NASCAR fans will soon get see another cryptocurrency on the racing circuit and Ross Ulbricht has been found guilty of running Silk Road. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 6:
- Cryptocurrencies will be visiting NASCAR again. After a successful sponsorship by the Dogecoin community of NASCAR driver Josh Wise, Bitcoin will now be joining the racing circuit. Driver Justin Boston will be sponsored by Bitcoin payments processor BitPay in the NextEra Energy Resources 250 held on February 20, 2015. BitPay also sponsored the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl that took place in December last year.
- BitPay also provided some interesting data, reporting that over 100,000 merchants accepting Bitcoin for payment. According to BitPay, more than half of these businesses are accepting Bitcoin through BitPay. The news could therefore be a bit biased, but at least merchant adoption has been quite successful regardless. Now it is just a matter of getting the customers to actually pay with the digital currency.
- Ross Ulbricht has been found guilty of running the online drug market place Silk Road. The trial lasted several weeks, and took numerous surprising turns in which even former Mt.Gox CEO Mark Karpeles was said to be the man behind Silk Road. Another suggestion was the Ulbricht had indeed founded Silk Road, but stopped being involved afterward. The latter could easily be proved wrong as Bitcoin is not at anonymous as many might believe. Silk Road payments were traced to Ulbricht’s laptop until the moment he was arrested. Ulbricht could now be sentenced up to life in prison.
- Bitcoin’s price has remained flat for once compared to last week at a price of about $227. For most of the week the coin was trading within a rather narrow range of $223 to $229 per coin. Even so, trading was far from stable as Bitcoin did experience another flash crash in the meanwhile losing three percent of its value under a minute. This mini crash was limited in size, but it was also a broad one that affected most major exchanges. For now, Bitcoin remains waiting for its first truly calm week of the year.
- Last week a research from the Southern Methodist University showed that “fraudulent schemes have scammed at least $11 million in these virtual deposits from customers over the past four years”. But there is now some good news with regard to fraud prevention, as students from the Trinity College Dublin are building their own Bitcoin “credit check” database. It is hoped that the database will enable “business partners to identify possible indicators for fraudulent business practices or money laundering, whilst still granting sufficient anonymity.”
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