Even After A $5 Million Theft, Bitcoin Still Has True Believers At CES

A Florida man uses 10,000 best bitcoin gambling sites to buy a pizza, officially becoming the first person to use bitcoin for a real world transaction.

Its kind of awkward," said Rivero. With a little soldering, he and his colleagues reconfigured the device so that the merchant could punch in the cost of the item, and created a surface where the customer could easily approach with their phone and tap to have their transaction information transferred over. It was a crude hack, but it worked. Meanwhile the industrial design team had created 3D-printed housing for the phone.

Bitcoin has the potential to become universal in a way that regionalized payment systems subject to government regulation cannot. Regional payment processing firms lobby governments for regulations to protect them against foreign competition, resulting in a fragmented payment processing market and protectionist transaction fees.

The end perspective is one of many chunks of data flying between devices where it can then be assembled according to the rules laid out by the block chain software. Of course, this sort of architecture won't work with machines running 8-bit processors, which means it won't appear on low-end devices any time soon. However, Brody is convinced we won't be dealing with embedded processors for much longer as connectivity takes over our every appliance and electronic device.

On January 4th, some of Bitstamp's operational wallets were compromised, resulting in a loss of less than 19,000 BTC. Upon learning of the breach, we immediately notified all customers that they should no longer make deposits to previously issued bitcoin deposit addresses. As an additional security measure, we suspended our systems while we fully investigate the incident and actively engage with law enforcement officials.