Monthly Archives: October 2013

Bitcoin

Tech Stuff, Uncategorized, , ,

I still remember hearing about Bitcoin a lot earlier but really got involved with it about a year ago. I will not explain all about Bitcoin here, as there’s many great videos and even a whole Wiki about it, but if you do not already know about it, my thoughts will probably give you a few reasons to have a look if not making you downright curious 😀

Not just Bitcoin, but cryptocurencies in general are one of the greatest innovations lately if you consider the impacts they could have on society. The fact, that it is a currency that can not be controlled by anyone under normal circumstances (I am pretty confident, that even the NSA does not have enough specialized computing power available and even if, many Bitcoin clients have blocks hardcoded, thus all preceding transactions can not be reversed) is incredibly important, considering no inflation as the amount of coins has a hard limit and the fact that nobody can take bitcoins away from you. Deniability is more inherent in the whole idea than anonymity, so you can easily transfer coins to a so called “Brainwallet“, where you can remember the keys or write them on a piece of paper.
Despite these great characteristics, the fact that you can send bitcoins to anyone without worrying where that person might be and receive it in about one hour (being notified of the payment almost immediately) with no transaction costs.
When I think about how much money credit card companies make nowadays without providing a real benefit over Bitcoin, I can only conclude either they will lower these fees dramatically (which I doubt will happen) or be a good reason for all kinds of businesses to drive Bitcoin acceptance. Considering the main concept, that you have a private key, out of which the bitcoin address can be generated and the address itself, that can only be used to send coins (and view all transactions the address was ever involved in), it would be possible to have a business operate in a way where stealing money the old-fashioned way is impossible. When the public key is just not present in a restaurant for example, no one can be forced to hand over any coins, since there is just no way to do that. Might be especially useful for any kind of machines, even though I can not think of anybody still buying things like train tickets the old-fashioned way if everyone used Bitcoins.

If you’re not convinced yet, I find it quite entertaining to consider Bitcoin as an asset class. If you’d bought any about two years ago, you’d see the value increased by 200 times and selling the Bitcoins is completely tax-free in Germany (if you held them for more than a year) 🙂
Clearly, predicting the future price is not a serious business, because adoption, possible regulations, security problems and such things can not be anticipated, but considering every person *just in Germany* would use it, there would be 0,5 Bitcoins for every single person by 2040. The current price of about 100€ per coin seems to be incredibly low compared to this scenario…

Berlin is the perfect place to spend a few bitcoins, I tried Room 77 and Floor’s so far and they’re both great even besides embracing Bitcoins!

40th Berlin Marathon 2013

Sports

Unlike the perfect Californian weather in Goleta, when I got up really early to take the chance of getting a ticket for this years’ marathon in Berlin (there were only 2000 left that were released for online registration at 5 P.M. CET I believe) it was surprisingly cold for late September in Berlin. If you know me you’ll recall I prefer warm or even hot weather to everything under 15°C where you have to wear real (and comparatively heavy) clothes to run a long distance. Nevertheless us two runners and our support team took an early train into Berlin and were eager to experience this big event. We got through perfectly and better than expected, because there were not many tourists traveling so early on a Saturday and most participants seemed to arrive from the city center or the east/south part of Berlin.

The start was incredibly slow, but the atmosphere was already nice, because there were just so many people and it was really international with every third participant from Denmark in my perception (they seemed to all wear the same shirts with a Danish flag).

Unfortunately I made the same mistake as last time in Santa Barbara – I just enjoyed the atmosphere too much and wasn’t paying attention to the speed (or maybe I just wasn’t prepared well enough as well). It felt absolutely nice the first half, but I just used my reserves too fast so that from about km 30 on it was a little painful, but the feeling of running through the Brandenburg Gate at the end made up for that. Also there were so many fun participants (just have a look at random race pictures and you will see what I mean :D).

I was hoping to finish below 3:30h, but made it in 03:39:54h (11.49 km/h), at least a slightly improved personal record and still room for improvement 🙂

Previous competitions:

  • 10km “City-Nachtlauf” in Berlin on July 31st 2010 in 0:41:43 hours (14.4 km/h)
  • 22.1 km “Stadtlauf” in Berlin on August 28th 2011 in 1:33:00 hours (13.6 km/h)
  • 51km “Harzquerung” in Wernigerode on April 28th 2012 in 5:41:31 (9 km/h)
  • 10km “IGA-Lauf” in Berlin on May 20th 2012 in 0:44:45 hours (13.4 km/h)
  • 42 km “Santa Barbara International Marathon” in California on November 11th 2012 in 3:42:06 (11.4 km/h)
  • 51 km “Harzquerung” in Wernigerode on April 27th 2013 in 5:52:36 hours (8.7 km/h)