Category Archives: Cryptocurrency

BitCoin, LiteCoin, etc.

AMD cuts Radeon R9 280 price as inflation woes die down

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AMD's cryptocurrency nightmare appears to be over, as prices for the company's graphics cards have fallen back to earth.

The chipmaker is now claiming that all of its R9 series GPUs are back in stock at retailers, and at normal prices. As Forbes points out, a quick check of online retailers such as Newegg shows a wide range of AMD cards available at normal prices.

AMD has never directly explained the recent supply shortages and inflated prices for its high-end cards. Still, it's widely believed that miners of alternative cryptocurrency (such as Dogecoin and Litecoin) were gobbling up the supply in bulk, causing AMD's partners to jack up their prices.

It's unclear exactly why demand has subsided, but a recent IRS ruling that cryptocurrency counts as taxable gross income may have helped cool the mining craze, along with the rise of hyper-efficient, mining-dedicated ASIC hardware. Whatever the cause, it's ultimately good news for PC gamers, who can now have a more realistic choice between AMD and Nvidia cards. It's probably good news for AMD as well, as the company can go back to focusing on its core audience.

Along that line, AMD has just cut the price of its Radeon R9 280 graphics card from $279 to $249. The old price made sense while AMD's higher-tier R9 280X was suffering from inflation. Now that asking prices are back in the $299 range, there needs to be a bigger price gap to make the R9 280 worth considering.

As AnandTech points out, the R9 280 still falls into the Gold tier of AMD's Never Settle bundle, so it may be worth the extra $50 over an R9 270 card if any of the free games on the list sound appealing.

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AMD cuts Radeon R9 280 price as inflation woes die down

Such hack, much sad: Doge Vault reportedly loses $56,000 in heist

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On Tuesday, Doge Vault, one of the most popular online repositories for the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, formally acknowledged that it had been hacked two days earlier.

On the 11th of May, the Doge Vault online wallet service was compromised by attackers, resulting in a service disruption and tampering with wallet funds, the site wrote.As soon as the administrator of Doge Vault was alerted, the service was halted. The attackers had already accessed and destroyed all data on the hosted virtual machines.

While Doge Vault hasnt officially said how much was lost, a newly created Dogecoin wallet shows that 121,550,030 dogecoins have been transferred into it over the last 24 hours. At present exchange rates, thats worth about $56,000.

The company did not immediately respond to further questions, nor did it provide additional details about who the perpetrators might be.

Dogecoin first debuted in December 2013. Unlike Bitcoin and other altcoins, Dogecoin has no hard cap as to how many coins will be mined. It's just the latest cryptocurrency to suffer from attacks that pilfer wallets from exchanges and end users. Recently, such attacks have become extremely commonas a result of people failing to heed best practices that dictate only a small amount of currency should be stored in 'hot' wallets. In fact, the growth of cryptocurrency theft in recent years has even led to attacks becoming an automated feature of some botnets.

For a more detailed account of how such pilfering attacks operate, Ars covered a similar incident that happened to Bitcoinia in 2012.

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Such hack, much sad: Doge Vault reportedly loses $56,000 in heist

Bitcoin wins US election panel’s approval for political donations

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Federal regulator finds the cryptocurrency qualifies as "money or something of value" but imposes restriction on its use.

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Bitcoins may soon be helping fund an election campaign near you.

The US Federal Election Committee on Thursday unanimously approved a proposal for political action committees to accept donations in the form of Bitcoin, finding that the cryptocurrency qualified as "money or anything of value" as defined by the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. However, with its 6-0 vote, the commission that enforces US campaign finance laws imposed several conditions on its acceptance.

PACs must sell the bitcoins they received and convert them to into US dollars before depositing the proceeds into a campaign account. The commission did not approve the use of Bitcoin to acquire goods and services.

The decision came in response to a proposal by the Make Your Law committee to accept individual Bitcoin donations up to $100. To address the anonymous nature of Bitcoin use, the MYL promised that all Bitcoin contributors would be required to provide their name, physical address, and employer.

While the decision was issued as guidance and not as new regulations, the commission's vote suggests that other PACs will be allowed to operate under similar conditions.

In its decision, the commission acknowledged that "government agencies, courts and others are grappling," but said it "expresses no opinion regarding the application of federal securities law, tax law, or other law outside the Commission's jurisdiction to MYL's proposed activities."

Bitcoin's acceptance has grown dramatically in the past couple of months. Cryptocurrency ATMs have begun to pop up, some casinos have said they would accept digital currency payments, and even eBay has begun allowing for limited sales of Bitcoins on its US and UK sites.

The FEC's decision comes a day after the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued an advisory warning investors to be wary of Bitcoin and other virtual-currency related investments. Noting that the cryptocurrency is uninsured, unregulated, and volatile, the SEC said its chief concern was the risk of fraud.

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Bitcoin wins US election panel's approval for political donations

Crypto()Currency

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Nascar Dogecoin finishes 20th

Dogecoin car finishes 20th in NASCAR race, still wins the Internet By Kevin Collier on May 05, 2014 Josh Wise, the NASCAR driver inexplicably sponsored by theDogecoincommunity, finished 20th on Sunday. He captured Dogecoins heart in the process. READ THE FULL STORY

BYDAVID SEAMAN This isnt a live demonstration in the sense that it is happening now (I recorded it over the weekend); it is live in the sense that you are watching these events as they unfolded, there was no time compression and nothing edited out. As you can see fromthe video, it took me less than two minutes to move funds from a desktop to a Samsung Galaxy S5the same process using traditional banking tools such as PayPal, a paper check, or even withdrawing cash from one checking account and walking it to my other bank would take much longer than two minutes. READ THE FULL STORY

ByFran BerkmanonMay 01, 2014 Drive east from downtown Cleveland for about 10 minutes into an unassuming suburb called Cleveland Heights. At the intersection of Cedar and Lee, thats where youll find Bitcoin Boulevard U.S. It sounds like a high-tech, brightly lit promenade, paved with sleek neon blue and green bricks inscribed with ones and zeroes. But Bitcoin Boulevard U.S. is basically just eight brick-and-mortar merchants on the same block that decided to start acceptingBitcoinat the same time: Thursday. READ THE FULL STORY

ByAaron SankinonApril 30, 2014 When people talk aboutBitcoin, they usually call it a cryptocurrency, digital currency, virtual currency, or just electronic moneyall of which are accurate. But these terms miss one of the most interesting features of virtual currenciesthey arent just electronic, theyre also programmable, allowing users dictate precisely how they behave. Imagine being able to tell all the money in your wallet not to allow itself to be spent on tequila shots before embarking on a night out bar hopping. Or parents being able to directly control what kids spend their allowance on without having to constantly look over their shoulders. READ THE FULL STORY

By Saumya Vaishampayan, MarketWatch Bitcoin is the hottest investing trend since the Internet, according to venture capitalists who have sung its praises. But the money hasnt exactly followed. Venture capitalists invested $74.1 million in bitcoin startups across 39 deals in 2013, according to data provided by CB Insights. Thats less than a third of what Internet companies raised in first-round funding in 1995, when Internet leaders like Yahoo, Inc. YHOOand eBay Inc. EBAY were just getting off the ground. READ THE FULL STORY

The virtual currency straight up: computer money created by an anonymous hacker in 2009 has captured hard-core geeks hearts. Its appeal? It enables bank-free (aka middleman-free) anonymous purchasing and, crucially, its a global currency thats not tied to any central bank and not much different than a dollar or a euro. The key characteristics of this digital cash also happen to make it a great fit for people who arent so down with advanced digital technology: the 326 million Africans who lack access to basic banking services. This isnt such a crazy idea. Mobile payments that work on standard-feature phones have already made strong inroads in Africa, with 16 percent of Africans using the services. The largest provider of such payments, M-Pesa, already operates in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa, as well as India and Afghanistan. READ THE FULL STORY

The Silk Road, for all its clever uses of security protections like Tor and Bitcoin to protect the sites lucrative drug trade, still offered its enemies a single point of failure. When the FBI seized the server that hosted the market in October and arrested its alleged owner Ross Ulbricht, the billion-dollar drug bazaar came crashing down. If one group of Bitcoin black market enthusiasts has their way, the next online free-trade zone could be a much more elusive target. READ THE FULL STORY

Bitcoin may be the future of digital money, but it has a big problem here in the United States: why use it to buy anything when millions of merchants already accept debit and credit cards? Today, if you want to buy a bottle of lemonade with bitcoins, you need to scan a QR code with your phone or email a long bitcoin address to the seller. For most people, buying with bitcoins just isnt as easy as Visa or MasterCard. READ THE FULL STORY

ByPatrick Howell ONeillonApril 19, 2014 Never has there been a more confident, carefree group of drug users than those buying and selling on theSilk Roadin the weeks leading up to April 20, 2012. Hot off the infamous black markets first birthday celebrations, those hazy-eyed optimists were busy getting ready for what seemed would be the greatest4/20sale of all time. A feeling of invincibility permeated the Road and all who walked it. If the cops hadnt shut her down yetafter all the media attention the black market had receivedthen they might never come. This party didnt have to end. READ THE FULL STORY

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