Bitcoin Blog | The Bitcoin Trader

Bitcoin Poised for Rally

2012-05-29T19:11:00.001-07:00

I don't normally like to make predictions, but... (click images to enlarge):

Enter the Dragon: BTCChina's Volume and Exchange Rate Suddenly Explode Higher

2012-05-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Bitcoin community has been abuzz over the last 48 hours as trading activity on the only Chinese Bitcoin exchange, BTCChina, has gone stratospheric, with volume 700% above the norm and prices skyrocketing more than 10% higher than the Mt.Gox exchange rate.

Traders on the Chinese exchange are showing no signs of relenting, with 7698 BTC traded yesterday and 8495 BTC already traded today. The last trade was for 35.8 RMB or $5.64 USD, significantly greater than the $5.12 rate on Mt.Gox. With this activity, BTCChina has, at least for the moment, thrust itself into position as the second largest Bitcoin exchange.

Possibly related, earlier this month, Roger Ver (memorydealers.com) and Yifu Guo (BitSyncom) organized a Bitcoin meeting in China. With only 24 hours notice, over 30 people showed up to learn about and discuss applications for Bitcoin, including opening an exchange in Macau to facilitate the movement of currency to and from "China's Las Vegas."

Also coming out of Roger and Yifu's visit to China was a contract with a tablet manufacturer to produce a sub-$100 tablet running two Mali-400 processors and sporting a 1200x600 IPS screen. Taking a step toward realizing BitSyncom's Meshnet project, each tablet will run Bitcoin relay node and wallet software. The manufacturer, hearing about Bitcoin for the first time, considered loading all of his tablets with Bitcoin software (over two million per year), which could spawn others to do the same. Expect to see BitSyncom's tablet on the market by the end of the calendar year.

Is the activity on BTC China related to the development of these projects? Hard to say, but hopefully we'll find some answers in the coming days.

Bitcoin's Liquidity: A Third Look

2012-05-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

Back in November 2011, I wrote about Bitcoin's liquidity, and how it had improved from six weeks prior. Let's take a look at how we're doing, six months since:

On October 16th, a $50,000 purchase would have moved the price from $3.40 to $3.92, a 15.3% increase. A sale of $50,000 worth of Bitcoins would have taken the price down to $3.03, or a 10.9% drop.

On November 27th, a $50,000 purchase of Bitcoins on Mt.Gox would have moved the price from $2.46 to $2.60, a 5.7% increase. A sale of $50,000 worth of Bitcoins would have taken the price down to $2.30, or a 6.5% drop.

So, how is it looking now?

The market is looking considerably more stable. Today, a $50,000 purchase would only move the price from $5.11 to $5.16, a 1% increase, and a sale of $50,000 would drop the price to $5.06, also a 1% move.

In the last seven months, the Bitcoin market has clearly matured significantly, making it increasingly stable and usable as a currency; something many merchants have been waiting for before deciding to accept Bitcoin. Hopefully this will translate into wider acceptance and growth of the economy.

Bitcoin's Hogwarts: San Francisco Tech Space "20Mission" to Open in August

2012-05-18T19:16:00.000-07:00

Jered Kenna, formerly of TradeHill, and Jonathan Ryan Owens of RingCoin have teamed up to launch 20Mission, a huge 41-room tech space project in the heart of San Francisco.

The goal is to open 20Mission to tenants on the 1st of August. Finding tenants will apparently not be a problem, as the reservation list has grown quite long, with prospective tenants even stopping Jared on the street to get in on the action.

Kenna and Owens are hoping the space will produce a wide array of successful projects, most of which will be focused on Bitcoin-related businesses, though the space isn't being advertised as "Bitcoin-only." No doubt, having this much talent concentrated and living in a small space will streamline the development process and encourage the type of brain-storming that could produce exceptional ideas.

In this three-minute video, Jered Kenna takes us for a tour and explains the idea behind 20Mission, including who the building is geared toward, what the spaces will look like, and his crazy plans for the roof:

GLBSE Valuations, 13 May 2012

2012-05-13T07:17:00.002-07:00

This is a snapshot of the valuation of each security on GLBSE with at least 1000 BTC in total volume traded (excluding Pirate bonds, as they are temporary), as of 0700 PDT (UTC-7), May 13th 2012:

Asset	24hr Avg	Issued	Private	Valuation (BTC)	Valuation (USD)
ZIP.A	0.784	10000	40000	39200	$195,020
GIGAMINING	1.499	20000	0	29980	$149,151
BITBOND	0.648	41000	0	26568	$132,176
TYGRR-BOT	1.05	10000	0	10500	$52,238
MU	0.8	10000	0	8000	$39,800
TYGRR-BANK	0.113	50000	0	5650	$28,109
PUREMINING	0.453	10000	0	4530	$22,537
COGNITIVE	0.529	5000	0	2645	$13,159
TEEK.B	1.04	2000	0	2080	$10,348
YABMC	0.304	5000	0	1520	$7,562

Bitcoinica's Founder to Cease All Involvement with Bitcoin

2012-05-13T06:34:00.000-07:00

Hot on the heels of a major hack at Bitcoinica, Zhou Tong, the founder of Bitcoin's most successful Bitcoin project to date, has just announced that he will no longer involve himself in any Bitcoin-related projects:

"I, Zhou Tong... will discontinue all involvement in Bitcoin-related projects after the Bitcoinica incident has been fully resolved until further notice. I failed at one thing... that is generating value for the society. Bitcoinica did create a place for people to trade more efficiently and provide liquidity to the market. However, speculation is a zero-sum game (or negative-sum, strictly saying). I know there can be many justifications for Bitcoinica's value, but all of them are against my intuition and values."

In his announcement, he also revealed that Bitcoinica was actually sold in November of 2011, with the official handover happening in January of this year.

Not surprisingly, he will be moving on to pursue other projects:

"I have started working on another project (not Bitcoin-related) that is going to make a little difference on the Internet. So far I have achieved great progress and I'm pretty confident about this new venture."

Zhou Tong, a 17 year-old developer from Singapore, took the Bitcoin community by storm by creating the first advanced trading platform for Bitcoin. Several security incidents eventually pushed the site to the brink, the most recent being a $90,000 USD theft on May 11th. The site currently remains offline.

Upcoming GLBSE IPOs - A Review

2012-05-12T22:08:00.001-07:00

ZETA-MINING 2012-05-13 @ 18:00:00 (GMT-4)

Yet another mining operation. You will likely receive predictable but small dividends if you invest in Zeta Mining (1 MH/share).

REBATE 2012-05-14 @ 23:18:35

This is definitely the most interesting of the upcoming offerings. Bitcoin Rebate is described as "a blend of penny auctions and arbitrage. Users bid on blocks of Bitcoin (powered by ZipConf) arbitrage opportunities against other players."

The concept of buying more Bitcoins for less Bitcoins might seem like a strange one, but it works if you understand the arbitrage going on behind the scenes. I suspect this will be a very popular and profitable site, at least until the arbitrage space gets a little more crowded and margins fall.

Half of the business is up for grabs (25,000 shares with each earning 1/50,000 of the fees collected by the service). Priced at 0.2 BTC each, this gives Bitcoin Rebate an initial valuation of $50,000 USD).

GOLD 2012-06-05 @ 18:00:00

This "gold bond" (not the stuff you put on your nuts) gives you the privilege of lending your BTC to the owner of the gold so that he can invest the money is his personal business. The gold is essentially acting as collateral, and bond holders will be paid a dividend of 0.73% of their investment on a weekly basis. Definitely an interesting way to secure a Bitcoin loan and a new way of using GLBSE.

SILVER 2012-06-05 @ 18:00:00

Same as the gold bond, but silver.

BITCOIN 2012-05-22 @ 22:00:00
PROPERTY 2012-06-08 @ 08:00:00
CASINO 2012-06-08 @ 18:18:00
INSURANCE 2012-06-18 @ 18:00:00
PENSION 2012-06-22 @ 18:00:00

These five are nothing more than someone reserving ticker names in the hopes that they can be sold off in the future.

Happy investing!

VirWox Breaks June 2011 Bubble Record for Volume Traded

2012-05-12T16:05:00.001-07:00

Bitcoin's fourth largest exchange, VirWox, just posted a record for weekly volume traded of nearly 30 million Linden Dollars (SLL), or $115,000 USD. The previous record was set during the Bitcoin bubble of June 2011.

And in case you think this might be caused by inflation of the Second Life currency, the exchange rate has actually remained extremely stable, holding between 250 and 270 SLL/USD for the last three years. Notably, this exchange rate is managed through "printing" of the currency to keep up with demand.

The largest exchange, Mt.Gox, has seen its market share drop, with weekly volume continuing to dwindle and flirt with yearly lows. The loss of Bitcoinica, which conducted all of its trades through Mt.Gox, will no doubt add to Mt.Gox's woes in the coming weeks and months.

Bitcoinica Shutdown is Potentially Permanent

2012-05-12T07:31:00.001-07:00

The latest from Zhou Tong in regards to yesterday's hack and the loss of over 18,000 Bitcoins:

- It's more serious than we thought. We need some additional time to come up with a compensation proposal.

- Likely we will either shut down the platform or re-develop entirely (which will take months instead of days).

- The preliminary decision: reimburse for the full amount, including margin balances and position P/L.

- The root cause of this problem is an email server compromise. The email server belongs to one of our team members.

- Reminder again: Please do not reuse your Bitcoinica passwords as the database server was compromised. Do not click any links in the email. All Bitcoinica announcements will be updated on Bitcoinica website when available.

Important Disclaimer: I'm not a partner of Bitcoinica LP after the corporate reorganisation. Therefore, I have no financial obligation in this matter as I'm only an employee of Bitcoinica LP responsible for daily operations (no shares, no voting). However, I'll do my best with the team to resolve this problem as quickly as possible and minimize the impact for the community. I appreciate your patience and understanding.

Sadly, these events are unfolding only 18 days after ownership of Bitcoinica was transferred to Intersango, who is now left holding the bag.

Meet Kronos.io: Ringcoin's Answer to Bitcoinica

2012-05-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

As we continue to digest the news coming from Bitcoinica, another group of developers is working hard to level the playing field in the battle for the Bitcoin CFD space, which until now was monopolized by Singapore's boy-genius, Zhou Tong.

Jonathan Ryan Owens and his team from Ringcoin are fiercely putting together the final code for Kronos.io. Advertised as "Bitcoinica on steroids," Ringcoin will be leveraging their highly touted ZipConf platform to improve the Bitcoin trading experience.

Unlike Bitcoinica, Kronos will utilize the tech behind ZipConf to eliminate its hot-wallet risk, allowing for instant multi-market hedging.

With security concerns being the topic du jour, Owens seeks to reassure his future user base:

"Under the hood, ZipConf is what allows Bitcoins to be delivered instantly to remote exchanges, which is also a huge security bonus. Bitcoinica has persisted in having a zero sysadmin policy. Kronos is built by sysadmins, on top of software built by other sysadmins (ZipConf). Kronos uses SSH and SFTP to remain extra secure; I won't even have the keys!"

Planning to support three exchanges at launch (Mt.Gox, Bitstamp, and CrytpoXChange), Kronos will be faster and allow for even greater leverage than with Bitcoinica. Of course, greater leverage equates to greater risk, but Kronos promises a functioning stop loss, something Bitcoinica's users have been keen to have at their disposal.

In light of today's hack at Bitcoinica, Owens has lit a fire under his team. Originally expecting to launch in one to two weeks, the new target is three days.

Though the site might look familiar to Bitcoinica's users, that's only because it currently uses the Twitter bootstrap common to many sites. When Kronos is launched, expect to see a unique design unveiled, which Ringcoin claims will be extremely intuitive and user-friendly.

Alberto Armandi, the lead developer for the project, was quick to remind that it's what's under the hood that counts: Kronos is built on a node.js realtime price monitor developed over the last few months using jquery and ajax with a node.js backend. It's a tool that Armandi coded for his own site, BitcoinRebate.com, another interesting service scheduled to launch in the coming days.

For further information, you can contact Jonathan Ryan Owens at info@ringcoin.com. In the meantime, someone pass the methadone; this leveraged trading withdrawal is killing me!

Developing: Bitcoinica "Hacked" - Potentially 18,000 BTC ($90,000 USD) Stolen

2012-05-11T09:35:00.001-07:00

Bitcoinica has been shutdown until further notice, following a theft of 18,000 BTC. News of the hack was posted this morning by Bitcoinica's founder, Zhou Tong:

"Today, we have discovered a suspicious Bitcoin transaction that doesn't seem to be initiated by any one of the company owners. Some of them are not online at the moment so this is not conclusive.

Suspicious transaction:

{
"account" : "",
"address" : "182tGyiczhXSSCTciVujNRkkMw1zQxUVhp",
"category" : "send",
"amount" : -18547.66867623,
"fee" : 0.00000000,
"blockhash" : "00000000000003f6bfd3e2fcbf76091853b28be234b5473a67f89b9d5bee019c",
"blockindex" : 1,
"txid" : "7a22917744aa9ed740faf3068a2f895424ed816ed1a04012b47df7a493f056e8",
"time" : 1336738723
},

We have contacted Rackspace to suspend all our servers and lock down our accounts. All your trading and financial data is safe (as far as I know), apart from the Bitcoin loss. Thank you for your patience and understanding while we investigate this issue in detail."

And in a follow-up post:

"Our data is kept inact. Any order placed before the shutdown will still be valid. However, no order execution will happen (no zhoutonging either).
If the market moves significantly, we will come up with a proposal to compensate disadvantaged customers once the investigation is complete."

Bitcoinica was also the victim of a 43,000 BTC ($215,000 USD) heist back on March 1st.

It will be interesting to see how the market is affected by the inability of traders to take leveraged positions in either direction. Also, you should not surf to Bitcoinica.com, as the site has been redirected to a porn site.

Bit-Pay Processes Record-High Merchant Transaction of 3095 BTC (~15,000 USD)

2012-05-09T23:08:00.000-07:00

Bitcoin's most successful payment processor, Bit-Pay has just set a new record for itself, processing a 15,000 USD transaction between a customer and a merchant in the United States. The purchase was completed in Bitcoins (3095 BTC), with Bit-Pay converting all or a portion of the transaction into US dollars for the merchant.

The merchant? Butterfly Labs, selling one of its 25 Giga Hash mini-rigs.

FarmVilleFeed.com (100,000+ Daily Impressions) to Run Bitcoin-Based Advertisements

2012-05-08T20:37:00.001-07:00

I've heard a few people suggest that games like FarmVille would be the perfect match for Bitcoin.

Well, Zynga's not exactly ready to take that step, however, ladies and gentlemen of Bitcoin land, I am pleased to announce that the brains behind FarmVilleFeed.com is in the process of creating a specific page on his blog to promote Bitcoin.

He will also be accepting Bitcoin-based ads on his site, which will give Bitcoin entrepreneurs the chance to expose their sites to a blog which receives over 100,000 daily impressions.

Why accept Bitcoin-based ads? Simple: no more payment-processor middlemen to take a cut of your advertising revenue!

The Bitcoin Stock Market - Miners and Pirates, Oh My!

2012-05-05T09:43:00.001-07:00

As of this morning, there are 8.9 million Bitcoins in circulation with a combined value of over $45 million USD. It isn't exactly a secret that a good portion of those Bitcoins are held by speculators and investors hoping to see the currency gain traction and their Bitcoins appreciate in value. All that to say, there is a heck of a lot of money sitting idle and not being put to work. At least, that was the case until recently.

Non-Bitcoiners may not be aware of this, but there is a substantial secondary market where Bitcoins are being used to kickstart (heh) various community driven projects, mostly, at this point, with a view to further developing the infrastructure that overlays and streamlines the Bitcoin economy.

The GLobal Bitcoin Stock Exchange (GLBSE) is the primary site through which most of these transactions are occurring. To give you an appreciation of the size of this market, over 5600 BTC ($28,000 USD) in securities were traded on the exchange in the last 24 hours, equal to about 1/6th of the 24 hour volume on Mt.Gox.

The top five securities by total volume traded, measured in Bitcoins, all represent mining operations, which shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone.

(Edit: I spoke too quickly here. Three of the top five are mining operations, one is a bank, and one is a trading bot. Thanks to one of the readers for picking this up.)

The larger mining operations are always looking to acquire more hardware, and there's no better way to do that then to sell stock in your operation. Things get interesting when you look at the next five securities. Four of those five are "Pirate Pass Through" bonds, which I'll explain...

There's this "bank" see, run by a mysterious individual going by the name of "pirateat40" (pirate at 40) who has been soliciting Bitcoin deposits to finance an even more mysterious business of sorts. There are various theories floating around as to the nature of this business, most of which fall into one of two categories: one, a massive (by Bitcoin standards) Ponzi scheme where the interest on earlier deposits is paid using later deposits, or two, pirateat40 actually sells Bitcoins for cash to various entities who are looking to acquire substantial amounts of the currency without leaving a paper trail, as would happen if they used a conventional exchange.

Six months into the scheme, and not a single interest payment from the Bitcoin Savings & Trust bank has been missed, yet the interest rates are enormously lucrative for anyone willing to take the chance. For example, a 2000 BTC deposit (~$10,000 USD) will earn 7% interest per week! You heard (read) me. If you were lucky enough to be one of the earlier account holders, you could be pulling in enough interest on a 2000 BTC deposit to cover a mortgage on a decent sized home. Unfortunately, pirateat40 is not always accepting new deposits (lending some support to the "not a Ponzi scheme" theorists), which leads us back to GLBSE and the "Pirate Pass Through" bonds, a means for anyone to get in on the Bitcoin Savings & Trust action.

A "cartel" of some of the more well-known members of the community has established a series of bonds that pay out 1.28 BTC per bond after four weeks. Each issue of bonds (PPT.A, PPT.B, PPT.C, etc) is auctioned off on GLBSE and typically sells for between 1.06 and 1.09 BTC per bond, giving investors a very respectable 15 to 20% ROI. The money raised from the bond sales is deposited into the Bitcoin Savings & Trust, where the bond backers earn substantially more interest (as explained above) than is paid out to the bond holders. Should the Bitcoin Savings & Trust default on their interest payments, the whole scheme would fail, and the bond holders would be paid out only a fraction (25%) of the bond value. For the moment, however, everything is holding together.

Not surprisingly, given the ingenuity of Bitcoiners and the ease with which Bitcoins enable financial transactions, an issue of "Anti-Pirate" bonds was created, sort of a credit default swap for anyone looking to hedge the risk of depositing with Bitcoin Savings & Trust. Interestingly, after a week, not a single Anti-Pirate Bond was sold, and in the words of the bond's backer, the sale was "a spectacular failure."

By the looks of things, pirateat40 has earned a lot of trust in the community. The question remains, however: what the heck is he doing with all those Bitcoins?

In the meantime, you might want to look at some of the other offerings on the GLBSE which range from companies like ZipConf (claiming to be able to pay a 6% dividend) to Satoshi's Daemon, a racehorse whereby the horse's winnings are distributed to the shareholders. And if you don't feel comfortable making your own investment decisions, there's always the "Gamma Bitcoin Fund," where you can have your investments managed for you.

Of course, if those don't sound exciting enough, you could always take a chance with the pirate...

ZipConf.com - Waiting for Confirmations About to Become A Thing of the Past

2012-05-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

A consequence of Bitcoin's architecture has always been the risk, albeit tiny, of the zero confirmation double-spend. As a result, most Bitcoin exchanges have made it a point of only accepting a deposit after the Bitcoin network has verified the transaction, with six confirmations being the accepted standard. Typically, wait times are on the order of an hour to complete a deposit to an exchange.

Addressing the problem, ZipConf.com is rolling out a service to eliminate this delay, thus making Bitcoin an even more efficient means of moving your money.

"ZipConf acts as clearing house to provide instant credit to its clients and partners while assuming the risk associated with zero confirmation transactions," says Jonathan Ryan Owens, ZipConf's founder.

Obvious potential customers include those interested in conducting arbitrage trading between exchanges, where previously the hour-long delays associated with moving Bitcoins added a potentially expensive obstacle to the process. Consequently, you can anticipate a leveling in Bitcoin valuations across exchanges once ZipConf is operational.

After months of testing, Jonathan Ryan Owens says the API used to integrate his service with ZipConf's partners is ready to go. Once a site is integrated with ZipConf, it can allow its users to withdraw their funds instantly to a Bitcoin exchange, making the conversion of Bitcoins to fiat currency near-instantaneous. While sites like BitInstant have done a fantastic job in facilitating the conversion of fiat to Bitcoin, this is the first time that the Bitcoin to fiat path has been streamlined.

In developing ZipConf, great effort has gone into monitoring the Bitcoin network to log invalid transaction attempts and orphan transactions, ensuring the service has a complete picture of what's going on with the Bitcoin network at any given time. They've even been attempting double spends through various means to ensure they know what to look for when their service is operating.

Explains Owens, "The way we've built our platform is with two things in mind: security, and scalability. If we have to scale to supporting larger volume, we can do that with very little effort, as we've built the system in such a way (our monthly IT cost for multiple VPS alone is over $200) that we're ready to expand rapidly, and as such we'll be partnering and providing integration information (API documentation, support) to as many partners as possible, as quickly as possible."

Catering to traders and other users that require speed in their transactions, fees will start at 0.75% for individuals with the intent of reducing them as volume increases. "We hope to be able to reduce fees as low as 0.4% in the near future, once the volume is there," says Owens.

A key element to ZipConf's strategy is to ensure miners rapidly accept and propagate its transactions. Of course, a little incentive never hurts, therefore ZipConf will be paying significantly higher than typical transaction fees to miners that include its transactions in their blocks. For example, a 100 BTC transaction will net a pool or miner 0.07 BTC (or $0.35 at today's exchange rate), significantly higher than the 0.0005 BTC enforced by the standard client.

ZipConf's profits will go toward other Bitcoin projects which are currently under development. "We haven't put much out there into Bitcoin," adds Owens, "but we have been spending a lot of time tooling up to be able to rapidly develop and introduce services from here on out, so keep your eyes open - this is just the first of hopefully many useful services we'll be putting out."

The site is currently in private beta with intentions to step up to a public beta come Friday, May 4th.

BitInstant Transfers $1.1 Million in April as the Bitcoin Economy Takes Off

2012-05-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

Charlie Shrem, CEO of BitInstant, today reported that his service transferred $1.1 million in USD and Bitcoins in the month of April, representing 120% growth over February and 340% growth over December. BitInstant is a popular service primarily used to rapidly move US dollars into and between the Bitcoin exchanges.

His report comes hot on the heels of widespread indicators of exponential growth throughout the Bitcoin economy. Loan services, stock exchanges, merchants, and Bitcoin gambling sites are all demonstrating significant growth for the first quarter of 2012.

Seemingly sensing the momentum, Bitcoin miners are also stepping up their game, with the network experiencing a rare (record?) spike to 18 Thash/s just yesterday (image courtesy of http://bitcoin.sipa.be/). Though the spike could be merely a representation of some miners getting lucky, the overall trend is clearly to the upside after last fall's difficulty drop.

Network transaction graphs are also pointing to a rapid increase in the number of Bitcoins moved in a given day (graph not currently available but will be posted when blockchain.info comes back online).

Finally, though I'd love to get philosophical about the reasons for Bitcoin's growth, at the end of the day, it might just be the porn. =)

We'll have to keep a close eye on whether this is just a blip or a sign of a prosperous future for our fledgling currency - if I had to guess, I would say it's the latter.

Bitcoin Explained

2012-04-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

These videos were written and produced by Bitcointalk forum member hazek. They're compiled here for easy access. If you find the videos worthwhile, please tip their creator. 1MYx9ovWCYgc1JZCrdTK2forQcsurezC7w

Subscribe to the channel here.

Bitcoin Horse to Run First Race on May 2nd

2012-04-28T13:10:00.002-07:00

Bitcoin users are a creative bunch, and rightly so, given they're using the most versatile currency ever created.

And it doesn't get more creative than this!

Using the Bitcoin Stock Exchange, forum member TTBit has sold enough "Bitcoin Interest Rights" to train a horse by the name of "Satoshi's Daemon" (ticker symbol SATOSHISDAEMON.HORSE on GLBSE).

The Bitcoin-backed bronco is scheduled to run on Wednesday at Evangeline Downs in Louisiana. With $8700 for first place, the international consortium backing the horse could expect to see a nice dividend payout.

Try doing that with PayPal, son!

Edit: Satoshi's Daemon finished in last place. =(

Bitinstant Hints at New Contract Allowing Bitcoins to be Purchased from 700,000 Locations Including Wal-Mart and 7-11

2012-04-21T11:02:00.001-07:00

Have a listen to the interview below, starting at 15:45. Exciting stuff!!!

Edit: is this going to be some sort of Bitinstant gift card? If so, it would allow people to buy Bitcoins with credit cards and leave the chargeback liability with the merchant selling the cards! Brilliant!

(Click here for a direct link to the relevant part of the interview)

Bitcoinica Becomes Registered Financial Services Provider

2012-04-20T20:07:00.001-07:00

Bitcoinica's boy-genius, Zhou Tong, today announced that Bitcoin has become a registered financial services provider under the laws of New Zealand. Arguably one of the greatest Bitcoin success stories, Bitcoinica continues to thrive, and the site's new status will add legitimacy to the Bitcoin economy as a whole.

The press release can be found here:

https://www.bitcoinica.com/posts/registered-financial-services-provider

10 Exciting Things About Bitcoin - Right Now

2012-03-04T19:22:00.000-08:00

1) The success of Bitmit - Bitcoin's eBay. Over 550 listings and growing rapidly.

2) The boom happening over at Silk Road. While I don't condone the illegal applications of Bitcoin, the site's success if further proof that Bitcoin is a technology that fills a gap.

3) The appeal and rapid growth of Ogrr.com, which is bringing in hundreds of new users each month and expanding exponentially.

4) Mt.Gox is about to launch "e-commerce solutions" this week.

5) Recent discussions regarding making Bitcoin truly anonymous.

6) The upcoming completion and launch of Bitcoin.com by the good folks at Tradehill (currently down).

7) The popularity of coinworker.com.

8) The announcement of the upcoming Bitcoin Conference in London.

9) Through no fault of their own, tens of thousands of Bitcoins were stolen from various high profile Bitcoin businesses. Why is this good news? Not a single user was impacted as the owners chose to absorb the losses. It was also the first time that a major hack or closure didn't impact Bitcoin's market value.

10) And the most exciting news of all: you can now tip cows for Bitcoins.

Silk Road Growing in Popularity at Impressive Rate

2012-03-03T22:55:00.000-08:00

On the Bitcointalk Forums, Blitzboom posted a recent snapshot of the Silk Road Forum stats, showing the site is growing rapidly.

On a monthly basis, more users are joining the Silk Road Forums than the Bitcointalk Forums!

'Bitcoins for Christmas' Donates 85 BTC to Habitat for Humanity

2012-03-03T19:00:00.000-08:00

The March 1st deadline for reclaiming non-redeemed Bitcoins came and went and a non-trivial amount of Bitcoins were left in the 'Bitcoins for Christmas' sleigh: 85 BTC worth over $400.

As was promised, the leftover Bitcoins were donated to Habitat for Humanity, where they will be put to good use building homes for the less fortunate.

Thank you everyone for participating, especially the sponsors who helped us cover a portion of the development and hosting costs. 74 gifts were sent, totaling 250 BTC.

We look forward to doing it again next year!

Bitcoin Network Marks Three Consecutive Months of Steady Growth

2012-03-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

Showing its resiliency, the Bitcoin network has continued to grow steadily since December of 2011, and is now on pace to challenge the network computation capacity previously hit at the peak of the 2011 "bubble".

Source

Through all the politics, hacks and cons, this here is the proof that Bitcoin isn't going away anytime soon.

Vires in Numeris!

Bitcoin Arms Dealer Goes Live

2012-03-02T21:56:00.000-08:00

First there was the drugs...

Then there was the sex...

And now, there's the violence...

Color me... not surprised.