Bitcoin Guru

European leaders are planning to crack down on the use of bitcoin, prepaid credit cards and other methods of anonymous payment in response to the Paris attacks last week, Reuters reported Thursday. It's part of a crisis plan that aims to dismantle suspected terrorist financing networks after the massacre, claimed by the Islamic State group, killed 129 people and wounded hundreds. Interior and justice ministers from throughout the European Union are scheduled to meet in Brussels Friday, where they will encourage the leaders to “strengthen controls of nonbanking payment methods such as electronic/anonymous payments and virtual currencies and transfers of gold, precious metals, by prepaid credit cards,” according to a draft obtained by Reuters. Bitcoin is the most popular form of digital cryptocurrency, with users able to transact in relative anonymity with fees lower than those generally imposed by credit card processors. It's frequently used as part of cri...

The concept of buying Bitcoin at retail stores is quite an appealing one, as it removes most of the friction associated with obtaining digital currency in the first place. While these services are limited to particular regions for the time being, buying Bitcoin for cash does not mean people will remain completely anonymous. LibertyX lets users buy BTC from over 19,000 stores in the US, but users will need to go through an identity verification process, removing any form of anonymity. Purchasing Bitcoin with cash is one of the faster ways to obtain digital currency these days, although very few countries actively offer such a service. The only exception to that rule is LocalBitcoins, a peer-to-peer trading platform connecting buyers and sellers directly, allowing them to set up their own payment methods. Unlike LocalBitcoins, LibertyX is not trying to target the entire world, but just the United States for now. Their business model is rather elegant: walk into any o...

The city of Memphis will now have a Bitcoin ATM as the firm Coinsource installs three new machines in the state of Tennessee. The company is the largest Bitcoin ATM provider in the U.S. and has averaged over one installation per week in 2016. Memphis Bitcoin ATM One of Three in Tennessee logo2-id-fa176b8a-9aee-44f6-9ad5-4672e628e52e-300x300Memphis, in Tennessee's southwest, will get its first Bitcoin automated teller machine. Additionally, the company Coinsource installed two Bitcoin ATMs in the city of Nashville. Coinsource has established 60 Genesis Coin brand cryptocurrency ATM across the U.S. since its inception. "The demand for bitcoin ATMs has never been higher than it is today. The most rewarding part of our job is to answer the call when requests come in for new locations, so it is exciting to make history in Tennessee," said Coinsource CEO and co-founder Sheffield Clark. "Our reach in the South is growing. So far, we have 60 machines across eight states, and...

Only weeks after the execution of a hard fork to mitigate various DoS (denial-of-service) attacks, the Ethereum network and its developers are struggling to deal with yet another major flaw. This time, major issues in regards to smart contracts have emerged, which have rendered the efforts of decentralized applications in the Ethereum network purposeless. On November 1, the Ethereum development team and the founder of Solidity warned users and developers against a bug that allowed variables to be overwritten in storage. Variables in a smart contract are agreements made between two or more parties. Thus, if an attacker can gain access to the storage and alters the variables, crucial agreements in decentralized applications can be affected and funds may be extracted, which may pressure developers to discard previous smart contract-based projects to recompile contracts. Ethereum developers including Ansel Lindner stated that the development of an Ethereum application is failing to opera...

At its core, bitcoin is about giving users better control of their money. Often called "programmable money", bitcoin has scripts that limit how future bitcoin transactions can be spent (and that control variables like who can spend them). One such script ensures the correct person is spending the bitcoin by checking if the correct signature was used before unlocking and sending the funds.  This week, Blockstream core tech developer Russell O'Connor revealed he's been testing a couple of new scripts on an Elements Alpha sidechain (which is pegged to the bitcoin testnet) that could add new functionality. Called "covenants", the new style of scripts potentially opens up possibilities for how bitcoin users can control, or restrict, spending of their money — possibly for their protection. (This is an idea that was previously explored by researchers Malte Möser, Ittay Eyal, and Emin Gun Sirer). One use case for these scripts is to help users rein in their coins in...