Weekly Bitcoin Update – 11 August 2014

Posted by: DeepDotWeb

August 11, 2014

A recap of the week’s biggest Bitcoin stories from the perspectives of the best sources for e-currency news around the web

A Lake Tahoe property has sold for $1.6 million in Bitcoin. As Candace Jackson of the The Wall Street Journal reports, the 1.4 acre property site, located on the California side of the lake at luxury resort Martis Camp, sold for a total of 2,739 bitcoin. The new owner will have views of the Pacific Crest and the surrounding mountain range. According to Martis Camp spokesman Brian Hull, the buyer plans to build a home on the property.

A Hacker has stolen $83,000 worth of Bitcoin from a mining pool. Charlie Osborne of CNET writes that the Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit recently identified a security flaw that enables hackers to steal the the currency while confirming that at least one hacker has taken advantage of the exploit. Using a fake Border Gateway Protocol broadcast, the hacker managed to gain $83,000 over a four month time span. According to Dell SecureWorks, around 8,000 dogecoin were also swiped by the hacker.

Could Bitcoin be nothing more than an NSA or CIA project? According to Jerin Mathew of the International Business Times, the CIA Project claims that the name of Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakomoto, proves the cryptocurrency’s link to these government organizations. As Nakomoto translates to “central intelligence” in Japanese, the CIA Project believes that Bitcoin must have been crated by the Central Intelligence Agency. The organization even went so far as to claim that “the command structure of Bitcoin core development is 100% centralised.”

ChangeTip will not be providing the ability to make micropayments in Bitcoin to YouTube, Tumblr, and Google+. As Nermin Hajdarbegovic of CoinDesk writes, the platform, which already allows for such payments on Twitter and Reddit, allows for small payments to be made by including the ‘@changetip‘ tag and the screen name of an individual to a comment. ChangeTip hopes to take advantage of low cost to users in order to turn the service into a full-fledged tipping or fundraising service.

A week after enabling Bitcoin transactions on its website, Dell has received a payment of approximately $50,000 in Bitcoin. Eric Calouro of NewsBTC reports that the order, which is for the company’s PowerEdge server solutions, was made for a total of 84 bitcoins. Dell CEO Michael Dell was so impressed by the order that he announced the deal on his official Twitter page. The computer company saved approximately $1,000 in processing fees by making the enabling the transaction to be made in Bitcoin.

The Wikimedia Foundation has revealed that it had received $140,000 in Bitcoin since it began to donations in the form of the cryptocurrency last week. As Josh Wolford of WebProNews writes, the non-profit organization, which manages Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Wikimedia Commons, has raised the donations through CoinBase. In response to the large number of donations, a CoinBase representative noted that Bitcoin “ensures 100% of donated funds go to the cause.” The Wikimedia Foundation has been able to operate its services without the need of advertising since it began its operations.

Regulation

The United Kingdom may soon begin to regulate Bitcoin as a currency. Dwayne de Freitas of VentureBeat reports that Britain could soon recognize Bitcoin “as legal, digital cash.” In a statement, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne noted that Bitcoin is popular because it is “quick, cheap, and convenient” and that he wants to see how the service could be to help British consumers. Freitas noted that the switch to Bitcoin could be used to limit the power of the US dollar, which can be used as a tool “to exert American political will around the world.”

Contrastingly, Gleb Kostarev of CoinDesk writes that Russia’s Ministry of Finance recently drafted a bill that could essentially ban the issuance of the cryptocurrency. Not only does the organization plan to amend Article 27 of the Federal Law ‘On The Central Bank of the Russian Federation’ to ban the use of “monetary surrogates in Russia,” but the agency also plans to prevent its constituents from accessing online Bitcoin marketplaces.

The Bitcoin Foundation is still wrestling with New York State’s recent “BitLicense” regulations and wishes to extend the comment period by up to six months. As Sydney Ember of The New York Times notes, the organization’s letter Benjamin M. Lawsky, the state’s superintendent of financial services, specifically cited that the Bitcoin community is “not well-versed in New York financial services law or regulation. Thus, the Foundation finds that it need more time to determine whether the regulations are beneficial for the Bitcoin community.

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Updated: 2014-08-11