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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In a bid to avoid another Mt. Gox
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The UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, today dipped into his pocket and displayed a new 12-sided £1 coin, the coin’s first redesign in 30 years. It is, supposedly, the world’s most secure coin.
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Robocoin has announced that the first Bitcoin ATMs in the U.S. will be installed later this month in Seattle, and Austin, Texas.
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A growing number of establishments are accepting Bitcoin as payment. Now you can even use it to play arcade games. British company Liberty Games combined the cutting edge currency with the aging gaming platform to make a simple transaction hilariously complicated. The company used a Raspberry Pi and a PiFace add-on to make the payment interface.
Liberty Games first tried their Bitcoin payment mod on a pool table. After receiving good feedback for that mod, the company decided to apply it on an arcade machine.
The great thing about their method is that it doesn’t mess with the machine’s software, which means it can be performed on pretty much any coin-operated arcade game. Not that you should.
[via Gamefreaks]
TigerDirect has been teasing for a while that Bitcoin payments would be turning up. That day has come with the retailer announcing this week that it is now accepting Bitcoin as payment for any of the items it sells.
TigerDirect sells a wide variety of computer hardware, displays and gadgets among other things. The payment processor for TigerDirect is BitPay and Tiger is now the largest customer for BitPay. TigerDirect is only accepting Bitcoin online, retail stores aren’t accepting the virtual currency at this point.
TigerDirect also has a bunch of hardware that you can purchase aimed specifically at Bitcoin mining. That opens the possibility of being able to pay for items with the Bitcoins mined using hardware you bought with Bitcoin.
[via CoinDesk]
For over a century, every last bit of paper money that’s circulated around the United States has come from just one single supplier, Crane & Co. But as The Washington Post found out, that century of loyalty was almost for naught when the 90s came along and brought with it a new menace to American currency; Crane had to overhaul their entire production process thanks to none other than lycra-laced, skin-tight denim.
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Arguing that it is "not a currency in the real meaning of the word," Chinese authorities have banned financial companies from using Bitcoin. This is to "protect the status of the renminbi as the statutory currency, prevent risks of money laundering and protect financial stability." [New York Times]
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Brazil’s national currency is the real, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at its iTunes storefront. Apple prices everything there in US dollars, which has led Brazil’s Consumer Protection Secretariat to write a formal letter to the company requesting an explanation. We’re not sure why this has taken so long, given that iTunes came to Brazil two years ago, but in any case Apple now has ten days in which to respond or face the threat of a penalty. Other countries that’ve tackled Apple over its pricing policies in the past have generally failed to reach a resolution, and in some cases citizens have even been urged to take matters into their own hands.
Filed under: Misc, Internet, HD, Mobile, Apple
Source: Brazilian Ministry of Justice
State-issued currency is the scaffolding upon which capitalism was built, but it’s always been prone to mayhem. For instance in 1920s Germany, extreme inflation forced German businesses to actually print millions of their own customized paper bills. Now largely forgotten, this notgeld, or "emergency money," was once ubiquitous—amounting to an ornately-decorated I.O.U. in Weimar Germany.
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