Bitcoin wallet format

May 7, 2014
Filed under,

In 1998, a new kind of currency was discussed on internet blogs by tech visionaries Wei Dai, Satoshi Nakamoto and Nick Szabo: Bitcoin. This virtual currency quickly spread around the globe and became an entire business market online. But recently, Bitcoin has been hitting the headlines like it did when it first debuted, this time for disappearing websites and suicide mysteries.

The most appealing feature to users of Bitcoin was the anonymity feature; they could be used to purchase just about anything that allowed payment anonymously. There were several types of ways to acquire Bitcoins. One could go on an exchange marketplace, which allowed people to buy and sell Bitcoins using different currencies. Also, people could “mine” Bitcoins by solving math problems on a computer; this is one way in which Bitcoins were created. All Bitcoins were stored in a virtual “wallet, ” either on a cloud or a computer.

Some downsides accompanied the benefits of Bitcoin. Because of it’s anonymity, Bitcoin was a popular choice for drug and other illegal purchases online. It was practically impossible to trace back to a single person, so this allowed people to buy and sell just about anything, many on the dark website, “Silk Road.” Another con of using Bitcoins was that your money was never truly safe. Clouds have been hacked before and on a computer, the wallet can be easily deleted or viruses could destroy the wallet. Those were the risks you took when you decided to use Bitcoins as your currency.

Earlier this month, the Bitcoin market collapsed — wiping out this new “currency experiment.” Mt. Gox, the number one Bitcoin company, announced they had “lost three-hundred and fifty million in Bitcoins to hackers.” A few days before that, Mt. Gox had deleted all of its tweets and the CEO, Marx Karpeles, resigned from the Bitcoin Foundation Board of Directors. This dilemma sent Bitcoin users into a frenzy, leaving millions of dollars in investments at stake. Mt. Gox then had to file for bankruptcy protection. A Bitcoin CEO from Wisconsin, Autumn Radtke, was then found dead in her Singapore home. A suicide was suspected. It should be noted that Dorian S. Nakamoto, or Satoshi Nakamoto (a pseudonym for the creator), is a sixty-four-year-old Japanese-American man who Newsweek identified as the man behind it all. He denied all assertions and stated that he once worked for a defense contractor, but that was it. In the past week, $116 million dollars worth of Bitcoins was found at Mt. Gox in an old bitcoin wallet format. They claimed that they thought no Bitcoins were there.