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Offline mike623317

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Maybe someone else already posted this, but i didnt see it.

http://globalcryptonews.com/blacksburg-based-bitshares-looking-to-make-strides-in-cryptocurrency-market/

Blacksburg-based BitShares looking to make strides in cryptocurrency market
22 June, 2015

Dan Larimer believes bitcoin, will have trouble remaining competitive as time passes. He talked about that in a recent interview as he attempts to push the cryptocurrency he launched into a stronger position in the new market that continues to be debated.

Bitcoin can be bought directly through an online exchange or obtained through a very tedious and expensive process called mining, which requires a computer to solve complex mathematical puzzles to obtain them.

Larimer, however, said he sees the mining process as unsustainable. High speculation over bitcoin, he said, has also made the currency volatile, causing its dollar value to regularly fluctuate. Bitcoin is creating millions of dollars “every single day to pay people to burn electricity,” Larimer said, referring to the use of high-end computer hardware to successfully mine. “Our system doesn’t have the expense of paying people to burn electricity.”

About a year ago, Larimer launched BitUSD, another cryptocurrency that is backed by BitShares, the greater cryptocurrency network that he also created last year. BitShares was ranked fifth among other cryptocurrencies in the world late last week, according to coinmarketcap.com, a site that allows visitors to see the top 100 cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin, by far the most valuable, was priced at approximately $249 Thursday afternoon, while BitShares was worth seven tenths of a cent. The value rankings are based on each currency’s market cap, which is calculated by multiplying the unit price of the currency by its total shares in existence.

With approximately 2.5 billion shares that Larimer said were all “created out of thin air,” BitShare’s market cap was at $19.7 million Thursday. In contrast, Bitcoin’s just 14.2 million shares gave it a market cap of $3.5 billion.

BitShares has started positioning itself to try to make some leaps in a developing sub-market of the financial sector that has drawn as many questions as it has excitement.

Although the money backed by BitShares has existed for about a year, holders of the currency haven’t really been able to spend it because serious merchants have yet to accept the tender as payment. But BitShares has pushed forward some developments its creator said will make it more accessible to the market.
Earlier this month, BitShares struck a partnership with Danish cryptocurrency exchange CCEDK that will allow digital money users to buy or sell BitShares.

Cryptocurrency users have for the past year had to buy bitcoin that they would afterward trade for BitShares on other exchanges, but CCEDK will allow holders to more directly receive money for their BitShares.

As with bitcoin, exchanges are places where digital currency users can buy more, or other, cryptocurrencies or sell the ones they have for actual money such as dollars and euros.

Now here comes the somewhat complicated, but important, part that Larimer said differentiates BitShares from its more popular counterpart bitcoin: BitShares are strictly for trading, whereas BitUSD is the actual digital money holders use to buy goods and services.

Unlike bitcoin, BitUSD is backed by the BitShares trading capital. While bitcoin and BitShares each stand alone and are therefore volatile due to speculation, BitUSD’s financial backing gives it a more concrete value, which Larimer said is at $1.05.

“BitUSD was designed to not have that volatility,” said Adam Ernest, founder of Follow My Vote, a voting network that’s using BitShares’ technology in hopes of improving election accuracy and transparency.
Follow My Vote and BitShares, each of which are supported by teams at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, have been in partnership since late last year and formed a group about two weeks ago that will offer overall expertise to people involved in cryptocurrencies.

“We want to take blockchain technology and make it easy for businesses to use as their internal ledgers,” Larimer said.

Ernest said he anticipates BitUSD’s better stability will make its spenders and recipients more confident about not losing money from its transactions later.

“It’s just a matter of time before we get on that list,” Ernest said. “Anyone accepting bitcoin today is likely to accept BitUSD tomorrow.”

Cryptocurrencies are not to be generalized with the rest of the digital currency realm they belong to.
For example, PayPal and online banking — while done via the Internet like bitcoin — move money like the dollar. A merchant accepting cryptocurrency gets paid in bitcoin, or, for BitShares’ sake, in BitUSD.

The received cryptocurrency can then later trade for other cryptocurrency or money like the dollar. But the amount of dollars the person gets depends on the most current price of the digital currency. Larimer said bitcoins also don’t have to be bought whole.

Another facet that distinguishes the use of cryptocurrency from other money is the use of a public ledger, which makes public all of the currency’s transactions and how much money live accounts hold. Unlike credit card purchases, where the merchant knows exactly who it’s selling to, cryptocurrency users hide their identities behind cryptographic addresses.

Users employ a private cryptographic key that creates a digital signature to authenticate each transaction. Cryptocurrencies are kept in digital wallets, but users have been advised by experts to employ various measures, such as storing the wallets offline, to prevent hackers from finding the private keys they’ll need to steal money.

And unlike fraudulent charges to credit cards, stolen cryptocurrency can’t be recovered.
Cryptocurrencies are also decentralized, meaning that they are subject to no government or bank involvement that could interrupt or freeze their use. Larimer has said before that the users themselves are the banks.

Because they are subject to no institutional involvement, their transaction fees are known to be kept low, which many proponents say is a big plus when it comes to foreign transactions.

But there are some transaction fees that support the networks. Larimer said BitShares shareholders, including himself, earn a flat two-cent fee from every transaction.

More in-depth developments are occurring with BitShares, all of which can be found at bitshares.org. Some of those include improvements that will speed up the rate of transactions and a feature that will allocate 80 percent of a new member’s $100 sign-up fee to the current user who referred the person to BitShares.