Converging on Cryptocurrencies #6

Altcoins:

The Winklevoss twins' cryptocurrency exchange has gotten the NY regulators go ahead to trade ethereum.

Bitcoin:

Coinkite, a web based bitcoin wallet, has been forced to shut down due to repeated DDOS attacks.

The bitcoin network could consume as much electricity as Denmark by 2020.

One of the cofounders of Mozilla is offering to pay ad viewers in bitcoin.

You can now use bitcoin to buy games on Steam.

The Swiss city of Zug will accept bitcoin for public services.

Craig Wright presents some evidence he is the creator of bitcoin. This stirred some controversy to say the least.  Doubts.  Serious doubts.

It seems he chickened out or was only ever a scam.

The quest to find Satoshi Nakamoto continues then.

Blockchain:

Ruminating on blockchains and distributed ledgers.

Using the blockchain for medical trials.

Craig Steven Wright Does NOT Have a PhD, a Supercomputer and Probably is NOT Satoshi Nakamoto

When WIRED named Craig Wright Tuesday as the most likely suspect to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of bitcoin, we laid out two possibilities that outweighed any others: “Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.” Three days later, new clues point to that second, strange scenario.

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2nd link.

Dr Craig Steven Wright, Reportedly Creator of Bitcoin, has House Raided by Australian Federal Police

Australian Federal Police raided the Sydney home on Wednesday of a man named by Wired magazine as the probable creator of cryptocurrency bitcoin, a Reuters witness said.

The property is registered under the Australian electoral role to Craig Steven Wright, whom Wired outed as the likely real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous figure that first released bitcoin's code in 2009.

More than a dozen federal police officers entered the house, on Sydney's north shore, on Wednesday after locksmiths broke open the door. When asked what they were doing, one officer told a Reuters reporter that they were "clearing the house".

The Australian Federal Police said in a statement that the officers' "presence at Mr. Wright's property is not associated with the media reporting overnight about bitcoins".

The AFP referred all inquiries about the raid to the Australian Tax Office, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Is Dr Craig Steven Wright the Real Satoshi Nakamoto, the Creator of Bitcoin?

Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody.

The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiast’s equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and a tieless, rumpled shirt, his brown hair neatly parted. His name hadn’t made the conference’s list of “featured speakers.” Even the panel’s moderator, a bitcoin blogger named Michele Seven, seemed concerned the audience wouldn’t know why he was there. Wright had hardly begun to introduce himself as a “former academic who does research that no one ever hears about,” when she interrupted him.

“Hold on a second, who are you?” Seven cut in, laughing. “Are you a computer scientist?”

“I’m a bit of everything,” Wright responded. “I have a masters in law…a master’s in statistics, a couple doctorates…”

“How did you first learn about bitcoin?” Seven interrupted again, as if still trying to determine Wright’s significance.

Wright paused for three full seconds. “Um. I’ve been involved with all this for a long time,” he stuttered. “I—try and stay—I keep my head down. Um…” He seemed to suppress a smile. The panel’s moderator moved on. And for what must have been the thousandth time in his last seven years of obscurity, Wright did not say the words WIRED’s study of Wright over the past weeks suggests he may be dying to say out loud.

“I am Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin.”

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Bitcoin Creater Satoshi Nakamoto's Email may be Hacked

Someone has taken over the email account belonging to bitcoin’s secretive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, saying he will sell Nakamoto’s secrets for money.

The hacker, who told WIRED his name is “Jeffrey,” claims to have also obtained information on Nakamoto that could be used to unmask his identity. Jeffrey didn’t tell us much, but when we asked him how he managed to take control over the satoshin@gmx.com email address that Nakamoto had used for some of his correspondence, he wrote: “The fool used a primary gmx under his full name and had aliases set up underneath it. He’s also alive.”

In a Pastebin post, Jeffrey said he will release Satoshi’s secrets if someone pays 25 bitcoins—about $12,000 to his bitcoin address. He says he has email messages dating back to 2011. A programmer (or group of programmers) going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto released the open source software that drives the bitcoin digital currency in 2009. Ever since, as bitcoin has expanded into a worldwide phenomenon, people have tried to unmask its creator, but his true identity has never been sufficiently proven.

Jeffrey wouldn’t say how he took over Nakamoto’s account, and he didn’t respond to many of our questions. But it looks like he leveraged the gmx.com address to take over other Nakamoto accounts. One was used Monday to post a message to the P2P Foundation website. Another to deface an old bitcoin developer page on the Sourceforge open-source coding site.

In his P2P Foundation message, Jeffrey claimed that information about Nakamoto was already being sold online. “Apparently, you didn’t 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.”

But Jeffrey didn’t provide any evidence to substantiate this claims. And it’s not clear what information he really has on bitcoin’s creator.

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