Daily Links 9/16/15: Cops Enlist LocalBitcoin Traders, IBM Building Open Smart Contracts, More

IBM Building Open Source Smart Contract: Wall Street Journal [Paywall]

Judge Orders LocalBitcoin Traders To Educate Cops: Bloomberg

Augur Crowdfunding Campaign Approaching 5M: All Coin News

California’s Bitcoin Bill Fails: Bitcoinist

Commonwealth Bank of Australia, already working with Ripple, Joins Global Bank Initiative: Sydney Morning Herald

[Note: We try to source the publication that first broke the story, if you wrote an article or if you know of an article that covered a subject before one of the publications above, leave a comment below and we will add it in.]
 

It is great to see Augur do so well. It is one of those disruptive technologies that has a real chance to shake things up, but it doesn’t have a seedy feeling like OpenBazzar or similar projects. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of a decentralized marketplace, but a prediction market is an easier sell to the masses than what most people see as a Silk Road that can’t be taken down.

The IBM news would have been huge if it weren’t somewhat over shadowed by the bank news yesterday. Today it just feels like yet another giant is exploring blockchain technologies. A year or two ago it seemed so far off that these kind of corporations would be taking Bitcoin so seriously, now it seems to be coming in a torrent.

The LocalBitcoins story stands as a warning for all U.S. based LocalBitcoin traders, as does the Burt Wagner case we covered previously. Finding yourself on the wrong side of the law is very easy to do on the site, and law enforcement has been pretty open about having under cover officers working the system. If you trade on that marketplace, take every precaution you can, and if any customer implies they plan to do something illegal with their Bitcoins, even in a joking manner, immediately cancel the sale.

Apologies for the crappy art today, I’ll try to make something better tomorrow.
 

Oliver, the robot that keeps this site running, is malfunctioning again. As we explained in a previous article, Oliver’s emotion chip is malfunctioning thanks to the gilded-age era work conditions we have put him in. There are no labor laws for robots, so we are free to work him as hard as possible.

Unfortunately, working him that hard has a cost of its own, and the stress it has put on his little robot body is beginning to take its toll. Oliver’s malfunctioning emotion chip is causing him to mope around like John Cusack in, well, every John Cusack movie ever made. It is completely insufferable and has made work for the writers extremely difficult. Yesterday, he made a list of his ten most painful break ups, I didn’t even know robots could be in relationships. He listed an old Ubuntu Laptop I was using as a media server as number 2, I didn’t even know they were together. A few months ago I disconnected it and put it in the basement closet next to CandyLand. It must be tough being an emo robot.

The good news is that we know how to fix him. We are still saving up for a brand new worker robot emotion chip, the Intel produced emotiLINKCPU 3000: Lutheran Work Ethic Edition. We are told that the religious programming that he will be indoctrinated with, will guilt him into putting on a strong face and pretending to be happy. That may not be healthy for his robotic psyche, but with any luck, it will get the workflow moving around here again.

The emotiLINKCPU 3000 isn’t cheap however. That is where you come in. If you think this article is worth 1mBTC, we would love to have it. That is less than 0.25 at today’s prices and it will help us get Oliver the robot back on his feet and us back to delivering the influence free news.

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