Monthly Archives: January 2015

Robert Faiella AKA BTCKing Sentenced To Four Years In Prison

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Robert Faiella, better known as BTCKing and Charlie Shrem's partner in crime, was today sentenced to four years in prison for the part he played in selling USD $1 million worth of bitcoin to Silk Road users.

Using Shrem's BitInstant service, Faiella fulfilled orders by Silk Road users who wished to purchase bitcoins so as to then use them to buy their drug of choice via the Silk Road. Pleading guilty, former plumber1 Faiella told the court that his decision to act as a broker to people looking to purchase bitcoin came as a result of having no other way to support his family. Continue reading →

  1. Mushrooms anyone? ↩

Bitcoin Finance in 2014

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Bitcoin had a tumultuous year in 2014. The headline news all year was the greatest collapse in the exchange rate since 2013 (remember in April '13 when Bitcoin went from $260 to $50?). There were also scams enacted on a massive scale – the size of which had not been seen since 2012. Very few businesses flourished, and many floundered. All in all, just another year in the single most fun and exciting phenomenon of our lifetime. Continue reading →

Prosecutors Seek to Bar DPR Interview From Jury – Updated

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In Wired Andy Greenberg writes that the Preet Bharara's team prosecuting the Silk Road case wants to bar the Jury from being exposed to the only interview done with the Dread Pirate Roberts of the Silk Road. The interview done by Andy Greenberg for Forbes is notable for sounding to Department of Homeland Security agents a lot like Mark Karpelès and containing a number of answers from the Dread Pirate Roberts which supports the argument presently being advanced by the defense that in spite of founding the Silk Road and being caught holding the bad for the Silk Road Ulbricht had little to do with the Silk Road for most of its history. Continue reading →

Preview of Obama's Internet Law Enforcement Proposals

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Tonight Obama takes to the pulpit for his speech nominally designated the "State of the Union" though so far his earlier attempts had more the impression  of being a wish list of changes Obama would like applied to the Union. Ready to go on the White House website he even has a pdf of changes he would like to make to the federal law in order to deter "Cyber crime" further through empowering law enforcement. Continue reading →

Spammer Escalates to Murder

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Minh Nguyen who previously was most notable for starting the venture capital funded spam fountain Plaxo has allegedly murdered his ex-wife's husband. Nguyen allegedly killed the man in the victim's own home. Plaxo raised $28.3 million in venture capital funding trailblazing new frontiers in spam proliferation before being acquired by Comcast in 2008.

British Banker's Association: Bitcoin A Threat to Sterling, May Aid Terrorists

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Just like the seasoned freedom fighter who decapitates his victim without hesitation, so too does Bitcoin. Riding high upon the war horse that is its network, a bitcoin dismounts so that it may grab a fiat currency by the hair so as to tilt the victim's head back before slitting its throat. As the life blood of fiat begins to drain away, its issuers and supporters cannot believe nor accept what is happening to it. Continue reading →

Assbot Gains Web of Trust Functionality

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Recent downtime for nanotube's gribble bot on Freenode demonstrated a critical single point of failure in Bitcoin infrastructure. Today as a remedy to the problem Kakobrekla unveiled asswot functionality in assbot greatly increasing the robustness of the infrastructure Bitcoin business builds on top of. In an important improvement in the authentication model, all Web of Trust operations are now authenticated by decrypting one time passwords. The one time passwords expire within 15 minutes of being invoked, but assbot supports receiving decrypted passwords out of order.