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A new service is offering people bitcoins for old smartphones. Traade will pay for phones in the Ecoin and will then recycle them.

The Canada Revenue Agency has laid out two different bitcoin tax rules, covering transactions made for goods or services, and for profits made with trades.

Every day, more businesses add bitcoin as an option for payment. Here are profiles of 10 businesses, online and off, that have adopted bitcoin for payments.

The feathercoin cryptocurrency, which uses a mining technique similar to litecoin's, is enjoying a rapid adoption among Ecoin fans.

Wallet and block exploring service Blockchain.info has upgraded its security, apparently in response to a phishing campaign.

Take it as a sign of bitcoin’s growing mainstream visibility: other alternative currencies are being branded with the label the “anti-bitcoin.” Writing in FT Alphaville, Joseph Cotterill last week featured a link to a post by Barnard College economics professor Rajiv Sethi about a local currency project in the US called Macon Money. Along with […]

A number of Canadian bitcoin exchanges are running into regulatory challenges, as the country’s big banks move to close their accounts, in many cases without explanation. Earlier this month, the Royal Bank of Canada closed the accounts of Calgary-based VirtEx as well as Canadian Bitcoins, an Ottawa-based bitcoin exchange.  Canadian Bitcoins has also had its […]

A group of US filmmakers is using bitcoin to crowdfund its documentary on the rise of the virtual currency. “The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin,” about a computer programmer obsessed with the virtual currency, explores the competitive mining market and the startups involved in the bitcoin community. The movie is being produced by 44th Floor […]

Bitcoin took an important step closer to broader consumer adoption last week, when it became supported by the HTML 5 standard. This means one-click support for bitcoin payments could make its way into popular browsers before long. HTML is the language used to describe what a webpage looks like to a web browser. Version 5, […]

In the wake of reports linking the closure of several bitcoin exchanges with recently released guidance by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), CoinDesk spoke with Bitcoin Foundation general counsel Patrick Murck about the impact of the FinCEN regulations. (Murck is also a principal and founder of Engage Legal, with expertise in legal and regulatory […]

European bitcoin exchange Bitcoin Central has suspended its service temporarily, after it was hacked last week. Bitcoin Central’s website said a few hundred bitcoins had been stolen from a hot wallet after an intruder managed to reset the password for its hosting provider’s web interface, locking the exchange out of its own site. The attacker […]

Forget price volatility and hacker attacks. The biggest threat to bitcoin’s future – at least in the United States – could be the little-known Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Writing in American Banker, Ecoins researcher and Bitcoin Foundation board member Jon Matonis describes how at least three US exchanges that trade bitcoins have shut down […]

Tyler Moore, a computer scientist at Southern Methodist University, discusses research he conducted with Nicolas Christin that found a high risk of failure among bitcoin exchanges. (Click here to read more about the study.)

If the Cyprus bank “haircuts” are inspiring savers to take a new interest in bitcoin, the Marketplace Fairness Act could do the same for online retailers. The proposal, currently working its way through the US Senate, would require web-based businesses to collect sales taxes from online customers based on the jurisdictions in which they live. […]

The president of PayPal says he’s intrigued by bitcoin and is thinking about adding the digital currency as a funding instrument for the popular online payments processor. “I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at it (bitcoin), and it’s truly fascinating the way the currency has been designed … ,” David Marcus said in […]

Who’s your average bitcoin user? Chances are he’s young, male, geeky and smart. That’s according to demographic research from Quantcast, which measures the habits of digital media audiences online. Quantcast tracks 100 million websites around the world that have been tagged by their owners. It tracks behavior over time using cookies, and infers demographic information […]

If a Canadian entrepreneur has his way, we could soon see the bitcoin equivalent of a cash machine gracing our shopping malls. Jeff Berwick plans to install a bitcoin ATM in San Diego early next month. The machine will be similar to a regular ATM, but instead of simply dispensing money from a bank account, it […]

Investing in bitcoins can be risky. So it’s probably not surprising that starting a bitcoin currency exchange is risky too. Online bitcoin exchanges have a failure rate of 45 percent, with customer balances often wiped out, a new study has found. “Bitcoin is expressly designed to be completely decentralized with no single points of control,” […]

A growing number of peer-to-peer file-sharing sites — among them the notorious The Pirate Bay — is starting to accept bitcoin donations from their users. The main page of The Pirate Bay’s website now lists a bitcoin address, presumably for donations. OpenBitTorrent has also joined the party, as has PublicBitTorrent. Istole.it  also features a bitcoin […]

Bitcoin’s value is likely to remain volatile, which will limit the digital currency’s usefulness, according to a select group of economics professors across the US. The IGM Economic Experts Panel — 38 academics from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of California-Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — tackles a […]

A much-hyped distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on several bitcoin exchanges failed to materialize this week. A post (since deleted) on the text-sharing site Pastebin.com over the weekend had promised a massive attack on the bitcoin infrastructure for Monday, April 22. The stated goal was to bring the price of bitcoin down to $30 […]

Bitcoinfilm.org has released its first short documentary: a look at the bitcoin market in Argentina, where currency controls and inflation running in the double-digits has been hitting would-be savers hard. “There is much potential in bitcoins and too few people know about it,” the Bitcoinfilm.org website states. “We want to make several small documentaries and […]

The ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) wars are heating up. Butterfly Labs — the US-based company that has been promising a low-powered, low-cost ASIC mining rig for months now — has finally shipped one to a US blogger and bitcoin specialist. David Perry, who owns the technology blog Coding in My Sleep, took delivery of a […]

Bitcoin isn’t the only alternative currency enjoying some momentum and buzz these days. BizX, an 11-year-old company that provides a trading mechanism for its BizX dollars, just scored $700,000 in Series A funding from angel investors … its first outside investment ever. Based in Bellevue, Washington, the company is different from bitcoin in that its […]