Digital Currency News. Bitcoin Embassy Launches In Poland’s Capital Warsaw. A new bitcoin embassy was launched in Poland’s capital Warsaw on 12th May with the aim of promoting the digital currency in the country and fostering innovation. Located on Krucza 46 street, right in the city centre, the embassy is a stone’s-throw from the Warsaw Stock Exchange and Poland’s central bank – two of the most powerful financial institutions in the Polish economy. Inside the newly furbished, contemporary office space stands bitcoin mining hardware.
On one of the walls hangs a triple clock showing local time in three cities: Montreal, Tel Aviv and Warsaw. “These are the first three cities in the world where bitcoin embassies were opened,” explained Piotr Hetzig, chief executive of Bitcoin Embassy Warsaw (pictured above), adding: “Our bitcoin embassy is the first institution of its kind in Europe, and this is a result of the rapidly developing Polish bitcoin scene.” Europe’s first bitcoin embassy So, in certain circles, bitcoin is certainly booming. Bitcoin services.
TigerDirect Becomes the Latest Retail Giant to Pounce on Bitcoin. Another major online retailer has announced that it is now accepting bitcoin. This time it’s TigerDirect. The company revealed the news on Thursday to much fanfare on its site, with an educational guide to bitcoin and incentives for GPU card shoppers to “Start Mining with AMD”. TigerDirect will use BitPay as its payment processor, becoming that company’s largest client to date. Bitcoin will be accepted only for online purchases, not in physical stores. TigerDirect’s parent company, Systemax Inc. (which includes Canadian subsidiary TigerDirect.ca) is a Fortune 100 company with annual revenues of over $2bn and more than 3,000 employees. “TigerDirect has always been on the forefront of alternative online payment methods and delivering the most convenient ways for our customers to shop,” said Steven Leeds, TigerDirect’s Director of Corporate Marketing.
Getting serious TigerDirect, like fellow electronics retailer Newegg, has been teasing bitcoin plans for a few months now. Industry impact. Digital currency biz Liberty Reserve shut down, founder arrested. Update: We’re looking for stories about how the shutdown of Liberty Reserve has affected your life. Tell us your personal stories here. Digital currency Liberty Reserve has been shut down after U.S. and Costa Rican authorities arrested founder Arthur Budovsky Belanchuk in Spain. Central American newspaper The Tico Times reports that Budovsky was arrested Friday. Investigators say that Budovsky’s businesses in Costa Rica, including Liberty Reserve, were used to launder money for child pornography websites and drug trafficking. From VentureBeat Customers don’t just get irritated when you screw up cross-channel personalization. This isn’t the first time Budovsky has been in trouble with the law. Liberty Reserve has offered mostly unregulated payment processing services for U.S. dollars and euros for years.
Cybercrime expert Brian Krebs writes that Liberty Reserve was also one of the most popular forms of payment in the “cybercrime underground.” Dark Wallet: A Radical Way to Bitcoin. Cody Wilson is a twenty-five-year-old former law student at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the inventor of the Liberator, a gun made almost entirely from plastic pieces created with a 3-D printer; he uploaded to the Internet a blueprint that anyone could use to print such a gun. Wilson, who espouses libertarian views, created the blueprint to make a point: information should be free.
Not everyone agreed with him. In May, after Wilson successfully fired the gun at a range near Austin and posted the design online, the State Department requested that those files be removed from the Web site of his nonprofit, Defense Distributed. Wilson complied—but not before the files had been downloaded two hundred thousand times, igniting a debate about whether there should be limits to the free flow of information over the Internet, and over the role of the government in enforcing those restrictions.
But where a currency exists, capitalism will inevitably find it. Illustration by Grafilu.
The biggest Bitcoin win in gambling history. In just one weekend of furious gambling, a single Internet high roller has taken home close to 11,000 bitcoins—or about $1.3 million. The man, known online as Nakowa, has turned one of Bitcoin’s most popular and profitable casinos into a loser. What no one can figure out: Is he a cheater, a genius, or the luckiest man on earth? This is almost certainly the biggest gambling win in Bitcoin history and, as of early Monday morning, Nakowa is still betting high. Just-Dice.com, a European-based cybercasino offering a set of dice games played for the highly valuable digital currency Bitcoin, has been on a roller coaster ride. Nakowa’s gambling began badly.
His weekend started on a losing streak that made Just-Dice richer than it had ever been, causing the site to hit its highest single profit point of all time (7,000 bitcoins or $862,400 on hand), according to multiple witnesses. However, as Nakowa—who has been called “fearless”—continued playing, a big swing hit hard. The Just-Dice.com homepage. Africa's first Bitcoin wallet launches in Kenya. Africa's first Bitcoin transfer service has launched in Kenya, piggybacking on M-Pesa, the country's highly successful mobile banking platform. The service, called Kipochi, will allow Kenyans to move money abroad while dodging the hefty transaction fees charged by companies like Western Union and MoneyGram. Kipochi -- which means purse in Swahili -- describes itself as a lightweight, easy-to-use Bitcoin wallet.
Users only need an email address, phone number and passport or national identity number to sign up and can currently transfer up to one bitcoin a day using the service -- although this is expected to increase soon. Kipochi will link to M-Pesa, the system that many Kenyan citizens currently use to transfer money by text message within the country, and will allow them to send and receive Bitcoin across borders, converting it to and from an M-Pesa balance. Exchanging money will be made much cheaper, as Bitcoin only charges $0.04 (£0.03) per transfer. Study: 45 percent of Bitcoin exchanges end up closing. A study of the Bitcoin exchange industry has found that 45 percent of exchanges fail, taking their users' money with them. Those that survive are the ones that handle the most traffic -- but they are also the exchanges that suffer the greatest number of cyber attacks. Computer scientists Tyler Moore (from the Southern Methodist University, Dallas) and Nicolas Christin (of Carnegie Mellon University) found 40 exchanges on the web which offered a service of changing bitcoins into other fiat currencies or back again.
Of those 40, 18 have gone out of business -- 13 closing without warning, and five closing after suffering security breaches that forced them to close. Four other exchanges have suffered serious attacks but remain open. One of those is Mt Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, with Moore and Christin stating that at its peak it handles more than 40,000 Bitcoin transactions a day, compared to a mean average of 1,716. Image: Shutterstock. Fred Wilson: Money Is Information, Like Bits, And We Want To Invest In Ways Of Moving It. Fred Wilson, legendary New York venture capitalist and partner at Union Square Ventures, is the latest VC to highlight his interest in startups that help move money, “an area that is still very much up for grabs,” in his opinion.
“Money is information, like bits,” he said today, giving currency a spin that puts it in a continuum with the many blogging and content companies that his firm has invested in over the years. (That list has included Twitter, Tumblr, FeedBurner, del.icio.us and Disqus.) Speaking on stage today and continuing on the e-commerce theme, Wilson added that he is also interested in more startups focused around marketplaces.
Wilson is also an investor and board member at Etsy. Two days into TC’s conference, bitcoin has been a buzzword that’s already come up more than once among the investors on stage. Wilson described his interest as about the movement of money. “I think Foursquare is doing great,” Wilson said today. Bitcoin Crash APR 2013: Nearly halving its value in 6 hours! Crisi di Cipro, BitCoin diventa un bene rifugio. Crisi di Cipro, BitCoin diventa un bene rifugio Il cambio della moneta digitale è quadruplicato negli ultimi due mesi: la maggior parte di acquisti dai Paesi più colpiti dalla crisi Può sembrare paradossale ma per evitare i rischi dei mercati azionari la via di salvezza scelta da sempre più investitori è BitCoin.
La moneta digitale, regolarmente quotata sui mercati valutari in rapporto alle principali divise del mondo, nel mese di marzo ha visto più che raddoppiare il proprio. Dai 40 dollari per BitCoin dei primi giorni del mese, si è arrivati agli oltre 95 di ieri. COME L'ORO E IL MATTONE - A causare l'impennata sarebbero, secondo gli analisti, proprio gli investitori europei più colpiti dalla situazione finanziaria di Cipro – ovvero spagnoli, greci e russi – che sembrano oggi scegliere una moneta digitale come, fino a poco fa, sceglievano l'oro o gli immobili. ALTERNATIVA - E infatti il nuovo sistema bancario peer-to-peer sta conoscendo fortuna un po' ovunque. (Ansa/Berg) Www.foxbusiness.com/investing/2013/03/22/bitcoin-interest-explodes-as-cyprus-nearly-implodes/
As policymakers in Europe threaten the sanctity of bank deposits in crumbling Cyprus, the faceless operators of decentralized electronic currency Bitcoin must be smiling somewhere. The currency, a favorite among those worried about the safety of traditional banking and paper currency, is emerging as an apparent winner from the drama surrounding the bailout of tiny Cyprus. Bitcoin “is clearly having a breakthrough moment here, and a deeply surprising one given its novelty and nascent infrastructure,” said Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx, in a note on Friday. To be sure, Bitcoin is still a relatively new and small system that is subject to technical glitches and regulators are only now scrambling to keep up.
Still, led by surging interest in the embattled eurozone and Russia (a favorite client of Cypriot banks), that breakthrough is clear through a number of metrics, including the surging value of the currency itself. Not Your Father’s Currency Click image to enlarge U.S. Bitcoin developer: Bitcoin Volatility, regulation, open source, elusive Satoshi Nakamoto.
With Bitcoin all the rage and startups popping up left and right, it's hard to know who's an expert in the virtual currency and who just has an opinion. Most people would put Jeff Garzik in the former camp. A Bitcoin core developer for three years, he left his job at Red Hat on Friday to start work at Bitpay, the biggest Bitcoin payment processing service. IDG News Service caught up with him at the Bitcoin 2013 conference in Silicon Valley this weekend, where he talked about the state of Bitcoin today, the parallels with open source, and Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto. Following is an edited transcript of the conversation. IDGNS: What's on people's minds at Bitcoin 2013? Garzik: Bitcoin's growing up. For a long time the Bitcoin developers were working at Fortune 500 companies like Red Hat and Google.
IDGNS: I've talked to people here who trade bitcoins on exchanges, they say the exchanges need to become more professional and more stable. IDGNS: Because Mt.
Bitcoin Fever: The World's Largest Online Currency: Video. Jittery Spaniards Seek Safety in Bitcoins. Since Sunday, a trio of Bitcoin apps have soared up Spain’s download charts, coinciding with news that cash-strapped Cyprus was planning to raid domestic savings accounts to pay off a $13 billion bailout tab. Fearing contagion on the other end of the Mediterranean, some Spaniards are apparently looking for cover in an experimental digital currency. “This is an entirely predictable and rational outcome for what’s happening in Cyprus,” says Nick Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group. “If you want to get a good sense of the stress European savers are feeling, just watch Bitcoin prices.”
The value of the virtual currency has soared nearly 15 percent in the last two days, according to the most-recent pricing data. “One hundred percent of that is due to Cyprus,” says Colas. “It means the Europeans are getting involved.” Meanwhile, for Russian millionaires who have also been burned by the Cypriot tax levy, Bitcoin is far from a safe haven shelter. Pay Another Way: Bitcoin. At WordPress.com, our mission is making publishing democratic — accessible and easy for anyone, anywhere. And while anyone can start a free blog here, not everyone can access upgrades (like going ad-free or enabling custom design) because of limits on traditional payment networks. Today, that changes: you can now buy WordPress.com upgrades with bitcoins. PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions.
Some are blocked for political reasons, some because of higher fraud rates, and some for other financial reasons. Whatever the reason, we don’t think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya should have diminished access to the blogosphere because of payment issues they can’t control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them. Bitcoin is a digital currency that enables instant payments over the internet. Bitcoin payment interface Common Questions How does Bitcoin work? We won’t cover these details here.
Zero! US regulator: Bitcoin exchanges must comply with money-laundering laws. The federal agency charged with enforcing the nation's laws against money laundering has issued new guidelines suggesting that several parties in the Bitcoin economy qualify as Money Services Businesses under US law. Money Services Businesses (MSBs) must register with the federal government, collect information about their customers, and take steps to combat money laundering by their customers. The new guidelines do not mention Bitcoin by name, but there's little doubt which "de-centralized virtual currency" the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) had in mind when it drafted the new guidelines. A FinCEN spokesman told Bank Technology News last year that "we are aware of Bitcoin and other similar operations, and we are studying the mechanism behind Bitcoin.
" America's anti-money-laundering laws require financial institutions to collect information on potentially suspicious transactions by their customers and report these to the federal government. In Spain, The Bitcoin Run Has Started. Dollar-Less Iranians Discover Virtual Currency. Under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, dollars are hard to come by in Iran. The rial fell from 20,160 against the greenback on the street market in August to 36,500 rials to the dollar in October. It’s settled, for now, around 27,000. The central bank’s fixed official rate is 12,260. Yet there’s one currency in Iran that has kept its value and can be used to purchase goods from abroad: bitcoins, the online-only currency.
Created in 2009 by a mysterious programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoins behave a lot like any currency. The advantage for Iranians is that bitcoins can be swapped for dollars that can then be kept outside the country. At online store coinDL.com, shoppers can use bitcoins to buy Beyond Matter, the latest album from Iranian artist Mohammad Rafigh. Iranian-American bitcoin consultant Farzad Hashemi recently traveled to Tehran and talked up bitcoin to his friends. As the value of the rial plunges, many Iranians are trying to acquire foreign currencies. What the WordPress Announcement Means for Bitcoin - Blog - Genesis Block - The BitInstant Blog. Bitcoin: more than just the currency of digital vice | Technology. Bitcoin’s Gains May Fuel Central Bank Concerns: Chart of the Day. Custom Chips Could Be the Shovels in a Bitcoin Gold Rush as Enthusiasts Design ASICs to Mine the Cryptocurrency Faster. Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33.
Mega update: Dotcom’s service now accepts Bitcoin. Bitcoin, the Darknet Economy, and the Low Over-Head Revolution. Wn322 - Fred's Business Model For Bitcoin Bank - BMFiddle. Namecoin.