Day: September 17, 2017

Bitcoin price is making a correction from its recent selloff, but it might be ready to resume the drop soon.

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Due to a recent update on a long-delayed upgrade to the underlying code of the internet, the world wide web is on the verge of adding a native payments system. The new specifications detail a suite of tools that allow merchants to accept many payment types, including Bitcoin, much more easily.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been working on a currency-agnostic web payment standard for more than two years. The 470-plus member organization is responsible for creating and maintaining the international standards for the world wide web and constantly works with the public and corporations to develop guidelines for its use.

The diamond industry and other supply chains can enjoy the benefits of Blockchain technology.

Major Wall Street analyst Thomas Lee, the co-founder Fundstrat Global Advisors, appeared on CNBC’s Fast Money and reaffirmed his short-term price target of $25,000, despite the nationwide ban on bitcoin exchanges issued by the Chinese government and its financial regulators. Tom Lee of @fundstrat says that bitcoin is headed to $25K, here’s why pic.twitter.com/FBJiwTQjqM — … Continue reading Wall Street Analyst Sees Bitcoin Surging to $25k Despite China Exchange Ban

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It is never good to see Bitcoin exchanges or brokers suffer a hack. Although not all of these incidents involve stolen money, it is still a worrisome development from a security vantage point. Litebit.eu, a Dutch cryptocurrency broker, has suffered two separate incidents over the past few months. It remains to be seen how this will affect the company’s reputation moving forward.

Litebit Hacks are Rather Worrisome

Most European cryptocurrency enthusiasts have come across the Litebit.eu platform at some point. The company has quickly made a name for itself as one of the more prominent cryptocurrency brokers in the European market. It provides users with a convenient way to buy most major currencies with convenient payment methods, including instant bank transfers, among others.

Unfortunately, the company is often targeted by hackers, and it seems some of those efforts have been pretty successful in recent months. Litebit’s latest hack comes in the form of a data breach which affects a lot of users. Considering how the company is one of the biggest brokers in the Netherlands, it has massive databases filled with personal information on users. This information includes payment methods used, addresses, phone numbers, and more.

During the September 12th attack, hackers gained access to Litebit’s backend and obtained email addresses, hashed passwords, and IBAN information, among other things. No money was stolen in the process, though, which is a positive sign. Moreover, the breach itself has been reported to the Dutch police and the local Data Protection Authority as well. It is unclear how much progress has been made in finding the actual culprits, though, but we will hopefully learn more about this investigation over the coming weeks.

Unfortunately, a similar incident occurred last month. It seems this involved the same type of theft, as customer accounts may have been affected during the incident. According to Bitcointalk, the company has disclosed that it was “potentially” breached, although no funds were stolen at that time. It is good to see the company be rather open about these events, although many people will not be too pleased about two breaches transpiring in quick succession.

As is always the case with such incidents, the company advises users to change their passwords and even reset their 2FA settings. Everyone in the world of cryptocurrency needs to use 2FA wherever possible, as plenty of services are affected by small and large data breaches at some point. In most cases, they are due to third-party service providers exposing information, rather than the company itself doing so.

The bigger question is how Litebit will move on from here. Two breaches in just over a month is not acceptable by any means. However, it seems both incidents have had something to do with the company’s “supplier” rather than the company itself. While no wallets were affected twice in a row, it remains to be seen if the company remains so “lucky” in this regard. Cybercriminals are targeting centralized cryptocurrency services. This trend will only grow worse over time, unfortunately.

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 throttled at 0.6 and 0.8. Disabling Javascript was sufficient to stop the miner, however. This short-term test likely lasted around 24 hours in total, but it has already upset many users.

An Interesting Idea That Needs Better Execution

For the most part, I love this idea. Consumers today are inundated with ads for products and services. Flashy banners, the dreaded pop up, and – worst of all – ads that auto-play with sound can be incredibly disruptive to users. If I am reading an article or looking for some information on a website, there is nothing more infuriating than wading through ads.

I can already hear what some of you are saying: “Why not put on an ad blocker then?” Honestly, I have given it some thought, but realize that these media platforms do deserve some sort of compensation for providing me with content. If ads are their main form of revenue, blocking their ads and denying them revenue seems wrong to me.

However, there is a tacit agreement that I allow companies to collect big data from me in order to make their ad campaigns successful. This means my data is stored in a large, centralized location and is then accessible to malicious attackers looking for vulnerabilities in those systems.

Having a site dedicate some of one’s computer power to mine cryptocurrencies while using their product or service might be a smart way to move forward. They would not need to show ads, which means ad companies would not need to collect big and vulnerable data to create better ad campaigns, and the companies would still get paid in the form of computational power required to find a block. All parties would seemingly benefit from this kind of arrangement.

It would need a few tweaks however. Firstly, not announcing a test like this – even if only for 24 hours – strikes me as a little cavalier. While companies do not need to announce every business test they perform, something that directly affects the CPU performance of a user’s computer probably deserves some upfront explanation. I also think that perhaps the miner should be throttled down a bit. No one will make any money if accessing a site is clunky and slow enough that users decide to go elsewhere. This is only a first test, but I think the idea – if modified – could be a great approach moving forward.

The last one and a half years tendencies in cryptocurrency mining demonstrate that home farms have become completely outdated. Their profitability falls, and the equipment and electric power costs grow. Therefore analysts of the leading cryptocurrencies systems are sure that home farms amount will continue to be reduced and within one or two years even … Continue reading Crypto Exchanges Are Being Closed in China, but the Production of Mining Equipment Is Gaining Momentum

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There is an intriguing development in the ongoing BTC-e debacle. Ever since the company’s domain was seized, there have been rumors it would relaunch under a different name. It appears the new name is Wex, and its domain is Wex.nz. A lot of people will be looking for ways to get their remaining money back from the company as quickly as possible.

BTC-e Becomes Wex and Will Resume Trading

Ever since things started to unravel for the BTC-e exchange, there has been a lot of confusion. US authorities now control the company’s original domain name. The company itself only controls a portion of user funds, whereas the rest is outside their control. This means all BTC-e users who had a balance at the time of the disappearance have lost access to their money, which will eventually be repaid by the team.

A week or two ago, customers could suddenly access a mirror site of BTC-e to either request a withdrawal of their money or update their details. However, there were a few caveats as far as this activity was concerned. First of all, US users could not access their accounts whatsoever, which immediately created a lot of friction. Secondly, users who requested withdrawals effectively waived the right to claim their missing funds. It is unclear how many people did so, though.

Today, it seems the BTC-e team is ready to put most of their misery behind them. The company has relaunched under a new name as of today, and it is expected that services will resume shortly. The new enterprise is known as Wex and uses a New Zealand domain name. It is something most users will get accustomed to pretty quickly. The site might not be ready for prime time, though, as the host server was returning a 524 error at the time of writing.

The goal was to make Wex different from BTC-e. The new exchange platform aims to remain unrelated to BTC-e, although it is quite difficult to forget this association. All user accounts should have been migrated successfully. Furthermore, the company plans to be fully compliant with Know Your Customer and anti-money laundering procedures moving forward. It will be interesting to see how Wex fares in this regard, as it will undoubtedly be scrutinized by government officials for the foreseeable future.

The current plan involves operating Wex in ‘test mode” for the next week or so. All migrated users will receive bonus cryptocurrency tokens to transfer balances as they see fit. It remains unknown how long the company will take to refund existing users, though. With a significant cut to all user balances, there is a lot of money waiting to be paid back. Although the company always claimed this would be done “as quickly as possible,” it remains to be seen how things play out.

Wex is still in the process of restructuring its assets and will need to undergo an audit before it can launch trading services. Whether or not the same cryptocurrency and associated fiat currency markets will be supported remains to be seen. Regardless, it is an important first step by the company. We can only hope affected users will get their money back soon so this incident can be put behind us once and for all.

The Mandarin Exchange is a new cryptocurrency exchange that proposes to minimise the risks of centralization while acknowledging the benefits of conventional exchanges through the concept of distributed management. Centralized exchanges are failing the market Regulated or otherwise, centralized exchanges suffer from generally poor reputations when it comes to basic service criteria such as customer … Continue reading Democratic Cryptocurrency Exchange Mandarin.top launched ICO

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