After $250,000 theft, Bitcoin exchange Bitfloor reopen Joel Falconer 2012-09-28 http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/28/after-250000-theft-bitcoin-exchange-bitfloor-reopens/... Early in the month, we reported that the top US Bitcoin exchange, Bitfloor, had a security breach that resulted in a theft of Bitcoins worth $250,000. At the time it was very much up in the air as to whether Bitfloor would be able to resume operation, but today it has announced that it is back in business. ... Despite a number of high-profile setbacks, Bitcoin growth continues unencumbered, and the decades to come will be very interesting as one of society’s oldest tools — currency — is disrupted. ... |
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Bitcoin - a Means for Redistribution of Wealth Rüdiger Koch 2012-09-27 http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/koch20120927... Amazing things would happen if a large percentage of transhumanists were financially independent. How can this be done? ... There is a way… We need to redistribute wealth! ... Should 1 Billion people use Bitcoin in the future, the price will have to rise 5 orders of magnitude to compensate. In other words, if you buy a Bitcoin today, you have $12 to lose, should the project fail entirely. But you have $100,000 or more to gain should it succeed. This already suggests how redistribution of wealth works in favor of early adopters. Early adopters are able to acquire Bitcoins cheaply. ... Cryonicists will find the option of a brain wallet interesting: As a private key is simply a very large (256 bit) number, it can be deterministically created from a pass phrase. This is a string of words that have meaning to you, possibly salted with things like your social security number. Since you can remember the string now, you should be able to remember it after your reanimation. So as long as you keep your memory, you can access your funds even if everything else has been taken from you during your time in the dewar. ... Transhumanists tend to be freethinkers, which means they usually can’t agree on anything. This is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the H+ movement. But if we can agree for once to use Bitcoin and use our personal networks to spread it, there are enough of us to make Bitcoin’s success and hence, rising prices, a self fulfilling prophecy. ... From Koch's bio on ieet site: Rüdiger Koch is CTO and founder of the first African Bitcoin exchange, Fikisha Africoin in Lagos/Nigeria. Previously, he worked as an IT Consultant in the banking and IT industry in Germany, Switzerland, Thailand and Singapore.
...
Rüdiger serves as head of the Business & Bitcoin department of ZeroState and has previously served as vice chairman of De: Trans.
Re IEET: The IEET's mission is to be a center for voices arguing for a responsible, constructive, ethical approach to the most powerful emerging technologies. We believe that technological progress can be a catalyst for positive human development so long as we ensure that technologies are safe and equitably distributed. We call this a "technoprogressive" orientation.
...
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Bitcoin Savings and Trust Facing SEC Investigation Over 'Ponzi Scheme' Alistair Charlton 2012-09-27 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/388782/20120927/bitcoin-savings-trust-sec-investigation-pirate-ponzi.htm... Founded in 2008, and with honourable intentions from its creators and many users, the BitCoin currency is almost immune to money-laundering and hard to track, making it ideal for users looking to make illegal purchases online. ... Bitcoin Savings and Trust has now caught the SEC's attention, according to Willard Foxton at the Telegraph, who claims to have seen an email sent by SEC investigator Philip Moustakis to many of those who invested in Pirate's scheme ... "the BitCoin currency is almost immune to money-laundering"  perhaps he meant almost ideal for money-laundering? ...or almost immune to money-laundering laws? ...the SEC investigation will no doubt lower the value of Bitcoins and possibly scare investors away from the currency altogether.
no doubt eh? If only predicting the market were as simple as this guy assumes. |
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Gavin Andresen Launches Non-Profit Bitcoin Foundation to ‘Standardize, Protect and Promote’ Bitcoin Can it legitimize the currency in the eyes of the mainstream? Jessica Roy 2012-09-27 http://betabeat.com/2012/09/gavin-andresen-launches-non-profit-bitcoin-foundation-to-standardize-protect-and-promote-bitcoin/... The Bitcoin Foundation has stacked its board with well-known, high-profile people active in the Bitcoin community so that users feel safe donating. Still, as Mr. Perry points out, “according to the dissenting voices, it’s representative only of the ‘big business’ side of Bitcoin, not the actual users.” Indeed, some users have expressed dissent on the boards, but for the most part they seem supportive of a unified effort to legitimize Bitcoin. ... |
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Single mention. Not a new story - but illustrates Bitcoin's use as a bypass system. Download, print, fire: gun rights initiative harnesses 3D technology Project aims to let anyone print a gun in their own home, raising new concerns about the legality of homemade firearms Alexander Hotz 2012-09-26 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/26/3d-printing-guns-legal-issues-us-law?newsfeed=true... Indiegogo asserted that the group violated company policy, claiming that the project is related to the sale of firearms. But, as Wilson is quick to point out, Wiki Weapon isn't a for-profit venture and doesn't intend to ever sell tangible firearms. The group's aim is simply to publish a schematic, which would be available online for anyone free of charge. Despite this hiccup, Defense Distributed still managed to raise the money it needed from donors by using the direct deposit platform Bitcoin. ... |
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Second Bitcoin Hack Highlights Challenges, Resilience of Anarchic E-Currency Hack occurred due to exchange operator leaving his keys unencrypted Jason Mick 2012-09-25 http://www.dailytech.com/Second+Bitcoin+Hack+Highlights+Challenges+Resilience+of+Anarchic+ECurrency/article27776.htm... London-based BitFloor founder Roman Shtylman reported the theft to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (despite their anarchic nature, Bitcoins can be considered personal property and are arguably "illegal" to seize via hacking). He's also reopened the exchange, though his volume is down substantially placing his site as the thirteenth largest exchange globally. ... For now, though, some more folks have lost their hard earned cash to the world of Bitcoin. The lesson is that as grim as today's corruption prone offline economy is, digital anarchy isn't entirely danger free either. ... |
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There doesn't seem to have been much Bitcoin coverage in Greece - but here is a little at least. |
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A rather negative piece from Austria (in German) Bitcoins: sex, drugs and contract killers Michael Leitner 2012-09-25 http://futurezone.at/digitallife/11181-bitcoins-sex-drogen-und-auftragsmoerder.php... The alternative currency Bitcoin has been praised by many experts to be a fair and transparent alternative to the current monetary system. But now more and more pitfalls are being revealed that could prevent the currency and its concept from being a far-reaching success. ... Within a few months the value of a Bitcoin at the largest Bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, shot from one to almost 30 U.S. dollars. The rally, however, on the 16th of June came to an abrupt end. A hacker was able to steal nearly 500,000 Bitcoins and threw more than 100,000 of them on the market. This broke the price massively, at times it was even at 0.01 USD per Bitcoin. ... Sex, drugs and weapons - the currency of the darknet ... According to Kay Hamacher, an IT Expert from the Technical University of Darmstadt, the Bitcoin model is in any case, doomed. The problem: Because Bitcoins are limited to 21 million units, and these, like real money, can be lost, it will eventually result in a bottleneck. "You can talk about the probabilities, but finally Bitcoin will disappear one day." ... |
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Wait.. so.. Bitcoin is active in the mobile payments industry... and is a failed idea? Perhaps he only meant to say that Bitcoin failed to get any acknowledgment from the MintChip folk despite being a voters favorite in their competition. Whatever he meant - that's some piss poor journalism right there. |
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Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Better security for the internet currency Bitcoin Felix Würsten 2012-09-24 Paper 'Two Bitcoins at the Price of One? Double-Spending Attacks on Fast Payments in Bitcoin' Elli Androulaki Ghassan O. Karame Srdjan Capkun http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~clark/biblio/bitcoin/Karame%202012.pdfThe internet currency Bitcoin was created in 2009. It should offer the same advantages as cash. The new electronic currency has an increasing number of supporters. But ETH-researchers found out, that there is a securitiy problem. They also have a suggestion, how this problem could be solved. ... Together with Ghassan Karame and Srdjan Capkun, Elli Androulaki, a postdoc at the Institute of Information Security, managed to demonstrate that there is actually a security loophole here, even if it has never been exploited in concrete daily life. With an elaborate configuration, the buyer can actually spend his electronic coins twice: first, he buys the goods he desires; then he transfers the same amount to his own account. The problem as far as I can see is that of double-spending attacks against vendors who accept zero-confirmation transactions. I've seen this (or very similar) discussed around the forums before - so the wording of this article seems a little misleading to me in that it seems to imply it's a new discovery. This paper looks like an interesting technical analysis of this (IMO well-known) issue, with some useful figures and will presumably be helpful for those implementing zero-conf risk-reduction strategies e.g Our experiments in Section 4.4 show that the average
time for a peer to receive both TRA and TRV is approximately 3.354 seconds
would seem to suggest that a point of sale system could subscribe to some sort of double-spending monitoring system which might give the all-clear after some reasonable small wait time (I'm guessing somewhere around 5 seconds might be reasonable in terms of risk vs convenience?) |
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Short article regarding externally accumulated personal data, with only a single mention of Bitcoin - as the punchline. |
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Article in Ukranian newspaper - ZN,UA "Mirror of the week" Прообраз валюти майбутнього google translation: (The prototype of the currency of the future) Arthur Fedorchuk 2012-09-21 http://dt.ua/ECONOMICS/proobraz_valyuti_maybutnogo-109113.html(via google translation) ... The world community has come up with a virtual digital currency - Bitcoin - unaffiliated to any government or bank ... Even the fact that Bitcoin has existed since 2009, it is taken to pay for goods and services, as well as freely converted into electronic and real currency in most countries in the world, enough to treat him as a serious phenomenon. ... |
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Currency: The made-up money exchange http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-save/currency-the-madeup-money-exchange-8160840.html[entire article text] This week saw the launch of Britain's latest community currency. But how does its value compare to other imaginative monetary adventures? Bristol Pound = £1 sterling. Bristol's new currency is available for use in selected independent stores in Bristol and aims to boost the city's economy. Stroud, Totnes and others have similar schemes. Bitcoin = £7.70 Bitcoin is an electronic money system designed so that web users can transact without having to use traditional banking methods. Despite being made of binary, £158,000-worth of it was stolen last week from the Bitfloor currency exchange. Don't ask. One Whuffie = several high fives Term from a sci-fi book by Cory Doctorow in which currency is replaced by social credit. Since adopted in real life by people who really ought to know better. One Euro = 80p Fanciful invented on the idea that European nations could share a monetary union without a complete fiscal union. Whatever next, eh? |
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Looks like more of the PM folk are seeing that Bitcoin is a good thing to add into the mix. The Near Future: When Silver Does not Protect Your Privacy 2012-09-20 http://silvervigilante.com/the-near-future-when-silver-does-not-protect-your-privacy/... All the risks of using bitcoins are present when using the dominant financial system. It’s quite obvious considering the systemic fraud of the way things are that bitcoin can only be safer. As long as you stay away from fantastical bitcoin schemes promising too-good-to-be-true returns, so far in the bitcoin experiment you would have been fine assuming you did not wrongly speculate on market volatility. The reasons to use bitcoin are much greater and diverse than the reasons to use the dominant financial system. For instance, allowing bitcoins to freely circulate will increase options for payment available to all consumers. From a merchants’ perspective, bitcoins can only bring more business, not less. ... Where silver and precious metals fail to protect your privacy and you from political persecution, bitcoin does not. ... Of course, holding bitcoin alone is, in my opinon, as risk as holding any one thing. In the modern age, we can not only move into alternative currencies, we can diversify in them as well. |
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Single mention. Cybercrime: Businesses Using Anonymous-Style Hacking to Ruin Competitors Online businesses are increasingly employing denial of service attacks against competitors, as criminals monetise Anonymous' preferred hacking technique. David Gilbert 2012-09-20 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/386351/20120920/business-attacking-competitors-ddos-anonymous.htm... One of the more prominent services is Gwapo, which promises to take down a personal website for an hour, for just $5. For larger websites the cost moves up to between $10 and $50 per hour. To avoid detection, the service only accepts payment though anonymous services such as Liberty Reserve and Bitcoin. ... |
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Report: Most ZeroAccess zombie computers found in U.S. Marcos Colon 2012-09-20 http://www.scmagazine.com/report-most-zeroaccess-zombie-computers-found-in-us/article/259986/... According to the SophosLabs report, the two primary tactics used are click fraud, unknowingly clicking on an ad repeatedly to drive up countable hits, and bitcoin mining, a way of stealing virtual currency by using a machine's computational power. These strategies can earn the botnet owners a potential $100,000 each day. ... Researchers have been analyzing ZeroAccess for at least three or four years, Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser at SophosLabs, told SCMagazine.com on Tuesday. Since the U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world, he believes it's much more likely to be a target. “Americans have really powerful computers,” Wisniewski said. “When we see malware that's meant to steal banking credentials, [attackers] like to focus on the countries that have the money. If you target Americans, you're going to get a lot more bitcoins.” ... |
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sophos technical paper The ZeroAccess Botnet – Mining and Fraud for Massive Financial Gain James Wyke, Senior threat researcher SophosLabs 2012-09 http://www.sophos.com/en-us/why-sophos/our-people/technical-papers/zeroaccess-botnet.aspx... The ZeroAccess botnet that communicates on port 16471 (32-bit) and 16470 (64-bit) is currently downloading plugins that facilitate Bitcoin mining. ... These statistics clearly show that the Bitcoin mining botnet is the most prevalent, followed by the click fraud botnet with the kernel-mode botnet a very distant third. ... If we estimate the total size of all ZeroAccess botnets to be 1,000,000 machines and use the statistics acquired from the successful installs data that suggests that the proportion of the total machines that connect to the Bitcoin mining botnet is 62%, then we have 620,000 machines that could be participating in Bitcoin mining. ... We can see that ZeroAccess’ mining pool is close in size to some of the biggest public pools. These generate huge numbers of Bitcoins, for example the DeepBit pool [14] has mined over 1 million Bitcoins in the course of one year. ... Using botnets to mine Bitcoins deprives hard-working legitimate Bitcoin miners from generating those coins and therefore receiving payment. More importantly this activity taints the Bitcoin image. There have been several cases of Bitcoin exchanges being broken into and Bitcoins stolen [17], and there are concerns that the currency may die off like some digital currencies have done so before it [18]. A continued association with botnets and malware does nothing to increase the more widespread adoption of Bitcoin. ... |
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