Monthly Archives: March 2015

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Decreases For Second Time This Year

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With what is the sixth adjustment in the Bitcoin mining difficulty for 2015, the difficulty has decreased to 46,717,549,645. This is a reduction of -1.50% over March 8th's all time high of 47,427,554,951. The hash rate as today's change stands at 334,417,246 GH/s.

Today's change also marks the 2nd time that the difficulty has adjusted downwards during 2015. For the sake of comparison, the mining difficulty only decreased twice last year. Despite this, 2015's hash rate has remained above levels seen throughout 2014.

Boost VC Embraces Child Founded Start Up

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As the great Bitcoin recession continues, 17 year old Louison Dumont's Bitproof has caught the eye of VCs, having been accepted into the Boost VC incubator. The service allows users to certify and prove ownership of a document and its proof of existence. The company is attempting to raise VC capital although the service has struggled to find a monetization avenue

Document certification is a valuable service when done correctly, however at a first glance Bitproof.io seems to have a fundamental problem. The deedbot specification proposed on Trilema requires users to submit documents that are GPG signed, which creates a strong link between owner and document. Bitproof uses a username based identity to certify a document which lacks the non-repudiation strength GPG provides.

March 19th OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Overview

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The pre-announced OpenSSL updates purport to address 13 vulnerabilities. Two of the vulnerabilities were graded as being of High severity by the OpenSSL project. The first, CVE-2015-0291 allows client connections to engage in a denial of service attack against servers running OpenSSL. The second high severity issue was the older CVE-2015-0204 where RSA connections could be silently degraded to export quality RSA, originally OpenSSL graded this as a low security vulnerability but reclassified this as a high severity vulnerability. Continue reading →

Users Of Evo Marketplace & BTC-E Are Like Two Peas In A Pod

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With claims that the shut down of the Evolution marketplace may have netted the owners as much as 130,000 BTC, rumours began circulating yesterday that BTC-E ceased withdrawals so as to limit the ability of the thieves to exchange their new found riches for what some people call untainted coins.

The rumour that BTC-E had paused withdrawals as a result of stolen coins entering the exchange came from an Australian by the name of paulgr. Paulgr, who is a moderator for the BTC-E chat room said: Continue reading →

UK Regulates Self Out of Bitcoin

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Regulators in the United Kingdom have announced they will begin applying anti-money laundering rules on digital currency exchanges. The British treasury offers that the move will magically promote innovation and lessen criminal activity. This move however in reality means something other than what Reuters' press release on behalf of the Treasury supposes. Continue reading →

National Bank of Romania Clarifies Its Position On Bitcoin

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In a press release dated the 11th of March 2015, the National Bank of Romania clarified its position on Bitcoin stating that it is neither a national nor foreign currency, that no-one is obligated to accept bitcoin as a means of payment and that is not a form of electronic money as defined by the law.

Referencing the risks associated with Bitcoin as claimed by the European Central Bank and European Banking Authority, BNR advises consumers to be mindful of such risks and finished by saying that the BNR will attempt to keep track of Bitcoin's progress.

Bitcoin Foundation Reaches Release

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The Bitcoin Foundation chaired by mod6 and ben_vulpes has announced its first release milestone. The release dubbed 0.5.3.1 by the foundation consists of a set of patches applied to the original 0.5.3 Satoshi codebase and recipe for combining it all into a static Bitcoin daemon build. This release removes a substantial amount of cruft from the original 0.5.3 release including hooks for Qt and Windows builds along with the problematic alert system and universal plug and play.  This release works on Linux with supported release for other platforms planned in the future. The release tarball is available here.

Journalist Barrett Brown Bears Full Restitution Brunt

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After a guilty plea that when presented to the judge assigned him 63 months of time spent in a Federal prison and ordered nearly a million dollars in restitution, Barrett Brown's effort to have the restitution reduced has been denied by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Brown was ordered to pay restitution to Stratfor and others based on the full calculated damages for the crime of reporting on a crime where the actors responsible for committing the criminal act have not been found, convicted, or otherwise sanctioned. Continue reading →

Security As A Coffin

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On Thursday, Sakurity published an exploit on their blog regarding Authy's SMS 2-Factor Authentication API. The bug allows for an attacker to bypass the now notorious 2FA window with the string

../sms

Coinbase is one of Authy's customers, who claims to "take careful measures to ensure that your bitcoin is as safe as possible." The bitcoin webwallet provider has been a vocal advocate of 2FA, popularizing it to the point of Gavin proposing its inclusion in Bitcoin Core. Continue reading →

Evolution Shuts Up Shop, Taking User Funds With It

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In a forum where its users discuss the buying and selling of drugs in full view of the public, rumours are circulating that the darknet market place named Evolution has closed its doors with the owners taking with them anywhere up to 43,000 BTC in user funds.

Deepdotweb first reported yesterday on the difficulties Evolution users were facing in withdrawing their bitcoins. To placate those users, Kimble, one of the owners of Evolution provided this explanation for the delay: Continue reading →