As discerning dark web drug dealers and pseudonymous hackers have figured that Bitcoin is not magically private money, many have turned to Monero, a digital coin that promises a far higher degree of anonymity and untraceability baked into its design.

But one group of researchers has found that Monero's privacy protections, while better than Bitcoin's, still aren’t the cloak of invisibility they might seem. Monero is designed to mix up any given Monero "coin" with other payments, so that anyone scouring Monero's blockchain can't link it to any particular identity or previous transaction from the same source. 

Internet paranoiacs drawn to bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency.

Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable — while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of bitcoin’s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order. It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. 

Purity is so hard to find. Everything is, in some way, tainted, even if you don't see it at first. This painful truth seems to have descended upon one of the purer minds in tech, that of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Speaking on Monday in New Delhi, India, at the Economic Times Global Business Summit, Woz explained that he was fascinated by the purity of cryptocurrency. "Bitcoin to me was a currency that was not manipulated by the governments. It is mathematical. It is pure. It can't be altered," he said. Ah, but it seems it can be stolen. "I had seven bitcoins stolen from me through fraud," he said. 

For almost two years, hackers could have easily stolen your prized stash of bitcoins if you were keeping them in the popular software wallet Electrum, thanks to a critical security vulnerability that went unpatched until now.

The vulnerability allowed any website to steal bitcoins stored using Electrum, as long as the software was running and there was no encryption password set up, according to security researchers. The bug was initially reported by Github user “jsmad” on November 24, 2017. Electrum, however, didn’t fully patch the bug until Sunday, January 7, and only after Google security researcher alerted them to how serious the bug really was. 

China plans to ban trading of bitcoin and other virtual currencies on domestic exchanges, dealing another blow to the $150 billion cryptocurrency market after the country outlawed initial coin offerings last week.

The ban will only apply to trading of cryptocurrencies on exchanges, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the information is private. Authorities don’t have plans to stop over-the-counter transactions, the people said. China’s central bank said it couldn’t immediately comment. Bitcoin slumped on Friday after Caixin magazine reported China’s plans, capping the virtual currency’s biggest weekly retreat in nearly two months. 

Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be largely anonymous. But a software tool gives the IRS has a better chance of identifying people who hide their wealth.

You can use bitcoin. But you can’t hide from the taxman. At least, that’s the hope of the Internal Revenue Service, which has purchased specialist software to track those using bitcoin, according to a contract obtained. The document highlights how law enforcement isn’t only concerned with criminals accumulating bitcoin from selling drugs or hacking targets, but also those who use the currency to hide wealth or avoid paying taxes. The IRS has claimed that only 802 people declared bitcoin losses or profits in 2015.

Bitcoin hit an all-time high Wednesday thanks to continued adoption in China and other parts of the world where traditional currencies are tightly controlled.

The digital currency, which just turned eight years old, reached $1,140.64, which was higher than the $1,137 it hit in November of 2013. In December, bitcoin also surpassed its previous all-time high in total market capitalization, which now exceeds $16.1 billion. The latest increase was driven by capital or currency restrictions in countries ranging from China to India and Venezuela, where people purchased bitcoin to protect their savings, as well as increased adoption by investors.

If you are fascinated with the idea of digital currency, then you might have heard about BlockChain.Info. It’s Down!

Yes, Blockchain.info, the world's most popular Bitcoin wallet and Block Explorer service, has been down from last few hours, and it's believed that a possible cyber attack has disrupted the site. With more than 8 million Digital Wallet customers, BlockChain is users' favorite destination to see recent transactions, stats on mined blocks and bitcoin economy charts. Until resolved, which may take next few hours, Blockchain.info digital wallet users would not be able to access their online accounts.

Now LeakedSource disclosed details from two Bitcoin data breaches that affected the bitcoin exchange BTC-E.com and the discussion forum Bitcointalk.org. The data breach notification service LeakedSource reported the data breach suffered by many IT services, including Last.fm and DropBox, both occurred in 2012.

The Bitcointalk hack is known. LeakedSource reported that user details were stolen in the incident, the leaked records include usernames, passwords, emails, birthdays, secret questions, hashed secret answers and some other internal data. Despite the LeakedSource’s notification, there is no news about incidents occurred to BTC-E customers.

Slovenia-based Bitcoin exchange portal Bitstamp is warning users of a Google Chrome extension that steals their Bitcoin when making a transfer.

The extension's name is BitcoinWisdom Ads Remover and is a Chrome extension that removes ads from the BitcoinWisdom.com, a website for consulting all kinds of Bitcoin-related statistics, all presented in easy-to-understand charts. According to Bitstamp, a website that lets users exchange Bitcoin for US dollars, this extension contains malicious code that is redirecting payments to its own Bitcoin address, instead of the one intended by the user making the transaction.