A former U.S. federal agent was sentenced to 78 months in prison on Monday for stealing bitcoins during the government's investigation of Silk Road and for secretly soliciting payment from the operator of the online black market for information on its probe. Carl Force, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, admitted to charges of extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice. In a San Francisco federal...

The head of collapsed Bitcoin exchange MtGox was facing fresh embezzlement charges Wednesday, as Japanese media said some of the allegedly stolen funds were spent on prostitutes. Tokyo police said they had arrested France-born Mark Karpeles, 30, for moving 20 million yen ($166,000) in client money to his bank account, as he faces fraud allegations over the disappearance of hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-worth of the virtual currency.

Kim Dotcom certainly hasn’t been letting his ongoing fight against US extradition charges slow him down. On Thursday, according to Mashable, he remotely addressed a startup convention in Sydney, Australia to pitch his latest idea: an alternative internet called MegaNet. Dotcom is wanted in the US on criminal copyright infringement charges thanks to his file-hosting site Megaupload, which had a successful run until it was shuttered by the US Justice Department in 2012

Bitcoin has a bad reputation. The decentralised digital cryptocurrency, powered by a vast computer network, is notorious for the wild fluctuations in its value, the zeal of its supporters and its degenerate uses, such as extortion, buying drugs and hiring hitmen in the online bazaars of the “dark net”. This is unfair. The value of a bitcoin has been pretty stable, at around $250, for most of this year. Among regulators and financial institutions, scepticism has given way to enthusiasm...

Bitcoin, despite its reputation as anonymous internet cash, was never designed for perfectly private payments. For the promise of fully untraceable money, cryptocurrency fans have been waiting for Zerocoin—a technology designed to have default uncrackable anonymity. After years of development, that incognito cryptocash is finally showing signs of a life, now in the form of a stealthy startup.

...We describe the historical context which led to the development of these [crypto-]currencies and some modern and recent trends in their uptake, in terms of both usage in the real economy and as investment products. As these currencies are purely digital constructs, with no government or local authority backing, we then discuss them in the context of monetary theory, in order to determine how they may be have value under each...

Nearly 25 years after receiving my PhD in Finance from the University of Chicago, I finally heard from the Prize Committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel -- popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. No, I was not awarded the prize -- I was not expecting to. The committee has invited me to nominate someone for the 2016 Prize. I feel honored. Frankly, this is as close as I am going to get to the Nobel Prize.

Bhagwan Chowdhry. He is the Professor of Finance at UCLA says he is nominating Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto for the 2016 Nobel Prize for Economics

Having the ability to transfer blockchain-based cards into the Spells of Genesis client will further enhance the overall gaming experience.

Today, we’re excited to introduce the first US-issued bitcoin debit card, the Shift Card. The Shift Card is a VISA debit card that currently allows Coinbase users in twenty-four states in the U.S. to spend bitcoin online and offline at over 38 million merchants worldwide.

Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody. The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiast’s equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and a tieless, rumpled shirt, his brown hair neatly parted. His name hadn’t made the conference’s list of “featured speakers.

The latest trend in Bitcoin Mining is utilizing the cloud to mine for Bitcoins which is cost effective and can produce on average 5% returns on your investment as long

When wired named Craig Wright Tuesday as the most likely suspect to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of bitcoin, we laid out two possibilities that outweighed any others: “Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.” Three days later, new clues point to that second, strange scenario.

Digital cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin may have failed to unseat their more traditional rivals, but the technology that underpins Bitcoin may yet bring about a revolution in finance and other industries…

Several major companies from across both the technology and financial industries—including IBM, Intel, and Cisco as well as the London Stock Exchange Group and big-name banks JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and State Street—have joined forces to create an alternative to the blockchain, the global online ledger that underpins the bitcoin digital currency.

Banks are enthusiastically jumping onto the Blockchain wagon claiming "Blockchain is an important technology development that has the potential to change fundamentally the world’s capital markets." This is a hugely extravagant claim for what is a basic, if very elegant, piece of computer code.

Walk around downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, and you’ll mostly notice how good everything seems. The weather’s great. There’s a healthy stream of tourists. Downtown businesses, once struggling, have rebounded in the past year. One thing you likely won’t notice, at least unless you squint, is any sign that one company, flush with tech startup cash, tried to make St. Pete the Bitcoin capital of the world. The year before, a company called BitPay shelled out a bundle of money...

Today, bitcoin is thriving like never before. Or hadn't you heard?

The term “financial inclusion” is a new buzzword in the fintech space. With the rise of services like Abra and MPesa, we are convinced that bitcoin is the solution to the problems of the unbanked. With bitcoin, we say, the house cleaner in Dubai can get her money home and the refugee can get his money over the border into a safer place. I’m even known to wax poetic about the topic. That’s fine. Optimism is a wonderful tonic for the soul.

I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer. The software I’ve written has been used by millions of users, hundreds of developers, and the talks I’ve given have led directly to the creation of several startups. I’ve talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes.