Singapore should adopt a light touch approach in regulating virtual currencies such as Bitcion, and instead allow technology to do most of the "governing" to safeguard against illegal activities.
According to David Moskowitz, director of Singapore-based Bitcoin broker, Coin Republic, regulation alone will not necessarily achieve its goal of addressing concerns such as money laundering or the failure of a Bitcoin exchange.
In Bitcoin, transaction malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of bitcoins being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves.
Bitcoin today is like the Internet of 20 years ago, showing immense promise but in need of much more development, a digital currency executive said Monday, kicking off the Inside Bitcoins conference.
As the first digital system offering the possibility to store and transfer currency value in “a completely distributed manner,” it holds the promise to become a huge, global system, allowing people to securely exchange money through email or some other digital means at no cost, without involving a central bank, said Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle.
One thing cannot be disputed about the person (or persons) responsible for creating Bitcoin: they were skilled in math, and expert at coding. Five years after the Bitcoin software was first released, no major fixes have been needed to the core code, which uses cryptography to generate and transfer virtual money.
You've probably heard of Bitcoin, the digital currency that has no central control.
Bitcoin relies on complex cryptographic calculations (or, more accurately, on deliberately time-consuming ones) and a globally, public database known as the blockchain that allows its digital "coins" to be owned by just one person at a time.
Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles lied when he said that the former world's biggest Bitcoin exchange – which filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. on Sunday and in Japan on Feb. 28 – had been relieved of 850,000 Bitcoins by hackers, according to the alleged hackers themselves.
“We stole no bitcoins,” the alleged miscreants wrote on Karpeles' hacked and defaced blog on Sunday, which was posted on Pastebin not long after. “There were none to steal.”
Following the MtGox Bitcoin exchange losing millions to a hack and filing for bankruptcy, anonymous attackers took over the personal blog and reddit account of MtGox CEO Mark Karpeles on Sunday. After seizing control, the hackers posted (Pastebin) a message to the two spaces detailing their findings and the reasoning behind the attack.
Newsweek made a splash today with its cover story claiming it had found Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive creator of Bitcoin. Even Nakamoto's family, some of whom were interviewed by Newsweek, didn't know about his invention.
"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," Nakamoto told the Newsweek writer, confronted outside his home in Temple City, California.
Yet another Bitcoin institution has had its coffers drained by hackers and will be forced to shut down as a result.
Self-termed "Bitcoin bank" Flexcoin has told its customers that the theft of its Bitcoins, valued at $610,000 (£366,000), has driven the company over a cliff. Effective immediately, the site said it will be shutting down and suspending its service.
Mt. Gox, the Japan-based Bitcoin exchange, has had a remarkably bad month. All withdrawals from the service were halted on February 7, 2014; the CEO, Mark Karpeles, resigned from the board of the Bitcoin Foundation on February 23, 2014; and there was an indefinite closure of all transactions "for the time being" as of two days later. There has been a slow unraveling of the digital currency's valuation since February 1, 2014, though it has been on the mend at the time of writing.
