Over the weekend, Ross Ulbricht’s lawyer, Joshua Dratel, filed a motion asking the court to dismiss all charges against the Silk Road kingpin. It’s largely what you’d expect from a bullish defense attorney. But here’s the twist: Dratel throws bitcoin under the bus.
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With April 15 looming, plenty of bitcoin barons have been wondering how to treat their newfound crypto-fortunes. Does it count as capital gains? Is it taxed like a currency? Is it taxed at all? Well, on Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service announced definitively that Bitcoin is property and much be taxed as such.
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Bitcoin, like all great fantasies, has a compelling creation myth: one Satoshi Nakamoto existed on the internet just long enough to give birth to everyone’s favorite cryptocurrency before disappearing for six years. Theories abounded as to the man’s true identity. No one could track him down. That is, until Newsweek did just now.
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Flexcoin, famous for making bitcoin banking as easy as regular banking, is no more. The company shut its doors on Tuesday morning after hackers stole 896 bitcoins (nearly $620,000) from its vault on Sunday. And the most unsettling thing? That wasn’t even the only bitcoin heist last weekend.
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The Mt.Gox saga just gets sadder and sadder. Not only did the company file for bankruptcy, but Mt.Gox CEO Mike Karpele went on Japanese TV a few minutes ago and admitted that everybody’s money is gone. Gone, gone, gone.
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Ever since a single Bitcoin became worth a small fortune, there have been people trying to steal them. Sure, there have some small-time thieves who’ve stolen a few hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin here and there. But there have also been heists. Massive, highly orchestrated attacks that lead to millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency changing hands. And they just keep happening.
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Bad news, you lovers of liberty and cryptocurrency. Somebody just hacked into the resurrected version of the Silk Road (a.k.a. Silk Road 2)
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Toronto-based wearable startup Bionym’s Nymi band uses your ECG to securely identify you to various devices and services, and as of today there’s another trick up its sleeve – acting as a secure, easy to use Bitcoin wallet. The company revealed today that one of the launch applications that will ship with the Nymi will be a Bitcoin wallet, and that said wallet will provide a more secure method of storing your account’s private key.
All Bitcoin transactions consist of a key exchange: when someone is depositing funds into your account, they use the public key (it’s public since people don’t often get that cheesed about getting free money); when they want to send or withdraw the cryptocurrency, they use the private key. Recently, some evidence has suggested that it’s actually frighteningly easy to get at that private key if it’s stored on a hard drive or shared via QR code.
What Nymi brings to the table is a way to keep the private key securely stored independent of any computer, and tied to your unique ECG biometric signature. This makes it not only secure, but also more convenient than existing Bitcoin wallet solutions, Bionym President Andrew D’Souza explained in an interview.
“People just don’t understand how [Bitcoin] works, and how they gain access to it without putting themselves at risk,” “We see Nymi as essentially being that enabling technology that brings it to market. Everyone who buys a Nymi will get a Bitcoin wallet and be able to securely transact, and understand that their wallet is encrypted, and tied to their biometrics so that even if you lose your Nymi or it’s stolen they won’t be able to access your bitcoins.”
D’Souza says that while Bitcoin has a lot of potential, there’s a risk that it will either fade away into obscurity because of its perceived complexity, or that it’ll get legislated away and receive such a negative connotation that it doesn’t ever hit the mainstream. By making Bitcoin more accessible, and more secure, Bionym hopes to help it avoid those pitfalls. Their vision is of a world where you maintain a Bitcoin savings wallet on a computer, but then use your Nymi like a walkaround checking account for daily transactions.
“With Nymi, when you walk away from your computer your Bitcoin wallet will lock automatically,” explained Bionym Chief Cryptographer Yevgeniy Vahlis. “But it won’t just lock in terms of the interface; there’s nothing there to steal. Everything that’s important about your Bitcoin account is stored physically on the Nymi, so hacking into your computer won’t allow anyone to steal or misuse your Bitcoin, even if they hack into your computer while you’re using your Nymi.”
The Bitcoin Wallet will be shipping with the first Nymi armbands when they eventually ship. Bionym is keeping mum on when exactly that will be, but the company still states an “early 2014″ ship date on its pre-order page for the first batch of units. As with any hardware startup, demonstrating utility to early customers will be key, so Bitcoin integration, if it really can democratize the concept of the cryptocurrency, could indeed be a killer app.
Americans are spoiled—at least where Bitcoin’s concerned, we are. While people are free to mine, spend, and speculate on Bitcoin freely here in the States, citizens of other countries aren’t so lucky.
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You probably won’t be surprised one bit to learn there’s a new Bitcoin competitor out there. A group of cryptographers just announced the creation of Zerocoin, an ultra-anonymous cryptocurrency that’s otherwise a lot like the dozens of other newly launched cryptocurrencies.
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