Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Coinbase, America's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has announced they are completely removing all support for Bitcoin SV (BSV) by January 9. All current holders of that cryptocurrency on the exchange will need to withdraw or the assets will be liquidated after that date. Bitcoin SV is not the original Bitcoin but a fork supported by Craig Wright. This removal follows a delisting in 2021 after the cryptocurrency suffered a "51% attack." Since that time clients have not been about to buy or sell Bitcoin SV on the exchange. According to CoinGecko, Bitcoin SV is currently the 53rd biggest digital assets, with a market cap of $967 million.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Decrypt: When a company like Nike finds someone using its brand without permission, it can ask the courts to order the unauthorized goods to be destroyed. Nike has done this in the past, but its latest trademark lawsuit comes with a twist -- the products it wants to "destroy" are NFTs, which are inscribed permanently on the Ethereum blockchain. The case in question involves Detroit-based StockX, a site that lets people buy and sell used brands, including Nike sneakers. [...] In a complaint filed last month in New York federal court, Nike accused StockX of ripping off its brand in order to cash in on a "gold rush market" for NFTs. As a remedy for StockX's alleged infringement of its trademarks, Nike wants the company to turn over its profits and stop the NFT sneaker sales. It also wants a judge to "order that StockX be required to deliver to Nike for destruction any and all Vault NFTs."

According to Alexandra Roberts, a trademark law professor at the University of New Hampshire, it's fairly common for companies to ask to destroy goods that infringe their IP -- there's even a law that entitles them to do that. But whether a court will grant the order is likely to be informed by what the brand owner is looking to destroy. Where do NFTs fit into this? It's an open question since the courts have never had to address it before. And even if the New York court agrees to order the destruction of the StockX NFTs, there's the question of how exactly Nike would go about doing that.

Records on the blockchain show that StockX has indeed inscribed the NFTs on Ethereum, which means they are indestructible except in the extremely unlikely event that developers agree to fork the blockchain to get rid of them. According to some, the most practical thing for Nike to do would be to send the NFTs to a so-called burner wallet. This wouldn't destroy them but still achieve the same purpose: "This means that the best outcome for a brand that is seeking to have NFTs destroyed may be to have them sent to a burn address, which still does not actually destroy them but renders them incapable of being transferred anymore," writes the Fashion Law Blog.

When you type in a URL to your browser and press "enter," your browser sends that name to a network of computers called the Domain Name System (DNS), which converts it into IP addresses. These numbers are what allow your browser to find the right server on the internet and connect to it. When you navigate to a website, you are trusting a handful of organizations that have been charged with keeping the DNS working and secure.

"To people like Steven McKie, a developer for and investor in an open-source project called the Handshake Network, this centralized power over internet naming makes the internet vulnerable to both censorship and cyberattacks," reports MIT technology review. "Handshake wants to decentralize it by creating an alternative naming system that nobody controls. In doing so, it could help protect us from hackers trying to exploit the DNS's security weaknesses, and from governments hoping to use it to block free expression." From the report: The system would be based on blockchain technology, meaning it would be software that runs on a widely distributed network of computers. In theory, it would have no single point of failure and depend on no human-run organization that could be corrupted or co-opted. Handshake's software is a heavily modified version ("fork") of Bitcoin, and just as Bitcoin's network of miners protects the cryptocurrency from manipulation and makes it virtually impossible for authorities to shut down, a similar network could keep a permanent, censorship-resistant record of internet names. The Handshake team is far from the first to try to create a decentralized naming system for the web. But unlike previous efforts, Handshake isn't trying to replace DNS but work with it.

Besides ICANN, there's yet another class of organization whose job Handshake aims to decentralize. See that little padlock icon in your browser bar, to the left of the domain name? That means your computer has verified that your connection to this website is encrypted and that the site is authentic, not a fake one designed by a criminal trying to steal your login credentials. It does that by checking the veracity of a string of numbers called the site's digital certificate, issued by one of a number of so-called certificate authorities. These entities, many of which are for-profit companies, are crucial to internet security. They can also get hacked. And if one gets breached, and an attacker can start issuing fake certificates, it undermines the security of the whole internet. But if website names are managed on a tamper-resistant blockchain, then you don't need certificate authorities; the naming system itself can provide the guarantee that the site you're connected to is real. That's what Handshake aims to do.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: An unknown attacker has exploited a bug in the Verge cryptocurrency network code to mine Verge coins at a very rapid pace and generate funds almost out of thin air. The Verge development team is preparing a hard-fork of the entire cryptocurrency code to fix the issue and revert the blockchain to a previous state before the attack to neutralize the hacker's gains. The attack took place yesterday, and initially users thought it was a over "51% attack," an attack where a malicious actor takes control over the more than half of the network nodes, giving himself the power to forge transactions. Nonetheless, users who later looked into the suspicious network activity eventually tracked down what happened, revealing that a mysterious attacker had mined Verge coins at a near impossible speed of 1,560 Verge coins (XVG) per second, the equivalent of $78/s. The malicious mining lasted only three hours, according to the Verge team. According to users who tracked the illegally mined funds on the Verge blockchain said the hacker appears to have made around 15.6 million Verge coins, which is around $780,000.

Popular digital exchange Coinbase has announced support for Bitcoin Cash. "Bitcoin Cash was created by a fork on August 1st, 2017," a blog post reads. "All customers who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase account. Your Bitcoin Cash balance will reflect your Bitcoin balance at the time of the Bitcoin Cash Fork, which occurred at 13:20 UTC, August 1, 2017."

The recent announcement has disrupted the markets. Bitcoin has dropped 12 percent, with the other two cryptocurrencies supported via Coinbase not faring too well either.

Update: Coinbase said Tuesday evening users wouldn't be able to buy and sell bitcoin cash four hours after it said trading of the cryptocurrency would be enabled on its platforms. Chief executive Brian Armstrong said the company is looking into whether employees tried to profit from advanced knowledge of the news.

Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: All eyes may be on the meteoric rise of Bitcoin at the moment, but it's far from being the only cryptocurrency on the block. Startup Tether issued a critical announcement after it was discovered that "malicious action by an external attacker" had led to the theft of nearly $31 million worth of tokens. Tether is a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency formerly known as Realcoin, and it says that $30,950,010 was stolen from a treasury wallet. The company says it is doing what it can to ensure exchanges do not process these tokens, including temporarily suspending its backend wallet service. Tether knows the address used by the attacker to make the theft, but is not aware of either who the attacker is, or how the attack took place. The company is releasing a new version of its Omni Core software client in what it says is "effectively a temporary hard fork to the Omni Layer."

Timothy B. Lee via Ars Technica explains Bitcoin Gold: A new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Gold is now live on the Internet. It aims to correct what its backers see as a serious flaw in the design of the original Bitcoin. There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies on the Internet, and many of them are derived from Bitcoin in one way or another. But Bitcoin Gold -- like Bitcoin Cash, another Bitcoin spinoff that was created in August -- is different in two important ways. Bitcoin Gold is branding itself as a version of Bitcoin rather than merely new platforms derived from Bitcoin's source code. It has also chosen to retain Bitcoin's transaction history, which means that, if you owned bitcoins before the fork, you now own an equal amount of "gold" bitcoins. While Bitcoin Cash was designed to resolve Bitcoin's capacity crunch with larger blocks, Bitcoin Gold aims to tackle another of Bitcoin's perceived flaws: the increasing centralization of the mining industry that verifies and secures Bitcoin transactions.

The original vision for Bitcoin was that anyone would be able to participate in Bitcoin mining with their personal PCs, earning a bit of extra cash as they helped to support the network. But as Bitcoin became more valuable, people discovered that Bitcoin mining could be done much more efficiently with custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). As a result, Bitcoin mining became a specialized and highly concentrated industry. The leading companies in this new industry wield a disproportionate amount of power over the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Gold aims to dethrone these mining companies by introducing an alternative mining algorithm that's much less susceptible to ASIC-based optimization. In theory, that will allow ordinary Bitcoin Gold users to earn extra cash with their spare computing cycles, just as people could do in the early days of Bitcoin.

sqorbit writes: Bitcoin dropped below $7,000 after hitting an all-time high. After the so-called "fork" was suspended, Bitcoin reached a peak of $7,888 around 1800 GMT on Wednesday before dropping down below $7,000. Some investors appear to be selling in order to buy "Bitcoin Cash" which was a split on August 1st. Bitcoin Cash reached $850.

Alyssa Hertig, writing for CoinDesk: The organizers of a controversial bitcoin scaling proposal are suspending an attempt to increase the block size by way of a software upgrade. Known for its strong early support from bitcoin startups and mining pools, the plan, called Segwit2x, or simply 2x, was to trigger a block size increase at block 494784, expected to occur on or around November 16th. The suspension was announced today in an email, written by Mike Belshe, CEO and co-founder of bitcoin wallet software provider BitGo. One of the leaders of the Segwit2x project, he argued that the scaling proposal is too controversial to move forward. He wrote: "Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean block size upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin's growth. This was never the goal of Segwit2x."

Merely weeks after it was announced that Bitcoin was splitting into two separate entities, the initial version of bitcoin and it's new "bitcoin cash," the network is adding a third version, according to a report. From the article: On Wednesday, a group of bitcoiners scheduled yet another split for the network in November, which would create a third version of bitcoin. So, what makes this version different from the others? Right now, the bitcoin network can sometimes take a long time to process transactions due to so many people using it. This is because the "blocks" of transaction data that get added to bitcoin's public ledger, the blockchain, are getting full. In the weeks preceding the fork, bitcoin coalesced around a solution called "segregated witness," which will change how data is stored in blocks to free up some space when it kicks in later in August. But the size of the blocks themselves will stay at one megabyte on the original bitcoin blockchain. Still, some bitcoiners maintained that the only way to speed bitcoin up for the foreseeable future was to increase the size of blocks themselves. So, a group of bitcoin companies and developers got together and launched a fork called bitcoin cash, which does not include segregated witness. It bumped the size of blocks up to a maximum of eight megabytes. That fork was widely anticipated to be a failure before it happened, but at the time of writing, bitcoin cash is trading above $300 USD per coin, which is comparable to cryptocurrencies like ethereum. Sounds like everyone got what they wanted, right? Oh, no. There's a third group of bitcoin developers, companies, and users who advocate for a "best of both worlds approach." This group includes Bitmain, the largest bitcoin infrastructure company in the world, and legendary bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik. They got together back in May and signed what is known as the "New York Agreement," which bound them to implement a two megabyte block size increase alongside segregated witness via a hard fork within six months of the time of signing. They call the fork Segwit2x. Now, that's exactly what's happening. According to an announcement posted to the Segwit2x GitHub repository, a bitcoin block between one and two megabytes will be created at block 494,784.

Saturday night TechCrunch reported the following about Bitcoin: 24 hours ago the cryptocurrency was trading below $3,700. About an hour ago it surged passed $4,000 and has no signs of stopping. It's now trading around $4,135.00. For reference, a week ago Bitcoin hit an all-time high as it passed $3,000 for the first time... So the million-bitcoin question is, why now...?

Two weeks ago Bitcoin went through a hard fork, and came out essentially unscathed... A few days later Bitcoin locked in SegWit, a code modification that fixes malleability issues and frees up space in blocks, allowing for more transactions to be stored in each one. These two code-related developments have helped boost conference in Bitcoin's future. Another reason -- the ICO frenzy. The amount recently raised via initial coin offerings have now (at least temporally) topped amount raised via early stage venture capital. Just last week Filecoin raised $180 million in a few hours. Most investors have to convert fiat currency to bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to participate in ICOs, which could be driving up the price (and providing some investors with their first taste of bitcoin). Another reason -- Wall Street's new obsession is bitcoin.

Bitcoin is dividing in two. Disagreements about how to operate the cryptocurrency have led to a new strand called Bitcoin Cash, which is breaking off from the bitcoin system. From a report: Bitcoin Cash launches Tuesday in what is known as a "hard fork" from bitcoin, a virtual currency based on peer-to-peer transactions without any central authority or bank behind it. The new offshoot is a response to the increasing popularity of bitcoin, which is struggling to deal with massive numbers of transactions with its underpinning technology. The main bitcoin currency is adopting a system called Segwit2x that moves transactions out of the current blockchain, while bitcoin Cash will use bigger blocks within the blockchain. Bitcoin holders are set to receive the same amount of bitcoin cash as they have in bitcoin if the exchanges and wallets they use support the new coin, another report added. Exchanges including Kraken and ViaBTC have said they'll support both, while others like Coinbase and Poloniex have said they won't, citing uncertainty that bitcoin cash will have lasting market value.

Thursday's news of a $50 million heist of digital currency at Ethereum. was followed today by reports of a second heist from the DAO, according to the Bitcoin News Service -- this one for just 22 Ether. "It appears this is just someone who wanted to test the exploit and see if they could use it to their advantage... " Slashdot reader Patrick O'Neill writes: The currency's community is currently debating a course forward for a currency who is built on the idea that it is governed by software and not human beings. One option is to fork the code, another is to do absolutely nothing at all."
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, posted Sunday that "Over the last day with the community's help we have crowdsourced a list of all of the major bugs with smart contracts on Ethereum so far, including both the DAO as well as various smaller 100-10000 ETH thefts and losses in games and token contracts." The list begins by including "The DAO (obviously)," but is followed by a warning that "progress in smart contract safety is necessarily going to be layered, incremental, and necessarily dependent on defense-in-depth. There will be further bugs, and we will learn further lessons; there will not be a single magic technology that solves everything."

The Daily Dot wrote Friday that "Because of the way the code in question is written, Etherum's developers and community have 27 days to decide what to do before the hackers are able to move the money and cash out... What's happening now amounts to a political campaign. But the debate is far from over. The clock is ticking now, the world is watching, and the next step of the cryptocurrency experiment is unfolding under a spotlight burning hotter every day."

HughPickens.com writes: The Bitcoin community is facing one of the most momentous decisions in its six-year history. The Bitcoin network is running out of spare capacity, and two increasingly divided camps disagree about what, if anything, to do about the problem. The technical issue is that a block, containing a record of recent transactions, currently has a 1MB limit. Increasing the block size would allow more transactions on the network at once, helping it to scale up to meet growing demand. But it would also make it more difficult for ordinary users to host full network "nodes" that validate new transactions on the network, potentially making the digital currency more centralized as a result. Now Rob Price writes that two high-profile developers have released a competing version of the codebase that risks splitting the digital currency in two.

Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn have released Bitcoin XT, an alternative version of the core software that supports increasing the block size when required. Bitcoin users will now be forced to decide between "Bitcoin Core" and Bitcoin XT, raising the prospect of a "fork," where the digital currency divides into two competing versions. According to Price, Core and XT are compatible right now. However, if XT is adopted by 75% of users by January 2016, it will upgrade to a larger block size that will be incompatible with Core — meaning that if the other 25% don't then choose to convert, it will effectively split the currency into two. So far, 7.7% of the network has adopted XT, according to website XTnodes.com. "Ultimately, how the dispute is resolved may matter more than the specific decision that's reached," says Timothy B. Lee. "If the community is ultimately able to reach a consensus, the process could become a template for resolving future disagreements. On the other hand, if disagreements fester for months — or, worse, if a controversial software change splits the Bitcoin network into two warring camps — it could do real damage to Bitcoin's reputation."

First time accepted submitter groggy.android writes This year's biggest news about Bitcoin may well turn out not to be the repeat of its surge in value last year against the dollar and other state currencies but its impending eclipse by another independent but corporate-backed digital currency. Popularly known as Ripple, XRP shot up in value last year along with other cryptocurrencies that took advantage of the hype around Bitcoin. However, among the top cryptocurrencies listed in Coinmarketcap.com, a site that monitors trading across different cryptocurrency exchanges, Ripple is the only one that not only regained its value after the collapse in the price of Bitcoin but has more than doubled from its peak last year. In September it displaced Litecoin to become the second most valuable cryptocurrency. Even more surpising, a Ripple fork, Stellar, is one of the two other cryptocurrencies in the Coinmarketcap top ten that have risen sharply in value during the last few weeks.

What makes Ripple different from Bitcoin? Strictly speaking, Ripple isn't the name of the digital currency but of the decentralized payment network and protocol created and maintained by the eponymous Ripple Labs. Users of the Ripple system are able to transact in both cryptocurrency and regular fiat currency like the dollar without passing through a central exchange. XRP is the name of the native unit of exchange used in the Ripple network to facilitate conversion between different currency types.

samzenpus (5) writes "A while ago you had the chance to ask GNU and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman about GNU, copyright laws, digital restrictions management, and software patents. Below you'll find his answers to those questions."

ASDFnz writes "It has been just over two months since the bitcoin block chain was rocked by a near disastrous fork causing the bitcoin price to crash. The culprit of the crash was found to be a bug that prevented pre version 7.1 bitcoin clients accepting large blocks that could be generated by version 8 clients. A temporary fix was put into place by Bitcoin Project lead developer Gavin Andresen that forced version 8 clients to generate blocks that version 7.1 could understand. It is important to note though, the fix was a temporary one! In just under two days on the 15th of May the fix will expire and version 8 clients will once again be able to make large blocks that older clients will not be able to understand."

New submitter jhantin writes "The Bitcoin blockchain has forked due to a lurking backward-compatibility issue: versions older than 0.8 do not properly handle blocks larger than about 500k, and Slush's pool mined a 974k block today. The problem is that not all mining operations are on 0.8; blocks are being generated by a mix of several different versions of the daemon, each making its own decision as to which of the two forks is preferable to extend, and older versions refuse to honor or extend from a block of this size. The consensus on #bitcoin-dev is damage control: miners need to mine on pre-0.8 code so the backward-compatible fork will outgrow and thus dominate the compatibility-breaking one; merchants need to stop accepting transactions until the network re-converges on the backward-compatible fork of the chain; and average users can ignore the warning that they are out of sync and need to upgrade." Turns out there's an approximately 512K limit to atomic updates in Berkeley DB which were used by versions prior to 0.8. 0.8 uses a new database, allowing blockchains that old versions won't accept to be created.