CoinDesk, 3/11/2014 3:21 PM PST In a move that signals a positive regulatory stance, Luxembourg has invited dialogue with digital currency businesses. |
The Economist, 3/10/2014 4:50 PM PST ON MARCH 6TH Newsweek made waves by claiming to reveal the identity of the inventor of Bitcoin, the digital currency. According to the magazine the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto is in fact a 64-year-old man called Satoshi Nakamoto. The Mr Nakamoto in question, for his part, has denied he is Bitcoin's inventor. Indeed in a subsequent interview with a reporter from the Associated Press, he struggled to name Bitcoin correctly. But as impenetrable to most people as the inner workings of the cryptocurrency is a curious word used to describe how Bitcoin’s supposed inventor was uncovered: Mr Nakamoto was "doxxed".The term "dox" (also spelt "doxx", and short for "[dropping] documents") first came into vogue as a verb around a decade ago, referring to malicious hackers' habit of collecting personal and private information, including home addresses and national identity numbers. The data are often released publicly against a person’s wishes. It is a practice frowned upon by users of Reddit, a popular online forum, and many others. More recently journalists have co-opted the phrase. It is now used by some, in a non-pejorative sense, to mean deep investigative reporting. This has blurred the distinction between nefarious digital intrusion and noble journalism. Farhad Manjoo, a technology reporter for the New York Times, pithily summed up the change in the word’s meaning: ... |