The Silk Road takedown has shaken up the Bitcoin community to an extent but once the dust settled it’s hard to say that it hurt anything. In fact, it’s easy to argue that in taking down the Silk Road the FBI has just forwarded their cat-and-mouse game with illegal activity and vindicated the use of Bitcoin in anonymizing transactions—especially because the FBI is currently having trouble getting at the founders stash of bitcoins.

The Bitcointalk.org forums are now back after having been hacked last week.

Merchants can look forward to even better pricing from BitPay enabling yet-easier transactions with Bitcoin as well.

As FBI struggles to get the Dread Pirate Robert’s booty the Bitcoin community mocks them

Last week saw the FBI raid the infamous Silk Road trading website—a space famous for the ability to exchange in illegal loot (such as drugs and guns) amidst totally legal transactions—this led to a sudden dip in the value of BTC and a subsequent recovery. It’s also led to a lot of thought about the Silk Road founder, Ross Ulbricht the alleged Dread Pirate Roberts. During the raid, the FBI successfully sized some 26,000 BTC in wallets belonging to users of the website; and the FBI also believes that they have captured DPR’s personal treasure, a wallet the agency believes contains over 600,000 BTC (market value of around $8 million .)

However, from news reports, and the FBI spokespeople, the agency itself cannot crack the encryption on that wallet. So it’s hard to say that the FBI even knows what they have.

In the interim, enterprising Bitcoin community members managed to identify the Silk Road wallet being held by the FBI and released its block chain information. It would seem that someone kindly labeled this address “Silkroad Sized Coins” as well. As the Bitcoin protocol permits users to send messages along with coin, people have been using this capability to send messages to the FBI and the public, by donating small amounts to the wallet.

One note has an oddly poetic request for donations: “A deep well lies hidden at 19FZMqGmkLVNxtkjeXW5sUtVThPkFVkThM where strange eddies swirl the bits. Drop a coin and make a wish. The splash will echo through the blockchain for eternity, and binary fortune will smile on you.” It’s not alone—numerous users have used the now-publicly-visible wallet as a bulletin board to post requests for donation that are far more blunt.

Violet Blue from ZDNet has noted several other interesting comments including:

One public note on Blockchain reads: “The only way to have a drug-free world is to have a people-free world. And even then, the animals will get stoned.”

Another says: “Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. -Abraham Lincoln.”

A common public note message for the feds is, “You cannot arrest an idea.”

And Gizmodo caught a line from Breaking Bad: “Who are you talking to right now? No, you clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!”

Bitcointalk.org back online after being hit with a hack attempt

The ever-popular Bitcoin community forum Bitcointak.org is back online after a hack took it down shortly after the Silk Road raid. For more details read the write up over at Naked Security. Users of the site received a PGP-signed message detailing the shutdown of the site and it remained offline until October 7th.

The operators have posted a message detailing the attack as well and their response; and since it is the nature of forum software to become vulnerable—even open source—they’d like to reveal the source to trustworthy members of the Bitcoin community for auditing and review. As a result, hoping in the future that the site can provide a thicker hide against potential hack attempts.

To harden it the administrators are running the site on a virtual machine with extra security precautions.

Problematically, the hack appears to have been perpetrated via a backdoor installed in 2011 (left behind from a hack that occurred during that year) as a result, the database—including user names, passwords, private messages, etc.—could have been secretly accessed during that time.

Even though the password hashes were extremely strong, a change of password may still be wise.

BitPay updates pricing schedule for the business of accepting BTC

As a leader in the Bitcoin transaction space, BitPay has been moving ever forward to offer greater opportunities to merchants and service providers who want to accept bitcoins. To facilitate this, the company has begun offering new pricing that follows a flat-rate model that claims to rival that of Square. The different tiers offered run from $30/mo all the way up to $3000/mo.

All of the plans become available in November.

As usual, the starter package is free, but requires a 1% transaction fee—but the cheapest tier at $30/mo (and every subsequent tier) takes 0%. At $30, or “Professional”, BitPay offers easy eCommerce tools, retail POS tools, daily e-mail support, a shopping cart with 20 plugins, and daily bank deposits. All available only for one domain. In short, a cheap way to accept bitcoins from customers by using BitPay’s method of eliminating price volatility by estimating current price against multiple exchanges and then making sure the merchant gets the amount expected.

At $300, or “Buisness”, BitPay adds QuickBooks, unlimited daily processing, and access to 3 domains.

In the $3000 “Enterprise” tier a dedicated account manager takes over, all interaction travels over a VPN for enhanced protection and security, and of course an unlimited number of domains can be supported.

It was only two months ago, BitPay enhanced their services with microtransaction capabilities for publishers—a common and desired capability to permit website visitors to pass through paywalls or tip content creators. With this change to the pricing schedule, BitPay is placing themselves into the market at a critical juncture between other monetization systems and enables merchants easier and cleaner access to audiences who want to use BTC for products and services.