Irish man Gary Davis, also known as “Libertas,” has been sentenced to 78 months in prison for helping to run the now defunct Silk Road website on the dark web.

The Irish national, who was extradited to the US in July last year, was arrested in January 2014.

Anyone who’s been following Bitcoin and the dark web for some time will know that Silk Road operated at unprecedented levels.

During its heyday, from 2011 until 2013, the site was used by thousands of drug deals to distribute more than $200 million worth of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to more than 115,000 buyers.

Powered by Bitcoin payments, it was also used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars derived from those unlawful transactions .

Davis pled guilty before United States District Judge Jesse M. Furman, who also imposed his sentence in October last year .

There’s now a cryptoart lottery using Bitcoin blockchain to pick a winner — and it’s brilliant

We’ve heard about auctions using blockchain to record sales of expensive works of art . We’ve seen the abstract musings of the cryptoart world , too. But what about a cryptoart charity auction that’s using blockchain to pick the winner?

Well, an initiative being run by a trio of firms including cryptocurrency swap exchange service ChangeAngel, crypto-clothing store CryptoBantam , and cryptoartist Trevor Jones , is doing just that.

The raffle style event is auctioning one of Jones’ Bitcoin-inspired artworks, called “The Ecstasy.”

What’s more, the cryptoart raffle is not only taking payments in Bitcoin (and fiat currency) but it’s also using the blockchain to pick the raffle’s winner too. How, you might ask? Well, let me tell you.

Like a standard raffle or lottery, customers buy entry tickets. Raffle ticket sales are logged and added to a list, (the list can be viewed on the CryptoBantam website under “ Lottery History “).

When the competition closes on August 4 each ticket will be assigned a sequential hexadecimal number starting from zero, a spokesperson from CryptoBantam told Hard Fork.

The list of numbers will be published online, and timestamped on an internet archive, such as the Wayback Machine , for transparency.

Now here’s where the blockchain comes in. Once the list is compiled, CryptoBantam will announce a “deciding block.” At the moment, it has chosen a block that will be mined around 9PM UTC August 4, 2019. About two hours after ticket sales are complete.

“Provisionally this will be Bitcoin block number 588,525,” the spokesperson said in an email to Hard Fork. “In order to win, entrants must match their hexadecimal ticket number with the ending [last two or three] digits of the hash” of the chosen Bitcoin block.

Given the hash is pretty much impossible to know ahead of time, it would be very hard to game the system. It’s definitely a novel way of using the Bitcoin blockchain’s inherent randomness, and to be honest, I think it’s kinda brilliant.

Confused? Thankfully CryptoBantam broke it down further.

Say you bought the 80th ticket (counting from 0, this is number 79 in decimal), in hexadecimal this would be 4F. Let’s say the competition was decided by Bitcoin block 587,785, which was mined the other day.

As you can see, the last two digits of the hash are 4F, and so ticket number 79 would be recognized as the winner.

CryptoBantam will use either the final two or three digits of the hash depending on the number of tickets it sells. If less than 256 tickets are sold, two digits will be used. If more than 256, but less than 1,024 entries are sold, the raffle will use the final three digits of the hash. (At the time of writing, it just so happens CryptoBantam has sold 268 tickets.)

Should no hexadecimal ticket number match the hash in the chosen block, the next block that’s mined will be used until a winner is found.

The auction, the artwork, the charities

The lottery started in the evening on July 6, 2019, and will end this weekend around 7PM UTC on August 4.

The artwork being sold in the lottery is by crypto-inspired artist, Trevor Jones. The piece, called “The Ecstasy,” pictures two angel-like figures in front of a shimmering Bitcoin. One of the characters is seemingly distressed and exhausted, while the other winged savior stands over them offering a helping hand. The Bitcoin, omnipresent in the backdrop.

Jones has made a name for himself in the cryptoart world for his innovative augmented reality paintings. Take a look at the video below to see how it works.

According to CrpytoBantam, all the profits will be split evenly between three charities, War Child, Thirst Relief, and The Little Edi foundation.

Hackers exploit Mozilla Firefox bug reportedly affecting Coinbase users

Mozilla has warned hackers are exploiting a critical “ zero-day ” exploit in its Firefox browser — and cryptocurrency owners are most at-risk, ZDNet reports .

Details of the bug are scarce, but Mozilla has described it as a “type confusion vulnerability” that could occur when interacting with JavaScript objects.

“This can allow for an exploitable crash,” reads Mozilla’s latest patch note . “We are aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this flaw.”

Samuel Groß, one of the security researchers who found and reported the bug, confirmed he did so way back on April 15 — over two months ago.

“The first public fix then landed about a week ago,” Groß tweeted earlier today. He then said security fixes for Firefox are usually held back until the next full release is prepared to launch.

According to Groß, hackers are able to exploit the bug for “ Remote Control Execution “, or RCE, but it would only be effective under certain conditions.

RCE usually affords attackers complete control over a targeted web server. In this case, considering the contents of Mozilla’s patch notes, it seems major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has been targeted directly.

“However, most likely it can be exploited for [ Universal Cross-Site Scripting (UXSS) attacks] which might be enough depending on the attacker’s goals,” Groß continued.

UXSS attacks often lead to loss of sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and other critical credentials.

So far, no specific details of how the bug has been exploited have been released. Hard Fork has reached out to Coinbase for more information, and will update this piece should we receive a reply.

Mozilla has now released a patch, and urged users to update their browsers as soon as possible.