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
Category Archives: Bitcoin
Foundation and No Such lAbs Continue Improving Bitcoin: V Ascendant
This past month's work by the Bitcoin Foundation and No Such lAbs shows substantial ground being laid for a better Bitcoin future with much of the work occurring on the V code management system and its reimplementations. The original V was authored by asciilifeform in Python and released at the end of August with the intent that it would be reimplemented numerous times by users seeking to understand its workings. In particular an implementation of V in perl by Bitcoin Foundation co-chair mod6 which is anticipated to be released for public consumption soon includes further advanced functionality including the production of flow graphs. Further work teased in the No Such lAbs September statement was the near completion of routing work for the Cardano boards and an Ada implementation of RSA encryption suitable for running on bare metal for the glory of the most serene republic. The Bitcoin Foundation intends to use V to package their bitcoind version 0.5.4 release.
Bharara Snubbed By Supreme Court
Bloomberg reports that the United States Supreme Court has refused to consider whether convictions won by Preet Bharara should not have been overturned on appeal (archived). While this decision to decline entertaining Bharara's zealotry only immediately rescues three defendants from the jeopardy of having their cases revived, it lays the groundwork for hundreds of other defendants to have their convictions or guilty pleas vacated under the higher standard for insider trading criminal liability established by the appellate court. This is a severe blow to the embattled Bharara's office which will now be burdened by the influx of defendants looking for freedom from the sanctions criminally imposed on them by Bharara. This is just the latest even in a long downward spiral of reality hitting Preet Bharara after his unjustly criminal prosecution of Ross Ulbricht.
USMS Schedules Final Silk Road Auction
The United States Marshals Service has announced its final Silk Road auction to sell 44,341 Bitcoins. The Auction will be held November 5th. The Bitcoins will be sold in 21 lots of 2,000 with a 22nd lot of 2,341 Bitcoin. Per the Marshals service this is the last planned sale of Bitcoins criminally seized from Ross Ulbricht by Preet Bharara and his co-conspirators. The full details of the sale along with a calendar of sale milestones is reproduced below: Continue reading
Malleability Issues Continue Testing Zero-conf Faithful
Coinkite in a blog post revealed that a number of their customer's transactions are continuing to be affected by malleability issues (archived) which stem from valid signed transactions having more than one potential transaction ID number until mined. Previously malleability concerns stemmed from different possible valid encodings with MtGox being a noted transaction encoding deviant. The malleability issue affecting Coinkite is that a transaction ID may use either the low or high S value from the ECDSA signature of a transaction. Transaction ID's have never been a reliable tool for distinguishing unconfirmed transactions, and any service that depends on using them to distinguish unmined yet broadcasted transactions does so at their and their customer's peril. Considering the disastrous forking that resulted from the last attempt to soft fork away a malleability vector it is unlikely this can or will be addressed through a soft fork process. Transaction malleability is one of many reasons to wait for confirmation through mining before accepting a Bitcoin transaction.
Eyewitness: People Walking Out of BitPay Office in Tears
According to a known and reliable eyewitness numerous people have been spotted leaving the BitPay office in tears. This suggests rumors of further rounds of layoffs at BitPay. The witness further suggest that the marketing department was hit hard as many people's phone lines at BitPay no longer work. BitPay's struggles over the last year suggest high burn rate is a severe danger to companies starting up in the Bitcoin space.
Bet Over Ethereum's Survival Rockets Past 100 BTC in Wagers
A six day old Bet on whether Ethereum rides into 2016 as a continuing economically viable thing has managed to so far draw more than 129 Bitcoin in wagers. The criteria assigned for Ethereum to fail include the value of Ethereum tokens falling under 0.001 BTC per Ethereum token during December 2015 or if the volume of Ethereum tokens traded during the month of December 2015 being less than 100 Bitcoin in value. At the present 23 Bitcoin have been staked on Ethereum's failure while 106.11 Bitcoin are staked on Ethereum surviving December. According the the wager on BitBet price information is to be taken from Poloniex. As of this writing Ethereum is trading for around 0.004 Bitcoin per token with an all time low price of 0.00243990 Bitcoin per token on August 10th shortly after Ethereum's release. Continue reading
CFTC Regulatory Butt Thunder Continues
As Bitcoin continues marching towards its grandiose destiny, it seems we just can’t get enough of the inept US Butt Thunder striking yet another fool boy and his pale imitation of a domestic commodity exchange. Continue reading
Pascal Reid Pleads Guilty Promising to Service USG "Law Enforcement" – Full Draft Plea Text
Pascal Reid who was charged for his involvement in trading Bitcoin on an individual basis in the state of Florida has announced his intention to accept a guilty plead which compels him to train "Law Enforcement" on Bitcoin related topics. He is further compelled as well to consult with Miami area police and the United States Secret Service on cases involving Bitcoin as they see fit. Reid's efforts to have charges dismissed back in November were denied by Judge Katherine Fernandez Rundle. In addition to working on the behalf of local and federal "Law Enforcement" agencies the plea agreement includes a sentence of 90 days in jail with credit for time served, and the agreement is further conditional on Reid reimbursing Florida $500 for their expenses in prosecuting him. The explicit public disclosure that the plea bargainer must turn stoolie is uncommon, but it highlights that the cost of signing the papers and avoiding trial is your own title to yourself. It is a tremendous credit to the local officers of the court that the explicit nature of this was made available to the public in this rare occasion. All parties involved in Bitcoin are advised against knowingly dealing with Pascal Reid, or any other party know to have entered a guilty plea, either in business or mere conversation for the entirety of the future. The full text of the draft plea agreement is below: Continue reading
Coinwallet Turns Stress Test Into Dust Givaway
Spam generator Coinwallet has taken a different avenue to carry out its latest network "stress test" by presenting its latest round as a "giveaway" where they are posting private keys owning numerous dust outputs on the Bitcointalk forum. According to their announcement they intend to distribute roughly 200 Bitcoin in this manner. Attempts to claim these outputs may explain the recent increase in the number of weird non-standard transactions hitting certain Bitcoin nodes. Previously suggested countermeasures for surviving a transaction flood including demands for a higher base transaction fee per kilobyte of transaction data should still work to help keep nodes running happily throughout this event.