Speaking on yesterday on Bloomberg TV’s Street Smart, SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert claimed that the bitcoin industry is nearing a positive “inflection point” after downward-trending six months. Silbert was on the show to discuss SecondMarket’s buyers’ syndicate for the U.S. Marshal Service’s auction of nearly 30,000 BTC seized from the Silk Road, but the conversation…
In an interview yesterday with Bloomberg TV’s Street Smart, Western Union CEO Hikmet Ersek said his company would be open to implementing some form of bitcoin integration if the cryptocurrency is approved by regulatory authorities. When asked about how seriously Western Union viewed bitcoin as a threat to their business model, Ersek didn’t appear to…
Identity-verification startup BlockScore announced today that it has raised $2 million in seed-round funding. Originally designed to provide a verification service for bitcoin ATM systems, wallet providers, miners and exchanges, BlockScore is one of the first startups to attempt to make the leap from the cryptocurrency market to the mainstream. The seed round investors include…
Not all that long ago, Hive was seen as little more than a user-friendly wallet program for the Mac OS. Like many things Apple, it was largely unknown beyond a core user base, and rarely mentioned in the list of popular bitcoin wallet clients. That changed in May, however, when Hive opted to switch platforms…
Speaking with the Wall Street Journal‘s MoneyBeat blog, Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) CEO Jason Oxman weighed in on the rapid development of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as payment platforms. As a trade organization representing payment giants like Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon, Google and AT&T, the ETA’s position on bitcoin carries significant weight. What is that position?…
In a new report published by Switzerland’s Federal Council, regulators claim that the “economic importance of virtual currencies as a means of payment is fairly insignificant at the moment.” The report claims that bitcoin and other digital currencies will have a marginal effect on the Swiss economy for the “foreseeable future,” and no influence on…
The New York Post reported today that the NASDAQ, one of the largest stock exchanges in the world, is quietly building a bitcoin exchange. With regulators at the New York Department of Financial Services widely expected to publish new rules for bitcoin exchanges by the end of summer, the tech-friendly NASDAQ is in a strong…
As the developer of the cross-platform Java library BitcoinJ, Mike Hearn knows a thing or two about the status of the overall bitcoin protocol. Until recently, Hearn was a developer at Google, but he recently decided to take the relatively risky step of moving into bitcoin full time. During an interview with the Epicenter Bitcoin…
In March, San Francisco-based bitcoin payment startup ZipZap was forced to halt its ambitious plan to bring retail-level bitcoin-buying to a huge network of brick-and-mortar businesses. As the price of bitcoin became increasingly erratic following the collapse of Mt.Gox and the fear that Chinese authorities were on the verge of banning cryptocurrencies, ZipZap’s payment processing…
Even in a state that is home to many of the best-known bitcoin startups in the world, digital currency still exists in something of a legal gray area. Transactions not backed by the U.S. dollar have a different legal status under California law, are there are a variety of disincentives and penalties for using alternative…