In a recent blog post the International Monetary Fund presented a key feature of Bitcoin as a "risk" to its agenda, namely the one where Bitcoin allows people to transact without regard for various controls states would like to impose (archived). They further advocated the populist misconception that Bitcoin exists for the poor who have been excluded from existing financial services due to their poverty.
Monthly Archives: January 2016
Twitter's Jack Dorsey No Longer A Paper Billionaire
With the declining fortunes of his social media noise hole Twitter and his electronic fiat payments application Square being reflected in their stock price, Jack Dorsey is no longer a Billionaire according to his paper holdings. Sorry for your loss.
Netherlands Arrests 10 For Money
Police in the Netherlands arrested 10 men for moving their own money around, a phenomenon which is unfortunately still prosecuted as money laundering by the morally bankrupt (archived). Police allege the financial activities of these men are connected to other men who are actively involved in marketing drugs, the drug sellers remain "under investigation" instead of being arrested. According to "press" agents who were invited to accompany "law enforcement" agents the men were caught because they deposited money to their bank accounts and swiftly withdrew their money using ATMs. This is a peculiar fact to present as critical to the case as it presents as abnormal minimizing the amount of time cash stays in the bank, a sane course of action when the struggles of fiat institutions make bail ins, negative interest rates, and all kinds of other evils a danger for money left in the custody of a bank.
Linux Keyrings Bug Dates Back To 3.8 Kernel
Perception Point today publicly disclosed a vulnerability in the way Linux kernels from 2012's version 3.8 and later handle keys (archived).
Recent Bitcoin Direction
In recent days a number of developments have taken place in The Most Serene Republic of Bitcoin relevant to the future direction of Bitcoin, the experiment: Continue reading
Bitstamp Bans Russia
Bitstamp declared in an email that they are banning access from all IP addresses originating from the Russian Federation to their website.. The email was posted on Bitcointalk citing a draft proposal, via Coindesk, for Russia to restrict surrogate money. Coindesk claims upon speaking with the deputy minister of finance, Alexey Moiseev, that there are plans to create laws to punish any individual attempting to convert cryptocurrency into Rubles. However, no official law has yet to be implemented banning the use of Bitcoin in Russia, and a draft proposal to amend the use of surrogate money was published on a Russian news outlet which states (translated):
cryptocurrency, production of which is not carried out on the territory of the Russian Federation, will no longer be money substitutes
If ratified the aforementioned amendments would not go into effect until sometime 2017, thus cryptocurrency produced outside of Russian jurisdiction would technically be legal. Bitstamp's preemptive banning of Russian customers, similar to that of Satoshi Dice blacklisting US-based IP addressed, seems completely unwarranted. It has yet to be confirmed whether or not the funds of Russian customers are accessible for withdrawal or have been "frozen" by the exchange.
Lightning Network Code Finally Public
Code for the Lightning network daemon has been made public for the first time on Github (archived). The daemon at present is limited to operation on its own special testnet-L where transaction ids are normalized to prevent malleability. The daemon's README warns against deploying the daemon on the live Bitcoin network or any altcoins in its present state. Blockstream's publication of this code comes as fiat concerns grow more desperate to project their own failings on to Bitcoin through their latest "ClassicCoin" forking effort.
Fiat Feeling Pain Below The Corn Belt
A movement is building in the Middle West to compel the United States Government to raise the amount of debt that qualifies for restructuring under Chapter 12 "family farm" bankruptcy terms (archived). This push comes amid widespread fear from agricultural lenders concerned that the present limits would push many of the year's anticipated farm bankruptcies into either Chapter 7 liquidation or a far more expensive Chapter 11 reorganization, alternatives which would make their receiving eventual repayment far less likely. Depressed prices for corn and other staple agricultural products in the United States along with declining export sales are leading to grim prospects for 2016 on the farm. Sorry for your loss.
Desperate Ether Huffers Turn To Spam
CoinBase Blames DDoS For Irregular Exchange Behavior
Yesterday morning after a large price decline broomstick fired partially in response to Mike Hearn's temper tantrum, Coinbase's exchange experienced a complete outage. The outage was eventually resolved and trading resumed. Brian Armstrong took to Twitter and blamed the outage on a DDoS. He is claiming the attack consumed 1 TB of bandwidth. Coinbase solicited the services of Cloudflare in late December. This mitigation service served more as a marketing tactic than as a measure to establish actual security – a lesson Coinbase seems to have yet to learn.