This mining calculator will display your expected earnings in both Ether and Dollars. The calculations are based on the assumption that all conditions (difficulty and. Make money with your gaming pc or mining rig. Easy step by step guide. Nicehash: https://www.nicehash.com. CryptoCompare needs javascript enabled in order to work. Follow these instructions to activate and enable JavaScript in Chrome. PC • To the right of the address bar, click the icon with 3 stacked horizontal lines. • From the drop-down menu, select Settings. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. MAC • Select Chrome from the Apple/System bar at the top of the screen. • Select Preferences. From the drop-down menu. • In the left-hand column, select Settings from the list. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. CryptoCompare needs javascript enabled in order to work. Follow these instructions to activate and enable JavaScript in Chrome. PC • To the right of the address bar, click the icon with 3 stacked horizontal lines. • From the drop-down menu, select Settings. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. MAC • Select Chrome from the Apple/System bar at the top of the screen. • Select Preferences. From the drop-down menu. • In the left-hand column, select Settings from the list. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser.
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The British isles governing administration should really apply the very same regulation and identification prerequisites to bitcoin wallets as it does to lender accounts, Accenture has suggested. Paperwork obtained by CoinDesk as a result of a Freedom of Data ask for demonstrate the multinational management consulting company’s response to the Treasury’s contact for data on electronic currencies. Dated December 2014, the corporation will take a pretty good stance on cryptocurrencies, these types of as bitcoin, highlighting their probable. Accenture states: “Digital currencies are at an early phase of improvement and usage, but they are right here to keep and the engineering has the probable to reinvent several elements of monetary solutions.” Even so, the document also recognises the threats affiliated with these currencies, such as cost volatility, lack of consumer defense and the probable loss of resources, for illustration by forgetting a non-public critical, or as a result of a fraudster getting accessibility. Suggested regulation Accenture believes bitcoin’s largest issue at the moment is its affiliation with, and use in, income laundering. ★★★ How To Bitcoin Ghs Rechner Commerzban★★★How To Bitcoin Ghs Calculator Zip. Free Bitcoin Generator Tool Online. How To Best Cloud Mining. Jan 7, 2018 - It is a fork of Bytecoin — the very first implementation of CryptoNote. If you ever thought about a passive income on the Internet, our app is created for you. Litecoin provides faster transaction confirmations 2. If you expect to earn a lot of money through mining then it would be smart to purchase a more secure. It promises the identification prerequisites applied to lender accounts should really also be applied to bitcoin wallets. “In the very same way that governments call for identifiable lender accounts (as a result of named accounts and know-your-buyer checks), a requirement for named, identifiable electronic forex wallets would be a core component of a protected, legit electronic forex economic system,” the document reads. It goes on to counsel a centralised authority might need to have to be established to “supervise and keep an eye on the use of electronic forex wallets”. Accenture stresses regularly in the document that regulation should really be restricted to electronic forex wallets, rather than applied to electronic currencies more broadly. Any regulation that is established, needs to be “reasonable and proportionate”, with crystal clear guidance on the rules and responsibilities for the participants of electronic forex wallet techniques. What is Bitcoin cloud mining? Cloud mining is a service that allows anyone to participate in the mining of bitcoins by leasing mining hardware. TeraBox has a powerful network of ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit) powered computers specifically designed to mine bitcoins. The power those machines generate is used to solve blocks which in turn will reward you with bitcoins. The power generated to be able to mine bitcoins is called “Hashing Power”. We sell hashing power in the form of bitcoin mining contracts which are measured in Gigahashes per second(GH/s). The more GH/s you purchase the more bitcoins you will be able to mine. Like last year’s, the scientists of have collared a new polar bear for fans to track! An 8-year-old mom with a yearling cub, she’s been given the name X33410, a number that the research team will use when tracking her throughout her life. But we want you to give her a more personal – and memorable – name! Every fall, polar bear scientists travel to Wapusk National Park in Manitoba, Canada, to monitor the western Hudson Bay polar bear population. They take size and weight measurements, and perform a census on the number of bears and cubs they see and catch. Some females get outfitted with GPS collars so they can be tracked throughout the year. The information gathered paints a picture of the lives of polar bears hunting out on the sea ice. So what was the name? I think I’m already too late in this cause I’m watching this 10 months after the last post here But I have a magical suggestion cause it was playing a spiritual band named Mirabai Ceiba when I met the first polar bear here today in your site explore.org. So:))) If not this one, I’ll name the other one that I saw today Mirabai or Mira – Means “sea, ocean” in Sanskrit. This was the name of a 16th-century Indian princess who devoted her life to the god Krishna. Seneff claims that as many as half of all children born in the United States by 2025. Uncovers Link Between Glyphosate, GMOs And. The mining industry and. Whether or not you use our Cloud Mining or your own hardware. EOBOT.COM SCAM!!! NOT PROFIT CLOUD MINING. LTC – LITECOIN CLOUD MINING; REP. Dont know about anyone else. I went there and with minimal funds saw that little by little i lost it all. From what i see you mine at a loss. Last contract i had i paid.000045 per mh at end of contract of 4 plus hours i made whopping.00400374 BTC mind you i paid total of.008 btc for that privilege. They have a new feature mrr-pool mining. Basically you setup for scrypt and as it advertises estimated earnings are.0000350 and from what i saw its about that. But if it costs you.0000450 per mh right off the bat your mining at a loss. Better off just open your car window while driving and toss money out. The site is very well put together but seems like rig owners are greedy so unless they reduce their prices i dont see any point going there. I know mining is not an exact formula and profit is varied but has to be even minimal profit to be worth investing in. Sign In: ========================== WHY CLOUD-MINING? CloudMining is a new trend in earning BiTCoin and really a good way to mine without the hassle and worrying of electricity bill spike! – No heat or hardware to maintain. – Immediate results, mining updates every 24hrs – Earn even your PC is dead – Earn while sleeping, literally do nothing – Let your money work for you – Much cheaper and profitable than having your own rig – Purchase hash-power and mine for as long as the data centers/company exist WHY HASHOCEAN? Get your FREE 15kh/s hashpower today! Historically, politicians have always fought for the power to create money out of thin air, so they can increase their spending without having to directly increase taxes. The staggering growth of political power throughout the twentieth century — the century of war — was largely made possible by replacing money limited by gold with paper currencies, which can be printed at will by government-controlled banks. Cryptocurrencies are the first self-limiting monetary systems in the history of mankind, and could be our greatest chance to check the growth of political power since the Magna Carta. Join Stefan Molyneux, the host of Freedomain Radio – the most popular philosophy show in the world – as he reveals the hidden political and military power of government currencies, and shows how cryptocurrencies could be greatest revolution in human history, and the foundation of a truly free and prosperous planet. The Next Web Europe Conference – April 25th, 2014 Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: Bitcoin Address: 1Fd8RuZqJNG4v56rPD1v6rgYptwnHeJRWs Litecoin Address: Lbxr3M8oezWaguEBc35MoyvQT88C85Sqpi Get more from Stefan Molyneux and Freedomain Radio including books, podcasts and other info at: Video Rating: / 5. Link: In this video, I’ll show you how to buy and sell BitCoins. When you look at the growth of value in seeds, nothing matches it When you relate it to bitcoin purchases, it’s like magic that you can remove seeds from your kitchen counter top tomatoes and with just the seeds, buy bitcoins, in two months! I have not seed any videos which bring this to light, so I thought I might! PLEASE DONATE BITCOIN or LITECOIN to Support our efforts to waken the masses. BITCOIN: 18TndrqgZfHjPf7vv78jygxKF6vPfGwA7K LITECOIN: LSxSujEYKCG6T78DrDpnpzwDusgzca27as SUBSCRIBE for more on BITCOIN / LITECOIN MINING / TRADING / NEWS Forget Mining BITCOIN, Start MINING LITECOIN with Home Built LITECOIN MINING RIG The era of Bitcoin mining on the GPU is dead. A year ago, a single Radeon graphics card could crank out a reasonable fraction of a Bitcoin in a single day. Today, that same GPU earns a thousandth of a Bitcoin in 24 hours, generating little value while consuming a substantial amount of power. The shift to ASICs for Bitcoin mining mirrors the shift from CPUs to GPUs, but the market isn’t content to just turn those mining rigs off — not when there’s an alternative currency available for which ASIC miners do not exist. That alternative is Litecoin — and there’s reason to think that buyers have emptied the shelves of AMD’s Radeon hardware to build mining platforms. First off, there’s the fact that you can’t find a high-end Radeon in stock at the moment. Newegg and Amazon are both out of stock, while over at Amazon, the lowly AMD Sempron 145 — a single-core, 2.8GHz chip with a.75 price — is the 5th most popular CPU. Further proof of this trend is the Litecoin network hash rate, is shown here: Clearly Litecoin miners are coming online, and they’re coming online en masse. Many of these are undoubtedly Bitcoin miners switching over now that GPUs are no longer cost effective, but some of these systems are probably driven by new miners. Litecoin confirms transactions faster (every 2.5 minutes, rather than every 10 minutes for Bitcoin) and it contains more coins — 84 million coins will be found in total under the LTC protocol, as opposed to 21 million for BTC. Bitcoin and Litecoin prices tend to move together; Bitcoins stratospheric leap over the past month (it’s down from a high of 00 but trading at 3 as of this writing) has created an odd situation where it’s easier to mine Litecoin and then convert LTC to BTC then it is to just mine BTC to start with. Why bother installing CPU-mining malware on thousands of machines, when you can just break into someone’s Amazon cloud computing account and create a well-managed datacentre instead? This week, a software developer discovered someone had done just that, and made off with a pile of litecoins on his dime. Melbourne-based programmer Luke Chadwick got a nasty shock after receiving an email from Amazon. The firm told him that his Amazon Key (a security credential used to log on to Amazon Web services) had been found on one of his Github repositories. 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Recently Bitcoin (BTC) had a market cap of.48 billion and Litecoin (LTC) was at 5 million. Litecoin is based upon the Scrypt hashing algorithm and Bitcoin is based on SHA256D. Miners are incentivized with bounties. For each Litecoin found the current reward is 50 LTC and the maximum number of coins in exisitence is capped at 84 million. For each Bitcoin discovered, the reward is down to 25 BTC and will continue to be halved on a regular basis until 2040 when the maximum supply is reached capped at 21 million. Mining cryptocurencies is a post in itself. Briefly, it involves using freely dwnloadable software run on dedicated hardware or cloud computing power to solve complex calculations. The calculations get harder over time and the rewards get reduced as well. Miners are rewarded or discovering blocks which are added to a block chain every 10 minutes. Currently it may make more financial sense to try to mine LTC rather than BTC. Video Rating: / 5. 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July 20, 2017 @ 8:47am CDT Gilligan Hodes. Estimated Expected Cryptocurrency Earnings The estimated expected cryptocurrency earnings are based on a statistical calculation using the values entered and do not account for difficulty and exchange rate fluctuations, stale/reject/orphan rates, and a pool's efficiency. If you are mining using a pool, the estimated expected cryptocurrency earnings can vary greatly depending on the pool's efficiency, stale/reject/orphan rate, and fees. If you are mining solo, the estimated expected cryptocurrency earnings can vary greatly depending on your luck and stale/reject/orphan rate. Time Frame LTC Coins BTC (LTC/BTC at 0.01612800) USD (BTC at $11,781.40) Power Cost (in USD) Pool Fees (in USD) Profit (in USD) Hourly 0.00057462 0.00000927 $0.11 $0.10 $0.00 $0.01 Daily 0.01379091 0.00022242 $2.62 $2.40 $0.00 $0.22 Weekly 0.09653637 0.00155694 $18.34 $16.80 $0.00 $1.54 Monthly 0.41372728 0.00667259 $78.61 $72.00 $0.00 $6.61 Annually 5.03368192 0.08118322 $956.45 $876.00 $0.00 $80.45. Free Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis How To Buy Bitcoin BTC USD Sell Crypto. Digital Cryptocurrency News Investing Tips & Chart Trading Ethereum ETH Etherium WIN FREE BITCOIN! Leave a comment below of your thoughts for today's video to enter! Winner from comments selected every Friday!! Amid Bitcoin mania, Business Standard explains everything that you need to know about cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin mining, cryptocurrency exchanges, how cryptocurrencies came into being, the blockchain technology, among other things: What is a crpytocurrency? Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, essentially, are digital currencies. But, they are like gold in more ways than one. Like gold, cryptocurrencies have to be mined. They do not have a central issuing authority, so they are deregulated currencies. Simply put, there is Wed, 24 Jan 2018 06:26:26. Best Bitcoin Cloud Mining Companies 2017. By BitinAdmin Published August 8, 2017 Updated August 10, 2017. There are several risks you must be aware of before you invest in bitcoin cloud mining: Mining Competition, Ponzi Schemes, Bad business, Bitcoin Volatility. There are a few things to consider to minimize risks. Bitcoin Cloud Mining. What Is Bitcoin Cash? December 21, 2017. This is all because of the problems created by Bitcoin Core’s blocks being full. By|| Earlier this morning, we published the first of our twice daily bitcoin price analyses. We forecasted that, in light of the sideways action we had seen during the twenty-four hours directly preceding our snapshot, we could see either the bulls or the bears take control of the intraday swing, and in turn, some decent volatility from which we could draw a profit under the framework of our breakout strategy. Action has now matured throughout the day, and we are about to head into the US afternoon session and – beyond that – the Asian session later on tonight. So, what did today’s action tell us, and where are we looking to get in and out tonight? Get a quick look at the chart below to see what’s on. As the chart shows, action throughout today’s session gave us the break we were looking for, and we were able to get in for a nice quick profit on the short side of our range. In light of this, we are looking at a new range defined by in term support at 411 flat, and in term resistance to the upside at 415.43. This morning we noted that the range in focus gave us just enough room to bring an intrarange strategy to the table – something we’ve not done in a while – but/and today’s action means we can/cannot do the same this evening. So, long at support, short at resistance. Stops, as usual, just the other side of the entry to define risk. Looking at breakouts, a break above resistance signals long, with a stop at 412 defining the risk on the position. A target at 424 gives us a nice risk to reward profile. Conversely, a close below support will signal short toward a downside target of 407, and a stop at []. By|| Meet Stratumn, a Paris-based startup that wants to create a platform-as-a-service for developers interested in the blockchain. With Stratumn, you can build, deploy and run applications on the company’s platform, and these applications can communicate with the bitcoin blockchain. It’s like Heroku, but for blockchain developers. CoinWarz Dash mining calculator. Enter your mining rig's hash rate and the CoinWarz Dash calculator will use the current difficulty and exchange rate to calculate how. CoinWarz Zcash mining calculator. Enter your mining rig's hash rate and the CoinWarz Zcash calculator will use the current. Dash Mining Calculator. Calculated mistake n; calculating adj; calculatingly adv; calculation n; calculational adj; calculative adj; calculator n; calculatory adj; calculiform adj; calculifrage n. Canary in a coal mine n; Canary Islander n; Canary Islands proper; canarylike adj; canarypox n; canasite n; canasta n; canaster n; canavanine n; canavesite n. The company just raised $670,000 (€600,000) from Otium Venture and business angels, such as Ledger Wallet CEO Eric Larchevêque. At heart, the bitcoin blockchain is a distributed database that registers all bitcoin transactions with a timestamp. Many have taken advantage of the blockchain to build applications that were unrelated to bitcoin transactions. For instance, Stampery wants to replace notaries with the bitcoin blockchain. The service can issue legally binding proofs for all your sensitive documents, and these proofs live on the blockchain. But Stratumn is taking this idea one step further and saying that other startups like Stampery are going to appear. Instead of having to redo the hard work from scratch, Stratumn lets your application talk with the blockchain without any effort from your side. In order to do this, Stratumn has built an open specification called Chainscript. Without getting too technical, Chainscript files are JSON files that can store a bit of data. You send these this data to the blockchain using Stratumn. And later, you can retrieve and audit these packets of data if you follow the Chainscript format. In other words, a company like Stampery could have built its platform on top of Stratumn using Chainscript. Contracts and notarized documents are one thing, but Stratumn can take another dimension with other blockchains. While the biggest blockchain is the bitcoin’s blockchain, foundations and companies are working on other blockchains. It’s still the very beginning for the young startup, but if Stratumn can build a blockchain-agnostic platform that works with private blockchains or alternative blockchains, []. By|| It has been almost a year since the Great Bitcoin Debate, which unleashed Bitcoin’s civil war, was brought to public attention. Now, a year later, an unofficial truce seems to have been reached with bitcoin’s potential crypto competitors, such as Ethereum, and potential competition from numerous bank sponsored consortiums focusing attention once again on making bitcoin great and appealing to all. The Great Bitcoin Debate began with a series of posts by Gavin Andresen in Spring 2015 which argued for an increase in transaction capacity due to estimates that the limit of approximately 200,000 daily transactions would be reached by early 2016. Gavin’s arguments however faced fierce resistance and, as time went on, what started as an amicable debate over scaling bitcoin turned ugly. The Blocksize Wars Theymos, the top moderator of r/bitcoin, a place that used to be called a “home” for the bitcoin community, initiated a policy of censorship of scalability discussions and enforced it by banning a number of prominent and long-time contributors to the subreddit leading to the creation of r/btc and bitco.in/forum as censorship free alternatives. Coinwallet.eu started spamming the bitcoin blockchain to show what would happen once capacity was reached. In turn, alternative clients like XT and Bitcoin Classic as well as mining pools which used them were DDoSed. The most vicious attacks however, were attempts to character assassinate and smear individuals and companies. Mike Hearn, after being fully vilified by one “camp”, was the first figurative casualty of the “war” and left to work for R3 banking consortium. Gregory Maxwell, in turn, attracted so much hate by the other “camp”, which nicknamed him Saruman, the magician who sold out to Sauron in the Lord of the Rings, to the point where he too left for a short period and gave up his commit []. By|| Are you a blockchain-savvy young engineer dreaming to work at the happiest place on Earth? If so we might have an interesting offer for you. The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) has published a wanted ad for a “Disney Private Blockchain Intern,” but unfortunately the job is in Seattle, Washington not Disneyland. We have recently seen more and more established companies jumping on the blockchain bandwagon. Claiming they will be the first to implement the technology derived from bitcoin into fields as diverse as mortgages, wines and more, it was hard to tell if many are really in need of blockchain solutions or just caught up in the hype. This doesn’t seems to be the case with Disney as they tried to keep the fact that they are working on it rather low key. The wanted ad says that the Disney Private Blockchain team assists business segment users and developers research and develop software mechanisms to protect privacy in distributed ledger participation, applications and services. It provides the support, consulting, and solutions to meet the tactical needs of the business. The position is for Disney Private Blockchain within the DTSS (Disney Technology Solutions and Services business unit), to research and develop software mechanisms to protect privacy in distributed ledger participation. This is a position for a Computer Engineer or Electrical Engineer who wants to work on applications with a focus on security The intern will assist architects, developers and QA in Audit and Compliance is related to Access Control. Access control basically amounts to tracking who has access to what objects. Accesses can be granted and revoked. The project is about designing and implementing an access control using open ledger and blockchain framework for Disney Corporate, ABC, ESPN, Disney Interactive, and Walt Disney Productions. By|| The Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab has announced that it has raised $900,000 for a Bitcoin Developer Fund from a number of interesting donors. The goal of the new fund is to cover salaries, travel and overall support of Bitcoin protocol development efforts, including events like workshops. The donors include firms such as the bitcoin mining giant BitFury, the world’s largest bitcoin mining hardware producer Bitmain, Chain, Circle and Nasdaq as well as individuals such as Jim Breyer, Jim Pallotta, Jeff Tarrant, Reid Hoffman and Fred Wilson. Valery Vavilov, CEO of The BitFury Group, commented: “It is important that we as a community support the brilliant minds who work on further development of the innovative Bitcoin Blockchain technology. By partnering with the MIT Media Lab and offering our support, we enable talented engineers and developers to concentrate on developing new technological solutions that will benefit the entire Bitcoin Blockchain ecosystem.” The initiative emphasizes that the donors do not have any influence over the developers and say its goal is to support “diversity of thought” in the space. “This allows developers to work on code and develop new ideas that may be controversial, but can do so with the assurance that they won’t be fired for diversity of thought. Similarly, staff, students and professors of the DCI have differing opinions about Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Classic, but the DCI as an initiative is not in favor of one over the other.” Unfortunately for any academics that want to develop code for Ethereum or any other cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin, this fund specifically applies to the development of code for the leading protocol. However, the initiative says that “where there is a strong need and potential sponsors, we are open to talking with other open-source cryptocurrency projects about developing []. By|| Payroll in Bitcoin has just reached Germany, with payment processors BitPay and PEY partnering to allow Germans to make their living in cryptocurrency. Last week, BitcoinCT r: 8 payment processor BitPayCT r: 17 announced that they had begun a new partnership with PEY, a German Bitcoin payments venture. The Hanover-based company broke the announcement on their site as well, joining Canadian gaming company OPSkins and American human resources company Zuman in using BitPay’s Bitcoin payroll API. Salary to be paid in cryptocurrency PEY will be debuting Bitcoin payroll with t3n, a technology publication, after which they plan to expand through Europe and offer payroll services to companies outside of Germany. T3n recently announced their decision to allow their employees to receive their salary in cryptocurrency. Additionally, they are offering employees a bonus of up to 44 Euros tax-free. T3n says in a blog post: “One motivation to implement the new form of salary payment, of course, is in our editorial related interest in new technologies and their adaptation by users in everyday life.” Transaction and tax advantages Using Bitcoin for payroll offers several key advantages over traditional bank services, including much faster confirmations, ease of international transfers, and a significant reduction in transaction fees. Additionally, Bitcoin has so far not been considered legal tender in Germany, as such it is tax-exempt, allowing employees who earn cryptocurrency to keep more of what they earn (as evidenced by t3n’s tax-free bonus offer). Corey Glaze, Sr. Sales Engineer at BitPay, explains in a blog post: “Bitcoin offers a significant improvement over other methods for business payroll payments and payouts. Since transactions confirm in minutes and can be transmitted more securely than other online payments, businesses can use bitcoin to make both local and international payments faster and more affordably than through []. By|| The MIT Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) has announced more than $100,000 in scholarships and support for underrepresented minorities and women to attend Consensus 2016: Making Blockchain Real. In collaboration with CoinDesk, the DCI will be selecting 50 Consensus Scholars to attend the event from 2nd to 4th May in New York City. This will be our second year collaborating on a scholarship effort for the conference – we are excited to continue to foster a more diverse community of attendees at Consensus. A study conducted on 'Consumer Attitudes on Bitcoin and Other Virtual Currencies' found that the level of awareness of virtual currencies varies by gender and race. The study found that men were more likely than women to be aware of virtual currency, and Caucasians were more likely to have heard about virtual currency than Latinos and/or African Americans. Given that we are at the forefront of leveraging cryptocurrencies to address financial inclusion and other important issues, it is important to expose underrepresented minorities to the field and provide access to a broader range of people from different ethnic and economic groups. If cryptocurrencies are to gain widespread adoption, the digital currency community has to reflect our society’s diverse culture and consumer base. From adoption to identifying use cases to developing applications, we will increase innovation when diverse voices are included in the conversation. The former president of the National Academy of Engineering, William Wulf, said: 'Sans diversity, we limit the set of life experiences that are applied, and as a result, we pay an opportunity cost – a cost in products not built, in designs not considered, in constraints not understood, in processes not invented.' The Consensus 2016 scholarships will be offered to women and underrepresented minorities between the ages of 18-25 years old, as well as to graduate students of []. By|| Bitcoin was seemingly dragged into the very public debate on privacy and encryption recently. Specifically, President Barack Obama warned that if the government can’t access phones, “everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket,” which appeared to refer to cryptocurrency. Last week, Bitcoin Magazine reported on Bitcoin’s industry representatives and their positions on encryption, privacy, Bitcoin’s role in tax evasion and money laundering and more. In part two of our coverage: What do the actual builders of these pocket-sized “Swiss bank accounts” think? Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Electrum developer Thomas Voegtlin, Breadwallet CEO Aaron Voisine, Mycelium developer Leo Wandersleb and Ledger CTO Nicolas Bacca to see where they stand. Broken The debate on encryption and privacy caused by the ongoing dispute between Apple and the FBI took a sharp turn this week. The United States Department of Justice had long claimed it was unable to access encrypted iPhones without help from Apple, but this turned out not to be true. Although the Department of Justice did not explain how they got access to the phone, the Bitcoin wallet developers Bitcoin Magazine spoke to were not surprised that they could. Ledger CTO Nicolas Bacca speculated: “To get access to the data, the FBI probably relied on some kind of physical attack involving the flash memory. Swapping the flash memory or disabling writes could get you infinite retries, so you can brute force the access code. The operating system doesn’t handle that securely.”Bacca also pointed out that Bitcoin itself is much more secure than a typical iPhone.“I believe Bitcoin is less at risk against physical attacks compared to other cryptosystems, because you always get a way to invalidate a possibly compromised key – just send the coins to a different address if you notice quickly enough. The issue is properly []. By|| Best known as the creator of JavaScript and a co-founder of Mozilla, Brendan Eich these days has moved on to a new project. He is CEO of Brave Software, which wants to “build a better Web” that puts users in control of their data, blocking trackers by default. Brave is building its own browser and promotes micropayments and better ads as an alternative to poorly performing ads that drive users to blockers. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently met with Eich to discuss his latest venture. [ Also on InfoWorld: 22 JavaScript frameworks ready for adoption.| JavaScript founder Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer.| Brendan Eich celebrates the rise of JavaScript compilers.| Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s Application Development newsletter. ] InfoWorld: What is the principal mission of Brave Software? Your slogan says you are building a better Web. Eich: There’s a simple answer, which is to block everything — it makes the browser faster. But we’d like to try two things on top of that. One of them is a better way to do anonymous, highly private ads — ads that don’t involve tracking. That’s because we think most people are used to the Web being funded by ads. They don’t want to necessarily pay for content. The second thing is a micropayments channel. There’s a connection between the two so the users can pay for content if they want to. Again, it’s anonymous, a very small payments channel that doesn’t require you to give your credit card. It’s a browser-based micropay wall. We block everything for speed and privacy and safety, given the malvertisement that’s getting into the ad supply chains. One of the things we’re trying is better ads to make payments work for publishers without users []. By|| Other than the ongoing Bitcoin block size debate, there are other topics being discussed on social media which relate to digital currency and blockchain technology. The topic of one particular discussion comes in the form of Andreas M. Antonopoulos using the term “internet of money” to describe Bitcoin, a sentence for which a trademark request has been filed back in 2015. Uphold is also involved in this story, considering the trademark application belongs to them. What is the world coming to when people start patenting pretty common sayings? Also read: Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis For – Buying Dips Worked The Antonopoulos – Uphold – Internet of Money Triangle When looking over the Twitter conversations taking place these past few weeks, there seems to be a war of words going on between Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Uphold. Most people active in the world of Bitcoin and digital currency will be well aware of how Uphold was known as BitReserve until very recently. Things started off when Antonopoulos publicly challenged Anthony Watson – the CEO of Uphold – to sue him for using the term “Internet of Money”. Not that there is anything wrong with that on paper, although a trademark filing was submitted for this term by Uphold Global Foundation Corporation back on September 10th 2015. However, it is equally important to note the trademark has been published for opposition on February 2, 2016. Snap taken from Uphold’s official website. Antonopoulos pointed out how the trademark sentence ‘Internet of Money” can be opposed, and the argument about this issue was picked up by a certain Bitcoin media outlet. After the article was published by them – and later on retracted– even more, drama ensued on Twitter. Anthony Watson never said he was planning to use Antonopoulos over []. By|| Another hospital in the United States has fallen victim to a virus bringing their services to a halt. MedStar Hospital Center, located in Washington, noticed the virus intrusion early Monday morning, resulting in email services being shut down, and having no access to their vast database of patient records. This matter has piqued the interest of the FBI, who are currently investigating the matter to determine whether or not Bitcoin ransomware is involved in this attack. Also read: Antonopoulos and Uphold Get into a Spat over Trademarked Saying MedStar Washington Hospital Center Faces Virus Threat Given the number of hospitals being infected by Bitcoin ransomware over the past few months, it only seems to make sense this issue plaguing the MedStar Washington Hospital Center should be classified in the same category. However, it remains unclear as to whether or not Bitcoin ransomware is the cause of this attack, as there has not been an official statement just yet. What we do know is how no information appears to be stolen from the hospital database, which is cause for a sigh of relief. Healthcare institutions have a vast amount of personal details about their patients, and all of these details could be of high value to individual internet criminals. Luckily, this is not the case here, or so it would seem. MedStar has to be applauded for their course of action, as the decision was made to shut down all system interfaces. Doing so effectively cuts all access paths for this virus to spread itself through the entire hospital IT system. That being said, all of the clinical facilities will remain open although there will be some delays due to staff reverting to paper records for the time being. Keeping in mind how MedStar operates ten different hospitals, as well as []. By|| Ethereum, a public blockchain platform which boasts its smart contract technology, represents a decentralized virtual machine executing peer-to-peer contracts with its native digital cryptocurrency Ether (ETH). But, just how decentralized with it? A quick analysis of the network demonstrates that the phenomenon which has terrified bitcoiners for so long has taken hold on the Ethereum network. Bitcoin is not the only blockchain encumbered by mining centralization. The Ethereum miners have consolidated in a more dramatic fashion. While many cryptocurrencies used Scrypt, Vitalik Buterin believed Scrypt was not memory hard enough to use for the alt. Currency network. By|| Key Points Bitcoin price continued to move higher against the US Dollar, and my buy dips idea highlighted in yesterday’s post worked perfectly. The price cleared a bearish trend line formed on the hourly chart (data feed from Bitstamp), and looks set for more gains. The price almost reached $425, which is a resistance area and I think it’s time to book profits if you are in a trade. Bitcoin price moved higher after a minor correction as forecasted. Read more how BTC/USD can trade from the current levels. Bitcoin Price is all Bullish? Bitcoin price surged higher and after a minor correction managed to gain bids for another upside move. I highlighted a plan of buying dips yesterday, which worked perfectly, and now I think it is time to book profits as BTC/USD is heading towards a major resistance area and it is not worth the risk. The price stayed above a major bullish trend line formed on the hourly chart (data feed from Bitstamp), and also managed to break a minor bearish trend line on the same chart. BTC to USD almost tested the 50% Fib retracement level of the last wave of the $412 low to $427 high and started to move higher. BTC/USD may be heading back towards the $427 high, but the bulls need to be careful, as there is a convergence forming. I think the best idea is to stay away for a couple of sessions, and wait for the price to stabilize, then we can analyze further. On the downside, the $420 level remains a major support area for the BTC in the short term. Looking at the technical indicators: Hourly MACD – The hourly MACD is in the bullish slope, suggesting buyer’s strength. RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI is []. By|| Although there is still a lot of confusion in the world as to what Coinkite will be doing with their business moving forward, it looks like they will be fully transitioning to a hardware business model, rather than software solutions. Opendime is one of the first projects they have announced in a while, and it will serve as a way to accept and spend Bitcoin through a physical device no bigger than a regular USB drive. Also read: BullBear Analytics Re-launches Website & Opens Up Membership The Coinkite Opendime Has Potential It is important to keep in mind an Opendime from Coinkite will not replace a traditional Bitcoin wallet, as users looking to move funds in and out of this USB flash drive will still need a separate software or app. But at the same time, this USB disk-shaped device is an attractive option to gift Bitcoin to other users, or even selling pre-funded devices with a particular Bitcoin balance. Coinkite wants to stress the Opendime has a lot of features under the hood, such as the private key being generated inside the device itself. As a result, no one knows the key, not even the end user. Some people might see this as a weak spot for this bitcoin wallet device, as it is rather unusual not to have the private key associated to one’s wallet. In fact, the product page mentions how the Opendime removes the trust factor from the equation altogether, as a user can give their device to anyone without worrying the funds can be stolen. With the private keys stored on the device itself, it seems rather risky to give the Opendime to anyone else, especially if it contains one’s own funds. However, the private key can be “unsealed” making it appear to []. By|| With a 300% growth on a global level, 2015 was the year of fintech, and the latest studies show that 2016 will double this investment data. From ecommerce to mobile payments to banking services, the blockchain is at the center of any innovative technology and new platforms, as the distributed ledger represents the vanguard for the disintermediation of value transfers between individuals and companies. Blockchain Club to invest in Fintech This is the reason why a few days ago SiamoSoci launched its new project called Blockchain Club, which aims to form a group of investors that wish to participate in the growth of fintech startups based on Blockchain technology. Dario Giudici, CEO of SiamoSoci, explains: “Any investor would have liked to invest in companies like Google, Paypal or Amazon back in 1998. Now we have our second chance: a technology that will likely impact on our lives as much as the internet does, and the opportunity to do early stage investments on companies that might be the next game changers. That’s why we created the Club.” Dario Giudici, CEO of SiamoSoci Blockchain Club is being realized in partnership with BlockchainLab, the Italian research lab funded by Intesa SanPaolo and Azimut. Its team of experts is gathering all the most promising startups that are developing services on the blockchain, and will support the Club in its selection of the best Italian and global projects that will compose its portfolio. Giacomo Zucco, CEO at BlockchainLab, says: “BlockchainLab aims at collecting the Italian and International excellence to screen every existing project in this field and to understand the future trends” After its previous project that invested in Bitcoin, called Cryptoclub, SiamoSoci once again targets the blockchain. How Blockchain Club works The goal is to collect five million euros from private []. By|| The Original Cryptocurrency Forecasters – founded in 2010 – March 28th, 2016 – With the Bitcoin & Altcoin trading space growing daily, we at BullBear Analytics are excited to announce that we are opening up our services to the masses with our new website launch (www.bullbearanalytics.com). We have created new subscription packages that will accommodate all types of traders from newbies, to everyday speculators, to experienced day traders, and even a custom-built package called “ The Wolf” for those who consider themselves The Wolves of Bitcoin. These new subscription packages contain a variety of features including daily newsletters, a multi-channel Slack room, as well as personal skype calls and custom made reports. Slack has been a wonderful addition that has allowed us to create specific chat rooms for different markets, provide real time price notifications, host archives of past reports and updates, make company announcements, and communicate directly with our clients in a public or private way. Not only does BBA cover the bitcoin markets, but we also provide technical analysis of the altcoin markets with weekly updates and constant Slack discussion on the most promising and liquid altcoins in the space. We currently cover Ether, Monero, and Dash, and are always on the lookout for new additions to the coverage universe. We also dabble in and comment on Forex, Stocks, Gold and Silver, and we will be launching new products throughout the year. We are also pleased to formally and publicly introduce our Chief Analyst, Adam K. Wyatt (@AKWAnalytics). Adam is well known in cryptocurrency trading circles as one of most objective and consistent analysts in the business. He leads the way in our analyses and forecasts, and is active in our slack channel every day talking with and getting to know our traders, both new and old. BullBear Analytics is []. By|| The Russian Finance Ministry has long taken a determined hardline stance against bitcoin and other digital currencies, deemed by the regulator as ‘surrogates’ of the ruble. The Deputy Minister of Finance in Russia hopes that the draft law calling for the criminalization of bitcoin will be passed to the State Duma – the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament – before the end of the current session in August. A recent report by Russian publication RIA Novosti, has revealed that the Russian Deputy Finance Minister, Alexei Moiseev, hopes that a law is crafted to introduce criminal liabilities to those who exchange bitcoins for rubles and vice versa. Notably, Moiseev intends to see the bill pass through the Duma before the end of the current spring session, which comes to a close on August 6. As reported by the publication, Moiseev is quoted as saying: I hope that in a rather short period of time, we will be able to do this [pass the bill for a ban on bitcoin]. I think that will be able to bring in the bill before the end of the spring session. I do not know if we will be able to adopt [the bill] in its first reading. The news comes following a recent report that confirmed that the Russian Finance Ministry is chalking up a proposal to ban the cryptocurrency. The proposal for the ban is in its final version, having already been offered for public discussion and calls upon various articles in the Constitution of the Russian Federation that deems the Russian ruble as the only monetary unit permissible in the Russian Federation. For instance, Article 75 states: The monetary unit of the Russian Federation is the ruble. The Central Bank of the Russian Federation is the sole issuer of currency. The introduction and []. By|| An interesting development has been announced earlier today, as Coinify is working hard to expand their presence in the Asian region. Thanks to a partnership with iPayDNA, they can now offer multi-coin payments across Asian countries, Another notch in the belt for digital currency as a whole, and a promising partnership to shake up the way payments are handled in the region. Also read: Coinkite to Terminate Bitcoin Web Wallets and Focus on Hardware Coinify Joins Forces with iPayDNA This partnership is quite interesting in its own right, as iPayDNA is a Hong Kong-based payment processor, and Coinify is a digital currency payment service provider hailing from Denmark. While it is not unusual to see international partnerships taking place in the digital currency ecosystem, it speaks volumes as to how the demand for alternative payment options truly is universal. Expanding in the Asian market is not an easy feat, although Coinify has been working on trying to achieve this goal. With a strategic partner in Asia, blockchain-based merchant processing solutions will be coming to consumers in that region. IPayDNA is a very dominant player in this area, and it will be interesting to see how this partnership will affect digital currency payments as a whole. Coinify Sales Manager Morten Bebe stated: “The increasing popularity of alternative payments is reinforced by the strong shift from cash to electronic payments and the increasing number of customers searching for their preferred payment method in a secure environment. Besides these strong indicators of the potential that blockchain payments have in the area, we are pleased about opportunities contributing to the infrastructure and supporting the digital currency adoption process.” Local merchants in Asia are very different from those in Europe or the US, and it is pertinent for Coinify to have a partner []. By|| Prominent bitcoin platform CoinKite which has provided the Bitcoin community with secure and robust multi-sig wallets, merchant tools and developer API has announced today that the company will terminate its bitcoin web wallet service and developer API. Coinkite emphasizes that the team is still a huge supporter of bitcoin and will continue the development of bitcoin-related products. The Coinkite team stated on their blog that the company will drift apart from its software services to hardware products during the next few months. In the meantime, no new user sign-ups will be accepted and the Coinkite platform will not distribute any new API keys. Coinkite stated legal issues and DDoS attacks as a few major factors behind their decision to terminate its web wallet services. The Coinkite platform has continuously been a victim of intense DDoS attacks since its launch in 2013 and as a centralized bitcoin service, the company has consistently been targeted by government agencies and state actors. “Being a centralized bitcoin service does attract attention from state actors and other well funded pains in the butt, and as a matter of fact, we’ve been under DDoS since the first month we launched—over three years,” said the Coinkite team. “Plus we have put real fiat dollars into our lawyers’ pockets, to defend our customers from their own governments. This is not what we love to do, which is coding and delivering awesome services.” 14 days from now, on April 11, all Coinkite web wallet users and developers will be requested to withdraw balances on login. Otherwise, the all logins will lead to force withdrawals after 30 days, on April 27. The team further explained that tor access will be terminated, API will be disabled and zero balance accounts will be automatically closed. The company hasn’t released any explicit details regarding future hardware []. By|| Bitcoin Video Casino is one of the coolest and oldest gambling sites you will be able to find in the whole digital currency gambling industry. It is among the only online casinos that offer players Las Vegas style casino video machines, loaded with several popular games offering attractive betting returns. Most Casino players these days like to play with Video Machines, and Bitcoin Video Casino offers an incredible number of different slot machines games, thereby allowing a high quality professional gambling experience. The site offers several advantages: No registration, at least 99.5% expected return on all games, instant payouts and the option to play Bitcoin Video Poker on any mobile device. It also offers a secure gambling platform, where players can register with an anonymous account. The registration process is quite simple and users will need to bookmark or copy down their Bitcoin Video Casino URL in order to get back into their account. At Bitcoin Video Casino, games are provably fair, and the gambling style is based on the classic Video Poker machines in Las Vegas. The site doesn’t offer any extra Bonuses, but it has an excellent referral program. The referral program offers up to 25% of the house edge as income. By bringing new players to the site users will earn a commission over the new player wins and losses. The site is super user-friendly and the interface very is easy to use. Developers can also use Bitcoin Video Casino API to build bots or any other support software they can imagine. At Bitcoin Video Casino players can open their free accounts and enjoy the pleasure of being able to play with a completely anonymous account. So, if you are one of those gamblers who really enjoy staying anonymous, Bitcoin Video Casino is the right place for you! The opinions expressed []. By|| Bitcoin services startup Coinkite has announced that it will soon be dropping its popular and secure bitcoin web wallets, Tor access to users as well as their API in order to focus on hardware-based bitcoin products and services. The phase out from its current roster of services including its web wallet will play out over the next 30 days, Coinkite announced in a blog post today. The company insists that it is moving on to the “next phase” of Coinkite, one which does not involve the web wallet service offered to its customers who include individuals and businesses. In its blog post, Coinkite adds that it remains big proponents of the cryptocurrency and its applications while noting that the company is only moving away from the software realm of Bitcoin services. The revelation offers clear insight into the decision taken by Coinkite, citing state-sponsored threat actors and DDoS attackers who have been targeting the company ever since its launch over three years ago. An excerpt from the blog explaining Coinkite’s decision to stop its web wallet reads: Being a centralized bitcoin service does attract attention from state actors and other well-funded pains in the butt, and as a matter of fact, we’ve been under DDoS since the first month we launched – over three years – yay. Plus, we have put real fiat dollars into our lawyers’ pockets, to defend our custoemrs from their own governments. This is not what we love to do, which is coding and delivering awesome services. Coinkite was one of the earliest developers of bitcoin services and developer tools, having been founded in 2012. The service was launched the following year. In 2014, Coinkite launched multi-signature wallets. In the same year, the company expanded its multiple signature service for up to 15 members. The same year []. By|| Spurred by Ethereum’s recent high-profile write up in the New York Times, Chris DeRose, Community Director at the Counterparty Foundation took to Twitter to vent his disbelief that Ethereum will amount to all its hype. On DeRose’s personal Twitter page, he sent a tweet to Bitcoin beat writer Nathaniel Popper, the journalist who penned the NYT piece warning him that he should be wary to endorse the alt.currency as a “project” due to it only having hype behind it and no substance. Of course, a bold and contrarian statement such as this one didn’t go unheard in the world of social media others soon chimed in with their own opinions, notably defending Ethereum. The momentum of Ethereum has been largely well received among those in the world of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. With the value of the alt. Currency as a cryptocurrency exploding in recent months, it’s been an attractive investment alternative as Bitcoin’s price has conversely been in a bit of a slump as late. Ethereum’s cryptocurrency value is only part of its allure to many enthusiasts, however, as it’s become increasingly popular as large industries and businesses have experimented with using its smart contract technology in real-world applications. Apparently DeRose’s gripe is that he sees little intrinsic value in Ethereum, according to his tweets, in the nature of smart contracts and believes the “overhead” and complicated infrastructure to bolster such a technology isn’t likely. His Twitter argument consistent of a back and forth conversation primarily with Mark Wilcox, an Ethereum crowdsale investor and clear advocate of the project. A highlight of DeRose’s main arguments against smart-contracts include: No one needs smart-contracts. He considers them expensive to produce and maintain. Their logic can be performed better and cheaper by centralized servers. DeRose’s involvement with Counterparty ‘s Bitcoin blockchain based []. By|| Decentralized technologies like Bitcoin and emergency response app Cell 411 could help with South Africa’s economy and high crime rates. South Africa’s government has let its citizens down, overseeing both a disappointing economy and a frightening crime rate. Thankfully, the people still have recourse in decentralized technology. With BitcoinCT r: 8 in one metaphorical hand and Cell 411 in the other, the average South African can hope for a brighter future, government incompetence be damned. Bitcoin’s potential to alleviate economic woes South Africa’s economy is in trouble. Sluggish economic growth compounded with a drought, spells ill for a nation that has traditionally been one of the continent’s most prosperous. These issues are particularly well illustrated by currency troubles, prompted by government failings. Faced with corruption surrounding the untimely departure of the finance minister, the county’s currency, the rand, fell over 6% almost instantly. 'President Jacob Zuma has become a one-man wrecking ball who will stop at nothing in order to survive, including wrecking the economy and wrecking South Africa,' David Maynier, the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) shadow minister of finance, told parliament during the nationally televised debate. In February, the country announced an austere budget aimed at avoiding credit rating downgrades, but investors were not convinced and analysts said a recession is still likely to affect the country. Thankfully, South Africa’s citizens don’t necessarily have to live with the consequences of their government’s folly. By employing Bitcoin instead, they can ditch the rand for a currency that has, for well over a year at any rate, surmounted numerous obstacles to exhibit an incredible growth in price. South Africans seem to be catching on to this, with Bidorbuy, Africa’s largest online retailer, not only accepting Bitcoin as a payment option for its thousands of sellers, but actively encouraging its use. Since approximately []. By|| Bitcoin technology startup Coinkite has announced it is winding down its web wallet in an effort to focus on enterprise hardware products. The phasing out of the product, Coinkite said in a blog post, will take place over the course of 30 days, after which users logging into the site will automatically have their balances withdrawn. The company indicated there would be an additional process for any unclaimed funds leftover from the transaction. In interview, Coinkite CEO Rodolfo Novak said that the startup is keen to move away from software, as he indicated resources are being drained at the company by the “amount of bullshit” involved in offering the service. Novak told CoinDesk: 'We want to write software, not deal with lawyers and DDoSing.' Novak also cited the high cost of offering reliable free software services as another pain point considered in the transition. Founded in 2012, Coinkite has long offered prominent developer tools, including API and wallet products that the company once lauded as more decentralized and more privacy-friendly than alternatives. 'One of the main issues with SaaS is all the free users and need support and we want to provide good support. All these things have costs,' Novak continued. Coinkite encouraged wallet users to switch to products available from Bitcoin.org, Bitcoin Core, Electrum and Ledger. Microsoft’s lunch Novak said Coinkite now plans to focus on creating bitcoin transaction processing hardware, a product it positioned as one that would appeal to more lucrative enterprise users.Notably, Novak positioned such a device as a more secure alternative to cloud-based services such as Microsoft Azure. The comments come at a time when Microsoft is ramping up its Blockchain-as-a-Service testbed with the goal of a more formal Spring launch.' It’s not safe to use hosted services,' Novak said. 'It’s important to have servers that are meant to []. By|| A representative of Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) has indicated he believes Asia should emerge as a leader in blockchain technology. The comments came as part of a keynote address at the OECD-ADBI Roundtable on Capital Markets and Financial Reform in Tokyo last week, where vice minister for international affairs Masamichi Kono addressed the subject. There, Kono noted Asia’s historical aptitude in leveraging emerging technologies before discussing blockchain tech. Kono said: 'An area of strength for Asia may be in making the best use of technological innovations. Particularly for those ‘disruptive technologies’, including distributed ledger and blockchain technologies, Asia has a competitive edge, and should be in a position to be able to deploy those new tools in financing growth in the region in a more cost-effective yet safe manner.' Kono ended his remarks by noting that the FSA believes upholding confidence in its markets to be its top priority, but that it would support technologies that could enhance transparency and accountability as well as enable innovations in accounting and corporate governance. The statements came as part of a wider discussion on how Asia’s financial system is changing following the 2008-2009 financial crisis, with Kono noting that the market is more broadly shifting away from an 'overreliance on a limited number of banks'. Entitled 'A New Strategy for Growth Finance in Asia', the speech also touched on topics including the need for new regional strategies for long-term investment and regulatory reform. Focus on regulation The statements are the latest that find Japan’s top financial regulator taking more of a leadership role in industry matters following a string of announcements that found it moving to bring bitcoin and digital currencies under existing legislative frameworks. For example, the FSA recently submitted a proposed change for domestic financial regulations to Japan’s national legislature. The definition would effectively []. By|| One of the largest and oldest organizations for computing professionals will kick off its annual conference on the future of mobile cloud computing tomorrow, where blockchain is scheduled to be one of the attractions. With more than 421,000 members in 260 countries, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) holding such a high-profile event has the potential to accelerate the rate of blockchain adoption by the engineering community. At the four-day conference, beginning Tuesday, the IEEE will host five blockchain seminars at the 702-year-old Exeter College of Oxford. The conference, IEEE Mobile Cloud 2016, is the organization’s fourth annual event dedicated to mobile cloud computing services and engineering. Speaking at the event, hosted at Oxford University, professor Wei-Tek Tsai of the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems engineering at Arizona State University will talk about the future of blockchain technology as an academic topic of research. Computing shift While this looks to be the first IEEE conference to deal so closely with blockchain, its presence at an event dedicated to cloud computing is no surprise. 2016 is shaping up to be the year many stopped talking about bitcoin as a decentralized ledger and started talking about it as a database. Last month, IBM made a huge splash in the blockchain ecosystem when it announced among a wide range of other news, that it would be offering a wide range of blockchain-related initiatives. Further, in November, Microsoft coined the term Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) to describe its sandbox environment where developers could experiment with tools hosted on the company’s Azure Cloud platform. Companies including ConsenSys, Augur, BitShares and Slock.it have joined that effort. Oxford University via Shutterstock. By|| MIT announced today it has raised $900,000 to fund the work of three bitcoin developers. The Bitcoin Developer Fund, backed by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and others is intended to give the three bitcoin coders working to resolve the block-size debate and other similar technical challenges an academic platform from which to work. MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) director Brian Forde said the university’s role in helping support these coders is just part of the academic community’s responsibility to create a place where bitcoin’s developers can continue their work. Forde told CoinDesk: 'We built out the fund to be able to support people like Wlad [van der Laan], Cory [Fields] and Gavin [Andresen] who have supported bitcoin to continue their work in an academic way.' Beginning in April 2015, the developers have been working with the MIT DCI in a full-time capacity. MIT’s Media Lab created the Digital Currency Initiative, also in Apirl 2015, to foster an academic exploration of the blockchain. Corporate donors to the fund included BitFury, Bitmain, Chain, Circle and Nasdaq, along with venture capitalists Jim Breyer, Jim Pallotta, Jeff Tarrant and Fred Wilson. LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman, who is also a co-founder of PayPal and a member of the so-called PayPal mafia, also participated. The money was given as what Forde called 'unrestricted gifts', a decision intended to prevent the donors from obtaining any influence over the developers. In regards to the Bitcoin Core versus Bitcoin Classic debate over how to scale the network, MIT says it has no official position. An Academic Platform In spite of MIT maintaining a neutral position, the bitcoin scaling debate certainly plays a role in the Boston-based university’s decision to help raise the fund. The network’s developers, including those with the ability to implement changes decided upon by members of the []. By|| This is a guest post by Justin O’Connell. The Aite Group projects the blockchain market could be valued at $400 million by 2019. For that reason, some of the biggest names in banking, industry and technology have entered into the space to evaluate how this technology could change the financial world. IBM and Linux, for instance, have brought together some of the brightest minds in the industry and technology to work on blockchain technology through the Hyperledger Project. The Hyperledger Project is under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, and seeks to incorporate findings by blockchain projects such as Blockstream, Ripple, Digital Asset Holdings and others in order to make blockchain technology useful for the world’s biggest corporations. IBM has also contributed its own code to the project. According to John Wolpert, IBM’s Global Blockchain Offering Director, when IBM and Linux began working together on the blockchain project, Linux made clear it wanted to “disrupt the disruption,” in part with their findings, as well as the data gathered by projects such as Ripple, Ethereum and others exploring the blockchain. The Linux foundation announced its Hyperledger project on December 17, 2015. Just one day later, 2,300 companies had requested to join. The second-largest open source foundation in the history of open source had only 450 inquiries. “So, it’s either going to be a holy mess or it’s going to change the world,” Wolpert said at The Blockchain Conference in San Francisco presented by Lighthouse Partners. As Wolford puts it, a team of IBMers is “on a quest” to understand and “do something important” with blockchain technology. “I don’t know why we got this rap in the ‘70s, way back, that we are not cool, that we’re kind of stodgy, and that is not the IBM of my experience,” Wolpert, who founded the taxi service Flywheel, explained. By|| Bitcoin price broke above its narrow 4-day trading range, but may soon re-enter the horizontal layer that has been constraining market activity. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3-hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? Join now and receive a $29 discount using the code CCN29. Bitcoin Price Analysis Time of analysis: 14h00 UTC Bitstamp 1-Hour Chart From the analysis pages of xbt.social, earlier today: Although it looked like the wave would push toward $440 in SUnday’s low liquidity, the wave has been declining piece-meal since the high at $428. In keeping with the jagged price patterns visible in the chart, we can expect that the spike up will eventually be fully retraced, or perhaps continue lower. The vicinity of the 200-period moving average (red) seems a logical target, below which we’d look to short. Staying above means ongoing consolidation. Summary Bitcoin price reversed quickly from an upward spike on Sunday. Price is currently retracing the spike and may continue doing until reaching its level of origin. Meandering price with no clear direction. Only a directional breakout could clarify this chart, but until then there may be a lot more sideways price action to endure. Bitfinex Depth Chart and Buy/Sell Volume What do readers think? Please comment below. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3-hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? Join now and receive a $29 discount using the code CCN29. Readers can follow Bitcoin price analysis updates every day on CCN.LA. A Global Economic Outlook report is published every Monday. Disclaimer The writer trades Bitcoin. Trade and Investment is risky. CCN.LA accepts no liability for losses incurred as a result of anything written in this Bitcoin price analysis report. Bitcoin price []. By|| The alarm clock wakes me at 8:00 with stream of advert-free broadcasting, charged at one satoshi per second. The current BTC exchange rate makes that snooze button a costly proposition! So I get up, make coffee and go to my computer to check the overnight performance of my bots. TradeBot earns me on Trump and Branson TradeBot, which allocates funds between the main chain and various national currency side-chains, generated a lucrative 0.24 BTC return. TradeBot has been reliably profitable ever since I set it to trade USDcoin according to political prediction market data. As expected, the latest poll numbers came in as highly supportive of Trump’s re-election as USDcoin CEO. Trump’s resistance to de-anonymizing public spending, by moving USDcoin off the Confidential Transactions layer, continues to erode his coin’s credibility. In his latest speech, Trump maintains that full CT-privacy is essential to 'combatting CNYcoin’s sinister ring-signature scheming.' I make a note to increase my long position in GBPcoin. Following CEO Branson’s memo to the effect that government finances and national banks be brought into compliance with the public blockchain, British corruption indices have flatlined.As the first national econmy to 'go light,' Britain leads the global recovery from the Great Debt Default of ’20. By|| Recently, UpholdCT r: 56 (formerly known as BitReserve) CEO Anthony Watson has revealed his intentions to sue prominent security expert and highly respected author of “Mastering Bitcoin,” Andreas Antonopoulos, for his use of the phrase “The Internet of Money.” Antonopoulos asks the community for help Antonopoulos has offered a minimum 1 bitcoinCT r: 8 reward to anyone in the community that can find the earliest use and application of this phrase. Andreas Antonopoulos writes in his blog: “The best and earliest example of the use of this phrase will be awarded a 1 bitcoin reward. If more than one example are worthy of reward, or more funds are raised, the operators of this site may (at their discretion) give additional rewards to the earliest or several examples. The minimum reward donated will be 1BTC.” Chicken and egg debate Since early 2013, many experts and startups including Antonopoulos have used and applied the phrase “The Internet of Money” as a general description of digital currencies such as Bitcoin. Some financial institutions like the Development Bank of Japan began to use the phrase as early as in November, 2010. In fact, Yoshitaka Fukui, former senior vice president of the Development Bank of Japan published a full report on the topic “The Internet of Money” on November 29, 2010. Yet, Watson has continued to justify his possession of the phrase “The Internet of Money,” and explained that his former company BitReserve have been using the phrase as their company slogan. He further emphasized that he is not willing to engage in a legal dispute against a “random I’ve never heard before today,” referring to Andreas Antonopoulos. The fight over “The Internet of Money” will continue The disrespect Watson displayed against a highly respected member of the Bitcoin community like Antonopoulos agitated many []. By|| It’s hard enough for non-technical users to deal with ransomware infections: understanding public-key cryptography, connecting to the Tor anonymity network and paying with Bitcoin cryptocurrency. A new malicious program now makes it even more difficult by completely locking victims out of their computers. The new Petya ransomware overwrites the master boot record (MBR) of the affected PCs, leaving their operating systems in an unbootable state, researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro said in a blog post. [ Roger Grimes’ free and almost foolproof way to check for malware.| Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld’s Security newsletter. ] The MBR is the code stored in the first sectors of a hard disk drive. It contains information about the disk’s partitions and launches the operating system’s boot loader. Without a proper MBR, the computer doesn’t know which partitions contain an OS and how to start it. Trend Micro researchers say Petya is distributed through spam emails that masquerade as job applications. This suggests that its creators target businesses in particular, with the messages being directed at human resources departments. The emails have a link to a shared Dropbox folder that contains a self-extracting archive posing as the applicant’s CV and a fake photo. If the archive is downloaded and executed, the ransomware is installed. The malicious program will rewrite the computer’s MBR and and will trigger a critical Windows error that will cause the computer to reboot — a condition known as a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Following this initial reboot, the rogue MBR code will display a fake Windows check disk operation that normally occurs after a hard disk error, according to computer experts from popular tech support forum BleepingComputer.com. During this operation, the ransomware actually encrypts the master file table (MFT). This is a special file on NTFS []. By|| Banks and other established financial players have not taken a liking to Fintech and digital currency just yet, as they see both industries as major competitors to their offerings. While it is certainly true Bitcoin and Fintech can bring significant improvements to the table, they should be seen as complementary allies who will bring success to the banking industry. Or that is what the Monetary Authority of Singapore seems to be thinking, at least. Also read: Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis For – Looking To Buy BTC? Embracing Bitcoin and Fintech as a Bank is Necessary There is no denying the banking sector has seen very little to no real innovation for quite some time now, opening the door for other players to step in and offer something entirely different. In fact, a lot of financial experts see Fintech and Bitcoin as two major threats to the banking system, which would explain the vocal opposition to any solution that is not controlled by a bank or government. But the Monetary Authority of Singapore sees things different, as they feel both Fintech and Bitcoin are capable of complementing the current financial infrastructure, rather than be competing with banks. A combination of traditional banking with innovative technology and services has the potential to create a powerful and versatile financial ecosystem all over the globe. Fintech startups and entrepreneurs are renowned for thinking outside of the proverbial box when it comes to accessing financial services. Particularly where the money lending and peer-to-peer aspect is concerned, most Fintech companies have a leg up over their more traditional counterparts. But that does not mean these startups are looking to overthrow the banking system, although they might be able to in the long run. Any bank that is too slow – or simply unwilling – []. By|| Finding the right online casinos for the right persons is a matter of mixing and matching, as every individual player has their own preferences and needs. While everyone wants to find the safe online casino games they desire, the choice of payment method can be a determining factor in choosing the ultimate casino platform. Most online casino players will stick to the more traditional payment methods, including Paypal, Skrill, and Neteller. There is a wide variety of places where one can play safe online casino games and pay with one of these supported payment methods, such as casino.com, Bitstarz, Pokerstars, and Wonderland Casino. All of these platforms have received high praise from reviewers and players alike, part of which can be contributed to their variety of accepted payment methods. But there is another group among the players looking for safe online casino games, as not everyone wants to see a casino reference on their online payment account or credit card statement. Bitcoin offers these people a way to remain anonymous on the casino platform of their choice, while still being able to play their favorite safe online casino games. It has to be said, there are some popular Bitcoin casinos available on the Internet today. The aforementioned Bitstars, for example, supports a wide variety of payment method, including Bitcoin. Moreover, players can also withdraw their earnings in Bitcoin, or use any of the other traditional supported payment methods, including Poli bank transfer and LavaPay. Other platforms which have seen a significant growth over the past few years are: FortuneJack, Betchain Casino, and BitCasino. More and more platforms originally only accepting traditional payment methods are expanding their services to Bitcoin users as well, in an effort to attract more people looking to play safe online casino games. In the end, []. By|| These days we hear a lot about multinational corporations entering the blockchain space via partnerships with each other. Less known are the blockchain companies, who do not have ties to multinationals, partnering with each other to push blockchain technology. Last week, Eris Industries selected Ledger as its hardware security partner in the pursuit of bettering the security of critical workflows – that is, back-office processes, a target of many blockchain projects – and protect its blockchain-based infrastructure. Ledger, a blockchain security provider, offers hardware solutions for consumers and enterprises. Ledger, founded in 2015, first released a best-selling smart card based hardware wallet and entered the B2B market with TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) and HSM (Hardware Security Module) solutions. Eris is building the leading blockchain application platform for industrial uses of blockchain and smart contract technology. “We work on problems of network level business process automation,” CEO Casey Kuhlman told CCN. “Traditional data and process management tooling has automated many internal business processes within industry. However, business processes which need to operate on a network level (i.e., outside of the context of a single enterprises’ data silos) benefit from being operated using a distributed application paradigm. Eris greatly reduces the friction required in building, testing, and operating such applications.” Eris views its partnership with Ledger as bringing a missing piece to their project: a hardened key management solution. It has never been our intention to become a security company. “Rather we have been actively working to extend our platform in such a way that it would be highly interoperable with numerous other software and hardware companies from blockchain client builders to key management and security systems.The partnership not only validates our architectural strategy, but it also dramatically enhances the eris platform as more of our users begin to harden their smart contract []. By|| Ethereum, considered by many to be the most promising altcoin, has grabbed the attention of The New York Times. The “newspaper of record” has run a big feature story on Ethereum, noting its value has spiraled 1,000% in the last three months and is attracting interest from major financial companies that are using it for private blockchains and smart contracts. The story notes the first public version of Ethereum was recently released. The story noted there are numerous applications built on Ethereum that allow new ways to place bets, pay bills and even launch Ponzi schemes. Some cryptocurrency observers claim Ethereum will face more security issues than bitcoin due to its more complex software. Currency system has faced less testing and suffered fewer attacks than bitcoin. The unusual design could also invite more regulatory scrutiny considering some potentially fraudulent contracts can be written into the system. Capabilities Draw Interest However, the system’s capabilities have drawn interest from major corporations. Last year, IBM announced it was testing the alt.currency system as a way to manage real-world objects in the Internet of Things. Microsoft has been working on various projects that make it easier to use Ethereum on its Azure computing cloud. Marley Gray, a business development and strategy director at Microsoft, said Ethereum is a platform for solving problems in different industries. He called it the most “elegant” solution seen to date. Private Blockchains Expand Many companies have created private blockchains using Ethereum. These private blockchains could eventually undermine the value of the Ether, the individual unit in the alt.currency system that people have been buying. Major banks have shown interest in using blockchains to make transferring and trading money more efficient. Several banks have examined how to use Ethereum. JPMorgan has developed a tool called Masala that enables its internal databases []. By|| Alpha and beta. A basic premise of the efficient markets hypothesis is that you shouldn’t be able to beat the market in simple dumb ways. (Stronger forms say you shouldn’t be able to beat it in difficult smart ways either, but leave that aside.) So buying stocks with relatively low prices, or low volatility, or good recent past performance, or that start with the letter R, or that have green logos, or buying on Monday and selling on Thursday, shouldn’t get you returns that are better than a broad market index. But sometimes that stuff works anyway, and so there are 'smart beta' funds that try to beat the market in simple dumb ways (sometimes with math, but still): They don’t do much active trading or subjective stock-picking, but they do overweight stocks with relatively low prices, or low volatility, or good recent past performance, or whatever, because stocks with those factors have generally outperformed the overall market. Why does this work? There are about three possibilities. (Here I am loosely following Cliff Asness.) > Perhaps the outperformance of, say, stocks starting with the letter R is compensating investors for some extra risk: Those stocks have some risk in addition to regular market risk, and so investors demand higher returns for holding them. Perhaps there is some persistent human behavorial bias that affects prices: People are always gloomy on Mondays and happy on Thursdays, so stocks are cheap on Monday and expensive on Thursday. Or maybe it doesn’t work at all, it is all an illusion in the data, and as soon as you mention the outperformance of stocks with green logos it will stop. Anyway, at the Financial Times, John Authers is skeptical of smart beta, arguing both for theory 1 (the outperformance compensates for risk) and theory []. By|| There is little to no love lost between the true Bitcoin believers and the R3 CEV consortium, as both parties will never see eye-to-eye on most aspects of digital currency. However, when the Director of Market Research of R3 CEV decides to openly criticize and attack the Bitcoin Core developers, things are on the verge of getting out of hand. Tim Swanson even referred to the Bitcoin codebase as a “legacy Rube Goldberg machine”, a comment that does not sit well with the Bitcoin community by any means. Also read: Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis For – Looking To Buy BTC? Tim Swanson of R3 CEV Goes On the Offensive It was only a matter of time until the most recent Bitcoin pric e spike started receiving some negative attention, and very few people will be surprised it comes from none other than R3 CEV. Although this consortium is seeing its fair share of attention thanks to the growing list of partners in the financial world, many digital currency enthusiasts oppose their ideas of creating permissioned private blockchains. That being said, the current Bitcoin block size debate has been a significant source of a difference in opinions as well. With both Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Classic developers trying to tackle this issue through different means, addressing scalability of this ecosystem should not be a big hassle. However, several months into the block size debate, the future remains unclear as to which solution will be adopted in the end. Tim Swanson, Director of Marketing for R3 CEV, has taken to Twitter to voice his opinion on how the development of Bitcoin is going. It comes as no surprise to find out he has an adamant and negative opinion regarding this matter, and even went as far []. By|| Dragon’s Tale is an online free-to-play Bitcoin Casino Multiplayer Role Play Game where players are allowed to pick a character and roam around the game meeting other player, completing tasks, and gambling for bitcoin. In this remarkable game, players will certainly find a lot of fun and original games that you won’t find in any other online Casino. Dragon’s Tale was able to introduce a new kind of entertainment by offering a community based Casino Role play Game where player will find dozens of unique mini-games capable of providing lots and lots of fun. Besides mini-games, players will also be able to find several tournaments and other events managed and organized by the community. One of the funniest games you will find in Dragon’s Tale is the Beetle Derby. The Beetle Derby is sort of like betting on horse racing, but in this case, huge beetles race against each other while player bet on the final outcome of the race. However, in the Beetle race a player can gain an edge over other players by making a careful analysis of the playfield. Each beetle has a speed and a personality that affects its movement. The beetles race and as an added twist, there are objects randomly placed along the race track that affect the beetles movements. Before the race starts, players are able to choose from one of eight beetles, and they are able to take a look at the racetrack which can greatly help them determine their best strategy. Players can place their bets in three options: Win: betting on a specific beetle to get the first place; Place: betting that the beetle will win first or second Place: Show: betting that the beetle will get first second or third.Each of the objects lying on the []. By|| Key Points Bitcoin price surged higher during the past session against the US Dollar and broke a major resistance area. There is a major bullish trend line formed on the hourly chart (data feed from Bitstamp), which can act as a buy zone for the bulls moving ahead. If the price corrects from the current levels or moves down, then one may consider buying near the $420-415 support area. Bitcoin price is showing a lot of positive signs. If the current break in BTC/USD is not false, then more upsides are possible in the short term. Bitcoin Price Sighting Gains? Bitcoin price finally managed to pop higher, and the biggest positive was the fact that BTC/USD moved above a major resistance area of $420. Once the price broke the stated level, there was a spike towards $427, which clearly shows how important was the resistance zone. The price is currently correcting and moving down, but the bears have to be careful if they are planning to sell BTC versus the USD. There is a crucial bullish trend line formed on the hourly chart (data feed from Bitstamp), which may act as an important support area and also a buy zone. The bulls may consider buying near $420-415 area as long as the price is above the trend line and support area. The stop should be an hourly close below the trend line support. Moreover, the 50% Fib retracement level of the last wave of the $412 low to $427 high might also act as a major support area for the bulls, which is just above the highlighted trend line. Looking at the technical indicators: Hourly MACD – The hourly MACD is in the bearish slope, calling for a minor correction as shown the chart. RSI (Relative Strength Index) – []. By|| Nearly every Bitcoin exchange in the world is adhering to KYC and AML requirements, as they want to protect their own platforms from scammers, as well as abide by the legislative framework in the countries they operate in. Some people have taken offense by these detailed requirements, although some exchanges take things one step further than they need to. When someone wants to buy or sell Bitcoin, there does not seem to be an immediate need to link one’s social media account, although some platforms might require one to do so. Also read: Is Ethereum’s Mining Getting Too Centralized? Fine Line Between KYC Compliance And Intrusion It only makes sense for companies dealing with customer funds – in particular on an international scale – to perform thorough security checks at every given time. Verifying someone’s identity is pertinent to ensure people are who they claim to be, and no stolen or money laundered funds is exchanges to and from Bitcoin through the exchange platform itself. However, there are only so many steps a Bitcoin exchange is required to take by law, including asking for a government-ID scan, a proof of address, and if needed, a document signed by a notary. That latter document is usually only asked when dealing with business or corporations, or high-volume traders. But asking for somebody’s social media accounts is a bit strange, although some people might argue it makes perfect sense as well. People are far more open about themselves on social media, and a lot of information can be derived from their profiles. But at the same time, this is invading user privacy beyond any measure, as one’s private life has little to do with their Bitcoin activities in most cases. Coinbase, for example, has allegedly been asking for customers’ LinkedIn profiles, []. By|| Photo Joseph Lubin, right, founded ConsenSys, which specializes in applications that run on Ethereum. Andrew Keys, left, is director of enterprise business development at ConsenSys. A new virtual gold rush is underway. Even as Bitcoin, riven by internal divisions, has struggled, a rival virtual currency — known as Ethereum — has soared in value, climbing 1,000 percent over the last three months. Beyond the price spike, Ethereum is also attracting attention from giants in finance and technology, like JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and IBM, which have described it as a sort of Bitcoin 2.0. The rise of the relatively new virtual currency has been helped by a battle within the Bitcoin community over how the basic Bitcoin software should develop. The fights have slowed down Bitcoin transactions and led some people to look for alternative virtual currencies to power their businesses. Enter Ethereum. Like Bitcoin, the Ethereum system is built on a blockchain in which every transaction is recorded publicly. The promise of such a system is that it allows the exchange of money and assets more quickly and more cheaply than relying on a long chain of middlemen. But Ethereum has also won fans with its promise to do much more than Bitcoin. In addition to the virtual currency, the software provides a way to create online markets and programmable transactions known as smart contracts. The system is complicated enough that even people who know it well have trouble describing it in plain English. But one application in development would let farmers put their produce up for sale directly to consumers and take payment directly from consumers. There are already dozens of functioning applications built on Ethereum, enabling new ways to manage and pay for electricity, sports bets and even Ponzi schemes. Photo ConsenSys employees in Brooklyn. The company has hired more than 50 developers. By|| Bitcoin is dubbed as the digital gold. Bitcoin is a decentralized open source digital currency which operates independently without the interference of banking or financial institutions. Unlike traditional fiat currency, Bitcoin doesn’t need a trusted party to facilitate transactions as the members of the network themselves act like one. Bitcoin and Gold have many similarities. They both hold a unique position of being an alternative investment option for individuals as well as organizations. To an extent, they are not directly impacted by the performance of fiat currencies as they have a value of their own. However, the price fluctuation may be observed when a Gold-Fiat Currency pair is analyzed, due to variations in the value of fiat currency at any given time. These similarities between gold and bitcoin make them great assets for investment purpose. Bitcoin also exhibits various characteristics associated with ideal money. The digital currency satisfies the following 8 qualities in varying degrees. -General acceptability -Durability -Portability -Homogeneity -Divisibility -Malleability -Cognizability -Stability of Value Even though gold satisfies most of the parameters, it becomes impractical to use gold in the day to day situations as one can’t weigh the exact quantity of gold and pay for the merchandise they buy in shops and marketplaces. Also, online transactions with gold are not quite possible either.Just like the way we buy bitcoin from bitcoin exchanges, even gold bullion can be bought online. There are many bullion platforms that allow people to invest in gold and other precious metals where people can just purchase the precious metal. They can either choose to get the bullion shipped to their address, or let the platform hold it for them in their vault.There are many bullion platforms that now allows buyers to pay with bitcoin as well. Though it is a recent addition, the inclusion of []. By|| Bitcoin is often referred to as being many things, ranging from a commodity to currency, and even a solution to solving all of the financial trouble in unbanked and underbanked regions. But very few people believe Bitcoin has the potential to change reserve banking altogether, allowing consumers to be no longer enslaved to the banking ecosystem. While there is serious doubt central bank-issued currency will ever disappear completely, Bitcoin could end up becoming a full-reserve banking solution. Also read: Bitcoin and Bullion, A Great Combination Bitcoin is Financial Freedom At its core, the Bitcoin protocol is designed to give consumers and business owners complete control over their finances at any given time. Although there is a lot of focus on the financial side of using Bitcoin technology, this point needs to be hammered until people understand Bitcoin is not just the technology, but it is a viable currency as well. When getting involved in Bitcoin, the sole user is responsible for keeping their funds safe. There are no banks or governments involved, and this thought scares a lot of people. Up until this point, there has been a fair amount of handholding by these established financial players. However, everyone needs to remember banks and governments are the root cause of the financial trouble the entire world is in right now. That being said, it is unlikely to see government-issued currencies going away anytime soon. Replacing the legacy system and financial infrastructure all at once will be quite the challenge, even though a good amount of Bitcoin community members would like nothing more than for that to become a reality. However, there is a chance for both fiat currency and Bitcoin to complement each other, in a rather straightforward way. Reforming Full-Reserve Banking Reserve banking is an integral []. By|| The electronic payments sector is a huge industry that is growing at a rapid pace. The growth of population increased spending power combined with multiple payment options has been the greatest contributing factor for its growth over the years. The advent of cryptocurrencies opened up a whole new section of electronic payments waiting to be capitalized upon by the credit/debit card issuers, payment processors and technology startups. The rapid growth in bitcoin user base combined with the slow adoption of bitcoin payment options among the businesses has created a perfect opportunity for the card companies. Bitcoin debit cards are a result of this situation. Bitcoin debit cards fill a large gap in the cryptocurrency payments by bridging it with conventional payment methods. Crypto debit cards are mostly connected to either the Visa or the Mastercard networks, similar to conventional cards. The only difference between cryptocards and conventional cards being the source of funds. While conventional cards are connected to a bank account, cryptocards are connected to a cryptocurrency wallet. These cards can be used on any POS terminal or online payment gateways connected to the respective card issuer network (Visa or Mastercard). In order to spend bitcoin through a crypto card, one doesn’t need to have a wallet QR code or address. These cards can be used like just any other card and an equivalent amount in bitcoin will be deducted from the wallet to pay for the purchase. The merchant will not notice any difference. This makes paying with bitcoin possible, virtually anywhere. The payment processor and the gateway provider will also receive the applicable transaction and processing fees. These cryptocards opens up a whole new market segment for the industry players. In order to capitalize on it, companies are planning to offer cryptocard services, for which they are conducting surveys. By|| Bitcoin price broke above its narrow 4-day trading range. A strong resistance zone waits a few dollars above price. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3-hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? Join now and receive a $29 discount using the code CCN29. Bitcoin Price Analysis Time of analysis: 16h00 UTC Bitstamp 4-Hour Chart From the analysis pages of xbt.social, earlier today: The corrective wave continued higher in a upside breakout during early Sunday in the US. The move is causing 4-hour RSI to reverse diverge to the February price high. This may cause a temporary pullback as the market re-attempts the resistance ceiling near $440 (Bitstamp). Low liquidity during weekend trade may see price reach the resistance ceiling (bright blue annotation) but the push would be too-far-too-soon and the resulting price spike may be retraced completely by profit-taking during Monday’s trading session. Continuation above the resistance ceiling would break a 4-month barrier to advance. If the market can hold price above the resistance ceiling, then we have reason to switch outlook to bullish mode.However, until then, the upward price move is unconvincing and we remain cautious of reversal back into decline. Summary Bitcoin price continues higher after pausing for several days. We keep an eye on the declining trendline running through $440 in the Bitstamp chart for a critical break of long-term resistance.Reader sjs had asked for targets and possible catalysts of a rally. Analysis will be presented in tomorrow’s post. Bitfinex Depth Chart and Buy/Sell Volume What do readers think? Please comment below. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3-hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? Join now and receive a $29 discount using the code CCN29. Readers can follow Bitcoin price analysis updates every []. By|| An interesting shift in mining power is taking place in the Bitcoin world for quite some time now, as various mining pools have started supporting Bitcoin Classic. However, not too many Classic blocks were mined on a daily basis, begging the question as to whether or not miners were even interested in the current block size debate. More recent Bitcoin block stats show how there are a lot of more blocks being mined as of late, with KnCMiner still leading the charge. Also read: How Will Virtual Reality Affect Bitcoin And The Blockchain? Bitcoin Classic Mining Gains Momentum It has taken quite some time, but the support for Bitcoin Classic mining is slowly increasing over time. Although there is still a very long way to go before this software solution can be called a clear winner, the number of mined Classic blocks on the network has seen a healthy increase. Based on the latest statistics found on the NodeCounter website, a total of 59 out of the latest 1,000 blocks on the network were mined by pools supporting Bitcoin Classic. It is rather significant to see this number go up after quite some time, as there is also more mining power directed at these pools than ever before. The same mining pools are responsible for generating these Bitcoin Classic blocks, though. KnCMiner is still leading the charts, as they mined 40 out of the 59 blocks. Keeping in mind how this company is manufacturing mining hardware themselves, that could explain the sudden increase in mining power directed at Bitcoin Classic pools. F2Pool is slightly ahead of Slush Pool for the time being, with 11 and 8 Bitcoin Classic blocks respectively. It is good to see a diversification of mining power among the bitcoin Classic mining pools, although it would []. By|| Kristov Atlas is a network security and privacy researcher who studies cryptocurrencies. He is currently a security engineer for bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain and co-founder of the Open Bitcoin Privacy Project. In this opinion piece, Atlas discusses bitcoin’s ongoing block size debate, arguing that the economic analysis of potential changes to the system has been largely ignored by network developers. As many writers have proffered their short-term suggestions for addressing bitcoin’s transaction throughput, I’d like to take a step back and explore how we think about, discuss, and plan the future of bitcoin. To date, much of the discussion around Bitcoin’s scalability has suffered from two major problems: > We lack a systematic process to set and achieve goals with respect to security, censorship resistance and the overloaded term 'decentralization'. We have a poor understanding of the relationship between engineering decisions and their economic consequences ('cryptoeconomics'). By 'we,' I mean myself foremost, but I can fairly include many stakeholders in the ecosystem including some protocol developers, wallet providers, miners, exchange operators, writers, and enthusiasts. Because we lack these tools, we are ill-equipped to make protocol decisions and to plan bitcoin’s software future. In this post, I’d like to focus on the second deficit in the list: economics. What is crypto-economics? I define crypto-economics as the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in cryptographic consensus networks. In particular, it is the study of the economic implications of cryptographic design choices in such networks (like bitcoin).For example, suppose you created a cryptocurrency that did not have a predetermined supply algorithm for the currency units, but was instead determined on a month-to-month basis by majority vote among a few human keyholders.How would this system compare to bitcoin?Another example. A wallet client sending a bitcoin transaction must communicate the []. By|| One of the biggest questions in the world of digital currencies right now is whether or not Ethereum will be able to surpass the US$ 1bn market cap once again. Although the ETH trading price is in a bit of a slump right now, there has been a good amount of positive news which can all lead to a future price increase. But at the same time, the rumours about smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain are a potential roadblock. That does not mean there are no other benefits to Ethereum technology, though. The Good And Bad News For Ethereum Making Ether more accessible to countries all over the world is a major step in the process of reaching the US$1bn market cap once again. Two Asian exchanges have added an ETH trading pair earlier this week, as both Coincheck in Japan and Korbit in Korea made the digital currency accessible to its users. While this is positive news regarding the global availability of the Ether token across major exchanges, there is no indication either platform will see significant success as a result of this move. Getting a digital currency into the hands of as many people as possible is a good thing, although it is no guarantee of a positive outcome. Additionally, Vitalik Buterin presented the Ethereum roadmap at a Coinbase meetup earlier this week. To many people, rumours about this announcement would lead to Ethereum being integrated into Coinbase in the long run, although there are no indications that will be happening anytime soon. Some people might see this as a weakness for this project whereas others see the presentation as offering “nothing new”, considering most of these development stages were hinted at in the past. This brings us to one of the more important aspects when taking the []. By|| Coinify, a Denmark-based blockchain currency payment provider, has partnered with a Hong Kong payment service called iPayDNA International to offer blockchain payments to merchants in Asia, allowing merchants to accept 17 blockchain-based currencies, including bitcoin. Coinify also recently partnered with a Vietnamese bitcoin exchange. The agreement allows Coinify to offer its blockchain merchant processing service to merchants in a region where iPayDNA holds a dominant market position. IPayDNA’s merchants will be able to accept 17 blockchain currencies including bitcoin in a secure environment and receive payouts in local currency to their bank accounts within a few days. “We are thrilled about teaming up with iPayDNA. Being a company native to the Asia-Pacific region, they have the best understanding of local merchants needs and at the same time being a company with an international mindset, they perfectly match the qualities we look for in our business partners,” said Morten Bebe, Coinify’s sales manager. Asia-Pacific Leads In E-Commerce The Asia-Pacific region has more than 60% of the world’s population and accounts for almost 75% of global payment transactions, Coinify noted in a press release. The region also holds the highest share of e-commerce in GDP. Bebe said more customers are seeking alternative and secure payment methods. “Besides these strong indicators of the potential that blockchain payments have in the area, we are pleased about opportunities contributing to the infrastructure and supporting the digital currency adoption process,” he said. One Stop For Online Merchants The partnership’s value proposition is to act as a one-stop center for online merchants by providing the most card and non-card payment options, said Guan Seow, managing director at iPayDNA.By offering a broad selection of blockchain currencies via Coinify, iPayDNA’s merchants can further benefit from this variety. “All iPayDNA’s customers, who are open to embrace blockchain currencies as their new []. By|| As investment in FinTech continues to rise, investors are becoming more selective in doling out money to startups, including those focused on bitcoin and blockchain. 'There’s an increasing realization that [FinTech] is a specialized sector,' said Jalak Jobanputra, founding partner of Future Perfect Ventures. 'It’s the realization that a lot of this does take extra time and the regulatory landscape is uncertain, and you need to invest in companies and entrepreneurs that understand that and have expertise and patience.' The hesitancy is with both pure play venture capitalists and corporate investors. Global funding of FinTech startups reached an all-time high in 2015 at $13.8bn, up 106% from the $6.7bn invested in 2014, according to a March report by CB Insights. Last year, blockchain and bitcoin startups received record-high funding at $474m, and it was the first time those categories of companies secured mid-stage Series C rounds. Matthew Wong, research and data analysis at CB Insights, the consulting firm that co-sponsored the report, says big deals in blockchain will continue in 2016, although the space is maturing. Instead of funding in mining and wallet startups, investors will look to broader applications for things like fraud and compliance, he said. No more naivety But 2015’s increased mega-rounds of $50m or more, coupled with the low number of deals in Q4 2015, signals the investor class is becoming more discerning, willing to put large amounts of money in proven business models and less willing to make deals on theoretical use cases. While large deals headlined 2015, these tapered off in the last two quarters of the year. There were 154 deals in Q4, the lowest quarterly total since Q1 2013.Mega-rounds increased dramatically, though, with 60 in 2015 up from only 15 from 2011 to 2013.A more perceptive investor community could, in turn, indicate a future shake []. By|| Leading Bitcoin Blockchain infrastructure provider and transaction processing company, BitFury, has recently released a white paper entitled “Digital Assets on Public Blockchains”. The paper demonstrates methods of storing and transferring digital assets securely on the bitcoin-secured public blockchain. Blockchain infrastructure enables digital asset management During the process of drafting its white paper, the BitFury group discovered blockchain infrastructure can be utilized for digital asset management that would allow the global economy to store purely digital assets and control them online. Major blockchain networks, most notably the Bitcoin blockchain network, hold the capacity for storing various sets of data apart from the main transaction data. The BitcoinCT r: 8 blockchain, for example, enables senders to store alternative data sets on the actual transaction, such as texts or strings of data. This secure storage of data on an irrefutable and unalterable blockchain like the Bitcoin blockchain is made possible due to the unique property of the bitcoin blockchain that allows senders to embed additional information. The usage of digital assets in financial services Since early 2015, the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community have seen the rising interest of financial firms and global corporations in the blockchain technology. The R3 consortium, which is composed of the world’s largest and most powerful banks have already used the Ethereum network to build their own permissioned blockchain to send and receive international payments at lower costs and process traditional financial settlements on the blockchain network. The BitFury team explains that blockchain-secured digital assets can be used effectively in financial services and on emerging consumer-to-consumer markets. Digital assets stored on the blockchain network can be further used for alternative activities such as crowdfunding, charity, peer-to-peer lending and smart properties purchases. As the Bitcoin blockchain network is transparent, it allows anyone to track the digital asset on the []. By|| Key Points Bitcoin price annoyed many traders during the past few weeks, as there were no real movements in BTC/USD. If we look at the weekly chart (data feed from Bitstamp), then we can figure out that there is a significant resistance around $490-$525. BTC may struggle to break the stated resistance levels, but if there is a break, then gains are likely in BTCUSD. Bitcoin price traded in a range this past week. Can buyers succeed in taking BTCUSD higher or sellers might gain strength for a downside move? Bitcoin Price- $490-525 as Resistance Bitcoin price managed to stay above a key support area of $400 this past week, but there was a lot of struggle to clear a critical resistance area of $425. BTCUSD was mostly seen trading in a range of $400-425, and both the range support area and range resistance zone played well as buy and sell zone respectively. Now, if we look at the big picture and try to analyze the weekly chart, then we will know that the price is currently trading below a monster hurdle. There is an important resistance band zone formed near $490-$525, as can be seen on the weekly chart of BTCUSD (data feed from Bitstamp). The stated levels acted as a support and resistance earlier many times. So, it can be considered as a major pivot area. One positive for the bulls is the fact that the price is above the 100-week simple moving average. There is a possibility that the price may continue to consolidate in a small range for some time before the price either moves above the resistance area or breaks the 100-week SMA for a downside move. Looking at the technical indicators: Weekly MACD – The MACD is flat, and there is no []. By|| It seems to be only a matter of time until a VC mind shift is taking place in the world of digital currency. Whereas most of these individuals and firms have been looking at bitcoin startups in the past, they moved to blockchain companies about a year ago. But that trend seems to be changing yet again, as there is a larger focus on Ethereum startups right now. Also read: Dutch Central Bank Examines Blockchains and May Launch Own Digital Currency VC Funding in Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Ethereum All three of these particular segments hold a lot of promise for the future, which has not gone by unnoticed by VCs. Not that anyone is losing confidence in Bitcoin itself, mind you, but the blockchain has far broader use cases than just the financial side of things. Ethereum is showing how blockchain technology can be used to create autonomous corporations, and smart contracts are an integral part of the future for both digital currencies on their respective blockchains. With all of the VC funding flowing into Bitcoin and blockchain startups during 2015, exciting projects will start to come to fruition later this year. Or that seems to be the general hope at last, as VCs are not the most patient bunch when it comes to projects still under development. Even though it takes time to do things right, the return on investment timespan has to be kept as short as possible. It should come as no surprise to find out a lot of VCs are keeping a close eye on Ethereum, as this project has been focusing on using the blockchain for non-financial purposes. Evolution in the world of blockchain means VCs have to diversify their portfolios and adapt their strategies. Moreover, there is a growing list of proof-of-concepts being []. By|| In the past few months, Ethereum has climbed up the ranks to become the second largest cryptocurrency. Ethereum efficiently displaced Litecoin which has been holding that position for a very long time to take its place on the list. Litecoin is an altcoin created by Charles Lee. It was released on October 7, 2011. The cryptocurrency was developed to overcome certain mining challenges posed by bitcoin due to the adoption of high-performance processing equipment by select masses. One of the advantages of Litecoin against bitcoin was the reduced mining time and the increased number of maximum cryptocoins that can be mined over the network. While bitcoin is capped at a maximum of 21 million tokens, Litecoin is set for a maximum of 84 million crypto tokens. Litecoin was created using scrypt proof of work algorithm, which was slated to be ASIC mining resistant, but it was made redundant over time as powerful Litecoin miners surfaced. The altcoin currently holds the distinction of being the third largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and Ethereum. Comparing Ethereum with Litecoin is like comparing apples to oranges. Except for them both being fruits, they are completely different from each other. Similarly, Ethereum and Litecoin are worlds apart. The whole idea behind creating Ethereum was to serve a much larger purpose that. Litecoin which is just another wannabe bitcoin. The intention of creating Ethereum is to enable Blockchain 2.0 applications and the futuristic Blockchain 3.0 as well. The main purpose of Ether, the crypto token on Ethereum platform is to facilitate an exchange of value for the services rendered on the platform. The Ethereum platform functions as one giant decentralized computing device powered by a network of computers, similar to bitcoin miners. These computers on the network contribute the processing power required to host, manage and maintain the []. By|| The phenomenal rise in the value off Ethereum few weeks ago had people speculating about Ethereum turning out to be Bitcoin killer. The increasing value of Ether and a surge in trading volumes has led to a comparison between both digital currencies. Now, is the comparison between both platforms exaggerated? Bitcoin and Ethereum Bitcoin is a digital currency which was originally created as an alternative monetary system. On the other hand, Ethereum is created as a blockchain 2.0 platform that can be used to create and execute smart contract applications over blockchain. Bitcoin platform’s crypto token is called bitcoin (which can get confusing) an Ether is the crypto token used on Ethereum platform. Mining Bitcoin built on SHA cryptographic algorithm uses proof of work algorithm that depends upon the amount of processing power spent by the miner to discover and decrypt new blocks. This has allowed miners to graduate from PCs, GPUs to Application Specific Integrated Circuits. The use of high-performance mining equipment has led to an increase in mining difficulty, leaving miners using PCs and Outdated mining equipment obsolete. Ethereum platform started with its own version of the proof of work algorithm called Ethash. Ethash is designed to resist the use of ASICs by miners due to increased memory requirement. While the miners currently available in the market are not compatible with Ethash, it may soon become available (thanks to falling price of computer hardware). However, they won’t stay useful for long as the platform intends to switch to Casper – A proof of stake algorithm in the next release, Serenity. Proof of stake algorithm is inherently ASIC resistant as the miner can only mine a certain portion of the blocks depending upon the percentage of cryptocoins they own. This will, in turn, keep the difficulty level in []. By|| Ethereum now has the whole world’s attention. The cryptocurrency and smart contracts platform is now being included in most of the exchanges that were only dealing with Bitcoin, the firstborn of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The South Korean Bitcoin exchange, Korbit has become the latest bitcoin exchange to include Ethereum into its order books. Korbit is the first Korean Bitcoin exchange founded by Tony Lyu. The company is based in Seoul, South Korea. The inclusion of Ethereum by Korbit follows a similar announcement made by Japan’s largest Bitcoin exchange – Coincheck. The inclusion of Ethereum into the leading Bitcoin platform follows the increasing demand for the new cryptocurrency. Ethereum has been performing really well in terms of value and market capitalization in the recent months. Even though it is experiencing a slightly higher fluctuation in its value compared to bitcoin, it can be attributed to growth pains. After all, even bitcoin went through a similar phase ages ago. The announcement of the inclusion of Ethereum to Korbit was made by the platform in a mailer to all its customers. With this announcement, Korbit users will now be able to trade ether against bitcoin on their favorite cryptocurrency platform. Korbit has not made any indication of adding fiat support to Ethereum at the moment but we can expect it to be gradually introduced, depending upon the performance of ether and demand for the crypto token. Working within the current structure, those who are interested in buying ether with fiat will have to first buy bitcoin and then convert the bitcoin balance to its equivalent in ether. Korbit is not charging any fees for this cryptocurrency swaps happening on its platform. Korbit currently boasts of having over 30,000 members and a cumulative trade volume of 80 billion South Korean Won. There are over 1300 merchants who []. By|| Immense hype surrounds virtual currencies and distributed ledgers these days. Maybe this is inevitable if you combine an inscrutable, cutting-edge technology, its enigmatic origins, and a flow of $1 billion in venture funding thus far. But will these technologies create pathways for people in emerging economies to access and use financial services that meet their needs? Definitions vary, but for our purposes, a “virtual currency” is a non-government-backed digital representation of value. Many virtual currencies rely on cryptography and distributed computing to facilitate transactions. These transactions are documented on a “distributed ledger,” a database shared among network participants who collectively validate transactions accordingly to an established protocol. Bitcoin and Stellar are two examples of virtual currency systems, and the blockchain that underpins Bitcoin is one type of distributed ledger. We often hear how these technologies boast capabilities we care about in financial inclusion: efficiency, transparency, security and cost-effectiveness. Yet few applications of these technologies have demonstrated as much in scaled, real-world contexts, especially in communities without high-speed Internet, widely available smartphones, reliable energy access or stable incomes. This is the reality in many countries, after all, and for applications of these technologies to scale there, the lessons learned by the digital revolution thus far are highly relevant. In Tanzania, millions of Tanzanians did not start using mobile money to save, transfer or borrow funds just because the technology was available. Providers first had to refine prices, improve user interfaces and match product attributes with consumer needs. The collective impact of those adjustments was made clear when access to formal financial products nearly doubled over just four years. Applications that harness virtual currencies and distributed ledgers, on the other hand, are still at an early stage of development. BitPesa, for example, allows people in the U.K. To send money to East Africa using Bitcoin. By|| A roundtable hosted by CIGI in Toronto, called “Regulating Blockchain & Distributed Ledger Technologies: Challenges and Opportunities for Canadian Innovation”, featured individuals from industry, government and academia. Addison Cameron-Huff, a technology lawyer, recently blogged his thoughts about that panel. There are very important questions he feels people must ask themselves before knowing fully the right approach to blockchain regulation. For instance, regulators, lawyers and theoreticians must know what they’re discussing. The blockchain space is nascent. Huff highlights some of the aspects of blockchain that could be regulated: “Smart contracts, industry standards, technical standards, regulations, acts, common law, etc.” Nearly one year ago, New York released the BitLicense. The license, officially called a “ License to Engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity.” Thus far, a single one has been issued. That 31-page application was controversial among Bitcoiners. On that application, personal and professional references are required. This sort of scrutiny will be turned to blockchain technology. Cameron-Huff believes, at the current stage, individuals must ask themselves, “What are the benefits of blockchains right now? What will the future benefits be? What might the downsides be?” Huff also questions where trust might lie in the blockchain world: with banks, Bitcoin exchanges or programmers? What sorts of laws, if any, would be required? Ominously, Huff asks: “Will we still have banks in 30 years?” He wonders how blockchain transactions will be managed, and to which sorts of taxes they will be subject. Betokening of some of the powers of distributed ledger technology: “Will government authorities take a cut of transactions directly?” Huff is wary that too much regulation could undermine the benefits of distributed ledger technology or, at least, hurt the role of his native land, Canada, in the global blockchain industry. His piece is sort of a walkthrough of a possible future science []. By|| Bitcoin price remains within the narrow $7 range that has constrained trade during the past four days. Although price is currently declining, there is a strong support level nearby, in the form of the 200-period moving average. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3-hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? Join now and receive a $29 discount using the code CCN29. Bitcoin Price Analysis Time of analysis: 14h00 UTC Bitfinex 1-Hour Chart From the analysis pages of xbt.social, earlier today: Although price has been crisscrossing the 1-hour chart 20-period moving average (20MA, green), the past day’s upward price pattern appeared corrective. Being corrective (counter-trend) and having failed to make a new high, earlier (xbt.social) analysis proposed that price would eventually continue decline today. This has transpired, but the distance of decline remains is uncertain. The declining wave has fallen short of the 200MA (red) in most charts, but in the Bitfinex chart, shown above, price had spiked down to the 200MA and then pulled back. The 200MA at $413 is the critical level below which confidence of continuing decline will strengthen. Failure to breach the 200MA may result in a slow sideways grind below $420. So, in order to get some tradeable range, let’s hope the bears can take control, because the bulls have only managed lower highs for the past 3 weeks. Summary Bitcoin price had made a fourth lower high for March earlier today. The market is now trading price lower from over-bought indicator conditions but must get below the $413 (Bitfinex) level before decline can proceed. Bitfinex Depth Chart and Buy/Sell Volume What do readers think? Please comment below. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3-hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? By|| Bitcoin has been gaining a lot of traction In China over the years, as the majority of trading volume is originating from that country. At the same time, the People’s Bank of China has been opposing Bitcoin for quite some time now, leaving consumers to wonder how the future of digital currency will look. Now that WaCai, a top finance and accounting app in China has listed Bitcoin as a major currency, things could get absorbing over the next few months. Also read: The Who’s Who of Bitcoin And Blockchain Technology Bitcoin is A Major Currency According To WaCai Mobile finance and accounting applications are becoming more popular all over the world as of late. Consumers want quick and convenient access to financial tools and services, and the mobile ecosystem seems to be the platform of preferences to do so. However, banks and other established financial institutions are playing catch-up in this regard, as independent companies and Fintech startups seem to be outcompeting them. WaCai is one of the top financial and accounting applications for mobile users in China, and the company completed a successful round of US$50m back in December of 2014. That was not the first round of funding for this company, though, as they have seen their fair share of success since its inception in 2008. Keeping in mind how WaCai is available for both iOS and Android users, there seems to be a huge market waiting to be tapped in China. More and more consumers are well aware of their financial situation, and they will be looking for advice on how to increase their wealth wherever they are, regardless of which device they might be using at that time. It is interesting to note how the WaCai app mentions Bitcoin as one of the primary []. By|| Previously the different obstacles that impeded the application of the traditional law enforcement environment to DAOs and the necessity for dispute resolution mechanisms were discussed. Below you will find a couple of possible ways that may alleviate this situation but the answer to the problem requires an out of the box approach to disputes and their role in commercial transactions. Possible but fundamentally flawed approaches One way DAOs could settle disputes is by appointing a legal representative who would act as the only real world link to the company. Why would a DAO establish a legal representative in the first place is quite simple: other DAOs and large businesses won’t transact with shady DAOs who can’t be held responsible for their actions, so from a commercial point of view it makes sense to, while looking to preserve the investors identifications, build a structure that is capable of committing to a deal and be held responsible for its actions. The key aspect to this approach is that if the legal representative is the only physical person that can be linked to the DAO this person needs to have access to the DAOs funds. Because eventually he would need to comply with the sentence. If a DAO is found guilty of breaching a contract and its only link to the real world is a person who doesn’t have the power to execute the court’s sentence then we are back to square one. This approach, while quite simple at first glance, comes with a few notable obstacles. First: while proving that the legal representative has access to the funds on day one of the dispute would be pretty straightforward, making sure that the DAO doesn’t remove his access would be a concern. Second: while this would work for commercial and civil disputes, if the []. By|| This week’s terror attacks in Brussels has caused French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to cite the darknet as a terrorist tool and call for measures to improve intelligence expertise in technologies terrorists use, according to a French ministry website. Bernard Cazeneuve Because cryptocurrency is used for darknet transactions, efforts to control the darknet could fuel government efforts to control cryptocurrencies in Europe. Cazeneuve told The National Assembly that terrorists use the darknet. He made his remarks in the context of a wide-ranging discussion about what the government must do to strengthen its counter-terrorism efforts. Cazeneuve said it is imperative that domestic intelligence achieves the expertise the enemies are using. Intelligence technicians, engineers and analysts need to be able to detect terrorist activities so that human resources can be mobilized when necessary. He said the Internet and social networks must be used effectively in this effort. Scientist Describes Darknet Nicolas Arpagian, the scientific director of the National Institute of Advanced Studies of Security and Justice, expanded on the darknet in a Europe 1 news report on Cazeneuve’s remarks. Internet search engines only index a fraction of the pages on the Internet, Arpagian said. The darknet, by contrast, includes non-indexed pages. The darknet is not easily accessible, Arpagian said. It is necessary to download a particular navigation system like Tor. Tor, the best-known software for this type of navigation, enables a user to preserve anonymity by doing a server-by-server “bounce,” masking the IP address. Arpagian said darknet pages enable all sorts of transactions using bitcoin, including weapons and drugs. Arpagian’s take on the darknet differed from Cazaneuve’s. Arpagian does not blame the technology if evil doers utilize it. “The technique will not make the world good, generous and humanist,” he said. If law enforcement were able to shut down the darknet, the users would create []. By|| Although a lot of people are looking at the ongoing battle between Bitcoin and Ethereum, the underpinning technology remains an important factor as well. Some of the most prominent companies focusing on this technology are BitNation, Blockverify, and Slock.it. All of these companies are holding a pitch-off in London, England at the end of April. Among the panel of judges is Visa Europe Collab, and it will be interesting to hear their views on what these companies are bringing to the table. Also read: Hardware Wallet Comparison – KeepKey vs Trezor vs Ledger Nano Digital Catapult Event In London It is positive to see blockchain companies getting a bit of attention during a dedicated pitch-off taking place in the financial capital of the world. Similar to how must project pitches work, participants will have a brief span of time to present their project in front of a panel of judges. Among these judges are tech entrepreneurs, investors, and accelerators. Such a mixed representation is integral to highlighting all elements of the pitches as they are being presented. After all, part of a successful pitch is able to answer any and all questions the judges may have. Rest assured there will be some interesting questions as the judges panel includes Visa Europe Collab, Tech London Advocates, Digital Catapult, and Wayra Open Future. Most of these industries will be well aware of what blockchain technology is capable of in the financial world, although the concept has far more use cases outside of the realm of finance as well. With three blockchain startups pitching at the Digital Catapult event, distributed ledger technology is represented quite well. All three projects offer something different, as BitNation, BlockVerify, and Slock.it are all using the blockchain to tackle an entirely different []. By|| Among methods for accepting donations, Bitcoin stands out with its ease of use, low cost, and simple setup process. This is especially useful for podcasts and other decentralized media forms, many of whom offer their service for free in hopes of receiving voluntary donations, making their operating margins potentially slim. CoinTelegraph spoke with several independent media outlets, from podcasts to radio to video shows, about the unique considerations provided by deriving funding from Bitcoin. A significant source of income Mark Edge, host of radio show Free Talk Live, indicates that BitcoinCT r: 8 income is around “20% now, sometimes lower. 50%+ at times in the past,” while Rodger Paxton of the LAVA Flow Podcast claims: “I receive about half of my income from my podcast by bitcoin.” Brian Sovryn, host of technology and futurism podcast Sovryn Tech, also receives a similar ratio. “I do a podcast called Sovryn Tech that has been covering Bitcoin since its inception, and so I pretty quickly set up a Bitcoin donation address and that has worked out well for me over the years. Sometimes it’s from quite a few listeners in small amounts, and other times someone will donate once a year or a every few months with a significant amount.” Sovryn is also an indie game developer, and the ratio of Bitcoin received in that pursuit is significantly higher. “While my donations for my podcasts and blog posts are often varied between Bitcoin donation or PayPal donation, it’s very different in that 87% of my PC game sales are with Bitcoin.” Convenient, low cost donations Paxton prefers donations in Bitcoin because of the ease of setup and relative absence of fees. “I love that there are no fees. Both Patreon and PayPal have very large fees that []. By|| John Biggs is CEO of stealth bitcoin startup Freemit and a former editor at TechCrunch. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Gizmodo and Men’s Health. In this opinion piece, Biggs argues that the bitcoin community has become complacent in its quest for financial change, standing by as institutions seek to stamp out its more revolutionary impulses. You say you want a revolution. But act like it’s coming, not like petulant nerds intent on destroying a burgeoning industry from the inside. At this point in the bitcoin lifecycle, the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) and naysaying we’ve been hearing is mostly true. The network is abysmally slow. The use cases are half-baked and consumers will receive no implicit benefit from bitcoin over, say, swiping their Visa card. The bitcoin 1.0 experiment is, in short, over. But, I would argue – and you will probably agree – that bitcoin and related technologies aren’t an experiment any more than TCP/IP was an experiment or HTML was a shot in the dark. Just as the first web pages looked ugly as sin, the current state of bitcoin is in the same position. These technologies point the way to the future, but we’re letting that future be controlled by those who will be quickest to destroy it. Death by distraction Transferwise, Revolut and the banks with their 'blockchain-like contracts' are sucking up the oxygen necessary to go forward with a true Internet of Value. While we dick around over block size and who is angry at whom, the powers that be are quickly and mercilessly tearing into everything that we have worked hard to build. I have watched this industry move from 'To the moon!' Optimism to a world in which big banks pay lip service to [bitcoin creator] Satoshi Nakamoto []. By|| In a recently-published annual report for 2015, the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank) dedicated an entire section on blockchain and fintech innovations. The section titled Block Chain Technology Look Promising, explained that this innovation may hold the keys to cutting down transaction costs in the financial system. The report highlighted the ability of blockchain-based payment system to speed up the settlement time of transactions, as well as improve transparency. By|| Markets Weekly is a weekly column analyzing price movements in the global digital currency markets, and the technology’s use case as an asset class. Bitcoin prices fluctuated largely within a tight range of $405 to $420 during the seven days ending 25th March, maintaining relative stability even as the bitcoin community faces questions of scalability and an upcoming drop in the number of new bitcoins minted per transaction block. The modest price fluctuations followed the trend of the last several weeks, with bitcoin prices generally enjoying stability and robust trading volume. During the week ending 18th March, for example, bitcoin prices wavered between $410 and $420 while market participants traded 30m BTC. This robust trading volume continued during the seven days through 25th March at 12:30 PM UTC, totaling 32.6m BTC, Bitcoinity figures reveal. Chinese exchange OKCoin accounted for 50.31% of this volume, while Chinese bourse Huobi took up another 46.90%. The remaining exchanges all claimed less than 1% of the remaining volume. Bitcoin experienced a modest week-over-week decline during the seven-day period through 12:00 UTC on 25th March, starting out at $418.31 and ending at $414.34. However, the digital currency did experience some fluctuations in that time, falling to $404.62 at 12:00 UTC and then recovering to $409.01 at 09:00 UTC on 19th March. Several hours later, bitcoin prices declined once again, hitting its weekly low of $404.45 at 09:00 UTC on 19th March before recovering to $412.20 at 18:00 UTC on 19th March. The currency kept zig-zagging, rising to $418.41 by 21:00 UTC on 23th March. Ether rising In addition, the digital currency ether has been generating substantial visibility, a development that could draw attention – and trading activity – away from bitcoin. While bitcoin experienced these modest fluctuations, ether saw robust trading volume. The digital currency enjoyed transaction volume of []. By|| Verisign, a digital signing and security solutions provider has recently moved to patent a technology that prevents double spending. The technology in question can effectively detect and prevent digital assets like bitcoin and other cryptocurrency from being double spent, thus protecting the interests of the receiver. Most digital currencies work using a single use cryptographic key. This key can be transferred only once for the transaction to be considered valid. When multiple transactions are conducted using the same cryptographic key, only one of these multiple transactions will be recognized and rest will be rejected automatically. This is an important feature which prevents people from taking an undue advantage of the digital asset by making multiple copies of the same cryptographic key and using it to conduct multiple transactions (after all ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ are the most widely used functions on any computer). In the patent application, Verisign nowhere mentions that the technology is specifically meant for digital currency industry. The patent application, currently available for public to verify and raise any objections is titled “ Systems, Devices and Methods for Detecting Double Signing in a One-time Use Signature Scheme ”. The application, for a clear understanding of what the technology does, gives a detailed description of the possible use cases of this technology. Cryptocurrency does makes it appearance multiple times in the application as it is one of the major sectors that need such solutions to prevent fraud. Thanks to the blockchain technology developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, a solution for double spend issue was first presented in the year 2008. The paper introducing Bitcoin to the world marked the first time in the history of digital currency where someone solved the double spend issue. However, in current day state, there are few challenges that prevent the inbuilt double spend proof feature []. By|| Are bitcoin transactions really frictionless compared to traditional currency? Alexander Kroeger, a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Startup Group, and Asani Sarkar, an assistant vice president at the bank’s Integrated Policy Analysis Group, analyzed bitcoin transactions and concluded that price differences across bitcoin exchanges and other factors create frictions that can impact market participants’ incentive to use bitcoin as a payment method. The researchers presented their analysis on the Liberty Street Economics blog of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. While bitcoin transfers are relatively frictionless for the user, frictions do occur when bitcoins trade in exchange markets resulting in meaningful and persistent price differences across bitcoin exchanges. Such exchange-related frictions reduce market participants’ incentive to use bitcoin as a payments alternative. What Bitcoin Proponents Claim Unlike traditional fiat currencies, there is no central authority governing bitcoin. Instead, bitcoin uses a mutually-agreed-upon set of code comprising the bitcoin protocol. Proponents such as the Bitcoin Project claim the bitcoin protocol can reduce the time, fees, and risk associated with transferring value compared to traditional currencies. Payments submitted over the U.S. Automated Clearing House (ACH) network, for example, take as long as two business days to settle compared to 10 minutes typical for bitcoin payments. Bitcoin has become accepted for payment by a variety of businesses and organizations. In March 2014, Bank of America filed a patent for a system to execute wire transfers using cryptocurrency exchanges to mediate between two sovereign currencies. Bitcoin’s Limitations Transactions between digital wallets occur at a negligible cost relative to transaction amounts. But unlike traditional currencies, bitcoin does not serve as a widely-accepted unit of account. Hence, most users seeking to pay in bitcoin have to purchase it on exchanges using traditional currency. After receiving bitcoin in a transaction, the user []. By|| United States senator Bernie Sanders, a Presidential hopeful as a candidate for the Democratic nomination up against Hillary Clinton and whose entire campaign funding comes predominantly from donations is now accepting bitcoin, perfectly coinciding with his image as a grassroots candidate. With about 2 million donors, 5.7 million contributions at an average of $27 to a total of $138.9 million, 99.98% of which are campaign donations, Bernie Sanders has the numbers to back his claim as a grass roots candidate. It’s only prudent on his part then, that he’s perfectly willing for his campaign to start accepting donations in bitcoin. A Comedy Central debate pitting Republican front-runner for the Presidential nomination Donald Trump and Democratic hopeful for the Presidency Bernie Sanders shows the latter candidate seeking donations. Donations in any way he can get it, including the cryptocurrency. “I would like to ask for money. If you’ve got anything, any small changeanything under a dollar I’ll take it. If you’ve got a gift card that’s partially used, we could use it,” the Senator stated in his closing statement while rounding up the debate, before adding without seeming to fully understand the cryptocurrency: If you have parts of a bitcoin, we’ll almost have one full bitcoin. While the program is of course satire played out between two impersonators of the Presidential hopefuls, it is yet another mainstream outlet where bitcoin gets a mention, slowly but surely making its way into the consciousness of the masses. Bitcoin’s quick mention in the satirical debate follows a prominent mention in the highest grossing film of 2016 to date in Deadpool. The Marvel superhero’s best friend accepts bitcoin in a bar and the scene even contains a bitcoin sticker complete with the cryptocurrency’s logo. Although restricted to fleeting mentions so far in mainstream outlets, writers of films and sketch []. By|| Last night a group representing 40 banks, accounting firms and members of the media gathered for the public launch of Domus Tower, a whispered-about startup rumored to be developing a blockchain capable of facilitating more than one million transactions per second. At the event on the seventh floor of Museum Tower in Midtown Manhattan, the company’s chief technical officer demonstrated an early version of the blockchain, though one admittedly not running at anywhere near its theoretic top speed. But beyond the geeky tech demos, the startup with an unusual history, and new approach, announced it was in the early phases of launching a new trust-based blockchain consortium. The group would be dedicated to settling equities in the United States and eventually comprised of five companies each representing a different sector. The company’s CEO Joe Forster said: “By having an immutable recording device and public-private keys, you can develop the trust to straight-through process.” Focus on settlement The blockchain itself, designed to render irrelevant a very specific division of the DTCC that provides clearing and settlement services, isn’t composed of any revolutionary cryptographic tools, but rather public-private key functionality combined with hashing, much like the bitcoin blockchain. By trimming fat elsewhere in the code, the company’s CTO, Rhett Creighton, said he’s able to transact blocks of 10,000 transactions each at a rate as high as more than one million transactions per second. To be precise, the Domus blockchain — as the company calls it — has reached a top speed of 1.24 million transactions per second, according to numbers also released last night in a white paper describing the technology’s makeup and performance. The maximum transaction size in the test was 256 bytes, counting the size of signature itself. The most heated part of the evening was when Creighton, a graduate of MIT, turned over questions []. By|| This is a guest post by Sunil Aggarwal. He runs an online learning solutions company, Theory Frames, and has taught about Bitcoin and blockchain at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research in Hyderabad, India. The global monetary system has reached a unique point in its history. The money that defines it is undergoing a serious shift. At one time, there were nearly 200 national currencies, with the current figure just above 180. For a national currency to become global money, it has to undergo conversion to other currencies at the prevailing exchange rate. And outside its national borders, it is subject to the laws of supply and demand. A Bangladeshi taka would rarely be demanded on the global market as compared to the U.S. So for the global population, labor output is not measured in reference to any actual universal money, but by the power centers of different political regimes. This notion of fiat money has dominated the entire 20th century and continued to do so in the first decade of 21st century, until the emergence of Bitcoin. There was no political subjectivity involved in Bitcoin; it was based on the mathematical design of issuing currency as well as settling payment transactions through a continuously updating chain of distributed ledgers called the blockchain. Bitcoin successfully solves the issue of double-spend that is a typical problem of digital money. It was quickly accepted by people because it was money, a payment rail and a messaging system all-in-one. It ensured both privacy as well as the security of a unique digital signature to every user without depending upon any intermediary. In less than eight years since its emergence, Bitcoin has grown to nearly 10 million user wallets, a daily transaction range of more than 200,000 and a market cap of more than []. By|| The creators of the modern Internet thought that it should have a built-in payment system. Web pioneer and Netscape creator Marc Andreessen, who considers Bitcoin as a good model for standard Internet payment systems, noted that if he had a time machine and could go back to when the Web was first designed, “one thing I’d do for sure would be to build in Bitcoin or some similar form of cryptocurrency.” Tim Berners-Lee himself, the creator of the Web, tried to develop a micropayments system for the Web through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the ‘90s, but the idea hasn’t been implemented so far. Recently the W3C restarted its work on an overall Web payments architecture and produced initial drafts. The W3C drafts make only incidental mentions of Bitcoin and distributed ledger technologies. However, it’s worth noting that digital currencies based on distributed ledgers are the only form of Internet-native payment system that exists, works and effectively implements one-click payments. There are blockchain-based projects to add micropayment layers to the Web, including micropayments in the core Internet protocols, but adding payments to the underlying Web protocol itself would require years of standardization work by official bodies such as the W3C. An interesting intermediate approach is integrating micropayments in the browser. A high-profile team headed by Brendan Eich, creator of the Javascript programming language and former CEO of Mozilla, recently launched a new browser dubbed Brave, which offers faster browsing by replacing ads with clean and light ads, with an option to switch ads off via Bitcoin micropayments. A forthcoming version of the Brave browser, planned for April, will include micropayments and a built-in Bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Eich to find out more about Brave’s approach, strategy and roll-out schedule. Eich confirmed that the schedule for the built-in []. By|| There are few people as well-equipped to comment on the concept of blockchain -based crowd equity as Boost VC CEO Adam Draper. In addition to his involvement with the long list of blockchain-related investments made at Boost VC, Draper also launched BoostFunder, which he says was the first crowdfunding-for-equity platform. Draper recently shared some of his thoughts on blockchain-based crowd equity on an episode of the Bitcoin.com Podcast. Initially, the venture capitalist stated: “I think we’re at this sort of crossroads with the crowdfunding of the coin-based system. It’s going to work because it’s efficient, you can keep track of it, and the ledger clears it automatically. There are a lot of things that are better about that system.” Draper went on to discuss the need for regulatory approval of this type of system, the effects of the JOBS Act, and the need for this type of fundraising system to have time to develop and grow over time. Regulatory Approval Is Needed for Mass Adoption The main issue Draper sees with blockchain-based crowd-equity platforms is the lack of regulatory approval. Draper explained, “The problem is right now that you need a regulatory body to adopt it. Otherwise, it’s just not going to get mass approval.” While many early Bitcoin and blockchain adopters do not like the idea of asking for regulatory approval, Draper said, “It’s going to be really, really important for the system to have that regulatory approval. You’ll never go completely around the government.” Draper then added that this need for regulatory clarity is not something he personally desires, but rather the simple reality of the situation. He noted: “And I don’t love saying that ‒ for the record. I also see the regulation as a barrier to entry. To get through that regulatory approval ‒ []. By|| Amid the birth and death of many Bitcoin clones, we sometime hear about exceptions that are actually looking to bring innovation to the digital currency space. The current limitations of Bitcoin have open doors for many of such developers. One among them is Mourad Ilyes Mlik, a DevOps engineer at Netis d.o.o., who is also heading the development of CreditBit. NewsBTC recently got the opportunity to speak with Mourad, as he explained how CreditBit – as a digital currency and payment protocol – is looking to provide solutions to Bitcoin’s current limitations. Here are some excerpts from our conversation: Yashu: How would you explain CreditBit to a Bitcoin follower? Mourad: The differences between Creditbit and Bitcoin are clear and fundamental. Usually Bitcoiners claim that PoS is flawed because coins are generated from thin air or as they like to call it “no stake at stake”. This is where the PoW hybrid comes in, Credibit solves the no stake at stake by generating coins fairly using PoW for the first 6 months; it uses X11 hashing algorithm (Dash hashing algorithm) which is also ASIC resilient. After the 6 months period, Creditbit will not waste any resources, so I like to think of it as environment friendly. This was the fundamental difference, beside the fact that can do 10 times more and 10 times faster transactions at lower costs (no miners, no wasted energy, simple solutions). What prompted you to lead an altcoin project like CreditBit, considering there are already 600+ digital currencies claiming to be better than Bitcoin? As you can see in our repos we are the first Hybrid coin that got many important projects to work with the Hybrid coins technology and with support for both PoW and PoS, these can be seen in our []. By|| Recently, Bitcoin investor and ex-American citizen Roger Ver issued a video challenge on Adam Kokesh’s Youtube channel to Bernie Sanders. In the challenge, Ver begins with a preamble on what he views as the immoral roots of paying taxes and goes on to explain why he believes in voluntaryism vs. The video concludes by Ver saying he will donate $100,000 USD worth of Bitcoin to the charity of Bernie Sanders’ choosing if he accepts a live and in-person 3-hour long debate with Adam Kokesh anywhere within the United States between now and the end of 2016. Ver has made headlines in recent years for both his successful investments in Bitcoin and blockchain related businesses along with his very public renouncement of his U.S. Citizenship in 2014. At the beginning of the video, Ver takes aim at Sanders for listing him in a campaign supporters video which put Ver’s name in with various other wealthy individuals who have given up their U.S. Citizenship in order to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Ver proudly states the reasons why he considered patriotism to be on par with racism as far as its motivations to pledge allegiance to a group of people over another based solely on where one was born. Kokesh has been attempting to engage Sanders on debate through multiple channels and wants to distinguish some of the Democratic Party candidate’s views in relation to socialism against those of voluntaryism. Kokesh’s view’s on “voluntaryism” are summed up in his definition which he describes all human relations should be voluntary, free from violence and free from coercion. It appears the common theme that Ver and Kokesh share on the matter of Sander’s view of socialism vs. Voluntaryism is that Ver and Kokesh simply don’t believe that paying taxes to any form of []. By|| Bitcoin Press Releases: March 11, 2016 — Binary options trading platform eXbino ( is pleased to announce several new developments aimed improving the trading experience for its users. The company is working on integrating SpotOption software into its platform. Exbino would also like to announce its new eXbino Follow feature, which enables social trading. The company has also completed Cubits integration, and now offers long-term BTC and USD options for bitcoin trading. The SpotOption technology comes from SpotOption, a company providing binary options solutions since 2010. This technology enables unique binary options trading features such as One Touch, 60 Seconds, Option Builder, Algo Trading and Ladder. SpotOption won Finance Magnates’ “Best Binary Options Platform Provider” award in 2015. With headquarters in Israel and branches in Cyprus and Hong Kong, SpotOptions services clientele located in North America Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia. Through SpotOption, eXbino will now provide Ladder, Pairs and Limits to customers, broadening their selection of binary options trading instruments. The platform is also announcing eXbino Follow, a social media services that allows traders to follow one another and engage in “social trading.” “We have followed the trading society needs. Our eXbino Follow feature lets our users profit from their combined knowledge. We are happy and proud to bring the most complete binary options trading solution possible, but there’s always room to grow. Our team keeps on working hard on developing new solutions to make the trader’s life easier. We are absolutely sure that the changes we’ve made will bring exactly that to our most valuable asset – our investors.” The company has also integrated Cubits into its platform. Cubits is an online bitcoin trading platform servicing the European market. Cubits brands itself as “an all-inclusive platform to buy, sell and accept Bitcoin.” The platform’s easy-to-use interface supports instant bitcoin []. By|| There are never enough Bitcoin hardware wallets to choose from, even though there is some fierce competition in this market segment already. Companies such as TREZOR, Ledger, and BitLox are all vying to become the market leader in physical Bitcoin wallets, and new enterprises are emerging as well. Digital Bitbox is one of these new contenders, and they focus on making their solution portable, open source, and supporting mutisignature. Multisig Physical Bitcoin Wallet By Digital Bitbox Up until this point, there are very few physical Bitcoin wallet offerings supporting mutisignature. After all, it does not make immediate sense to require multiple keys for sending transactions when using a device usually owned and used by just one person. Then again, multisignature support could make sense for companies, startups, and groups of Bitcoin enthusiasts working on a collaborative project. What makes the Digital Bitbox offering so interesting is not just the multisig support, but also how they are focusing their attention on the right aspects. Private keys are never broadcasted to the computer or the Internet, which has become a standard among physical Bitcoin wallet providers these days. Additionally, the device has an on-board SD card, which can be used for wallet backup and recovery. But that is not all, as the Digital Bitbox uses external entropy to offer additional security. Entropy is added through random bytes during the factory installation, removing the need to trust the company creating the device. Moreover, additional entropy is added when users enter their device password. Usage of the device can be further protected by two-factor authentication, and all communication via USB is encrypted with AES-256-CBC. This minimalistic wallet design will be greatly appreciated by Bitcoin users, as there is no screen involved. Moreover, there is a small hole in the wallet to add it to one’s []. By|| Although some digital currency community members have been worried about the Lisk project from day one, it seems like the team is rolling out their plans right now. Raising a lot of money for a proof of concept is one thing, but without a clear path of direction, there is not much use for a project. A launch data has been made publicly available, although that is still subject to change depending on investor behavior. Also read: Bitcoin Technical Analysis for 3/25/16 – Big Moves Ahead The Lisk Road Ahead For 2016 First and foremost, a lot of people have been wondering about the actual launch date for the Lisk initiative. The company has completed their ICO successfully, yet there was no real roadmap in place during this stage. In a Medium blog post, the company mentions how the current plan includes a launch date of April 11th, although it will depend on how many investors have generated their Lisk passphrases on the ICO site by April 4. What is of particular interest is how this launch date will provide all users with the full client, rather than rolling out a beta client and add new features over time. This is a very nice approach, which is rather different from most ICO projects over the past few years. All of that ICO money will be put to good use once a full Lisk client is available to all investors. Speaking of the ICO, Lisk raised 14,080 BTC and over 80 million XCR, which are quite staggering amounts. That being said, about 70 BTC and 2.5m XCR will be refunded, and the final numbers will be released over the next few days. With close to 3,900 individual investors partaking in this ICO, there was a genuine interest in the project []. By|| Cloud mining has come of age. Today you can operate from the comfort of your home, without having to invest in a huge data center and still mine Bitcoin or other alternative currencies. Yet like traditional mining operations, there are investments to be made in order to reap rewards. So where is cloud mining headed? The Ins and Outs of Cloud Mining Cloud mining, sometimes called remote mining, is just the same as mining cryptocurrencies, but without needing to invest in hardware yourself. Think of it as piggybacking on professional-grade remote hardware provided by a cloud mining services provider. You could mine BitcoinCT r: 8 or other altcoins like Litecoin or Ethereum. Essentially, cloud mining is a service that you pay for and in return you get “hashing power” hosted in data centers and sold in GigahashCT r: 70 /seconds (GH/s). As a buyer, you will select the desired amount of GH/s and a period of contract you would like to mine for. No requirement for investment There are many reasons to consider cloud mining. The principle reason being that there is no requirement for any investment in mining hardware. Cloud mining is fully scalable, this means that you can buy the capacity you want based on your own needs and ambitions. There are fixed maintenance and electricity costs and novices who have never mined before can wet their feet before taking a full on plunge into mining on their own. Cost of entry smaller The costs of entry into cloud mining are significantly smaller than starting a full-on mining setup of your own. Hashflare, for example, offers a 10 GH/s plan with unlimited contract for as low as $ 2.20. Miners should keep in mind that since there are costs to be borne by the cloud []. By|| You can add R Jesse McWaters, financial innovation lead at the World Economic Forum (WEF), to the growing chorus of industry voices warning that we’ve reached a 'peak' when it comes to the hype surrounding blockchain technology. 'I’m trepidatious about inflated expectations re: the blockchain,' McWaters said in a new interview, the comments coming as he described the ongoing 'awakening' he’s seen among major financial institutions in regards to the technology. While even the WEF itself has lauded blockchain as a global ' mega-trend ', McWaters worries that such language may encourage institutions to overlook the serious challenges facing the further development of the technology. McWaters told CoinDesk: 'There can be a tendency to assume that the technology not only enables a distributed financial architecture, but makes the transition to it easy. I think that nothing could be further from the case.' McWaters said that through his work with the Swiss non-profit, he’s drawing the conclusion that process will need to be realigned, stakeholders will need to standardize data policies and regulators will need to understand blockchain systems should the ecosystem want to achieve stable growth. 'It’s wonderful to see the awakening, but we need to see that this excitement is tempered by patience and that taking the tech from pilots to full-scale implementation will be measured not in months and not in years, but maybe decades,' he continued. McWaters also took aim at comparisons between the blockchain and Internet industries, cautioning that what is often lost in this comparison is the amount of time this transition took. 'Many of those discussion points,' he added, 'weren’t fully realized until the 2010s.' Explorations ahead Still, the WEF is on the verge of conducting trials of its own.Launched in 2014, the WEF has been increasing its focus in understanding disruptive innovations as part of a larger []. By|| Hollywood sets trends. What the stars wear, people generally begin wearing, perceiving it to be hip. It could be that a great many more people will be entering into the Bitcoin space, supposing their subconscious picked up on a little image in the background of a few scenes. Can you see it? There in the upper left-hand corner. A Bitcoin sticker! It’s in Wade Wilson’s (who turns into Deadpool) best friend’s bar. It turns out the main character’s bar accepts Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency has steadily made its way into popular culture. Starting in 2013, press attention caused the price of Bitcoin to steadily rise, further begetting the attention of financial players and others. Over the years, few feature films have included Bitcoin in the script, but that appears to be picking up steam in the previous couple years as more than one feature film has included Bitcoin in some shape or form. Deadpool, a 2016 American superhero film, quickly became the highest grossing film so far in 2016. A sequel has already been green-lit. At the end of its 13th day of release, Deadpool had grossed more than $250 million domestically and $500 million more worldwide. It easily passed the previous President’s Day weekend and February record holder, “Fifty Shades Of Grey.” The film cost just approximately $58 million to make and as of today, is closing toward $750 million in the global box office. A digital asset, Bitcoin represents the payment system and native currency designed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto and represents a way of transmitting value without a central authority. Bitcoin, the first decentralized digital currency, has grown to become the largest in the world in terms of total market value, perhaps hinting at why it has made its way into some forms popular culture. By|| A new type of Bitcoin ransomware is making the rounds, albeit this version is doing something different entirely. Or to be more precise, Petya Bitcoin ransomware will block access to the entire hard drive, rather than target specific files or directories. This type of malware seems to be mainly infecting computers in the Benelux, although other parts of the world are not safe from harm either. Also read: Ledger Blue Gets Nod of Approval From French Minister of Economy Petya Bitcoin Ransomware Is Here One would come to expect it becomes much harder to distribute Bitcoin ransomware through traditional means, as most consumers and enterprises should be well aware of emails with suspicious attachments by now. But that does not seem to be the case, as this malware campaign is directly aimed at companies and job centers. Rather than sending out an email with a dodgy Excel file, Petya Bitcoin ransomware is spreading through a job application email. In the email text is a dropbox link, which will download an executable file once a user clicks on it. Although no one should run executable files they do not know or trust, those who do will be greeted with a blue screen of death. Rebooting the computer will happen automatically, which is where Petya wills tart to do its nasty work. By taking control of the Master Boot Record, the Bitcoin ransomware is showing messages of how the filesystem is being checked and repaired. However, there is no system check taking place, but instead, files are made inaccessible. This is where Petya differentiates itself from other types of Bitcoin ransomware, as the malware will block file access although it remains unknown whether or not anything is encrypted at all. Similar to other types of Bitcoin ransomware, owners of infected computers will []. By|| Since the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) launched its new means of regulating companies operating in the cryptocurrency industry, BitLicense, eight months ago in June 2015, the regulatory process has only approved one application. Launched to foster acceptance by administrative bodies When it was announced that the NYDFS was launching its BitLicense programme in New York, the news was met with positive remarks by leading industry professionals. Many take the view that regulation, although it may limit the cryptocurrency industry temporarily, is in reality hugely beneficial as it means there is growing acceptance by administrative bodies, and therefore hopefully, the general public will feel more comfortable using the new technology. A spokesperson for the NYDFS tells Fortune: “There are always going to be those who argue for little-to-no regulation, but we think that ultimately the BitLicense is going to a be a positive for the long-term health of this industry. If digital currency is going to gain wider adoption, strong consumer protections and oversight (to help ensure that customer money doesn’t fall into a black hole) will be critical.” A number of companies, such as Bitfinex, BitQuick, BTCGuild, EobotCT r: 5, Genesis Mining, GoCoin, Kraken, LocalBitcoins, PaxfulCT r: 43, and Poloniex, made a decision to leave New York in order not to have to deal with BitLicense. “This particular piece of legislation is unnecessary and is an obstacle to free market innovation,” wrote Genesis Mining on its blog. KrakenCT r: 11, an exchange headquartered in San Francisco, said that the license, “comes at a price that exceeds the market opportunity of servicing New York residents. Therefore, we have no option but to withdraw our service from the state.” Application difficulties Despite the programme being in []. By|| Ethereum has been captivating the audience in the world of digital currency, although the project has been making waves in traditional finance as well. Due to its attractive blockchain implementation and the prospect of smart contracts, things have gotten competitive in the digital currency world. But in the end, most users want a secure wallet solution, and Etherli seems to hold a lot of promise, even though it is a web wallet. Also read: Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis For – Break Near? Etherli Multisig Web Wallet with 2FA for Ethereum Unlike the Bitcoin world, wallet solutions for Ethereum are not as widespread as one might expect. There is the standard Ethereum wallet, and Jaxx is offering a viable alternative for a variety of platforms as well. But Etherli wants to bring something different to the table, as they combine a multisig web wallet with two-factor authentication. Although web wallets are not the most secure solution – funds are controlled by a third party after all – Etherli is operating in a different manner. By creating a multisignature wallet solution, the end user will hold the majority of keys associated with the address, putting them in full control. However, there is always the question as to whether or not the generated keys are stored in a database on the platform. Two of the three necessary keys are produced in the client on the user’s computer, whereas the third is produced on the server. This third key is the only one belonging to Etherli while the other two will be in firm control of the end user. This should put most “trustless’ concerns aside, even though some Reddit users are still wondering about the usage of Ethereumjs for the signing process. The addition of two-factor authentication is a much-needed feature in []. By|| Coinsource, a bitcoin ATM network, has installed its first bitcoin ATM in San Francisco, in a grocery store in the city’s Mission district, according to SFist.com. The installation marks the network’s 18th ATM from New York to California. The San Francisco installation demonstrates the San Diego, Calif.-based company is following through on its expansion plans CCN reported in November when it made its second New York City area installation. The earlier CCN report noted Coinsource was one of 22 companies that secured a New York State BitLicense at the time. Coinsource Provides Service The company provides high-touch support through its website, social media channels and email, company managing partner Sheffield Clark noted. A Coinsource local representative provides on-the-ground support. Clark said Coinsource makes private compensation arrangements for locations hosting its ATMs. According to its website, Coinsource now has eight ATMs in New York City, one in Brooklyn, N.Y., one in Jamaica, N.Y., two in Las Vegas, one in Philadelphia, Pa., one in Dallas, Texas, one in Ft. Worth, Texas, one in Palo Alto, Calif., and one in San Diego, Calif. San Francisco’s Third Bitcoin ATM Coinsource spokesman David Wachsman told SFist that there are currently two other bitcoin ATMs in San Francisco, also in the Mission district, both of which are in the same location. The Coinsource machine in Mission Groceries is the only one in the city available until 2 a.m., Wachsman noted. Clark said the company’s machines feature cutting-edge security standards and provide instantaneous transfers compatible with any mobile bitcoin wallet.Coinsource’s GenesisCoin bitcoin ATM offers bitcoin with rates starting at 7% that get lower with higher volume purchases, according to The Merkle. Mission Groceries is located a block and a half from the 16th and Mission stop on the BART, two blocks from the 16th Street and Hoff []. By|| Ledger, one of the more popular physical Bitcoin wallet manufacturers, has been given a slight nod of approval from the French Minister of Economy. Based on the Twitter post made by the company, Emmanuel Macron is holding the Ledger Blue, which will be the company’s next generation blockchain security device. Although the picture is rather vague due to the bright screen on the device being held, this is an interesting scenario for Bitcoin and Ledger. Also read: Lisk Announces Short-term Roadmap and Launch Date Ledger Blue Promotional Stunt Although quite a few digital currency enthusiasts have been looking forward to the Ledger Blue, a bit of extra promotion never hurt anyone. Especially if that promotion comes from the French Minister of Economy Emmanuel Macron, who is allegedly holding the new Ledger Blue in a picture recently posted on Twitter. French Minister of Economy @EmmanuelMacron hodling the Ledger Blue, next generation blockchain security device pic.twitter.com/puSCNxGYLp — Ledger (@LedgerHQ) March 24, 2016 Improving physical Bitcoin wallet security is of the utmost importance, and Ledger seems to be on the right track to do exactly that. What is of particular interest is how the company refers to their Bitcoin wallet product as “the next generation blockchain security device”, avoiding the term “Bitcoin” entirely. It is not the first time companies active in the world of digital currency tend to ignore the term Bitcoin altogether, as blockchain is still a very powerful buzzword to attract media attention. Everything is blockchain these days, even though very few projects are not directly related to Bitcoin. The only major exception is the R3 CEV consortium, as banks are not too keen on embracing Bitcoin for the time being. But there is even more Ledger Blue news, as the Developer Edition went into production []. By|| Key Points Bitcoin price stayed in the bullish zone, and rebounded successfully after a minor dip towards the $413-412 support area. BTC/USD is currently attempting to break a bearish trend line on the hourly chart (data feed from Bitstamp). A break above the trend line and resistance area might set BTC for more gains against the USD. Bitcoin price remained above the 100 moving average, which a positive sign. Now can it gain pace and move above the $416-418 resistance area? Bitcoin Price Sighting Gains? Bitcoin price as stated in yesterday’s post showed a lot of positive signs and it continued to remain above a key support area of $410-415. As long as the price is above the stated levels, there is a chance of it gaining ground for a move towards $425 or may be even higher. There was a minor dip recently in BTC/USD, but the price found support around the 100 hourly simple moving average, which holds a lot of significance for BTC to USD in the near term. Currently, the price is rebounding and attempting to clear a bearish trend line on the hourly chart (data feed from Bitstamp). If the bulls succeed in breaking the resistance area, then a move towards the last swing high of $420 is possible. On the other hand, if the price fails, then it may move down towards a bullish trend line on the same chart. It would be interesting to see in that case whether BTC/USD can hold the trend line support or not. BTC may either bounce or break the support area for more losses in that situation. To sum it up, as long as $410 holds, BTCUSD remains in a bullish zone. Looking at the technical indicators: Hourly MACD – The hourly is likely to []. By|| Expanse is a community driven cryptocurency and a smart contracts platform much like Ethereum and Lisk. It was first announced in September of 2015 and differs from its competitors by utilizing a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) in order to make decisions to the design, operation, development path, and investment strategy of the project. Unlike Ethereum and Lisk, Expanse did not have an ICO phase and the team’s main focus was on fair coin distribution upon launch. Expanse has no ICO or Crowdsale, only a small reserve which is managed by the community through a decentralized organization controlled through smart contracts. Unlike other projects the future of Expanse is chosen by contributors, miners, traders, and those that just want to be a part of and shape the future in a fair and decentralized manner. Another interesting fact about Expanse is that even though the development team has a reserve of EXP those coins cannot be dumped on the market in an exit scam because the funds are made available slowly over time. The funds are locked in a smart contract which releases only 10% of the coins at a time over a long period. This provides an incentive for the development team to keep working on the project and keep Expanse’s price as high as possible because it directly affects their funding amount. Expanse has seen recognition from Microsoft as it has been added to their Azure Blockchain as a Service platform. What this means is that developers can use the Azure portal to easily deploy single click cloud based blockchain environments and start creating your decentralized apps in minutes. The template will automatically setup your lab with the most popular lab settings and include the library of existing Blockchain as a Service partner offerings. The library of []. By|| Dragon’s Tale is one of those addicting games that you just don’t forget. Its ingenious originality has made the game quite popular among the role play game and casino gaming lovers. Today, it is already considered the most popular Casino Role Play game in the Bitcoin Industry. Dragon’s Tale is home to more than hundreds of casino-based mini-games that allow players to gather some bitcoins. Among these games, players will find dozens of Skill-based games and dozens of luck-based games. After learning how to play and how to use the Dragon’s Tale gameplay interface, players will be able to roam around the islands that comprise the world of Dragon’s Tale and find these mini-games. This week, we will be talking about one of these cool skill-based games that is pretty easy to play and where you can easily earn some coins. Mining is a simple and easy-to-play skill-based mini-game that players will be able to find at Dragon’s Tale and one that can help them raise a gambling Bitcoin stack. The whole game goes on in China and mining can only be done near the great wall. That’s the place where players can find caves where they can mine. Like the other mini-games, mining is available in different stakes and player can bet from as low as 10bitmils. When a player starts to mine, boulders will start to come out of the ground. The player can earn if he matches the corresponding shape, size, number of crystals contained, or even by the color of the boulder. Since this is a skill-based game, there’s a whole lot of gambling strategies you can use, so go ahead and sign up to Dragon’s Tale to find the Great Wall of China, start mining and earn some bitcoins. By|| Close to the heels of Russia trying everything in its capacity to make bitcoin illegal in the country, the French Minister for Interior Affairs is not targeting the darknet. Freedom of choice and free speech have become rare commodities these days and even in those small pockets where one can find it is being targeted by the governments across the world. Be it the United States government passing laws that conveniently erases the right to privacy from the constitutional rights of the citizens or the Russian government’s attempts to ban bitcoin or Venezuela trying to show bitcoin in a bad light by using state sponsored media for propaganda. The motive seems to be the same everywhere. In a recent National Assembly meeting, the French Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve mentioned that the deepweb is extensively being used by the terrorists. He was quoted saying that the terrorists who have been striking in the Europe are encrypted messages and darknet. His comments were connected to Bitcoin, the digital currency that is widely used in the deepweb marketplaces where collecting money for goods without divulging complete personal details during the transaction is virtually impossible. Deepweb, the unindexed part of the internet which makes up for almost the whole internet except for those sites that are indexed by search engines has been there for a long time, even before search engines became a norm. However, only in the recent days did the term deepweb and darknet was labelled as the place for illegal activities on the internet. The Silk Road online darknet marketplace was mainly responsible for this negative connotation as it gained notoriety by selling illegal drugs and contraband for bitcoin. Since then, Silk Road has been shut down and its creator jailed as a result of a federal investigation into its activities. Deepweb is not []. By|| Back in April 2014, DarkMarket, a decentralized anonymous marketplace with a name guaranteed to fuel the nightmares of conservatives everywhere, was forked and given a more widely acceptable title. The resulting, friendlier-sounding, OpenBazaar, was a fully functional, free to use, peer-to-peer (P2P) market platform with robust decentralized infrastructure that enabled commercial activities to be conducted outside the control of third parties. If that sounded like a formula for another illicit drugs marketplace such as the notorious Silk Road, the project lead Brian Hoffman stressed that that wasn’t the aim. Speaking to CoinDesk in June of that year, Hoffman spelled out the central value proposition for OpenBazaar as being the freedom of two parties to transact without needing to rely on the security and integrity of a questionable centralized service, adding that the team behind the project will push for lawful uses of its service. A redesigned and improved OpenBazaar launched in test mode on 2nd March. The test period during which the site only accepts 'testnet bitcoin,' which has no value, is intended to help the developers identify as many bugs as possible, with as little risk as possible. The project’s test version has been downloaded more than 19,593 times and early vendors are up sporadically, with service to the site itself still being rather spotty. OpenBazaar co-founder Sam Patterson told CoinDesk the market has released four new versions based on lessons learned from the tests and expect at least one more before the final launch in 'the next few weeks.' Not willing to wait for the release of a field-tested version of the software, a 'handful of eager users' downloaded and ran the 'mainnet version' of OpenBazaar at their own risk, according to this Reddit post, which Patterson verified.On 3rd March, the first OpenBazaar transaction for three 'SuperBitcoiner' keychains was conducted between Shayan Eskandari, a []. By|| The Dutch central bank has committed to developing an internal blockchain prototype dubbed 'DNBCoin', according to a recent publication. Buried in the latest annual report from the De Nederlandsche Bank, published on 16th March, is a tiny item detailing the experiment. Elsewhere in the report, DNB posits that blockchain tech could improve its business – a possible indication of how it may look to apply lessons learned from the DNB project. Described only as a 'prototype coin based on blockchain technology', there are no details on the project’s release or objectives. DNBcoin is mentioned under a heading that loosely translates to 'aims for 2016', suggesting that the project is a priority for in-house developers this year. Mentioned on several occasions during the report, blockchain technology is offered as possible cost-saver in the financial industry, though the central bank concedes it’s early to say what possible applications might take shape in the years ahead. The report states: '[Blockchain technologies] can affect the revenue models [of] banking systems, they can also benefit with new ways to generate revenue and [reduce] costs.' As pointed out by payments and banking consultant Simon Lelieveldt, the development signals a desire on the part of the Dutch central bank to explore blockchain tech as an avenue for swapping physical cash with digital replacements. 'So when we now see central banks moving forward in the electronic cash domain (now conveniently labelled: blockchain/FinTech) it might be to no longer spin it off to the market, but to create a permanent digital replacement of cash,' wrote Lelieveldt. 'Therefore, this time it might be different.' Central banks and blockchains In recent months, a growing number of central bank officials from around the world, particularly the Bank of England, have suggested that blockchain technology could be applied to create more centralized digital currencies. Yet the process of []. By|| Two analysts at the New York Federal Reserve Bank today published the results of analysis on how friction between bitcoin transactions could lead to price differences. If true, their conclusion that fees charged by exchanges discourage arbitrage could help explain why many still don’t view bitcoin as a safe or stable store of value. 'There are significant frictions when bitcoins trade in exchange markets, resulting in meaningful and persistent price differences across bitcoin exchanges,' wrote Asani Sarkar, assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, adding: 'These exchange-related frictions reduce the incentive of market participants to use bitcoin as a payments alternative.' The argument goes that since every bitcoin is the same as any other bitcoin, they should all be valued equally. The price differences across exchanges should be offset by arbitrageurs buying bitcoin from one exchange for a low price and immediately selling it on another exchange at a higher price. As a case in point, the bank presents data from BTC-e, Bitfinex, and Bitstamp, three of the larger bitcoin exchanges in the world. According to the authors’ interpretation of the data, bitcoins bought on BTC-e 'consistently' trade at a lower price than those bought on either Bitfinex or Bitstamp at an average of 2% and as much as 20% To account for this difference, the authors argue that fees charged by the exchanges for transactions, withdrawals and deposits of traditional currency disincentive arbitrageurs and lead to the price differences. 'These fees reduce the profits from arbitrage, and may explain the observed price differences,' the authors write. The idea that bitcoin is a poor store of value compared to more traditional investment vehicles is nothing new, but companies like LedgerX are waiting for permission from the CFTC to create options that could help off-set risk. An increased interest from []. By|| Ethereum is currently one of the most sought after cryptocurrency protocols. The potential to develop and use distributed applications (dapps) on its decentralized blockchain is too attractive to be dismissed. It is relatively a much younger protocol than Bitcoin. However, the demand for ether – the crypto tokens for Ethereum platform – has increased in the recent days following the foundation’s move to sell a certain number of premined token to raise funds for the project. The complete development of Ethereum has been charted on 5 different stages – starting with Olympic, Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. Its Homestead version was launched earlier last month, has since gained a considerable traction. In an event organized by Coinbase, Vitalik Buterin – one of the main developers of Ethereum platform – discussed the future of Ethereum and the changes that need to be made in order to ensure better industry and individual adoption. According to Buterin, some of the changes that need to be made on Ethereum includes drastic improvements to the privacy features of the protocol. Being used for creating fintech applications and smart contracts, the privacy is of utmost importance. The community intends to build another layer over the core Ethereum protocol to meet the security and privacy requirements of different Ethereum applications. Scalability is one of the problems currently faced by Bitcoin. As the network grows, even Ethereum may face the same problems. In order to avoid such a situation, the platform intends to consider a couple of approaches to building a network that can continue to operate even in the absence of full nodes. According to Vitalik Buterin, the use of lightning networks and sharding are two possible approaches currently being considered for the purpose. The protocol can be further optimized by implementing an improved consensus algorithm for virtual mining. Going by Vitalik []. By|| Bitcoin Press Releases: OXBTC recently released a promotional cloud mining contract with “A Price No One Can Compete With” as they state at only $149 per THS, which seems to be the lowest price among major cloud mining service providers globally. However, it is only a short-term promotion with limited supply as well for the most cost-efficient contract. From March 21 st to March 30 th, people will have a chance to purchase 100 GHS AT MOST for each account on www.OXBTC.com and they have a sales limit of 5 THS every day during the 10-day promotion. So first come first served. We’ve done a little comparison of the mainstream prices for cloud mining contracts. OXBTC does have obvious competition: Platform Price (per THS) Minimum Purchase OXBTC.com $149 1 GHS CEX.io Trading Only Trading Only Hashnest.com AntS7: $151 4.86 THS (an S7 unit) AntS5: $312 1.155 THS (an S5 unit) BW.com $238 10 GHS Besides the promotional mining contract, they are also offering major discounts on the currently sold OXBTC GHS02 contract. It is a good opportunity to buy some cloud hashrates at such a low price if you don’t have a big budget to experience another way of mining. Trading of hashrates on OXBTC market is available too if you want to sell out your contracts. OXBTC – a new cryptocurrency investment platform which offers both cloud mining and deposit services was launched a couple of months ago. Founded by several well-established investors in China, they have an experienced R&D team who has been in the cryptocurrency industry for many years. Benefited by a very competitive electricity cost and the economy of scale, OXBTC has deployed 3 of China’s largest mining farms in Sichuan, Ordos and Inner Mongolia. Till now, OXBTC has been running 5.6 PH/s hashing power with the []. By|| Bitcoin Press Releases: Lisk raises over 14,000 BTC (approx. 5.7 Million USD). Placing the Lisk ICO as the second most successful crypto-currency crowd-fund to date, and within the top 20 highest funded crowd-funds world-wide. Aachen, Germany – Lisk, the decentralized application and custom blockchain platform has successfully finished its crowd-fund and raised over $5,700,000 (14,000 BTC). Lisk functions as an alternative to other decentralized application platforms: due to the simplicity of the platform and its use of JavaScript, programmers will be able to develop their own dapps rapidly and easily. The launch of the Lisk platform is estimated to be on the 11th April. The Lisk team is working together with Microsoft to bring the Lisk decentralized application platform to the Azure cloud. As a first step Microsoft Azure has officially integrated Lisk into its Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) program – meaning developers worldwide can develop, test, and deploy Lisk decentralized applications using Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and infrastructure. Additionally, Lisk is in a strategic partnership with the research lab Chain of Things which investigates whether blockchain technology can be effective in establishing security in the Internet of Things. The aim being for the CoT Research Lab to test the feasibility of blockchain based Internet of Things applications on a global scale. Lisk is actively seeking out developers who can develop JavaScript based decentralized applications with the Lisk SDK. A few weeks ago the Lisk team organized a ‘Best Dapp Ideas’ contest where anyone could submit Dapp ideas that can be build with the Lisk platform. The winners of this contest were announced last week, among them the decentralized trust platform called Dust. Developers can access the Lisk documentation and start developing decentralized applications in JavaScript today. The Lisk community already came up with over 40 ideas []. By|| Bitcoin Press Releases: A new project aims to disrupt the $200 billion Cable TV sector, using a market-driven platform fuelled by its own digital currency Sollars and $ense. The platform where content creators can set their own price for their content was recently announced on bitcointalk. Solomon Adekale, filmmaker crypto-currency entrepreneur and founder of Sollywood TV and the New Money project, first recognised the Hollywood pricing problem when he was studying in film school: “Back in film school, I realized the pricing nonsense of Hollywood didn’t actually start at the top, it started at the very bottom with us; student filmmakers. ‘From the very first day we start shelling out thousands of dollars for that education not once are we taught that our films are worth anything but the fee we have to pay to have them shown at someone else’s film festival. It should be worth something. And that’s sort of how it hit me” His answer was Sollywood TV: a free market where any content creator or provider could sell their content at a price that viewers would be prepared to pay, whether that was $7.99 or $0.07 – or even way less. The platform would take a 10-20% fee, and the rest would go to the creator or provider. That’s unheard of in the industry. The New Money project will be partnering with Cryptonomex, OpenLedger, ShareBits and the Muse project for the upcoming technical development. They are set to begin production on the video in April showing how New Money will challenge and disrupt Cable’s $200 billion business model. Pre-Sale: SoLCerts As typical of most crypto-currency projects, Solomon and his New Money project partners will be launching a pre-sale token to help reach their short and long term goals. This token is called SoLCerts. By|| Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin gave a presentation at the headquarters of San Francisco bitcoin startup Coinbase this week in which he outlined the road ahead for the open-source blockchain project. Fresh off the launch of its first production-ready version Homestead, a number of bitcoin industry startups have begun to take a closer look at Ethereum, exploring its capabilities as part of pilot projects. Coming amid the ongoing block size debate, as well Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s pointed criticisms of the bitcoin network, the event sparked speculation on social media forums in the days leading up to the event. However, while Coinbase co-founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam were present at the event, there were no major announcements or indications that the startup was moving to formally embrace or begin building products on top of the technology. Comprising roughly 30 slides, Buterin’s presentation gave an overview of Ethereum’s path forward, which will include two additional releases, dubbed Metropolis and Serenity, to be launched at later dates. Buterin discussed network statistics including the number of decentralized applications running on the platform, the price of its native token, ether, and the rising number of global meetups dedicated to Ethereum. Still, Buterin sought to downplay expectations for the platform, indicating that, despite assertions, the toughest work for Ethereum’s development team lies ahead. For example, Buterin said that ensuring optional privacy on the network and proving it can scale are current points of concern. Elsewhere, slides touched on the platform’s three-stage planned transition from proof of work to proof of stake transaction validation, and proposed improvements to its Ethereum virtual machines which handle the blockchain’s internal state. The event was open to the public, and according to its Meetup page, drew roughly 40 attendees. Image courtesy of Tim Swanson. By|| Since its launch, Bitcoin Classic ‘s node count has steadily increased. The latest release of the alternative Bitcoin implementation even topped the charts, with almost 3,000 Bitcoin Classic 0.12 nodes reachable on the network. But a closer look at these statistics reveal some odd details. First, IP-data suggests that many Bitcoin Classic nodes might not really be many Bitcoin Classic nodes at all. Instead, a single node could use multiple IP addresses to spoof total node count. This possibility appears more likely in light of the observation that very few Bitcoin Classic nodes seem to be replacing existing Bitcoin Core nodes, indicating that these are new nodes, rather than node operators actually make the switch. That said, it is theoretically possible that many new users are simply firing up (and shutting down ) Bitcoin Classic nodes in the same geographical area simultaneously. However, it is certain that a lion’s share of all Bitcoin Classic nodes are hosted in data centers, predominantly by Amazon Web Services and Choopa. That’s unsurprising, as dedicated websites offer such services, and this practice is encouraged by Bitcoin Classic supporters. Recent data analysis, moreover, shows that a vast majority of nodes in these data centers are almost certainly paid for by a relatively small group of people. This raises the question: Is it useful to run full nodes from data centers at all? Does the sharp increase of Bitcoin Classic nodes in any way benefit Bitcoin, Bitcoin Classic or both? Let’s take a look at why anyone would want to run a full node. Validation Perhaps the most important reason to operate a full node is validation.With a full node, users can check whether transactions are valid according to all of Bitcoin’s rules. Using nothing but the open source software, node operators can verify that any bitcoins they []. By|| Regardless of where one looks in the world, financial turmoil is brewing everywhere around us. Canada is no exception to this statement, unfortunately, even though the new Liberal government is planning to invest in people and the economy over the next few years. That being said, this economic stimulus will come at a great cost, and could end up hurting the Canadian economy even more. All of this is indirectly working for Bitcoin and other forms of alternative finance. Also read: Bitcoin Uncertainty in Venezuela is Beneficial to SurBitcoin Boosting Canada Economy Comes at a Risk Nearly every economy around the world is facing a problem right now, and government officials are trying to figure out various ways to focus on this issue. The old tried and tested tactic seems to be the most logical way to address these concerns, although injecting a lot of money at infrastructure spending is quite a significant concern. People have to understand that the money required for an economic stimulus has to come from somewhere. In Canada, that means there will be a government deficit three times what was originally predicted during the election last year. As this deficit grows larger and larger, it becomes much harder for Canada to return to a balanced budget. While the numbers on their own might not mean much to some people, there is the topic of how the Liberal government broke just about every promise they made to the citizens before the election. Although it is nothing new to see lies and broken promises in the world of politics, people have the right to be upset and make their voice be heard about as well. To make matters even worse, the Liberal government will be taking virtual control of the Bank of Canada i nfrastructure, as a []. By|| March 11, 2016 — Binary options trading platform eXbino is pleased to announce several new developments aimed improving the trading experience for its users. The company is working on integrating SpotOption software into its platform. Exbino would also like to announce its new eXbino Follow feature, which enables social trading. The company has also completed Cubits integration, and now offers long-term BTC and USD options for bitcoin trading. The SpotOption technology comes from SpotOption, a company providing binary options solutions since 2010. This technology enables unique binary options trading features such as One Touch, 60 Seconds, Option Builder, Algo Trading and Ladder. SpotOption won Finance Magnates’ “Best Binary Options Platform Provider” award in 2015. With headquarters in Israel and branches in Cyprus and Hong Kong, SpotOptions services clientele located in North America Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia. Through SpotOption, eXbino will now provide Ladder, Pairs and Limits to customers, broadening their selection of binary options trading instruments. The platform is also announcing eXbino Follow, a social media services that allows traders to follow one another and engage in “social trading.” “We have followed the trading society needs. Our eXbino Follow feature lets our users profit from their combined knowledge. We are happy and proud to bring the most complete binary options trading solution possible, but there’s always room to grow. Our team keeps on working hard on developing new solutions to make the trader’s life easier. We are absolutely sure that the changes we’ve made will bring exactly that to our most valuable asset – our investors.” The company has also integrated Cubits into its platform. Cubits is an online bitcoin trading platform servicing the European market. Cubits brands itself as “an all-inclusive platform to buy, sell and accept Bitcoin.” The platform’s easy-to-use interface supports instant bitcoin trading in 17 currencies. By|| Bitcoin Press Release: Lisk raises over 14,000 BTC (approx. 5.7 Million USD). Placing the Lisk ICO as the second most successful crypto-currency crowd-fund to date, and within the top 20 highest funded crowd-funds world-wide. Aachen, Germany – Lisk, the decentralized application and custom blockchain platform has successfully finished its crowd-fund and raised over $5,700,000 (14,000 BTC). Lisk functions as an alternative to other decentralized application platforms: due to the simplicity of the platform and its use of JavaScript, programmers will be able to develop their own dapps rapidly and easily. The launch of the Lisk platform is estimated to be on the 11th April. The Lisk team is working together with Microsoft to bring the Lisk decentralized application platform to the Azure cloud. As a first step Microsoft Azure has officially integrated Lisk into its Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) program – meaning developers worldwide can develop, test, and deploy Lisk decentralized applications using Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and infrastructure. Additionally, Lisk is in a strategic partnership with the research lab Chain of Things which investigates whether blockchain technology can be effective in establishing security in the Internet of Things. The aim being for the CoT Research Lab to test the feasibility of blockchain based Internet of Things applications on a global scale. Lisk is actively seeking out developers who can develop JavaScript based decentralized applications with the Lisk SDK. A few weeks ago the Lisk team organized a ‘Best Dapp Ideas’ contest where anyone could submit Dapp ideas that can be build with the Lisk platform. The winners of this contest were announced last week, among them the decentralized trust platform called Dust. Developers can access the Lisk documentation and start developing decentralized applications in JavaScript today. The Lisk community already came up with over 40 ideas for []. By|| 27 years on Wall Street to Bitcoin. An increasingly common evolution for former Wall Street executives. Blythe Masters was one of the most publicized to leave Wall Street to explore digital currency and blockchain technology. If her history at JP Morgan is any sign, she might be exactly the right person to fight in favor of blockchain technology. In a recent blog post at Ounce.me called, “ Blythe, Master Of The Financial-Verse,” the history of Blythe Masters is detailed. As she built JP Morgan’s commodities arm, she once said her division’s competitors are “scared shitless of us” and said “we are going to build and finish building the No. 1 commodities-trading franchise on the planet.” Though her plan did not go perfectly, her dedication and positive-thinking are exactly the sort of attitude that creates winners, and the same will hold true in the blockchain space. An opinionated woman while on Wall Street, Masters once told Larry Summers – who has also become a bitcoiner – that she opposed the financial overhauls by the Obama administration. “She said things everyone else in the room felt but they weren’t willing to say,” Tim Ryan, chief executive of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association,” described. As US senators accused JP Morgan in 2008 of manipulating oil prices, she snapped back: “Are you calling me a liar?” “She is definitely not a shrinking violet,” Bart Chilton of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said.Critics of Masters call her “the woman who built financial weapons of mass destruction,” a claim she denies. During her time at JP Morgan, her superiors defended her: “You are one stough kid,” one executive wrote.“I think he meant I was one ‘tough’ kid,” she told employees. “I will be checking that with him.”vWhy is Ms. Masters in digital currency now?She wishes “to build []. By|| Bitcoin price fell away from yesterday’s strained highs, but a price correction introduces some uncertainty about what’s next. Previous price patterns suggest the decline will continue, but simple technical analysis helps us plan contingency, and identify the confirmation of decline. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3-hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? Join now and receive a $29 discount using the code CCN29. Bitcoin Price Analysis Time of analysis: 14h00 UTC OKCoin 1Week Futures 1-Hour Chart From the analysis pages of xbt.social, earlier today: xbt.social subscribers opened a short position after a combination sell signal fired in both the 1-hour and 15-min charts, earlier today. It is not unusual for the market to test the 1hr 20MA after an initial wave of decline. Magenta arrows in the 1hr OKCoin futures chart, illustrates this corrective pattern. The structure of the wave presently pushing higher looks typically corrective – and not like a new wave of advance. However, we can never say never in the market, hence xbt.social risk planning dictates that we close our short trade if price prints any new high above yesterday’s wave top. One other painful scenario is illustrated by the blue arrow. The market can complete the current corrective wave, yet still fail to decline, and re-enter the tortured sideways slog it has become prone to lately. In this case, price will creep toward our stop-loss at the previous high and knock us out of the trade for a small loss.With most of the possible outcomes covered, we want to see price decline below the 1hr 200MA (red) which will be a confirmation of additional decline and give us an opportunity to increase our short position’s size (or increase fiat allocation for buy-and-hold). Summary Bitcoin price had declined from overbought conditions []. By|| Although many people are looking to run a Bitcoin Node on their computer or another device, very few people are aware of what types of security risks are associated with this process. One Reddit user pointed out how running a Bitcoin node puts users at risk of undergoing scans to determine whether or not there is a wallet address file stored somewhere. The Bitcoin client software will automatically reject most of these scan requests, but it is something to be aware of at all times. Bitcoin Node Users Vulnerable to Wallet Scans Although these wallet scans are not a particular threat just yet – HTTP requests will get blocked in most cases anyway – it is important for users to keep in mind that running a Bitcoin wallet on the same device might not be the best idea. Based on the logs provided by this Reddit user, the scan is actively looking for the wallet.dat file on the computer, which can be important for other Bitcoin clients if it is not encrypted. It has to be said, however, that Bitcoin is not the only target of these wallet scans. The logs mention other digital currency as well, such as Namecoin, Peercoin, Primecoin, and Litecoin. Digital currency enthusiasts would be wise to run their coin wallets on an entirely different machine compared to the Bitcoin node. Keeping in mind how all of these wallet scans are HTTP requests, users should try to avoid running an HTTP server on the same device as their Bitcoin node either. For example, an exchange site or block explorer running a node on the same server could be exposed to a potential loss of wallets in the future. Moreover, people running a Bitcoin Node should never store any coins in a wallet stored on the same []. By|| Zcash, which is an implementation of the zerocash concept, is often referred to as the first form of truly anonymous digital cash. While Bitcoin been called a haven for criminals by many misinformed individuals, the reality is Satoshi Nakamoto ’s creation is a mostly-transparent ledger. Although Zcash enables the highest level of privacy currently allowed by cryptography, there are still some potential issues (mostly unrelated to privacy) for the financial-anonymity protocol to overcome. Zcash CEO Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn recently discussed some of these issues on Epicenter Bitcoin. Privacy Preserving Spends Take a Minute or Two to Generate The main issue with Zcash right now is that generating a new privacy-preserving spend is somewhat inefficient. Zooko, as he is commonly known, explained this issue during his recent Epicenter Bitcoin appearance: “The current alpha code that we have running on a testnet ‒ it takes like about a minute or two of CPU time to generate a new privacy-preserving spend and only like a few milliseconds, I think, to verify. The latter part is for the good for performance, and that’s really important because all the full nodes and the miners have to be doing verifications all the time. The former part is pretty bad because it takes a whole minute or two on like a high-powered, supercomputer 64-bit laptop CPU.” Zooko also added that privacy-preserving spend generation likely requires more than 4 gigabytes of RAM, although he also mentioned that they don’t have precise measurements on RAM requirements quite yet. In regard to the consequences of the current system requirements involved with privacy-preserving spends, Zooko stated: “That is totally prohibitive for certain use cases like generating a new spend on your smartphone, for starters. Also, anything that’s got a real low- latency requirement where you get incoming money you receive and []. By|| This is a guest post by Victoria Ross. Bitcoin was embraced by many for its libertarian ideals of economic liberty and individual sovereignty. But it has now effectively been dragged into the current, and very public, privacy debate between Apple and the FBI. Last week, President Barack Obama said he believes a balance must be sought between privacy and security. As one example of the risks of strong encryption, and seemingly referring to cryptocurrencies, Obama pointed out that if government can’t access phones, “everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket.” To find out where Bitcoin’s industry representatives stand on this issue, Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Bitcoin Foundation director Bruce Fenton Coin Center director of research Peter Van Valkenburgh, and senior fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato institute and former Bitcoin Foundation board member Jim Harper. Encryption and Law Enforcement The current debate on encryption started when recent acts of terrorism in San Bernardino, California brought about a highly publicized showdown between Apple and the FBI. After a San Bernardino couple, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people, the FBI found Farook’s iPhone 5C was locked with a password and data encrypted. The action of the FBI to seek the decryption from the terrorist Farook’s iPhone brought Apple into the California district court of Judge Sheri Pym, who ruled Apple should offer “reasonable technical assistance” to law enforcement, and must provide a tool that would allow federal agents to beat a security feature that prevents the phone from erasing after some failed unlocking attempts. Apple CEO Tim Cook, however, worries that creating a patch to enable entry through a back door threatens the ability to maintain privacy for its hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.This sentiment was echoed by Bitcoin industry representatives.Bitcoin Foundation director []. By|| Bitcoin usage and adoption seems to be on the rise in certain countries around the world, although that was only a matter of time according to some industry experts. Venezuela is an interesting country to keep an eye on from a Bitcoin perspective, as government officials seem to be cracking down on digital currency. However, even the arrests of several Bitcoin miners cannot sway the mind of consumers looking to venture into the Bitcoin world, and SurBitcoin is reaping the benefits from this mind shift. Also read: Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis For – Beginning of Bullish Trend? SurBitcoin Benefits from Bitcoin Turmoil Turbulent times are ahead for Venezuela by the look of things, as law enforcement agencies arrested two individuals involved in Bitcoin mining about a week ago. Even though the digital currency is not illegal in the country, the local government has never been keen on the concept of Bitcoin, as they see it as a threat to the local monetary system. But that is not all, as local state-sponsored media – called VTV – has issued a stern warning about Bitcoin once again, claiming how this is not a reliable form of money as there is no government support or inherent value of digital currency. To some people, this may sound very similar to what Russian government officials have been telling the people for quite some time now. All of these actions are leading to a lot of questions being raised by the Bitcoin community in Venezuela, and some people are worried about whether or not they should get out of digital currency. After all, nobody wants to be arrested for their involvement in digital currency, even though such actions by governments are frowned upon by Bitcoin enthusiasts and industry experts all over the world. By|| The founder of the Bitcoin Association Switzerland, Luzius Meisser, recently released the results of a block size survey he conducted. He wanted to test the differences in which entrepreneurial and technical mindsets viewed the block size problem. His hypothesis stated that entrepreneurs likely favor larger blocks than those of a technical mindset. “And the answer seems yes.” Of 269 respondents, 146 preferred a block size between 0.5 MB and unlimited, with most preferring more than 4GB. Meisser determines this is because he received more responses from r/btc readers than /r/bitcoin readers. The results from a previous survey are seen above. “There is a deep divide between readers of the traditional two forums [r/Bitcoin and BitcoinTalk] and readers of /r/btc,” he concluded. 39% of r/Bitcoin and BitcoinTalk prefer block sizes over 4MB, while 94% of the r/btc readers prefer block sizes over 4MB. 76% of individuals who read other news sources first prefer a block size limit over 4 MB. Those who prefer a block-size under 4MB view Bitcoin as a settlement system or digital gold. Of those who prefer over 4MB, 10% view Bitcoin as a settlement system and 6% view it as digital gold. “This confirms the widespread suspicion that the block-size disagreement is related to what we want Bitcoin to be, although not to the extent I would have expected to see,” Meisser wrote. “The ‘electronic cash system’ still clearly wins among every group.” Other data suggests wealth does not play a factor in how one aligns him or herself in this discussion. Those who prefer block-sizes under 4B generally find technology more important than business strategy. Those who prefer over 4MB “tend to emphasize the importance of business strategy relative to technology.” As Meisser concludes: “ I see the block-size decision as a trade-off between a technical risk (loss of []. By|| It seems that after the meteoric rise of Ethereum, Bitcoin supporters can no longer just try to deny its invitational approach to blockchain and the smart money has decided that if you can’t beat them, join them. Buenos-Aires headquartered RSK Labs has revealed that it raised $1 million to further develop the first smart contracts platform codenamed Rootstock. The funding round was led by a number of very influential bitcoin firms from around the world including: Bitmain, the Chinese bitcoin hardware mining giant, Coinsilium, the blockchain venture investment fund based in London and Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group that now owns CoinDesk. Silbert said: “Our team at DCG feels that Rootstock developing is important for both the technical and business communities building on blockchain technology today, and will enable many new use cases that have not been possible to date”. RSK Labs says this successful round allows it to expand its current presence in Latin America to Asia, Europe and the US, while securing the funding needed to ensure the complete execution of its roadmap. Rootstock is the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin that also rewards the Bitcoin miners via merge-mining, thus allowing them to “actively participate in the Smart Contract revolution” in a way that is also fully compatible with Ethereum. Eddy Travia, CEO of Coinsilium, added: ”I am very proud that Coinsilium supports the talented Rootstock team to develop a platform enabling smart contracts secured by the Bitcoin blockchain which I see as an essential element in the transition to a world of blockchain-based solutions for enterprises and public organizations.” RSK explains that its private testnet will be opened soon to a small number of miners, partners and users. During the following months, wallets, block explorers and further enhancements to the network will be []. By|| Share with: Leading Blockchain currency payment service provider, Coinify ApS and Hong Kong based payment service provider, iPayDNA International Ltd. Are proud to announce a new partnership that will bring advanced Blockchain payments to a vast amount of merchants residing in the Asia Pacific region. Partnering with iPayDNA is another step of Coinify’s recently announced push into the Asian market. The new PSP agreement will allow Coinify to extend their Blockchain merchant processing solution distribution channel throughout the Asia Pacific region where iPayDNA holds a dominant position. Morten Bebe, sales manager at Coinify, expressed: “We are thrilled about teaming up with iPayDNA. Being a company native to the Asia Pacific region, they have the best understanding of local merchants needs and at the same time being a company with an international mindset, they perfectly match the qualities we look for in our business partners.” Asia Pacific is home to more than 60% of the world population, accounts for nearly ¾ of global payment transactions and has the highest share of eCommerce in GDP. “The increasing popularity of alternative payments is reinforced by the strong shift from cash to electronic payments and the increasing number of customers searching for their preferred payment method in a secure environment. Besides these strong indicators of the potential that Blockchain payments have in the area, we are pleased about opportunities contributing to the infrastructure and supporting the digital currency adoption process,” Morten Bebe concludes. Guan Seow, Managing Director of iPayDNA, expressed: “Our value proposition is to serve as a one stop center for online merchants by offering them the most card and non card payment options. By adding a broad selection of the most popular Blockchain currencies via Coinify, our merchants can further benefit from this variety. All iPayDNA’s customers, who are open to embrace Blockchain []. By|| The number of exchanges supporting Ethereum is slowly starting to increase, which goes to show the genuine interest in the popular digital currency. Now that the largest Bitcoin exchange in Japan has added ETH to their platform, things could get fascinating in this region of the world. Buying and selling Ether can be done through credit cards and international wire transfers, which could open up arbitrage opportunities in the future. Also read: OXBTC Launches Bitcoin Cloud Mining Promotion Ethereum Gains More Exposure In Japan Up until a few months ago, there was very little discussion about Bitcoin and other digital currencies in Japan. Not that there was a ban against digital currency in the country, though, but Bitcoin and consorts just never managed to gain significant traction in Japan for some reason. Slowly but surely, that situation is changing in favor of cryptocurrency. Coincheck – the largest Bitcoin exchange platform in all of Japan – has been getting a lot of attention as of late, which has translated into a decent amount of trading volume as well. Part of this success can be attributed to how easy Coincheck makes it to buy and sell digital currency, as the platform supports a variety of payment methods, all of which are designed to make the process as smooth and fast as possible. Users of this digital currency exchange platform can use bank transfers or credit cards to purchase Bitcoin, and now Ethereum as well. International transfers will have to be denominated in USD value, though, which will be converted to its equivalent JPY value when the funds arrives in the Coincheck account. This process will be complete free of charge, which is a good way to attract international digital currency traders. Moreover, the Coincheck platforms offers a few tools for advanced []. By|| Having fallen out of favor in the circles of highly influential blockchain technology players, Bitcoin likely won’t see its widespread commercial adoption beyond the retail and speculation level. This is a long-term view, and not to minimize the usefulness and impact of what Bitcoin is and has inspired. But, as players like R3 CEV, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and a slew of other companies experiment with blockchain technologies, it’s clear to see that they’re looking to serve their clients, who perceive no uses for Bitcoin itself in their industry. Mike Hearn, a Bitcoin developer privy to what’s taking place in the new commanding heights of the blockchain experience, predicted Bitcoin’s eventual downfall. Is his speculation coming true? Bitcoin developers, in the view of a blockchain-forward financial technology company, are somewhat atavistic in the sense that, while Bitcoin will serve as future inspiration, it won’t serve as future medium. To that end project after project have been endeavored upon, looking to incorporate Bitcoin-inspired technology in whatever way desired. Examples include: a blockchain inspired nation-state; a blockchain inspired tax code and IRS; a blockchain inspired online banking platform; a blockchain inspired financial system; blockchain inspired criminal justice; blockchain inspired sports analytics, and so on. Blockchains fall under three different categories: public, like Bitcoin; private, like Ripple, which runs open-source; and public-private, of which there is not exactly an example. Platforms like Ethereum and Ripple have partnered with the above-mentioned legacy organizations who currently research blockchain technology. Ripple CEO Chris Larsen has been cited by banking industry workers as inspiring DAVOS banking participants to investigate the blockchain. Multiple blockchain projects have reached out to, and work in some capacity with, Microsoft Azure and its blockchain-as-a-service project. Meanwhile, Bitcoin remains mired in a block size debate grounded largely in ideology, though that’s clouded with technological lingo. Bitcoin Core, []. By|| Building trust in the Bitcoin world can be quite a challenge these days, as companies who deal with digital currency payments hardly have a clue as to what to do if something goes awry with a customer’s payment. Moreover, the payment processors in question are responsible for funds arriving where they should in a timely manner, although they might run into issues with that as well. This story stems from a Reddit user who experienced a series of problems when booking a hotel on Expedia using the Coinbase checkout page. Also read: Bitcoin Technical Analysis for 3/24/16 – Slow and Steady Expedia and Coinbase Issue Causes Bitcoin Concern Using a website such as Expedia to rent a hotel room or a flight with Bitcoin sounds like a great opportunity for any Bitcoin enthusiasts. It is of the utmost importance to have major retailers and brands supporting digital currency payments, and Expedia is a great addition. Unfortunately, hardly anyone on the Expedia support team has a clue what to do when it comes to Bitcoin transactions. Fortunately for them, they have a capable payment processor – Coinbase – which can help with any issues that may arise during any Bitcoin payment process associated with Expedia. However, the recent Reddit post makes a mention of how things can still go horribly wrong and escalate from zero to one hundred real quick. For some reason, the Coinbase payment website never acknowledged the incoming Bitcoin transaction, and the user was redirected to the Expedia payment screen. Although it is not uncommon for payment processor web pages to not update instantly, a 15-minute delay or longer is rather unusual. Resolving such an issue should not be all that difficult, as Coinbase should be able to sort out the problem manually, and ensure Expedia receives the []. By|| We have collected four typical scams to remind you that Bitcoin is just cash, and you should take care to use it as real money: Carefully. Most frauds and scams don’t happen because of the technology involved but rather due to the underlying greed and callousness on the part of the users. There is something about Bitcoin that attracts all kinds of scam artists and frauds. It even has the potential to turn secret service agents into thieves. Secret Service accounts theft In December 2015 ex-Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges was sentenced to nearly six years in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering and obstruction charges in connection with the theft of more than $820,000 in bitcoinCT r: 8 from accounts connected to the Silk Road. Now the US government believes that he may have been involved with additional thefts from the now-defunct online dark market: 'the US had recently become aware of additional thefts of bitcoins from Secret Service accounts, the facts of which led the government to believe that Bridges, working with others, was also involved in these thefts.' US District Judge Richard Seeborg, who presided over the case, remarked that from what he could see, this crime had been motivated by greed. “No departure or variance is warranted in this case,” he said. Greed and naivety feed thugs Why Bitcoin attracts thugs? Very simply because of its very nature. You can remain anonymous while conducting Bitcoin transactions and there is no chargeback mechanism built into the virtual currency. We would like to emphasize here the word currency because it is akin to paying with cash. Reversals and chargebacks are more talk of the plastic money domain. A study done by researchers at the Southern Methodist University in Texas, USA in January 2015 reveals a []. By|| Key Points Bitcoin price gained bids intraday and traded higher to settle above the $415 resistance area. The price is currently facing a major hurdle near the all-important $420 resistance area. There are many support areas formed on the downside on the hourly chart of the BTCUSD pair (data feed from Bitstamp). Bitcoin price gained intraday to trade near $418-420. Now, can BTCUSD continue trading higher as there are many supports formed on the downside? Bitcoin Price – Trend Lines Support Bitcoin price showed a lot of positive signs during the past few hours, and if we look at the short-term view, then BCTUSD was all bullish. However, can we consider it a change in the trend from bearish to bullish? Only time can tell, but looking at the higher timeframe chart, the price is still below a monster resistance area of $420-425. The stated level holds a lot of importance for the next major move in BTCUSD and could ignite a lot of volatility. In the short term, Bitcoin price has formed many support levels against the USD. BTC sellers are likely to face a tough time, as there are a couple of bullish trend lines formed on the hourly chart of the BTCUSD pair (data feed from Bitstamp). Moreover, the price is also above the 100 hourly simple moving average, which is a positive sign. A break below the first trend line support may call for a test of the 38.2% Fib retracement level of the last leg from the $403 low to $418 high. One might consider buying dips, but only if it’s a short term call. The most important support is around $410, followed by $405. Careful trading is suggested for BTCUSD in the short term as long as it is range trading. Looking at []. By|| Coinsource launches its first low-fee Bitcoin ATM in The Golden City SAN FRANCISCO, CA (March 23, 2016) – Coinsource, the reliable and secure national bitcoin ATM network, today announced the installment of a new bitcoin ATM at Mission Groceries at 2128 Mission Street in the heart of San Francisco, California. The new machine is only the third bitcoin ATM in the colorful city by the Bay and the only one open every day. It also boasts the latest closing time for a bitcoin ATM in the entire city, with doors open until 2:00 AM daily. Coinsource’s GenesisCoin bitcoin ATM offers attractive low prices to buy bitcoin, with rates. Headline goldman Companies GOLD Ran gold Resources Ltd. View All Search Results ». Promote trust and transparency through the execution of smart contracts on. Harbor Clause of. Bitcoin Mining bitcoin news bitcoin price. Markets Update: The Bitcoin Price Rocket Blasts Off Again - As we likely in a final markets update, bitcoin markets were working like a jarred can of soda — waiting to pop. The bitcoin cost rocket started a climb yesterday leading a $4,500 zone. Then a cost of bitcoin bloody to a high of $4,865 only 24-hours after on Oct. [1] Bitcoin's process of authenticating each new transaction that is added to the blockchain, commonly referred to as mining, also creates new bitcoins. Every four years, the number of bitcoins produced is halved, until as many as 21 million bitcoins have been created. After those bitcoins have been created, which is expected. The arms race in the Bitcoin mining industry has resulted in a huge shakeout of providers. Most of the Companies that were producing their own ASIC’s have either folded or moved into cloud mining where they run equipment on behalf of the client – but the growth in cloud mining has led to an increase in scam artists. Bitcoin Mining Equipment Bitcoin ASIC’s of 2016 are just to costly for retail consumers to have plugged into their own homes – and too noisy – the latest machines sound like a jet engine. If you want to buy Bitcoin mining equipment there are only two producers worth looking at – and one doesn’t disclose what it sells it’s equipment for (although its rumored to be above $35k a piece). These are the SP50 from Spondoolies Tech and the Antminer S7 from Bitmain. Comparing them is like chalk and cheese. The SP50 produces 110TH and the S7 produces 4.7TH, so you need 23 S7’s to make one SP50. Long gone are the days of individuals running their own miner and generating a passive income – as the network power sits above 1 Eta Hash. This all comes from Moore’s law and economies of scale. Smaller chips with more power efficiency and bigger machines equals more profits. Some miners have moved to cloud contracts where they can offer you better returns by putting their equipment in low cost regions like Iceland, Sweden or Georgia. The lower the electricity costs the less the maintenance costs, and the colder it is the more free cooling you get! You can see a list Bitcoin Mining Equipment providers. Bitcoin Mining Contracts But how do these cloud contracts stack up – the truth is not very well in general. A lot of the mining contract providers turn out to be scams or re-sellers of larger players taking their margin off the top. After all its very easy to set up a website, take payments and use them to look as if you are providing a genuine service – a typical ponzi scheme. A number of people have fallen victim to this type of scam – and the real secret to avoiding it is seeing the facilities for yourself in a video – although this is never 100% certain. Some of the newer mining scam providers are getting better at giving the illusion of being legit – they provide videos, register companies, and advertise themselves on legitimate sites offering them a share of the profits for bringing in customers. A lot of the cloud mining comparison sites don’t do due diligence on who they are adding – they just add Companies based on whether they can make money from them. Only go to a trusted Bitcoin Mining Comparison site. Another important factor to look at when choosing a mining contract is to look at the details of the contract. A number of providers reserve the right to cancel the contract after a period on non profitability and have other punitive clauses (they are basically transferring their risk for buying and owning the machinery to you). Buying a mining contract is fraught with pitfalls. So be careful what you choose and how you pick it. You can see a list Bitcoin Mining Contract providers. With cloud mining you can make money and earn cryptocurrencies. Calculator to estimate. And is subject to some volatility due to Bitcoin’s. Dec 16, 2017 - [/r/cryptocurrency] I made a calculator for Hashflare, a cloud mining service, trying to account (roughly) for difficulty and price increases. If you follow any of the. Balance in 1year at current BTC price, expected profit after 1 year in USD if bitcoin does not increase/decrease in value. Balance in 1year at est. CryptoCompare needs javascript enabled in order to work. Follow these instructions to activate and enable JavaScript in Chrome. PC • To the right of the address bar, click the icon with 3 stacked horizontal lines. • From the drop-down menu, select Settings. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. MAC • Select Chrome from the Apple/System bar at the top of the screen. • Select Preferences. From the drop-down menu. • In the left-hand column, select Settings from the list. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. The CW’s Arrow celebrated its 100th episode/contribution to the “Heroes v Aliens” crossover event by drawing 3.5 million total viewers and a 1.3 rating, nearly doubling its most recent numbers to hit one-year highs (since last season’s crossover ep). To recap #DCWeek thus far: ♦ Supergirl 3.5 mil (+33%), 1.1 (+20% week-to-week) ♦ The Flash 4.2 mil (+40%), 1.5 (+36%) ♦ Arrow 3.5 mil (+84%), 1.3 (+86%) RELATED Leading out of that, Frequency (1.08 mil/0.3) added a few eyeballs while flat in the demo. RELATED Elsewhere in the ratings. CBS| Survivor (8.8 mil/1.9) and Code Black (5.9 mil/1.0) ticked up from their Thanksgiving Eve numbers, while Criminal Minds (7.4 mil/1.4) matched its most recent outing. RELATED FOX| Lethal Weapon (6.4 mil/1.6) dipped a tenth, while Empire (7.8 mil/2.8) slipped to new series lows. NBC| The Rockefeller Center tree lighting (10.5 mil/1.7) rose 30 and 13 percent from last year. Tyler Perry Presents Ruth Chris’ Dolly Parton’s Christmas of Many Colors: Circle of Love (11.5 mil/1.7) was down a smidgen from the original. ABC| The Goldbergs (5.9 mil/1.7) and Speechless (4.9 mil/1.7) each slipped two tenths, Modern Family (6.8 mil/2.2) was steady, black-ish (5.4 mil/1.8) rose three tenths and Designated Survivor (5.5 mil/1.3) ticked up to its best rating since Oct. Want scoop on any of the above shows? Email and your question may be answered via. You can also see the full season's ratings. RELATED2016 Renewal Scorecard. Income tax login know your pan bitcoin mining meaning in urdu the 3 kings stars. Related stories Get more from: Follow us on. AFP Relax Pottermore is planning the release of a new audiobook version of its 'go-to guide to the high-flying sport,' with British actor Andrew Lincoln set to narrate. To be released globally via Audible on March 15 (and now available for pre-order), the book was written by Kennilworthy Whisp (a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling) and was originally released in written form in 2001. In the audiobook version, the BAFTA-nominated actor channels his 'inner witch' -- using various voices and accents as he reads through the book, with a highlight said to be his narration of the diary entries of Gertie Keddle on the early days of Quidditch. Bitcoin mining, the computing process that makes transactions with the cryptocurrency possible, is about to become more expensive for some after China ordered mining facilities to close. ViaBTC Technology Ltd., which runs the fourth-biggest bitcoin mining collective, is raising maintenance fees for some of its clients Friday to 50 percent from 6 percent, according to a statement posted on its website today. 'Some of our long-term hosting partners are facing a Fri, 12 Jan 2018 05:13:39,,, Sponsored Links bitcoin cash algorithm mining. |
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