The victim's family leaving court Friday afternoon. Left to right: Mary Todd, the victim's mother, with her son Chet Todd, his wife Corynne, sister-in-law, and husband Rick Todd. Photo: Belmont Lay After a week of court testimony, the tragic death of Shane Todd, 31, which sparked an i...
Shane Todd was a gifted engineer working for the Singaporean research agency Institute of Microelectronics. But in June 2012, he was found dead in his apartment. Police ruled the death a suicide, but Dr. Todd's family believed otherwise, lobbying the FBI and members of Congress into b...
The agency froze the Dwolla (a US-based online payments system) account of Mutum Sigillium (aka Mt. Gox) on the grounds that it had lied in an official form. When asked if his company "[accepts] funds from customers and send[s] the funds based on customers' instructions," Mt. Gox CEO ...
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...
Shane Todd's parents, Rick and Mary Todd, arriving at the coroner's public inquest. Photo: Belmont Lay Investigators and friends testified today that Shane Todd, the American engineer who was found hanging in his bathroom in Singapore last year , was depressed and even visited suicide...
The e-commerce giant is offering an escalating discount, up to 10 percent for $100 spent on coins, for customers who convert US dollars in bulk into Coins. There are several reasons why launching such a new exchange medium may be to the company's advantage. But many companies have tri...
Bitcoin, the four-year-old virtual currency that approximates cash on the internet , now powers an economy worth more than $1 billion and is widely admired for the technical sophistication that allows it to operate without a central authority. It got its own ticker on CNBC and inspire...
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 navi...
The ESEA gaming network has been exploiting its users' powerful graphics cards to mine Bitcoins without their knowledge. 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 large...
Welcome to The Verge: Weekender edition. Each week, we'll bring you important articles from the previous weeks' original reports, features, and reviews on The Verge. Think of it as a collection of a few of our favorite pieces from the week gone by, which you may have missed, or which ...
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’...
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 op...
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 ...
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 tel...
That staggering amount comes in a little less than a year, as the brothers are only reported to have begun "dabbling" in Bitcoin starting last summer. “We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error,” Tyler Winklevoss to...
Shane Todd. Photo courtesy the Todd family. "Mom, I’m going to call you every week," 31-year-old Shane Todd reportedly told his mother before he was found dead last June in an alleged suicide in Singapore . "If you don’t hear from me for a week, call the American embassy." It's possib...
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 ...
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 begin...
As far as preventing the attacks, Mt. Gox says there isn’t much it can do other than disconnect the trade engine backend from the internet, a partial fix that would allow selected users to continue to trade even if the site were hit with another DDoS attack. Mt. Gox's marketing manage...
Users who stored their Bitcoin in the system will be able to get the money back after a waiting period. The site will be opening a claims system, refunding amounts of less than 50BTC (currently around $6400) within 90 days as long as only one person makes a claim on it and processing ...
"Lots of people in the Bitcoin community chafe at what they think are silly, designed-fifty-years-ago government regulations that tell you what you may or may not do with your money," said Gavin Andresen, the lead developer on the open source Bitcoin Project that powers the currency. ...
Bitcoin, the decentralized virtual currency now worth over $1 billion , was designed to be as open and transparent as possible. Unlike traditional currency, you can download every Bitcoin transaction that's ever taken place and, more interestingly, tap into those transactions in close...
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 th...
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 unde...
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 Ba...
After intense lobbying by a US Senator, the Secretary of State, and the US Attorney General , Singapore will conduct an official coroner's inquiry into the unexpected death of American engineer Shane Todd, starting on May 13 . Todd told friends and family that he was working on a join...
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 th...
The sell-off was precipitated by a glitch that prevented a newly-mined Bitcoin block from checking out with an older version of the software. Since each new block of the purely digital currency relies on the blocks before it for authentication, this created a fork in the chain — miner...
This is hardly the first online retailer to accept Bitcoins, but the Bitcoin Store is hoping to undercut the competition and keep prices lower than other Bitcoin stores. According to Bitcoin Magazine , the store is slightly undercutting retailers like Amazon and NewEgg. According to V...
Bitcoin's rise can also be attributed to the fact that the currency has remained relatively free from major security breaches. In September, BitCoin exchange BitFloor was forced to temporarily suspend operations after a hacker stole more than $250,000 in virtual money. Things have bee...
