Reports are emerging that the European Union is planning some sort of "crackdown" on Bitcoin in the wake of the Paris mass shooting amid allegations that ISIS has some Bitcoins. This is in spite of the declared intention of ISIS and their actual movement to establish a precious metals based monetary system in their caliphate. Estimates floating around in the media suggest that if ISIS has a stash of Bitcoin, its value is roughly the equivalent of 3 million United States Dollars, a figure which is substantially lower than the value of some individual pieces of military equipment which has found its way to ISIS through the United States. Continue reading
Category Archives: Fiat/BTC interfaces
Larcenous Winkelvii Exchange Hits $2200/BTC, Recants
Shortly before Qntra experience significant downtime this week due to a hardware failure, the Gemini "exchange" reversed a trade that had on Friday November 13th taken the traded price of Bitcoin on that exchange to 2200 United States dollars per Bitcoin. Gemini's "account review team" along with their "executive management" by their own reports conspired to brand the trades a "customer error" and reversed the trades leaving some other parties to these trades with zero or negative balances as they had continued trading after the earlier trade. Winkelvii apologists are blaming fiat market "obvious error rules" for the reversal, though the volume of the trades that took Gemini out of concordance and to 2200 United States Dollars was only 80 Bitcoins suggesting a critically thin order book which makes all attempts at actually trading on that exchange the result of erroneous judgement.
Theymos Threatens Coinbase's Social Media Privileges
Brian Armstrong, CEO of the YCombinator incubated startup Coinbase has been vocal in supporting BIP-101. He claims Coinbase will begin using full nodes with BIP-101 code patched in sometime in December if no other proposal reaches "consensus". Theymos who moderates the Bitcoin subreddit and Bitcointalk, threatened to ban Coinbase representatives if they were to begin promoting software that implemented BIP-101 to the public before a consensus is reached.
Fiat/Bitcoin Interfaces Experience Week of Extreme Price Volatility
Interview with David Francois on Building a Real Bitcoin Business
Operating a Bitcoin business is difficult and, a lot of times is the first step down the road which brings pretty much 9x% to crime within six months to a year (archived). With the excess influx of Venture Capital into companies pretending as to have any involvement with Bitcoin, I sat down with David "davout" Francois CTO of Paymium, formerly known as Bitcoin-Central, to talk about the fundamentals from his personal experience in developing a Bitcoin company that can survive the ruthless climate of the world of Bitcoin. Continue reading
FBI Agent Encourages Paying Ransomware Demands
The Security Ledger report at a summit the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s CYBER and Counterintelligence Program at the Boston field office, Joseph Bonavolonta, encourages paying ransomware demands (archived). The quality of the encryption implementations utilized in ransomware is frequently too high for his office to do anything to recover the affected files. As a prophylactic measure he encouraged healthy backup measures so systems could at least be restored to a pre-ransomware state.
EU Court Rules Bitcoin Above VAT
Yesterday the EU Court of Justice relased a ruling (archived) stating that transactions exchanging Bitcoin for fiat currency are exempt from the VAT (Value Added Tax). This puts Bitcoin exchange transactions in the same VAT exempt class as exchanges between other currencies or similar financial instruments.
Ethereum Bet Update
The bet over Ethereum's ability to make it out of 2015 alive previously covered on Qntra has climbed to more than 209 Bitcoin in total wagers. The odds have shifted with 35% of the wagers now predicting Ethereum's demise while 65% largely in early wagers stands hoping Ethereum just might have a future. Since September 25th only 1.45807 Bitcoin in new bets have come in in favor of Ethereum. At present Ethereum is trading around 0.0016 Bitcoin per Ether token a in a substantial and sustained decline from their peak price in August. Further bad news came for Ethereum near the end of September when Buterin revealed his foundation backing Ethereum was spending at a rate that would leave it insolvent.
LSE Report Reveals Dismal Performance of VCs in Bitcoin
A new report by Dr. Garrick Hileman and Danqing Ying of the London School of Economics reveals some interesting and noteworthy facts and figures about the state of the fiat-facing Bitcoin economy – that Tacoma Narrows bridge of finance that exists largely in the minds of government regulators and social media "experts" – from which, some highlights: Continue reading
Operation Cyber Juice: Police and Their Favorite Drug of Abuse, Part 1
Back in September the Drug Enforcement Agency announced an action dubbed "Operation Cyber Juice" involving the bust of a handful of underground labs compounding imported raw anabolic steroid materials into oral and injectable preparations suitable for end users. Also busted were a number of distributors including persons dealing steroids at a LA Fitness club Franchise and at a Juice bar (archived). At least as interesting though, not very surprising is the number of underground labs and clearnet internet vendors who were not busted despite publicly declaring a presence in the United States. Continue reading