Category Archives: News
Top Bitcoin News Last Week: New York Subpoena, Senate Inquiry, Android
Bitcoin News
A roundup of the top Bitcoin news from August 12 to August 18:
Tuesday, August 13
Wednesday, August 14
Thursday, August 15
Friday, August 16
Saturday, August 17
Top 10 Countdown: Most Popular Bitcoin Stories in July 2013
Here are the top 10 most popular stories On Bitcoin brought you in July 2013.
10. Bitbetex Jumps on the Bitcoin Gambling Bandwagon After SatoshiDice Exit
9. Bitcoin Gambling Company SatoshiDice Sold for $11.5 Million
8. Argentina Bitcoin Adoption Jumps in Recent Months
7. Turn Cash into Bitcoins in Seconds with the Lamassu Bitcoin ATM Machine
6. Bitcoin Prediction Market Predictious: Bet on Gender of the Royal Baby
5. Finding Business Model Opportunities in Bitcoin
4. Inside Bitcoins NYC Keynote: Is Bitcoin the New Financial Order?
3. Work in Silicon Valley? Pay with Bitcoin at Coupa Café in Palo Alto
2. Building Bitcoin into the Core Architecture of the Web
1. Cruise Ship Startup Community Blueseed Gets Bitcoin Funding
Thanks for reading in July!
Analyst Dick Bove Says Buy Bitcoin at $50, Today’s Price above $100
I’ll Buy Bitcoin at $50 — Dick Bove
In a statement that seems to be either out of touch or bearish on the current Bitcoin market, banking analyst Dick Bove said he would buy Bitcoin at $50.
Bove is vice president of equity research at Rafferty Capital Markets. He continued in a phone interview, “If I could buy them at a low enough price, like $50, then I think it would be worthwhile speculating with a few of them.”
The currrent price of Bitcoin is over $100.
Google’s Android Security Team Addresses Bitcoin Vulnerability
Last week, it was discovered that a vulnerability in Android may leave users of Bitcoin mobile apps at risk. This week, Google’s Android Security Team confirmed and addressed the security concerns on their blog:
The Android security team has been investigating the root cause of the compromise of a bitcoin transaction that led to the update of multiple Bitcoin applications on August 11.
We have now determined that applications which use the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) for key generation, signing, or random number generation may not receive cryptographically strong values on Android devices due to improper initialization of the underlying PRNG. Applications that directly invoke the system-provided OpenSSL PRNG without explicit initialization on Android are also affected. Applications that establish TLS/SSL connections using the
HttpClientandjava.netclasses are not affected as those classes do seed the OpenSSL PRNG with values from/dev/urandom.Developers who use JCA for key generation, signing or random number generation should update their applications to explicitly initialize the PRNG with entropy from
/dev/urandomor/dev/random. A suggested implementation is provided at the end of this blog post. Also, developers should evaluate whether to regenerate cryptographic keys or other random values previously generated using JCA APIs such asSecureRandom,KeyGenerator,KeyPairGenerator,KeyAgreement, andSignature.In addition to this developer recommendation, Android has developed patches that ensure that Android’s OpenSSL PRNG is initialized correctly. Those patches have been provided to OHA partners.
It appears from this notice that consumers should expect their apps to be fixed in short order.
Bitcoin.org also published a synopsis of the problem and suggested solutions.
We recently learned that a component of Android responsible for generating secure random numbers contains critical weaknesses, that render all Android wallets generated to date vulnerable to theft. Because the problem lies with Android itself, this problem will affect you if you have a wallet generated by any Android app. An incomplete list would be Bitcoin Wallet, blockchain.info wallet, BitcoinSpinner and Mycelium Wallet. Apps where you don’t control the private keys at all are not affected. For example, exchange frontends like the Coinbase or Mt Gox apps are not impacted by this issue because the private keys are not generated on your Android phone.
After New York Inquiry, Senate Jumps on Bitcoin Bandwagon
First New York Inquiry, then Washington
In the same week that the New York State Department of Financial Services subpoenaed 22 companies in an effort to better understand the uses and implications of alternative currency Bitcoin, the Senate is launching its own inquiries.
As the New York Times reported,
The Senate’s committee on homeland security sent a letter this week to the major financial regulators and law enforcement agencies asking about the “threats and risks related to virtual currency.” These currencies, whose popularity has grown in recent years, are often used in online transactions that are not monitored by traditional financial institutions.
“This is something that is clearly not going away, and it demands a whole government response,” said a person involved in the Senate committee’s investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is continuing.
