A list was recently published by the Crypto Economics Consulting Group (CECG) of all the dangerous men who are currently (or may soon be) in prison for bitcoin-related crimes.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
The 6 Most Vicious Criminals in Bitcoin (OP-ED)
A list was recently published by the Crypto Economics Consulting Group (CECG) of all the dangerous men who are currently (or may soon be) in prison for bitcoin-related crimes.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Bitcoin Anywhere: A Bitcoin to Credit Card Gateway From Abine and Coinbase
Abine announced the release of Bitcoin Anywhere, a new service that lets users spend bitcoin at all online merchants that accept MasterCard. The service, currently in an invite-only beta, permits funding of a Blur “Masked Card” from a Coinbase wallet.
Currently, Bitcoin Anywhere is available only to invited users of Abine’s Blur premium service.
Blur Masked Cards are one-time MasterCards created on-the-fly by Abine, which can be used at all online merchants that accept MasterCard, which, in practice, means all online merchants. Masked cards don’t compromise the user’s real name and address and have a built-in limit to avoid hidden charges.
“When a user makes a Masked Card, we are issuing a limited-balance, limited-duration credit card for that transaction. When you generate a masked card we charge your funding source,” said Andrew Sudbury, Abine co-founder and CTO.
Bitcoin Anywhere aims to make bitcoin payments widespread by automatically signing up all online merchants. Only the users know that they are paying with bitcoin, whereas the merchants continue to use their credit card payment systems.
The Abine announcement notes that leading venture capitalists invest in the Bitcoin ecosystem because they are persuaded that more consumers will use Bitcoin if it is accepted more broadly, while Bitcoin companies bet on wide acceptance catalyzing mainstream use.
“What we aim to achieve is to assess consumer demand for a purchasing experience that balances innovation, convenience, compliance and security,” said Sudbury. Abine plans to share the results of the beta program with other Bitcoin companies and interest groups.
Abine is a Boston-based company founded by Rob Shavell, Andrew Sudbury and Eugene Kuznetsov, focused on developing easy-to-use privacy solutions for consumers. Blur, the flagship service of Abine, is an integrated solution for privacy and online life management.
Besides masked cards, Blur offers password management, online forms auto-fill, and one-time disposable email addresses. The premium service costs $39 per year (with discounts for multi-year subscriptions), and includes extra features such as data synchronization across multiple devices, secure backup and a masked phone number.
With Bitcoin Anywhere, Abine enters the Bitcoin ecosystem with the same emphasis on privacy and ease-of-use.
In related news, Australian Bitcoin company CoinJar announced the public launch of the Bitcoin debit card CoinJar Swipe. The card permits spending bitcoin anywhere that accepts EFTPOS. That means just about anywhere since the EFTPOS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale) payment network is widespread in Australia and New Zealand. The CoinJar announcement is titled “Now every Australian business accepts Bitcoin.”
The card also permits withdrawing bitcoin as cash at any ATM in Australia.
Abine and CoinJar are betting on expanding the adoption of Bitcoin by making the digital currency completely transparent to merchants. That seems to make sense, because acceptance by merchants is one of the critical bottlenecks in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Once consumers can spend their bitcoin anywhere, more people will participate in the emerging Bitcoin economy.
Images via Abine.com
This is the Most Important Chart for the Global Economy (Op-Ed)
Every major global currency is down against the US dollar for the past 200 days. This has been intentionally engineered by central banks and governments in order to stimulate their weak economies by d
Why African Bitcoin Entrepreneurs are Unfazed by the Silence of Regulators
When it comes to Bitcoin regulation, Africa is uncharted territory. Indeed, none of the 54 African countries makes it to any of the legality-of-bitcoin-by-country lists found online.
MAR 10 Digest: Factom and Tether Announce Partnership, Reddit Accepts Bitcoin for Merchandise
Factom and Tether enter into a partnership to share each other’s Bitcoin 2.0 tech, Reddit announces that its merchandise store is now accepting bitcoin, and more top stories for March 10.
Did uTorrent’s Mining Ware Blunder Give Bitcoin a 3000% Publicity Boost?
Surreptitious mining ware planted on user PCs by torrent site uTorrent has created a backlash and could even be behind this week’s 3000% increase in Bitcoin Wikipedia requests.
U.S. Consumer Study: Bitcoin More Secure Than Mobile Wallets, Checks
The Walker Sands 2015 Future of Retail survey of 1,400 online consumers across the United States found that study participants consider mobile wallets and applications the least secure form of payment
Threshold Signatures are a ‘Significant Milestone’ in Bitcoin Security
A group of six researchers from the City University of New York, Princeton University and Stanford University, released a paper on March 8, introducing the first threshold signature scheme compatible
Monday, March 9, 2015
Talk about Tipping: This Week on Decentral Talk Live
This week on Decentral Talk Live, hosts Ethan Wilding and Anthony Di Iorio have a new slate of guests covering topics like tipping, the ways companies get financing and pay employees in the bitcoin space, and the latest developments at Kraken.
We’ll start with Justin Maxwell of Tibdit who will answer the questions: What’s a “tib” and what’s a “dit”? And how will Tibdit help to level the playing field, by making the internet more of a meritocracy for content providers?
Similarly, Toronto-based http://cryptiv.com/ seeks to make tipping and microtransactions through its online wallet simple and fun. This crypto-agnostic system is designed to work across various social media platforms. Founder Mat Cybula drops in to Decentral Talk Live to chat about the potential cultural impact that social tipping could play in supporting content creators.
Finding the right system for paying employees is a challenge for all companies from the smallest start-up to the largest multinational. Adding digital currencies into the mix might seem like just one more headache. But is it really? David Shin from Paywise tackles the ins and outs of salary packaging and outsourced administration services on this episode of Decentral Talk Live.
Getting the money to start your new business venture is another financial challenge for new companies. Seedcoin is the world’s first seed-stage Bitcoin and Blockchain start-up virtual incubator. Eddy Travia discusses the ways that new Bitcoin and blockchain businesses can get the support they need to get off the ground. The objective of Seedcoin is “to invest in the creative entrepreneurs of the Bitcoin and Blockchain space and help them develop future services, products and applications” that will re-shape the way people manage and exchange financial and intellectual assets.
Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken, will also stop by to talk about the latest news from Kraken, the cryptocurrency exchange based in Japan. Last November, Kraken was tasked with assisting authorities in their investigation of Mt.Gox and with helping to redistribute recovered assets to its creditors.
Decentral Talk Live is a daily talk show hosted by Anthony Di Iorio and Ethan Wilding, along with a rotating panel of guest hosts. It airs on decentral.tv, Monday through Friday, at 3:00 pm, EST.
Dumb vs. Smart: Which Network is Better for Bitcoin
Nowadays, we deal with computer networks all the time. We chat and talk on networks. We get in-formation on networks and we spend our free time on networks. Perhaps we even get our food from networks.
Threshold Signatures: The New Standard for Wallet Security?
A group of researchers from Princeton University, Stanford University and the City University of New York, have announced a new ECDSA threshold signature scheme that is particularly well-suited for securing Bitcoin wallets.
Threshold signatures can be thought of as “stealth multi-signatures.” The new Bitcoin security scheme is detailed in a research paper titled “Securing Bitcoin wallets via a new DSA/ECDSA threshold signature scheme.”
The announcement follows three previous posts by Steven Goldfeder on the Freedom to Tinker blog, hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Goldfeder is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton, interested in cryptography, security, privacy and decentralized digital currencies.
Bitcoin wallets often are attacked by increasingly sophisticated cyber thieves. Coupled with the irreversibility of bitcoin transactions, that poses important security problems that decrease user confidence in Bitcoin and could prevent the digital currency from going mainstream if no robust and simple solution is found.
The researchers note that the Bitcoin ecosystem needs a breakthrough in security.
Banks use two or multi-factor authentication schemes: the user’s password – which may have been compromised by hackers – isn’t enough to initiate a transaction, but the user must provide at least one more authentication, often by replying to an email or using a smartphone authentication app or equivalent stand-alone device. Today, reputable Bitcoin services such as Circle and Bitstamp use two-factor authentication to provide security, but users must say goodbye to anonymity and provide proof of identity.
Even more secure three-factor authentication methods that include biometrics are emerging.
DIY-minded and privacy-conscious Bitcoin users can run their own wallet and “be their own bank,” but running a wallet has proved to be too much of a security risk. As soon as hackers gain access to the wallet, they can instantly and irreversibly take the money and run.
Cold storage – keeping the main bitcoin wallet on a device that is not connected to the Internet, and moving only the funds needed for daily expenses to online storage – often is seen as too much of a hassle.
Therefore, most security-conscious bitcoin users rely on external services, at the cost of compromising their anonymity and the “DIY spirit” of Bitcoin.
Multi-signature (multisig) wallets offer a solution. A multisig transaction, for example a 2-of-3 transaction, requires the agreement of the required number of authorized signatories, in this case two out of three. However, the paper shows that multisig transactions present significant usability problems, and serious anonymity and confidentiality drawbacks.
“Bitcoin currently lacks support for the sophisticated internal control systems deployed by modern businesses to deter fraud,” say the authors of the paper. “To address this problem, we present the first threshold signature scheme compatible with Bitcoin’s ECDSA signatures and show how distributed Bitcoin wallets can be built using this primitive.”
In a threshold signature scheme, the ability to construct a signature is distributed among different devices (for example a computer and a smartphone), and each device receives a share of the private signing key. For individuals, threshold signatures allow for two-factor security, or splitting the ability to sign between two devices so that a single compromised device won’t put the money at risk. For businesses, threshold signatures allow for the realization of access control policies that prevent both insiders and outsiders from stealing corporate funds.
The researchers built a prototype implementation of a two-factor secure wallet, a desktop client and an Android app, and released open source code on Github. A video shows how the system works: a user initiates a transaction on the computer, and the computer then begins the threshold signing protocol with the phone. The phone will show the user the transaction details and will proceed with the transaction only with the user’s explicit approval. The computer and phone use QR codes to initially pair, and for all subsequent sessions they communicate over the local Wifi network.
If threshold signature schemes become common, private bitcoin wallets will support the same multi-factor authentication offered by major wallet providers, while continuing to offer a high degree of anonymity.
Recognizing Women in Bitcoin – The Week in Review from Decentral.TV
Sunday was International Women’s Day, when the Bitcoin community is joined with others around the world to promote awareness of women’s issues by launching its first Bitcoin Women’s Day.
Like International Women’s Day, “Bitcoin Women’s Day is not just for women,” says Sarah Boone Martin of the Digital Currency Council. The issues that women are concerned about – equal access to healthcare, to financial systems, to the world economy, to employment, to education; a sustainable environment, personal safety, security and autonomy – these are all issues that are important to the Bitcoin community as a whole.
The purpose of Bitcoin Women’s Day can be broken down into three key goals: first, to celebrate the accomplishments of women in the space; second, to raise awareness of issues and barriers they face both within and outside of that space; and third, to promote Bitcoin as a means of addressing some of the issues that women face around the world.
Leading up to Bitcoin Women’s Day, decentral.tv aired episodes that addressed some of these concerns.
On Tuesday’s episode, Tatiana Moroz discussed her role in helping to found the Women’s Crypto Association. She noted that there are few women in venture capital, which influences how projects are funded.
“Men value things differently than women. More diversity in the venture capital space will lead to more diversity in the products that are created and the companies that are born,” she said. Moroz encouraged more women to join the Women’s Crypto Association.
“There are a lot of great women in the space,” she said, but noted that they don’t necessarily get the invitations to speak at events. “We’d like to have more of a ‘best practices’ for conferences,” Moroz said. “We don’t want anything particularly special. We want it to be noticed that we are also contributing.”
She objected to the way that many conferences relegate women speakers to a “Women in Bitcoin” type of panel.
“That’s not enough,” says Moroz. “Lots of women have experience in a variety of different topics. Offering them actual speaking engagements rather than just a panel on women is a better direction for us to go in.”
Decentral Talk Live also featured a conversation with Connie Gallippi, whose BitGive Foundation is the first charity to receive 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. The type of projects that BitGive work on include Save the Children, which now accepts bitcoin directly; the Water Project, which brings clean and safe water to sub-Saharan Africa; and Medic Mobile, which uses mobile phones and open source software to improve healthcare in the developing world.
Gallippi recently has been to Africa to see a well that BitGive funded entirely through bitcoin donations. In co-operation with BitPesa, a short video is being produced that chronicles the Water Projects’ bitcoin-funded well and looks at the future social impact of bitcoin in developing countries.
“The technology is there but we just need to build out the infrastructure and user base,” says Gallippi.
The week ended with an interview with Anne Connelly, director of marketing and fundraising for Dignitas International, a charity that aims to transform healthcare for the most vulnerable. Dignitas delivers frontline care in Malawi, conducts research and develops practical solutions and advocates for better health policy and practice.
Connelly recently succeeded in convincing her boss that bitcoin could be a valuable addition to their fundraising goals.
It wasn’t easy. She had to overcome the organization’s fears of the unknown, not to mention bitcoin’s notorious volatility.
Connelly had to “come up with a better way of thinking about it,” and finally, through her repeated efforts, she was able to convince Dignitas to accept bitcoin donations in the same way that it accepts stock donations.
“It’s about sharing the knowledge about what we do in the Bitcoin community now” she says, “and hopefully in the future there will be some more donations.”
Donations help the foundation keep babies HIV-free, keep young people with HIV/AIDS on treatment and boost maternal health.
All three of these women have been instrumental in raising awareness about bitcoin and the way it can have a positive impact on society – as well as the ways in which women are making a difference in the Bitcoin space.
Decentral Talk Live airs daily, Monday to Friday, at 3:00 pm EST on decentral.tv.
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