Vice Motherboard is alleging that the account used by the FBI inflitrator into the Silk Road 2.0 was named 'Cirrus', and that the user had notably at one point been a staff member of the original Silk Road. This conclusion was reached through a process of elimination. Vice also reports that some people involved in Darknet markets had suspicions about this user for some time.
Category Archives: Bitcoin
Judge Rejects Florida Man's Bid to Dismiss Case
Florida Judge Fleur Lobree dismissed Pascal Reed's motion to drop illegal money transfer charges in an case relating to him selling roughly $25,000 worth of Bitcoin to a Secret Service agent in a sting last winter. Reed's lawyer argued that as merely a token of value applying Florida's money transmission laws to individuals as opposed to corporations would set a horrifying precedent:
"The statute was intended for the exchange of money for money, If you extend it to anything of value, then any customer using a credit card to buy something, anyone holding a yard sale and accepting cash, is a money transferer."
According to Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle two other people were arrested as a result of this sting targeting "individuals engaged in high volume Bitcoin activity."
Silbert Syndicate Wins 48,000 BTC at auction
Barry Silbert has self disclosed on twitter that his bidding syndicate has won 48,000 BTC in the recent United States Marshal's Service auction. Tim Draper had earlier announced winning the other 2000 BTC up for bidding. Silbert's tweet:
Barry Silbert Announcement: Pleased to share that the syndicate organized by
@BitcoinTrust & our trading division won 48k bitcoin auctioned by US Marshals
Ethan Burnside Fined By SEC
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has fined Ethan Burnside for operating the Bitcoin Trading Company (BTC-TC) and Litecoin Global (LTC-Global) virtual currency securities exchanges. Per the SEC's order Ethan Burnside will pay: Continue reading
Blockchain.info Discloses Vulnerability Window
On their blog, Blockchain.info has disclosed that a routine update left them serving insecure code to customers using their wallet between 12:00 AM and 2:30 AM GMT today. All customers who used the Blockchain.info web wallet to interface to create wallets, generate addresses, or send transactions are reported to be affected. The problem given the scope appears to be that Blockchain.info was serving weak pseudo-random number generating software.
11 Bidders 27 Bids in Latest USMS Bitcoin Auction
Reuters reports that 11 parties have entered 27 bids for Bitcoins in the latest Auction by the United States Marshals Service. Reuters notes in their write up that Steve Englander of Citi anticipated most bids being entered below market price.
Congress Man Proposes Bill (H.R. 5777 Full Text Attached)
Outgoing United States Representative Steve Stockman of Texas has proposed a bill, H.R. 5777 that if it became law would impose a moratorium of five years on regulatory and statutory constraints upon cryptocurrency, as well as changing the treatment of cryptocurrencies under United States tax law to that enjoyed by traditional currencies. The moratorium proposed would apply to regulations and statutes at both the state and federal level. The chance this bill passes either house of the legislature is remote given a lack of support and Stockman's limited remaining time in Congress. If it makes it out of Congress its chance of becoming law would still be rather remote, because it would arrive on Obama's desk and require his signature. At present the bill has been introduced to the floor of the House and referred to both the House Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. Continue reading
Justice Department's Subpoena to Theymos of Bitcointalk
In a continuation of the saga of the subpoena sent to Theymos of Bitcointalk, the subpoena has now been released. Full plain text below: Continue reading
First Difficulty Drop of the ASIC Age
Today's difficulty change marks the first time since the introduction of Bitcoin mining ASICs that the network difficulty has dropped. Network difficulty went from 40,300,030,328 to 40,007,470,271 which is a loss of 0.73 percent. The first difficulty decrease happened in 2011 when pool operators discovered the existence of botnet miners for the first time and banned several. Other difficulty decreases happened during the GPU mining era when price dips made the energy cost of mining unprofitable in the near term. Since January 2013, the month before the introduction of the first commercial ASIC miners by Avalon mining difficulty has increased by more than 1,300,000 percent.
Australia: The Tax Institute Calls for 'Voluntary' Bitcoin Registry, Treating Bitcoin as Currency
In a filing with the Australian Parliament the Tax Institute proposed a number of changes and suggestions for future measures the Australian Government could consider with respect to Bitcoin. Among those changes were treating Bitcoin as a currency rather than a good which would end the burden of processing GST taxes on Bitcoin purchases, a bane which has lead at least one startup to leave Australia. Also proposed is a "voluntary registry" of Bitcoin addresses in order to: Continue reading