What is a Bitcoin Address and How Do You Sign It?

Were you watching ESPN's Gameday last week? You may or may not have missed a man in the crowd with a laugh-inducing sign asking his mother to send him bitcoin. His sign, complete with an address and the bitcoin symbol was probably a way to get the word out about the digital currency, but he seemed to get a lot more than he bargained for. The man, a Redditor with the username Bitcoinpitcher2 confirmed to the online community that indeed he was the person holding the sign. A quick check of the address he used on the sign shows 98 inbound transactions totaling 22.43230668 BTC - or $22,682.88....

In the latest news from bitcoin's "Why didn't I think of that first?" department: one lucky college football fan has reportedly received over $20,000 in donations simply for putting his bitcoin wallet address up for the cameras on ESPN's College Gameday. Holding up "Hi Mom Send Money" signs at college sports events isn't new, but this fan went a few steps further, replacing 'money' with a large bitcoin logo and even larger QR code of his payment address. He even used a vanity address generator to insert the characters 'HiMoM' near the beginning of the address for authenticity. A QR code is....

One of the hot topics in the bitcoin community lately has been multisignature transactions. Put simply, what this does is provide several private keys for a bitcoin address, which serves as an additional security measure (if you're unfamiliar, read this). The folks at BitPay, who are hard at work on their Bitcore project, have announce they have a multisignature wallet in the works. Dubbed Cosign, the wallet will make spending multisig bitcoins just as simple as it is to spend from a single-signature address by having other people or computers "sign" transaction to confirm they are valid.....

Here at news BTC we recently formed a partnership with what we see as a very interesting concept in the digital currency space - SharetheBTC. This company has designed a platform and concept with the goal of spreading the word about bitcoin, through a sort of share network for which the initiator receives a particular amount of BTC based on the number of BTC transferred to those members of his network. So how does it work? First, you have to sign up to the site. You can do this here. You will receive a reference code upon sign up - so take note of this and keep it in a safe place. Next,....

Android wallet users were sent into a panic over the weekend, after Google discovered a flaw in its mobile operating system that rendered generated bitcoin addresses unsafe. According to Mike Hearn, the forum contributor who reported the bug, the way in which random numbers are generated in Android is flawed. Random numbers are used along with a private key to sign a transaction when sending from a bitcoin address. The flaw means that any random number used more than once with the same public bitcoin address enables that address to be compromised. This problem will affect any Android-based....