Cryptocurrency News Round-Up: MtGox Update; Dogecoin v1.6 and Bitcoin Boulevard

The last 24 hours was another relatively stable day overall on the cryptocurrency marketplace.

Bitcoin, the daddy of them all, saw its market cap rise 1.5% in value in the last day, according to CoinMarketCap.com, with litecoin and peercoin seeing similarly moderate gains.

Auroracoin, the Icelandic-based cryptocurrency, saw a drop of 5% in value but it remains the third most valuable of all virtual currencies with a market cap of $293 million.

Yesterday's big winner, Pandacoin - the "bitcoin of Asia" apparently - was today's big loser, dropping out of the top 100 cryptocurrencies with a loss in value of 94%.

Dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency saw a gain of 14%, reversing a similar drop in the previous 24 hours. This could be due to the launch of dogecoin v1.6, more of which below.

MtGox Update

It wouldn't feel like a crypto round-up if we didn't mention the beleaguered MtGox exchange.

A new website, MtGoxRecovery.com, has gathered information from some 1,600 MtGox customers and is seeking to put together a case against the company and its CEO Mark Karpeles, eventually hoping to file a lawsuit in order to recover damages.

It would be only the latest in a growing list of groups and companies looking to sue MtGox, with seveal groups in the US already in the process of suing the exchange, which has filed for bankruptcy protection in both Japan and the US.

Bloomberg reports that a judge in Chicago has frozen the assets of MtGox Inc, the American affiliate of the bankrupt bitcoin exchange.

Many people are concerned about the exchange's lack of transparency, especially as rumours emerge that over $100 million of bitcoin - which are suspected to belong to Karpeles - were observed being moved around the bitcoin blockchain in recent days.

Karpeles is accused by many of having lied to the courts about the amount of bitcoin lost in a claimed cyber-attack against the exchange which forced it to shut down

This is likely to run and run...

Ponzicoin is a scam, just has poor security

Anything which has the word 'ponzi' in the name is clearly going to be viewed as somewhat risky.

Therefore it didn't come as much of a surprise when those involved in ponzicoin - a sort of cryptocurrency gambling game based on a "ponzi-type model" - reported on Monday that their investments had been stolen.

But it turns out that rather than running off with users money, ponzicoin organiser Vortuarackne had been hacked, and has subsequently refunded all deposits and shut down the site.

Probably best for all involved

Dogecoin v1.6 launched to address multipool gaming

For most of the dogecoin community the price of one dogecoin is not that important - at least not compared to those monitoring the price of one bitcoin.

However a flaw in the dogecoin code had seen mining pools being able to game the system and cherry-pick specific blocks of dogecoin which were provably calculable, allowing them to "hammer our network's hashrate - making mining for the solo doges incredibly difficult, while dampening their payouts massively," according to Reddit user Such Hungry Shibe who has just announced the launch of version 1.6 of dogecoin which addresses this problem.

Such update. Much hashrate.

Would the real Satoshi Nakamoto please stand up?

Following on from Newsweek's claim that the mysterious breator of bitcoin, known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, was in fact an Japanese-American man called....Satoshi Nakamoto, the New York Times took it upon itself to find all men of the same name in Japan.

There are 28 men with that name listed in the Japanese phonebook with more listed on Facebook and Twitter.

Apparently there are a lot of Nakamotos in Japan, with the name being the 487th most popular of 10,000 known surnames in the country.

The New York Times found a councilman, an obstetrician, a tour bus operator and an employee of the Asahi beer company all called Satoshi Nakamoto - and any of them could be person behind the creation of bitcoin....possibly.

Bitcoin Boulevard

The Hague is best known as the seat of the international courts of justice but it could soon become one of the cryptocurrency world's most important cities.

On 20 March, to mark the official start of spring in Holland, all of the businesses along two canal-facing streets in the city will start to accept bitcoin - as well as changing the street names to 'Bitcoin Boulevard'.

The businesses include nine restaurants and an art gallery and the initiative could be the beginning of wider bitcoin adoption in the city.