Bitcoin exchange Gemini has been launched, and Imogen Heap is showing how the future of digital rights may look like. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 41:
- Singer-songwriter and composer Imogen Heap launched her latest single Tiny human using blockchain technology as a new way of sharing music. More specifically the song was released as a digital smart contract and shared via Ethereum’s blockchain. It offers a glimpse of the future of digital rights on a decentralized and transparent shared system, opposed to the complex and parasitic web of middlemen that artists are currently facing.
- An unpatched vulnerability in the Bitcoin network took central stage this week as it became the subject of a transaction malleability attack. Bitcoin wallet Coinkite was one of the first companies to communicate on the attack, finding that “a number of our customer’s transactions modified and rebroadcast with a new transaction number”, while adding that the attack was “being applied to almost all transactions on the network” and could best be described as a “nuisance only”. Even so, transaction malleability can mess up a company’s bookkeeping depending on the software used, which is said to have happened to the infamous exchange Mt. Gox. At least one exchange, Cryptsy, now seems to be facing this kind of problems as well as its CEO reported “BTC withdraws are currently experiencing issues due to the block chain malleability issue”.
- The self-proclaimed “NASDAQ of Bitcoin”, BTC exchange Gemini, was officially launched this week shortly after receiving a trust charter from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). The New York City based exchange, founded by tech entrepreneurs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, has also already been reviewed by Digiconomist. The full review can be found here.
- It has been confirmed that the last batch of a little more than 44,000 Bitcoins (worth more than $10 million at current rate), seized by the US Marshals Service (USMS) from online drug market place Silk Road, will be auctioned off on the 5th of November 2015. The batch is part of the 174,000 coins the USMS had originally seized from Silk Road in total.
- The price of Bitcoin has continued to increase for the third week in a row, increasing by a little over two percent to a current rate of roughly $244 per BTC. The price of Ethereum continued to decline in the meanwhile, losing well over eight percent. One ETH is now trading at about 64 cents, with its price free falling since the start of September.
