Bitcoin Weekly Recap: Australian Stock Market, NCAA Football, and iPhone wallets

For the week ending June 20th bitcoin news was action packed! A bitcoin company listed on the Australian stock market, bitcoin embraced on the Apple platform, bitcoin coming to the NCAA, and bitcoin is even less anonymous than people thought.

Bitcoin Goes to the Australian Stock Market

On June 15th digitalBTC was listed on the Australian stock exchange trading under the ticker DCC. digitalBTC is involved in a range of products and services including a wallet, a marketplace, mining, payment services, and trading. The listing enables institutions and retail investors to get exposure to the bitcoin asset class and the regulatory reporting requirements will provide additional transparency into the bitcoin ecosystem.

Bitcoin Coming to NCAA Football in December

The former Beef O'Brady's Bowl will now be known as the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl, ESPN Events and BitPay announced Wednesday morning. In line with the bitcoin branding of the event, tickets and merchandise will be available for purchase with bitcoin. A wildcard is whether or not fans will be holding up bitcoin signs hoping for digital donations.

iPhone No Longer Barrier To Bitcoin Adoption

This week bitcoin wallets started being accepted into the Apple app store. To the surprise of many, Coin Pocket was the first wallet in the store and not the wallets offered by Blockchain, Gliph, or Coinbase. Apple’s policy change is important because a key bitcoin use case is using bitcoin as a wallet replacement. Unable to use a bitcoin wallet on their iPhone meant those users couldn’t use bitcoin when out shopping or traveling.

New York Holiday Inn Piloting Bitcoin

A Holiday Inn Express in New York is accepting bitcoin. There was confusion this week when bitcoin businessman Charlie Shrem said the location would accept bitcoin, but the hotel general manager said they were not currently taking bitcoin. I called the location today and confirmed the hotel accepts bitcoin.

Another 10 Billion Revenue Company Accepts Bitcoin

Digital River Inc, an ecommerce payment provider announced it will let customers accept bitcoin for U.S. payments. Digital River has clients such as Microsoft, Spotify, University of Phoenix, and Trend Micro. Digital River uses Coinbase to process the bitcoin transactions.

U.S. Marshals Accidentally DIsclosed Private Bidders

Next Friday the U.S. Marshals will be auctioning off around $18 million worth of bitcoins. This week as part of the auction process the USMS inadvertently sent an email disclosing the identities of parties likely intending to bid on the bitcoins. The list is not a complete list of interested parties, but it includes a range of bidders and many prominent names from bitcoin company executives and investment firms.

Bitcoin Even Less Anonymous than Thought

Bitcoin was initially trumpeted as an anonymous currency. That myth has largely been debunked, but this week the University of Luxembourg published a study detailing how the bitcoin network may be able to reveal a user’s home address or street. Fortunately for mainstream users, this attack won’t apply to them. The nature of the attack means users of popular wallet services like Coinbase and Blockchain are immune. Only those running a bitcoin node on their computer are vulnerable to the information disclosure.

Bitcoin Wallet Startup Raises $12 million

BitGo announced they raised $12 million in financing. BitGo is a security platform, offering a wallet as well as a cloud security service for customers. They claim to be “the world’s most secure bitcoin wallet.” Investors included SecondMarket, Redpoint Ventures, Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments, and others.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing David Smith has a long bitcoin position.

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