BitCoin

A security expert claims the FBI is lying about how it located the Icelandic server hosting the Silk Road underground drugs bazaar.

When Ross Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI and charged with being the operator of the billion dollar drugs empire known as Silk Road, one of the most intriguing questions for many was just how the law enforcement agency was able to locate the server hosting the website considering it was running on the anonymous Tor network.

Some bitcoin enthusiasts have used their cryptocurrency to travel around the world. Others have spent it on a trip to space. But the very earliest user of bitcoin (after its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto himself) has now spent his crypto coins on the most ambitious mission yet: to visit the future.

Michael Dell announced on Twitter in July that his namesake company would let customers buy Dell products using Bitcoins, making the tech vendor one of the largest businesses to accept the digital currency.

A month later, the Dell CEO said on Twitter that the company had received an order for PowerEdge servers worth more than 85 Bitcoins, or about $50,000. There were no details about the customer that bought the systems, but it's likely among the largest Dell has received since accepting Bitcoins as payment.

Bitcoin pool GHash.io announced on Wednesday that “it is not aiming to overcome 39.99 [percent] of the overall Bitcoin hashrate."

This marks a clear departure from the large pool’s recent flirtations with 51 percent. If that threshold is crossed for sustained periods of time, it concentrates power in ways that Bitcoin’s decentralized design normally does not allow.

Somebody just bought a whole heck of a lot of bitcoins.

For the first time in Bitcoin's five-year history, a single entity has repeatedly provided more than half of the total computational power required to mine new digital coins, in some cases for sustained periods of time. It's an event that, if it persists, signals the end of the crypto currency's decentralized structure.

A curious and probably accidental artefact has popped up in the Bitcoin blockchain, with a user reporting that it's identified as containing a virus by Microsoft's Security Essentials.

The reason El Reg is inclined to think it's accidental: in this discussion on a Microsoft discussion board, user edc678 says MSE is identifying the signature of the STONED virus in the blockchain.

Since STONED is a 27-year-old relic from the DOS days – all it did was pop up a boot message telling users “Your PC is now STONED”. It's believed to hail from New Zealand in 1987.

HashFast, an embattled Bitcoin mining startup, announced on Thursday that it has fired half of its employees as a way to save money.

 Plaintiffs in two class-action suits charging the embattled Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox with fraud have agreed to a settlement, and new plans to revive the exchange have been drafted.

Earlier this year a class-action suit in Illinois was filed against Mt. Gox, following reports revealing the theft of some 850,000 bitcoins -- worth hundreds of millions of dollars -- due to a hacking attack. The exchange subsequently filed for liquidation with a Japanese court.

For many crypto-minded libertarians, Bitcoin is the future of money. But that dream hasn't been helped much by the numerous high-profile legal cases involving the currency in recent years: The Bitcoin Savings and Trust hedge fund collapsed; uncertainty fueled the implosion of Mt. Gox, the currency's largest exchange; and the high-profile Silk Road takedown is a treacherous story combining Bitcoin, drugs, and alleged murders.