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Paul Koster, Director of the Netherlands Stockholder’s Association (Vereniging van Effectenbezitters), went on a rant against Bitcoin in a January 15 article calling for the Central Bank to completely ban the cryptocurrency.

The European Union introduced legislation in November 2014 that implemented a new Value Added Tax (VAT) to virtual purchases.

The website DNAinfo ran a story on January 13 about a murder in NYC with the headline “Bitcoin Trader Accused of Murder.”

Perianne Boring is the president of the Digital Chamber of Commerce. The chamber will be hosting an Anti-Money Laundering Boot Camp at the North American Bitcoin Conference 2015 in Miami on January 16 and 17. Boring took time from her schedule to speak with Coinpectra about the boot camp and the importance of compliance with AML regulations for companies in the Bitcoin industry.

Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock, speaks with Coinpectra about the company’s new projects, including Medici and whether it will work with the Counterparty platform, how Wall Street and regulators are receiving the project, and how the old system has allowed financial predators to roam free.

BitMex, one of the world’s most advanced Bitcoin derivatives exchanges, recently announced the addition of a futures contract for Bitcoin. Now that the cryptocurrency’s value has fallen to below $300 for the first time in nearly two years, the expansion of trading alternatives could give Bitcoin the boost that it needs.

Coinbase has updated its User Agreement to allow the company, either directly or through third party intermediaries, to collect credit histories from its 1.9 million users.

Dish Network, rebranded as Dish, will unveil a new internet television service (IPTV) at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show.

Nubis Bruno, an Argentinian web developer, has designed a way to help organic farmers in his country sell their goods online using Bitcoin.

Coinpectra can reveal that reports of Bitreserve facing a trademark lawsuit because of its use of the name “Bitgold” are unfounded.

There has been a lot of news lately about websites and nodes that operate on the Tor network have been compromised by various governmental police agencies.

After nearly a year of investigations, Japanese police are saying that the missing Mt. Gox Bitcoin vanished due to someone with inside knowledge of the system.

The City of New York is following the same path as the state in trying to use regulation to push Bitcoin into obscurity. A Manhattan Community Board ruled that a Bitcoin decentralization block party would be refused permits.

Edward Snowden now accepts donations in Bitcoin for his legal defense fund.

Emin Gün Sirer, the Cornell professor who recently said that ChangeTip needed to die a quick death has returned to the offensive on the issue of privacy. ChangeTip CEO Nick Sullivan recently criticized Sirer´s statements saying that it felt “like a charity being yelled at”. What Sullivan did not do though was to explain how ChangeTip could even remotely be considered a “charity”.

The major cryptocurrency event, Inside Bitcoins, will be held next year in Singapore on January 29-30, 2015.

The Federal Reserve Bank in Washington, D.C. has issued a report entitled Bitcoin: Technical Background and Data Analysis. The recently released report, dated October 7, is a technical analysis of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin protocol. While mostly accurate, it contains a number of assumptions and self-serving statements suggesting that, despite a great deal of empirical research and terabytes of data, the Federal Reserve lacks a fundamental understanding of Bitcoin.

Coinbase has recently been demonstrating why consumer regulation is such a problem.

Politicians rarely think about the long-term implications of policy proposals and nowhere is this more evident than in the Russian Federation.

Most people have no idea how insecure their credit and debit cards are. Scary Fact: A child with an old-style VCR can use it to obtain the information stored on a bank card's magnetic strip. It is that easy to defraud both banks and banking customers. A recent report issued by Trend Micro outlines the problem in graphic detail.

Warren Buffet is one of the most well-known investors in world. He has been in the news a great deal over the last few years after he publicly criticized the wealthiest members of society for paying lower income tax rates than most people. In March of this year, Buffet came out as an opponent of Bitcoin, as revisited in a recent article in Business Insider.

Even if gold were becoming hard to find on Earth recent discoveries on the asteroid Eros indicate that there is more gold on that one small space rock, 20,000 times more, than is produced on Earth in a single year.

A new service plans to help students use Bitcoin to reduce their student debt by as much as 17%. Brawker, in combination with Tuition.io, is offering tuition gift cards to students.

Tor founder Roger Dingledine has reported today that some of the network specialized servers have been compromised.

Coins.ph has a new service that allows recipients to instantly withdraw money from a bank ATM.

The world of Bitcoin is coming to the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, sponsored by a huge partnership between BitPay, Circle, Kraken, Bitmain, Blockchain, Bitstamp, Private Internet Access, Robocoin, and yBitcoin. The world of Bitcoin show will feature ten different brands that are shaping the Bitcoin and virtual currency industries.

A student in the Netherlands, as part of a class project, may have found a way to prevent censorship of text messages by enlisting the aid of the Bitcoin blockchain.

The Conference of State Banking Supervisors (CSBS) recently released their “Draft Policy on State Virtual Currency Regulation.”

Whenever we do any type of business on the internet we receive a warning that our passwords will never be requested in an email. The reason for this is simple: Scammers often pose as legitimate businesses in phishing scams. While requests for passwords are unusual, they are not unknown and sometimes are necessary. Blockchain.info is an excellent example of this and the company has recently requested account passwords from many of its users.

Bitcoin has a large presence on and off, the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This makes sense when we consider that this is one of the finest technical colleges in the world. The University itself has not become directly involved in cryptocurrency in the past, but it seems that this is about to change. The fall semester will be offering “Computer Systems Security 6.858” and a few of the modules in the class are related to cryptocurrencies.