Users Of Evo Marketplace & BTC-E Are Like Two Peas In A Pod

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With claims that the shut down of the Evolution marketplace may have netted the owners as much as 130,000 BTC, rumours began circulating yesterday that BTC-E ceased withdrawals so as to limit the ability of the thieves to exchange their new found riches for what some people call untainted coins.

The rumour that BTC-E had paused withdrawals as a result of stolen coins entering the exchange came from an Australian by the name of paulgr. Paulgr, who is a moderator for the BTC-E chat room said: Continue reading →

UK Regulates Self Out of Bitcoin

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Regulators in the United Kingdom have announced they will begin applying anti-money laundering rules on digital currency exchanges. The British treasury offers that the move will magically promote innovation and lessen criminal activity. This move however in reality means something other than what Reuters' press release on behalf of the Treasury supposes. Continue reading →

National Bank of Romania Clarifies Its Position On Bitcoin

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In a press release dated the 11th of March 2015, the National Bank of Romania clarified its position on Bitcoin stating that it is neither a national nor foreign currency, that no-one is obligated to accept bitcoin as a means of payment and that is not a form of electronic money as defined by the law.

Referencing the risks associated with Bitcoin as claimed by the European Central Bank and European Banking Authority, BNR advises consumers to be mindful of such risks and finished by saying that the BNR will attempt to keep track of Bitcoin's progress.

Bitcoin Foundation Reaches Release

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The Bitcoin Foundation chaired by mod6 and ben_vulpes has announced its first release milestone. The release dubbed 0.5.3.1 by the foundation consists of a set of patches applied to the original 0.5.3 Satoshi codebase and recipe for combining it all into a static Bitcoin daemon build. This release removes a substantial amount of cruft from the original 0.5.3 release including hooks for Qt and Windows builds along with the problematic alert system and universal plug and play.  This release works on Linux with supported release for other platforms planned in the future. The release tarball is available here.

Journalist Barrett Brown Bears Full Restitution Brunt

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After a guilty plea that when presented to the judge assigned him 63 months of time spent in a Federal prison and ordered nearly a million dollars in restitution, Barrett Brown's effort to have the restitution reduced has been denied by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Brown was ordered to pay restitution to Stratfor and others based on the full calculated damages for the crime of reporting on a crime where the actors responsible for committing the criminal act have not been found, convicted, or otherwise sanctioned. Continue reading →

Security As A Coffin

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On Thursday, Sakurity published an exploit on their blog regarding Authy's SMS 2-Factor Authentication API. The bug allows for an attacker to bypass the now notorious 2FA window with the string

../sms

Coinbase is one of Authy's customers, who claims to "take careful measures to ensure that your bitcoin is as safe as possible." The bitcoin webwallet provider has been a vocal advocate of 2FA, popularizing it to the point of Gavin proposing its inclusion in Bitcoin Core. Continue reading →

Evolution Shuts Up Shop, Taking User Funds With It

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In a forum where its users discuss the buying and selling of drugs in full view of the public, rumours are circulating that the darknet market place named Evolution has closed its doors with the owners taking with them anywhere up to 43,000 BTC in user funds.

Deepdotweb first reported yesterday on the difficulties Evolution users were facing in withdrawing their bitcoins. To placate those users, Kimble, one of the owners of Evolution provided this explanation for the delay: Continue reading →

Largest Bitcoin Bet Resolved

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The largest Bitcoin bet in terms of absolute value, where on BitBet.us Mircea Popescu laid down 1000 BTC of his own funds on the proposition that Bitcoin would outperform Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway class A stock has been resolved as "No" with Bitcoin's exchange rate having suffered over the past 12 months. A year ago Mircea announced the bet on his blog Trilema and further declared that to hedge the bet he had sold Berkshire. Asked about how he felt about the bet's final outcome he offered: Continue reading →

OpenSSL Severe Vulnerability to be Revealed March 19th

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The OpenSSL project has announced that on March 19th they will be releasing updates to address what they are referring to as a "highest severity defect" affecting all of their supported versions. Details of the vulnerability are being kept under embargo until the patches are released, though this time the OpenSSL has had the courtesy to disclose the issue to the LibreSSL core team. Here's a snippet from the OpenSSL security policy on high security vulnerabilities: Continue reading →