Bitcoin News Round-up.

A lot has been going on in the Bitcoin world lately, so let’s recap, review , and organize this for you.

Satoshi Nakamoto has been found! Or has he?

Newsweek may have jumped the gun on their story last week. Reporter Leah McGrath Goodman claimed to have found the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.  She claims to have tracked him down to his home just outside of Los Angeles California. Living a humble life in relative solitude, Dorian S. Nakamoto, is this years target. Although the answers given by Dorian Nakamoto leave very little certainty to her claim it was published nonetheless.  Many attempts to put a face to the digital currency have been made since the release of the “Nakamoto Whitepaper” in 2008, all of which have been debunked. This Nakamoto lives a life very much unlike what you would think of someone who holds $400 Million in Bitcoin. This may have been just another attempt to unmask the ghost that is Nakamoto. As the story made its viral way around the internet something very strange happened, Satoshi’s account on the P2P Foundation website where he had introduced the world to Bitcoin, his account has been inactive for years, suddenly there appears this message, “ I am NOT Dorian S. Nakamoto.”

Mt. Gox Implosion.

The largest Bitcoin holding and trading company has vanished long with about 850,000 Bitcoins, worth roughly $474 million. The closing of Mt. Gox is a result of security breaches, bugs, and transaction malleability. It is unknown what has been done with the remaining Bitcoins held by Mt. Gox.  In its wake the US and Japanese governments have started to move on the regulation and taxation of the currency and its profits. Senator Joe Manchin [D] WV has called for the regulation of Bitcoin, and The Federal Reserve has answered. In one of her first acts being the new chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen gave this as her response to Sen. Manchin, “Bitcoin is a payment innovation that’s taking place outside the banking industry. To the best of my knowledge there’s no intersection at all, in any way, between Bitcoin and banks that the Federal Reserve has the ability to supervise and regulate. So the Fed doesn’t have authority to supervise or regulate Bitcoin in anyway,”

Greg Simon, Founding member of The Bitcoin Financial Association says this, “Mt. Gox was a private corporation that was offering financial services, mainly related to bitcoin. The management of that corporation has lost or stolen approximately $400 million worth of client funds.Those funds were in fiat currency and in bitcoin. Bitcoin the protocol did not steal it. Bitcoin itself did not disappear. Management of a corporation lost or stole it.”

This sudden closing has also taken to the internet forums and every financial magazine, website and show has blasted the company as well as the currency itself. Many people feel that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme and a mal-investment, and I wouldn’t wholeheartedly disagree with them, though I don’t wholeheartedly agree with them either. Bitcoin is a currency, and like any other currency it is merely a tool for the transferability of wealth and the attainment of goods and services.

Mr. Simon also states, “The problem is not the integrity of digital bitcoin or digital US dollars or digital whatever currency. The problem is the need to centralize trust into humans. Humans are corruptible with power. When we centralize trust and control into humans that creates a risk, a single point of failure in the system. The single point of failure in the case of Mt. Gox was humans.”

And then there is the Suicide…

On February 28th 28-year-old Autumn Radtke, chief executive of First Meta, a Singapore-based virtual-currency exchange, was found dead in her home, a suspected suicide. As yet, nobody knows if her death was related to her business. This is a huge loss for her family, The First Meta Company as well as the entire Bitcoin community.

“Prior to taking the reins at First Meta in 2012, the 28-year-old Radtke had once closely worked with technology giant Apple to bring cloud-computing software to Johns Hopkins University, Los Alamos Labs and the Aerospace Corp., according to her biography. She then took up business development roles at tech start-ups Xfire and Geodelic Systems, according to information on her LinkedIn profile.” Says Javier E. David for CNBC online.

First Meta  “provides a safe & sanctioned place to bring all your virtual assets online or on your mobile devices, enabling you to organize, manage, and easily cash out your virtual assets” according to their website.