Calendar 2018The CalendarFree Printable PlannerPrintable CalendarsFree PrintablesCome InPlannersOrganizingTemplatesForwardCick on to get this free printable calendar 2018!The calendar planners come in fun and delightful colors!My editors thought the best present they could give me this holiday season was a bitcoin, the increasingly popular form of digital currency that uses cryptography instead of government regulation to validate transactions.It was a kind gesture, and it made me very worried about my reputation at the office.But never one to turn down free money, I happily obliged.If I secured a bitcoin, I had to make one promise: to use a bitcoin and only a bitcoin to purchase Christmas gifts for my family and friends.Created in 2009, bitcoin is a libertarian’s dream currency: unregulated and pseudonymous for users.Mocked by the business press as a shady fad, bitcoin saw its unit value pass that of an ounce of gold on the day after Thanksgiving, hitting $1,242, and peaking at a 9,000% gain for the year.

Despite its fringe reputation, bitcoins have been jingling in some distinguished pockets lately.Billionaire showman Richard Branson announced recently that he’ll accept them as payment for flights into space, and outgoing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke praised digital currencies like the bitcoin in a recent letter to the Senate.So my editors did something most young reporters only dream of: they wired me a bunch of money and trusted me to not skip the country with it.Then they ushered me into the bitcoin marketplace just as the holiday shopping season got under way.There are some benefits to doing your holiday shopping using bitcoins.For one thing, bitcoins are a far more secure method of payment than your credit card, so if you use them, there’s little reason to fear identity thieves as other shoppers might.“It keeps your personal information hidden, so it’s a much more secure way of shopping for presents online,” says Stephanie Wargo of BitPay, a company that helps merchants use the currency.

And there are thousands of vendors online who accept bitcoins as payment.The independent jewelry shop Cisthene, run by husband-and-wife duo Jen and Dennis Altman of Asheville, N.C., year as a fee-free alternative to credit card payments.So far, bitcoin sales have been minimal.“We’ve had three orders in six months,” Dennis told me.Make that four: I purchased a leatherwrapped crystal necklace (.0998 BTC) for my mom.Next, Fred Ersham of Coinbase, a leading digital wallet company, recommended I try BitDazzle, which he described as “an Etsy for bitcoin.” “They have literally so many different things,” he assured me.You can buy everything from furniture to hand-sewn cloth diaper covers there.The more purchases I made, the easier it got.I bought socks made out of Alpaca wool for my dad from a farm in Massachusetts (.0206 BTC).For my stepmom, I bought a bottle of Pinot Grigio (.0402 BTC) from City Wine Cellar, a Staten Island wine store that accepts bitcoin for online purchases.

I logged back onto BitDazzle and got my little sisters a machine that projects stars onto the walls and ceiling (.09537 BTC).For my cat (what, you don’t buy Christmas presents for your pets?)I commissioned a portrait (.0294 BTC) from a Vancouver artist named Cliff Blank.bitcoin price drop january 2014“Vancouver is the first place in the world to have a bitcoin ATM,” Blank said.bitcoin purchasing power“So it’s really going full steam here.” Buying online was pretty easy, but what would happen when I tried to buy things with bitcoins in the real world?buy bitcoin in calgaryTurns out, it’s not as simple.bitcoin core rpm

On a recent rainy night, I took some friends and co-workers to a New York City bar named EVR, co-owned by bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem.The 24-year-old has made millions off the digital currency.His bar is the only one in Manhattan that accepts bitcoins.Shrem’s girlfriend Courtney is a waitress there, and she set us up with plates of wings and fries and glasses of champagne and vodka sodas (.2649 BTC).cheapest bitcoin vpsPaying at EVR was not.bitcoin shares explainedThanks to the complicated digital transaction process, it took 20 minutes to get bitcoin change out of one digital wallet and into another equipped with a mobile app–a lot of trouble compared with just forking over your Visa.bitcoin credit card reddit(Coinbase, where I kept my bitcoins, had its app pulled from the iTunes store a few weeks before.)bitcoin betting bot

Scanning the QR code was easier, though.Finally, the payment was transferred.There is another downside: very few brick-and-mortar stores actually accept bitcoins today.That’s how I ended up at Subway in Allentown, Pennsylvania, over Thanksgiving break.The guy making the sandwiches accidentally rang us up for 17.23 bitcoins—over $20,000—before realizing it should be $17.23 instead.bitcoin space minerSo what did I learn?There are some reasons to think bitcoins could be the future—especially if someone like Bernanke is giving them a closer look.But for now, I’ll probably stick with cold hard cash—unless, that is, my editors are buying.5.56mm Classic Bullet Necklace Quantity Default - Sold Out 5.56mm Hand Pressed Bullet Necklace Classic Finish Made in the USA 30?Jumper Chain Share this Product Product Reviews from Verified CustomersCSI: Cyber’s double-header finale has everything wonderfully horrible about this incoherent, paranoid baloney sandwich of a show: Overwrought melodrama, gargled tech jargon, comical graphics, an extensive array of stylish vests, and Oscar Winner™ Patricia Arquette grimacing her way through a hefty career mistake with aplomb.

I have to break some very bad news about one core element of CSI:Cyber nuttiness.This is the last we’ll see of television’s most aggressively inept high-ranking federal agent.Peter MacNicol will no longer pick up a paycheck for playing a character who has done literally nothing to deserve one, and/or the writers finally realized Sifter served no purpose other than fulfilling the show’s befuddlement close-up quota.RIP Stavros Sifter, you were too beautiful.And your first name was Stavros.“i will remember u” - sarah maclaughlin Please leave your finest Stavros Sifter memories in the comments, but in the meantime— I have two episodes of inspired lunacy to tell you about.The episode opens in Detroit, where Avery and Mundo flew to deal with a power outage caused by someone hacking the city’s electricity grid.The power outage is a mask for a jewelry store robbery, but the thief ends up killing the jewelry store owner’s son.When the gang goes to investigate, they discover that the thief was after something even more arbitrarily valuable than diamonds: A laptop with $500,000 worth of Bitcoin.

The thief stole the Bitcoin from the laptop (which, if the jewellers kept $500,000 in it and took the trouble of putting it in a safe, why wouldn’t they have a password-protected wallet?)and bounced, transferring it to a new wallet with two passwords.Luckily, Krummy knows that it’s not impossible to trace Bitcoins, so he finds the thief’s wallet in a minute.“The biggest misconception about Bitcoins is that it’s anonymous, that’s why it’s the preferred currency in the deep web.It’s used to fund drug deals, hit men, human trafficking— but it’s not actually that anonymous.” Oh my god, did Krummy read my rant on the traceability of Bitcoins???(Of course, Sifter [RIP] needs an explanation of how the blockchain works.)do you even mine broTurns out the now-dead son convinced his parents to transfer their retirement savings into Bitcoin.“He said Bitcoin was the currency of the future,” the old jeweller laments.“But now— my son was killed over this imaginary currency!”

The jewelry store owner’s other, alive son haaaates Bitcoin.“I knew those damn Bitcoins were a bad idea!”Then he hires two “Bitcoin bounty hunters” to retrieve the money for his parents, setting off a string of violence, since Bitcoin bounty hunters are apparently not to be trifled with.They torture the thief, who hides the digital currency on a botnet he’s created.The FBI can’t figure out which two computers out of 20,000 infected machines are the ones that the bounty hunters will target until they infect themselves.very realistic depiction of how to infect your device with a botnet.Once they do that, there’s a dramatic showdown where Krummy runs around and shoots a guy.All is well that ends well, and Nelson slow-dances with a tablet.Also at the beginning of this episode, Raven (the other girl hacker whose name I never remember) congratulates Nelson for working for the Cybercrimes Division for TWO MONTHS.That means all of the shit we’ve seen is supposed to have happened within 60 days.

But shit is about to get PERSONAL.................Every single episode of this hallowed program starts with Special Agent Avery Ryan giving her tragic spiel/narratively convenient backstory about how mysterious hackers ruined her psychology practice/life by leaking her patients’ files.Well, it turns out the psychology-hatin’ hackers are back, and this time they’re releasing audio from another psychologist’s therapy sessions.And, of course, it gets worse: The hackers have gone for round 2 in ruining the lives of people seeking professional help for managing their mental health as a means to attract Avery’s attention.Nelson finds this out by using a Bluetooth sniper rifle data-scooper he’s somehow procured for personal use to data-snipe Avery’s FBI laptop.seriously where did he get thisAll season, Avery has been preternaturally good at identifying when people are lying and when people are innocent based on the flimsiest gestures and vocal intonations.Yet she has no idea that one of her former patients hacked her until she’s arrived at a creepy warehouse recreation of her office, and even once she knows its a former patient, she doesn’t know who it is.

What’s more, it turns out the former patient became a hacker solely because he was in love with Avery and wanted to know more about her.So much so that he’s lured her to his spooky industrial zone of psychosis in order to die with her, via carbon monoxide poisoning.Avery jacks him on the head with a recreation of her old name plate, though, and manages to call Mundo to let him know the address of the warehouse.Her stalker goes to jail, and she goes home—only to find her ex-husband, whose existence we only discovered this episode.Now that her old tragic backstory is resolved, the writers hasten to give her a new one: Turns out she had a child who died in ambiguous circumstances.She and her husband hug and cry about their dead kid and it’s a pretty depressing season-capper, but THEN— the scene cuts to Krummy getting into a car with his sobbing sister.She killed the murderer of their parents and wants to give him the gun!This appears to be setting Krummy up for hella going to jail next season, which sounds boring.