Two men have been charged in connection with a vast drugs operation involving virtual currency and the "dark web".Richard Sinclair, 32, was arrested after police seized drugs worth an estimated £100,000 at his home at Cranagh Road, Coleraine, on 26 August.In a separate raid, Kyle Hall, 25, of Chamberlain Street, Belfast, was also detained.Both men were refused bail.The "dark web" is a collection of websites that hide the operator's identity.Drugs linked to a European-wide investigation were to be sent through the post hidden inside jigsaw puzzles, prosecutors said.The men are jointly charged with conspiracy to supply and possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply.Mr Sinclair is also charged with transferring criminal property, while Mr Hall faces charges of having Class B and C drugs with intent to supply and possessing criminal property.In court in Belfast on Friday, a prosecution lawyer said police discovered Mr Sinclair in his bedroom destroying evidence on an encrypted memory stick.

Hundreds of drugs transactions were displayed on a nearby computer, the lawyer claimed.The court was told police also seized five sealed packages from his home.Two were DVD boxes with £1,500 cash in each and the other three contained suspected MDMA powder - the base from which ecstasy is made - the prosecution said.A further £6,000 in cash and quantities of LSD were also recovered.Police were also alerted to a parcel addressed to Mr Sinclair at a courier depot in Belfast.It contained two jigsaw puzzles with a total of 3,000 MDMA and other psychedelic pills with a potential street value of £40,000.CCTV footage allegedly showed Mr Hall had left the parcel at the depot.Police searched his home and seized 1,000 ecstasy tablets, 120 boxes each containing 28 diazepam pills, 2kg of herbal cannabis, 500g of crystal MDMA and £7,500 in cash, the court heard.The lawyer set out admissions made by Mr Sinclair in police interviews.This was a complex investigation involving mainland Europe, in particular the Netherlands, the lawyer said.

She said police described his method as "ingenious".Despite Mr Sinclair's admissions, his defence lawyer argued he did not fit the profile of a high-flying drug supplier and was feeding his gambling habit."Itsimply mushroomed and got out of control," he said.Although Mr Hall also made admissions, he denied conspiring with Mr Sinclair.bitcoin fidelityThe judge was told that he claimed he was running a legitimate DVD supply business.bitcoin mobiNEW YORK When hackers penetrated a secure authentication system at a bitcoin exchange called Bitfinex earlier this month, they stole about $70 million worth of the virtual currency.The cyber theft -- the second largest by an exchange since hackers took roughly $350 million in bitcoins at Tokyo's MtGox exchange in early 2014 -- is hardly a rare occurrence in the emerging world of crypto-currencies.New data disclosed to Reuters shows a third of bitcoin trading platforms have been hacked, and nearly half have closed in the half dozen years since they burst on the scene.bitcoin chennai

This rising risk for bitcoin holders is compounded by the fact there is no depositor's insurance to absorb the loss, even though many exchanges act like virtual banks.Not only does that approach cast the cyber security risk in stark relief, but it also exposes the fact that bitcoin investors have little choice but to do business with under-capitalized exchanges that may not have the capital buffer to absorb these losses the way a traditional and regulated bank or exchange would."Therebitcoin fork may 2017is a general sense in the bitcoin community that any centralized repository is at risk," said a U.S.-based professional trader who lost about $1,000 in bitcoins when Bitfinex was hacked.bitcoin billionaires clubHe declined to be named for this article."Sobitcoin ledger live

when investing, you always have that expectation at the back of your head.I lost a small amount compared to the others, but I know of traders who lost millions of dollars worth of bitcoins," the trader said.The security challenge for the bitcoin world does not appear to be letting up, according to experts in the currency.ethereum node payment"I am skeptical there's going to be any technological silver bullet that's going to solve security breach problems.bitcoin berlin bezahlenNo technology, crypto-currency, or financial mechanism can be made safe from hacks," said Tyler Moore, assistant professor of cyber security at the University of Tulsa's Tandy School of Computer Science who will soon publish the new research on the vulnerability of bitcoin exchanges.His study, funded by the U.S.ethereum node payment

Department of Homeland Security and shared with Reuters, shows that since bitcoin's creation in 2009 to March 2015, 33 percent of all bitcoin exchanges operational during that period were hacked.The figure represents one of the first estimates of the extent of security breaches in the bitcoin world.In contrast, data from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a non-profit organization, showed that of the 6,000 operational U.S.banks, only 67 banks experienced a publicly-disclosed data breach between 2009 and 2015.That's roughly 1 percent of U.S.Among the world's stock exchanges, however, security breaches are much higher, with hackers attracted to the large pools of cash moving in and out of these trading venues.The latest survey of 46 securities exchanges released three years ago by the International Organization of Securities Commissions and World Federation of Exchanges found that more than half had experienced a cyber attack.Moore collaborated on the research with Nicolas Christin, associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Janos Szurdi, a Ph.D.

student also at Carnegie.In 2013, Moore and Christin wrote a research paper on security risks surrounding bitcoin exchanges when Moore was still a professor at Southern Methodist University.That research entitled “Beware of the Middleman: Empirical Analysis of Bitcoin Exchange Risk” was peer-reviewed and presented at the 17th International Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference in Okinawa, Japan in 2013.In the most recent study, the rate of closure for bitcoin exchanges in Moore's research edged up to 48 percent among those operating from 2009 to March 2015.Hacking did not necessarily trigger the closure in each case."A 48 percent closure is not acceptable, but not surprising given that bitcoin is a new technology," said Richard Johnson, vice president of market structure and technology at Greenwich Associates.Johnson has written reports on risk and security issues in the crypto-currency world.Profitability is a big problem for bitcoin exchanges, with many of them unable to generate enough volume to keep afloat.

Bitcoin exchanges overall could be launched for as low as $100,000 up to $1 million, said Erik Voorhees, founder and chief executive officer of digital currency exchange ShapeShift.That is a fraction of what U.S.forex exchanges' are required to put up.Retail FX trading platform FXCM, for instance, is required by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to have at least $25 million in capital at all times.A key factor tied to the risk posed by exchanges is whether customers are reimbursed after closure or after the loss of bitcoins following a hack.Each closure and breach have been handled differently, but Tandy's Moore said the risk of losing funds stored in exchanges are real.In the case of Bitfinex, which is now up and running after the hack August 2, customers lost 36 percent of the assets they had on the platform and were compensated for the losses with tokens of credit that would be converted into equity in the parent company.At Tokyo's MtGox, customers have yet to recover their investments more than two years after closure.Experts say trading venues acting like banks such as Bitfinex will remain vulnerable.