In a piece appearing on ZDnet today Ken Hess wrote a about his letter campaign to inform United States Senators of "Bitcoin's illegality" and of how Tom Coburn's office responded. Mr. Hess's case for Bitcoin illegality consist of his reading of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5 of the United States constitution which enumerates as a power of Congress: Continue reading
Author Archives: Aaron 'BingoBoingo' Rogier
MtGox Trustee Moves to Repay Creditors, Work With Kraken
According to the New York Times, the liquidator in the MtGox bankruptcy case is moving in the direction of repaying creditors and will partner with the Fiat/Bitcoin exchange Kraken to do so. Among assistance Kraken might offer to the trustee is an evaluation of Mt Gox's assets and help investigating the collapse of MtGox. Any decision to repay the customers with Bitcoin though would happen at the discretion of the Trustee. Jesse Powell of Kraken offered a few informative quotes: Continue reading
Sony Pictures Suffers Targeted Cyber Attack
The Los Angeles Times reports that a group calling itself #GOP or "Guardians of Peace" has compromised the ability of movie studio Sony Pictures to derive any utility from their information technology infrastructure. Allegedly the group behind the event has not made any concrete demands, but is threatening to leak internal information from the studio to the web if certain demands are not met. This event deviates from typical, far less selective, ransomware attacks which happen to affect single computers opportunistically and then demand a set monetary ransom to facilitate the recovery of files. Self Proclaimed "hack victim" Mark Karpeles have offered that the Sony hackers might be Chinese or Korean based on a text encoding error.
Bank Hacker Who Blackmailed For Bitcoin to be Sentenced
Lewys Martin who plead guilty to hacking Halifax Bank and demanding a ransom of 2800 BTC in exchange for not releasing the details of 28,000 account holders will likely have his sentence announced according to City AM. A detail of particular note is that the police:
managed to trace Martin despite him using specialised software to shield his IP address.
European Parliament Mulls Google Breakup
Reuters reports that the European Parliament is working on a resolution that proposes a forced split between Google's European search engine business and the rest of their operations. Reuters offers that: Continue reading
Netherlands Repatriates Some Gold
There are reports that the Netherlands has repatriated a substantial portion of its gold holdings from the Federal Bank of New York to their own physical custody. This move changes their allocation of gold held at home from 11% to 31%, and the portion held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 51% to 31% while the remainder of their holdings are split between the Bank of England and Canada. There is no news yet as to whether they've drilled the bars and found tungsten.
US Department of Justice: Kim Dotcom can't challenge asset forfeiture
In its continuing case against Kim Dotcom, lawyers for the United States Department of Justice are proposing that Dotcom's objections to seizing his assets around the world be completely tossed aside under the doctrine of fugitive disenfranchisement. This is in spite of the fact that Kim Dotcom is not under any reasonable definition a "US Person" who reasonably could be a fugitive. A few points: Continue reading
After Survery Vessenes' Foundation "Pivots"
In a blog post the communications and marketing director of Vessenes' Bitcoin Foundation Jinyoung Lee Englund announced that they would be shifting their focus almost entirely towards the goal of funding "core development" in the wake of results from a member survey. In the past this Foundation has engaged in a mix of activities including lobbying, marketing, and "outreach" in addition to providing Gavin Andressen a salary to work on the Foundation's fork of Satoshi's Bitcoin codebase. After justifying the move in their post they offer the following: Continue reading
Buterin Beats Zuckerberg for Award
Vitalik Buterin beat Mark Zuckerberg for the 2014 World Technology Network award in IT software. The award is presented for Buterin's role as co-creator and inventor of Ethereum which has yet to exist and co-founding Bitcoin Magazine. The event was held at the Time & Life building which no longer houses Time Inc. Time was of course spun off Warner Communications earlier this summer to a chilly reception by investors.
Barry Silbert to Form USMS Auction Bidding Syndicate Again…
Fresh off of Twitter:
1/ Announcement: @BitcoinTrust and our bitcoin trading desk will be forming a syndicate to bid in the US Marshals #bitcoin auction…
— Barry Silbert (@barrysilbert) November 18, 2014
2/ Details to come shortly. Stay tuned!
— Barry Silbert (@barrysilbert) November 18, 2014