BitCoin

It was only a matter of time before the 2013 meme of the year tried to turn his success into financial gain.

Enter Dogecoin: a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency that seems to have started as a joke and is beginning to actually accumulate some value. As with most things meme, there's a community on Reddit called Dogemarket where users are trading Dogecoin for actual, real-world items — though as of today, a single Dogecoin is worth only $0.00023.

A Bitcoin mining hoax started by a prankster on the 4chan imageboard has reportedly led some Mac users into erasing all of their data within seconds.

If you get a spam message advertising an application called “Bitcoin Alarm,” the name may tell you all you need to know.

The desktop Windows application sends price alerts by SMS to a mobile phone. But closer examination of its code turned up several suspicious traits that indicate it may try to steal the virtual currency, wrote Kenny MacDermid, a research analyst with security company Arbor Networks.

 Vicco, Ky., is about as small town as it gets, with a population that hovers around 330 people. That does not appear to have kept its residents, namely Police Chief Tony Vaughn, in the dark when it comes to Internet trends and emerging crypto-currencies.

The city commission on Monday approved a measure that would allow Vaughn to receive his salary entirely in Bitcoin, an alleged first in the US and yet another story bolstering the reputation of the unregulated virtual currency as a payment method that will one day, supporters hope, stabilize and become commonplace.

Bitcoin mining is becoming a serious business.

This chart, from Bitcoin wallet service and block explorer Blockchain.info, shows the amount of computational power worldwide dedicated to Bitcoin mining — the process of maintaining the public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions, and of being rewarded new Bitcoins for participating in this process. In just the last few months, this amount has exploded.

First came the closure of criminal underground Silk Road, now an apparently vast theft of Bitcoins from one of the sites that replaced it, Sheep Marketplace. Are the users of darkweb markets now being targeted by criminals?

A weekend message on the Tor-based Sheep Marketplace claimed that 5,400 Bitcoins (worth about $5.6 million) had been stolen with the message, “we are sorry to say, but we were robbed on Saturday 11/21/2013 by vendor EBOOK101. This vendor found bug in system and stole 5400 BTC – your money, our provisions, all was stolen.”

A single bitcoin is now worth over $1,000, but the process of mining for the digital currency — in which people devote computing power to facilitate global Bitcoin transactions and secure the currency's network — is growing increasingly expensive. Serious miners have started to build dedicated facilities for the sole purpose of Bitcoin mining. Journalist Xiaogang Cao visited one such center in Hong Kong, the "secret mining facility" of ASICMINER, reportedly located in a Kwai Chung industrial building.

Although enthusiasm for ‘crypto-currency’ bitcoin is expanding, it is not going to save people’s privacy from US NSA spy agency data mining. A truly anonymous online currency is needed, Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation told RT.

Just as bitcoin soared above $1,200 mark, almost matching current gold prices, some 1500 proponents of the digital currency gathered in London to discuss the problems of the ‘crypto-money’ and how it could change the world.

Many people have a tale of a lost or broken hard drive containing some bit of precious data they wish they could recover. But perhaps no one on the planet has thrown out a hard drive as valuable as the one James Howells says is now buried in a landfill.

According to an article in The Guardian today, Howells threw out the hard drive, "rescued from a defunct Dell laptop," this past summer. "And then last Friday he realised that it held a digital wallet with 7,500 Bitcoins created for almost nothing in 2009," the story notes.

 Bitcoin Internet Payment Services, a Denmark-based exchange billing itself as Europe's biggest, was robbed of bitcoins worth more than $1 million in a theft that took place over the course of the past several days.