Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Avoiding Coins Created With Coingen

Some of you might be aware of a new service launched called coingen, which allows any idiot with about 0.2 BTC to make their very own crapcoin.


Now, some of you might be saying: But Hazard, don’t you create coins for people as well? Well, yes, but the difference is that I’m always available for future developmental work and to fix any problems a coin might encounter. Coingen comes with no such guarantee, which is especially problematic since these coins come with a death sentence attached from the moment they’re created.


You see, coingen was created by one of the oldest bitcoin supporters and exists solely to discredit altcoins. Accordingly, every coin this site spits out has it’s difficulty scaling set the same as Bitcoin – 400% in either direction every 2 weeks. History has shown that this is a laughably bad idea, and that the difficulty will get stuck at some obscenely high value. This causes miners to jump ship and block generation to come to a standstill. At this point the coin is effectively dead, unless a patch is issued. Since all these coins lack a developer, no such patch will ever come. It is therefore inevitable that all coingen coins will be dead within a few days of launch.


In the end, the buyer is left with a dead coin, and the miners have wasted time mining air. Everyone gets screwed – except the coingen operator of course. He makes a nice little profit on the whole ordeal.


Thankfully, coins generated by this site are extremely easy to avoid if you know what you’re looking for. Our of sheer laziness, every coin generated through this site shares the same genesis block, so we can have a quick look at the genesis hash to see if it was created through it. In the debug console (help tab) type in getblockhash 0. If it returns either of the following, it’s a coingen coin:


SHA256 Coins


000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f


Scrypt Coins


12a765e31ffd4059bada1e25190f6e98c99d9714d334efa41a195a7e7e04bfe2



source: http://cryptolife.net/avoiding-coins-created-with-coingen/



Saturday, January 11, 2014

Bitcoin Price Breakout

The trading range Bitcoin found itself mired in for the last few days has finally broken to the upside.


After the fall from $1000 (Bitstamp rate), the Bitcoin price found strong support and bottomed around $800, as suggested in my last trading update.


Bitcoin price then struggled to rise above the 38.2% Fib or $850 level. Now broken to the upside, this level will likely act as support as Bitcoin price currently falls to retest the breakout.


The next immediate challenge is the 50% Fib, which very nearly coincides with the last fractal high at $878. At the moment, price seems to be consolidating between these two levels.


The Bigger Picture


Daily Bitcoin Price on Bistamp with Fibs, Fractals, Support/Resistance/Trend Lines and MACD.

Daily Bitcoin Price on Bistamp with Fibs, Fractals, Support/Resistance/Trend Lines and MACD.

For those of you following my trading, I’m still long. Holding through that trading range was no kind of fun but it paid off. With any luck, Bitcoin price will soon embark on another trip to $1000.


A lot of people have been wondering lately: why price didn’t crash on the GHash worries or jump on the Overstock excitement? Ultimately, it isn’t news which moves the market; it’s people buying or selling which moves the market. Although news has been mostly positive lately (I interpret the community’s effective response to the GHash story as a sign of health), there simply remained a lot of sellers to satisfy before we could move higher.


The Bitcoin Bifrost


Check this out:


4 Hour Log of Gox with Fibonacci Channel

4 Hour Log Chart of Gox with Fibonacci Channel.

This chart is copied from Hypron’s original work on TradingView.


Hypron also made this useful site which lets you monitor the Bitcoin price across (by default) Gox, BTC-e, Huobi and Bitstamp – all on one screen.


By connecting the low points in October of 2011 and 2013, then angling the channel between the 1st recorded low and high, a very interesting channel is formed. A lot of major turning points coincide with the levels formed.


I regularly use Fibonacci levels in my trading and this new Fib channel tool also seems really useful.


If nothing else, this channel shows Bitcoin price remains in a steady uptrend over the long-term. For this reason, I favour long over short trades and this reasoning is more valid the longer the timeframe. A long from a good support held over time is definitely the least risky path to profit in this market.


Update: Potential Bull Flag Forming


Breakout with bull flag pulling back to previous resistance / current support.

30 min. chart showing breakout with bull flag pulling back to previous resistance / current support.

I published this chart about a potential bull flag forming. Currently the topside is being tested. If price decisively breaches the flag, I’d consider that strongly bullish.



source: http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/01/11/bitcoin-price-breakout-trading-update/



eBay Merchant to Sue PayPal

Update: Seems there’s some fishiness going on about this whole deal.


http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1uw282/before_we_get_too_excited_about_the_ebay_merchant/


PayPal is known for being antagonistic towards Bitcoin. The company is known to “sever business relationships” with people who sell Bitcoin products (specifically miners) on eBay, the company that owns PayPal. It doesn’t really seem fair for PayPal to block people from selling Bitcoin mining gear. After all, Bitcoin miners are just specialised computers, and there’s nothing illegal or prohibited in eBay’s terms of service about selling computers. But since Bitcoin threaten’s PayPal’s entire business, it seems a logical (though anti-competitive) move on PayPal’s part.


However, one eBay merchant who goes by the username TerraHasher on Bitcointalk.org has had enough of PayPal’s anti-Bitcoin stance. PayPal has repeatedly frozen his account for selling Bitcoin products on eBay. His plan is to take the online payments company to court.


“I finally got a judge to allow me to file a lawsuit against PayPal, and after complying with the judges request that we send a letter of intent to sue them this week and giving them 2 weeks to reply or resolve the issues. We will be allowed to file a 4 MILLION dollar lawsuit against paypal…


after going from customer service rep, to supervisor, to specialist, to team lead, then finally to manager over the course of 1 hour 30 minutes with nobody giving me any real information. I HIT GOLD, the manager states, your selling bitcoin. i politely reply, ‘no sir, i am not, that is against paypals rules, i am selling specialized hardware which is like a computer but designed for one purpose, and that is hashing on a SHA- 256 encrypted network.’ He replies back, well it’s all the same and bitcoin is direct competition with paypal’s business model therefore we do not condone, anything bitcoin related.“


The PayPal representative outright stated that they do not like Bitcoin because it competes with PayPal. Terra’s account was repeatedly frozen and unfrozen until he finally decided to get his lawyers involved.


“By wednesday afternoon [January 1] my legal team says O.K. this is where we step in, a company cannot hold peoples money hostage because they dont like bitcoin. And the battle begins, their paralegals transcribe every phone call, copy every e-mail print every screen shot, copy hundreds of complaints from srew-paypal.com and paypal sucks.com. The start blasting it everywhere, writing senators, congress people, filing complaints with the DOJ, the FTC, the IC3, the NW3C everybody pretty much, at the same time the file a petition with the court for a ruling on letting us Sue them in court…


…[the judge] then turns his phone around and it is flashing the number 34 on it, as in 34 voice mails. He says ‘you sure know how to ruin a mans weekend, i dont know who you talked to, but i want to see all of you in my courtroom on monday morning and i will rule on your petition…’


This morning we arrive 30 minutes early at the court house and the room had like 15 people in it. The judge comes in, sits down, and says ‘Send them a letter of intent to sue, request that they reply within 2 weeks, if they do not resolve the issue, or reply, i will see this case in my courtroom.’ ”


This story is ongoing and it’ll be interesting to see how it unfolds. Personally, I’m rooting for Terra. PayPal has unjustly punished too many of its users in the past and it’s time for a change.



source: http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/01/10/ebay-merchant-sue-paypal-anti-bitcoin-policies/



Reduce Your Carbon Footprint Using Bitcoin

My Clean Sky, an innovative company out of Australia led by CEO Guy Lane, allows users around the world to offset their carbon emissions.


Every time you drive or take a plane from point A to point B, you are creating excess carbon and contributing to global warming. In fact, every minute your computer runs, every time you download the blockchain: Carbon is emitted. Most of us have accepted this fact and don’t think twice about it because not using cars, planes, or computers is not a possibility. For those whom would still like to quiet their burning conscious, My Clean Sky provides an incredibly valuable carbon offset service: Offsetting refers to contractually connecting a client’s carbon footprint with carbon ‘abatement’ projects.


On January 8th, 2014, My Clean Sky announced that they had received their first Bitcoin payment for a carbon offset. A Scandinavian man offset 6.5 tons of CO2 for a total of 0.10223 BTC using Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) generated from a hydropower plant. The particular carbon footprint that said Scandinavian man was offsetting was an international flight: imagine his peace of mind as he slept on that plane!


I was able to catch up with CEO Guy Lane and have this interview to share with you Bitcoiners. While I do not know the exact numbers of Bitcoiners that are also environmentalists, I think we can all agree that Bitcoiners as a lot are much much more forward-facing than the general populace. Consider offsetting your carbon footprint!


Carbon Offsetting Is The First Line Against Global Warming

Carbon Offsetting Is The First Line Against Global Warming

Who is your team?


My Clean Sky is led by myself and several contractors. I have been in the carbon auditing business since 2002 and have established various green businesses over the years. See more about my background: http://www.seao2.com/about/


What is your company’s mission?


My Clean Sky’s name is our mission: to keep the sky clean. Nature knows best, she gave us 275 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. Since the industrial revolution, humans have added an additional 125 ppm (over 400ppm now). My Clean Sky’s role is to help clean up the excess and prevent it from getting worse.


What is VCS?


VCS is Voluntary Carbon Standard. This is one of the standards to create quality carbon credits.


http://www.v-c-s.org/


When did this idea first come about?


I was first inspired to become a carbon offsetter in 2003 by a US firm called Planktos. They were conducting experiments to promote marine plankton growth through a process called iron fertilization. They were offering carbon offset certificates called Blue Green Tags (as in Blue Green Algae). That was when I decided to establish an enterprise I tried a few different models before settling on that which I use today.


My Clean Sky was initially launched in 2007, specifically targeting air travel. However, over time we have broadened our focus as we developed more carbon audit methodologies. Now we can offset anything. Our motto is:


If you can emit it, we can measure it and offset it.


We have added some options on the website over the past few days: http://www.mycleansky.net/


Where is this hydropower station located?


Chongquin in central China. In China, most electricity comes from coal. By funding a hydropower station, this provides clean energy that displaces carbon based coal energy. As such, the hydropower station reduces total CO2 produced by the electricity network and earns one carbon credit for every tonne of CO2 it prevents.


Where are you all based?


Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. Beautiful one day, perfect the next.


Why do you believe that this is but the first of many transactions in the future?


Every time there is a polar vortex or a major bushfire or drought, the public understands that we have been harsh with the planet and that we need to change. We need to conduct our global affairs in a manner that is consistent with nature – an aspiration is called the Blue Economy. The best solution is to not produce carbon emissions in the first place. However, on a planet powered by coal and oil, that requires a strategic approach towards renewable energy.


In the mean time, My Clean Sky can help mop up the carbon mess.



source: http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/01/10/interview-guy-lane-ceo-clean-sky-pay-carbon-offsets-bitcoin/



Friday, January 10, 2014

AnonCoin

Basic Info


Launched: June 6, 2013

By: meeh (a username on bitcointalk)

Type: POW Scrypt

Supply: 4,2 Million coins

Speed: 3.42 minutes

Retarget: 24 hours

Reward: 4.2 til block 42000; 7 til block 77777; 10 on block 77778; 5 afterwards

Reduction: 50% every 306600 blocks (2 years)

Premined: 1000 blocks

Fees: Same as LiteCoin

Website: https://anoncoin.net//

Source: https://github.com/Anoncoin/anoncoin

Summary


AnonCoin (ANC) goal is to be used on both darknets like I2P, TOR and others, and internet/clearnet. At current moment it works with SOCKS over I2P/TOR. Native support to I2P should be in place soon. It’s a scrypt based coin, forked from Litecoin but still got some nice features from other coins too.

What is Anoncoin?

Anoncoin is a coin with active development support which focus on Anonymity. It was forked out of Litecoin, but have since catched up with the Bitcoin 0.8.5.3 source, and taken it’s own way.

Features (Some will not take effect before protocol switch #3): 3 minute block targets 5 coins, then subsidy halves in 306600 blocks (~2 years) A limit on 4,2 Million coins Native I2P support (Anonymous darknet)

The I2P Network? I2P is a scalable, self organizing, resilient packet switched anonymous network layer, upon which any number of different anonymity or security conscious applications can operate.

I2P is an open source project developed in early 2003 by a group of full time developers with a group of part time contributors from all over the world.

It is fundamental to understand that inside an I2P network the “hidden” component is represented by an application in execution on the node doing, and of course the path followed by the information to reach the destination. Another important concept for I2P is the “tunnel”, a directed path which extends through an explicitly selected list of routers. The first router that belongs to a tunnel is named “gateway”.


Also for I2P a layered encryption model is implemented, known as “garlic routing” and “garlic encryption”, the information transits on network routers that are able to decrypt only the respective layer.

I2P Routing?


When Alice wants to send a message to Bob, she does a lookup in the netDb to find Bob’s leaseSet, giving her his current inbound tunnel gateways.

Alice’s router aggregates multiple messages into a single “garlic message”, encrypting it using a particular public key, in this way only the public key owner can open the message.

For typical end to end communication between Alice and Bob, the garlic will be encrypted using the public key published in Bob’s leaseSet, allowing the message to be encrypted without giving out the public key to Bob’s router.

She selects one of her outbound tunnels and sends the data include of necessary instructions message and with instructions for the outbound tunnel’s endpoint to forward the message on to one of Bob’s inbound tunnel gateways. When the outbound tunnel endpoint receives those instructions, it forwards the message according the instructions provided, and when Bob’s inbound tunnel gateway receives it, it is forwarded down the tunnel to Bob’s router.

Be aware, we have said that transmission is unidirectional, this means that if Alice wants Bob to be able to reply to the message, she needs to transmit her own destination explicitly as part of the message itself.

I2P is end-to-end encryption. No information is sent in clear or decrypted during its path including the sender and recipient. To each node is assigned an internal network address different from the network IP address that isn’t used.

Layered Encryption


The term layered encryption refers to the encryption process used during the transfer from a source to the destination through a series of peers that composes the tunnel.

Both Tor and I2P use layered cryptography. Intermediate entities have only to know how to forward the connection on to the next hop in the chain but cannot decipher the contents of the connections.

I2P is end to end encryption. No information is sent in clear or decrypted along its path, including the sender and recipient. To each node is assigned an internal network address different from the network IP address that isn’t used.

I2P uses cryptographic ID to identify both routers and end point services, for naming identifiers is used the “Base 32 Names” techniques that attributes a SHA256 digest to the base64 representation of the destination. The hash is base 32 encoded and “.b32.i2p” is concatenated onto the end of the hash.

Garlic Routing


Garlic Routing is very similar to onion routing with several differences. Let’s consider first of all that in garlic routing, it is possible to aggregate multiple messages. Another difference from Tor is that the tunnels are unidirectional.

Garlic routing in I2P is adopted mainly in three distinguished phases:

1. For building and routing through tunnels (layered encryption). In I2P communication tunnels are unidirectional; this means that each interlocutor has to create a couple of tunnels, one for outbound and one for inbound traffic. There is also the possibility of a reply from the recipient, therefore another couple of tunnels must be created for a total of four tunnels.

2. For bundling, determining the success or failure of end to end message delivery.

3. For publishing some network database entries.

The Tor network?’

The Deep Web is the set of information resources on the World Wide Web, not reported by normal search engines. It is a network of interconnected systems not indexed having a size hundreds of times higher than the current visible web.

A parallel web that has a much wider number of information represents an invaluable resource for private companies, governments, and especially cybercrime. In the imagination of many persons, the Deep Web term is associated with the concept of anonymity that goes with criminal intents that cannot be pursued because they are submerged in an inaccessible world. It’s fundamental to remark that this interpretation of the Deep Web is deeply wrong.

Tor is the acronym of “The Onion Router”, a system implemented to enable online anonymity thanks to the routing of Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers hiding user’s information.

As usually happens, the project was born in the military sector, sponsored the US Naval Research Laboratory, and from 2004 to 2005 it was supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Access to the network is possible using a Tor client, a software that allows user to reach network resources otherwise inaccessible. Today the software is under development and maintenance of Tor Project. Using a Tor Network a user could avoid his tracing, his privacy is guaranteed by the unpredictable route of the information inside the net and due to the large adoption of encrypting mechanisms.

Connecting to the Tor network

Imagine a typical scenario where Alice desire to be connected with Bob using the Tor network. Let’s see step by step how it is possible.

She makes an unencrypted connection to a centralized directory server containing the addresses of the Tor nodes. After receiving the address list from the directory server the Tor client software will connect to a random node (the entry node) through an encrypted connection. The entry node would make an encrypted connection to a random second node which would in turn do the same to connect to a random third Tor node. The process goes on until it involves a node (exit node) connected to the destination.

Consider that during Tor routing, in each connection, the Tor nodes are randomly chosen and the same node cannot be used twice in the same path.

To ensure anonymity the connections have a fixed duration. Every ten minutes, to avoid statistical analysis that could compromise the user’s privacy, the client software changes the entry node.

Up to now we have considered an ideal situation in which a user accesses the network only to connect to another. To further complicate the discussion, in a real scenario, the node Alice used could in turn be used as a node for routing purposes with other established connections between other users.


A malevolent third party would not be able to know which connection is initiated as a user and which as a node, making the monitoring of the communications impossible.

The Tor client distributed from the official web site of the project could be executed on all the existing platforms and many add-ons are freely available that allow the integration of navigation software in existing web browsers. Despite that the network has been projected to protect user’s privacy, to be really anonymous it’s suggested to go though a VPN.

A better mode to navigate inside the Deep Web is to use the Tails OS distribution which is bootable from any machine without leaving a trace on the host. Once the Tor Bundle is installed, it comes with its own portable Firefox version, ideal for anonymous navigation due to an appropriate control of installed plugins.

The user must be aware of the presence of many plugins in his browsers that expose his privacy to serious risks. Many of these plugins could be used to reveal a user’s information during the navigation.

As said, the resources inside the Tor network are not indexed and is very hard to find them if we are accustomed to classic search engines. The way to search the information is profoundly different due to the absence of indexing of the content. A practical suggestion to new users is to refer to Wikis and BBS-like sites that aggregate links, categorizing them in more suitable groups of consulting. Another difference that the user has to take in mind is that instead of classic extensions (e.g. .com, .gov), the domains in the Deep Web generally end with the .onion suffix.


Be careful, some contents are labeled with commonly used tags such as CP= child porn. PD is pedophile, stay far from them.

The Deep Web is considered the place where everything is possible, you can find every kind of material and services for sale, most of them illegal. The hidden web offers to cybercrime great business opportunity, hacking services, malware, stolen credit cards, and weapons.


We all know the potentiality of the e-commerce in the ordinary web and its impressive growth in last couple of years, well now imagine the Deep Web market that is more than 500 times bigger and where there is no legal limits on the goods to sell. We are faced with amazing businesses controlled by cyber criminal organizations.


Conclusion from the first ref. The article has the main purpose to introduce basics of the two most diffused softwares to anonymize a user’s experiences on the web, Tor and I2P. Their importance is very high; thanks to these networks it is possible to avoid censorship and monitoring. At the moment I have a meaningful experience with Tor networks, its community as said provides a great support for those users that desire or need to be anonymous on Internet.


I believe that despite the fact that I2P has existed about a decade, it is very under-utilized, the presence of a limited community represents in my opinion a brake on its growth.


I have used both and I found both efficiency effective. I tried also to sniff a package using specific software with the intent to disclose navigation data or any reference to the user’s identity, of course without success.


The success of anonymizing a network is related to their diffusion, and without doubt Tor is a step forward, and the more users have access to sharing resources, the faster will be the navigation.

Milestones belong to a series and can be created from the series page by a project owner or series release manager.

There are no milestones associated with The AnonCoin Project

trunk series Focus of Development

Bugs targeted: None

Blueprints targeted: None

The “trunk” series represents the primary line of development rather than a stable release branch. This is sometimes also called MAIN or HEAD.

News


Announcement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=227287.0

News: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/07/bitcoin-scares-banks-governments

Websites


Main Site: http://anoncoin.net/

I2P: http://anoncoin.i2p/

Tor Link: http://futz4b7tmqzoxnc6.onion/

Wallets

In progress

Exchanges

Only a few major ones are listed here.

Cryptsy: http://cryptsy.com/


Coins-e:http://coins-e.com/


Bter: http://bter.com/

Charts

Criptovalute: http://www.criptovalute.it/anoncoin

Explorers

Explorer.Annon: http://explorer.anoncoin.net/

Altcha.in: http://altcha.in/chain/Anoncoin

Pools

Only a few major ones are listed here.

Coinpool: https://coinpool.in/

Coinpool I2P: http://coinpool.i2p/


Comparison of Pools: https://github.com/Anoncoin/anoncoin/wiki/Comparison-of-mining-pools

Forums

Anoncoin: http://forum.anoncoin.net/

Wiki

Wikipedia:

Wiki:

Merchants


Only a few major ones are listed here.

Lotto: http://lotto.anoncoin.net/

Main List of Merchants: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade



source: http://coinwik.org/AnonCoin



Thursday, January 9, 2014

Yahoo Infects 2 Million European PCs with Bitcoin Malware

For four days last week Yahoo’s European servers were the equivalent of a cyber Typhoid Mary, spreading disease to anyone who came near. Yahoo was the victim of a major security breach, which caused its servers to send out millions of malware-laden ads to an estimated two million European users.


Suspicions were first raised by Dutch security outfit Fox IT, which estimated that Yahoo’s servers were responsible for 27,000 malware infections every hour the malware was live on Yahoo’s website.


Yahoo confirmed the embarrassing attack in a statement:


“From December 31 to January 3 on our European sites, we served some advertisements that did not meet our editorial guidelines – specifically, they spread malware.”


The statement went on to point out that mobile users and Mac users were not affected, as the malware apparently targeted Windows systems, The Guardian reports.


Bitcoin mining malware was involved


One rather interesting aspect of the attack was that it involved bitcoin mining. The malware would start using infected PCs as mining rigs but it is still unclear how many computers were infected. Although the average PC with an integrated graphics processor is virtually useless for bitcoin mining, tens of thousands of PCs laden with mining malware could produce some results.


In late 2013 German police arrested two hackers who were charged with spreading mining malware to several networks and an undisclosed number of PCs. Following a preliminary investigation, authorities concluded that the duo managed to mine over €700,000 worth of bitcoins. Since they did not have to invest in mining rigs, or pay the electric bill for that matter, it seemed like a very profitable endeavour – until they were raided by the GSG-9, Germany’s elite counter-terrorist police unit.


Little is known about the bitcoin malware served by Yahoo. The German hacker-miners appear to have used a custom version of readily available malware, tweaking it to include a mining scrip and evade detection.


Cyber criminals and bitcoin


Developing and spreading bitcoin mining malware is not easy and with a rapid increase in hash difficulty it will soon be a thing of the past. PCs have not been viable bicoin mining platforms for months and the only way to make any cash on PC bitcoin mining is if you don’t have to buy the hardware or electricity. At this point a network of average PCs will waste more energy generating bitcoins than the bitcoins are worth. Of course, malware is one way of doing it.


In addition to mining malware, some malicious developers have devised a new form of ransomware. The number of bitcoin ransomware detections is going up and the trend was first noticed in the second half of 2013. Ransomware has been around for two decades, but bitcoin is making it a lot more alluring for malicious developers. The software encrypts all content on infected computers and instructs the victims to pay a ransom for the unlock key. Cryptolocker’s ransom is two bitcoins, or about $1,700.


There are a number of different ransomware models that could evolve to use bitcoin. Security experts have also voiced concerns that mobile ransomware could become a major security risk in the near future.


What makes bitcoin so valuable to cyber criminals?


Aside from the sheer value of stolen or illegally mined bitcoins, anonymity is probably the main reason hackers are embracing bitcoin. Renting a botnet costs money and bitcoin is perfect for untraceable transactions between two parties that don’t want to share their identity. The same is true of ransomware – using bitcoin to receive a ransom payment makes sense.



Acquiring specialized software, proprietary hardware, zero-day exploits and other tools used by hackers requires quite a bit of cash. Contrary to what most people think, many hackers do not operate alone. Although there are still plenty of ‘lone wolves’, the cybercrime ecosystem has evolved.


Like any economic entity, it has a hierarchy and what could only be described as division of labour is taking hold. In other words, many hackers are specializing in different niches and cybercrime syndicates are becoming more sophisticated, with a structure similar to traditional criminal syndicates or even legitimate businesses.


As bitcoin is ideal for paying accomplices and funding the whole operation, it is bound to see more use in the murky waters of the deep web.



source: http://www.coindesk.com/yahoo-infects-2-million-european-pcs-bitcoin-malware/



China's answer to Amazon, Alibaba, bans Bitcoin

Internet retailer forbids trading in the virtual currency as China attempts to tighten currency controls.


Alibaba, the Chinese internet retail giant, has banned the use of Bitcoin, the virtual currency that shot to prominence last year, the latest step in a nationwide crackdown.

Taobao, Alibaba’s third-party online marketplace, was ordered to shut down Bitcoin trading by China’s central bank, after a growing number of merchants began to accept it.

China enforces strict controls on its currency, the renminbi, and the growing popularity of Bitcoin has become problematic for the state.

Thousands of wealthy Chinese citizens are believed to have used Bitcoin to circumvent the country’s strict capital controls, threatening the government’s attempt to control the renminbi.

BTCChina, the country’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, was forced to stop taking deposits by the central bank last month. This was expected to send the value of the currency in China falling, although it has remained resilient, as Chinese users find alternative ways to use it.



source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/currency/10558945/Chinas-answer-to-Amazon-Alibaba-bans-Bitcoin.html