backed, QE-fed leeches and aparatchicks. It's arrived to the point where Conde Nast is actually kicking out the last remaining workhorses in the stables to make room for Barnum. 

The Hard Fork Missile Crisis

As previously reported, Gavin Andresen proposed increasing the block size and later attempted to describe the economic and political implications of such a proposal. In both instances he was met with furious backlash from the community.

Today Gavin posted on his personal blog an article titled "Looking before the Scaling Up Leap", stating "My goal is to prove that it is safe to raise the maximum block size from 1MB to at least 20MB" along with "I'll argue we should schedule a hard fork." Reddit soon blindly praised Gavin for his work, with comments such as "Fork it hard." Continue reading

2014 Story of the Year: Mt Gox Finally Dies

This year's biggest story in Bitcoin actually predates the founding of Qntra. Back in February Mt Gox finally closed its doors. Since Jed McCaleb opened it for Bitcoin Trading in July of 2010, through its astounding three years of incompetence and mismanagement under Mark Karpelès Mt Gox had served as a central source of drama and uncertainty in the Bitcoin space. Continue reading

Collected Points From the NSA's Recent Document Dump

Numerous media outlets are going deep into the NSA's recent Christmas Eve document dump while Der Spiegel is supposing itself to cover new Snowden documents.In addition to the unsurprising post-Snowden revelation that NSA analysts routinely acted outside of their legal ability to monitor, a number of technical revelations came out about the NSA's surveillance abilities as they care to disclose them two years ago. As this document dump was an official agency disclosure take it with a grain of salt or several trucks full of salt as you feel necessary. Continue reading

Satoshi Nakamoto Institute Launch Podcast

Daniel Krawisz and Michael Goldstein of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute today broadcast the first episode of their new podcast titled "The Crypto-Mises Podcast". Episode one covers app coins and why they are a bad investment and includes a response to Vitalek Buterin's article "On Bitcoin Maximalism, and Currency and Platform Network Effects."

The new podcast comes off the back of the duo's informative round table discussion series.

Preet Bharara: Keep Politics Out of Ulbricht Defense

The Daily Dot reports that prosecutors in the Ross Ulbricht case working under Preet Bharara is seeking to bar Ulbricht and his defense team from bringing up the subject of Ulbricht's political beliefs at trial, and wants to prevent Ulbricht from saying anything political at all on the stand. Preet Baharara is himself specifically concerned that the defense wants to bring up: Continue reading

Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl Preview

Today the 2014 NCAA College Football bowl match ups were announced and the University of Central Florida Knights (9 wins, 3 losses) will be facing the North Carolina State Wolfpack (7 wins, 5 losses) in the Bitcoin St Petersburg bowl. The St Petersburg bowl which presently carries the Bitcoin name was born in 2008 as the magicJack bowl, before serving as the Beef 'O' Brady's bowl from 2009 to 2013. The game will begin at 8:00 pm Eastern time December 26th at Tropicana field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team and air on ESPN. Let's take a look at the teams: Continue reading

Sergio Demian Lerner Hired By Vessenes' Foundation

Vessenes' Bitcoin foundation today announced it has hired Sergio Demian Lerner as the foundation's "Core Security Auditor" and he is intended to work on security aspects of the Bitcoin Core fork of Satoshi's Bitcoin implementation. Sergio Demian Lerner is scheduled to appear at the laBITconf bitcoin conference in Buenos Aires on December 7th, 2014. The Vessenes' foundation also announced its intention to offer release candidates for version 0.10 of their Bitcoin client in the next week.