Search Results from Financial Cryptography
Bitcoin UK has done two podcasts on the cryptocurrency history before Bitcoin: E-gold, E-cash & the Banking Crash, and Bitcoin & a Little Bit of History Repeating? These podcasts were done at the same time as my rant as posted...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on April 22, 2014 09:00 AM
Before Bitcoin, there was cryptocurrency. Indeed, it has a long and deep history. If only for the lessons learnt, it is worth studying, and indeed, in my ABC of Bitcoin investing, I consider not knowing anything before the paper as...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on April 8, 2014 07:14 PM
How fast does an alternative payment system take to join the mainstream? With Paypal it was less than a year; when they discovered that the palm pilot users were preferring the website, the strategy switched pretty quickly. With goldmoney it...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on March 10, 2014 06:55 AM
This was a draft of an article now published in Bitcoin Magazine. That latter is somewhat larger, updated and has some additional imagery. MtGox, the Bitcoin exchange, is in the news again, this time for collapsing. One leaked report maintains...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on February 26, 2014 04:56 PM
Clive asks in comments a long time ago (apologies for late reply): any thoughts to VISA's extraodinarily abrupt behaviour over stopping all ePassport issued VISA cards? ( http://m.krebsonsecurity.com/2010/09/visa-blocks-epassporte/ ) Aside from the seamier side (which all financial systems attract) a...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on February 5, 2012 05:24 AM
As an example of good disclosure that we can use to analyse our risks on new attacks come from Symantec: Key points: Executables using the Stuxnet source code have been discovered. They appear to have been developed since the last...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on October 20, 2011 09:29 PM
Many people are asking me about BitCoin, and I've put off writing about it because I need to be clear on why I think it is not a long term player. Of course, I've been wrong before ... Anyway, it...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on June 11, 2011 07:57 AM
Chris Skinner talks about his surreal experience with a gold ATM: The idea is that you put cash in and get gold out. So nice. I plumped for the cheapest gold nugget priced at £100 and inserted my MasterCard....
Posted in Financial Cryptography on May 31, 2011 03:27 AM
(Lynn and RAH point to) an article on the sad declines of e-gold, which I was involved with in some sense back in the period 1998 to 2000. Bullion and Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold Following his...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on June 11, 2009 10:27 AM
If there was a post-of-the-month award, this would be it. Over on Digital Money, David Birch reports on how the banking world is waking up to the changing map: ... was [the panel's] position that technology is no longer an...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on February 16, 2009 06:42 AM
What's wrong with this picture, from an affidavit filed into a random Los Angeles court concerning divorce proceedings (his emphasis): "I personally maintain and control ALL access security codes and passwords. I have been and am the ONLY individual in...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on August 14, 2008 04:03 PM
Lynn picked it up: WASHINGTON, July 21 (UPI) -- An Internet digital currency business, E-Gold Ltd., and three principal directors, admitted to money-laundering charges, U.S. prosecutors said Monday. E-Gold and its corporate affiliate, Gold & Silver Reserve Inc., pleaded guilty...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on July 22, 2008 12:13 PM
What lies in store for us next year? More security gloom. There has to be a turn-around in process to make it stop going down, or fraud has to reach an economic limit or balance. Neither is yet in sight....
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 29, 2007 08:43 AM
So what happened in 2007? All doom and gloom, really. Here's a roundup of what I called the year of the platypus, for some mixed up reason to do with security in its own worse nightmare: Security went down, overall....
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 15, 2007 08:29 AM
Dani reports that WebMoney is now doing a DGC or gold based currency. This is big news for the gold community, as there is currently (I am told) a resurgance of interest in new gold issuers, perhaps on the expectation...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on August 8, 2007 10:52 AM
As mentioned, I advised e-gold on governance models way back when, and now we can see how the company deals with its relationship to the US government. Someone has posted a video over on YouTube of some 2006 testimony before...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on May 21, 2007 10:02 AM
As discussed earlier, the US government, in cases against e-gold and presumably yet-to-be-charged account holders, has apparently completed seizure of some part of the gold: In an unprecedented move on or just before Wednesday May 9th, 2007, the United States...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on May 11, 2007 10:34 AM
Someone pointed out that the indictment unsealed last week against e-gold, etc includes this clause: 78. As a result of the offenses alleged in Counts One and Three of this indictment, the defendants E-GOLD, LTD., GOLD & SILVER RESERVE, INC.,...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on May 4, 2007 07:54 AM
Ordinarily I wouldn't follow the course of a case in such detail, contenting to only pick out the big picture and the important messages for Financial Cryptography readers. However, because of the 'special circumstances' in the e-gold case, I'll post...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on April 30, 2007 05:08 PM
Bob Hettinga found and forwarded the press release from the Washington DC courts: A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. has indicted two companies operating a digital currency business and their owners on charges of money laundering, conspiracy, and operating...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on April 28, 2007 12:12 PM
The gold community is a-buzz with the news ... first an announcement from BullionVault (no URL): There have been growing stresses on our relationship with Brinks Inc, the US-owned vault operator, and it has become clear that they feel uncomfortable...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on April 28, 2007 11:15 AM
In our side project of collecting reported threat statistics, here's lots of them: MessageLabs, a company that counts spam, recently stopped counting bot-infected computers because it literally could not keep up. It says it quit when the figure passed about...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on April 1, 2007 04:51 PM
Somehow I ended up on Wikipedia's entry on phishing, and added a link from the AOL playtime era to its more modern incarnation of the rape & pillage of a financial district swollen with multi-nationals, conglomerates and fat, bloated merchant...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on February 23, 2007 03:27 PM
Some numbers from Guillaume Lovet on what it costs to gain control of an online bank account: The most straightforward is to buy the 'finished product'. In this case we'll use the example of an online bank account. The product...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on February 22, 2007 12:56 PM
What is to happen in the coming year? (Apologies for being behind on the routine end-of-year predictions, but I was AFI -- away from Internet -- and too depressed with predictions to make the journey. Still, duty calls!) More depression...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on January 10, 2007 01:27 PM
Dave Birch posts on telco operators in Britain and NFC -- near field communications. You should read the lot, but here's most of it as it's mostly FC: I think they are alluding to a tussle between service providers (eg,...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on September 13, 2006 05:52 AM
Dave Birch reports that money in virtual worlds is well past GP. The online security for World of Warcraft is a bad as it is for internet banking, and World of Warcraft has six million subscribers (more than many banks...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on May 7, 2006 06:19 AM
Journalist Roger Grimes did some research on trojans and came up with this: Even more disturbing is that most banks and regulatory officials don’t understand the new threat, and when presented with it, hesitate to offer anything but the same...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on May 5, 2006 05:55 PM
Having created the five parties model for digital governance, one of the things that has persisted is the difficulty in getting this implemented. Some DGCs have adopted it completely, more or less (goldmoney and Pecunix rise to mind), others only...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on April 16, 2006 11:06 AM
Bad news for Microsoft, but (other) browsers may breath a sigh of small relief. It seems that there is a shift from email-based phishing across to trojan hijacking. Predictable - as people gradually wake up to phishing, and as the...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on March 18, 2006 01:46 PM
Highlighting an order by Judge Collyer in the previous entry, we find her order duly signed: ORDER As agreed by the parties in open court on January 13, 2006, it is hereby ORDERED that Suntrust Account Number 1000..... and Regions...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on January 26, 2006 03:15 PM
The case against G&SR, operators of the e-gold payment system, has been filed in Washington DC courts. Here are some of the filings, apparently from the PACER system, which is a US Government site for court documents. Complaint Doc3 Doc4...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on January 26, 2006 12:20 PM
Often people expect your transaction systems to be scaleable, and fast and capable of performing prodigous feats. Usually these claims reduce down to "if you're not using my favourite widget" then you are somehow of minimal stature. But even when...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on January 18, 2006 10:45 AM
Daniel points to the arisal of 'Robot agents' to manage arbitration proceedings: "Robot agents digest all the information and make proposals to the parties. Once the arbitrator is agreed upon, the robot agent finds a suitable meeting date for everybody,"...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on January 9, 2006 10:49 AM
Troubles come in threes for e-gold, the gold payment system that dominates the field (by transactions if not reserves). On the 19th of December, the G&SR offices in Melbourne, Florida, were apparently raided by the FBI and US Secret Service....
Posted in Financial Cryptography on January 3, 2006 03:45 PM
Editor's note: Daniel Nagy translates an article on Paymer by N. Senchenko. This system is related to WebMoney, and emulates the "anyone can be an issuer" model. Written by Nikita Senchenko in Russian ("Анатомия Paymer" at http://owebmoney.ru/paymer.shtml), translated into English...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 31, 2005 02:34 PM
We would be remiss if we didn't also measure the theory of GP (GP1, GP2, GP3) against that old hobby horse, phishing. When ecommerce burst on the scene as an adjunct to browsing, it pretty quickly emerged as "taking credit...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 30, 2005 07:51 PM
e-gold rocketed to success in late 1999 in a classical exponential growth curve that took everyone by surprise. Why the mathematics of growth continue to shock and awe has never been explained to me, but when you've just taken a...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 26, 2005 07:57 PM
As the final part of this rant-in-four-parts, I'd like to leave you with a view that this is of relatively broad significance, if it works at all (previous parts: GP1, GP2, GP3). I attempt this by putting it in context...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 23, 2005 07:36 PM
Previously, we talked about the Growth and Fraud's GP which is the place where growth kicks off into a self-sustained value growth machine (Parts 1,2) . Then I made some remarks on how to instruct security strategy, which lead to...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 19, 2005 09:12 AM
In the closing weeks of 2005, we can now look back and see how the Snail slithered its way across the landscape. 1. Banks failed to understand phishing at any deep level. They failed in these ways: Pushing out websites...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 14, 2005 02:25 PM
Imagine if you will a successful FC system on the net. That means a system with value, practically, but for moment, keep close in your mind your favourite payments system. Success means solid growth, beyond some point of survival, into...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 11, 2005 03:21 PM
A while ago, Matt pointed me to several links in Wikipedia on "Project Cryptography", crypto topics1, topics2, digital signatures, etc etc. All could do with some updating, but that's the nature of Wikis, right? Which reminds me to check in...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on October 1, 2005 04:24 PM
Over on Cato, there is an article bemoaning the fate of Paypal: The company would no longer permit customers to use the service for purchases associated with "mature audiences," gambling, hate paraphernalia, or prescription drugs, along with a long list...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on August 28, 2005 08:36 AM
by Nikita Sechenko Translated from the Russian by Daniel Nagy There are two approaches to one's personal safety. The first one is difficult: never leave the iron plugged in, never smoke in bed, do not place the gas stove near...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on June 6, 2005 02:11 PM
An article in BusinessWeek documents the rise and fall of ShadowCrew, a community of crackers and traders. The story mirrors much of the net world and if you took away the bias and the element of crime, you could be...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on May 22, 2005 03:47 PM
Over on the CostaGold settlement blog (yep, class action is now done by blog!) there is news that the court has granted final approval for the settlement of the seized funds. This hopefully brings the sorry episode to a close,...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on January 30, 2005 09:48 AM
Everyone knew that OSGold was "probably a fraud." Now, writes Declan McCullogh their bank is being sued, and Judge Kaplan has said that the actions of the bank " tend to show conscious disregard or recklessness and give rise to...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on January 28, 2005 09:29 AM
Over on the Register they are reporting on a rebellion - they called it a strike - by eBay's users in Spain. Initially, this just seemed to be a bunch of grumbling spaniards, but the rebellion quickly spread to other...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on November 24, 2004 07:26 AM
In line with my last post about using payment systems to stupidly commit crimes, here's what's happening over in the hacker world. In brief, some thief is trying to sell some Cisco source code he has stolen, and decided to...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on November 5, 2004 11:38 AM
Hernando de Soto has done what I think is the most significant work in economics in the last decade. He has researched what makes people poor. Travelling many poor countries and looking at many impoverished economies, he believes he has...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on October 14, 2004 06:26 AM
Almost forgotten in the financial world, but e-gold, the innovative digital gold currency issuer based in Florida, USA (and nominally in Nevis, East Caribbean), was one of the biggest early targets for phishing [1]. Because of their hard money policy,...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on July 31, 2004 12:19 PM
I must have written a hundred times that privacy enhancing payments are only private to a degree. From eCash to Ricardo to e-gold to PayPal to greenbacks to ... well, all of them can be tracked somewhat. They help protect...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on July 13, 2004 11:03 AM
Goldmoney's newly released bar count shows, as predicted, that it has now overtaken e-gold as the largest issuer of gold currency. Last quarter growth was 42%, and as e-gold have been flat or declining for many years now, goldmoney's future...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on July 2, 2004 02:53 PM
G&SR/e-gold, an issuer of digital gold currencies, faces a new tax from the Florida state within which it has located its network operations [1]. (Or, an old tax, newly applied?) It's hard to see the logic of this one, but...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on June 27, 2004 06:43 AM
Craig Spencer has created a live fee revenue calculation page for e-gold. This is the sort of analysis we need for the next stage of maturityfor DGCs: taking the live data feeds of the major parties, and extracting the business...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on June 25, 2004 02:45 PM
The following email from spammers & scammers indicates that the view of e-gold and Paypal is about the same - a round 400k each of addresses. I don't believe that there are that many e-gold active users out there, but...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on April 15, 2004 04:46 PM
Goldmoney, a DGC with strong governance and strong growth, announced it had reached a metric tonne in mass of gold in accounts. That's about $13.2m worth, or about €10.3m at today's spot prices. It also announced 10,000 customers in 100...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on February 11, 2004 04:43 PM
News reports from a couple of weeks back indicate that a worm called Dumaru-Y installs a keylogger that listens for e-gold password and account numbers. ZDNet .. VNUNet .. TechTarget This is significant in that this might be the first...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on February 9, 2004 08:57 PM
Another sign of the increasing maturity of the DGC ("Digital Gold Currency") sector is in this article over on the Gold Economy blog/news site. The hallmark of a mature sector - independent analysis of the things the Issuers would rather...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on January 18, 2004 09:44 AM
Invisiblog - anonymous weblog publishing File-Exchange - File dump and public key retrieval mechanism XCA Workshop on Electronic Contracting (WEC) Digital Money Forum (DM7) Financial Cryptography '04 Financial Cryptography Payments Events Circuit OpenMoney GoldMoney Pecunix eBullion 1mdc e-gold PayPal May...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on December 30, 2003 06:32 PM
Issuance has been at the core of FC since the time dot. It's either the entire 6th layer - which I called Value - or it is an application in its own right. Finance - the 7th layer, of applications...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on October 14, 2003 02:26 PM
Trust is a funny thing. It's hard to pinpoint. One can say easily that one trusts someone, but less easily why. Trust could be considered to be an expectation that some predicted event will come to pass. Put that way,...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on October 12, 2003 01:32 PM
Merchants who *really* rely on their web site being secure are those that take instructions for the delivery of value over them. It's a given that they have to work very hard to secure their websites, and it is instructive...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on October 3, 2003 12:20 PM
Peppercoin, a venture by Ron Rivest and Silvio Micali to monetarise certain token money ideas based on statistical settlement, raised some money ($4 million on top of $1.7 million). This is a standard crypto-hype-venture capital-DRM play. The crypto is cool,...
Posted in Financial Cryptography on September 24, 2003 01:08 PM