CNBCBitcoin continues to tumble, briefly breaking below $6000CNBCBitcoin continues to tumble, briefly breaking below $6,000. The digital currency briefly falls below $6,000 to its lowest since mid-November, according to CoinDesk. The decline follows re…
Last week, an enigmatic and fiendishly tricky puzzle that had baffled bitcoiners for years was finally solved. In the process, it earned the individual who cracked it a 5 BTC jackpot and brought new acclaim to the team behind the project. After being launched in 2015, at the height of the bitcoin bear market, the […]
Last week, an enigmatic and fiendishly tricky puzzle that had baffled bitcoiners for years was finally solved. In the process, it earned the individual who cracked it a 5 BTC jackpot and brought new acclaim to the team behind the project. After being launched in 2015, at the height of the bitcoin bear market, the puzzle attracted a flurry of interest. As the months passed and no one stepped forward to claim the prize, interest in the puzzle waned, until last week’s sudden news that its mysteries had been decoded.
1FLAMEN6 was the name assigned to a notorious bitcoin address created in 2015. The notoriety came on account of the 5 BTC locked inside it. The coins were anyone’s to claim, but to unlock them they would have to solve a visual puzzle that had baffled some of crypto’s greatest minds and finest armchair detectives. The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto is a visually rich painting by @coin_artist, who devised the board game-inspired artwork in conjunction with fellow crypto creative Rob Myers. It was evident that the painting contained clues that would reveal the key to the bitcoin wallet, but those clues were so obscure and esoteric as to thwart all attempts to crack them.
That’s until a 30-year-old programmer operating under the pseudonym of Isaac stepped forward and helped himself to the prize. Motherboard spoke to the code-cracking genius, who confessed that holding bitcoin wasn’t safe in his country, hence the desire to preserve his anonymity. Isaac only learned of the puzzle a month ago, but in three weeks made more progress than the crypto community had made in the past three years. Encoded in the painting, Isaac discovered, was the key to the bitcoin wallet prefaced by the phrase “B34u7y, truth, and rarity”, put there to signal that its finder had been successful.
17th Century Wisdom Meets 21st Century Tech
The phrase encoded in the painting is taken from a William Shakespeare poem called The Phoenix and the Turtle. The poem, like its author, is a subject of some mystery and much speculation. The same can be said of Satoshi Nakamoto of course, who the painting was named after. @coin_artist explained to Motherboard how the inclusion of Shakespeare was “important to me because events flipped my life upside down and I created this piece at rock bottom. The painting was also created during the toughest part of the bear market and those original bitcoins I loaded into that address were half of everything I had to my name. It was essentially a prayer that things would get better.”
@coin_artist created the painting while her fellow artist Rob Myers help encode the key which was hidden in it, using flames around its border and ribbons tied to the key to correspond to binary strings. The full story of how Isaac went on to decode the rest of the clues is a lengthy but fascinating one. Thanks to the number of bitcoin forks that have occured since the 1FLAMEN6 wallet was loaded with 5 BTC, the final prize is in fact greater than $50,000.
Conveniently for @coin_artist, the puzzle was solved at the same time as she was seeking to promote her latest project, Neon District, a blockchain RPG game set in a dystopian future. In keeping with its designer’s methodology, the game is loaded with easter eggs which, when solved, will help players uncover a grand prize of some description. Coincidences aside, cryptocurrency and cryptographic puzzles are a mind-boggling match made in heaven.
Did you try to solve the bitcoin puzzle after it was announced in 2015? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Wikipedia, and @coin_artist.
Want to create your own secure cold storage paper wallet? Check ourtools section.
College kids using Bitcoin to pay for ‘huge drug deals,’ prosecutor says USA TODAY DES MOINES — An Iowa man has been arrested and accused of selling shipments of narcotics and other drugs to two Ohio college students, who bought the drugs using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Authorities arrested Anthony Scott Boeckholt, 42, on Jan. 29 …
College kids using Bitcoin to pay for 'huge drug deals,' prosecutor says USA TODAY DES MOINES — An Iowa man has been arrested and accused of selling shipments of narcotics and other drugs to two Ohio college students, who bought the drugs using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Authorities arrested Anthony Scott Boeckholt, 42, on Jan. 29 ...
Over the past few months there’s been a lot of internet chatter concerning the digital currency tether (USDT) and whether or not it’s really backed by U.S. dollars. Further, there’s been skeptics, speculators, anonymous Twitter handles, and well-researched reports that claim tether printing moved the price of BTC considerably this past year. However, just recently […]
Over the past few months there’s been a lot of internet chatter concerning the digital currency tether (USDT) and whether or not it’s really backed by U.S. dollars. Further, there’s been skeptics, speculators, anonymous Twitter handles, and well-researched reports that claim tether printing moved the price of BTC considerably this past year. However, just recently a Ph.D. student at the University of Groningen analyzed the situation, and his findings reveal the theory of new tethers pumping the bitcoin price looks improbable.
A Statistical Point of View Doesn’t Support the Tether Printing and BTC Pump Theories
Two days ago, Oleksandr Ivanov, a data scientist from the University of Groningen, revealed a “statistical point of view” that looks into the theory behind tethers pumping the price of bitcoin. Lots of people believe that tether (USDT) printing had caused bitcoin’s significant spike in value, and they think this relationship is correlated to last year’s phenomenal rise. One study called ‘The Tether Report’ says that when USDTs are printed, the price had kicked into higher gear in “two-hour periods following the arrival of 91 different Tether grants to the Bitfinex wallet.” However, even though some people believe the two digital currencies are ‘tethered,’ Ivanov says the “correlation in all cases is still close to zero.”
“I approached this question from a statistical point of view — If the alleged Tether strategy is true, we should see a positive correlation between the change of the amount of tethers and the change of bitcoin price at some time frames,” explains Ivanov’s analysis.
A Negative Correlation Between the Number of Tethers and the Change of Bitcoin Price
Ivanov used the historical data from BTC prices using Coinmarketcap and the number of tethers in 2017. Following this, he calculated the daily percentage change of bitcoin price and the daily change of the number of tethers in existence.
“Next, I plot the bitcoin daily percentage change in price versus the amount of tethers daily percentage change, and most of the points center around zero — Some points on the far right corner of the plot correspond to large percentage changes in the amount of tethers. These are the outliers. Interestingly, they mostly lie below zero in the bitcoin price percentage change axis,” Ivanov’s research details.
Pearson correlation coefficient for bitcoin daily price percentage change and the amount of tethers daily percentage change is -0.17168 (p-value is 0.001, which is statistically significant). So there is a negative correlation between the change of the amount of tethers and the change of bitcoin price.
The researcher then looks into whether or not tethers are used to pump BTC prices over a longer period of time. The “correlation in all cases is still close to zero” says Ivanov, and his testing does not support the claims that BTC prices are moved by USDT printing — although, Ivanov explains, his statistical analysis doesn’t necessarily fully disprove tether manipulations.
“A transparent public audit of Tether will shed light on this issue,” Ivanov concludes.
What do you think about Ivanov’s research? Do you think tethers pumped BTC? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Pixabay, U.S. Treasury, Tether, Oleksandr Ivanov, and Forklog.
Do you like to research and read about Bitcoin technology? Check out Bitcoin.com’s Wiki page for an in-depth look at Bitcoin’s innovative technology and interesting history.
Bitcoin is getting smashed Business Insider Bitcoin is trading at the lowest level since mid-November when a corresponding surge in Bitcoin Cash saw Bitcoin prices fall below $US6,000. Bitcoin Cash hasn’t been immune from the latest selloff and has fallen below $US1,000 — also for the first …
Bitcoin is getting smashed Business Insider Bitcoin is trading at the lowest level since mid-November when a corresponding surge in Bitcoin Cash saw Bitcoin prices fall below $US6,000. Bitcoin Cash hasn't been immune from the latest selloff and has fallen below $US1,000 — also for the first ...
Many people, smartly, turn to a VPN to be able to surf the web privately. Hidester VPN has made their service even more anonymous announcing they now accept Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency for payment. February 5, 2018 It’s hardly a secret that all kinds of prying eyes look at where a person goes and what they do online. Of course, this makes many people uncomfortable. Hidester VPN has built a remarkable reputation as a resource in this area, providing a service where users can reliably and safely conceal their true I.P. addresses. To help protect privacy to an even greater
Many people, smartly, turn to a VPN to be able to surf the web privately. Hidester VPN has made their service even more anonymous announcing they now accept Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency for payment.
February 5, 2018
It’s hardly a secret that all kinds of prying eyes look at where a person goes and what they do online. Of course, this makes many people uncomfortable. Hidester VPN has built a remarkable reputation as a resource in this area, providing a service where users can reliably and safely conceal their true I.P. addresses. To help protect privacy to an even greater degree, and add a new convenient way for customers to pay at the same time, Hidester VPN recently announced they are accepting Bitcoin and a large number of other popular cryptocurrency for their services.
“We are always looking for ways to improve or add to what we offer,” commented a spokesperson from the company. “We’ve had requests to add cryptocurrency as a VPN payment method, and we are now proudly opening up that option.”
According to Hidester VPN, in addition to Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Ethereum, Nav, Neo, Qtum, Stratis, USDT, Waves, Monero, Verge, Ripple and Zcash are also accepted. Hidester delivers free access to users who may not be able to get content based on their location, full protection where data is kept safe on any network used, and complete anonymity. No user logs are ever kept.
Torrents, P2P, and downloads are all permitted when using Hidester VPN.
“Thanks to the encryption service from Hidester VPN, our members data cannot be captured by hackers when using public Wifi networks” said Hidester spokesman, referring to several past cases in which users had their crypto wallet content stolen when using public Wifi networks as they were not using any VPN service to protect themselves.
Feedbacks for their services have been completely positive across the board.
M.T., from California, recently said in a five-star review, “I travel a great deal for work and there’s nothing worse than having streaming services blocked when I am in Europe. Hidester VPN is a quick and easy way around that, plus it conceals my activities online, which aren’t anyone’s business but my own. It’s quick and reliable, and now I can pay with Bitcoin too! Fully recommended.”
This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.
Cryptocurrency is all the rage among savvy investors. But the technology has the potential for social change far beyond this. Cryptocurrencies can open access to financial services for underserved populations in developing countries, and they even have…
Cryptocurrency is all the rage among savvy investors. But the technology has the potential for social change far beyond this. Cryptocurrencies can open access to financial services for underserved populations in developing countries, and they even have the potential to reduce global poverty by facilitating better access to capital and financial resources, and by enabling small business transactions.
New York TimesAs Bitcoin Bubble Loses Air, Frauds and Flaws Rise to Surface – The …New York TimesSAN FRANCISCO — You did not have to be a technophobe to worry that the virtual-currency boom of the past year papered over plenty of problems. The scale …