MtGox Co., Ltd., once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange company, is insolvent, bankrupt, and now history. This bankruptcy (which I discussed yesterday) offers lessons to cryptocurrency startups. Mt. Gox’s fundamental lack of professionalism has become painfully clear since it filed for bankruptcy. According to a Wired expose last year, former…
Thousands of creditors may receive disbursements from the bankruptcy of MtGox, Co. Ltd., a Japanese corporation that once ran the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange. The bankruptcy filing last year was a rude awakening to Mt. Gox account holders who believe they collectively owned 750,000 Bitcoin, worth nearly a half billion…
Today’s computers encode data into bits – binary digits in one of two definite states, 0 or 1. Any calculation that needs to be performed with the bits is completed one at a time. Quantum physicists are racing to develop quantum computers, which use the various states of particles to…
Bitcoin continues to push deeper into the fabric of American society as it may now have an impact on who we elect as the President of the United States in 2016. Last week, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul became the first candidate to accept Bitcoin donations for his presidential campaign. In…
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, but it is not the only one out there. So what distinguishes alternative currencies from Bitcoin? And what purpose do these newer “altcoins” serve? Like Bitcoin, altcoins are based on mathematics. Unlike traditional currencies based on gold standards or fiat currencies that maintain their value…
Bitcoin is built on a distributed consensus technology – the blockchain – which allows transactions to be verified and securely stored without a centralized authority authenticating the transactions. In its current form, the blockchain serves as a ledger for digital currency. However, developers with a sophisticated understanding of cryptography seek…
Tired of paying state taxes in dollars? If bills recently introduced in New Hampshire and Utah pass, those states’ taxes could eventually be paid in bitcoin. The New Hampshire House of Representative’s Ways and Means committee is considering a bill that would allow New Hampshire to accept bitcoin payments beginning…
Report Analyzes New “Pieces to the Puzzle” of Causes Behind Mt. Gox Collapse On February 14, 2015, WizSec, a Bitcoin security firm based in Tokyo, published a report that claims to shed new light on the causes for the infamous 2014 collapse of the bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. It has…
On January 20, 2015, President Obama delivered his State of the Union address: an annual report on the condition of our country. Overall, the President concluded, while it is still “a hard time for many,” “the shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong.” In…
While some regulators are struggling to fit bitcoin’s innovative peg into preexisting holes—is bitcoin a currency or a commodity or something else entirely?—the novelty of digital currencies falls squarely within the regulatory purview of some agencies. One example is the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, the unit within…