This burnout happened a lot faster than I expected. From stem to stern, it's only been about four days?

He put together an elaborate media affair designed to coincide with Consensus 2016, using NDAs for media outlets, Andresen and Matonis, to act as information embargoes. Posted a confusing revelation blog post that included a terrible tutorial on how to sign a message with a Bitcoin  block private key (in a post that at first seemed to imply he was going to reveal his ability to do so). He then promised to move coins...

Finally, he posts an angry apology citing that people have started rumors about him that are false -- and that some of them he has proven false (without citing which rumors or how he addressed them) -- and withdraws suddenly.

He did a lot of groundwork for such a rapid flameout.

Interesting. I am curious about the stealth address angle and how it's supposed to work. I will read up soon.

Color me not surprised... The whole Hacking Team debacle just underlines that these technologies exist and someone felt like building one. Hacking Team themselves have a very bad rep amidst privacy concerned folks (reporters, infosec) so I rather expected they'd have something like this hidden in one sleeve or the other.

The question becomes: who have they sold this technology to and what are those people trying to use it for?

The high volatility of the BTC market has always made me believe that's one of the barriers to large scale consumer adoption. I think that it's also a huge potential service space for consumer-side services to hook up with merchant-side services and use BTC as backchannel for payments, thus helping avoid some of the volatility.

Meanwhile, the release of more easy-to-use smartphone apps and wallets (as well as services that sell BTC easily) may also be helping close that gap. The problem I've seen is that pretty much all of 2014 we saw consumer and merchant adoption flatten; now in 2015 it seems to be all about institutional adoption touting "we're going to use the blockchain!" without much regard for bitcoin as a currency.

I guess it'll be more give and take before we see BTC as currency rise again in the community. No doubt Bitcoin Black Friday will be the next canary for that.

This is pretty good. With more investment going into core proceeds of the Bitcoin industry (from merchant services to mining equipment) it paints a less-dark picture than the mining operations which are shutting down due to a low market value.

Yeah. Not sure exactly what this video is on about... Seems like someone with some video recording software would say something vaguely related to bitcoin and the IRC and see what happened.

I've seen a few Bitcoin-centric Minecraft servers come and go. This one, noting the excellent CoinDesk profile, looks like it might have a shot of surviving. I will have to stop by and check out the community.

Blockchain.info had a security issue last night during a patch. Fixed now but it could have led to some tighter security conditions in the aftermath, especially while they investigate what happened and who it affected. From the blog post, Blockchain.info has e-mailed everyone directly affected, but I believe investigation may be ongoing yet.

http://blog.blockchain.com/2014/12/08/blockchain-info-security-disclosure/

I think this is at the crux of the situation. The virus scanner could have mistaken a portion of the blockchain as having the same signature of some virus; but unless someone foolishly decided to clip out and execute the section (if it could run at all) nothing would happen.

Hm. I watch a couple Bitcoin shows on YouTube and I think that the ecology is not filled to the brim yet. I don't have time to check out your's tonight, but I will flag it to watch later.

The last line, I think, is really the crux of all this. We've seen a round of considerable money to into Bitcoin-related companies over the past month and the momentum is there. Obviously people with money think that the industry of bitcoin is worth money. The drop in the currency value from the previous norm did not really faze them.

Microsoft will have to talk to the CEO of Bitcoin first.

We're probably still a way out from grocery stores accepting BTC at the counter. It's still too niche to catch the attention of major outlets -- a good place to start might be small grocery stores instead.

Right now, the revolution of accepting bitcoins for product is happening primarily online (TigerDirect, NewEgg, etc.) And that's because it's extremely easy to do yet-another-digital-thing when you're already online.

I do look forward to the day that I can pay for pizza with BTC, but there will likely first need to be an expansion in adoption and also a change in the public perception of the use of Bitcoin in general.

I like the visual JavaScript effect of the different logos switching on and off when mousing over the desired platform.

I am just floored that Google let Microsoft's Bing beat them to this one. I'm glad that Google has rolled out with something; and, in the end, it's better than Bing's version. It strikes me that Google's minimalistic search result display could have done this without the chart. I did learn that Google is using Coinbase's API to display the data as well, which is a big win for the Coinbase folks.

It took them long enough. I am just beside myself thinking that Google let Microsoft's Bing beat them to the punch.

Why, thank you! Although it is Silicon Angle. I should pitch Silicone Angle to my bosses to see what they think.

In that one, I actually missed QuickBooks getting BTC invoices from last month, but it's certainly something that can bring more businesses into using the currency so it needed to be part of the weekly. And, much to my luck, Google finally implemented BTC conversions in search right when I was putting it out.

There is also: Anonymous Ads.

It feels a little thin on the ground right now for advertisers seeking spaces, but it has generated a little bit of BTC for me over the past month. I have very small traffic websites I use it on (including a Bitcoin-related fiction project.)

The notion that all news is good news can certainly apply here. Bitcoin itself is still growing and as the system shakes out the flaws (or would-be bugs) each step made is going to make it more robust. So here we are, another quasi-crisis and I can certainly see how strengthening the network against the sort of DoS nonsense is going to make it come out better than when it went in.

Plus, add on being able to use the bad publicity to increase the number of people who know about it.

I am beginning to notice a lot of complaints about CampBX. As one of the few US-based exchanges that I know of -- the the one exchange that worked great for me in 2013 -- I am not liking see it seem to degrade.