BitCoin

It appears that Butterfly Labs isn’t the only company having trouble making and selling specialized chips designed only to mine for bitcoins crazy fast. As Bitcoin buffs may already know, another rival firm, Avalon, has been having recent trouble getting its hardware off the ground.

Yifu Guo dropped out of New York University to start the company and Avalon was the first to ship a consumer-grade ASIC miner earlier in 2013. But while the company shipped around 1,000 miners earlier this year, it’s struggled considerably since.

More information has come to light regarding the US government's recent seizure of funds from online accounts belonging to Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange.

El Reg reported in May that the Department of Homeland Security had frozen an account with mobile payment processor Dwolla belonging to Mutum Sigillum LLC, a subsidiary of Tokyo, Japan–based Mt. Gox.

Germany has declared Bitcoin as a ‘unit of account’, which makes the virtual currency a kind of ‘private money’ and the process of Bitcoin mining has been deemed ‘private money creation.’

Bitcoin startup Lamassu Bitcoin Ventures, the makers of a Bitcoin ATM which promises to eat your paper (fiat) money and spit Bitcoins into your digital wallet in return, have funded their initial production run of 15 units a few hours after kicking off pre-orders (via their website) — taking the bulk of payments in Bitcoin, fittingly.

Google developers have confirmed a cryptographic vulnerability in the Android operating system that researchers say could generate serious security glitches on hundreds of thousands of end user apps, many of them used to make Bitcoin transactions.

Users of Android Bitcoin apps have woken to the unpleasant news that an old pseudo random number generation bug has been exploited to steal balances from users' wallets.

The Bitcoin Foundation's announcement, here, merely states that an unspecified component of Android “responsible for generating secure random numbers contains critical weaknesses, that render all Android wallets generated to date vulnerable to theft.”

Hackers at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas were recently seen offering bitcoin for sale via a robotic briefcase. People could simply walk up and put their loose change into the coin slot and in return they received a QR code printed on till receipt paper that they could use to redeem their bitcoins.

In a statement on its website, Bitcoin said it had given a presentation to the Bank of Thailand about how the currency works in a bid to operate in the country.

However, at the end of the meeting, "senior members of the Foreign Exchange Administration and Policy Department advised that due to lack of existing applicable laws, capital controls and the fact that Bitcoin straddles multiple financial facets... Bitcoin activities are illegal in Thailand".

The defense attorney for a South Carolina man facing drug charges is now denying that his client is the Casey Jones who had bitcoins seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) three months ago.

In a case believed to be the first of its kind, federal authorities have seized a Charleston man's virtual currency due to an alleged drug law violation with possible links to a shadowy online black market.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration recently posted a forfeiture notice indicating that agents had seized 11.02 Bitcoins worth $814 from 31-year-old Eric Daniel Hughes for allegedly violating the federal Controlled Substances Act. No other details were provided.