Finnish National TV Broadcaster Starts Sending Bitcoin Blockchain 73
New submitter Joel Lehtonen (3743763) writes "The Finnish national digital TV broadcaster Digita is co-operating with startup company Koodilehto to start transmission of Bitcoin blockchain and transactions in Terrestrial Digital TV (DVB-T) signal that covers almost the entire Finnish population of 5 million people. The pilot broadcasting starts September 1st and lasts two months. The broadcast can be received by a computer with any DVB-T adapter (like this $20 dongle). A commercial production phase is planned to begin later this year."
Re:Download only? (Score:5, Informative)
The summary was quite lacking. For those not wanting to rtfa, here's what it says under why broadcasting the blockchain in a way that can be picked up by low cast receivers is or might be useful. An AC post below also mentions that TV coverage may be better than mobile internet coverage.
Re:now you lose even more money on bc (Score:2, Informative)
Intrinsic value is not what keeps a currency strong. Devising a way to prevent cheap unlimited production of new currency is what we need. In the old days money was tied to gold - you can't simply print up more gold. These days the powers that be can steal the value of dollars you hold just by printing a new piece of paper with a big number written on it. The strength of bitcoin is that it is limited by design.
Re:now you lose even more money on bc (Score:4, Informative)
The Bitcoin payment network has utility value, because it can perform a useful function (move value from place to place, fast, with low fees). The digital currency unit within the network has value derived from the usefulness of the network it is part of. By itself the currency unit is as useless as a UPS shipping label would be without the rest of UPS.
It should be evident that a network of relay and processing nodes, databases, user software, websites, and smartphone apps can have non-zero value. We could differ on exactly what the value is, but given how much people pay for similar items elsewhere, I don't think you can argue it is zero.