This Bitcoin Weekly may have fallen on April 1st, but it’s not the April Fools edition for the Weekly.

This week, Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten is bringing bitcoin payments to the United States and to sweeten the pot has begun a week-long $30 discount (for purchases $100 and up) starting today. Overstock.com has invested in enterprise-grade Bitcoin blockchain product company PeerNova to the tune of $5 million. Align Commerce, a startup headed by an ex-Western Union general manager, seeks to change the landscape of money remittance with the Bitcoin network.

Also in the news, INTERPOL and Kaspersky warn that the Bitcoin blockchain can be used to store malware (and other potentially illegal data.)

News of two federal agents charged with money laundering and wire fraud for theft of bitcoins related to the Silk Road case surfaced.

This and more in this week’s Bitcoin Weekly.

Rakuten fully integrates Bitnet, BTC purchases, week-long $30 discount

Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, Inc. has announced full integration with bitcoin processor Bitnet Technologies Ltd., which opens up bitcoin payments to customers in the United States.

To encourage Bitcoin users to try out the website, Rakuten is offering a $30 discount to anyone who spends over $100 in BTC during the first week extending from April 1st until April 8th, 2015.

Fumio Kobayashi, president of Rakuten.com said: “Bitcoin turned the Internet into a secure, seamless global payment network. By integrating with Bitnet we are now offering consumers the industry standard in secure payments, and our merchants will benefit by receiving guaranteed payments. Both consumers and merchants will have peace of mind when participating in the Rakuten.com online marketplace.”

Overstock.com invests 5m into PeerNova

Bitcoin technology specialist PeerNova Inc. just got a $5 million booster shot of investment money from Overstock.com, Inc. this week as part of a series A funding round.

PeerNova describes itself as an innovator in trustless systems based on the Bitcoin blockchain and seeks to bring blockchain-based technologies to the enterprise at scale. Overstock.com and its CEO Patrick Bryne are already well known for jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon early in 2014 as one of the first large retailers to start accepting bitcoin payments.

PeerNova announced that it intends to use the new money to accelerate the development of its two core enterprise products focused on data security and financial applications.

Align Commerce uses Bitcoin to compete with Western Union

BTCFeed reports that Align Commerce will be using Bitcoin in order to bridge international distances for remittances similar to Western Union. As it turns out, the CEO and co-founder of Align Commerce Marwan Forzley also worked for Western Union, as a general manager for two years, before opening the doors of his startup in 2014.

The problem that Forzley says his company is attempting to solve is inherent to the SWIFT system, one of the most popular payment networks currently used by financial institutions to move money. SWIFT uses multiple banking intermediaries to move money and sometimes transfers can take several days to complete.

According to Forzley, Align Commerce’s system will allow clients to send fiat cash across the world in a matter of minutes by using the Bitcoin network as an intermediary. Clients of the company do not need to involve themselves in foreign exchange markets and can deposit and receive in their native currency due to Align Commerce having accounts in multiple Bitcoin exchanges across the world.

Forzley explains that the entire process from start to finish takes only a few minutes to complete.

As for regulation, Forzley says that his company does not suffer much burden from that yet and that it is in fact less burdensome than other remittance companies. And, while he expects this to change in the future, that chances are good that those costs for bitcoin-related businesses will still be lower than legacy systems such SWIFT and Western Union.

INTERPOL, Kaspersky Labs says Blockchain could be used to house malware

According to a report from INTERPOL prepared with the help of a Kaspersky Labs expert researchers have discovered something known to the Bitcoin community since 2009: the Bitcoin blockchain can be used to store any data, including malware and otherwise illegal data.

According to the report, the open space in the blockchain that allows for arbitrary data to be stored during transactions (usually for the purposes of signing or messaging) could be used to store malware permanently.

“The design of the blockchain means there is the possibility of malware being injected and permanently hosted with no methods currently available to wipe this data. This could affect ‘cyber hygiene’ as well as the sharing of child sexual abuse images where the blockchain could become a safe haven for hosting such data,” the Kaspersky’s research reads.

Researchers suggest that the blockchain could therefore be used to distribute malware for multi-modular systems that use computers running a bitcoin node as storage for parts of the malware software set. And, researchers concluded, the blockchain could also be used as a command-and-control for botnets due to its distributed nature and communication techniques that would make commands opaque to everyone except for recipients.

Gavin Andreson, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, however disagrees that a C&C structure in the blockchain would be very plausible because of how expensive it would be for hackers to utilize it. Each command would cost some non-trivial amount of BTC, which has a real world value. Furthermore, the permanent structure the Bitcoin blockchain means that even though these commands could be obfuscated now, in the future once discovered every command would be indelibly recorded.

Botnets currently exist that are substantially cheaper, more widespread, and less complex for storing, distributing, and commanding malware.

Odd twist to Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht trial: Federal agents charged with stealing bitcoins

Two agents have been charged with money laundering and wire fraud in relation to the underground dark web marketplace Silk Road. Carl Mark Force IV, who worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Shaun W. Bridges, who worked for the Secret Service, were named in allegations unsealed on Monday in federal court in San Francisco.

According to the New York Times, Force is alleged to have stolen and liquidated a “sizable amount of Bitcoins” for his own personal use while part of an undercover investigation of dark web marketplace Silk Road. Instead of turning over the bitcoins as part of the investigation, Force kept them for himself.

Bridges, it is alleged, diverted almost $8,000 in digital currency to his own accounts that he had gained control of during the course of the investigation.

This appears to tie in somewhat to the trial of Ross Ulbricht, convicted of being administrator of the Silk Road as “The Dread Pirate Roberts.” Ulbricht’s lawyer Joshua L. Dratel said that the trial judge suppressed this information from the trial at the government’s request. The government claims that the investigations by Force and Bridges happened external to the investigation into Ulbricht.

Although with this information surfacing, Dratel claims that Force attempted to extort the Dread Pirate Roberts out of $250,000 under the identity of “Nob.”

Bloomberg interviewed Blockchain Technology Consumer Solutions CEO Charles Allen about an encounter with Bridges and the basics of the story.

The story of potential corruption and malfeasance painted by the New York Times story adds entire new layers of mystique and intrigue to the already romance-laden Silk Road Trial.

Overstock.com Patrick Byrne speaks about ‘The Bezzle’

The Bezzle, according to Overstock.com CEO Patrick Bryne, is a term that refers to the amount of value embezzled from financial markets by dishonest actors, such as bankers and stockbrokers. According to Byrne the United States’ financial system is particularly susceptible to this phenomena but the Swiss banking system is not.

In the video above, he speaks to how a Bitcoin blockchain system at Bitcoin Conference 2014 in Amsterdam, with a publicly auditable ledger, could be used to prevent this sort of fraudulent behavior with banking and stock trading.

The example he uses in his talk is he alleges that there are instances where stock traders have sold the same stock to multiple holders—something that would be difficult with Bitcoin due to the blockchain. He uses this to speak to how blockchain-technologies could be a threat to “dishonest bankers” in the future but not to “honest bankers.”