Tech This Week: Bobbing up - Bitcoins, Missing-Plane signals and Whistleblowers at Oracle

INDIA: No matter if what happened this week was cryptic or clear, one thing is for sure; this was a time for cryptocurrencies.

Australian entrepreneurs aside, Bitcoin reached new highs, after prices generally swinging between $350 and $450 touched the mark of $550 per unit, compared to about $220 this time last year.

Some attribute this to mining dynamics, some to Chinese Exchanges' investment activity, some shove it towards the emergence of Blockchain kid and Bitcoin challenger Ethereum's growing attraction among banks and VCs.

That was not all. On one hand, PayPal is being made to shut down operations in Turkey because of localisation of IT infrastructure. On the other side, EU regulators are closely zooming in on Blockchain, the distributed ledger technology for its implications on financial markets and aspects like privacy, governance, compliance.

At the same time, PayPal has apparently pushed the envelope for embracing digital currencies and filed a patent for a device, which entails two modules: payment module engine and payment module database; and safeguards for credentials like TrueCrypt integration.

While the industry is still busy scratching heads over the question of ‘APIs and copyrights’ thanks to the high-decibel tiff between Oracle (oh, Oracle was in news for some whistle-blower drama over improper accounting for padding up cloud business numbers too when a former senior finance manager Svetlana Blackburn complained that she was terminated in retaliation and sought relief under SOX act filing a suit against Oracle) and Google; technology might be able to scratch some mystery.

Egyptair’s MS804’s black box signals have been sniffed out and robots are reportedly pursuing the next steps with the data recorders. Recorders are using technology to enable emitting of signals 30 days after getting wet and some 24 hours worth of data absorbing technical fodder from the many sensors on a plane. Now that can be really helpful in figuring out what went wrong with this flight that crashed in the Mediterranean last week enroute Paris to Cairo.

Questions hang in the air about the mysterious tragedy meanwhile. So do other doubts. Will Ethereum usher in smart contracts with the power of a breakthrough cloud computing model and distributed structure? Will it finally solve the volatility curse of bitcoins? Should hedge funds and courts be concerned that computers will displace them in financial world? What happens now when the likes of PayPal start accepting bitcoin currency?

Sooner or later, we will figure these puzzles out. Meanwhile, you can worry about all the intrusive advertising that Samsung is unapologetically about to dish out with its smart TVs (not just the new ones to arrive on shelves but the old ones too with software updates, as being guessed so far.) Revenue monetization with relevant branding or in-your-face, creepy entertainment – take your click.

The world changes every week and bit by bit.