Day: August 11, 2017

Wikileaks is now accepting donations using the privacy-oriented digital currency Zcash. With the addition of Zcash, donors have a private way of contributing funds. Previously only Bitcoin and Litecoin were accepted.

Most cryptocurrency enthusiasts will remember the Shadow Brokers. The hacker collective has been making a lot of headlines over the past few months. Not too long ago, it started selling major exploits through a monthly subscription service, and appears to have made around US$90,000 from doing so. The information below comes from an anonymous researcher and should be taken with a grain of salt accordingly.

The Shadow Brokers are Making Bank With Exploits

The Shadow Brokers are reaping the benefits of its monthly subscription service. Selling powerful exploits to criminals all over the world in exchange for a monthly contribution makes a lot of sense for all parties. So far, this venture has proven pretty lucrative for the group, although they had earlier struggled to auction off their exploits. This monthly subscription has resulted in close to US$90,000 in income so far. There was no guarantee of success when they originally announced their new business model.

The switch to this monthly service was announced in June of 2017. It involves distributing exploits for IoT devices, browsers, and operating systems, among other things. The cybercrime industry will continue to grow for quite some time to come. This is especially true now that criminals have an easier time getting their hands on different tools. This subscription service is not cheap by any means, but it seems plenty of people are willing to pay for it regardless.

According to information provided by an anonymous researcher, people are willingly paying for NSA malware. Such exploits and malware are potent and thus worth the coin. Indeed, they are one of the reasons why attacks such as BrickerBot and WannaCry have proven so successful. All of the money generated by this monthly subscription service has been paid in Monero, a far more anonymous currency compared to Bitcoin.

A total of five subscribers have been identified by the security researcher. He discovered five email addresses that had subscribed to the Shadow Brokers’ monthly service. He also successfully decoded the Monero payment ID for these users, which seemingly contains the email addresses in question. That is quite interesting, although it does not indicate that there is a way to link Monero user identities to transactions directly. Rather, subscribers had been asked to include a delivery email address when subscribing.

One of these five subscribers has written a blog post documenting this monthly dump service. As it turns out, the quality of exploits received in exchange for the money spent is not quite up to par. The user wrote that they felt “ripped off” and that it seemed the tools delivered were either fixed or no longer useful in general. If that is the case, this monthly subscription service will not be around for much longer. Then again, no other users have voiced any complaints to date.

Single reports such as this one always need to be taken with a healthy degree of skepticism. After all, one subscriber going public about the service to complain does not necessarily prove anything. The US$90,000 in revenue seems to hint at a proper service having been set up by the Shadow Brokers. There have always been a lot of questions regarding the validity of these exploits and the claims made by the hacker collective. It will be interesting to see whether or not they earn more money from this service in the coming months.

So that is another week pretty much done for our bitcoin price trading efforts and we’ve managed to close out the week on a pretty positive note. For anybody that caught this morning’s analysis, our efforts throughout the day to do just that won’t come as anything of a surprise. For anybody that missed it, … Continue reading Bitcoin Price Watch; Here’s What We’re Looking To End The Week With

The post Bitcoin Price Watch; Here’s What We’re Looking To End The Week With appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Bitcoin service providers are seeing an increase in mainstream adoption as Filipinos are increasingly using Bitcoin for remittances, payments of utility bills and other daily transactions.

Encryption is “very positive” in some situations, the former head of MI5 has told the media while discussing cybersecurity.

We have seen many different price speculation pieces in the press regarding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Perhaps one of the more famous wrong predictions was that of Professor Bitcorn. However, it seems Ken Goldberg may have just raised the bar in this regard, as his latest opinion article on the Bitcoin price predicts a massive correction all the way to US$3.50. That opinion has already created a lot of bad blood between him and Bitcoin users.

Ken Goldberg Riles up the Bitcoin Faithful

There are a lot of people who would like to see the Bitcoin price drop. Given the current momentum, there are plenty of investors who are disappointed that they never purchased BTC at lower prices. A market crash right now would certainly introduce a lot more investors to Bitcoin, although one could argue $3,000 per BTC is still a very low price as well. If it were left up to Ken Goldberg, however, the Bitcoin price would retrace all the way back down to $3.50.

Not surprisingly, Goldberg’s reasoning for this expectation is flawed. He is another financial “expert” who likes to compare Bitcoin to the Tulip craze of the 17th century. Economists have a habit of comparing apples and oranges more often than not, or bitcoins and tulips in this particular case. It is certainly true that the Tulip craze is an economic precedent that should never be repeated again. When that market finally came to its senses, the value of tulips crashed by roughly 99% in short order.

Ken Goldberg feels the same will happen to Bitcoin sooner or later. In his opinion, one could be “wishing they’d sold this $3,500 zone, as Bitcoin breaks under $35, with growing potential for US$3.50.” That is a pretty strong sentiment regarding the world’s leading cryptocurrency and one of the best-performing assets the financial sector has seen in the past handful of years. Anything can happen in the financial sector, but expecting a massive Bitcoin price retrace to 1/100th of its current value is a bit of a stretch.

Although Goldberg’s article on the Bitcoin price fundamentals may make sense to the untrained eye, it is obvious his “harbinger of exhaustions” is nothing but a mirage. Granted, there was a decline in trading volume as soon as the price surpassed $2,900, but that was hardly a guarantee of a massive Bitcoin price drop in the coming days or weeks. Even if that drop were to happen, there is no reason to believe Ken Goldberg would have been correct in his analysis.

Goldberg predicts Bitcoin may very well spike to $3,800 in the next few days. That seems to be the general consensus among Bitcoin trading experts as well, even though there will be significant resistance across the markets. Goldberg also ventures that issues affecting the Bitcoin technology might cause a future drop. Blockchain technology no doubt has scalability issues, and moving Bitcoin off exchange platforms can be challenging at times as well. However, these problems have existed for some time now and are being addressed. SegWit and the Lightning Network will address most scaling issues, whereas solving the exchange problem can only be done through decentralized trading platforms.

For Ken Goldberg, Bitcoin has “dwarf[ed] the Tulip Bulb lunacy.” Coming from someone who firmly believes traditional finance still has a fighting chance at a bright future, these statements can easily be ignored by people who see the bigger picture. Bitcoin has been fighting an uphill battle for several years now and has come out stronger every quarter. This is not in the same league as a Tulip Mania bubble, as there has never been anything like Bitcoin throughout history. At this rate, Ken Goldberg is well positioned to become the next Professor Bitcorn.

Civic has extended its huge daily gains to reach almost $0.70 while Filecoin raises a record $252 mln in its ICO.

An official from the European Commission has revealed it is currently building a blockchain tool to enable data sharing.

OneCoin, who have been found to be fraudulent, now face a huge fine from Italy as they are declared a ponzi scheme.

NEO has a market capitalization of $1.3 bln, this is around 50 times smaller than Bitcoin and 20 times smaller than Ethereum.