Gaming Giant Steam Disables Bitcoin in Russia

Steam, a platform that offers instant access to games globally, is no longer accepting bitcoin in Russia, according to customers in the country. There was nothing about the change in policy for Russia on the company’s website at the time of this report. Steam’s acceptance of bitcoin in April garnered major attention at the time. Bitcoin […]

BitGo Under DDoS Attack; Wirex Advises Customers Not To Use Platform

Wirex, a bitcoin debit card provider, sent an email to customers today advising them to avoid making transactions on the Wirex platform until it could confirm from that BitGo services have been resumed. The message included a BitGo tweet advising users it was under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. BitGo is a wallet and […]

EU Parliament Votes for Light-Handed Regulation of Blockchain Technology

European Parliament members (MEPs) voted to take a hands-off approach to regulating blockchain technology, Ars Technica reports. Following the vote, unnamed sources told Ars Technica that European Commission staffers are working hard to understand the distributed ledger technology behind virtual currencies ‒ seven years after the launch of Bitcoin, with venture capital investments now totalling […]

Microsoft Building Open Blockchain-Based Identity System With Blockstack, ConsenSys

Microsoft has announced that it is collaborating with Blockstack Labs, ConsenSys and developers across the globe on an open source, self-sovereign, blockchain-based identity system that allows people, products, apps and services to interoperate across blockchains, cloud providers and organizations. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals include giving everyone a legal identity by 2030. As a […]

Confidential Transactions: How Hiding Transaction Amounts Increases Bitcoin Privacy

Bitcoin right now is not really anonymous. While Bitcoin addresses aren’t necessarily linked to real-world identities, they can be. Monitoring the unencrypted peer-to-peer network, analysis of the public blockchain, and Know Your Customer (KYC) policy or Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulation can reveal a lot about who’s using Bitcoin, and for what. This is not great […]

Industry Heads Convene to Talk Public Blockchains on a Private Island

Blockchain Summit 2016 is here. From June 4th through June 7th many thought leaders of blockchain tech will converge on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island. No doubt idea exchange will be flowing. So too will the irony that the future of blockchain, a tech that is defined by enabling trustless exchange, is being discussed on […]