Bitstamp Bans Russia

Bitstamp declared in an email that they are banning access from all IP addresses originating from the Russian Federation to their website.. The email was posted on Bitcointalk citing a draft proposal, via Coindesk, for Russia to restrict surrogate money. Coindesk claims upon speaking with the deputy minister of finance, Alexey Moiseev, that there are plans to create laws to punish any individual attempting to convert cryptocurrency into Rubles. However, no official law has yet to be implemented banning the use of Bitcoin in Russia, and a draft proposal to amend the use of surrogate money was published on a Russian news outlet which states (translated):

cryptocurrency, production of which is not carried out on the territory of the Russian Federation, will no longer be money substitutes

If ratified the aforementioned amendments would not go into effect until sometime 2017, thus cryptocurrency produced outside of Russian jurisdiction would technically be legal. Bitstamp's preemptive banning of Russian customers, similar to that of Satoshi Dice blacklisting US-based IP addressed, seems completely unwarranted. It has yet to be confirmed whether or not the funds of Russian customers are accessible for withdrawal or have been "frozen" by the exchange.

Lightning Network Code Finally Public

Code for the Lightning network daemon has been made public for the first time on Github (archived). The daemon at present is limited to operation on its own special testnet-L where transaction ids are normalized to prevent malleability. The daemon's README warns against deploying the daemon on the live Bitcoin network or any altcoins in its present state. Blockstream's publication of this code comes as fiat concerns grow more desperate to project their own failings on to Bitcoin through their latest "ClassicCoin" forking effort.

CoinBase Blames DDoS For Irregular Exchange Behavior

Yesterday morning after a large price decline broomstick fired partially in response to Mike Hearn's temper tantrum, Coinbase's exchange experienced a complete outage. The outage was eventually resolved and trading resumed. Brian Armstrong took to Twitter and blamed the outage on a DDoS. He is claiming the attack consumed 1 TB of bandwidth. Coinbase solicited the services of Cloudflare in late December. This mitigation service served more as a marketing tactic than as a measure to establish actual security – a lesson Coinbase seems to have yet to learn.

Another One Bites The Dust: Cryptsy Edition

The altcoin exchange known as Cryptsy finally went full Gox after more than a year of warnings. Reports then came in that the company moved out of their office without any notice to users. Yesterday divorce proceedings involving the exchange's proprietor, Paul Edward Vernon, were posted to Bitcointalk leading to speculation that the civil court has frozen all of the proprietor's assets including Cryptsy's cold wallet until divorce proceedings have finalized. Cryptsy has acted irresponsible in regards to its users, and has yet to make a public statement of any kind regarding its situation.