The Verge
Vox Media, Inc.
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Bitcoin, a virtual currency "mined" from computer transactions, could one day challenge the hegemony of nation-issued money and create a truly viable decentralized, anonymous currency. Along the way, though, supporters must deal with the challenges of building a new exchange system — and the inevitable winners and losers that creates.
43 updates and 2295 comments below.
May 02 11:20p
This past February, the largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, announced a partnership with an American company called CoinLab. The goal of the partnership was to give Mt. Gox access to US customers through CoinLab, as the company is strongest in Japan. It also served to help Mt. Gox navigate new regulation guidelines the US government has proposed for Bitcoin transactions. In all, it looked like it could have been a win-win — but as Gawker reports, that doesn't appear to be the case.
CoinLab...
6:42a
The ESEA gaming network has been exploiting its users' powerful graphics cards to mine Bitcoins without their knowledge. "Mining" is the way Bitcoin is created — it involves dedicating some or all of a CPU or GPUs power to solving hashes, which in turn generates the virtual currency. The mining began on April 13th and affected thousands of gamers, who unwittingly mined over $3,700 worth of the currency. ESEA, which describes itself as "the largest competitive video gaming community in North...
Apr 23 9:30a
Bitcoin has had a wild ride these past few months. The stateless digital currency’s price has soared to new heights only to plunge back down to earth at less than half its previous value. As the price of gold takes a nose dive of its own, some serious economists have risen to Bitcoin’s defense as true believers urge traders to hang on. Others argue the electronic money scheme is either a dangerous fad, a form of Dadaist art, or more simply, not money at all. But even as the debate rages...
Apr 17 10:38p
Bitcoin exchange BitFloor is closing its doors, halting trading and announcing that it will return everyone’s funds. In an announcement on its main site, the company’s founder, Roman Shtylman, says that "due to circumstances outside [BitFloor’s] control" it "must cease all trading operations indefinitely." More specifically, BitFloor says that because its US bank account is closing it won’t be able to provide the same level of dollar deposits and withdrawals that it has been up to...
Apr 16 5:33a
Online dating giant OkCupid is the latest in an increasingly-long line of companies to accept Bitcoin for payments. The site has teamed up with Bitcoin wallet site Coinbase to allow singles to subscribe to its premium service using the digital currency. Other sites that have recently opened their doors to Bitcoin payments include Reddit and expense report site Expensify. OkCupid may not seem like a typical fit for Bitcoin, but as Coinbase puts it, "this is one more step forward for bringing...
Apr 12 12:59a
After a self-imposed 12-hour halt in trading due to crammed servers, Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox attempted to get back in business today with upgraded hardware — but it didn't take long before things went wrong again. The site is currently offline due to what the exchange tells The Verge is a "huge" DDoS attack; trading resumed for less than two hours.
Apr 11 12:46p
Major Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox is shutting down trading for 12 hours following wild fluctuations in the currency's valuation yesterday. The exchange handles three-quarters of all Bitcoin trading, and inaccurate reports of a DDoS attack on its website lead to a mass selling of the digital currency, causing its price to rapidly rise and fall. Though no DDoS attack had actually occurred, the large influx of sales was enough to disrupt Mt. Gox's website, and the exchange is now upgrading its...
Apr 10 2:45p
Open-source currency Bitcoin is currently experiencing an incredibly volatile day — after reaching a daily high of $266 earlier, one Bitcoin is currently valued at $178, though pricing has gone as low as $150 as of this writing. That's a difference of more than $100, quite the roller coaster for Bitcoin investors. This comes in the wake of a pretty massive increase in Bitcoin's value — a few weeks ago, the value of all Bitcoins in circulation broke $1 billion, and even today's volatile...
Apr 05 1:48p
Users of Coinbase, a Silicon Valley-funded startup that offers some Bitcoin banking services, have become the target of phishing attacks. The booming virtual currency has grown into an increasingly appealing target for hackers, soaring from a valuation of around $13 each at the beginning of January to around $140 currently. Earlier today it was found that some Coinbase users' transaction records were discoverable by search engines, and the company believes that the attackers used this...
Apr 04 12:30a
Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, says it’s been hit by a major DDoS attack that’s causing lengthy trading lags, 502 errors, and in some cases, preventing people from logging into their accounts. The news follows a hack of Bitcoin wallet site Instawallet earlier this week, which precipitated an indefinite suspension of its service.
Apr 03 4:26p
Bitcoin wallet site Instawallet has been taken offline after a security compromise, the latest in a trickle of hacks or thefts of the decentralized currency. VentureBeat has posted a missive from Instawallet's homepage, which is currently unavailable: "The Instawallet service is suspended indefinitely until we are able to develop an alternative architecture. Our database was fraudulently accessed, due to the very nature of Instawallet it is impossible to reopen the service as-is."
Users who...
Apr 01 11:30a
Mt. Gox chief marketing officer Gonzague Gay-Bouchery, left; CEO Mark Karpeles, right.
The virtual currency Bitcoin isn’t backed by any assets or central authority. It’s only three years old and its exact origin is a mystery. And yet, for some reason, tens of thousands of people have determined that a single Bitcoin — essentially a unique sequence of letters and numbers — hit $105 US dollars earlier today, the most in its short history. At a time when the euro seems increasingly...
Mar 30 2:46p
The combined value of all Bitcoins in circulation surpassed $1 billion this Thursday, as the exchange rate for each individual unit of the encrypted digital currency rose above $92. The milestone comes as the total number of Bitcoins nears 11 million and represents a huge jump from the record value of $32 recorded just one month ago. At the time of writing, the currency's market capitalization has dipped back below the billion mark, but small ups and downs are not uncommon — the current...
Mar 28 3:43p
Businessweek has a thoughtful and well-written defense of Bitcoin, the open source virtual currency that approximates cash on the internet. Writer and programmer Paul Ford points out that the Bitcoin experiment, so far, is working: it's actually being exchanged as money, and the underlying technology has proved "to be impeccable and completely functional." He makes a persuasive point that Bitcoin is "no more arbitrary than derivatives or credit default swaps." At the time of this writing, a...
Mar 27 11:55a
Businesses using Expensify will soon be able to reimburse international employees in Bitcoin. The expense report company today rolled out support for the virtual currency, lending yet more momentum to the decentralized form of payment. Speaking to The Next Web, Expensify CEO David Barrett said that Bitcoin fills a legitimate need for the company. "As our user base grows internationally, we’re getting an increasing number of requests for cross-currency reimbursement, and Bitcoin is...
Mar 20 4:03p
The community around Bitcoin, the fast-growing virtual currency that sustains an economy worth more than $650 million, has been shaken by what seems to be the first government response to its phenomenal rise. Yesterday the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the US Treasury Department, published some guidelines for how virtual currencies should be regulated — and it says many Bitcoin businesses need to register with the US government.
After mulling over its response...
Mar 12 2:28a
Technical problems caused preeminent Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox to suspend deposits today, and led to a major sell-off of the cryptographic currency. The news was reported by Ars Technica, and follows an unprecedented run that’s seen Bitcoin rise from a low of $2 in June of 2011 to a high of over $48. While the price at one point fell below $37, losing nearly a quarter of its value, it quickly recovered to within a few dollars of its high.
Mar 08 3:41p
Online institutions of all types are vulnerable to hacking, and Bitcoin is no exception: last week, hackers stole over $12,000 worth of Bitcoin currency from Bitinstant, one of the bigger Bitcoin transaction sites. As with many recent hacks, the Bitcoin theft was executed thanks to a bit of social engineering. According to the Bitinstant blog, the attacker went to the company's domain registrar posing as a Bitinstant employee — the attacker had a similar enough email address and knowledge...
Mar 04 12:03p
Have you amassed a wealth of Bitcoins, perhaps through some lucky winnings in your local Bitcoin casino? There's a new place to spend them — all-around Bitcoin guru Roger Ver has just launched his new venture, the creatively-named Bitcoin Store. The Bitcoin Store focuses on consumer electronics and electronic gadgets across a pretty wide range of categories. It doesn't look like it has the newest or most cutting-edge stock, but there is still a good variety of products available,...
Feb 28 3:25a
The Bitcoin digital currency hit an all-time high Wednesday, as its US dollar exchange rate climbed past $32 for the first time ever. According to Bitcoin Magazine, that eclipses the currency's previous high of $31.9099, reached in June 2011.
This week's milestone, while notable, doesn't come as a major surprise. After bottoming out at under $2 in 2011, Bitcon's value has steadily risen over the past several months, as the anonymous currency has entered new markets. Last year, a French bank r...
Feb 16 9:54p
As part of a (brief) rant on Twitter today about the dangers of using web services that are based in the United States, Mega founder Kim Dotcom said the service will expand "in the coming years" beyond cloud storage to offer secure email, web chat, voice, video, and "mobile" (emphasis his) products. Naturally, no details have been offered beyond the single tweet teasing the new features, but from a series of messages on Twitter it's clear that the focus is on privacy. The tease came after...
Feb 14 5:53p
The open-source currency Bitcoin may slowly be going mainstream, but that isn't stopping Reddit from adopting it as a new payment source for Reddit Gold (which gets you additional features when using the site). The site just announced Bitcoin as a new payment option, which will live alongside existing options Google Wallet and PayPal. Reddit also announced that it's simultaneously going to start accepting standard credit card payments for Reddit Gold, a bit of a more traditional payment...
Feb 01 5:50p
There's an entire industry of Bitcoin miners out there, people that set up specialized computer rigs to run 24 hours a day to mine the digital currency. Thanks to a 23-year-old kid from Brooklyn, this cottage industry is about to change. Yifu Guo, a digital media student on hiatus from NYU-Poly, has released the first batch of ASICs, which are chips custom-built to do one thing: mine Bitcoins.
These ASICs are capable of mining Bitcoins at a far higher rate than is possible with common...
Jan 23 10:10a
The digital currency known as Bitcoin has recently found a home in online casinos as a way to circumvent the government's crackdown on digital gambling. Now, a few of those casinos have released some financial data for 2012 and at least one managed to turn a nice profit over the last year. SatoshiDice, which offers up a game where players choose a number and bet on the chance that a randomly-rolled number is higher than their choice, says that it posted a profit of ฿33,310 — that works...
Jan 11 9:58a
The controversial digital currency Bitcoin has a display at CES. It's a good-sized booth, featuring a giant picture of a smiling woman holding an iPhone running a Bitcoin app. Crystal Campbell, a waitress who works at an Orlando restaurant that accepts Bitcoin, greets curious conference-goers with a friendly but not overeager smile. "It's basically like the cash of the internet," she explained to a tall brunette who had heard of Bitcoin, but wasn't sure exactly what it was.
It was a...
Jan 04 7:22a
Online gambling sites are turning their attention towards Bitcoin, with BusinessWeek describing how one site is letting US users pay with the digital tender following a huge poker site crackdown in 2011. Money never hits US banks at all, allowing the sites to operate without fear of reprisal from the government. Even the payouts are quicker — what normally takes up to 12 weeks with a US bank transfer takes only a matter of hours with Bitcoin. The new use for the decentralized currency will...
Dec 07 12:10p
Bitcoin-Central is set to become the first Bitcoin exchange to operate as a real bank, thanks to new approvals from French regulators. Run by Paymium, Bitcoin-Central partnered with two French companies — the payment processor Aqoba and bank Credit Mutuel — to create a payment service based on Bitcoins. Customers will be able to deposit their funds into the service in either euros or Bitcoins, and they will be able to easily convert the funds between the two currencies.
Thanks to the...
Nov 28 10:44a
The total number of Bitcoins in circulation just hit 10.5 million, triggering a safeguard against inflation that was hardcoded into the digital currency. This means a drastic change in the number of new Bitcoins being created, which is expected to have a huge impact on the economy that has been developing around the ecurrency.
The safeguard has to do with the "block reward," the number of Bitcoins that can be created at a time, which has dropped from 50 to 25. Bitcoin miners, geeks who...
Nov 21 12:00p
The anonymous online black market known as the Silk Road, which offers everything from drugs to pirated Red Bull, is back up after an outage that lasted about two weeks.
When Silk Road became inaccessible earlier this month, the rumors started flying. Its psuedonymous operator Dread Pirate Roberts was temporarily incommunicado, prompting theories that he’d been picked up by the FBI or had run off with the site’s deposits. There were also claims that the site had been hacked, or flooded...
Nov 16 9:43a
New chips from Butterfly Labs, a leading Bitcoin equipment manufacturer, promise speeds of 4.5 gigahashes per second to 1,500 gigahashes per second.
Jim O’Shea, a web programmer, gadget lover, and family man living in Pennsylvania, became a digital gold miner in June of 2011.
The resource he mines is not World of Warcraft currency, personal data, or fancy new domain names. It’s Bitcoin, the internet-native currency that many believe has the potential to become a revolutionary new...
Nov 15 7:05p
WordPress.com, the popular blogging platform / content management system is expanding its payment options for upgrades like going ad-free. Beginning today, users around the world will be able to pay with Bitcoin — the unregulated, decentralized digital currency built on public-key cryptography. Explaining its decision, the company noted that PayPal currently blocks access from over 60 countries, and that many credit card companies have similar restrictions, whether because of politics,...
Oct 01 12:01p
Some of the biggest names in the world of Bitcoin, the unregulated virtual currency with a small but devoted user base, are looking to give it a friendlier public face. Announced last week, the Bitcoin Foundation — which counts lead developer Gavin Andresen and Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles among its board members — is meant to do for Bitcoin what the Linux Foundation has helped do for open source software, paying selected developers for full-time work and nailing down best practices. In a...
Sep 27 1:17p
BitFloor, the Bitcoin exchange site that had about $250,000 in virtual currency stolen earlier this month, has reopened with a promise to make the theft up to users. In an interview with IDG, founder Roman Shtylman said that "I feel it's important to try and be clear of my intention to try and recover the coins," although he called that payback a "long-term plan" and said he wasn't sure when it would be done. For now, BitFloor is working again, and Shtylman says he's reported the theft to the...
Sep 05 7:12a
Popular Bitcoin exchange BitFloor — described by its owner as "the #4 USD exchange and #1 in the US" — has been forced to suspend operations after the equivalent of $250,000 was stolen in a virtual heist. Writing in a post on the Bitcoin Forum last night, founder Roman Shtylman explained that an attacker had gained access to an unencrypted backup of the exchange's wallet keys, using them to transfer "the vast majority of the coins BitFloor was holding on hand," a haul which Shtylman later...
Aug 27 3:43p
Remember pirateat40, the e-currency banker we speculated could be the Bernie Madoff of Bitcoin? Well, it looks like he owes a lot of people money. On August 17, pirateat40 announced the closure of Bitcoin Savings & Trust, a virtual hedge fund that promised to pay high rewards to investors who parked their Bitcoins there. Ten days later, investors are still waiting to get paid and pirateat40 is on the defensive. "When I know, you will," says his away message in the fund's official chat room,...
Aug 22 1:32p
Hours after MasterCard quashed rumors that it was talking to BitInstant about releasing a Bitcoin-based debit card, BitInstant has issued its own statement, officially announcing what it calls the BitInstant Paycard. The prepaid debit card will let users spend their Bitcoins at any store that accepts MasterCard, the company says, once they have been sent to BitInstant for holding. The company also maintains that it already has multiple partners for the card's release and that the Paycard will...
10:12a
MasterCard has said that it's not aware of plans to develop a credit or debit card based around Bitcoin virtual currency. Yesterday, it was rumored that transfer service BitInstant was partnering with two unnamed banks to release a Bitcoin MasterCard in the next two months. But according to MasterCard, it's never been approached by BitInstant. We've received the following statement:
MasterCard has no relationship with BitInstant. There are issuers who allow the conversion of Bitcoins to US...
Aug 21 1:48a
BitInstant is reportedly set to launch an international debit card based on the BitCoin virtual currency. That's according to Coding In My Sleep, which has published the transcript of an online chat in which BitInstant co-founder Charlie Shrem allegedly confirmed that the company is in the final stages of developing the card, which would launch within the next six to eight weeks. Shrem also posted a mockup of the Bitcoin card, embedded above.
According to Shrem, the card will operate as an...
Aug 15 2:27p
The market for Bitcoin — the digital currency of choice for the tech-savvy libertarian set — is hot again. The price of the popular online currency has steadily risen over the last six months, and the number of Bitcoin transactions per day has increased roughly 400 percent since May. The resurgence has several causes: the debut of a popular Bitcoin betting game, increased interest from Europe, and the growing success of the underground illegal drug bazaar, Silk Road. But the currency’s...
Aug 10 4:20p
Four men have sued Bitcoinica, one of the larger Bitcoin currency exchanges before it shut down in May, alleging that the exchange owes them $460,457.70 in lost deposits plus damages. It's a story that will sound familiar to anyone who has been following the saga of the fledgling currency and its nascent economy, a digital Wild West where bad actors routinely take advantage of inexperienced buyers and sellers in the absence of a sheriff.
Bitcoinica was launched by Zhou Tong, who claimed to...
Jul 16 12:02p
Despite growing popularity in the shadier parts of the internet, the anonymous, peer-to-peer currency Bitcoin has yet to break into the mainstream — but a new effort by German art student Max Albrecht may help to raise its profile. As a project for his university's summer exhibition, Albrecht has built a vending machine that converts €1 coins (about $1.20) into their equivalent Bitcoin value, currently around 0.15 BTC.
When a coin is inserted, the machine issues a printed receipt with a...
Feb 14 10:46a
Bitcoin, the alternative currency based on a clever application of cryptography, has had its fair share of problems lately: first the dominant Mt. Gox exchange got hacked back in June, and now Tradehill, another major exchange, is suspending trading following the exit of e-wallet service Paxum from the Bitcoin market and a $100,000 loss from a fraudulent payment processor.
While Bitcoin was conceived as a peer-to-peer system, the difficulty in manually managing your own transactions,...
Nov 27 1:41a
The digital currency Bitcoin once seemed poised to become a viable alternative to physical money. Wired has delved into its history, from the origins in a pseudonymously-written research paper, to its move out of the subculture shadow and the rapid disintegration that followed. Originally conceived as a libertarian alternative to corrupt global banking systems, Bitcoin was seen by some as potentially the greatest disruptive force since the internet itself, with units reaching a valuation of...
May 15 3:16a
US seizes and freezes funds at biggest Bitcoin exchange
Authorities in the US have reportedly frozen a mobile payments account associated with Bitcoin exchange MtGox, as part of an investigation announced Tuesday. Dwolla, an Iowa-based mobile payment startup, confirmed to Betabeat Tuesday that it has halted all activity associated with the account belonging to MtGox, after receiving a warrant from the Department of Homeland Security. A spokesperson for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) later told CNET that an investigation is...
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