Bitcoin's price hit a new record this week, soaring above $11,000 on Wednesday morning. The price has been a roller coaster since then, with the price briefly dropping to $9,000 later on Wednesday before regaining much of its lost value in recent days.
On August 1, a dissident faction of the Bitcoin community created a new payment network called Bitcoin Cash. There are lots of Bitcoin-derived spinoff currencies, of course, but this was unusual because it branched off from the existing Bitcoin blockchain. The result was the cryptocurrency equivalent of a stock split: everyone who owned one bitcoin before the split suddenly owned a "cash" bitcoin after the split.
Owning cryptocurrency isn't quite the Wild West experience it was at the beginning of the decade, but investors still face plenty of instability and risk. The threats aren't just abstract or theoretical; new scams crop up, and old ones resurge, all the time. Whether it's a fake wallet set up to trick users, a phishing attempt to steal private cryptographic keys, or even fake cryptocurrency schemes, there’s something to watch out for at every turn.
On Wednesday morning we reported on the arrest of a Russian man suspected of running a $4 billion dollar money laundering scheme. Later in the day, US officials released the indictment against the suspect, Alexander Vinnik.
Three years after Bitcoin suffered a massive decline in value, the cryptocurrency is once again valued at more than $1,000 USD.
In the early days of 2017, Bitcoin is already reaching new heights as the value of the cryptocurrency rises. As of 9 AM PT on January 3, Bitcoin was valued at $1,025 U.S dollars, according to Coinbase, a level not seen since 2013.
It just became significantly harder to mine Bitcoins. The halving event rolled around yesterday, July 9, and means that the reward for mining just dropped by 50 percent. The cryptocurrency is generated by machines around the world 'mining' for new bitcoins.
Four months have passed since the world learned the name of Craig Wright, a man who, as WIRED wrote in December, either created Bitcoin or very badly wants someone to believe he did.
Now rumors are swirling through the Bitcoin world that Wright himself is poised to publicly claim—and possibly offer some sort of proof—that he really is Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin. If he does, he’ll have to convince a highly skeptical cryptography community for whom “proof” is a serious word, and one that requires cryptographic levels of certainty.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved a plan from online retailer Overstock.com to issue company stock via the Internet, signaling a significant shift in the way financial securities will be distributed and traded in the years to come.
Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody.
The likes of Adam Ant and Billy Bragg are among the names backing the Free At What Cost? project. Launched by British composer Hélène Muddiman, the idea behind the campaign is to ensure that artists and content creators get a fair deal by charging for online views and listens.
The basic idea is to protect content against free viewing in an extension of the idea of simple DRM. While the logistics are still to be fully detailed, one of the proposals is to use a Bitcoin-like payment system to enables people to pay artists directly for access to their content.
