In a press briefing at the Department of Justice today, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and other law enforcement officials announced international cybercrime enforcement action against the darknet’s largest marketplaces: AlphaBay and Hansa Market. During the briefing, Sessions revealed that President Donald Trump had directed the Department of Justice to go after international cybercrime organizations such as AlphaBay.

“[Trump] gave us several directives,” said Sessions. “One is to dismantle internet transnational criminal organizations. That is what we are announcing today. Dismantling of the largest dark website in the world by far.”

Various agencies within the US Government worked with law enforcement in Thailand, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France on the takedown of AlphaBay.

According to the verified complaint for forfeiture regarding accused AlphaBay administrator Alexandre Cazes, the alleged criminal mastermind was holding just over $23 million worth of assets at the time of his arrest. Of that total amount, roughly $8.8 million are said to have been held in bitcoin, ether, zcash, and monero.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other law enforcement officials gave a press briefing on the takedown of AlphaBay earlier today. The official complaint is dated July 19, 2017.

According to the document, Cazes was “collecting tens of millions of dollars in commissions from the illegal transactions facilitated by AlphaBay” via a two to four percent commission on all sales.

there are 33 blocks left in this period we need 18 of them to be signaling for lockin
with >80% hashing power it seems likely, but there is a small chance we do not get a lock in on this period
welcome to, the final countdown!

Nederland - As part of an extensive international investigation, the Netherlands Police and the Public Prosecution Service have dismantled, seized control of, and shut down one of the biggest illegal market places on the internet today. It is Hansa Market, currently the most popular dark market in the ‘anonymous’ part of the internet, the so-called darknet.

Police on the trail of two missing laptops and a gold necklace followed it to the Montgomery County home of a self-described computer hacker who claims responsibility for what could be one of the largest virtual currency heists of all time, court documents say.

Theodore Price of Hatfield told a local detective and a Homeland Security agent investigating a burglary at the Bucks County, home of his girlfriend’s parents that he wrote software to steal between $40 million and $50 million in the online currency bitcoin, the documents say.

When the officers arrived at his door last week, he told them he had been preparing to flee to London on a chartered jet using a fake passport in the name of “Avengers” movie star Jeremy Renner, a complaint filed in federal court Wednesday says.

And, a computer expert at Cornell University who tracks bitcoin crimes finds a scenario that connects an alleged theft of a couple of laptops worth hundreds of dollars to a possible virtual heist of tens of millions plausible.

TL; DR: We are releasing an android wallet for the Lightning Network on Bitcoin Testnet.

The Uniform Law Commission, a private body of lawyers and legal academics from the several states, has just voted to finalize and approve a uniform model state law for the regulation of virtual currency businesses. This is great news for businesses, users, and developers of cryptocurrency and decentralized computing technologies.

We’re thrilled to see this pass the commission. I’ve been personally in the room at every one of the five drafting committee meetings that were publicly held all across the country over the last two years. And I’m writing this a bit jet lagged from my red-eye return flight from the full commission’s annual meeting in San Diego. Throughout these two years, I’ve become fond of several of the drafting committee members, and I’ve come to believe–absolutely–that they want what is best for innovation and for our community. I’ve also found them to be some of the few people smart enough about the law, patient enough to learn about the technology, and also hardworking enough help draft something so essential. You should know that this is not something they are paid to do; it’s a volunteer effort and a labor of love–specifically love of clear laws and a hatred of the costs (both human and monetary) that stem from sloppily drafted law or ill-considered regulation.

I’m also proud of several specific pieces of language in the act, because they closely mirror Coin Center’s frameworks and are the results of our advocacy, mixed with and meaningfully improved by, debates amongst the drafting committee members and the committee of the whole during this year’s annual meeting. I’ll highlight those passages later in this post.

Finally, I’m relieved. The discussion on the floor of the annual meeting in San Diego was not always easy and this model law could have been delayed another year or left to whither and die. I had moments, sitting in the ballroom of the US Grant hotel, when I thought all our work might come to nothing. But ultimately, critical commissioners came around, and as they learned more about the bill and the problems our community has encountered with the existing laws of money transmission, several had a change in heart. Several even became vocal advocates for the law’s approval. I personally enjoyed a few conversations with commissioners who, by offering further background about how the bill protects both consumers and innovators, I think I managed to help come to support the language we had worked so hard to perfect.

But all that aside, why is this a good model law for the states?
Two main reasons: certainty and safe harbors

The South African Reserve Bank (Sarb) will start testing a number of regulations related to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies within the coming months.

Cryptocurrency has attracted mainstream attention in 2017, which has resulted in significant growth in trade volumes and token values.

Speaking to BusinessTech at a Norton Rose Fulbright blockchain and Bitcoin event on Wednesday evening, Loerien Gamaroff, CEO of blockchain based solutions provider, Bankymoon, said that the company is currently in talks with the central bank and has been selected as its first sandbox (experimental) business to trial-run new regulations.

With a major inflection point for bitcoin just days away, some users are beginning to wonder about the safety of their holdings on major exchanges.

At issue is that several scaling proposals are set to come to a head on or around August 1, and depending on which end up gaining support, there is a risk that bitcoin could split into two competing currencies running on two different blockchains.

In the face of this concern, and the painful lessons learned from past blockchain forks, some exchanges are stepping up to make users aware of possible issues and how they can protect their assets.

Below, we’re keeping a running list of major exchanges and their remarks.

A federal judge granted a bitcoin owner the right to intervene in a closely watched court case involving the digital currency exchange Coinbase while also upbraiding the Internal Revenue Service’s demand for potentially millions of customer records.
In a stern 12-page order, the judge agreed to let an anonymous customer, known only as “John Doe 4,” challenge the IRS’s power to enforce a sweeping summons it served on the San Francisco-based Coinbase last year for customer records. The agency claims that only 802 people declared gains or losses for bitcoin in all of 2015, and suspects many others failed to pay taxes on profits following a two-year period in which the digital currency’s value soared from $13 to over $1,100.
The IRS’s investigation, however, has drawn fire from Coinbase and others who claim the agency’s demands ensnare too many people and involve too much information.
In her ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Corley strongly agreed, and declared the scope of the IRS request is unprecedented.

It’s been a tumultuous week since the man known as “Bitcoin Sign Guy” held up a pad of paper emblazoned with the words “Buy Bitcoin” during a congressional address by US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen.

But while details about Bitcoin Sign Guy remain largely shrouded in mystery, a few things appear to be certain. Namely, since drawing international attention to the cryptocurrency, he has apparently received thousands of dollars in bitcoin, become known (perhaps in jest) as one of the most often cited people in bitcoin and, most recently, got himself a new job.

In a blog post yesterday, the non-profit public policy organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, revealed Bitcoin Sign Guy was the newest member of its team.

After the guppies have settled, some know-it-alls tell me there’s a major flaw in my ointment. For one, while I am calling the money people are giving “contributions”, not a single one of the contributors would have paid money if they hadn’t believed that I was going to issue Soupies several months hence. Were my expensive lawyers wrong? Were these a series of sham transactions or are the payments gifts, free and clear? I’m not entirely sure, but I just made so much money I don’t really care. What’s more, there’s still no extradition treaty with Mercury.

FT Alphaville currently receives in the range of 10-20 unsolicited blockchain/ICO press releases per day. Weirdly the rate accelerated after we launched our ICOmedy series (presumably because any PR is good PR in this space).

A not uncommon structure of said unsolicited solicitations takes the form of:

We’re giving you this exclusively. Please respect our unsolicited embargo, you lucky journalists you, and please don’t share until the day we’ve designated for maximum PR offensive impact arrives. P.S. interviews with all the key people are available at your request.
Since we won’t be engaging in those sorts of opaque PR relationships, here are a few excerpts for your reading pleasure from some of the battier solicitations received this week. Beggars belief really.

The Elliott Wave Theorist is a newsletter founded in 1979 by Robert Prechter, who used the Elliott Wave Principle to predict the 1987 stock market crash.
In 2010, Prechter’s son wrote a report for the newsletter about bitcoin’s coming rise.
Nearly seven years later he’s warning about a cryptocurrency mania.

On Wednesday 19th July, 2017 a bug found in the multi-signature wallet (“multi-sig”) code used as part of Parity Wallet software was exploited by parties unknown. As of the time of writing, three wallet accounts holding large balances of ETH have been compromised and the balances moved into accounts held by the attacker. The self-titled “White Hat Group” used the same exploit to secure the other compromised wallets within Ethereum, with the stated intention of returning control to the original owners.

All other functionality of Parity, including all normal, non multi-sig accounts have no known vulnerabilities. To give some perspective: 3 multi-sig wallets were exploited from of a total of 596 vulnerable multi-sig wallets (the rest were commandeered by the White Hat Group), which themselves are a tiny fraction of Parity accounts.

The compromised accounts can be viewed on Etherscan. At the time of writing, the thief is attempting to launder the stolen funds through exchanges.

We already disabled the use of the broken code (it requires use of an on-chain registered resource which we were able to quickly unregister), which means future multi-sig wallets created in all versions of Parity Wallet have no known exploits. There are phishing attempts afoot; please ensure you download Parity only via our official Github repository, https://github.com/paritytech/parity.

Controversial cryptocurrency executive Josh Garza has plead guilty to one count of wire fraud.

As reported by CoinDesk earlier this week, Garza was rumored to have been preparing the plea, one for charges that stem from his operation of four cryptocurrency companies, GAW, GAW Miners, ZenMiner and ZenCloud, all of which were long suspected of fraudulent activities.

In total, the loss attributed to Garza’s fraud was estimated at $9,182,000. He is now set to be sentenced on October 12, at which time he will face up to 20 years in prison.

Russia is currently working on a regulatory framework to legalize Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), local publications reported on Wednesday. This is in addition to a bill that is being finalized to recognize cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether.

While Segregated Witness (SegWit) activation is looking more likely by the hour, Bitfury is getting ready to deploy a version of the Lightning network with or without the protocol upgrade.

The blockchain technology company, perhaps best known for its Bitcoin mining pool of the same name, successfully sent real bitcoins over a test version of the Lightning Network this week. Interestingly, Bitfury’s implementation of the technology is compatible with the current Bitcoin protocol and is therefore functional even without SegWit.

“This is a major accomplishment by our technical team and an important step forward for the Lightning Network and the growth of Bitcoin,” Valery Vavilov, CEO of The Bitfury Group, said in a statement.

Despite all the recent attention paid to ransomware, cybercriminals walked away with $5.3 billion from business email compromise (BEC) attacks compared with $1 billion for ransomware over a three-year stretch, according to Cisco’s 2017 Midyear Cybersecurity Report released today. 

Cybercriminals are increasingly taking a practical approach to their pilfering, going for the fastest method that they can steal a buck, or in this case, billions, says Steve Martino, Cisco’s chief information security officer. “What we are looking at is the continual commercialization of cyberattacks,” Martino says, pointing out that is a major theme in the report.

Ransomware exploits take time to develop before any financial gain is realized for cyberthieves, compared to crafting a phishing attack or blasting out spam of which 8% is found to be malicious, notes Martino. BEC attacks are less time-consuming to wage.

In addition, ransomware Bitcoin fees are often lower-dollar figures.

Roughly $90,000 in stolen ether confiscated as a result of a bug in a popular ethereum wallet software service yesterday have been cashed out, blockchain data shows.

As reported by CoinDesk, a total of 153,000 ethers were drained on July 19 due to a security bug in multi-signature wallet software offered by the startup, UK-based Parity Technologies. In a blog post yesterday, Parity went so far as to warn users that the bug was “critical,” advising them to take steps to safeguard their funds while the issue was resolved.

However, the stolen funds continue to move. As of press time, 70,000 ethers have exited the hacker’s address in seven consecutive transactions, each worth 10,000 ethers.

Data further shows the first transaction (which through two subsequent addresses), successfully cashed out 400 ethers via a cryptocurrency exchange service called Changelly. The price of ether around the transaction time was around $220, making an outflow worth nearly $90,000.

The Storj community’s most requested feature has been a drag and drop tool to use the Storj network easily. Your request has not gone unheard. Over the last eight months, we’ve been working closely with the FileZilla team to provide a graphical user interface for storing files on the Storj network. This has included building a C library called libstorj that can be integrated into applications such as FileZilla.
While we have already worked with a small group of beta testers up to now, we’re now ready to invite the greater community to help test for high reliability and scalability of the Storj network and Bridge with FileZilla. To join our group of beta testers, please join our community chat and ask a moderator to be added to the FileZilla test group channel. Your feedback will allow us to make significant improvements to the Storj network, Bridge service, and the FileZilla integration itself. We are still in the early stages of testing, but once that is complete the integration will ship as a promoted feature within FileZilla.
This integration gives existing FileZilla users the option to leverage Storj for a more secure, cost-effective and flexible storage solution compared to cloud providers like Amazon, making privacy and security the default. When this integration goes live, Storj will be available to 15 million monthly users.
We are excited to announce this partnership and integration. We are looking forward to the community’s help and feedback on making it even better.