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The hundreds of thousands of supporters that have descended on Brasil to watch their national team on the world stage play the beautiful game are joined by Mr Bitcoin, a yellow and purple mascot promoting Bitcoin Donation Cup, a global community donation program sponsored by ten Bitcoin companies to provide a seamless way for fans […]

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The US Marshals Service will auction off nearly 30,000 Bitcoins seized from the Silk Road shutdown. Got $200,000? Place a bid

If news reports are true, bitcoin in China may have a new adversary in the Payments and Clearing Association.

The creator of the former CNet talks about bankruptcy, Bitreserve and how bitcoin can help avoid another banking crisis.

Le gouvernement américain a annoncé jeudi la mise aux enchères des 29,656.51306529 bitcoins saisis de Silk Road. a mise aux enchères des bitcoins saisis du site marchand du Deep Web Silk Road a été annoncée le jeudi 12 juin 2014 par les US Marshals, d’après un communiqué publié sur leur site internet. 29,656.51306529 bitcoins - […]

The post Les US Marshals mettent aux enchères les bitcoins saisis de Silk Road appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Hesitant whistleblowers sometimes face an impossibly difficult decision: expose corruption and risk persecution, or turn a blind eye to abuses and continue a comfortable life. PayPub is an early-stage prototype that would give hesitant leakers an extra incentive to select the former option. That incentive is bitcoin. Developers Amir Taaki and Peter Todd told WIRED they […]

The post PayPub Could Encourage Whistleblowers With Bitcoin Payments appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

An attacker on a $2,000 budget could reveal bitcoin clients' IP addresses, researchers say.

Scammers are resorting to old tricks like phishing emails to steal bitcoin. Here's how to keep your funds safe.

Starting next week, Los Angeles Bitcoin users will have the ability to buy and sell Bitcoin at the new Robocoin ATMs. With just a scan of their palm, users have the freedom to exchange currencies through ExpressCoin at two Locali Conscious Convenience stores: one in Venice and one in Hollywood. The Robocoin ATMs cost $15,000 […]

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The cryptocurrency can now be a travel companion on business trips.

There is only way to hack the entire Bitcoin network, which has continued to hum along in the face of numerous Bitcoin business failures.

It involves a series of group of Bitcoin miners taking control of 51% of the Bitcoin's processing power, thus giving them the power to confirm transactions that don't exist. Miners are simply computers that unscramble the encrypted series of numbers attached to every Bitcoin transaction. There is profit in numbers, and many miners have formed large pools to extract the maximum amount of profit for their work. 

As a completely unregulated global currency made out of computer code, the only thing that has prevented the 51% threshold from being reached has been a form of mutually assured destruction: As soon as the 51% figure is reached, the price of Bitcoin will tank, leaving the digital junta little time to make much of a profit.

Today, mining pool GHash's share of the Bitcoin network ticked 51%:

Prices briefly sank 2% as word spread that the 51% level had been achieved. The crisis was momentarily resolved after a member of GHash agreed to remove some of its resources from the pool.

But there is now debate raging in Bitcoin world about what to do next. One commentator who wished to remain anonymous told BI, "This is not Bitcoin anymore, it's centralized GHashcoin....They are killing what is a big part of Bitcoins value."

Two Cornell computer scientists posted a note to HackingDistributed confirming that, indeed, this is a doomsday scenario:

Is this really Armageddon? Yes, it is. GHash is in a position to exercise complete control over which transactions appear on the blockchain and which miners reap mining rewards. They could keep 100% of the mining profits to themselves if they so chose. Bitcoin is currently an expensive distributed database under the control of a single entity, albeit one whose maintenance requires constantly burning energy -- worst of all worlds. 

Jeff Garzik, one of Bitcoin's core developers, was slightly more sanguine, Tweeting that the total share of processing power owned mattered less than the leadership at the top of that share.

The two Cornell researchers, Ittay Eyal, and Emin Gün Sirer, propose creating a "hard fork" on the Bitcoin network, a set-aside part of Bitcoin's transaction ledger that would sacrifice some  Bitcoin attributes in the name of preventing another similar attack. Others have proposed creating a peer-to-peer network of mining nodes which, instead of being able to access the entire blockchain, only target specified branches. 

There is a third way, the Eyal and Sirer say, which seems to describe the current situation:

...We can carry on as if nothing of importance happened. GHash will be on their best behavior for the next few weeks, and Bitcoin will limp along. What will bring the actual demise of Bitcoin is the subject of a future blog post, but this is by no means the end.

But it doesn't look good. 

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 When bitcoin’s price skyrockets, the printing presses kick into high gear. And when Bitcoin collapses, a new crop of stories go out. Something interesting is happening at the moment, however, as we have recently seen a decoupling of bitcoin’s price and the public interest. In short, bitcoin’s recent rally hasn’t been matched with rising consumer interest in the currency. Read More

The altcoin community celebrates the FIFA World Cup, while StartCOIN brings a new, decentralized twist to crowdfunding.