A small mining firm referring to itself as HashingSpace Corporation has pushed out a press release bragging that they have retained the services of IdentityMind Global to implement anti money laundering, know your customer, and other criminal regulatory services antithetical to Bitcoin. IdentityMind Global claims to have relationships with "more than 40" "virtual currency businesses" most of which serve as interfaces between fiat currency and Bitcoin. HashingSpace professes to primarily be a mining and miner hosting operation that also just happens to provide other services like a "wallet" and Bitcoin ATMs. On social media earlier this summer HashingSpace has claimed to possess 5 petahashes of mining hardware, an amount eerily similar to that claimed by GAW Miners before their collapse.
Author Archives: Aaron 'BingoBoingo' Rogier
Surviving a Transaction Flood
As populist noisemakers continue to push for blocksize inflation and services set to benefit from forcing users off of full nodes announce "stress tests" composed of transaction floods, the issue of making sure your transactions propagate with timely confirmations and your node stays online come to the forefront. Thankfully there are measures that can be taken now to which can provide benefits during a transaction flood and as fuller blocks becomes a more normal state for the Bitcoin network. Continue reading
Many Pools Rejecting XT in Favor of Other Undefined Fork
A handful of large mining pools including those operated by BTCChina and Bitfury have rejected Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's XTCoin proposal in favor of a different forking change which would leave them still more influence on their forked blockchain. The pools currently authoring blocks which support the proposal known as BIP 100 currently compromise a bit more than 50% of the hashrate, an amount which if BIP 100 actually had any working implementations would be insufficient to trigger a switch without an attack orphaning all blocks without a "triggering" vote.
At the moment BIP 100 exists as a proposal requesting comments, so it is not possible at the time of this writing to describe any of its points with certainty beyond votes for it being a clear repudiation of the XT effort. As BIP 100 exists now it preserves the 32 MB maximum message size as a hard explicit limit which the blocksize limit must stay under on a BIP 100 forked chain. With so many particulars of BIP 100 not being set in stone yet, it is not unlikely that support for it may wane though at the moment support is likely to persist as a repudiation of the XT effort to hijack Bitcoin.
Agora Marketplace Suspends Operations Citing Potential Tor Attack
Concerns about Tor security are cited by the Agora Marketplace as the reason behind their recent decision to suspend service. According to the Agora administrator research into deanonymization attacks as well as suspicious activity are prompting them to move servers as a temporary mitigating measure with a rewrite of their entire software stack being necessary. They encourage users of their platform to withdraw funds at the first possible opportunity. Their full announcement is reproduced below. Users are encouraged to validate the below text against public keys of known vintage. Continue reading
British 'Cultural' Capital Controls Interfere With Commerce
CNN reports that government of the United Kingdom is forbidding a buyer who paid 146,500 pounds formerly known as sterling for a watercolor painting from taking it to his home (archived) outside of Britain. According to the Kingdom's government it hopes that the ban will encourage the buyer, who purchased the piece as the highest bidder at Christie's auction house would make the decision to sell the painting on to a buyer intending to keep the watercolor in the United Kingdom. This is in spite of the fact that no such buyer for the artwork was interested in outbidding the actual purchaser in an auction. The export ban was put into place by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey. Continue reading
Twitter Forbids Monitoring Politicians' Deleted Tweets
A group calling itself the Open State Foundation reports that Twitter has denied API access for all of the accounts the Open State Foundation operates which track the deleted tweets of politicians and diplomats. They report that Twitter made the decision after a thoughtful internal discussion because: Continue reading
Windows 10 Banned From Numerous Torrent Trackers
Concerns about data collection and reporting tools Microsoft was embedded in Windows 10 has reportedly lead a number of top torrent trackers to ban users of Windows 10 from their services. While there are some amorphous concerns about a potential "piracy kill switch" Microsoft could trigger, there are concrete concerns about the level of information Windows 10 collects from installed systems and delivers to Microsoft. The debugging and performance related information collected by Microsoft presents a serious threat to the security of the torrent trackers as well as peers who connect to Windows 10 users in torrent swarms. Continue reading
BitBet Prediction Market Opens XTCoin Bet, Pool already over 100 BTC
Today BitBet has opened a bet on whether Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's XTCoin forking effort will succeed. The bet which closes to new betting July 2nd, 2016 and resolves on August 1st, 2016 enumerates a number of conditions under which the XT effort could be considered a failure. These metrics include sufficient mining of XT blocks to trigger the fork, the mining of a block over 1000000 bytes with the XT block version number, the mining difficulty of the XTCoin chain, and the price of XTCoin compared to Bitcoin. Back in March the largest Bitcoin bet in terms of value was resolved on the BitBet platform with a total of 5514.62 BTC in wager on the proposition that Bitcoin would surpass Berkshire Hathaway as an investment. At the time of this writing 100.09 Bitcoin have been bet on the side of the XT coup failing, while only 1.02 Bitcoin have been wagered that XTCoin will succeed.
Collected Notes on the XT Client and XTCoin fork
Several days after the Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced their coup attempt it is becoming clear that the XT effort is an effort to misrepresent a neutered, less robust, and rapidly changing system as Bitcoin. A number of parties are catching onto the false sense of urgency which has been pushed hard by Gavin Andressen over the past year and supported by a number of flooding attacks presented as "stress tests." Continually the coup's propaganda has been crashing into the hard face of reality as the reaction to the flooding attacks show Bitcoin works as advertised when the attack ends up allowing for a demonstration of transaction fee markets. Continue reading
Shutdown Notice Startup Shutdownify Lastest Failed Startup
In the world of Silicon Valley startups Shutdownify sought to make the process of failed startups shutting down a cleaner and more uniform process. Today Shutdownify announced it would be following in its customer's footsteps (archived) and utilizing its own services as the failure startup's niche was not sustainable as a business.