 |
Qntra - Herald Of The Most Serene Republic |
Barry Silbert of SecondMarket announced the spin off of the Digital Currency Group from the parent company. The announcement:
Important step towards separating our bitcoin biz from @SecondMarket. The name. Introducing…Digital Currency Group http://t.co/s4Hld235bP
— Barry Silbert (@barrysilbert) October 10, 2014
The trademark for the new venture was initially filed June 20th, and the Digital Currency Group has a website at dcg.co
As announced earlier, the United States Commodities and Futures Trading Commission dedicated a portion of their meeting today to the subject of Bitcoin derivatives. The full video won't be released for a few days, but the full transcript of the session on Bitcoin derivatives is below. Continue reading
Attorneys filed a response following the 48 hour deadline imposed for the Ulbricht defense team to respond to the Justice Department's rejection of the Horowitz Declaration and assert 4th Amendment rights. The reply asserts the Justice Department's response failed to address any technical analysis or conclusions from the Horowitz Declaration, and that the government claims the right to "engage in criminal conduct with impunity in its pursuit of investigative objectives, and not be held accountable therefor." The reply also hammers on the discrepancy of the government's position in the case versus the Auernheimer case. Continue reading
The United States CFTC will be meeting today and one of the topics for discussion is derivatives contracts that reference Bitcoin and whether or to what extent the CFTC may perceive to have juridiction on the subject. Also on the agenda is the separate discussion of Non-Deliverable Forwards and whether or not a clearing mandate may be appropriate. The meeting states at 1:30 PM US Eastern Time and continues to 5:00 PM with the Non-Deliverable Forwards discussion preceding the Bitcoin Derivatives discussion. There will be a live webcast at www.cftc.gov and video should be posted in two days on their site. Members of the public are welcome to also listen via conference call toll free at 1-866-844-9416 or one of several other international numbers.
After a reception last night the CoinAgenda and BitAngels conference kicks off today at the Palms in Las Vegas. The conference is composed of two parallel activities, a series of speakers and a competition where 20 startup proposals are presented and judged. Featured Speakers include: Continue reading
At today's hearing the day after the Justice Department filed a motion which asserted that cracking the Silk Road servers would constitute a lawful search, the judge in the case has given Ulbricht's defense team a mere 48 hours to counter the arguments in the filing. Ulbricht's trial is scheduled to begin November 3rd.
Below is the text extracted from the pdf of the filing available here. Continue reading
Auction site CryptoThrift has announced that they have lost more than 15 BTC in a breach of a hot wallet they used for keeping coins in escrow. The incident happens nearly one year after Bitmit, another auction site was hacked for a similar amount. Bitmit shutdown after the operators could not find a buyer who could cover losses. According to CoinThrift the attack occurred early the morning of October 5th but went undiscovered for some time. They report contacting Australian Federal Police about the incident.
On the blog of Peter Vessenes's Bitcoin Foundation Gavin Andresen offered an outline of measures he would like to see to improve the ability of Bitcoin to scale in the future, and one measure he proposes is a hard fork over blocksize. The measures mentioned include: Continue reading
Four Rockminer R4 Bitcoin miners were seized by the Customs Service in Chita, Russia along with the Russian Citizen transporting them according to a report by Coinside.ru's Maxim Primakov. According to the report this action may be supposed to be the beginning of a practical campaign against Bitcoin by the Russian Government following longstanding rhetorical opposition to Bitcoin by elements of the Russian Government.
Coinside's report offers hope that Customs officials along the European border may be less capable or inclined to seize Bitcoin mining devices, but cautions their readers about having mining devices delivered by Russian Post as the time taken to receive a Bitcoin miner is a critical factor that affects its possibility to mine profitably.