Anthony Murgio and Yuri Lebedev operators of the Bitcoin/Fiat exchange Coin.mx were arrested by the FBI at their Florida homes last week and charges in the Southern District of New York by Preet Bharara's office were unsealed against them this week. The Feds accuse Coin.mx of trading roughly 1.8 million dollars worth of Bitcoin and Fiat using the pretext of a memorabilia collector's club to conceal their actual activities from their banks and later acquiring control of a small credit union for greater autonomy. Continue reading
Category Archives: Bitcoin
Limits of Moore's Law Challenge Intel – Questions About Future Performance
There are numerous reports out today highlighting chip maker Intel's struggles in transitioning from a 14 nanometer to a 10 nanometer manufacturing process. Intel is addressing this challenge by introducing a third generation of chips produced on a 14 nm process. Traditionally Intel delivers two generations of chips at each node size. The first is a shrink of the previous generations chips followed by chips with architectural changes at the same node size, followed by a process shrink. This pattern of Intel's is typically referred to as "Tick" and "Tock" releases at each node size. Continue reading
Transaction Fee Market Develops Amid Surge in Transaction Volume
This week a flood of transactions which has alternately been called a spam attack or a stress test has forced Bitcoin users to adapt to a competitive transaction fee market for the first time since early 2013 when blocksize was consistently near default soft limit of 250 kilobytes. Numerous Bitcoin users and businesses are adapting to the flood of transactions by increasing their own transaction fees. At the present there are more than seventy megabytes of unconfirmed transactions leading to more naive users on Reddit and other social media to revert to speculating about blocksize hardforks which would merely amplify the problems this sort of flooding attack poses. Continue reading
Most Serene Republic Begins Advertising Public Blockchain Seed Nodes
In preparation for potential improvements to the Bitcoin reference client, citizens of Bitcoin's Most Serene Republic have begun establishing high availability Bitcoin nodes located in datacenters and hosted on dedicated hardware to serve as publicly advertised seed nodes from which Bitcoin users may sync their blockchains and more peers. The improvements to the foundation's reference implementation which spurred this move are the removal of all Domain Name System code from the client to allow an entirely statically built bitcoind as well as the removal of the legacy IRC initial peer discovery mechanism to reduce the attack surface bitcoind presents. Continue reading
Another Post BIP 66 Fork Dies after 3 Blocks
A second fork has followed the initial post BIP 66 fork further highlighting the continued danger of so called "soft" forking changes to the consensus code of Bitcoin network clients. The second fork persisted from 21:50 through to 23:40 on July 5th, 2015. Implementing the rather non-controversial change proposed by BIP 66 to enforce strict DER encoding on ECDSA signatures has without a doubt increased the fragility of the Bitcoin network such that users of all Bitcoin clients ought to consider waiting beyond the traditional 6 mined blocks before considering a transaction confirmed. Unless all major miners begin mining with fully validating node software, this instability is likely to continue indefinitely into the future with users of the latest versions of "Bitcoin Core" at risk of finding themselves stranded, maybe even permanently on the short side of an enduring fork.
Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Resigns in Failure
Greek banks continue to struggle beneath the onerous burden of financial debt imposed by their left-leaning welfarist government and as such are teetering on the brink of insolvency.1 Despite a slew of highly restrictive capital controls and out-of-the-blue "bank holidays" designed to maintain some modest levels of liquidity in the face of branch and ATM queues across the country, the condition of Greece's banks is less than ideal and quite possibly insufficient for long-term survival. Continue reading
The prospect of Greek debt default isn't just weighing down the local economy either. Inextricably intertwined as the global fiat economy is, the Euro has taken some damage, as have a number of stock markets around the world, as many are wondering aloud whether Greece is the canary in the coalmine of paper promises. ↩
Chain Fork Reveals BIP Process Broken
This weekend the Bitcoin Blockchain experienced a forking incident due a discrepancy between what the expectations of a group developing a Bitcoin network client named "Bitcoin Core" and the actual behavior of Bitcoin miners. The developers of the Bitcoin Core client through a process they refer to as "Bitcoin Improvement Proposals" or BIPs introduced a "soft" forking change into their client which would be triggered through a voting mechanism. In this case miners had appeared to vote in favor of BIP 66, which would have enforced stricter encoding of signatures in an attempt to address the transaction malleability issue which is most notable for having been used as a scapegoat by Mt Gox while actually having little to do with their collapse. Continue reading
Carl Mark Force IV to Plead Guilty
Carl Mark Force IV, formerly of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration has reportedly entered an agreement to plead guilty charges stemming from his theft of Bitcoin from the Silk Road marketplace. This plea agreement follows that of Shaun Bridges who was charged the same day as Force IV in an unrelated case of theft from the Silk Road. Force IV is expected to enter his guilty plea formally in court on July 1st, 2015. Working for a venture called CoinMKT Force IV further committed theft from one of that firm's customers by freezing the customer's account balance and repossessing the value for himself. Force IV converted most of his stolen and extorted Bitcoin value to the local currency of the United States and had the local currency wired to bank accounts under his control adding to the evidence prosecutors were able to use to damn Force IV.
XOtika.tv Bitcoin Live Adult Entertainment Reaches Beta
Bitcoin entrepreneur Naphex recently unveiled a beta version of his adult webcam site XOtika.tv for public testing and enjoyment. At present the service is only tested to work on Google's Chrome web browser, but the technological aspects of the service are continually iterating at this time for continued improvement. Even at this early stage though Naphex has recruited a number of high quality talents to provide numerous entertainment options for viewers. Unlike some older services like LiveJasmin which have happened to eventually sign on with third party Bitcoin payment providers, XOtika is built around Bitcoin and works to leverage advantages inherent to Bitcoin for the benefit of users and performers. Between the solid and improving technological base and the early stable of high quality entertainers XOtika has the potential to be the first serious contender born in Bitcoin to enjoy success in the live online adult entertainment industry.
Shaun Bridges Pleads Guilty to Silk Road Theft
Shaun Bridges who was charged the same day as Carl Mark Force IV has plead guilty to money laundering and obstruction of justice charges. Bridges as an agent of the United States Secret Service used passwords he coerced from a customer service representative of the Silk Road to move what prosecutors describe as $820,000 in Bitcoin value to a Bitcoin address under his control from Silk Road accounts.