Change is coming, and the cosy possition that banks as institutions have enjoyed for so long will not be secure long, finding themselves tomorrows dinosaurs. Huge, powerful, unwieldy, and eventually extinct. Overtaken by hordes of smaller creatures, nimbler and better able to adapt.
After community deliberation the final version of BIP 21 has been hammered out and I have upgraded it to a formal ‘Accepted’ status. What is a URI? Sites like The Pirate Bay provide so-called ‘magnet-URI’ links. When you search the site and find a file you wish to download, you will be provided a...
Juice Rap News relies heavily on viewer support and is fortunate to receive donations from people all around the world – it helps us to remain completely independent. Most donations, however, come to us via PayPal (booo), and since the illegal banking blockade on WikiLeaks, in which PayPal still participates, we have become more...
The recent MobileMoneyAfrica Summit showed impressively just how far ahead Africa is compared to the developed world when it comes to mobile payment. Of necessity, of course: Mobile phones are ubiquitous there, but only a minority of Africans hold a bank account. There are already serious efforts under way to create a truly cashless...
The editor in chief of the Esquire’s Russian edition, Dmitry Golubovsky, has been fined 40, 000 RUB (~1300 USD) for promoting drugs in an article they did about the Silk Road. The magistrate found Golubovsky guilty of unlawful advertising or promotion of drugs or psychotropic substances hanging him down the fine. The article itself...
Stallman makes a nice spiel about online payments and when prompted about bitcoin, says that it can be the one. His statement that bitcoin is not currently anonymous by default but can be made anonymous is totally correct. I think I was the one who introduced Stallman to bitcoin. He drafted our license for...
Showcasing a first-of-its-kind interface to enable regular users to use offline wallets (aka: “cold-storage”). Keeping their funds on a computer that never touches the internet, but still manage them online using a “hot wallet” that’s useless to an attacker.
Disruptive technologies seem to develop a rhetorical byword that becomes a descriptive synonym for the technology. When describing BitTorrent, we talk of peer-to-peer file-sharing, and with Facebook, of social media. Whatever the merits of these terms, they act as homogenous words for the particular technology, but in a neutral form that appears unbiased towards...
Few mom n pop eVendors have the needed software development skills to integrate bitcoin with their store, and even fewer have the knowhow to secure those stores from bitcoin breakins. Onto the scene steps osCommerce, an online store managment system, is used by well over 14,000 live websites, and the man who's bringing it...
Linode has cost me more than 3000 BTC (nearly 12k EUR at current rates) due to a security flaw in their platform. Linode is a cloud computing and web service providing company that is a popular hoster of web services throughout the world. Today I woke up to find my hot wallet on the...
Bitcoin challenges finance. BitTorrent challenges publishing. Both are decentralised systems. In BitTorrent, you download a movie from other peers in that network. Much like bitcoin. However, a downloader has to know which movie file he wishes to download.
Yesterday, Patrick Stratemen (CTO of Intersango.com) discovered a serious vulnerability in Bitcoinica. The vulnerability has since been fixed.
Recent Comments