The squat is filling up. A group of young men are sitting in a circle avidly discussing something. They include the bald-headed man I'd met outside, who turns out to be a university lecturer. Others are bankers dressed in suits chatting to hooded hackers and the documentary filmmaker....
If first generation companies were focused on the infrastructure aspects of the crypto-currency (generating or mining actual Bitcoin currency and providing an exchange for it), the next wave will be about making the math-based money simple for non-hackers to use, says Boost VC founder...
When is a cashless society coming? Do we have it on the horizon? It's so funny, that's such a European dream. This is the kind of thing I'll be talking about when I come out [to Wired Money]. Money has changed so much in the last few years, you've got cards pegged to the pound, and yo...
Bitcoin records every single transaction on its network in a public record called the blockchain. A new one is generated roughly every ten minutes and shared throughout the network. The determining factor in whether the blockchain is the real one or should be discarded as a fake is wh...
For all the Bitcoin hype, it's not hard to see that there's a big problem in how bitcoins are actually used. That comes from Bitcoin being both a currency and a commodity in its current guise. Its rise in value has been the thing to make it famous, but that's also the thing that has u...
Octopus Erik Charlton / CC BY 2.0 A team of researchers has mapped the movements of cargo ships around the world to work out where invasive marine species may attack. In Ecology Letters, the team describes how animals are sucked into ballast water on ships and then expelled in other p...
One of those is Mt Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, with Moore and Christin stating that at its peak it handles more than 40,000 Bitcoin transactions a day, compared to a mean average of 1,716. It has been the victim of a huge number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks o...
For Bitcoin miners, the name of the game is cryptography. And the lottery ticket is a hash -- a number that represents a big bunch of data and is created via cryptographic algorithms. If one miner -- or a group of miners -- can take the transactions on the Bitcoin network and convert ...
The Pirate Bay has opened its doors to public donations in the form of Bitcoins . The BitTorrent site has hitherto been funded by other methods such as banner advertising but, as the digital currency makes it far harder to trace funding, Bitcoins are a viable option for those who want...
Zach Copley/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0 Let's say you believe that the price of gold is going to go through the roof (as opposed to where it has been going lately: the basement). To capitalise on that belief, do you run out and invest in mining or smelting equipment companies? Or do you just ...
That's where it was before the mad spike of late March and early April, which saw it reach a high of more than £170 per bitcoin, briefly, before it crashed down again. While the bubble no doubt made a lot of money for some people (and lost a lot of money for many more), a return to a ...
against the "environmental disaster" claim. Writing in Forbes , Tim Worstall says the energy being used is "simply trivial," amounting to 0.025 percent of the total US household electricity supply. And worldwide, that percentage would be far lower. Besides, Worstall says, "at some poi...
Maybe it's a sign of the Bitcoin bubble. Criminals are trying to take control of PCs and turn them into Bitcoin miners. According to antivirus seller Kaspersky Lab , there's a new Trojan -- spotted on 4 April and spreading via Skype -- that takes control of infected machines and force...
The emergence of Bitcoin as a mainstream currency continues apace, with the first "Bitcoin ATM" supposedly destined for -- of all places -- Cyprus. In the wake of the Cypriot financial crisis that emerged in mid-March, it was noted (by Wired.co.uk and others) that an apparent spike in...
If you think your savings are under threat -- from a banking collapse, government seizure or anything else -- the traditional thing to do is withdraw your cash and stick it under a mattress. But could Europeans scared of losing their cash be turning to Bitcoins instead? One of the sid...
A Bitcoin transaction services company says that hackers broke into one of its brokerage accounts last week, nabbing more than $12,000 (£7,965) worth of the digital currency. That attack knocked Bitinstant offline over the weekend. The company says that while it lost Bitcoins, no cust...
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 27 February that its operations would move to Silicon Valley), recorde...
Kim Dotcom has announced that the web storage service, Mega, will accept payments made using the virtual currency, bitcoins. The payments are made via the Bitvoucher site which was set up to allow Mega users to buy package upgrades without divulging their identity to anyone outside th...
An Australian drug dealer has become the first person to be convicted of a Silk Road-related crime, after using the black marketplace to buy a stash of MDMA, amphetamine, marijuana and cocaine. People can buy goods from Silk Road only by connecting with the anonymising Tor network and...
As various tech companies report their fourth-quarter 2012 earnings numbers this week, so are two grey-market, Bitcoin-based casinos -- and one is turning profits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars after only six months of being in business Recently, both SatoshiDice and bitZino ...
A website that swaps real-world currencies for decentralised virtual bitcoins has been granted the status of a bank. Bitcoin-Central made a deal with French financial companies Aqoba and Credit Mutuel to grant it the status of a "payment services provider". This makes it easier for it...
The first commercial-scale vertical farm has opened in the tiny, densely-populated city of Singapore, with the aim of decreasing dependence on food imports Singapore, which lies at the end of the Malay Peninsula, is just 710 square kilometres, almost all of which is city. That leaves ...
Bitcoins are back in the news for the wrong reasons, as it emerges that trading site Bitfloor has had over £160,000 stolen by hackers. Bitfloor's founder, Roman Shtylman, took to the site's forum to let users know what had happened -- and to ask for "help" to avoid creating panic with...
