Jan. 29, 2019
The question of who controls the ability to merge code changes into Bitcoin Core’s GitHub repository tends to come up on a recurring basis. This has been cited as a “central point of control” of the Bitcoin protocol by various parties over the years, but I argue that the question itself is a red herring that stems from an authoritarian perspective—this model does not apply to Bitcoin. It’s certainly not obvious to a layman as to why that is the case, thus the goal of this article is to explain how Bitcoin Core operates and, at a higher level, how the Bitcoin protocol itself evolves.
Dec. 9, 2018
Purchased for almost $1 million on LedgerX’s trading platform just days after Bitcoin peaked a year ago, the call options have a strike price of $50,000 and an expiry date of Dec. 28, 2018. For the contracts to retain any value at expiry, Bitcoin would need to rally more than 1,400 percent. The options’ almost certain wipeout is a less-than-ideal outcome for the buyer, but it may not be quite as bad as it seems.
Nov. 6, 2018
A widespread scam pretending to be from ElonMusk and utilizing a stream of hacked Twitter accounts andfake giveaway sites has earned scammers over 28 bitcoins or approximately $180,000 in a single day. This scam is being pulled off by attackers hacking into verified Twitter accounts and then changing the profile name to ‘Elon Musk’. They then tweet out that he, being Elon, is creating the biggest crypto-giveaway of 10,000 bitcoins.
Sep. 23, 2018
Earlier this week, a bug was found in the Bitcoin’s core code base. Developers got in the rush, and finally released a fix on Tuesday. The bug turned out to be Denial of Service bug (DoS).
Furthermore, if anyone exploited the vulnerability, this could be used to disconnect nodes, or even crash a whole segment of a network. This was enough to rush the developers into action. The bug could be exploited by any miner, to double spend any transaction.
Sep. 22, 2018
Six hundred microseconds. That is about the time that Matt Corallo wanted to shave off of block validation with his pull request in 2016 to Bitcoin Core. 600µs is a lot less than what is saved with more efficient block propagation, like XThin, Compact Blocks, or now Graphene over typical links, especially those that are of similar low-end quality in network speed like Raspberry Pis are in compute speed.
Sep. 19, 2018
Over the last 24 hours, the cryptocurrency community has been discussing a critical vulnerability that was found in the Bitcoin Core (BTC) reference client. A bug introduced in Bitcoin Core version 0.14, that also affects all subsequent versions, could have caused a great majority of current Core nodes to crash. According to the developer’s Optech newsletter, Core contributors released a patch that fixes Core version 0.16.2 and the latest 0.16.3 fix requires an immediate upgrade.
Sep. 4, 2018
Mysterious movements from the original Silk Road wallet suggest that the US government is cashing out on the Bitcoin gradually. The Silk Road market may be dead—we actually checked just to see if it came back somehow—but its wallet appears to be alive. Over a billion dollars in Bitcoin are being moved from several wallets that are all tied to the supposed original Silk Road cold storage wallet.
Jul. 13, 2018
We found the full story in what’s called the Sentencing Position document filed by the United States of America in its federal court case against Theresa Tetley, aka the “Bitcoin Maven”. The Bitcoin Maven (a maven, in case you are wondering, is an expert or connoisseur) had already pleaded guilty to money laundering charges relating to bitcoins; this time she was back in court to be sentenced. Simply put, Tetley did indeed buy bitcoins for hard cash, according to the prosecutors.
Jul. 7, 2018
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can be analysed because every transaction is traceable. This means that they are an attractive system for physicists to study. In a paper published in EPJ B, Leonardo Ermann from the National Commission for Atomic Energy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and colleagues from the University of Toulouse, France, have examined the structure of the Bitcoin-owner community by looking at the transactions of this cryptocurrency between 2009 and 2013.
Jul. 3, 2018
Announcing the first excerpt to a literary work consisting of two parts. The excerpt is provided. I wanted to include it as a brief glimpse of history.
Even for those that can’t read the full book, I wanted to make this available to everyone. A short story if you will, with some of the most brought up questions and answers. I wanted the people and the facts to be known.
Jun. 29, 2018
In a novel investigative strategy, rather than just following the money, investigators went undercover as someone converting Bitcoin into cash, exploiting a financial bottleneck faced by dark web criminals. Law enforcement agencies are always looking for new ways to identify suspects on the dark web, whether that means using malware to unmask people, executing wide ranging attacks on the Tor anonymity network, or tracking a drug dealer’s physically mailed packages. But on Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced dozens of dark web arrests thanks to a relatively novel technique.
Jun. 13, 2018
Apple has updated its review guidelines to specifically prohibit iOS and Mac apps uploaded on the company’s official App Store from utilizing users’ devices for cryptocurrency mining operations. The ban applies for apps designed explicitly with mining operations in mind. Other cryptocurrency-related functions, like managing or trading cryptocoin funds, are still permitted.
Two sections have been updated in the new App Store Review Guidelines —section 2.4.2 (Hardware Compatibility) and 3.1.5 (b) (ii) (Cryptocurrencies). Apple updated its App Store review guidelines last week, during the WWDC 2018 conference. The company took this step after hidden cryptocurrency mining has become the most popular cybercrime trend among malware developers this past year.
Jun. 13, 2018
The exchange in question is called Coinrail, and if you visit its website right now you’ll see a “System maintenance” message that tells you more than they’re just updating the servers. The devil’s in the detail – the site is down because it got hacked over the weekend. The statement on Coinrail’s website says that some (but not all) of the cryptocurrency exchange’s digital currency was stolen by hackers.
May. 28, 2018
Public hearings for rural electric utilities are rarely sellout events. But the crowd that showed up in Wenatchee two weeks ago for a hearing about Bitcoin mining in Chelan County was so large that utility staff had to open a second room with a video feed for the overflow. As a result, an area famous for apples, wheat and conservative politics has been transformed into a kind of cyber-boomtown, with Bitcoin mining operations that range from large-scale, state-of-the-art warehouses to repurposed cargo containers to backyard sheds.
May. 24, 2018
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have taken a wild ride over the past 18 months. Now, according to Bloomberg News, the US Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into whether price manipulations have contributed to the meteoric rises and crushing falls. The coins prosecutors are examining include bitcoin and ether, which have both bounced up and down over the past 18 months.
May. 13, 2018
German Radoslav Albrecht has founded an online bank that allows clients to transfer loans anywhere in the world using Bitcoin. Bitbond uses cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to bypass the Swift international transfer system to lend money across the globe rapidly and at low cost. Clients hold the loans in digital tokens like Bitcoin only for seconds or minutes until they are exchanged back into the currency of the country where they wish to receive the funds, avoiding the crypto currencies fluctuating exchange rates.
Mar. 31, 2018
You may have heard of the death cross, because news outlets have grabbed onto it likely because it sounds awesome and people click on awesome things. The reality is less exciting: A death cross is when an asset’s short-term movement average crosses below its long-term average, indicating way more downward action in the market than usual, and apparently Bitcoin is nearing one. Sounds bad!
Mar. 23, 2018
In it, Roberto claims that he had a close encounter with a US government agent posing as the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. This encounter led Roberto to conclude that the US government created Bitcoin and will one day crash the market by selling all of Nakamoto’s stashed bitcoins.
Source: vice.com
Mar. 20, 2018
Lightning is a scaling solution for distributed payment networks, originally proposed for the Bitcoin blockchain. Lightning is designed to allow users to make off-chain payments through routers and hubs. Lightning even has the potential to support cross-protocol payments, such as a payment where the sender sends Bitcoins on the Bitcoin network and the recipient receives lumens on the Stellar network, without having to trust any parties in between.
Mar. 20, 2018
Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world — andwielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamedsoftware programthat purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.