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
Vessenes' Foundation Drops Sponsorship of Node Explorer
The Vessenes' Foundation was revealed in a social media post to have dropped sponsorship for the Bitnodes.io Bitcoin node explorer, turning the project over to Raspberry Pi reseller 21.co's care. It is not yet entirely clear what this means for the Bitnodes.io Banana Pi reseller program.
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.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Tops 60 Billion For The First Time
The Bitcoin mining difficulty has increased for the 7th consecutive time with the difficulty now standing at 60,813,224,039 – a gain of 2.49% over the September 17th adjustment.
Qntra (S.QNTR) September 2015 Statement
Windows TrueCrypt Fatally Flawed
Continued research after the first TrueCrypt audit yielded inconclusive results has discovered fatal privilege escalation vulnerabilities allowing for complete takeover (archived). So far this is known to affect TrueCrypt on Windows boxes, but there is still potential for other flaws to be discovered in TrueCrypt on other platforms. Details of the vulnerabilities are not yet disclosed, but this supports the possibility that it may not be possible at all to develop software offering any level of security on the Windows platform.
Buterin's Waterfall Nearly Spent
In a post on the Ethereum foundation's blog Vitalik Buterin with substantial optimism announced that the Ethereum Foundation has nearly spent down all of its reserves (archived). The Vitalik claims Ethereum Foundation expenses of roughly 410,000 Swiss Francs per month though he assures readers he can bring that down to a third of a million Swiss Francs in the near future and a quarter of a million Swiss Francs per month further into the future. Buterin claims approximate reserves of 200,000 Swiss Francs, 1800 BTC which will continue to be dumped onto the markets, and 2,700,000 of their own Ether tokens. A further amount of roughly half a million Swiss Francs, or nearly a month of their operating costs is claimed to be held in reserve for legal contingencies. Buterin's own estimate for the depletion of his Foundation's funds is June of 2016 though their burn rate suggests insolvency may arrive much sooner. When paired with claims of extraordinarily desperate measures being taken by Confiscatory agents of the state to acquire more Bitcoin (archived), it appears Buterin's Waterfall may be nearing the end of its most effective days.
Pumpkin Extortion Attempt Squashed
The Daily Mail reports (archive) a 53 year old ex-soldier has been jailed after he attempted to blackmail an elderly pumpkin farmer into paying him £50,0001 in bitcoin. Fearing for his livelihood, farmer David Bowman reported the threat to police and was then instructed by the UK's Foods Standards Agency to plough the field of concern, resulting in the loss of £120,0002 of stock. Continue reading
Editor Under Fire
A heavily redacted document detailing the deposition of CoinFire editor Michael Johnson regarding what were threats presumably made by Homero Joshua Garza of GAW Miners and his cohorts has been released. While the document does not mention Mr Garza by name, it is clear to anyone familiar with the GAW Miners and Paycoin debacles that many of the numerous gaps in the document are a reference to him and his partners in crime.
The original PDF document is available here, and the text of that document is quoted below. It outlines threats of assassination as well as Michael Johnson's eagnerness to work with LEA due to concerns for his own safety as well as that of family, friends and colleagues. Continue reading