Coin News

Bitcoin game show "Take My Bitcoins" reports it has awarded nearly 20 BTC since it launched in April.

The UK's Royal Mint has reportedly discontinued talks with Alderney about minting physical bitcoins.

We feature a mobile game that use caishencoins, and an altcoin modeled after a TV show.

We feature a mobile game that use caishencoins, and an altcoin modeled after a TV show.

KnCMiner has started shipping a 3 TH/s Bitcoin mining box, the largest single Bitcoin ASIC miner in existence at the moment.  The unfortunate part, though, is that none of these KnCMiner Super Jupiters arrived at their destination in one piece. KnCMiner has responded promptly on their forum, promising to ship new, properly constructed, units to affected customers, […]

The post KnCMiner Super Jupiter Bitcoin Mining ASICs Are Arriving In Pieces appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Bye-bye Gox and hello bitcoin debit cards! Catch this week's digital currency news roundup to get up to speed.

Perhaps no Bitcoin story is more well-known to the mainstream — and most haunts Bitcoin evangelists — than the rise and fall of MtGox.

For about two years, Gox was the world's largest Bitcoin exchange. Headquartered in Tokyo, the company at its height claimed it was processing $3 billion-worth of Bitcoin, and was valued by some at $1 billion dollars.

But cracks began forming in the Gox edifice just as Bitcoin demand began to surge: As early as Spring 2013, customers had begun complaining about delays in receiving transfers, and difficulties removing their fiat currency from their exchange's wallets. A crackdown on Gox's U.S. bank accounts that August further ratcheted up uncertainty about the fate of the exchange.

Finally this February, the firm announced almost half a billion dollars' worth of Bitcoins had gone missing. Today, it began formal bankruptcy proceedings.

No one is still quite sure what happened to the missing Bitcoins — or how many are truly gone.

But for Daniel Mross, a Bitcoin software developer and the protagonist of the new documentary "The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin," which premiered Wednesday at the Tribeca Film Festival, MtGox's downfall was more tragic than malicious. And he put into perspective how much dominant they exchange could have been. 

"I think MtGox had the potential of being a Google of Bitcoin, and to squander that is just really a shame," Mross told BI in an interview Thursday. "It was the one," he added.

The main problem, Mross said, was that CEO Mark Karpeles, 28, believed he was capable of taking on MtGox's workload by himself. Karpeles took over the firm in 2011, and thanks to its seemingly sophisticated software and access — however short-lived — to American financial services, Gox's popularity grew.

Gox's payrolls failed to grow with it.

"He was the CEO, the CFO, he was the lead developer — there were only two other programmers at MtGox, and they were only doing front-end stuff — so he wrote all the software, installed all the servers, did all the infrastructure," Mross said. "Just way too much, way in over his head."

The filmmakers were given a tour of MtGox's sterile, cubicle-less and seemingly windowless office, though Karpeles and chief marketing officer and fellow Frenchman Gonzague Gay-Bouchery come off as mostly upbeat, revealing no sign of the immense pressure their exchange is under.

That comes a bit later, when Karpeles gives a brief tour of his sparsely furnished apartment in downtown Tokyo, and tries and fails to play a one-handed version of "Fur Elise" on his electric keyboard.

"When we did talk to him when, we did finally get him on his own, then he opened up," Mross said. "He was actually really friendly in a quiet kind of way, he seemed kind of a loner, had his personal life that he valued."

"Definitely a quirky guy, a little bit off — in a good way, almost an endearing way," Nicholas Mross, Dan's brother and the film's director added.

Daniel said Karpeles kept them waiting for hours at a time, causing their footage to be shot at night and rendering much of it unusable. 

"That was definitely kind of an indicator of the bigger picture, how he dealt with things — 'Oh, I'll get to that whenever I'm ready to,' " Mross said.

Nicholas Mross said he tried to take a journalistic approach to Bitcoin's booms and busts, though is mostly a celebration of the cryptocurrency and the culture that's grown up around it.

Still, he does not omit the ultimate fate of another key protagonist, Charlie Shrem, who ran a U.S. exchange called BitInstant. Last fall, Shrem was indicted on money laundering charges. In fact, the film's key strength is just how early it got in on the Bitcoin story: There's a scene in which Shrem, only a few months after BitInstant's launch, complains of how much he's had to spend on lawyers.

"The first thought honestly was,  'This is terrible,' — we felt bad for the guy. But from a filmmaking perspective there's the idea of our footage now becomes historic — this thing happened that we we captured at a time that can't be recreated."

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Bitcoin ATMs continue to grow in number. This week's roundup includes more exotic locales, unexpected events, and various altcoins.

Bitcoin ATMs continue to grow in number. This week's roundup includes more exotic locales, unexpected events, and various altcoins.

By April 15, which was a few short days ago, most high school seniors had already submitted their statement of intent to register (SIR) to the college of their choice. Since then, they have turned their eyes toward the fall semester and what they will elect to study there. This decision, of course, is not easy. A person’s major has an influence far beyond the four years of college. Your major gives you a particular body of knowledge, expertise, and skills that you will carry with you for the rest of your life, and perhaps more importantly, determines how employers view that package. Thus, students want to select a major that is viewed favorably by employers, so that they may […]

The post A Message to the Class of 2018: Consider Cryptocurrency appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Six months ago Ethereum was an ambitious white paper committed to a thorough re-imagining of the ‘Bitcoin 2.0’ space. With a sincere desire to mould the blockchain in his own image Vitalik Buterin, our resident tech. wizz, penned the concept. Since inception the project has benefited from some key strategic partnerships and an unparalleled press onslaught. Ethereum has successfully inspired technologists itching to take blockchains to the next level. Enter Dr. Gavin Wood. Open-source projects live and die by the developer talent they attract. Upon first meeting Gavin two things struck me: his animated enthusiasm for fractals and his casual indifference to Bitcoin. Gavin is not a ‘Bitcoiner’ as you’d expect to meet at a conference. This is a capable […]

The post Web 3.0 – A Chat With Ethereum’s Gavin Wood appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Pelle Braendgaard talks to CoinDesk about his company's plans and the challenges bitcoin faces in the developing world.

The French Ministry of Economy and Finance has stated that earnings from bitcoin transactions will be taxed.

  There’s an interesting new altcoin: AsiaCoin is another Altcoin that claims to be different from the rest. Asserting itself as the first “continental coin”. With ambitions to dominate the Asian market in these “hard times”, AsiaCoin is a direct nod to the Chinese Bitcoin ban controversy but is it worth the hype?   To deduce […]

The post AsiaCoin, The First “Continental Coin” appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

  There’s an interesting new altcoin: AsiaCoin is another Altcoin that claims to be different from the rest. Asserting itself as the first “continental coin”. With ambitions to dominate the Asian market in these “hard times”, AsiaCoin is a direct nod to the Chinese Bitcoin ban controversy but is it worth the hype?   To deduce […]

The post AsiaCoin, The First “Continental Coin” appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Bitcoin wallet provider Xapo reckons it's about to make Bitcoin use substantially easier, by teaming up with your more established form of banks to create a Mastercard-branded credit card that'll let you blow your virtual money in actual shops.

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The People's Bank may be getting stricter with Chinese bitcoin exchanges after reported warnings to major banks.

The existing units for dividing bitcoin are too complex, but there is a simpler solution.

Bitcoin prices have dropped nearly 10% across all Bitcoin exchanges, with the bulk of the action understandably located on Chinese Bitcoin Exchanges.  A few hours ago, Caixin published a Chinese article claiming that the PBOC has met with commercial banks and third party payment processors, in particular those that do, or have done, business with Chinese Bitcoin […]

The post Caixin Article Claims PBOC Is Meeting With Banks And Payment Processors To Completely Cut Off Funding To Bitcoin Trading appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

'The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin' paints, as you might expect from the title, a rosy picture of the digital currency.

Newly-discovered bitcoin mining malware shows a greater degree of sophistication, says mobile security firm Lookout.

For all its advantages, Bitcoin has one major drawback: it's rather hard to spend. While the digital currency has legs in online marketplaces like Overstock and Square Market, few brick and mortar stores are equipped to trade in Bitcoin. Special ATMs...