1. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin ever produced. Instead, there will only ever be 21 million BTC in existence. Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, James J. Hunt, the Acting Special-Agent-in-Charge of the New York Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration ("DEA"), and Toni Weirauch, the Special Agent-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation ("IRS-CI"), announced the unsealing of criminal charges in Manhattan federal court against ROBERT M. FAIELLA, a/k/a "BTCKing," an underground Bitcoin exchanger, and CHARLIE SHREM, the Chief Executive Officer and Compliance Officer of a Bitcoin exchange company, for engaging in a scheme to sell over $1 million in Bitcoins to users of "Silk Road," the underground website that enabled its users to buy and sell illegal drugs anonymously and beyond the reach of law enforcement. SHREM, who personally bought drugs on Silk Road, was fully aware that Silk Road was a drug-trafficking website, and through his communications with FAIELLA, SHREM also knew that FAIELLA was operating a Bitcoin exchange service for Silk Road users.
From about December 2011 to October 2013, FAIELLA ran an underground Bitcoin exchange on the Silk Road website, a website that served as a sprawling and anonymous black market bazaar where illegal drugs of virtually every variety were bought and sold regularly by the site’s users. IRS Special-Agent-in-Charge Toni Weirauch said: "The government has been successful in swiftly identifying those responsible for the design and operation of the ‘Silk Road’ website, as well as those who helped ‘Silk Road’ customers conduct their illegal transactions by facilitating the conversion of their dollars into Bitcoins. The Company was designed to enable customers to exchange cash for Bitcoins anonymously, that is, without providing any personal identifying information, and it charged a fee for its service. SHREM knowingly allowed FAIELLA to use the Company’s services to buy Bitcoins for his Silk Road customers; personally processed FAIELLA’s orders; gave FAIELLA discounts on his explanation high-volume transactions; failed to file a single suspicious activity report with the United States Treasury Department about FAIELLA’s illicit activity, as he was otherwise required to do in his role as the Company’s Compliance Officer; and deliberately helped FAIELLA circumvent the Company’s AML restrictions, even though it was SHREM’s job to enforce them and even though the Company had registered with the Treasury Department as a money services
ness.
● Coinbase withdrawal transactions now using batching: Coinbase has rolled out batch withdrawals that they estimate will reduce their load on the Bitcoin network by 50%. Instead of each withdrawal payment generating a single onchain transaction, multiple payments will be combined into a single transaction once every 10 minutes. Currently a single bitcoin is valued at $188, an alarming result that is probably caused by money movements related to Cyprus and a general bubble-like excitement over the platform in general. The process of finding blocks is now so popular and the difficulty of finding a block so high that it could take over three years to generate any coins. To maintain their output, miners had to buy more servers, or upgrade to the more powerful servers, but the new calculating power simply boosted the solution difficulty even more quickly. Other ideas for greening cryptocurrencies involve moving bitcoin operations next to oil fields where they tap waste methane gas that’s usually flared, pipe it to generators and use the power for bitcoin mining. My buddy Tom explained how to set up a pooled mining account so I thought it would be interesting to share the instructions. While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual bitcoin
e worth.
15450 allows users to create new wallets for multiwallet mode from the GUI, completing a set of GUI actions that also allows users to load and unload wallets. However, even with the difficulties some users face, some feedback is positive. Pooled mining, however, is far more lucrative. In more general terms, the depth of the order book may also refer to the amount of liquidity that the order book can absorb. In fact, many wager that the DDOS attacks on many bitcoin-related services are direct action by hackers to inject instability in order to reduce the price. People like Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon are in charge of making sure their investors’ money is safe. Truly innovative business models don’t need to resort to old-fashioned law-breaking, and when Bitcoins, like any traditional currency, are laundered and used to fuel criminal activity, law enforcement has no choice but to act.