The U.S. Marshal service announced today that it will be auctioning off nearly 30,000 BTC seized from Silk Road accounts last year. Worth more than $17.5 million, the bitcoin will likely sell for a considerable discount from the market value. Interested parties must commit a refundable deposit of $200,000 from a U.S. bank by June…
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…
Grammy-nominated metal band Mastodon has joined the growing list of bitcoin-friendly musicians, announcing yesterday that they would accept the cryptocurrency for pre-orders of their forthcoming album Once More ‘Round The Sun. The band, signed to Warner Bros. Records, has partnered with BitPay for the release. The album is the sixth studio recording for the band,…
Earlier this week, self-governing British Crown Dependency Isle of Man announced plans to introduce friendly regulation for the island’s growing bitcoin industry. Yesterday, a group of six companies announced a plan to actively support the island’s growing cryptocurrency industry, offering free and steeply discounted services for bitcoin and digitial currency related startups. According to a…
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…
In an essay published this week by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), CEO Fayez Choudhury suggests that bitcoin and other virtual currencies could completely reshape their entire industry. The article, “It’s Not Really about Bitcoin, It’s about Change,” examines the almost-certain impact of blockchain-based technology on a field that is already at the front…
It’s no surprise that small domain names can go for huge prices. They’re easier to remember, faster to type, and they fit into marketing materials and social media with ease. The right three-letter domain name can go for huge amounts, like MI.com (sold for $3.6 million) and Box.com ($1 million). Given the exponentially increasing attention…
Another high-profile client has joined with Coinbase to accept bitcoin: Wilmington, NC,-based jewelry retailer REEDS Jewelers. The company isn’t on the same level as other high-profile national merchants like Overstock, Expedia or Dish Network, but with an estimated $109 million in annual revenue, it’s also not exactly small mom-and-pop store. REEDS will offer bitcoin buying…
When mainstream traders begin to request that bitcoin price data be added to services like Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance, it’s hard to make the case that digital currencies are purely a fringe investment. As of today, bitcoin prices are now listed right alongside the major world currencies like the Euro and the Yen. Simply…