Review Category : Uncategorized

 
 

Bitcoin Foundation On Capitol Hill, Day Two: Legislators

Representatives from the Bitcoin Foundation spent the beginning of this week on Capital Hill representing the bitcoin community to federal policy makers and law enforcement. After meeting with nearly a dozen federal agencies on Monday, yesterday served as an opportunity to interface with legislators. The team met with congressional staff from the offices of five legislators across both the Senate and House of Representatives. With Congress currently in recess, the Foundation capitalized on a rare opportunity to speak at length with government officials, whose schedules are often lighter between sessions. The timing apparently worked to their advantage, as they were …

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Riddell Williams Signs Prominent Bitcoin Legal Voices To Head Payments Practice

Seattle-based law firm Riddell Williams just signed two of the bitcoin community’s most prolific legal voices to chair their payments division. While the firm boasts a 100+ year history and more than 60 attorneys on staff, the decision to bring on Ryan Straus and Daniel Friedberg to lead the group makes a strong statement about the firm’s view on the future of financial law. Friedberg has published a number of pieces related to bitcoin regulation, including guest writing for the Bitcoin Foundation. He’s often quoted as a bitcoin legal reference by major news outlets, including recent appearances in Business Insider, Tech Cocktail, …

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Bitcoin Protocol Implementation of Native Two-Factor Authentication

At a town-hall style discussion in June, Bitcoin Foundation Chief Scientist Gavin Andresen cited wallet security as the most pressing issue in the bitcoin community. Though his solution at the time was hardware wallets, such as Trezor, he recently posted an alternative on GitHub: 2-factor authentication built into the client. The challenge facing users hosting wallets on their own computer is that their PC becomes a single point of failure. Once a security vulnerability occurs, a sophisticated attacker will have little trouble locating a wallet file, transferring it to their own computers and logging keystrokes to determine the password. Hardware …

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US Reaches 1 Million Bitcoin Downloads, Chinese Interest Fades Dramatically

At the end of last month, we noticed remarkable growth in data points surrounding bitcoin adoption in China. During May, China was the only country among the top 10 for most bitcoin client downloads of all time to see month-over-month download growth, taking the top spot for the May. Moreover, CNY as a percentage of total BTC exchange volume more than tripled since the beginning of 2013. Just a few weeks earlier we noted that China was almost dead even with the US for total nodes connected to the bitcoin network. That growth trend tempered quickly in June. Chinese Download Volume …

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China Climbs To Top Spot In Monthly Bitcoin Downloads, Second Overall

Last month we showed the initial impact after Chinese state-run broadcaster CCTV ran a piece about bitcoin. The Chinese presence in bitcoin has continued to accelerate since then, even as the rest of the world tempered its rate of adoption. In May, China surpassed the previously-dominant US in number of monthly bitcoin downloads, with 85K compared to 64K in the US. Not only did China climb it’s way to the top spot for the first time, but it was also the only country out of the top 10 highest all-time downloading nations to increase the number of monthly downloads in May. For …

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DHS Inquiry Leads to Lowest USD/Bitcoin Trading Volume In Months

Bitcoin trading volume has plummeted since news broke that the Department of Homeland Security issued a seizure warrant that stopped all activity between Dwolla and the Mt. Gox exchange. As of today, the 5-Day moving average of USD trading volume is at the lowest level in at least a year and a half (the data is a bit spotty beyond that), other than the last week in December 2012. In addition to total market volume declining, Mt. Gox is losing footing as the dominant player in the space. As of May 17, Gox was doing roughly 81% of total USD …

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Liberty City Ventures Announces $15M Fund For Bitcoin Investments

This morning, Liberty City Ventures announced a dedicated Digital Currency Fund to propel the growth of bitcoin companies. LCV has been active in supporting the bitcoin startup community, organizing the monthly NYC Bitcoin Startups Meetup. They’ve also announced plans to launch a bitcoin startup incubator to help early stage bitcoin companies. We expect LCV will join with the hatchery for that endeavor, as they not only announced the launch of an NYC incubator as well, but also host the meetups LCV organizes. Liberty City Ventures, a reference to the New York City themed installment in the Grand Theft Auto video game series, …

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Reminder: Hard Fork May 15th – Update to 0.8.1

In upcoming bitcoin news, TGB would like to remind all bitcoin-qt users to update their client to 0.8.1 before May 15th. On March 11th, there was a fork in the block chain: A bitcoin miner running version 0.8.0 created a large block (at height 225,430) that is incompatible with earlier versions of Bitcoin. The result was a block chain fork, with miners, merchants and users running the new version of bitcoin accepting, and building on, that block, and miners, merchants and users running older versions of bitcoin rejecting it and creating their own block chain. All pools running the 0.7 …

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Bitcoin: The Newest Tool In China’s Currency War Chest

Throughout history wars have been fought for a number of reasons, not the least of which is economic gain. The traditional means to that end has been physical combat, but we’re now in a new era – an era where wars are increasingly fought with technical and financial means. The US has already fallen victim to widespread cyber attacks originating in China and is suspected of conducting its own technological attacks on others. The recent economic crisis showed the world how susceptible even powerful nations are to financial tumult. Displacing the USD as the global reserve currency would put China …

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