The bitcoin network reached another historic milestone milestone today, achieving an estimated total computational speed of 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s = 1,000,000 GH/s). The current speed is 40x faster than where we began the year, faster than 79% of the bitcoin community expected as of just seven months ago. The path to this point goes back to the genesis block itself and offers insight into the foundations of the world’s first digital currency.

Bitcoin payment processor startup BitPay has exceeded 10,000 Bitcoin-accepting merchants using its services to take payments via the decentralised digital cryptocurrency. Around this time last year BitPay had accepted its 1,000th merchant — so it’s a measure of the momentum behind Bitcoin that BitPay is growing at such a rate.

The Atlanta-based startup, which was founded in 2011, raised $2 million led by Founders Fund back in May — bolstering an initial $501,000 round it closed in January. At the time of that initial raise, BitPay had some 2,100 merchants on its books.

Could the intelligence community have a secret exploit for Bitcoin? It's rather obvious that Bitcoin presents a very strong financial incentive to break its cryptography, since such a vulnerability could allow an attacker to claim large amounts of virtual currency for themselves. But given the decentralized nature of the currency, it may also be a target for intelligence officials looking for ways to track its use.

Last week, we learned that the National Security Agency has led an aggressive effort to “break widely used Internet encryption technologies.” ​The Office of the Director of National Intelligence claims it “would not be doing its job” if it didn't try to counter the encryption used by terrorists and cyber-criminals. There is speculation that many protocols or crypto implementations have been compromised, deliberately weakened, or have had backdoors inserted. In doing so, the NSA has made the Internet less safe for us all, perhaps including those that wish to take advantage of Bitcoin's privacy benefits.

Bitcoiners now have a safe place – like military grade encrypted safe – to share information and do some social networking without having anyone spying over their shoulder. Global Village, created by the people at NoBs.is, is still running in beta, but the developers assure that the military grade encryption that will protect the users’ data is already working.
If you’re interested in knowing more about the platform, you can create your account in a few seconds, using the service to generate groups, post status updates and send encrypted messages within the social network. According to a press release, only Global Village members who have an encryption key will be able to read users’ shared messages and the system will be built without a master key.
“Our security specialists are world class encryption experts. They mix and match encryption formulas, such as AES256, RSA, ECDH521, until we can guarantee that not even the dark lords of cyber spying will be able to see so much as a single picture of your cat”, says Konen Saarin, who manages the Icelandic company.
In a near future, Global Village users will be able to re-share their encrypted messages via Twitter and Facebook: “our digital kevlar covers apps, iOS and Android, as well as our site”, Saarin adds.

Canada is improving its Bitcoin exchanging scene. After the much awaited arrival of Bitcoiniacs, a physical store located in Vancouver that acts like a Bitcoin broker, now the country is expecting five cryptocurrency ATMs that will be available in Vancouver and other major Canadian cities.
“It’s just much more comfortable to go sit down in an office at a brick-and-mortar building with a professional that knows a lot about Bitcoins, do a professional transaction and get a receipt for it. It’s reassuring”, the Canadian Bitcoiner Ryan Johnson said to Global News about Bitcoiniacs, but what will change with the arrival of these machines?
The new Bitcoin kiosks were built by a Las Vegas-based company called RoboCoin

Belgium’s finance minister has no problem with bitcoin, he said last week, although he pointed out that there are few people there using it.
Minister of finance Koen Geens responded to a parliamentary question about bitcoin, commenting that he wouldn’t see the Belgian National bank having any objection to bitcoin, and stating that for the moment its use is limited to a handful of traders.
The nation’s anti-money laundering organization – the Cellule de Traitement des Informations Financières – hasn’t received any guidance on the cryptocurrency.
Geens reportedly added that although privacy and anonymity were a big part of bitcoin, there was no indication that the cryptocurrency is used on

London, UK (PRWEB) September 14, 2013
The Dublin, Ireland-based brokerage firm AvaTrade now offers attractive bonuses for new traders looking for Bitcoin trading to help them have a good start. It also has an attractive and user-friendly trading platform. It has eight types of trading platforms that include AVA Options, AvaTrader, Mac Trading, MetaTrader 4, etc.
ForexMinute informs that AVAOptions from AvaTrade is a great combination of flexibility and power of FX Options with FX Spot. The broker also offers AvaTrader, a fully customizable

W Chinach zaczyna panować bitcoinowa mania, ale nic nie wskazuje na to, by walutą zainteresowały się władze.

A critical bug fix was provided in an emergency release of Bitcoin 0.8.5 earlier this evening. On September 9, Bitcoin-Qt users with versions more recent than 0.8.0 were unable to start their software and received errors that their database was corrupt:

coin database inconsistencies found

Users were then prompted to reindex the block chain, a process that could take hours and was ineffective in resolving the inconsistencies. Bitcoin-Qt is the graphical version of the standard bitcoin client and the problem was later observed in Bitcoind, the command line version.

Negative Transaction Version Numbers
The problem was caused by an abnormal transaction published in block 256818 around midnight EST on September 9. Bitcoin transactions contain fields including a version number, input parameters and output parameters among other things. The version number is currently set to 1 and allows for the network to adapt to different transaction types in the future while still providing support for older transactions.

Bitcoins wurden dazu gemacht, überwiesen zu werden. Ein kleiner Einkaufsführer.

Im Prinzip kann man mit Bitcoins dasselbe machen wie mit Euro: Man legt sie zurück und schaut zu, wie ihr Wert mal steigt, mal sinkt. Oder man gibt sie aus. Transaktionen sind sicher, schnell und kostenlos. Während Euros über mehrere Ecken wandern, bis sie dort ankommen, wo sie hin sollen, gehen Bitcoins den direkten Weg.

Die heftigen Kursschwankungen, für die der Bitcoin berühmt ist, kann man auch als Einladung verstehen, Schnäppchen zu jagen: Einfach zwei Währungen in die Börse für den Online-Bummel laden und den Kurs beobachten. Wenn es gut läuft, erwirbt man all die Dinge, die man sich gelegentlich bestellt – Schuhe, Elektronik, Schmuck, Lebensmittel – günstiger.

Der Bitcoin.de-Shoppingführer stellt Möglichkeiten vor, Bitcoins auszugeben. Der erste Teil präsentiert Shops, die Direktüberweisungen akzeptieren.

Der Begriff Bitcoin geisterte in den letzten Monaten mehr und mehr durch die Medien. Aber was sind Bitcoins eigentlich? Was kann man damit machen? Wie kann man sie benutzen? Und wo liegen die Risiken? Dieses Buch vermittelt eine grundlegende Vorstellung davon, was sich hinter der neuen digitalen Währung verbirgt und wie sie funktioniert. Es beleuchtet die Vor- und Nachteile gegenüber den klassischen Währungen in unterschiedlichen Einsatzszenarien und diskutiert die Zukunftsfähigkeit der unterliegenden Technologie.

The Federal Election Commission is deliberating whether political contributions may be made in Bitcoin, and if so, how. The commission has until October 28th to determine whether donations in the emerging virtual currency comply with campaign finance restrictions, in response to a request filed last week by the Conservative Action Fund

Der ab Januar 2014 um $ 3.499 verfügbare neue TerraMiner II und der auf $ 5.999 reduzierte TerraMiner IV brechen die Barriere von $ 3 pro Gigahash

Austin, Texas (ots/PRNewswire) - CoinTerra(TM) www.cointerra.com [http://www.cointerra.com/] - das führende Unternehmen bei Leistung und der neue Value Leader bei Bitcoin ASIC Mining-Lösungen - gab heute die aggressive Bepreisung der zweiten Charge seiner spezialisierten ASIC Mining-Ausrüstung bekannt.