Digging for answers: The “strong smell” of fraud from one Bitcoin miner maker. For many crypto-minded libertarians, Bitcoin is the future of money.
But that dream hasn't been helped much by the numerous high-profile legal cases involving the currency in recent years: The Bitcoin Savings and Trust hedge fund collapsed; uncertainty fueled the implosion of Mt. Gox, the currency's largest exchange; and the high-profile Silk Road takedown is a treacherous story combining Bitcoin, drugs, and alleged murders.
For now, though, one company sits above all others when it comes to cultivating a new level of direct customer mistrust in the Bitcoin community: Butterfly Labs. For the past year, the Kansas-based Bitcoin miner maker has been embroiled in numerous accusations of fraud. Customer orders, totaling millions of dollars, were significantly delayed or never fulfilled. Now, the company's critics have fresh ammunition because of this same executive. “I’m on a good track now” Vleisides and three others were also implicated in the scam, and he took a plea deal. Extreme Performance. The MtGox 500. Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto revealed after years of mystery. [UPDATE 4:15pm CT: Reporters across Los Angeles have been hounding the man Newsweek identified as Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto.
He told reporters gathered at his front door that he is "not involved with Bitcoin. " Andrea Chang, a Los Angeles Times reporter, said on Twitter that this Nakamoto later also denied having had any involvement with Bitcoin. Responding to senator’s bid to ban Bitcoin, congressman calls for cash ban. Last month, a senator from West Virginia called on American financial regulators to ban Bitcoin in a seemingly gross misunderstanding of how the cryptocurrency actually works.
On Wednesday, however, a representative from Colorado responded with a tongue-in-cheek letter to those same authorities. Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) wrote: The exchange of dollar bills, including high denomination bills, is currently unregulated and has allowed users to participate in illicit activity, while also being highly subject to forgery, theft, and loss. For the reasons outlined below, I urge regulators to take immediate and appropriate action to limit the use of dollar bills.By way of background, a physical dollar bill is a printed version of a dollar note issued by the Federal Reserve and backed by the ephemeral “full faith and credit” of the United States. JP Morgan: Bitcoin is “vastly inferior” to traditional, fiat currency. At least one major investment bank isn’t bullish on Bitcoin these days.
On Tuesday, excerpts from an investor’s note written by JP Morgan’s foreign exchange strategist John Normand were published, and the remarks argue that Bitcoin is “vastly inferior” to fiat currency. JP Morgan did not respond to Ars’ repeated requests to see the entire investor’s note. According to Barron’s published excerpts, Normand writes that, as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin performs "no worse" than using the US dollar or another currency like it. But Bitcoin’s other two functions as a currency preclude it from being a serious contender in global exchanges. Bitcoin exchanges buckle under strain of phantom transactions. Mt.
Gox, Bitstamp, and other Bitcoin exchanges have temporarily suspended withdrawal transactions after coming under a form of a denial-of-service attack that abuses weaknesses in the way they keep track of fund balances, a security expert said. The attacks don't have any permanent effect on the central accounting mechanism for the digital currency, but they are likely the driving force behind a sharp decline in the bitcoin-to-dollar exchange rate over the past 48 hours. A (Relatively Easy To Understand) Primer on Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is one of the most powerful but least understood types of cryptography in wide use today.
At CloudFlare, we make extensive use of ECC to secure everything from our customers' HTTPS connections to how we pass data between our data centers. Fundamentally, we believe it's important to be able to understand the technology behind any security system in order to trust it. To that end, we looked around to find a good, relatively easy-to-understand primer on ECC in order to share with our users.
Finding none, we decided to write one ourselves. That is what follows. Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol. Manual Bitcoin Transactions. We work for a Major Retailer, here's the problem we have with accepting bitcoin, maybe reddit can help us explain a solution to our bosses. ...but with Bitcoins! The Bitcoin Business Generator. Leading Adult Site Porn.com Now Accepts Bitcoin. Leading adult site Porn.com has started accepting bitcoin payments.
The site is one of the biggest adult entertainment operations on the Internet, if you don’t count illegal torrent sites. Porn.com currently accepts traditional credit card payments, PayPal and online cheques, along with bitcoin of course. Bitcoin payments on adult sites are nothing uncommon, but Porn.com is by far the biggest service to embrace bitcoin.
Most adult sites that accept bitcoin are tiny and easily dwarfed by Porn.com, as it is effectively an umbrella for heaps of smaller porn sites. Help me answer Senate committee’s questions about Bitcoin. Over a month ago I testified at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Bitcoin.
I’ve been asked by the committee to submit answers to additional questions, and I thought I’d try to tap into the Bitcoin community’s wisdom by posting here the questions and my draft answers and inviting you to post in the comments any suggestions you might have. I’d especially appreciate examples of innovative uses of Bitcoin or interesting potential business cases. Coinbase's Fred Ehrsam Drops Knowledge on Paul Krugman. 3rCU6nS.png (2646×1572) Scalability. The core Bitcoin network can scale to much higher transaction rates than are seen today, assuming that nodes in the network are primarily running on high end servers rather than desktops.
If Snoop Dogg charges for his next album in BTC, what will happen to the network if you have millions of transactions at the same time..? P2sh_safe_address. This paper describes a mechanism for using Bitcoin’s P2SH functionality to build a stronger, more secure web wallet.
Background Bitcoin addresses (where your bitcoins are stored) are secured today using public key cryptography and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). This offers very strong security. But the secret keys used within ECDSA are lengthy 256 numbers which humans can’t remember, and the security of your bitcoin hinges on how safely you can protect this key from others. To help us protect and manage our keys, users employ bitcoin wallets. What is the best way to store Bitcoins? Hosted Wallets The most common way I’ve seen is using traditional Hosted Wallets. There are many services that run these (for free), the most obvious being the exchanges where most people buy Bitcoins to begin with. Also popular is Blockchain.info. The main advantage of this method is that the convenience level is very high. Dogecoin Is Dead, And We Have Killed Him. Dogecoin is dead. What killed Dogecoin is the same thing that’s killing Bitcoin — ASICs.
At the heart of “cryptocurrencies” is the crypto, a difficult mathematical problem called a hash function. Hash functions take an input, and transforms it into a unique output of fixed length. Even changing the input minutely, should alter the output greatly, meaning it is extremely difficult to reverse the operation, and thereby find the input. Cryptocurrencies require “miners” or people who’ve donated computing power the network. Crazy currency: The more I report on Bitcoin, the weirder it gets. The first time I ever heard the word “Bitcoin” was back in 2011, when I read about The Silk Road (like a lot of people) on Gawker. The Amazon of illegal drugs?
Powered by Tor and this weird “cryptocurrency?” Huh? At the time, I was living in Germany working for Deutsche Welle (Germany’s international public radio broadcaster). Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire. Bitcoin just crashed 50% today, on news that the Chinese government has banned local exchanges from accepting deposits in Yuan. BtC was trading over $1000 yesterday; now it's down to $500 and still falling. Good. I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: this is a start, but it's not sufficient.
Let me give you a round-up below the cut. Major China Bitcoin exchange halts deposits, price crashes by half. Following a recent decision by BTC China—the country's largest bitcoin exchange—to stop accepting new deposits in Chinese renminbi, the value of the digital currency has plummeted by about 50 percent over the course of several hours early Wednesday. BTC China attributed this change to the fact that one of its payment providers, YeePay, said it could no longer accept deposits in the Chinese currency. As of this writing, the weighted average of one bitcoin was $570.10 as listed on Mt.
Litecoin - Open source P2P digital currency. BTCrow.com - The bitcoin escrow service. Bitcoin and Intrinsic Value: a layman’s response to Alan Greenspan. Editor’s note: Matt Mihaly, a bitcoin fan and entrepreneur, recently wrote this article in response to Alan Greenspan’s recent comments on bitcoin. Bitcoin Fog. Bitcoin Pulse - Monitoring the pulse of Bitcoin. Individuals. Publishing Ideas - TradingView Documentation. Being able to publish and share your ideas is one of the key features of TradingView. When you publish an idea it will be available for the entire tradingview.com community to see and comment on.
Ideas can also be reposted to users' Twitter and/or StockTwits accounts, essentially allowing them to be broadcast across three different places simultaneously. In addition to being added to TradingView, Twitter and StockTwits feeds, ideas can also be embedded into web pages. *For example, the chart below was first published on TradingView and then embedded into this webpage using standard wiki formatting. Notice that the chart is still live and fully interactive.
This is an interactive chart. Once you have created an idea on a chart and would like to share it with the TradingView, Twitter or StockTwits communities you can do so by clicking on the "Publish Idea" button in the lower right hand corner of the chart. Trading Ideas on All Ideas. The weekly chart looks very good, at least for the short term.
Spread Charts - TradingView Documentation. The most basic definition of a spread chart is that it is a comparison between a financial instrument (such as a stock) and an additional variable (such as another financial instrument or a numerical value). TradingView Documentation. BTCUSD: 934.00 ▲+1.63% BTCUSD: 935.45 ▲+1.79% Bitcoin’s roller-coaster ride gets wilder as Wall Street, China climb on. Bitcoin has been on a rollercoaster ride for most of its four-year history, with a series of dizzying price spikes and stomach-turning plummets, often in close succession. Thursday was no exception, as the digital currency picked up an unprecedented endorsement on Wall Street and a dose of cold water from the Chinese government. For the first time, a major US investment bank has initiated coverage of bitcoins, and its overall assessment is relatively bullish.
Or, at least not as bearish as some people have been saying. Signholder Receives Over $24,000 In Bitcoin After QR Code Appears On ESPN. Bitcoin Arbitrage, Scalping Market Inefficiencies and Currency Market-Share Gradual Shift. One of the characteristics of any new development market or exchange that attempts to attract liquidity and develop price discovery processes, is that for certain newly structured instruments or thinly priced/thinly traded assets, a wide difference in available prices and fragmented liquidity from one market source to the next can exist.
The essence of this phenomenon has existed for a millennial since the ancient days of commodity trading in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), and was brought to light in Forex trading over the past decade, as electronic access to markets enabled arbitrage to take place at the speed of light in markets such as online currency trading, when comparing rates across various providers for the purpose of exploiting even the smallest difference.
BitcoinAverage - independent bitcoin price. Best of Trading bots to trade BTC on exchanges. Hi, please post here what the bots you are using. Bitcoin Cross-Exchange Spreads Reach 16-Month High. After months of customer difficulty at Mt. Home - Bitcoin Block Explorer. As China Looms, the U.S. Ponders Ways Not to Destroy Bitcoin. Governments will struggle to put Bitcoin under lock and key. Comment éviter de vous faire braquer vos Bitcoins. La conversion de devise en P2P (sans frais bancaires) « Korben Korben. Bitcoin Charts / Markets. Bitcoin Charts / Markets. Bitcoin Charts / Charts. Get Hex transaction from nodes. Pooled BRUTFORCING of wallets. "World's First" Bitcoin ATM Goes Live Tomorrow.
Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins. Certifier l’existence d’un document grâce au réseau Bitcoin. Affordable. Winklevoss Woes. What is Bitcoin? What is Bitcoin? - We Use Coins. Follow The Bitcoins: How We Got Busted Buying Drugs On Silk Road's Black Market.
Currency. Encryption. Confidentiality. Mining & Monetary creation. California sends a cease and desist order to the Bitcoin Foundation. “Taming the bubble”: investors bet on Bitcoin via derivatives markets. Regulation Dooms Bitcoin? Dan Kaminsky on BitCoin. PayPal Sees $20 Billion in Mobile Transactions: Video. Press Center - Bitcoin. BTCrow.com - The bitcoin escrow service. Escrow. Let's Get to Know Crypto Currency (BTC/LTC) New Minimum Transaction Size: Cutting Through The Hype. Bitcoin/bitcoin. Bitcoin GitHub History Visualized Sept 15 2012.
Engineering the Bitcoin Gold Rush: An Interview with Yifu Guo, Creator of the First ASIC-Based Miner.