Category Archives: Bitcoin

Fairly or not, bitcoin still has an image problem. For every VC who extols the innovative power of the digital currency, pop culture still sees it as a way for the paranoid cyber-libertarian to shop for black-tar heroin on the Silk Road. All the more reason, then, that bitcoin fans should rejoice that, in a move announced Monday at Techcrunchs Disrupt conference, PayPal is supporting the crypto-currency on its Braintree payments platform. When the internets most mainstream brand for moving money embraces a technology, its hard to see that system as a fringe operation.

Not that youll be buying Beanie Babies on eBay with bitcoin just yet. For non-financial tech nerds, Braintree is a startup bought by PayPal last year that creates tools for software developers to easily integrate payments into apps and websites. Instead of being shuttled off-site or out-of-app in the manner of the traditional PayPal payment flow, everything happens in-app, in exactly the way individual developers want. In supporting bitcoinan increasingly popular currency driven by open source software running across a worldwide network of machinesBraintree is allowing developers on its platform to effectively flip a switch and add bitcoin to the payment methods they accept.

Its still very much cutting edge, but its past bleeding edge. A lot of the things that needed to be solved for are solved for.

In other words, it will still be up to a merchant whether or not to accept bitcoin. PayPal users wont be able to open up their digital wallets and add bitcoin the way they would a credit card or cash from their bank accounts. But considering some of Braintrees most prominent merchants include hot startups such as Airbnb and Uber, chances are good that many more people who never thought to pay with bitcoin will start to see it as an option.

We think this has come far enough that its still very much cutting edge, but its past bleeding edge, Braintree CEO Bill Ready says of bitcoin. A lot of the things that needed to be solved for are solved for.

Ready contends that not so long ago, both merchants and consumers lacked any easy way to make use of bitcoin. He cites regulatory and user experience concerns, both of which he says Braintree has overcome through partnering with Coinbase, a startup that has turned paying online with bitcoin into a very PayPal-like experience. Much like clicking on a PayPal button will take you to a page where you enter your username and password to pay, paying a Braintree-backed merchant with bitcoin will mean entering your Coinbase credentials to access your bitcoin wallet.

Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong says the Braintree integration is just the latest signal that bitcoin is maturing into a genuine currency for buying and selling, not just a speculative investment. We want to build a new efficient payment network for the whole world, he says, not just gold 2.0.

Beyond the increased visibility and opportunities to pay using bitcoin, the Braintree support is also significant as a measure of mainstream corporate interest in the preferred currency of anti-corporatists. If Braintree were still a purely independent startup, supporting bitcoin would seem like a given, a way gain cachet among early adopters and venture capitalists bullish on the crypto-currencys potential. eBay-owned PayPal, however, is a division of a publicly traded company valued at the last closing bell at more than $67 billion. On the surface, PayPal doesnt need to dabble in bitcoin at all to sustain its business.

But Ready says betting on bitcoin now is a lot like betting on mobile commerce three or four years ago. People shopping on their phones back then was a very small part of the online shopping market. But that percentage has grown, and Braintree was able to ride that wave to its current success. Coinbase has only 1.6 million users compared to PayPals 150 million, according to figures from both companies. But getting into bitcoin now means gaining the opportunity to start figuring out how to work with a new payments system while that system is still new.

That kind of deep integration gives Braintree a competitive advantage if bitcoin moves toward the mainstream. It also allows Braintree itself to become an agent of that mainstreaming, a trajectory that can only help bitcoin shed whatever remains of its fringe reputation. Ready, who describes Braintrees support as PayPals first foray into bitcoin, says the move was a conscious decision by the PayPal leadership to work more closely with bitcoin.

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PayPals Support Is the Best Thing That Could Happen to Bitcoin

Update (9/9): Motherboards Patrick McGuire reports that he has corresponded with the person or persons in control of the account. Meanwhile, when I attempted to email the address again on Tuesday morning, I got a bounceback: Mailbox unavailable.

Little is known about the mysterious creator of Bitcoin beyond his pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the fact that he uses the email address satoshin@gmx.com. However, the latter may no longer be true. Reports are flooding in that the email account has been taken over by someone new, who is using his or her access to the account to email past correspondents of Nakamoto and to daisy chain into other online accounts associated with Bitcoins creator.

An administrator on the Bitcoin forum Bitcointalk.org claimed Monday to have received a strange email from the address. According to Bitcointalk user Theymos, the email said:

Michael, send me some coins before I hitman you.

This is not Nakamotos usual style. Additionally, graffiti was posted on the SourceForge page where Bitcoins code was posted by Nakamoto. According to a poster atHackerNews, it briefly read, Buttcoin is a peer-to-peer butt. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new butts or tracks butts.That graffiti appears to have been scrubbed since. Meanwhile, a P2P forum account associated with Nakamoto, which has been inactive since it went dark in 2009 with one exception in March, posted a new message from Nakamotos account:

Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently you didnt configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin.

The assumption is that Nakamotos email has been hacked due to the compromise of its password, but based on the timing, there may be a different explanation. The Pennsylvania-based email provider, GMX, may have made the account available to a new user due to lack of use. With access to the email address, the new owner could have used it to reset Nakamotos passwords on the SourceForge site and on the P2P forum to post the claim that Nakamoto had been doxed, an Internet term meaning his identity has been outed.

This is occurring almost exactly six months after the person we assume is the real Nakamoto returned to the Internet to announce, I am not Dorian Nakamoto, the man Newsweekincorrectly fingered as the creator of Bitcoin. To make that posting, the person behind Bitcoin may have had to sign into the gmx.com email account. He may have left it dormant after that, as dormant as its been since 2011 when Nakamoto stopped corresponding with people after handing the Bitcoin reins over to developer Gavin Andresen. According to GMXs Terms of Service, any account dormant for more than six months can be erased. From the GMX TOS:

Originally posted here:
Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Has Lost Control Of His Email Address

EBay chief John Donahoe told CNBC in June that he saw bitcoin and other digital currencies playing an "important role" for PayPal and stated that it would have to integrate digital currencies into its wallet software. The company originally bought Braintree for $800 million in cash last September and was seen as an addition to its PayPal business, although the two had been rivals before the deal.

Read MoreEBay considering accepting bitcoin as payment

Bitcoin currently has a daily transaction volume of $44 million, according to coinometrics.com, a digital currency research firm. This compares to $397 million for PayPal and $16.5 billion for Visa. Bitcoin is a "virtual" currency that allows users to exchange online credits for goods and services. While there is no central bank that issues them, bitcoins can be created online by using a computer to complete difficult tasks, a process known as mining. The digital currency has sparked interest among venture capitalists on both sides of the Atlantic but has also run into regulatory issues in many countries.

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Bitcoin gets green light from PayPal unit

Online payments platform Braintree will start processing Bitcoin transactions, allowing merchants to accept payments in the crypto-currency.

Braintree is partnering with Bitcoin payments processor Coinbase to allow its customers to accept bitcoins, and will launch the function in the coming months, Braintree said in a blog post on Monday.

Braintree is a division of PayPal, which is owned by e-commerce giant eBay.

Today were announcing PayPals first foray into Bitcoin, Braintree CEO Bill Ready earlier told an audience at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco. The Coinbase wallet will be easily presented for consumers to pay in a highly adaptive, mobile-optimized experience.

The companys v.zero software development kit, designed for payments made via apps and websites, will integrate Bitcoin functionality.

To accept bitcoin, Braintree merchants will have to open accounts with Coinbase and link the new account to their Braintree account.

Braintree merchants using Coinbase will receive all the benefits associated with accepting bitcoin payments, including 1 percent flat transaction fees, Coinbase said in a blog post.

Braintree also announced widespread availability of One Touch, a function that lets users pay for things using their iOS or Android mobile devices with a single touchclicking the Buy button.

Currently limited to merchants in the U.S., the function works with PayPal and with Braintrees own mobile payment app, Venmo, which lets users send payments to friends for free.

One Touch eliminates the need to input a username and password every time a payment is made. Its being used by apps such as Jane.com, which offers deals on apparel.

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PayPal subsidiary Braintree to process Bitcoin payments

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