Remittance Company Xoom Loses Corporate Cash To Fraud

Xoom's Chief Financial has resigned amid news that $30.8 million in corporate money had been transfered overseas. Xoom's primary business is allowing individuals in the United States to send money to people outside of the country.

This case continues to highlight the extreme vulnerability too fraud faced by companies handling United States Dollars. This company whose entire business was foreign money transmission lost when facing the inherent structural deficiencies of the fiat banking and money transfer system. It seems unlikely that the fiat monetary system can survive its backbone of insecurity.

BitStamp Wallet Now Officially "Hacked"

A total of 18,867.62695929 BTC were moved from BitStamp's hot wallet to a wallet that is outside of their control. A statement attributed to Nejc Kodrič appears on Coindesk which differs from the one available on Bitstamp's own site. The Statement attributed to Nejc Kodrič on CoinDesk: Continue reading

ESPN Sold Their Bitcoins

The New York Post reports that ESPN Events, the operator of the Bitcoin Bowl, sold their $500,000 rights payment delivered in Bitcoin by BitPay immediately upon receipt. Further the two competing schools accepted their appearance fee in dollars. BitPay is still under contract to sponsor this bowl game for two more years giving ESPN two more chances and various schools four more chances to hold the Bitcoin BitPay offers. Continue reading

New Bitcoin Foundation Releases Year End Report

The new Bitcoin Foundation has issued a year end address where they have highlighted the work accomplished so far to produce a higher quality reference Bitcoin implementation. The foundation which came together in late October has focused their efforts on producing a patch set for the Bitcoin 0.5.3 codebase that results in a minimal reference implementation of the Bitcoin Protocol. Continue reading

2014 Story of the Year: Mt Gox Finally Dies

This year's biggest story in Bitcoin actually predates the founding of Qntra. Back in February Mt Gox finally closed its doors. Since Jed McCaleb opened it for Bitcoin Trading in July of 2010, through its astounding three years of incompetence and mismanagement under Mark Karpelès Mt Gox had served as a central source of drama and uncertainty in the Bitcoin space. Continue reading

Collected Points From the NSA's Recent Document Dump

Numerous media outlets are going deep into the NSA's recent Christmas Eve document dump while Der Spiegel is supposing itself to cover new Snowden documents.In addition to the unsurprising post-Snowden revelation that NSA analysts routinely acted outside of their legal ability to monitor, a number of technical revelations came out about the NSA's surveillance abilities as they care to disclose them two years ago. As this document dump was an official agency disclosure take it with a grain of salt or several trucks full of salt as you feel necessary. Continue reading

Canberra Times: Police Concerned Over Online Drug Purchases

According to the Caberra Times the phenomenon of "tech-savvy young people" buying drugs online is leading to police and "crime experts" expressing concern over the phenomenon. One of the cited "crime experts", Dr Susan Goldsmid of the Australian Institute of Criminology, when asked about the size of online drug markets and the population patronizing them could not offer a response other than saying it was an "unknown" while also offering that it was unlikely in her estimation that users are buying drugs online when they have access to the traditional physical networks typically used for commerce in drugs.