Is this the sound a bitcoin market makes? Russian artist Dmitry Morozov, also known as ::vtol::, recently debuted a new art technology installation entitled silk that uses live data from bitcoin and litecoin markets across five different currencies to create music. The work was shown this past weekend during Cosmoscow, a contemporary art festival held in Moscow. According to the artist’s website, silk is a kind of autonomous stringed instrument that responds to price changes denominated in rubles, yuan, euros, and US and Canadian dollars. The software draws bitcoin price data from BitcoinWisdom.com. Here’s how Morozov describes the work on his official website: “The installation is tracking the real time changes in the market activities related to [the]…
London-based Innovate Finance is opening a blockchain lab in an attempt to explore the distributed ledger’s potential and drive its adoption by financial services companies. The independent membership association, which seeks to drive the UK’s position in the global FinTech sector, will open the centre in partnership with Hartree Centre – a high performance computing and research facility founded by the UK government in collaboration with IBM. Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO at Innovate Finance, said in a statement: “We are excited about the prospect of our members openly collaborating to deliver use cases to the wider community. If we can use the lab to develop open standards for the blockchain in financial services, we will be moving one step closer to…
Few groups have been as early and as active in attempting to understand the implications of digital currency and blockchain technology as US law enforcement. Despite expanded use and investment, cryptographic currencies such as bitcoin continue to be widely used for illicit activities. Dark market operators and extortionists were early and aggressive in their attempts to capitalize on the digital payment network and its cash-like approach to transactions, a trend that continues. As evidence, the Department of Justice, US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California (DOJ), appointed Kathryn Haun as its first Digital Currency Crimes Coordinator this June. The position finds Haun heading up a multi-agency task force in San Francisco and comprised of…
UPDATE (8th September 18:55 BST): This piece has been updated with comment from ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees. Digital currency exchange ShapeShift.io has raised $1.6m in new funding. As reported by TechCrunch, the round drew support from Digital Currency Group, bitcoin entrepreneur Roger Ver and Bitfinex, the Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange Bitcoin Foundation executive director Bruce Fenton, Transform PR founder and CEO Michael Terpin and Trevor Koverko, founder of education-oriented e-commerce platform eProf, also took part in the round as angel investors. The announcement comes nearly six months after ShapeShift announced $525k in seed funding, an amount invested by both Ver and Digital Currency Group founder and CEO Barry Silbert. ShapeShift later made…
The bitcoin stress tests planned by CoinWallet could breach UK law, a legal professional has suggested. The claim was first posted on Reddit yesterday, with user ‘btcdrak’ asserting: “The Computer Misuse Act 1990 in the United Kingdom makes it an offence to deliberately cause disruption to computer systems with intent.” Eitan Jankelewitz, associate at UK law firm Sheridans, said he would tend to agree with this assessment. The aim of these stress tests is to verify whether the bitcoin network is capable of handling a large stream of very small transactions. CoinWallet’s first test in June aimed to fill blocks with 105 BTC worth of miniscule transactions, but reached just 15% of its 200MB goal before its servers crashed. “I’m inclined…
The Connecticut Technology Council (CTC) has partnered with blockchain startup Tierion for a trial that will find government survey data secured on the bitcoin blockchain. As part of a drive to glean data from some 200 Connecticut technology companies, the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) is seeking perspective on issues including workforce demand and tax code awareness, among other issues, in a broad survey. As explained by Tierion CEO Wayne Vaughn, the company’s blockchain technology is not essential to the survey process, but rather provides the startup with a chance to expose new entities to the potential benefits of decentralized ledgers for recordkeeping. Bruce Carlson, president and CEO of the CTC, suggested that…