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Bitcoin's Software Gets Security Fixes, New Features
itwbennett (1594911) writes "The software driving Bitcoin's network was upgraded Wednesday, with security fixes addressing a problem that defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox blamed for losing nearly half a billion dollars worth of bitcoins. The latest version of bitcoin's software, 0.9.0, contains more than a half dozen fixes for transaction malleability, according to the release notes for the software. Bitcoin Core also contains a new feature for payment requests. Previously, merchants couldn't attach a note describing an invoice, and people also could not supply a refund address to a merchant. The latest version automatically supplies a refund address."
This wouldn't have prevented the Mt. Gox implosion since they weren't using the reference implementation. The foundation also renamed the software to "Bitcoin Core" to avoid confusion between Bitcoin-the-network and Bitcoin-the-reference-implementation,
Bitcoin is seriously overbought right now. Just the 24*6*25BTC that are mined every day are enough to send the price down because there's very little demand for them. Anybody who was already convinced of Bitcoin is waiting for lower prices to buy more and everybody else just isn't interested right now. Bitcoin looks dangerous, there are thefts everywhere: It's not just the exchanges which get robbed of their hot wallets. PC malware comes with BTC stealing components nowadays. Why buy Bitcoins? You can hardly do anything with them right now, except for niche markets. And how would you use them if you could? Make an irreversible transaction to a far away merchant, hoping you'll get your goods and the merchant doesn't just vanish? Right now, it's not very usable, so it can only be seen as an investment in a very uncertain future.