Ross Ulbricht has been sentenced to life in prison for the operation of Silk Road, the now-defunct online dark market.

The sentence was handed down by US District Judge Katherine Forrest in New York today, capping roughly a year and a half-long legal process that saw multiple bitcoin auctions and the shock indictment of two federal agents involved in the investigation.

In addition to the prison term, Ulbricht has been ordered to pay nearly $200m. In a 28th May court filing, US prosecutors asked Forrest to require that Ulbricht pay $183,961,921 to the federal government, an amount tied to proceeds related to the operation of Silk Road during its active period.

Despite featuring its fair share of salacious material – including the run-up to the sentencing in the Ross Ulbricht trial, this week's news cycle was perhaps more mature in its assessment of bitcoin as a financial technology.

Spurred by the inclusion of former US Department of Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to Xapo's board of directors, more enterprising journalists sought to venture into topics that aimed to illuminate debates on bitcoin as a monetary system.

Arguments centered largely on whether bitcoin represents a truly unique breakthrough in the history of money, one that can only be compared to disruptive technologies like the Internet, or whether it is a passing fad, one that, despite promise, is doomed to repeat past mistakes.

There is a myth in certain circles that it is too late to get into Bitcoin -- that if you didn't buy in early then you missed the boat. Not so, says Roger Ver. You might expect him to say that, though: he is also known as Bitcoin Jesus, after all.

It feels like a lot has happened to Bitcoin during its short lifetime, but the reality is that it is still early days for the cryptocurrency.

It is, however, changing fast.

Koinify has announced that it will no longer offer a token sales platform for decentralised applications (DApps).

The startup indicated that it would "provide assistance" to startups already slated to sell their software tokens on the service, including the decentralised prediction market Augur and the blockchain-based trading card game Spells of Genesis.

Koinify declined to elaborate on the transition in interview and in its official release, though CEO Tom Ding hinted that the company's platform could remain somewhat similar with its technology being applied to a "broader market".

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) announced this week it will use Ripple technology to facilitate payments between its subsidiaries, describing distributed protocols as "the way of the future".

Last May, Germany's Fidor became the first bank to integrate Ripple's protocol into its payments infrastructure, with two US banks, CBW Bank and Cross River Bank, following suit four months later.

Tech news site CIO quoted the CBA's own Chief Information Officer David Whiteing as saying the bank had "done a whole bunch of experiments" with bitcoin and other cryptocurrency technologies.

Circle's bitcoin Android app has received an honourable mention at Google's I/O Conference.

The two-day event, which showcases the tech giant's latest products, featured Circle's app in its best-in-class category, which "recognises excellence in applying material design in the creation of engaging user experiences".

As the only bitcoin or financial application showcased,Circle's offering was featured alongside notable applications including the New York Times – awarded for its elegant typography – and tumblr, accoladed for its animation.

is there any spot left to enroll in this great avatar campaign, i would like to be part of this nice promo.

Low electrical rates and taxation doesn't directly assures profit. Mining are usually much less profitable than purchasing Bitcoins since the possibility of hardware failure, sudden difficulty increase is high. RMAing a machine is pretty costly since you have to pay for the postage and the repair may take up to several weeks. The time will decrease the profitability. If a manufacturer decides to release hundreds of hardware suddenly, the difficulty can potentially increase by a magnitude. The cost of hardware is also quite an important factor in profitability too!

If Ukraine actually defaults on the 3 billion Eurobond which is owed to Russia, then it gives the Russians the justification they need to invade Ukraine. So if Poroshenko and his clowns want to avoid losing large swaths of land, I advice them to quickly sell whetever assets they have, and pay back their debt to Russia.

=snip=
Or this Abra:
https://www.goabra.com

I am sure it's the latter, but why not use Bitcoin instead?

These guys like this type of technologies because it disrupts THE SYSTEM. Most of these guys, originate from the older hacker communities and if you read their posts on the old BBS's you find that they very opposed to centralization and government controlled entities. <We need more people like this, who think out of the box>
In my opinion, he is part of the Satoshi group. ^Hide^

 

The near-demise of Kodak is a famous parable in business circles, illustrating the need for deeply-entrenched organizations to adapt in the face of evolving technology.

Financial service firms like Western Union and MoneyGram aren’t far behind, according to noted Bitcoin advocate and investor Barry Silbert. “You should be able to move money and value instantaneously and it should basically be free,” Silbert told Entrepreneur at this year’s Inside Bitcoins conference in New York City.

Though leading players in the space currently have the opportunity to incorporate Bitcoin into their businesses, they likely won’t, Silbert believes, which will eventually precipitate “a slow death.”

All of us who are interested in bitcoin follow the price in one way or another. It is, after all, a very clean and simple indicator of how bitcoin is doing. But given that the price of bitcoin is determined solely by supply and demand, and that the supply of new bitcoins is predetermined, with new coins being issued steadily at a rate that drops sharply in the future, the only variable of interest is demand. And the demand for bitcoin is determined by how useful bitcoins are to people. So if you want to know whether the price of bitcoins will go up in the future, you have to ask yourself how useful you think bitcoins are going to be. Bitcoins are an almost pure example of an ideal online currency, with almost flawless fungibility, divisibility, portability, scarcity, durability and un-consumability. But to somebody who already has access to modern financial tools like bank accounts and credit cards, there are very few new things bitcoin has to offer. The compelling uses for bitcoin so far are to serve as a vehicle for speculation, i.e., a ticket for the roller-coaster ride of the last few years, and as a method of gambling and making purchases on the dark markets. For traditional purchases, the merchants pay all of the fees and bear all of the risks of credit cards, so a modern consumer has no incentive to use bitcoin for such purchases. That may change, but until merchants find some way of offering a discount for the use of bitcoin, bitcoin demand is dependent on the discovery of new uses.

Convicted Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht faces life in prison at a sentencing hearing tomorrow in New York.

The end of the trial comes more than a year and a half after Ulbricht's legal battle with the US government first began. Ulbricht was found guilty in February of narcotics, computer hacking and conspiracy charges in connection with his operation of the Silk Road black market.

As reported by Wired, prosecutors asked the court earlier this week that Ulbricht be given "a lengthy sentence" to dissuade other would-be dark market operators.

My address:

1NZu9ERxuwKXLEpAcKdDwZTdnAr49x6YAY


Please quote for me. Thanks for making this thread work 

Dream Lover, a virtual relationship platform that allows users to send texts and receive pictures from professional models, is now supporting bitcoin as a payment option.

A product of the people behind adult entertainment studio Naughty America, Dream Lover follows in the footsteps of its sister website, which began accepting bitcoin in January 2014.

Launched later that year, Dream Lover allows users to spend bitcoin on account credits called Coins that can be used to purchase access to phone numbers assigned to Dream Lover models. Users pay for 30-day access to the phone number and any transaction fees.

Addy Yeow, the developer behind Bitnodes, has released a new hardware bitcoin node.

According to the website, which monitors bitcoin node performance worldwide, the Bitnodes Hardware B1 model comes equipped with the latest version of Bitcoin Core and is said to be a "low footprint quad-core single-board computer built and configured to operate a dedicated bitcoin full node".

Bitcoin attackers present "a new frontier" for cybercrime, a gathering of top security specialists heard in Barcelona this week.

Government agencies, banks, universities, private companies and consulting firms attending the Anti-Phishing Working Group's (APWG) eCrime 2015 event on Tuesday were warned by a panel of cryptocurrency experts that research in the sector is lagging behind criminal practice.

BTC-e has announced that US dollar withdrawals and deposits sent via bank transfer could be delayed for as long as two weeks.

In a 28th May message posted by the BTC-e support team, the European digital currency exchange blamed “a new American policy” for the anticipated delays.