Melotic exchange has announced it is closing down due to low demand and slow growth, Kim DotCom has been awarded US$96,000 monthly living expenses by a court room judge, CNET founder Halsey Minor wants to bring Bitcoin to India in a big way, and more top stories from May 4.
Melotic exchange closing down
Saying that it had not seen the growth and development of the exchange that it had hoped for, the team behind the Melotic exchange has announced it will be closing the platform down. The withdrawal function will remain on until May 15, after which any funds left on the exchange will be sent back to the wallet address they came from.
“After much deliberation, we at Melotic have decided to take the unfortunate step of winding down the digital asset exchange. Simply put, we did not experience enough growth in this product to justify the ongoing costs of development, maintenance, and support. However, we have exciting new products in development, and we will be focusing our resources on that.”
Kim Dotcom awarded US$96,000 monthly allowance
Facing giant legal bills and big rental costs for his New Zealand mansion, a judge in Kim Dotcom's extradition legal case has given the entrepreneur up to US$96,000 monthly living expenses from a large pot of Dotcom's money held by the government. Judge Patricia Courtney explained that:
“I have concluded that Mr Dotcom does not have the ability to meet his legal and reasonable living expenses from trust assets because, on the evidence, those assets are not sufficiently liquid.”
Lebanon launches techhub incubator
Seeking to boost their tech scene, Lebanon has been working with the UK to create a tech incubator and accelerator program in the Middle Eastern state. The “UK Lebanon Tech Hub” will be looking to help out new tech firms in the country, giving them access to assistance, direction and funds.
“The tech hub will act as an accelerator and mentoring hub for local startups, and falls under the BDL's Circular 331, a larger program announced in August 2013, aiming to help boost Lebanese startups by injecting some US$400m in equity funding.”
Founder of CNET wants to bring Bitreserve to India
Halsey Minor, the founder of previous internet hit CNET publishing, has said he wants to bring his new Bitcoin wallet offering to India. Having seen both success and failure in the 1990s dotcom bubble, Minor now sees a strong future in Bitcoin technology, and the market potential of the billion people living on the Indian subcontinent.
“Calling it the internet of money, Minor, who was in India recently to meet regulators, says banking is the last bastion that will get disrupted by technology. "After the US, UK and China, we want to now set up operations in India and we are talking to regulators and potential partners on a range of our internet-based finance offerings," he told TOI. He believes his brand will be operational in India before it takes off in the US.”
Bitcoin Suisse wants to set up its business in “new country” Liberland
Digital currency exchange and asset manager Bitcoin Suisse AG has announced plans to move some of its operation to the “free” country of Liberland. The small area of land on the Serbian Danube has been claimed by activists who say it is not owned by any country, and has picked Bitcoin to be its “national” currency.
“CEO of Bitcoin Suisse AG is involved in a Swiss group which intends to settle in Liberland. The president is trying to obtain official papers to sail in international waters to prevent being stopped by the Croatian police. More info/photo as soon as possible! #Liberland”
BitGo bug exposes user blockchain data
A flaw in the way BitGo has been generating its wallet addresses for change transactions means that it's been possible to identify wallets within Bitstamp, as it uses the BitGo security platform. At the time of publication BitGo has not yet fixed the issue.
“The heart of the problem is that BitGo does not randomly generate the order of change addresses in the output section of transactions, but instead generates the change address as the last output of each transaction. By identifying certain addresses as change addresses — specifically, addresses belonging to Bitstamp.”
Gavin Andresen proposes a block size increase to 20mb
Introducing new code into his own version of the blockchain's programming, core developer Gavin Andresen has proposed increasing the block size to 20mb. The increase in size in theory is enough for 140 transactions per second, but in reality will only around 60 transactions per second to take place on the blockchain and wouldn't come into effect until 2016.
“Hard fork: allow 20MB blocks after 1 March 2016. Allows any block with a timestamp on or after 1 March 2016 00:00:00 UTC to be up to 20,000,000 bytes big (serialized). I believe this is the simplest possible set of changes that will work.”
Bitcoin user creates secure treasure chest paper wallet printer
Working to solve the problem of how to print out a Bitcoin paper wallet without risking it being stolen or accidentally stored in the printer's memory, one Bitcoin user has made a secure standalone printer crafted into a treasure chest. The treasure stored inside the chest isn't gold though, it's a thermal printer connected to a Raspberry pi microcomputer, capable of generating private wallet keys.
“Piper wallet does exactly that with a raspberry pi and a cheap simple thermal printer. They sell their Piper wallet for $200 (or currently 0.25 BTC). Since they built their product with open source software I thought I’d build it myself for less. I did it for around 100 €”
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