This week starts with grim news for the Bitcoin exchange market space with 2015 seeing over five exchanges suspending or shuttering services, and several of them after suffering security compromises. Amid the exchanges suspending or closing includes Neagio, Vault of Satoshi, CAVIRTEX, Excoin, and BTER.com.

In lighter news, Porn.com reports that bitcoin represents 5% of total sales for adult entertainment.

For developers, BitPay has released a literal online playground with Bitcore Playground with interactive examples—it’s just missing a jungle gym and a swing set. Also this week Bitcoin Core 0.10.0 release announced.

Finally, read to the end for a link the O’Reilly Radar Podcast interview with Balaji Srinivasan about the impact and breadth of Bitcoin and blockchain technology

Exchange closures and suspensions: Netagio, Vault of Satoshi, CAVIRTEX, Excoin, BTER.com

The past week has seen a series of hacks hit Bitcoin exchanges as well as a series of closures featuring several Canadian and Chinese exchanges. February and in particular 2015 has been a very grim period for exchanges with an apparent market culling underway.

BTER.com: China-based BTER.com posted a statement that the exchange had been hacked and 7170 BTC stolen. The exchange then announced a suspension of services. An award of 720 BTC is being offered for information that leads to the return of the lost bitcoins. The front page is now the statement of suspension, no further news has surfaced.

Exco.in: Bitcoin exchange Exocoin is suspending services after a DDoS attack and hack in which customer wallets were attacked. The lead developer, Samantha Chen, has also announced her resignation from the exchange’s parent project Blackwave Labs. The current front page of Exco.in states that the hacker’s identity has been revealed, who acted under the moniker “ambiorx,” and the exchange is pursuing legal action. From the statement, “In the meantime, we will be doing an audit of our systems and investigating the possibility of rebuilding the trading engine.” No news has surfaced on the estimated time it will take to restart the echange.

CAVIRTEX: Canada-based Cavirtex is shutting down after an apparent security compromise. From a statement on the website, “Effective immediately, CAVIRTEX intends to cease carrying on an active Bitcoin business and will be winding down its operations in an orderly manner. As a result, effective immediately, no new deposits will be accepted by CAVIRTEX. Trading on CAVIRTEX will be halted effective March 20, 2015. Effective March 25th, 2015, no withdrawals will be processed.”

Vault of Satoshi: From the website, “Vault of Satoshi closed on February 5th, 2015. Balances will be reduced 25% of the ending balance per month starting March 15th, 2015 and continuing every month until all balances are zero (4 months time), at which time the site will be turned off completely.” The servers will completely shutdown June 15, 2015 and the closure will be complete. The development team at Vault of Satoshi state that they have gone on to work on “a non-cryptocurrency project” which has been identified as Turboflix—a platform that allows Netflix users to bypass territorial restrictions. Vault of Satoshi is also based out of Canada.

Netagio: From the press release, “As part of the new corporate direction, Netagio will close its Bitcoin, GBP, USD and EUR exchange platform and trading on all order books will be suspended from today, 16th February.” Customers have 30 days from that date to withdraw their funds from the exchange before the servers go offline. Netagio is based in the U.K. Further coverage can be read at NewsBTC.

Bitcoin drives 5% of Porn.com sales

According to a report published by CoinDesk, Bitcoin sales presently represent a total of 5% of adult entertainment website Porn.com’s sales.

This report comes approximately one year after Porn.com started accepting the currency, which started in January 2014. While the adult site’s vice president Phil Bradbury described bitcoin earnings as “substantial,” he declined to reveal the total sales completed with the currency. What is also notable is that the 5% figure is down from 10% last year.

E-commerce site Overstock.com, which started accepting bitcoins around the same time, CEO Patrick Byrne reported in 2014 that sales with bitcoins were “tiny” or less than 1%. And in mid-2014 bitcoin sales averaged about $300,000 a month.

BitPay releases Bitcore Playground development laboratory

Last year, Bitcoin payment processor BitPay, Inc. released an open source JavaScript library called Bitcore to facilitate the development of Bitcoin apps. This year, the company has announced the availability of a test version of the Bitcore implementation accessible online by developers to test and execute various components of the library with the Bitcore Playground.

The Bitcore Playground is a live implementation of the Bitcore JS library that presents a series of interactive code examples and the code that produces them examined. Examples include unit conversion between BTC and fiat, generating a Bitcoin address from a public key, deriving mutli-sig addresses, deriving hierarchical deterministic keys, discovering unspent outputs associated with a Bitcoin address, and building, singing, and broadcasting a transaction.

The Playground links to full documentation for Bitcore and includes a forum for developers to share insights.

Bitcoin Core 0.10.0 released

The most recent release of the Bitcoin Core implementation, version 0.10.0, has hit the wire and is now available at bitcoin.org and GitHub.

Importantly, Bitcoin Core 0.10.0 is not compatible with older versions of the core implementation, block files and databases in this implementation act differently than previous software. See the release notes for more information before upgrading.

Changes to the Bitcoin Core include faster synchronization, changes to transaction fees, RPC access control changes, REST interface, improved signing security, and support for watch only wallets.

Faster synchronization is affected by the addition of “headers-first synchronization,” in this model peers are asked for headers first and that is validated before downloading the data heavy blocks. Transaction fees will now be automatically estimated by the software for quick confirmation; default settings will select fees that will confirm quickly. By using the –rest flag developers can expose a new HTTP API that allows authenticated access to public node data. The wallet software can also now track transactions to and from wallets where all addresses (or scripts) are known even without the private keys, this implementation allows watch only wallets to be added.

The full discussion of the release notes is available here.

O’Reilly Radar Podcast: “More than a currency, bitcoin is an enabling technology”

Jenn Webb from the O’Reilly Radar Podcast interviewed Balaji Srinivasan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, about Bitcoin’s position as technology and its expected future impact. During the interview Srinivasan describes the bigger picture of Bitcoin, the technology of the blockchain and how it’s an enabling technology as much as a currency.

Srinivasan does an excellent job of describing how Bitcoin is a service-effect of the blockchain and that the underlying technology can be easily adapted (and is currently adapted) to provide services for other currencies, trades, validation, notary, certificates, contracts, etc. describing Bitcoin (and the blockchain) as programmable money.

“You go all the way back 20 years to the Internet, and it was not one single company that controlled the Internet. It was decentralized; anybody could build on it. Bitcoin is like that,” says Srinivasan.

He adds: “As an enabling technology, it’s a commons that people can contribute to.”

The entire interview is approximately 15 minutes and an excellent listen.

photo credit: Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license)