An Alberta man is hoping to become the first person to sell a house for Bitcoins. He's asking $405,000 Canadian, or its equivalent in Bitcoins, for the 3.6 acre site.
"We are hoping to be the first piece of real estate sold for bitcoins," Taylor More told us by e-mail. "We think maybe this could help push the currency more mainstream."
A Bitcoin transaction services company says that hackers broke into one of its brokerage accounts last week, nabbing more than $12,000 worth of the digital currency.
That attack knocked Bitinstant offline over the weekend. The company says that while it lost Bitcoins, no customers were affected by the hack.
Bitcoin has staged a dramatic comeback in the past two months, more than doubling its value against the dollar in that time and trading at record levels.
The virtual currency was trading above $32 a share today after languishing in the mid-teens in January. The record was reached on the same day that Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, reached an agreement with CoinLab to manage the exchange's operations in the U.S. and Canada.
Zach Harvey has an ambitious plan to accelerate adoption of the Internet's favorite alternative currency: installing in thousands of bars, restaurants, and grocery stores ATMs that will let you buy Bitcoins anonymously.
It's the opposite of a traditional automated teller that dispenses currency. Instead, these Bitcoin ATMs will accept dollar bills -- using the same validation mechanism as vending machines -- and instantly convert the amount to Bitcoins and deposit the result in your account.
While the question remains whether or not you should be eating Domino’s pizza at all, a clever service now allows you to pay for your pie with Bitcoins. The service is far from an official Domino’s app and is instead a gateway or broker between the world of pizza and the world of popular virtual currencies.
The Bitcoin scheme is a rare example of a large scale global payment system in which all the transactions are publicly accessible (but in an anonymous way). We downloaded the full history of this scheme, and analyzed many statistical properties of its associated transaction graph.
More than three-quarters of the digital coins in the Bitcoin digital currency scheme aren't circulating because they remain dormant in user accounts that have never participated in outgoing transactions, a recently published study has found.
Bitfloor, a fast-growing Bitcoin exchange that was felled by a security breach earlier this month, has resumed operations. Founder Roman Shtylman announced the site's revival on Google Plus.
The exchange lost Bitcoins valued at about $250,000 in the heist. As a result, Bitfloor was incapable of repaying clients who had deposited Bitcoins, forcing the site to suspend operations. Bitfloor still lacks the funds to repay those users, so it has officially designated those funds as "on hold."
Cyberthieves who stole more than $250,000 (£158,000) in digital money are still sitting on the cash.
The haul, in what is known as bitcoins, was stolen in a raid on the Bitfloor online currency exchange this month. Bitfloor boss Roman Shtylman said transaction-tracking technology in the bitcoin system showed the money had not been spent.
Sometimes a hack has unexpected outcomes. Today, a hacker who claims to have obtained Mitt Romney’s tax returns is demanding a ransom of $1 million in Bitcoins. The hacker probably didn’t expect to improve the market for Bitcoins overall, but that’s exactly what happened, as the value of Bitcoins spiked about 6 percent today, from $10.40 per Bitcoin to about $11 per Bitcoin at the end of the day.
