Bitcoin is coming close to undergoing a soft fork, or a new direction of the underlying software, as an upgrade that boosts the network’s transaction capacity is gaining widespread support. Called Segregated Witness or simply SegWit for short, the fork will more than double the current transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network by separating the ...

San Francisco public transport passengers received a pleasant surprise over the weekend as the city’s Muni network offered free rides as a result of the ticketing network being hijacked by ransomware. A variant of the HDDCryptor malware hit 2,112 computers within the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, with messages appearing on the screens of ticket ...

Uber Technologies Inc. rival Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) is seeking to raise new funding in a down round, according to a report published in India. According to The Economic Times, quoting “five people aware of the developments,” Ola is seeking to raise around $500 million. The round will be led by Japan’s Softbank and ...

Bitcoin wallet and blockchain explorer startup Blockchain (Blockchain Luxembourg S.A.) is celebrating a new milestone: passing the 10 million-wallet mark. The company claims that it is the first wallet provider to reach this milestone and it now holds over 50 percent of the bitcoin wallet market. Blockchain attributed much of their growth to recent geopolitical events, ...

Bitcoin wallet provider iPayYou Inc. has launched a new service that allows users to purchase goods on Amazon.com Inc. using bitcoin. Called Amazon Direct, the service allows users to transfer any amount of bitcoin from their iPayYou bitcoin wallet to Amazon. To use it, an iPayYou customer determines the dollar amount to transfer, then chooses ...

Distributed ledger blockchain technology may be be known for its original use for powering bitcoin and more recently for its financial technology implementations. Now, it’s being applied to supply chain management and tracking. IBM Corp. and retailing giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have teamed up to utilize the blockchain to track Walmart’s pork supply chain in ...

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has asked bitcoin exchange Coinbase Inc. for a copy of all of its U.S. users and their transactions. A petition filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the IRS in the District Court for the Northern District of California on Nov. 17 seeks approval to request the identities of U.S. Coinbase ...

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash of a drone built by Facebook Inc. to provide Internet access to remote areas. Facebook’s solar-powered Aquila drone has a wingspan roughly equivalent to a Boeing 737, coming in at 141 feet. It is designed to be able to fly at altitudes of around 60,000 to ...

Fintech blockchain development group R3CEV LLC (R3) has taken a blow as a number of leading banks have decided to leave the consortium, limiting the startup’s ability to raise funding. At the top of the list was merchant banking giant Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which left the group in October by choosing not to renew ...

What if distributed cloud resources running the Ethereum blockchain to deliver supercomputer-scale power could be a way to make scientific discoveries and run artificial intelligence? That’s the goal of the highly ambitious Golem Network (Golem Factory GmhB), a startup that has raised 820,000 ether, roughly $8.6 million, in a crowdfunding sale earlier this month, making ...