Free Republic

@RepThomasMassie speaks out on the cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on Ross Ulbricht by the criminal justice system. Join Rep. Massie and more than 370,000 people demanding clemency from @realDonaldTrum at http://freeross.org. Watch this Video...

A major bitcoin investor has suddenly died, leaving behind a cryptocurrency fortune reportedly worth more than $2 billion. Mircea Popescu, a Romanian national, drowned last week off the coast of Costa Rica, local reports said. He was 41. Popescu drowned at Playa Hermosa, according to Teletica.com, which reported that Popescu was swept away by the current and died. His death has prompted questions surrounding what will now happen to Popescu's enormous bitcoin fortune. Popescu, a controversial figure sometimes referred to as "the father of bitcoin toxicity," is known for launching a "bitcoin securities exchange" called MPEx in 2012, according to...

As federal authorities crack down on the far right after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the movement’s leaders have found new sources of suspicion: each other.In the Trumpist “America First” movement and the far-right paramilitary group the Proud Boys, alliances are fracturing as extremists brand each other as potential informants. Now racist live-streamers are accusing their former comrades of attempting to turn over followers to law enforcement, while Proud Boys chapters are splintering from the national organization over similar fears.Proud Boys Dealt Another Blow as Feds Crack DownUntil the FBI started closing in, white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Patrick Casey...

… on Monday the eccentric millionaire was arrested – this time for real – in Spain, where he is awaiting extradition to the US after he was charged with tax evasion by federal prosecutors who allege McAfee hid cryptocurrency, a yacht, and real estate as part of a conspiracy to evade taxes, which he forgot to pay from 2014 to 2018. At the same time the SEC also charged the former programmer for promoting investments in initial coin offerings (ICOs) to his Twitter followers without disclosing that he was paid to do so. McAfee’s bodyguard, Jimmy Watson, Jr., was also...

December, 2017. I'm late to the game, I know. I set up an account on Coinbase.com. $100.00 to start. January, 2018. Another $100.00 transferred in to Bitcoin. Total in is $200.00 January, 2019. My Portfolio Value is $40.90.

A high-profile Moscow economist has reportedly said the Russian government is looking to invest in Bitcoin next month. Australian crypto news website micky.com claims to have spoken with Vladislav Ginko, a lecturer at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. “US sanctions may be mitigated only through Bitcoin use,” the site quoted Ginko as saying. “I believe that the Russia [government] will start diversifying its reserves with Bitcoin in February this year when US Congress will introduce… new sanctions against Russia,” he reportedly said. Ginko estimated that the first wave of Russian investment in crypto...

Has the NSA just been hacked? Security experts speaking with FORBES think it’s possible, after a group published malware and attack code allegedly belonging to the Equation Group, a crew linked to the US intelligence agency. But while many believe the leak looks legitimate, the hackers could have pulled off a very clever ruse. --- Two days ago, on August 13, a group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers released files on Github, claiming they came from the Equation Group. The files included code allegedly designed to exploit firewalls from American manufacturers Cisco, Juniper and Fortinet . One Chinese company, Topsec,...

Sweden seemed to be at the forefront of the newest globalist scheme digital money v. cash, advocating a cashless global economy with a one-world currency. A CBS World News article reported in 2012 that a small number of businesses in Sweden accepted only credit cards, including some churches, even though elderly people prefer cash, especially in rural areas. Bjorn Ulvaeus, a former rocker, stated that cash encourages theft, citing his own son who was the victim of armed robbery three times. Cheating and cash theft may have declined in Sweden but cybercrime around the world is indisputably on the rise....

Two former federal agents accused of stealing bitcoins have been charged with wire fraud, money laundering and related offenses, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement. Carl Force, a former special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Shaun Bridges, a former Secret Service special agent, were both part of a Baltimore task force investigating Silk Road, the online marketplace often labeled the eBay of the drug trade. Force was given the task of establishing communications with Ross Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts," the San Francisco man who has been linked to Silk Road. Ulbricht was convicted last month...

providers of its core computing infrastructure to shut down operations. The selloff, which appears to have been exacerbated when Asian traders were forced to meet collateral demands under margin trading rules, left bitcoin down 14.49% at $194.04 in the late New York morning Wednesday, following a 15.02% plunge Tuesday, according to news service Coindesk. The digital currency is now down 39% from Dec. 31 alone and is off 83% from the all-time high of $1,165 that it hit at the end of a furious rally in November 2013. ... On Monday, CEX.io, a company that mines bitcoins on behalf of...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Spanish intelligence has intercepted messages passed between jihadists online discussing the weaponisation of the deadly Ebola virus for use against the West, while a blackmailer in Prague has threatened to unleash the virus unless the Czech Republic pay him one million bitcoin, a volume of online currency worth over £200 million. The national secretary of state for security in giving evidence to the Spanish Senate revealed online jihad propagandists had issued an edict to followers to kill Westerners by any means possible. Some of the methods suggested included “deadly chemical products from laboratories”, “poisonous injections” and “Ebola as a poisonous...

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) is the outsider's outsider — what other Texan would spend a freezing New Year's hundreds of miles away in New York City? But there he was last night at the launch event for the NYC Bitcoin Center, located just up the street from the New York Stock Exchange. Stockman's attendance was a favor to Center founder Nick Spanos, a real estate developer and Bitcoin enthusiast. Spanos helped phone bank on Stockman's most recent Congressional campaign. The Center itself is still in something of a planning stage, existing more as a statement about Bitcoin itself, though it...

China’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, BTCChina, has stopped accepting deposits in Chinese yuan. The shutdown has sent the currency into a downward spin, stripping it of half its value overnight. It is trading at $572 on Mt.Gox, down from a high of about $1,200 last week.

There are conflicting stories among Bitcoins’ supporters about why a Japanese programmer or team of Japanese programmers, who are known by a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, developed the original idea for the Bitcoins software. The primary justification for Bitcoins among libertarians is the prediction that Bitcoins will become an alternative currency to all existing central bank currencies. Bitcoins are seen as a first-stage revolt against central bank money. In this essay, I’m going to make a series of arguments. I’m going to tell you in advance what my arguments are. You can then judge whether or not I have been successful...

Political organizations can't accept contributions in the form of bitcoins, at least for now, The Federal Election Commission said Thursday. The commission passed on a request by the Conservative Action Fund, a political action committee, to use the digital currency. That group had asked the FEC recently whether it could accept bitcoins, how it could spend them and how donors must report those contributions. It was not immediately clear whether the same ruling would apply to individual political candidates. Bitcoin is a cybercurrency that is relatively anonymous and is created and exchanged independently of any government or bank. Some retailers...

As Bitcoin becomes an increasingly popular form of digital cash, the cryptocurrency is being accepted in exchange for everything from socks to sushi to heroin. If one anarchist has his way, it’ll soon be used to buy murder, too. Last month I received an encrypted email from someone calling himself by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who pointed me towards his recent creation: The website Assassination Market, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official–a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. According to Assassination Market’s rules, if someone on its...

Last week, bitcoin payment processor BitPay announced a deal with Gyft, a seven-month-old Google Ventures-backed software app that lets users buy and upload retail gift cards to Android-based smartphones. The partnership will allow customers to use bitcoins to buy gift cards for stores such as Gap (GPS, Fortune 500), Lowe's (LOW, Fortune 500), Sephora, GameStop (GME, Fortune 500), Burger King (BKW) and over 200 other retailers. While those stores won't handle the bitcoin transactions themselves -- that's done by Gyft and BitPay -- it brings the number of locations where customers can effectively pay with bitcoins from around 8,000 nationwide...

An anonymous individual or group claims to have obtained "all available" tax returns associated with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The alleged hackers claim to have accessed them via computers in the Franklin, Tenn., office of professional services firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. An anonymous posting on a file sharing website claims PwC was hacked; the same site has been used to boast of other high-profile corporate hacks. How'd they pull it off, allegedly? The posting states: "[Romney's tax returns] were taken from the PWC office 8/25/2012 by gaining access to the third floor via a gentleman working on the 3rd floor of...

Bitcoin is a type of "virtual currency" developed by an Opensource organization. Using them requires downloading some software and synchronizing the databases, a very lengthy process, taking perhaps a day or more. AFAIK from what I read, when Bitcoin was started, the "value" of a bitcoin was about 5 cents. Current quotes for the value of a bitcoin come in at around $135 USD. So I am intensely curious to know if any FReepers have ever successfully acquired a wallet, synchronized their DB's, and started acquiring/earning/spending bitcoins!