The Department of Homeland Security is investigating Mt. Gox , the largest Bitcoin exchange, for violating laws on US money exchange and money transfers—and it's grabbing the exchange's money in the process. DHS officials refused to comment on the ongoing investigation, but they did p...
The Department of Homeland Security has apparently shut down a key mobile payments account associated with Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange. Chris Coyne, the co-founder of online dating service OKCupid, tweeted out an e-mail he received from Dwolla this afternoon. The e-mail stat...
It might have passed you by, but an essential part of the Internet's infrastructure took a heavy knock last week. The Silk Road—you know, the website where you can buy any drug imaginable "—was subjected to a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Calling the Silk Roa...
Apparently, I'm a Bitcoin miner now, and it looks like I'm actually pretty good at it. Ars is currently in possession of one of the elusive but very real Butterfly Labs Bitcoin Miners . It's a tiny little black box that fits in the palm of my hand, and it contains a specialized ASIC a...
The American financial regulator for derivatives trading has told multiple news outlets that it is considering new rules for Bitcoin. "Here's what I know for sure: we could regulate it if we wanted. That is very clear," Bart Chilton, one of five commissioners at the Commodity Futures ...
More than two weeks after the Bitcoin exchange Bitfloor closed its virtual doors , many customers are still waiting to get their money back. One tally of 78 Bitfloor users on reddit found that Bitfloor owed them $267,000. The number might be much higher once all users are accounted fo...
In February, we reported on a major deal between Mt. Gox, the Japanese firm that runs the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, and the American startup CoinLab. Under the terms of the agreement, CoinLab would take charge of Mt. Gox's operations in the United States and Canada. CoinLab pr...
Competitive video gaming community E-Sports Entertainment Association secretly updated its client software with Bitcoin-mining code that tapped players' computers to mint more than $3,600 worth of the digital currency, one of its top officials said Wednesday. The admission by co-found...
A study of the Bitcoin exchange industry has found that 45 percent of exchanges fail, taking their users' money with them. Those that survive are the ones that handle the most traffic—but they are also the exchanges that suffer the greatest number of cyber attacks. Computer scientists...
On Wednesday evening, Bitfloor , the number four Bitcoin-based exchange (behind Mt. Gox, BTC-E, and Bitstamp) announced that it is closing its doors “indefinitely.” “Unfortunately, our US bank account is scheduled to be closed and we can no longer provide the same level of [US dollar]...
Sadly, you can't spend actual bitcoins like these (non-digital ones) for your online dating profile. CASASCIUS On Tuesday, as Bitcoin’s exchange rate fell to its lowest level in days at around $64 per bitcoin , OKCupid announced that it would accept the digital currency from users wan...
With trading set to resume on Mt. Gox in just a few hours, no one knows what will happen. Zach Copley Bitcoin’s biggest asset is also its biggest liability—no government or regulator controls what people are willing to pay for a little piece of nearly-anonymous computer code. That fac...
The MT.Gox lookalike site that delivered malware to unwitting Bitcoiners. In another example of the security mantra of "be careful what you click," at least one Bitcoin trader has been robbed in a forum "phishing" attack designed specifically to ride the hype around the digital curren...
Real Time Bitcoin Data Services On Wednesday afternoon, the Bitcoin bubble appears to have burst . As of this writing, its current value is around $160—down from a high of $260 . (It fell as low as $130 today.) There is no obvious explanation for why the digital currency has fallen so...
Bitcoin wallet service Coinbase has publicly, and presumably accidentally, exposed information about its users' names, e-mail addresses, and details of their transactions on the Coinbase website. The exposed e-mail addresses have become the target of phishing attacks. Update: Coinbase...
Two days after Bitcoin blasted through its all-time price—shooting past $100 per BTC—Instawallet, one of the digital currency's easiest-to-use wallet sites, has shut down indefinitely. Bitcoin’s price peaked at around $140 late Tuesday but has since fallen back down. It’s hovering aro...
At the end of February, Bitcoins hit an all-time trading high of just over $33 . That suddenly looks like chump change, with the value of Bitcoins today moving past $100. You can see nearly real-time changes in the value of Bitcoins at Coinlab , and track its steady rise over the past...
Bitcoin's value continues to rise. Zach Copley Cyprus just re-opened its banks Thursday after a two-week bank holiday meant to stave off major financial crisis. European Union authorities imposed unprecedented financial restrictions on the Mediterranean island nation and went to drast...
An Alberta man is hoping to become the first person to sell a house for bitcoins. He's asking CAD$405,000, or its equivalent in bitcoins, for the 3.6 acre site. "We are hoping to be the first piece of real estate sold for bitcoins," Taylor More told us by e-mail. "We think maybe this ...
The federal agency charged with enforcing the nation's laws against money laundering has issued new guidelines suggesting that several parties in the Bitcoin economy qualify as Money Services Businesses under US law. Money Services Businesses (MSBs) must register with the federal gove...
A technical glitch in the core Bitcoin software forced developers to call for a temporary halt to Bitcoin transactions, sparking a sharp sell-off. The currency's value briefly fell 23 percent to $37 before regaining much of its value later in the evening. The core of the Bitcoin netwo...
After rising steadily over the last several months, Bitcoin has reached an all-time high according to data on Bitcoin Charts . As of this writing, Mt. Gox , the most popular Bitcoin trading site (which announced on Wednesday that its operations would move to Silicon Valley), recorded ...
The world's leading Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, has announced a partnership with the Silicon Valley startup Coinlab. Under the agreement, Coinlab will handle Mt. Gox's American operations, which account for a large majority of the exchange's business. The transition will occur on March...
Ruby 2.0 was released yesterday , giving the open source programming language a variety of new features and better-than-usual compatibility with the previous version. One significant addition is "Refinements," an experimental feature that aims to change the way monkey patching is perf...
It seems like every week or so, bitcoin is moving further into the mainstream. Most recently, it was online gambling .In November, even WordPress started taking payment in the digital currency. Last year, a bitcoin bank was launched . And on Thursday, the Internet Archive announced th...
Kim Dotcom yesterday announced that the Mega storage service is now accepting payment via bitcoins , an encrypted, peer-to-peer digital currency that isn't backed by any government. While Mega allows free access to 50GB of storage, there are payment plans allowing anywhere from 500GB ...
Sadly, you can't spend actual bitcoins like these (non-digital ones) at a digital casino. CASASCIUS As various tech companies report their fourth-quarter 2012 earnings numbers this week, so are two gray-market, Bitcoin-based casinos —and one is turning profits in the hundreds of thous...
Hundreds of thousands of websites are potentially at risk following the discovery of an extremely critical vulnerability in the Ruby on Rails framework that gives remote attackers the ability to execute malicious code on the underlying servers. The bug is present in Rails versions spa...
Last year, we wrote about Satoshi Dice , a Bitcoin-based online "slot machine." This month, at least one company hopes to introduce Bitcoin-based poker. The move could help to re-open online poker to American gamblers in the face of vigorous efforts by the US government to shut down o...
Back in June I heard about two San Francisco startups—Lyft and SideCar—that had similar business models. By the next month, I became a driver for both companies . Both companies allow individuals armed with smartphones to moonlight as not-quite-taxi drivers. Then, potential passengers...
