Is there a place where I can find detailed reports on bitcoin?

I've been running a bitcoin only e-commerce business for 6 months now. Previous currencies might have involved cryptography, but not to the extent that Bitcoin employs it. What is special about it, is that the cryptographic schemes behind Bitcoin allows it to be DECENTRALIZED. There is no company, or body that can be swayed into changing the allocation of the currency. The bitcoin protocol is truly impressive in the way that it is almost it's own autonomous institution, providing value to humanity, and thus being supported by human activity. Here's a brief run down of how it works, with some shortcuts. 1. "Bitcoin" is a decentralized means of tracking and assigning wealth or economic value. Bitcoin is a software protocol, computer network, idea, community, movement, etc. 2. A "bitcoin" is a unit of the currency that is moved around by the Bitcoin network. 3. Central to Bitcoin is a public ledger, known as the Block Chain. Roughly every 10 minutes, a new "block" is added to this chain or ledger. This ledger records all of the transaction that have taken place in the last 10 minutes, and what quantities of bitcoin currency are now held at different public addresses. 4. A public address is a a 27 to 34 character string of uppercase, lowercase letters and the digits from 0 to 9. AKA base 58. 5. Each public address has a corresponding private key. Whoever has this key, may spend the coins that are held at this private address. Private keys are 51 characters long in the same format as a public address. 6. To spend an amount of bitcoin, you must use your private key to cryptographically sign the transaction, sending your bitcoin to another address. 7. This message or transaction is then broadcast to the network, and the computers in the network begin working to write into the block chain (or public ledger) that your address no longer has the amount that was sent, but that that amount is now held at the receiving address. 8. Each new set of transaction is recorded on the block chain, every 10 minutes as mentioned above. 9. All of the computers that are working to write new blocks to the block chain, are known as miners. 10. These computers are all racing to solve a cryptographic puzzle, which is required to write the new block. 11. The computer that solves the puzzle, and writes the new block receives an award of newly created bitcoin. 12. The reward associated with each block began at 50 in 2009, is now 25, and will halve every 4 years, until an ultimate quantity of 21 million bitcoin are created. 13. This transparency is a large part of the value created by Bitcoin, in that the rate of creation, and current amount in existence is known. That is my best attempt at translating what has taken me months to wrap my head around, and the implications go much further. I'm happy to answer other questions about Bitcoin; the system, the community, or business challenges and opportunities associated with it.

Although it appears to be semantics, it does make quite a big difference for a cryptocurrency as to whether it’s a coin or a token. A “coin” has an entirely different blockchain from all the other coins that are out there while a “token” is built upon an existing blockchain project. A “coin” is usually built using open-source blockchain code so what’s underpinning many of the coins that are out there is a very similar architecture. Many projects will add some unique features to build upon what’s open-source, but the foundation is mostly identical. A “token,” these days, is most often built upon Ethereum, becoming an ERC-20 token. The web architecture of the Ethereum blockchain is robust and familiar, so developers often opt to use this to streamline their coin. One disadvantage is if the Ethereum network gets overloaded, the cost of interacting with a smart contract or sending your crypto from wallet to wallet is going to be relatively expensive. It largely depends on how ambitious you want to be with your project and how it best fits your crypto's use case. It's important to remember too that what you started out as you don't have to stay forever. Your project can always fork over to become a new coin or a token on whatever blockchain your team believes makes the most sense.

I've been into bitcoin since 2011, and here's my brief take on where the opportunity lies. - Mining: Bitcoin mining is too difficult unless you invest a significant amount of money into it, think over $10,000 ... and it only becomes profitable if the price of bitcoin does another 10X (which it may. - Mining: Altcoins may be the quicker path to profits (http://coinmarketcap.com/) ... mine some altcoins and then converting them to bitcoin through one of the exchanges like cryptsy.com - Buying: I am waiting for another price crash before I buy back into bitcon, I'm hoping it will drop to $500. I see it rising back up over $2000 if it does drop, however now that the Chinese are into bitcoin, its a real possibility that the price will just keep rising. - Arbitrage: The price difference between exchanges is massive. You can now buy bitcoin at btc-e for $1000 and sell it instantly at mtgox.com for $1200. If you had $100,000 to arbitrage with, that is a cool $20,000 profit. The probem is that these exchanges may go down at any time and you risk losing your money/bitcoins. -Startup: You could build something with real value, although the competition now is fierce to build a product with real value that has not already been built. VC's are getting hot for bitcoin startups, check out press on Ripple Labs, BTC China, BitInstant, Coinbase, etc. There are some other opportunities, like buying a bitcoin ATM machine from a franchise (Robocoin, Lamassus) or something a little more in the grey area like starting a bitcoin casino. There's lots of opportunity in cryptocurrency if you look hard enough, I feel though that the window of opportunity for massive profits and value creation is narrowing due to the eyeballs looking at the bitcoin world right now. So whatever you want to do, take massive action and do it fast before you lose momentum and first movers advantage.

The US Gov hates cryptocurrency. In fact if you read recent laws (last 5 years) you'll find the language is vague + it can be construed that if you're a US citizen + you hold cryptocurrency, you may be in violation of law. Better to simply stick with fiat currency produced by every government in the world. Treat income management as a currency exchange proposition. Whatever language you speak, just target selling whatever you're selling into a country that reverse correlates the highest to your currency. So if you live in New Zealand + US currency is strong against the Kiwi, then sell product into the US. This way you always win big, because some currency in some country will always be your best investment.

I'm Joe Bradford, a scholar of Islamic finance and an advisor. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are permissible to purchase as long as they meet a few basic stipulations: the use case that they were created for is permissible, they act as a store of value, and they are a medium of exchange. While most cryptocurrencies will fulfill the last two stipulations there are some like meme coins etc that don't have actual use cases and no real utility other than being used for manipulation and pump and dumps. Those coins should be avoided outright. for more information on the topic you can check out my website where I have several articles and videos about the topic or schedule a call with me to discuss any intricacies about a coin you are looking to purchase.