Back in May Bitcoin Foundation Chief Scientist told a crowd at the Bitcoin2014: “I still don’t care about mining [except] in the way it affects user experiences.” In the past two months, however, the situation has changed. Writing for the official Bitcoin Foundation blog today, Andresen expressed deep concerns about centralized mining and the impact…
There are few tech incubator programs as prestigious as Y Combinator. The program has provided seed funding and business development guidance for some of the best-known startups of the last decade, including Dropbox, Airbnb and Reddit. In the bitcoin world, Y Combinator is perhaps best known as an early backer of Coinbase, easily one of…
Yesterday, mining pool giant GHash.io controlled fully half of the hashing power of the entire bitcoin network. For a distributed network that relies on trustless consensus, having the majority of the “voting” power controlled by a single mining pool is more than a little problematic. Most notably, it opens up the bitcoin network to the…
Over the course of 2013, Changpeng Zhao helped Blockchain grow from a small startup to one of the biggest names in the bitcoin industry. As the Head of Development, Zhao guided the company through countless stages, helping to launch a suite of storage and analysis tools used by people and companies across the globe. Anyone…
Las Vegas-based bitcoin ATM maker Robocoin unveiled it’s next-generation machines today, the “Robocoin 2.0.” The two-way ATM features a new, more user-friendly software system and several hardware tweaks and upgrades from its previous model. The entire system has been overhauled, presenting a more bank-like experience for Robocoin “branch” customers. According to the company’s recently updated…
Banking technology is changing at a never-before-seen pace, and it’s hardly surprising for a massive bank holding company like Capital One to advertise a position for a data scientist focused on emerging technologies. Even a company with over $286 billion in assets needs to keep on top of the trends, after all. What may be…
In a story published today by major U.K. newspaper The Telegraph, technology reporter Matthew Sparkes claims that the rapidly growing bitcoin network is more than the decentralization of money. As Sparkes sees it, blockchain technology is actually the “gateway to a coming digital anarchy.” While such views are nothing new within the fringes of the…
Cryptocurrency culture has made more progress into the realm of social networking thanks to two new tipping apps recently approved by Facebook. The Doge Tipping App and the Multicoin Tipping App provide simple tipping functionality much like that seen on Reddit and Twitter. Late last month, QuickCoin introduced a tipping-friendly bitcoin wallet for Facebook. The…
It’s not exactly a secret that eBay CEO John Donahoe has a soft spot for bitcoin. While he has been coy about announcing any concrete plans to formally integrate eBay and PayPal with a bitcoin wallet, he has made a variety of statements over the past six months indicating that such a move is likely….
CoinDesk reports that an unnamed researcher working with the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been barred from working with the program after it was revealed that the researcher had been using federally funded supercomputers to mine bitcoin. According to a March report by the NSF Office of Inspector General (OIG), the researcher used more than…