Dish Network announced its intention to become the biggest company to start accepting bitcoins. Andreas Antonopoulos published a Bitcoin beginner’s guide on Boing Boing. Coinsetter is adding new features for customers and app developers. And Erik Voorhees of SatoshiDice has settled with the SEC over unregistered securities trading.

Welcome to this Bitcoin Weekly. Read on to find these news bits and more.

Dish Network joins other businesses in accepting Bitcoin

Dish Network announced on Thursday that customers would be able to make manual bitcoin payments by the third quarter of this year. With over 14 million subscribers, the direct-broadcast satellite TV service provider will become the largest company to accept the virtual currency.

“We don’t know what the demand will be, exactly,” Bernie Han, Dish’s chief operating officer, said in an interview with the New York Times. “It might be tiny. It might be bigger than tiny. It’s probably growing.”

Dish is teaming up with Coinbase as bitcoin payment processor. Placing Dish Networks alongside Overstock.com, who joined Coinbase for BTC processing in January, and the San Jose Earthquakes who went with Coinbase for their new stadium.

Worth reading: “A beginner’s guide to Bitcoin”

In an article published at popular media blog Boing Boing, Andreas Antonopoulos, well-known Bitcoin entrepreneur and Chief Security Officer of Blockchain, discusses the basic ins-and-outs of Bitcoin.

In the article he answers a series of questions that a beginner might ask. These questions include “How does bitcoin work?”, “I don’t own any bitcoin. How do I get some?”, “Where do I keep my bitcoin?”, “How do I spend bitcoin?”

The answers are nothing new to Bitcoin veterans, but the information he provides is a solid refresher. For newbies it’s okay. He uses simple, direct language, provides resources and explanations, and, of course, pimps out Blockchain. However, Antonopoulos’s language is worded for the tech-savvy and much of that direct language is filled with computer and networking jargon. He does a reasonable job of defining much of the jargon, but it could be a turn-off for outright beginners.

Read “A beginner’s guide to Bitcoin” by Andreas Antonopoulos.

Coinsetter releases a stable of new features

The high performance Bitcoin forex, Coinsetter, is working on making new features available to customers.

Customers logging into trade pages will be presented with news alerts and other useful trading information. More charts are accessible even for users not logged into accounts. And the exchange has announced an updated withdrawal system that “substantially reduces the time it takes for Coinsetter to process your bitcoin withdrawals from secure cold storage.”

For developers, Coinsetter is adding APIs for developers to hook into the exchange’s data. A streaming Websockets API will allow web and mobile apps to monitor quotes and trade executions in real time. It’s also possible to get up to 500 ticks of historical information from the API using the “lookback” parameter for compiling trends. The Websockets APIs have been added alongside RESTful APIs and rely on a whitelist. More information is available on Coinsetter’s API documentation page.

Coinsetter arrived when the market was well-saturated with Bitcoin exchanges, but before MtGox tumbled from its perch. It took the exchange a few months to launch after its initial announcement but hasn’t made many waves since.

Erik Voorhees of SatoshiDice settles with the SEC over securities trading

MarketWatch reports that the Securities and Exchanges Commission charged Erik Voorhees, co-founder of Coinapult and founder of Bitcoin gambling website SatoshiDice, with offering shares in bitcoin-related websites without registering them. This is in violation of federal securities laws.

The SEC alleges that Voorhee’s traded in securities for two websites, SatoshiDice and FeedZeBirds. He asked investors to buy shares, but did not register those shares as securities. Investors bought shares with bitcoins. SatoshiDice is a leading Bitcoin gambling site and FeedZeBirds is a service that promises bitcoin payments to users who forward sponsored tweets.

According to the SEC, the first unregistered offering happened in May 2012 as 26,000 BTC was exchanged for 30,000 shares in FeedZeBirds. And later SatoshiDice sold 13 million shares between August 2012 and Feburary 2013 for 50,600 BTC.

These sales led to profits of more than $15,000, according to the SEC. Voorhees has agreed to settle with the SEC by giving up profits of $15,843.98 and paying an additional $35,000 in fines.

Further information is available from the SEC  press release on the matter.