UPDATED 16:41 EDT / JULY 15 2015

NEWS

Bitcoin Weekly 2015 July 15: Bitcoin and Greece, Hacking Team tracing software, Coinsetter margin trades, Cloudminr hack

If it weren’t for a thriving Bitcoin ecosystem, this Weekly would be all about the Greek economic crisis. While Greece has received a vote on the bailout–and Bitcoin speculation has died down somewhat, taking the market value from a peak of $317 back to a more recognizable $289–but this has given way to speculations of a different sort. The question remains: Does Bitcoin have a place to assist citizens of ailing economies? And what about the rest of the EU?

Hacking Team continues to keep the news busy with the leak of their software to the Internet at large. Amid the flotsam, a some Bitcoin cracking/tracking software called Money Module.

Coinsetter is releasing margin trading to the masses, no longer do you need to be a specifically chosen business to trade on margin or short bitcoin prices on the NYC exchange.

Finally, Cloudminr.io got hacked and poof it’s gone. See below for details about the potentially nefarious existence of this cloud mining outfit that came from nothing and went into nothing.

Is Greek economic turmoil behind the rise and fall of bitcoin market value?

Greece continues to make news in the Bitcoin sphere with the economic troubles rocking the country. During the recent turmoil numerous outlets had begun speculating that the increase in Bitcoin market prices dealt with speculators buying into the cryptocurrency; but shortly after Greece received a bailout market prices dropped again.

As reported by SiliconAngle, during the run-up to the bailout market value of Bitcoin exceeded $300—hitting a peak of $315.88 on BitStamp—but according to a recent report from CoinDesk those values have plummeted again to near $289.48.

As of this writing, BitcoinAverage.com shows global weighted bitcoin market value at 291.99.

Speculation remains in the hot seat about the sudden increase in market value as seems to correlate with the Greek economic crisis. According to an article on Finextra, Bitstamp reported a 79 percent increase in volume over a 10-week average.

However many in the community are uncertain this happened because Greeks sought out bitcoins; but it seems more likely that an increase in interest was led by expecting that Greek financial troubles might spread to the rest of Europe.

Bitcoin has been repeatedly touted by evangelists as a potential mechanism to save individuals from the collapse of their own currency. To the extent that during the Greek crisis writers, such as Christopher Mims at Wall Street Journal states, “Whatever happens to bitcoin itself, the technology underlying it opens up previously unimagined possibilities for the future of just about anything humans exchange.” However, Mims notes, he does not believe Greeks currently affect bitcoin (due to a lack of potential funds) but that bitcoin itself could be a store of value to prevent future turmoil similar to Greece.

Colin Kwan, COO of Magnr/BTC.sx, wrote for CoinTelegraph about the Greek crisis and argued that Bitcoin can be a store of value in the wake of economic troubles, although he softened his opinion that the biggest obstacle for people on the ground to get into bitcoin is still accessibility. He echoed Mims’s comments that the Greek people are likely not buying into bitcoin as they don’t have the capital to do so.

In the Bitcoin space, a number of recognizable people also put out commentary such as Charlie Shrem:

Shrem is unfortunately known for being one of the first people arrested in relation to bitcoin after being charged with aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business and was sentenced to two years in prison.

Kim Dotcom, of MegaUpload and Mega fame, couldn’t help but hop onto the bandwagon. Of course it should be noted that Mega does accept bitcoins for subscriptions as well.

And Tony Gallippi, co-founder and chairman of BitPay Inc., also weighed in citing some interesting but unlikely price points for bitcoin market value. The last big boom in bitcoin market value happened in November, 2013 and has not peaked over $1,000 since.

Hacking Team Bitcoin cracking/tracking software in the wild

More news has come to light about Hacking Team’s Bitcoin tracking software, which has now been released into the wild after the group was hacked themselves.

The software is called Money Module and it specifically targets cryptocurrency wallets in addition to other financial data. The software is reported to allow users to track and trace Bitcoin transactions as well as those involving altcoins such as Litecoin, Feathercoin, and Namecoin.

The software was originally reported for its capability to run on a computer and discover the passphrase used to unlock the “wallet.dat” file. From there an attacker can steal the coins from the wallet or determine transaction addresses, which greatly eases tracing transactions.

Jaron-Lukasiewicz-coinsetter-ceo

Image credit: Jaron Lukasiewicz of Coinsetter at CoinSummit, via Money & Tech

Coinsetter continues to woo Wall Street traders with margin trades and shorting

New York City-based high volume Bitcoin exchange Coinsetter announced this week that margin trading and shorting capability has been opened up to all users. The service had originally been rolled out only for select businesses

The service offers margin trading for users at 5:1 leverage and as an incentive Coinsetter is also offering up to $25,000 interest-free when using the new capability.

hacker

Photo via Charis Tsevis

Cloudminr hacked, user details leaked for sale

Bitcioin cloud mining service Cloudminr.io has shut down after a hack that also led to the defacement of the main page where the hackers offered customer information for sale.

As of this posting, the site is entirely unavailable and displays a page that reads “This Account Has Been Suspended.” Cloudminr.io launched in November 2014 and claimed to operate out of Norway—although as it is with most fly-by-night Bitcoin operations that’s impossible to confirm.

The amount in bitcoins lost from Cloudminr is unknown but it is know that the mining company had 79,267 customers. Amid the leaked customer details shows the strange addition of BitcoinTalk login details as well as Twitter and Facebook accounts.

News of the details for sale hit Reddit quickly, with a thread appearing on July 12th, and users were quick to check the leak of 1,000 user info records to see if they could find their own information. Reddit user /u/peque2 claims to have found their own username in the 1,000 username teaser.

The full documents allegedly appeared on BitcoinTalk at about that time, but the thread related to them was quickly expunged by the forum’s staff.

Accusations of potential fraud by Cloudminr have grown large in the wake of the reported hack including speculations of an inside job. Bitcoin news website 99Bitcoins opined that even if it was not an inside job, certainly one of the employees had been compromised by hackers.

Feature image by SiliconANGLE

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