It is hard to have a serious conversation about Bitcoin without discussing anonymity. While anonymity is not an inherent characteristic of Bitcoin, the two have become nearly synonymous in the public imagination. Since law enforcement depends on the ability to track financial transact...
BitPay, which processes payments for merchants in the virtual currency Bitcoin, has attracted some investors with a pedigree in pioneering alternative ways to send and receive money. The Atlanta-based startup said Thursday it has secured $2 million in seed capital from a group led by ...
A move by the U.S. government to rein in the unregulated use of Bitcoin involved the seizure of a Japanese company's account at Wells Fargo (WFC). Mt. Gox, the world's largest exchange for trading the virtual currency, has operated as an unlicensed money transmitting business in viola...
The payments industry has been ripe for disruption for as long as I can remember. Historically conservative and non-experimental, banking and financial services always appear to be the laggard for any new technology. But none of that has stopped recent innovators from pursuing things ...
More than a decade ago, regulators nearly suffocated PayPal . Now it looks like they’re trying to squelch another disruptive, innovative payments system. At least three exchanges in the U.S. that traded the digital currency Bitcoin have shut down, apparently as a result of guidance is...
Today, Bitcoin is the wild, wild West. But the sheriff is coming to town, and just like in the Old West, we'll see even more value creation once the law, the railroad and the homesteaders get here. For those who are not familiar with Bitcoin, it is a cryptography-based, decentralized,...
The dangers to financial privacy are monumental. Consider an Obama administration plan to give spy agencies unfettered access to data on American citizens and others who bank in the U.S. Suspicious Activity Reports, filed by financial institutions that operate in the U.S., are the pri...
I recently had a fascinating chat with the economist Peter Šurda to discuss how nonpolitical cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could alter the future of fractional reserve banking . Peter is also a software developer experienced in the online payments industry and will present at the Bitc...
Comments of the Week: Bitcoin ATM, CFPB's Balloon Loans, Budget Sequester On whether commissions should run the OCC and FHFA: "The influence of the industry threatens to overwhelm government Having pluralistic boards might well be the only protection we can develop for promoting a g...
It looks like a high school science project, but this countertop machine may be a bulwark of financial privacy in the age of digital money. Last weekend at the Free State Project 's annual Liberty Forum in New Hampshire, entrepreneurs Zach Harvey and Matt Whitlock advanced the anonymo...
Editor 's note: This post originally appeared on PaymentsSource . I've always had this nagging feeling about Coinbase's exchange service and I just couldn't quite put my finger on it. The San Francisco startup receives praise for its simple method of acquiring and selling bitcoins, a ...
I always check out this website before getting a loan - www.dollar-plan.com - My personal favourite are trusted payday because they can always get me a loan despite my poor credit history. Posted by lucysan | Friday, February 22 2013 at 11:06AM ET Bitcoin adoption is increasing and re...
The anonymous digital currency Bitcoin, which is already accepted on the Wordpress blogging site, has another mainstream partner. Reddit, the social news and entertainment site, now accepts bitcoins as payment for Reddit Gold, a subscription service. Created in 2009, Bitcoin is a dece...
The anonymous digital currency Bitcoin, which is already accepted on the Wordpress blogging site, has another mainstream partner. Reddit, the social news and entertainment site, now accepts bitcoins as payment for Reddit Gold, a subscription service. Created in 2009, Bitcoin is a dece...
PayPal's strict requirements for merchants that sell file-storage services have created an opportunity for competitors including BitPay, which processes payments in the digital currency Bitcoin. Last week, four vendors that market the cloud-storage services of Mega — the new venture f...
A group of angel investors including SecondMarket founder Barry Silbert has invested $510,000 in BitPay, a firm that processes payments for merchants in the digital currency Bitcoin. BitPay says it plans to use the new capital to move its headquarters to Atlanta from Orlando and to hi...
The budget deal reached at the beginning of this year extends an obscure but important tax break for U.S. banks that do business overseas, according to the FT . Under the "subpart F exception for active financing income" (rolls off the tongue, don't it?), income earned on certain tran...
Chris Larsen, who disrupted consumer finance in the 1990s and 2000s with E-Loan and Prosper, is seeking to shake up the industry again with Ripple, a peer-to-peer payment and lending system. Ripple looks to improve on Bitcoin, the decentralized virtual currency and payment system that...
The world's most popular web publishing platform has begun accepting Bitcoin, an international digital currency and payment system with no central issuing authority. WordPress, whose software is used by bloggers worldwide, said Thursday that customers can now use Bitcoin in lieu of cr...
There have been some new twists in the strange case of an alleged attempt to blackmail Mitt Romney for $1 million in bitcoins, raising additional legal questions about the digital currency. Two months ago I explained how an anonymous ransom letter threatening the release of then-presi...
Bitcoin and other virtual currencies can contribute positively to financial innovation but also subject users to various risks, according to a report published recently by the European Central Bank . According to the report, the growing use of the Internet, an increase in electronic c...
Bitcoin and other virtual currencies can contribute positively to financial innovation but also subject users to various risks, according to a report published recently by the European Central Bank . According to the report, the growing use of the Internet, an increase in electronic c...
Thanksgiving and the ensuing shopping sprees are a few weeks away, but a group of merchants who accept the digital currency Bitcoin are planning their own Black Friday before then. At least 25 retailers that accept the virtual tender are planning a sale slated for Nov. 9 that they've ...
Thanksgiving and the ensuing shopping sprees are a few weeks away, but a group of merchants who accept the digital currency Bitcoin are planning their own Black Friday before then. At least 25 retailers that accept the virtual tender are planning a sale slated for Nov. 9 that they've ...
It may be getting easier to buy with Bitcoin. BitPay, an Orlando-based company that helps online merchants accept the digitized currency as payment, said Tuesday more than 1,000 merchants have signed up for its service in the past year. Merchants who have signed up for BitPay include ...
It may be an elaborate hoax, but an apparent attempt to blackmail Mitt Romney shows the dark side of a disruptive financial technology and raises serious legal questions. In an anonymous letter addressed to PricewaterhouseCoopers, an individual or group of individuals claims to have o...
Returning bitcoins to the "from" address doesn't necessarily do what you think it does. If the sender used a hosted (shared) EWallet, the coins that you return will go to someone else other than the sender.You'll probably just want to pick a charity and send them there. If you wanted ...
And Bitcoin is a risky place to store large sums of money. Fanatics will argue it's a better long-term investment than the U.S. dollar, because of the predictable and fixed supply – the algorithm that creates bitcoins is programmed to stop once there are 21 million of them – and who k...
The PayPal-Discover deal; Dunkin Donuts follows Starbucks into mobile payments; a Bitcoin MasterCard? Understanding Basel III: The Impact on Small Banks About 6,000 U.S. banks, including those as small as $500 million in assets, are required to implement the "standardized" approach in...
This week, the U.S. Postal Service is threatening to default if Congress does not give it more of our money, while the Office of Financial Research is considering requiring financial companies to turn over your trading and transactions data. When will these dinosaur ideas of centraliz...
