Bitcoin startups lure quant whizzes from Wall Street

Armed with a doctorate in financial engineering, 34-year-old Timo Schlaefer was on his way to a promising career at Goldman Sachs in London. Previously with the bank's mergers and acquisitions team, he became an executive director of credit quantitative modeling at Goldman, where quants like Schlaefer are highly valued.

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Exclusive: IBM looking at adopting bitcoin technology for major currencies

By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss NEW YORK (Reuters) – International Business Machines Corp is considering adopting the underlying technology behind bitcoin, known as the “blockchain,” to create a digital cash and payment system for major currencies, according to a person familiar with the matter. The blockchain – a ledger, or list, of all of a digital currency's transactions – is viewed as bitcoin's main technological innovation, allowing users to make payments anonymously, instantly, and without government regulation.

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Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp suspends service after security breach

LJUBLJANA (Reuters) – Bitstamp, one of the largest exchanges for trading the digital bitcoin currency, said it has suspended its service after a security breach on Sunday, resulting in loss of around 19,000 bitcoins. The breach represented a small fraction of its total bitcoin reserve and the majority was held in secure offline systems, the Slovenia-based firm posted on its website on Tuesday.

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Texan charged in first bitcoin securities fraud Ponzi case

By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) – A Texas man who operated Bitcoin Savings and Trust was charged on Thursday with bilking his investors, in what prosecutors called the first federal criminal securities fraud case arising from a bitcoin-related Ponzi scheme. Trendon Shavers, 32, of McKinney, Texas, was charged with misappropriating about 146,000 of the 764,000 bitcoin, then worth more than $4.5 million, that he raised from September 2011 to September 2012 by promising investors “absurdly high” interest rates, U.S.

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