This week the stand-out news for Bitcoin is still eBay Inc. subsidiary Braintree opening up its service to allow merchants to take BTC payments via Coinbase. The move presents a significant new milestone in Bitcoin mainstream adoption and a great deal of favorable press.

However, this week also has the odd celebrity-centric hacking of Satoshi Nakamoto’s old e-mail. It would seem that Bitcoin’s Batman is not entirely invulnerable, but it’s also still too early to tell quite what’s going on, details below.

Coinbase took its sweet time in replying to the NYDFS proposed Bitcoin regulation called “BitLicense,” but it seems that the Bitcoin wallet-service has fallen in line with the rest of the industry with a “thank you for trying, but you can do better,” style of criticism.

Developers will also be able to rejoice over another Bitcoin-service API from Gem.co that will provide yet-another-wallet-infrastructure API that promises solid security and reliability. Gem is currently in early access so developers can jump in and test out the system.

Coinbase and eBay sitting in a Braintree

Braintree, eBay’s developer-centric payment service, just announced a partnership with Coinbase to accept Bitcoin with its service—much of the Bitcoin community is heralding this as a huge win as eBay also owns PayPal. The announcement went out over Coinbase’s blog and has been making waves all week.

The news was announced at TechCrunch Disrupt early Monday morning by Braintree CEO Bill Ready and brings a number of new merchants into the Bitcoin fold including Uber, Airbnb and HotelTonight.

Braintree merchants processing payments via Coinbase will receive the usual caliber of service the company has gained in the industry and see only 1% transaction fees (waived for the first $1M of sales) with no additional costs.

Accepting Bitcoin via Braintree should be as simple as integrating an existing account with the payment service with Coinbase.

The so-called hacking of Satoshi Nakamoto

Recently it’s come to the attention of the Bitcoin-community that the legendary creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, had an early e-mail address potentially hacked, according to The Guardian. Much of the hacking appears to be mired in rumor and speculation—owing little actual information—but the news has still caused quite a reaction.

The hacker who took control of Satoshi’s e-mail address at satoshin@gmx.com requested 25 BTC (approx. $12k) in a PasteBin post for the release. No news yet on if anyone has taken said potential leaker up on the multi-thousand dollar bounty.

The hacker also added a notice to Satoshi’s P2PFoundation web page outlining the bounty and the leak:

Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. 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. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin.

Reddit user /u/someguy123_ has posted a full accounting and timeline of the hack as well as commentary on each step of the story to /r/Bitcoin. The post has not been updated in two days, and there is very little to follow with this still-unfolding story.

Coinbase responds to NYDFS BItLicense

Coinbase has joined the rest of the Bitcoin industry with a formal response to the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) proposed BitLicense. In summary, Coinbase is not happy with the regulation and thinks it’s not only redundant but harmful, placing the wallet service solidly in step with the rest of the industry.

“We feel the proposed BitLicense falls short of its stated goal of balancing customer protection and rooting out illegal activity while encouraging innovation,” writes Coinbase in their official opinion.

In the response, Coinbase summarizes that its believes that the current money laundering regulations in Federal law are already sufficient. Worse, the company adds, aspects of the recordkeeping and anti-money laundering requirements hinder innovation by stifling Bitcoin-core utility. Finally, BitLicense fails to exclude non-financial use cases when companies are not storing Bitcoin.

All of this lines up with the rest of the industry, which, while cautiously optimistic about New York attempting to handle regulation feels that the BitLicense goes too far. Recently the OKCoin CTO and Kraken CEO both made similar statements; and, earlier in July, BitPay and Coinsitter weighed in with equally harsh criticism.

Gem the Bitcoin API built by developers for developers in early access

Adding to the ever-growing number of Bitcoin-related API development tools, Gem just announced a full-featured Bitcoin API service aimed at scalable multi-signature wallets.

The API is available at Gem.co and supports multiple languages for rapid implementation including: Ruby, Python, and Java—with NodeJS and PHP coming soon. Gem’s API supports high scalability by running on Gem.co’s own always-on infrastructure promising zero-downtime, high volume capability, and geographic distribution to allow for low latency anywhere in the world.

At the same time, the API and service promises a great deal of security via mutli-signature wallets. Unlike services such as Coinbase, Gem does not control all the keys to any given wallet, via co-signing with key control split between API service and developer (and potentially end user.)

In the announcement for Gem on Reddit, one of the senior engineers, Matt Smith, chimed in about security noting that the co-signed keys provide unparalleled security:

“This means that if we get hacked or you get hacked, the hacker only has one key and can’t do anything, but you retain access to enough keys to rescue your coins,” Smith wrote. “Or if one of us loses the key for any reason, the money is still accessible.”

This is true because only with both keys (one with Gem and one with the wallet application) can bitcoins be moved with Gem, without either key nothing happens; however, since the private keys to the bitcoins are still retained by the user they can be spent by the user without Gem’s involvement.

The Gem service and API is currently in an early access stage. Interested developers can sign up on their website.