The Leftover Bits 4/21/15: TradeBlock, Mt.Gox, Shapeshift and Naughty Police

Welcome to the latest installment of The Leftover Bits, the best source for your daily bitcoin news.

TradeBlock Teams Up With BitGo For Secure Professional Trading

TradeBlock and BitGo will be creating a “modular infrastructure” together to bring BitGo’s industry leading security to TradeBlock’s professional level trading and analysis platform.

The partnership was announced to media outlets through a press release. BitGo has been offering multi-signature bitcoin accounts since 2013. TradeBlock is a trading and analysis platform with the idea of bringing professional level wall street trading to Bitcoin. Its hook is their in-depth analysis that the Wall Street Journal described as “something like a Bloomberg for bitcoin”.

At the present moment, TradeBlock looks like a bitcoinwisdom and blockchain.info competitor mixed into one, but they see themselves going much further than that. When announcing a USD $2.4 Million funding round in July 2014, investor Andreessen Horowitz laid out his vision for the company. According to the Wall Street Journal, Horowitz envisions multiple securities being trading on the blockchain, from stocks and securities to precious metals. He is hardly the only one to see that future, but he wants TradeBlock to be the go to provider of information for those markets as well, not just bitcoin.

The added BitGo security will go a long way in providing legitimacy for the relatively young company.

Shapeshift Adds Fiat Currencies

Shapeshift is adding TetherUSD, a bitcoin blockchain powered cryptocurrency that is pegged to the US dollar, allowing for the near instant and anonymous purchase of TetherUSD coin with bitcoin.

Price stability through some form of fiat pegging is a popular trend in the cryptocurrency world. There is Bitreserve, which lets people store fiat and commodities on the blockchain using their blockchain extension, there is also Nubits, a completely separate digital currency that tries its best to stay around a buck, and also BitUSD, which sits between the two.

Recently, TetherUSD came on the scene, backed by the company’s fiat reserves. Shapeshift says they plan to add TetherJPY and TetherEUR in the future.

Police Officer Nabbed Selling Stolen Neptunes

A police officer who had been on the force for ten years and was a member of the SWAT team, was arrested after allegedly selling stolen computer equipment, including KnC Neptune Bitcoin miners. The officer was also caught accepting a USD $250 bribe for investigating the identity of a license plate owner for an undercover agent.

This comes after revelations that the DHS agent involved in the Silk Road case has come under investigation for several inappropriate actions.

As bitcoin’s light shines bright, it has become more attractive for all sorts of people, including criminals. Unfortunately, those criminals all too often double as “law enforcement.”

It is not clear at this time where the Bitcoin miners were originally stolen from.

[This story was found on CoinDesk]

Mt Gox Coins Gone by 2013

A new report by Wizsec states that the long missing Mt. Gox coins were often sold for cash on the Mt. Gox exchange, as well as other exchanges, after going through a mixing process. The report also notes that Mt. Gox was likely operating at a fractional reserve for years and was almost completely devoid of coins by 2013.

The entire Wizsec report is worth a read. They have not released their data publicly, because they want to protect the identity of their sources, but some data may be coming out in the future.

Surprisingly few people seem to be paying attention to the Mt. Gox failure more than a year after it collapsed, Wizsec is one of the few organizations doing really good work on it, and they should be commended by the community.