It’s the first Bitcoin Weekly of 2015 and it’s been an interesting holiday and New Years for the community. For the most part, the transition from 2014 to 2015 has been uneventful, even sedate, but the news just keeps coming.

Bitcoin recently turned six, Bitstamp has suspended operations after a suspected hot wallet compromise, Mt. Gox may have been insider fraud say Japanese police sources, Bitcoin falls below $300, and California paves the way for Bitcoin businesses.

And, of course, Bitcoin is (again) dead–so says someone else.

Read all about it in this edition of Bitcoin Weekly.

January 3rd: Genesis Block Day

Six years ago on January 3, 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto—the unknown creator of Bitcoin—mined the first block of the Bitcoin block chain known as the “Genesis Block.”

Happy sixth birthday, Bitcoin!

Bitstamp suspends exchange after suspected hot wallet compromise

Over the weekend, Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp (run by Bitstamp Ltd.) suspended operations after suspecting that one of its hot wallets had been compromised.

Troubles were noticed by users when bitcoin withdrawals became unreliable for the past week with complaints that support tickets had been slow to answer. This Monday morning, an e-mail went out to users of the site to avoid depositing BTC to accounts. The e-mail read that Bitstamp suspected its hot wallet had been compromised Sunday, January 4.

According to a release from Bitstamp confirming the possible attack the event resulted “in a loss of less than 19,000 BTC.” That translates to approximately $5.2 million at today’s exchange rate.

Bitstamp has been quick to add that the exchange’s reserves maintain more than enough BTC to cover deposits made prior to the suspected compromise. From Bitstamp’s website currently,

This breach represents a small fraction of Bitstamp’s total bitcoin reserves, the overwhelming majority of which are held in secure offline cold storage systems. We would like to reassure all Bitstamp customers that their balances held prior to our temporary suspension of services will not be affected and will be honored in full.

The site is still offline as the engineering team works “to transfer a secure backup of the Bitstamp site onto a new safe environment” and the company notes that they expect to bring this change online “in the coming days.”

Bitstamp is still offline as of writing and no new updates have been posted to the website. Keep an eye on SiliconAngle as we’ll keep you updated.

Japanese police suspect fraud, not hackers, led to Mt. Gox theft

In February 2014 then de facto Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox suffered a catastrophic series of failures and bitcoin losses that resulted in the collapse of the exchange. Since then the community has been wondering what happened to approximately 650,000 bitcoins missing from Mt. Gox’s coffers (reported numbers vary). Now, IT World reports that Japanese police have determined that only about 7,000 of the coins were taken by potential hackers.

The report, which appeared in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, cited a source close to the Tokyo police probe.

At the time of the sudden loss, Mt. Gox officials blamed a bug in the Bitcoin protocol—a charge roundly refuted by Bitcoin-core developers at the time. The loss led to Mt. Gox filing for bankruptcy on February 28, 2014.

According to Tokyo police, investigators found that bitcoins pooled by unknown parties from Mt. Gox did not correlated to customer accounts. Sources seem to speculate that Mt. Gox’s system was “fraudulently operated by an unknown party,” and by a party familiar with the exchange.

Bitcoin market value drops below $300

The beginning of 2015 has not been kind to the market value of Bitcoin as the price continues to drop. CryptoCoinsNews reports as much in an article talking about the apparent decline of the market. Importantly, while it seems in a 12-month window the price has been in a slide down, in a 14-month window it looks a great deal more stable.

Part of the problem is the lofty $1,000 that the Bitcoin market value peaked at in late 2013 and flirted with in 2014.

Market price is not a good indicator of Bitcoin’s health. While having value is good, the volatility of rising and falling has been a major obstacle for many merchants adopting the currency and consumers using it to buy goods. Fortunately, this has not stopped businesses from buying in during 2014 and this may be what’s led to the lowered price index.

As more and more merchants began to adopt bitcoin during 2014, the price has been steadily declining. This effect is potentially due to a greater demand for using bitcoins rather than buying them to speculate on rising prices.

At press time BTC is trading at $285.30 (via BitcoinAverage.com.)

California virtual currency bill goes into effect

In the summer of last year, the California legislature sought to strike a line of the current law that could have banned Bitcoin from the state. Governor Jerry Brown signed that bill, titled Bill AB129, into law last year and it comes into effect this year, reports CoinFinance.

The law had previously banned all corporate “virtual currencies,” that would have included anything from Starbucks tokens, Microsoft points, and even Bitcoin. Gov Brown felt that the language, while unenforced, could have been seen by potential virtual currency businesses as a reason not to enter into the California

This move shows direct encouragement by California in approaching Bitcoin businesses, especially in contrast to the hostile regulatory atmosphere cultivated by New York and Superintendent Ben Lawsky’s attempts to frame Bitcoin regulation with New York’s “BitLicense.”

Bitcoin has died, again

Since its inception in 2009, the growing popularity of Bitcoin has drawn tremendous speculation about its future. To this extent, and the dire needs of the new cycle to say something interesting, Bitcoin has been deemed dead or doomed multiple times. The recently dropping price has certainly attracted some attention.

This sort of reporting has led Reddit user /u/jtos3 to make Bitcoin Obituaries, a website to post articles related to the actual or eminent death of Bitcoin.

So far, Bitcoin Obituaries has collected 23 articles pre-eulogizing the virtual coin.

The obituaries start in 2011, about the same year that Bitcoin began to gain popular attention in main stream circles and cite articles as recent as late December when an author on Reuters predicted the demise of the currency in 2015.