Nearly a week ago one of the largest Bitcoin communities “Bitcointalk.org” was taken over by a social engineering attacker. It was found that the ISP hosting their site fell victim to a phishing attack and allowed the phisher access to the website behind the scenes. Hours later after the administrator found out what happened, sent an email to all users on the forum and told them that they should consider that all passwords/personal data were compromised.

You should act as though your password hashes, PMs, emails, etc. were compromised. The forum will probably be down for 36-60 hours for analysis and reinstall. I’ll post status updates on Twitter @bitcointalk and I’ll post a complete report in a post in Meta once the forum comes back online.

There’s been a lot of questions from this phishing attack as this is the face of the Bitcoin community.  The site in the past year alone has not been prone to long sessions of outages this year, this is now the 5th time that the site has experienced a greater than 1 day outtage. What makes people skeptical is that the site has raised over $500,000 in donations to help run/organize the site yet they are still running on old outdated versions of SMF software. (Which.. coming from a person who runs multiple SMF sites.. this is crazy due to how easy SMF makes it to upgrade your forums software.)

It was announced recently that NASDAQ began incorporating methods of how Bitcoin’s ledgers work. By using a blockchain of their own they are hoping to “provide extensive integrity, audit ability, governance and transfer of ownership capabilities” Whats nice about the blockchain format in my opinion is. There is no central body to host all of the information. It’s shared among all of the users and extremely transparent with where what money/coins are going where. Its like sticking a note on a $1 bill that says “the owner of this bill also owns 1% of Google Inc.” except this note can never be removed. The ownership of the dollar bill is public and the note doesn’t have to fit onto a certain sized piece of paper. With interest in Bitcoin at a low point in regards to its trading prices, people are looking at different ways to better use the blockchain technology and repurpose it..

Were you an early investor in Bitcoin? Are you hoping the prices will bounce back to where they were? Here’s a good link of speculation from a writer at Forbes.

As I finish writing this, Bitcoin is trading on BTC-e at a price of $238.56