Cory Doctorow — Boin Boing

Some Bitcoin enthusiasts have announced a new project called Bitcloud. The idea is something like the old Mojo Nation P2P architecture, in which individual Internet users perform tasks for each other — routing, storage, lookups, computation — in exchange for very small payments.

The Bitcloud protocol uses Bitcoin-style accounting to allocate those microtransfers, along with Bitcoin-style proof-of-work (they call it “proof-of-bandwidth”) and the authors suggest that the potential for profit by individual members will create enough capacity to replace a large number of centralized commercial services (“Youtube, Dropbox, Facebook, Spotify, ISPs”) with “distributed autonomous corporations,” that obviate the need for centralized control in order to supply anonymous, robust, free services to the public.

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Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff

When a group of cryptographers launched Zerocoin last year, they hoped their cryptography project could upgrade Bitcoin to be as anonymous as its most privacy-focused users have always wanted it to be. Now, after six months of waiting in vain for their code to be adopted by the Bitcoin community, they’re taking a bolder approach: Creating their own cryptocurrency, with privacy baked in from the start.

At the Real World Crypto conference Monday in New York, Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green announced the next phase in the evolution of Zerocoin: creating an alternative cryptocurrency with an infrastructure independent of Bitcoin. The new coins, which Green says will go into circulation in May in some sort of beta program, will have their own exchange rate with existing currencies, their own “miners” producing new coins, and their own public ledger of transactions known as the “blockchain,” just as Bitcoin does. But unlike Bitcoin, Zerocoin is designed to be spent and received without revealing any trace of a user’s identity.

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Rob Wile — Business Insider

Last week we told you how Texas Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) became the first sitting elected official in Washington to accept Bitcoin for his 2014 campaign against Sen. John Cornyn.

Dan Backer is going to make sure Stockman is not the last.

By Andrew Couts — Digital Trends

The rise of Dogecoin and the soon-to-launch Coinye West (yes, it’s named after the rapper) made it seem as though almost anyone can create a Bitcoin competitor. Now, with the launch of a clever and simple tool, that is actually true.

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By Nick Swartsell - Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON –Cody Wilson isn’t afraid of legal gray areas, whether they’re do-it-yourself firearms or anonymous online money.

Last year, the Austin resident and former UT law student posted plans for a 3D-printed plastic handgun online along with a video demonstrating the weapon. He took the plans down days later, after the State Department ordered them removed.

Now, Wilson has moved into another realm growing increasingly popular among tech-centric libertarians. He and six other coders are working on software that would further encrypt bitcoins, an increasingly popular quasi-anonymous online currency.

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