Bitcoin News With SiliconANGLE

The current trends in the Bitcoin show that while progress is slow, it’s constantly building momentum. Last week, Andreas Antonopoulos went before the Canadian Senate and gave an amazing 2 hour talk, this week Gavin Andresen went to Reddit and gave amazing answers.

The public comments period for the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) regulatory proposal “BitLicense” have ended and numerous heavyweights in the Bitcoin community and Internet free-speech have weighed in including BitPay, Coinbase, Reddit, the Internet Archive, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Gavin Andresen, Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, Reddit AMA

Yesterday, Gavin Andresen, notably the best-known Bitcoin Core developer and Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, participated in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). AMAs are a proud tradition on Reddit that allow experts, celebrities, politicians, etc. a chance to speak their mind to a multitude of people and have their thoughts recorded.

As of writing, Andresen’s AMA has reached 931 comments and he has actively participated in a large number of threads.

When asked what would be needed for Andresen to believe “Bitcoin is established,” he replied, “We need regulatory clarity, ease of use, and no-single-point-of-failure security.” The world is still waking up to Bitcoin and its effects—although business is slowly tuning in—it’s going to be more regulatory questions like New York’s infamous Bitlicense.

On the subject of the increasing value of individual Bitcoins (currently at $388) he showed a favor for speaking more often of Bits, or millionths of a Bitcoin. A Bit, as a result, would be $0.000388 approximately, meaning 100 Bits would be about 4 cents.

Apparently, he changed his name from Bell (his birth surname) to Andresen because his wife did not want to be known as “Michele Bell.”

Overall, reading Andresen’s responses to questions shows a solid foundation of a programmer who is passionate about Bitcoin. He sounds forthright, thoughtful, and knowledgeable and at the same time extremely sanguine about the future of Bitcoin itself.

If this sparks a reader’s interest, many could do worse than to peruse the comments in the AMA and pick out Andresen’s responses. CoinDesk has also picked out what they feel are the 12 best answers from his AMA.

Public comments on BitLicense closed, but criticism still strong

This last week effected the last period of time for public comments on New York’s regulatory proposal regarding BitlLicense. The regulation has been met roundly with solid criticism from numerous big businesses in the Bitcoin space including Circle, BitPay, and even the exchange Kraken. The common thread: it would be impossible for small businesses entering into Bitcoin use to comply with BitLicense.

The result: new startups would not choose New York for their incubation; and established businesses may simply be forced to leave.

“If New York develops rules that vary widely from other states it would only serve to complicate a state  license regime that is already inconsistent, onerous and serves as a barrier to entry for many firms,” Circle wrote in its thorough comments on the subject (PDF available.) “The end result could lead to firms exiting the New York market.”

BitPay had equally grim criticism of the proposed regulation, and one particularly pointed remark from the comments stated outright that the regulation “lacks innovative rule making that will deter jobs and innovation.” BitPay further fears that the regulation will serve to create “an unlevel playing field for Bitcoin transactions,” and also notes that it’s hard to tell what ancillary Bitcoin activities would be covered by regulations.

BitPay’s criticism followed that regulation could cover such services as developing open source applications that interact with Bitcoin and even providing encrypted backups for Bitcoin wallets.

Reddit, the Internet Archive, and the EFF have jointly sent in comments on BitLicense opposing the NYDFS proposed regulation. The article describes the regulation as “sprawling” and the EFF cites issues with highly invasive identification requirements in the regulation—up to and including fingerprints and head-shot photographs.

Bitnet raises $14.5 million

A potential competitor in the merchant service Bitcoin finance market just raised a chunk of change. San Francisco Bitcoin payment processing platform Bitnet announced on October 20th that it had closed a Series A funding round worth $14.5 million.

The company sits in a market space that competes with Bitcoin payment services for merchants such as BitPay, Coinbase, and GoCoin.

Amid Bitnet’s accolades, reports Coin Telegraph, is Bitnet’s core development team helped build CyberSource, a payments gateway bought by Visa in 2010 for $12 billion.

Italian administrations hit by encryption Trojan that ransoms for BTC

It’s almost like the plot of a TV show (this happened on The Good Wife recently) but there’s a trojan ransomware program that encrypts entire systems and then requests a Bitcoin payment to unlock (or it destroys the data.)

The original story is posted in Corriere Della Sera, in Italian, which reports that the trojan requests 400 Euros (approximately $506) in BTC before it unlocks the files. Numerous public facilities have been hit with this Trojan. After locking down all files on the network, the software requests 400 Euros (approximately) in BTC before releasing the data.

For background on how this type of trojan works see the Wikipedia entry on CryptoLocker.

The Italian newspaper reports that experts believe the cybercriminals running the ransomware may have accumulated over $100,000 in just five days.