Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin Harvard graduates who famously sparred with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and are now working as tech investors through Winklevoss Capital, are part of the growing group of venture capitalists who have taken a keen interest in Bitcoins. Last month, it was revealed that they personally own roughly one percent of the currency, a stake worth the… → Read More
Bitcoin exchange service Mt. Gox is experiencing some issues with U.S. authorities. The Department of Homeland Security issued a seizure warrant to Dwolla for the money in Mt. Gox’s Dwolla account. Mt. Gox users can’t use Dwolla as a funding option anymore even though it was one of the most popular options. The Japanese startup failed to register in the U.S. as a money transmitting… → Read More
BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in what is a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPal Mafia. → Read More
As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — without relying on his family name to do so. After taking the plunge as an entrepreneur himself, co-founding… → Read More
Bitcoins are nominally worth $113 as of this very moment. That means very little in the real world. As Forbes writer Kasmir Hill notes, it’s pretty difficult to go up to the McDonald’s cashier and offer an invisible cryptocurrency that resides entirely on the Internet in exchange for a Big Mac. She’s survived a week using nothing but Bitcoins and, although she’s still alive, her experience wasn’t… → Read More
If you’re sitting on a bunch of bitcoins that are burning a hole in your digital wallet, you now have another way to spend them. Today, mobile gift card company Gyft has partnered with BitPay to start accepting bitcoin within its app. → Read More
What do digital payments companies make of Bitcoin? Here at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, a digital money panel featuring PayPal, Stripe and Gumroad gave its thoughts on the currency that has VCs emptying their bank accounts to invest afresh. → Read More
Chris Dixon joined our co-editor Eric Eldon this morning at Disrupt NY 2013 to discuss his move out to San Francisco for a job at Andreessen Horowitz. One of the areas that interests him the most is the much-hyped Bitcoin space. The reason why Dixon is so interested is because it solves many problems for those who have tried to start a financial company in the past. He said: “There’s… → Read More
Joey DeVilla was (and still is) one of my favorite bloggers. Calling himself the Accordion Guy, Joey has been writing cool stuff for most of this decade, and he recently hopped on the bitcoin train by posting a long how-to in the vein of my own guide to mining. His is quite thorough in his process, but it sets an old HP all-in-one to the task, which resulting in very slow mining speeds and, as a… → Read More
There isn’t just a bubble in the Bitcoin economy, there’s a bubble in the number of posts about Bitcoin. I’ll pile on, even after this week’s mini-crash, but with a twist. A few weeks ago, I wrote some brief notes on what I thought about Bitcoin, but the over-arching feeling I had was that I couldn’t put my finger on what could become of this currency in the future. Perhaps that’s part of the… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — spared no expense to bring you the finest in up-to-date tech commentary. In other words, we tore into Twitter Music, ignored Facebook Home, dissected the internals of AirPlay, and cashed our Bitcoin checks. Our attention is a zero sum game, and whether it’s West Wing or Twitter pointers into the musicsphere… → Read More
A few months ago, while visiting a hacker friend’s magnificent new San Francisco loft, he gestured to a little alcove stuffed with server racks and said: “And over there are the Bitcoin mines.” I smiled and nodded, thinking, Oh, right, Bitcoin. Is that still a thing?
Andy, if you’re reading this, I apologize. Is it ever, and how. Over the last few weeks the hype around everyone’s favorite… → Read More
Another day, another Bitcoin-related investment, and further affirmation that VCs are hungry to invest in the ecosystem surrounding the decentralized digital currency. Today, OpenCoin, better known as the developer of open source payment protocol, Ripple, announced that it has raised an undisclosed angel round from Andreessen Horowitz, FF Angel, Lightspeed Venture Parnters, Vast Ventures and … → Read More
The price of freedom, as they say, is eternal vigilance. A user called bitbully on the Bitcointalk Forums found himself 34 bitcoins poorer when he visited a site claiming to be a chat service connected with Mt. Gox, a popular bitcoin trading service. The site, wwwdotmtg(this is an o)x-ch(this is an a)tdotinfo (do not visit this site), apparently places a cross-site transfer order on the victim’s… → Read More
The Bitcoin correction we wrote about yesterday was not caused by a DDOS attack on one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, Mt.Gox, but rather by a massive spike in interest in the crypto currency, according to Mt.Gox. During trading yesterday the value of Bitcoin plummet by 60%, dropping from a high of $265 to around $150 (it has since climbed back up slightly, to around $180). → Read More
Bitcoin is undergoing a classic correction after quintupling in price over the past 30 days. The currency, which was trading as high as $265 earlier today on Mt. Gox, plummeted and is now trading at around $150. We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what happened. But another San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill is saying that the crypto-currency is… → Read More
Today, Coinsetter, a New York City-based startup looking to launch a new Forex trading platform for Bitcoin, announced today that it has raised $500,000 in seed capital. The round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners and SecondMarket founder and CEO Barry Silbert (through his Bitcoin Opportunity Fund), with participation from angel investors like Jimmy Furland, a London-based technology… → Read More
Mining bitcoins – a process that helps manage bitcoin transactions as well as create new “wealth” – is the new Beanie Babies. Luckily for us, however, bitcoins seem to be going up in value and should maintain their value over time, unlike your mint condition Tiny the stuffed Chihuahua. But how do you get bitcoins? You can begin by buying them outright, but the market is… → Read More
A commentator on Bloomberg, Princeton student Evan Soltas, writes that Bitcoin is an “existential threat to the modern liberal state,” a line that can be read in two ways. One reading of his op-ed suggests we are all in danger and that the inability to tax and track bitcoins will result in a thriving black market and reduced fiscal control that will be disastrous for all of us. Taken another way … → Read More
Editor’s note: Jeremy Liew is a managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
As a VC, my interest in the Bitcoin ecosystem is not ideological but, rather, mercenary. I see the opportunity for Bitcoin to disrupt multi-billion dollar markets, but in doing so also create new big markets. There are three key markets in Bitcoin. → Read More
9flats, which operates a short rentals marketplace similar to and competing with Airbnb, has flicked the switch on Bitcoin support. The Berlin-headquartered startup now accepts Bitcoin payment, alongside its existing support for various credits cards and PayPal. → Read More
Hang around in the tech industry long enough and you or someone you know will be heard saying, “that’s so crazy it just might work.” Two years ago, if you’d have told me that an open-source, P2P currency would soon be a thriving, billion-dollar market, I would’ve told you that you were on a lonely bus headed to CrazyTown, U.S.A. But today, Bitcoin officially became a crazy idea that’s actually… → Read More
Expensify is now supporting Bitcoin to give international contractors an alternative to Paypal and the high fees associated with the service. → Read More
A Bitcoin brokerage, Bitinstant was hit by hackers who used a bit of social engineering to take control of the company’s DNS servers and ultimately funnel out $12,000 worth of Bitcoins. → Read More
Bitcoin is the “underground” digital money system that’s fueling growth and disruption in the online payment space. Coinbase is a “bitcoin wallet and platform” that lets merchants and consumers make transactions easily using bitcoin. → Read More
While the question remains whether or not you should be eating Domino’s pizza at all, a clever service now allows you to pay for your pie with Bitcoins. The service is far from an official Domino’s app and is instead a gateway or broker between the world of pizza and the world of popular virtual currencies. → Read More
Bitcoin, a heavily underground peer-to-peer payment solution, is starting to peek its head above ground. Today, a payment solutions company called BitPay has announced $510K in investment, led by Shakil Khan, Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland and Roger Ver. Put simply, BitPay feels like it is positioned to become the equivalent to PayPal for the virtual currency payment processor rival, Bitcoin. I… → Read More
After some prominent press (and some prominent naysaying), Bitcoin has suffered a bit of a crash, falling from a high in the twenties to about of $3 USD today. Interestingly, however, the intensity with which users, experimenters, and entrepreneurs are still supporting what could best be termed a movement has not waned.
The money to be made in this space is in the creation of an intelligent… → Read More
You’ve probably by now heard about Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer digital currency based on Satoshi Nakamoto’s infamous self-published essay, that is either a giant scam, a genius and innovative new frontier, or nothing new — depending on whom you ask.
For those unfamiliar, TechCrunch contributor Jon Evans best described it succinctly thus: “Bitcoin is an anonymous online currency whose… → Read More
It seems that Bitcoin is experiencing the same fits and starts that any new currency undergoes early in its history. Though Bitcoin is 2 years old, the mainstream press discovered it much more recently, and since then, Bitcoin has experienced some schizophrenic volatility — you can read Jon Evans’ recent diagnosis here.
Yet, absent from Evans’ post is the very latest news out of the virtual… → Read More
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