BitVPS a company plagued by problems since it's beginnings has lost access to its servers providing hosting to customers. The client portion of the site has been down for maintenance for several days causing customers to show up in the company's IRC channel for support. Unfortunate for those users, arij of BitVPS stated the company in addition to having lost access to its servers has no redundant backups of the servers, making for a complete loss of all clients' data. arij stated on IRC: Continue reading
Author Archives: thestringpuller
Consumers Begin Revolting, Bitcoin Is Not Visa
Gavin Andressen stated early on in his pursuit of a hard limit that he wanted Bitcoin to scale to Visa levels, stating the payment network's transaction throughput as a frame of reference. There is a common misconception about the structure of traditional electronic payment networks – this has caused the lemmings of the Bitcoin world to set an unrealistic goal of competing with an industry that is filled with holes. Bitcoin's decentralized ledger prevents it from ever being utilized as a retail payment network directly. Continue reading
XT Node Blacklists Fail to Prevent DDoS Attack
Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen recently chose to use the Bitcoin-XT project to attempt to provoke a hard fork in the blockchain to increase the block size limit. Users who support Gavin's code to hard fork the network to increase the block size, began switching to, and launching Bitcoin-XT nodes. After Mike Hearn's declaration of war, the number of XT-Nodes on the network began to increase. However Mike Hearn began seeing a pattern of nodes getting attacked by heavy DDoS attacks. Continue reading
BIP-101 Syndicate Shares Fiat Ties, Opposition to Actual Bitcoin
Upon a Crunchbase investigation of the companies attached to the open letter (text) published on Blockchain.info's blog supporting BIP-101, a correlation arose that indicates these companies have most likely been compromised for some time. All of these companies who have been known to employ heavy KYC terms, are heavily funded by fiat institutions that want to pervert Bitcoin. Continue reading
Trilema Publishes Bitcoin Competency Exam
Qntra earlier reported on the deficiencies of the CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium (C4) operated by the good friends of Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum infamy. The lunacy of the certifications inspired Mircea Popescu to create a superior alternative. Trilema has published a system for scoring one's basic comprehension of Bitcoin called the Basic Bitcoin Competency Certification. Continue reading
Concerns for the Toomim Brothers Mining
BIP-101 requires 750 of the last 1000 consecutive blocks to have a version bits set to 0x20000007 in hex to trigger a hard fork to remove the block size limit. Qntra recently published an article indicating the negligible miner support for XT, of which Jonathan Toomim commented the brothers' mining initiative would be supporting BIP-101 with blocks they solve. This lead into a brief investigation of the Toomim brothers who use GPG, yet are not in the Web of Trust. Continue reading
Hearn's Blacklist Shenanigans
Qntra and others have been detailing potential ulterior motives for the push for an XT hard fork. Populist support for "Bitcoin"XT tends to ignore code that has not been well publicized or that they find inconvenient to acknowledge. The code in question relates to the deanonymization of XT nodes running on Tor and the blacklisting of Tor exit addresses. This is achieved through an IP address blacklist of nodes which "misbehave" and checked daily against a list of nodes maintained by Mike Hearn which the XT client dutifully fetches. Continue reading
Coinwallet Plans Spam While the Spamming is Cheap
Last month a venture calling itself "Coinwallet" flooded the Bitcoin network with spam in what the company called a "stress test." The spam delayed underpaying transactions without fees insufficient to secure space to be confirmed in a block resulting in a scenario where a fee market for block space could develop. A Coinwallet representative recently stated the company will be performing another stress test in early September, claiming there will close to 4.6 GB worth of spam that will flood the network. Continue reading
Karpeles Facing Charges in Japan?
Mark Karpeles the CEO of the infamously defunct Mt. Gox is facing charges on fraud based on a
report released this week. An anonymous translation of the report can be seen below: Continue reading
Ripple Labs Fined for Violating Bank Secrecy Act
The United States Financial Crimes Enforement Network (FinCEN) released a statement today charging Ripple Labs Inc. with a $700,000 fine for willfully violating the requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act. XRP II, LLC a subsidiary of Ripple Labs Inc. operates Ripple Trade a website where users can trade various assets and currencies for XRP. FinCEN claims Ripple's subsidiary XRP II, LLC "failed to maintain an adequate anti-money laundering (AML) program" compliant with the BSA. This marks the first time a virtual currency exchanger has received a civil penalty from the United States government.