Bitcoin ‘creator’ Craig Wright is being sued for allegedly swindling $5 billion

Craig Wright, who once claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto , aka the inventor of Bitcoin , has been accused of attempting to swindle his former (and late) business partner Dave Kleiman’s estate of $5 billion worth of the cryptocurrency.

Kleiman, who died in 2013, was a forensic computer analyst, author of multiple books on IT security, and supposedly involved in the invention of Bitcoin. In 2011, he established a company called W&K Info Defense Research LLC in Florida with Wright. The duo allegedly held 1.1 million Bitcoins between them at the time.

According to the suit , filed by Kleiman’s family, Wright attempted to backdate and forge contracts, so as to transfer Kleiman’s assets to his own holdings. It alleges that Wright had designs on $5 billion worth of Kleiman’s Bitcoins and intellectual property pertaining to blockchain technologies.

In addition, it states that documents detailing the W&K company’s workings point to Kleiman being the sole member of the firm, and as such, his estate would be entitled to all 1.1 million Bitcoin mined there – which works out to a little over $10 billion. Naturally, Kleiman’s family wants all of it back.

In emails with Kleiman’s brother, Ira, Wright admitted that he was holding at least 300,000 Bitcoins that belonged to Kleiman.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, as it could potentially shed light on the shady origins of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. If Wright is found guilty, it could also affect nChain – the blockchain development firm where he serves as chief scientist – as well as Bitcoin Cash , the currency created last year by forking off from Bitcoin.

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This app makes writing Ethereum smart contracts super easy, perhaps too easy

Writing smart contracts for Ethereum is no longer the preserve of coders and programmers: there is now software that can automatically do that for you – or so the claims go.

Enter Fondu . The app provides a tool that helps non-coders get into the Ethereum smart contract game and launch their ICO without the need for learning how to code, or even pay a coder to write it for them.

The process is simple. All you have to do is answer some questions regarding the characteristics of your ICO, and the required code is automatically generated. The files required to launch your ICO are also made available for download. What’s more, the deployment program is also included in the downloaded files, so it will walk you through the launch process too.

I was concerned that if more tools like this become prevalent, the market would begin to see a flood of weak, buggy or illegitimate ICOs, compiled by people with no intention of delivering a product or service attached to the ICO’s token. However, Kolmogorov believes that this won’t be the case, as an ICO smart contract is such a small part of the overall launch of a cryptocurrency or token.

Nikita Kolmogorov assures us, “I’m pretty sure that my tool — making ICO’s slightly more accessible — will not cause any new scam-projects to appear. They would’ve appeared even if I didn’t launch the product — and fortunately, smart-contract is like at most 10 [percent] of the ICO costs, so a scam company wouldn’t benefit from it that much. Even more — just launching website, smart-contract and media-campaign is no longer enough to hold a successful token sale, so we should be safe here.”

That said, this isn’t a guarantee, clearly Kolmogorov means well and has honest intentions, but there is nothing to stop Fondu becoming a factory for future “shitcoins.” The market was already saturated with mindless cryptocurrency projects – many of which are now defunct .

If a project like Fondu makes it easier to start a cryptocurrency project, it’s reducing a barrier to entry which might be good, but it also opens the flood gates for anyone to get involved. And as history has taught us , not everyone’s intentions are as pure as Kolmogorov’s.

Kolmogorov continued, “Way more important is that now anybody can launch ICO with ERC20 [a popular Ethereum token protocol] tokens in [about] 15 minutes. My real cause here is to democratize the ICO and crowdfunding concepts. So that anybody can launch crowdfunding or token sale campaign in no time and for free. Like a house-wife or a house-husband launching a book club economy with ERC20 tokens. Could you imagine this before? I couldn’t — that’s why I tried to reimagine things.”

If we have whole swathes of inexperienced coders developing and deploying smart contracts with little motivation to build quality products – or worse, a huge ambition to build products that might not be all that well-engineered. Consider the fact that one single bug in a smart contract wrought havoc across the entire Ethereum blockchain.

Currently, Fondu is just a proof of concept to see if functional smart contracts could be written and deployed from just a few clicks of a mouse. Fondu urges users to check the code before it is deployed, so some knowledge – or rather access to someone with knowledge – is still required, so it’s not a full democratization of smart contracts just yet.

It’s clear that Fondu is trying to do a good thing, and bring the world of the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts to the masses and the average Joe, but as is the case with most do-good software, there is nothing stopping bad guys from using it to their advantage.

This candy dispenser lets you pay in bitcoin

A cryptocurrency enthusiast has created a candy dispenser that accepts payments in bitcoin.

The device, christened “sweetbit,” works by listening for incoming bitcoin transactions through blockchain.info and dispenses equivalent amount of candies. The dispenser is supported by Arduino Micro , a micro-controller which allows the device to be controlled through USB.

You can watch it at work here:

Its creator, David Knezić, says that he created the device to demonstrate how easy it is to integrate bitcoin payments. He has made the code public on Github .

While it is exciting to see everyday payments being powered by bitcoin, there are still multiple shortcomings that make btcoin a less than ideal form of payment for small transactions.

Smaller transactions with bitcoin currently incur massive transactions fee and take too long too process. I, for one, won’t want to wait forever just to get my candies. But Knezić says he is working on another device that will powered by Bitcoin’s Lightning Network (LN) instead.

Lightning Network, while still in nascent development, is seen as a solution to Bitcoin’s scalability problems. The network sits as a ‘second-layer’ on top of bitcoin’s blockchain and allows for faster and cheaper transactions. As of now, Lightning Network can support transactions of up to $150,000.

With increased adoption of soft fork Segwit, bitcoin is already seeing reduced transaction fees. With further implementation of Lightning Network , bitcoin will likely become suitable to be used like regular money for everyday payments like buying candies with it.