Bitmain, the Chinese digital currency mining firm, has filed a suit in U.S. District Court against a hacker identified as “John Doe” for a reported bitcoin theft, Cryptovest reported. “John Doe” allegedly took more than $5.5 million in bitcoin, as well as other assets of a digital nature. To that end, the court complaint said he was able to get into “a protected computer without authorization” and access the firm’s wallet at Binance. He allegedly took roughly 617 bitcoin in April. At the time, the cryptocurrency was priced at just over $8,900. The price of bitcoin as of Monday (Nov. 12) at 7:00 p.m. EST was $6,356.02, according to CoinDesk.
In other news, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne believes the adoption of cryptocurrency will survive the collapse of the financial system, Cryptovest reported. Bryne said in an interview with Naomi Brockwell, “People turn to it where they collapse, like Venezuela or Cyprus or Syria, something like that. When people start getting into it is when their own financial systems collapse.” ShapeShift.io CEO and Founder Erik Voorhees shared a similar view on his Twitter account: He said, “When the next global financial crisis occurs, and the world realizes organizations with $20 trillion in debt can’t possibly ever pay it back, and thus must print it instead, and thus fiat is doomed … watch what happens to crypto.”
On another note, the blockchain patent that IBM applied for in December was recently published, CoinDesk reported. The patent, called “Blockchain for Open Scientific Research,” has been described as a log for scientific research that is resistant to tampering. According to the patent filing, “The blockchain system can form a blockchain representing a research project, wherein the blockchain comprises a first block of research data and a second block of analysis data representing a log of an analysis performed on the research data.” However, the filing noted that “summary blocks and correction blocks” can be created on the chain. The inventors for the patent were named as Ravindranath Kokku, Jae-wook Ahn, Patrick Watson and Maria Chang.