Bitcoin Guru

Everyone in the world is seemingly keeping a close eye on the cryptocurrency markets right now. One of the currencies for which many people have high expectations is Ethereum. While still the world's second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, things are not exactly going as planned. With a 3.51% loss since yesterday, the Ethereum price has dipped below US$290 at the time of writing. This trend will not last all that long, though; that much is certain. When the Bitcoin price dips briefly, the rest of the cryptocurrency markets will do the exact same thing. In the case of Ethereum, the price of this token has taken a tumble over the past few hours. While the Ethereum price was well above US$300 not too long ago, maintaining that high price point has proven problematic. Volatility is the second nature of all cryptocurrencies, and it clearly shows as of right now. As far as the Ethereum price is concerned, it's now hovering close to US$290 for the time being. That is still a mo...

Bitcoin.com chief executive Roger Ver has issued a $1 million challenge to F2Pool owner Wang Chun, who has claimed at a blockchain conference in Hong Kong that Bitcoin Cash "will be short-lived." The two executives were part of a roundtable discussion at the Bitkan-hosted 2017 Shape the Future Blockchain Global Summit, debating on the potentials of Bitcoin Cash versus the original Bitcoin. For his part, Wang said Bitcoin Cash will be abandoned soon, or as early as November, when another hard fork is expected to happen. Roger Ver bets $1M that Bitcoin Cash will not be 'short-lived'"Bitcoin Cash will be short-lived compared with earlier attempts because we will soon have another one coming very soon… after SegWit2X is introduced," Wang said. The F2Pool co-owner's comment caught the ire of Ver, a confessed fan of Bitcoin Cash, prompting him to issue a bet. "How short-lived do you think Bitcoin Cash will be and would you be interested in making a wager ...

ICOs have rapidly become the new standard method of raising funds for cryptocurrency startups and enthusiasts. Although not every ICO raises its minimum goal, most projects have had no problem selling all the available tokens quickly. Throughout 2017, we have seen some major cryptocurrency ICO projects raise a lot of money. Below is a brief overview of the most successful ICO projects in terms of funding throughout 2017 so far. 10. MONETHA Although this project was only launched a short while ago, the amount of money raised surprised a lot of people. Monetha aims to provide a globally trusted commerce solution powered by the Ethereum blockchain to merchants in all industries. By raising US$36.6 million during the crowdsale, the ICO showed that people have high expectations for this project moving forward. 9. AETERNITY Bringing smart contract technology to the masses will not be easy by any stretch of the imagination. Aeternity aims to do exactly that by making smart contracts interface...

Recently a story broke on TorrentFreak outlining a test that The Pirate Bay ran for a short period of time. The Pirate Bay team is looking to see if skimming the computational resources of site visitors is a better way to raise revenue than displaying advertisements. Some users are not happy about this, but I see it as an interesting opportunity. MINING INSTEAD OF ADVERTISING Users who visited the Pirate Bay's site on September 16th may have noticed a spike in their CPU usage. Only certain pages would spike the CPU, and some users decided to look into what was going on. Apparently, the Pirate Bay had inserted a few lines of Javascript code – developed by Coinhive – into selected pages on the site that would utilize visitors' computing resources to mine cryptocurrencies, specifically Monero. The effect is detrimental to the overall user experience, apparently. Some users complained that it was immediately noticeable and off-putting. This makes sense, as the miner was variously...

There are many different opinions among government officials worldwide on what can and cannot be done with Bitcoin. Although most countries still claim Bitcoin is not a currency, some states are looking at ways to confiscate the cryptocurrency. However, that may not be the case much longer in South Korea, where a local court ruled that Bitcoin cannot be confiscated. It is a very interesting precedent, to say the least. It is quite interesting to keep an eye on the Bitcoin situation in South Korea. As most people are well aware, South Korean exchanges are the main sources of trading volume for quite a few different major cryptocurrencies. Bithumb in particular is bringing in a lot of trading volume, although Coinone and Korbit should not be overlooked either. Despite growth in the legitimate use of Bitcoin, it appears criminals are also flocking to Bitcoin in the country. Local police recently seized 216 bitcoins from an individual who was considered to be involved with criminal activit...

Cybercriminals have not given up on the idea of distributing Locky ransomware. Although most of the distribution methods in place today are being used by virtually everyone, there is a new solution being utilized by a few criminals. They now distribute the Locky ransomware payload through a modified Microsoft Word file, which will only be triggered once the document is closed. This is a new spin on the traditional "Word macro" distribution method we have seen used so often in recent years. A NEW WAY TO DISTRIBUTE LOCKY RANSOMWARE The Microsoft Word software suite allows criminals to execute many things that should not be theoretically possible. Installing malware by forcing users to enable specific macros to view content in a document and distributing the malicious payload that way seems to work just fine. However, since almost every ransomware distributor is using this method, the average consumer is slowly becoming aware of this problem and the threat it poses. The latest...