Online retail giant Overstock has partnered with blockchain startup ShapeShift to accept more than 60 cryptocurrencies as payment at its online stores.

With the announcement, Overstock.com shopperscan now use ether, litecoin, dash and bitcoin cash at checkout, a move that follows Overstock's early embrace of bitcoin as a payment method. Overstock first began accepting bitcoin for payment in 2014, and it has remained active in developing the technology, even launching a dedicated subsidiary to focus on applications.

In statements, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne sought to portray the decision as one that gives its customers greater freedoms outside of the traditional financial system.

Bryne said:

"Overstock is pro-freedom, including the freedom of individuals to communicate information about value and scarcity without relying on a medium created through the fiat of unaccountable government mandarins."

The move further comes at a timeof broader diversification in the cryptocurrency market, which has seen bitcoin's share of the total asset class slip below 50%.

As such, Overstock framed the move as one that keeps it in line with new developments in the blockchain market. Butwhether the company believes this trend will continue remains unclear.

Notably, Overstock said it intends to convert the cryptocurrency it receives to bitcoin, as well as issue refunds using the protocol.

Disclosure:CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in ShapeShift.

Overstock image via CoinDesk Archives

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Ether, Litecoin and More: Overstock Now Accepts Cryptocurrencies as Payment - CoinDesk

"When we first got this place, I was the only girl who was here and I actually got involved with this place because I have amazing friends," said Toni Lane Casserly, a faculty member at Singularity University, a collaborative technology learning platform.

Lane-Casserly has seen a shift in her years in the space. When she first got there, people were telling her that Bitcoin was used for bad ends. Now people are asking her how they could get involved in the ecosystem.

Another roommate, Viviane Ford, had a similar experience.

"It's funny to see this slowly just gain more and more ground. We used to have a Bitcoin predictor on the window up there and we would guess by the end of the year it's going to hit a thousand or something." said Ford, vice president of Operations at Comma.ai.

"There was one moment where we had a big white board upstairs, a bunch of us were talking about different things and I think Bitcoin hit $2,000," she said, adding that "at that moment we popped a bottle of champagne and celebrated."

Whether Bitcoin or other crypto currencies are flying high or sliding backward, for the visitors and tenants of the Crypto Castle, it's about the game and not the score.

Read more:
There's a house full of cryptocurrency gurus in San Francisco, and it's like a modern-day commune - CNBC

Do u kik? Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Kik is giving teenagers a wallet and an allowance.

For the unfamiliar, Kik is one of the largest messaging apps in the world, though tiny compared to services like WeChat, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Anyone who has scrolled through the bikini-heavy corners of Instagram (dont look at me)have probably seen something like Kik: b1ancAAAHor ~kIk Me~ in user bios. Its an invitation to connect personally, for chatting in private. Kik today is what BBM was to young Gen Xers or old Millennials.

With someones Kik ID, the app gives users a way to chat, send GIFs or do whatever the kids do these days, as long as whoever sent themessageseems cool; otherwise, they get blocked. Simple.

Fred Wilson thinks Kik is cool. The Union Square Ventures partner has backed the company, which has now attained a valuation of over a billion dollars, putting it in the unicorn club. According to App Annie, the company has had 30 million downloads on iOS and Android, and Android users have consistently logged about 5 hours per month on Kik.

As weve previously reported, Wilson has long believed that cryptocurrency could kickoff the next great leap forward for the web by making money native to the internet. That said, I dont think many people were expecting the companys announcement today: Kik is creating a new cryptocurrency, called Kin, running on the Ethereum blockchain.

They are going to decentralize Kik and use a new cryptocurrency called Kin to build a business model around a decentralized Kik and, hopefully, attract other developers to build decentralized communities using Kin as well, Wilson wrote on his blog.

With Kin, developers could earn money when users actually pay for services. Today, developers kill themselves building apps for Facebook and Google, and generally they can only monetize users attention in the form of ads. It takes a huge hit to earn anything.

So, the Toronto-based companyis giving a cryptowallet to several million young people and developers a strong incentive to make up ways for them to spend money in that wallet. If the internet has digital money moving at high volume, there will be new ways for companies to earn money besides selling out their users to Google and Facebook.

Ted Livingston, Kik co-founder. Noam Galai/Getty Images

Digital advertising is a $72 billion market. It grew by 20 percent last year, and nearly the entirety of that growth went to Google and Facebook, as Fortune reported. The two companies already control nearly two-thirds of the market. In a lot of ways, advertising is the currency of the internet, so online its as if the Federal government retired the dollar in favor of the Facebeso and the Groogble.

As Kik put it in the Kin whitepaper:

The reliance on advertising for digital media revenue has resulted in advantages for companies whose products reach mass audiences. Such companies can leverage network effects and economies of scale to apply intense pressure to smaller competitors while also stifling competition by providing their services free of charge.

By putting digital money in the hands of lots and lots of its users, Kik thinks it can create a new way for developers to make a living off their talent, but the key is teaming up.

Any one app that tries to take on these behemoths is going to lose, Ted Livingston, Kiks co-founder says in the announcement video for the new currency. Cryptocurrency is decentralized. If Kin takes off, there will be no new center of gravity. Instead, there will just be a Kin economy.

Kin will create 10 trillion units that it will parcel out over time. It will have an initial coin offering where ten percent of all Kin will be distributed. This should establish an initial value for the coins. Then it will begin distributing coins out to users and developers. The incentives at the start will be geared toward generate turnover. The more people are actually exchanging Kin, the more they should be worth. The more they are worth, the more developers will build new apps to generate more turnover.

Every day, new Kin will be released, and they will be distributed proportionally to apps based on how much Kin they move. In a way, it makes the rich get richer, but it also creates a strong incentive for techies to make stuff that people want to pay for.

To keep money flowing, users will be able to earn Kin without putting real money into the system. Everybody will get a wallet in their app. This could be important, because it allows young people to get into the idea of digital currency and really start using it. In the future, users will be able to earn Kin by providing value to other members of the Kik digital community through curation, content creation, and commerce, the white paper explains. Its vague, but the basics are there.

If Kin gets to be worth enough, we might see people, for example, pay for their Spotify subscriptions using money they earned posting funny photos on Kiks inevitable Snapchat Stories ripoff. Thats real value.

The white paper lays out several use cases in a Kin-economy. Users might use Kin to pay for access to exclusive, members-only groups around a celebrity. They might use Kin to buy exclusive content from an artist, such as a song download. And, of course, users will be able to tip people they like in Kin, such as webcomic artists working in a mobile-friendly format.

So that all sounds pretty nice. It also sounds like a nice ecosystem for porn stars, but whos judging?

Kik permissions, from the Google Play store. Screenshot

Though both porn stars and developers will have the same question:how easy will it be to turn Kin earned into actual money? Developers arent going to have an incentive to build great services that earn Kin if they cant pay rent with their earnings. Only a small portion of the Kin supply will become liquid in the near future, as most of the Kin supply is reserved for the Kin Rewards Engine, the white paper states.

So for an entrepreneur, that leaves them uncertain about if people will use Kin, if volume will be high enough, if it will be worth anything in fiat money and when they will be able to sell Kin for real money. Thats too much uncertainty for teams to start putting new Kikapp ideas onto whiteboards just yet.

Privacy is another big question mark. I went to download Kik to my mobile, and it asked for every possible permission, from access to my contacts to access to my microphone and camera. In its privacy policy, the company admits that it uses data collectors like Google Analytics and Nielsen (though there could be more), and users should look at those companies privacy policies to find out what they do with information gathered inside Kik.

So until Kik manages to knock Google out of its placeat the helm of the digital economy, itsstill making dinner off scraps that fall from the Mountain View gravy train.

UPDATE: Added data from App Annie. May 25, 2017 6:16 PM.

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cryptocurrency - observer.com

Oaktree's Howard Marks sounded a general alarm last week about the state of stock markets, private equity, credit markets and for good measure new digital currencies like bitcoin and ethereum. Essentially, he wrote in his letter to investors that everything is overvalued.

On the cryptocurrencies, he went further. He stated several times that they're "not real." Furthermore, he said, they are "nothing but an unfounded fad (or perhaps even a pyramid scheme)."

Cryptocurrencies may indeed be in the biggest valuation bubble since the dot-com era.

At the same time, there is undeniable excitement about their potential today among the top tier of venture capital investors.

Former PayPal COO David Sacks, who was also an early investor in Airbnb, Facebook, Palantir, SpaceX and Uber, tweeted last week that cryptos are the best candidate we've had for the next big thing in Silicon Valley (Web 3.0):

When I read Marks' comments about bitcoin not being real, I thought back to an interview I did with the CEO of McEwen Mining four years ago:

Any currency exists only because at least two parties (a buyer and a seller) agree that it represents value. So, what constitutes money? On a South Pacific island, we might agree that chicken bones are a currency. In prison, we might agree that cigarettes are a currency. Today, while we all use fiat or paper currencies as money, a medium of exchange, there is a growing concern about the value of these pieces of paper.

I don't see why Bitcoin can't also grow and become another viable currency, an internet based currency. If enough people accept it, it will be used. It seems to have momentum behind it and it's intriguing how it's truly separate from any country or central banks' manipulation and control.

There will be growing pains, like the guy who lost money out of his electronic wallet because he left his computer on all night. Also, Bitcoin will spawn competitors, alternative digital currencies. I think it's a mistake to write off this currency as a bubble or fad.

Will it threaten gold? I don't think so. I think the two will grow in tandem as alternative currencies to fiat currencies.

In the dot-com era of the late '90s, there were many warning signs of a huge bubble that was about to pop including:

By contrast, few people are quitting their jobs to start cryptocurrency companies (yet). Day trading is rare. Taxi drivers aren't asking about bitcoin.

If cryptocurrencies are a bubble, we're still in the early innings.

But there are signs of frothiness:

Bitcoin in 2017 is as real as Amazon or Priceline was in 1999.

Both those great companies had their stocks get killed when the dot-com bubble burst, but they used the nuclear winter they faced in the next few years to make themselves more profitable and take market share that they would never give back.

Amazon dropped from $76 per share (in today's post-split share value) at the end of 1999 to less than $6 after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Amazon trades now over $1,000/share.

Priceline went from $283 a share at the end of 1999 to less than $8 three years later. Today, it trades above $2,000.

No doubt many of this year's batch of ICOs, as well as dozens of other existing cryptocurrencies, will disappear in the coming years as things settle out.

But if you listen to Marks' advice and tune out the crypto space, you'll miss the ICO equivalents of Amazon and Priceline. Will ethereum be the next Google? Or the next Lycos?

More importantly, what will be the magnitude of growth from here? Bitcoin has grown from nothing to nearly $3,000 today (after a big pullback when it first hit $1,000 a few years ago). But where will it be in five, 10 or 15 years from now? And will it pull back to below $1,000 again before it breaks out to new highs?

To discard all cryptocurrencies as Marks did in his letter would be a big mistake. There is real value in these digital currencies.

Commentary by Eric Jackson, sign up for Eric's monthly Tech & Media Email. You can follow Eric on Twitter @ericjackson .

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Cryptocurrency skeptics warn of another dot-com bubble, but remember: That's where Amazon and Google started - CNBC

A foreign sanctions bill signed into law by U.S. President Donald Trump included a little-noticed provision on cryptocurrencies.

The U.S. Congress cleared thebill late last month imposing sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. It was a politically controversial development, given ongoing investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the stated opposition of the Trump administration to the legislation.

Trump ultimately signed the bill into law last week, though he sharply criticized the measure in an accompanying signing statement.

Notably for the blockchainindustry, however, is that the billincludes a mandate for the development of a national security strategy aimed at "combating the financing of terrorism and related forms of illicit finance."

One provision, which focuses on research into "illicit finance trends," mentions cryptocurrencies asan area of study.

The textcalls for:

"[A] discussion of and data regarding trends in illicit finance, including evolving forms of value transfer such as so-called cryptocurrencies, other methods that are computer, telecommunications, or internet-based, cybercrime, or any other threats that the Secretary may choose to identify."

The initial draft strategy is due to Congress within the next year, according to the bill's text, and is set to include input from US financial regulators, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, among others.

In some ways, the new billechoes anothersubmitted in May as part of a wider Department of Homeland Security legislative package.

That measure, as CoinDesk reported at the time, calls for research into the potential use of cryptocurrenciesby terrorists. Like the DHS bill, the new sanctions law doesn't constitute a shift in policy, but rather indicates that Congress is taking steps to explore the issue more closely.

Donald Trump imagevia Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Have breaking news or a story tip to send to our journalists? Contact us at [emailprotected].

Originally posted here:
Controversial US Sanctions Bill Calls for Cryptocurrency Research - CoinDesk

With this years incredible gains in the price of bitcoin, the number of hedge funds with exposure to cryptocurrencies is exploding. Fund administrator MG Stover & Co, accounting firm Auther Bell, and law firm Cole-Frieman & Mallon alone have62 in the pipeline.

Also read:Hedge Funds Are Quietly Investing in Bitcoin

As the prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies skyrocket, a large number of traders are seeking to launch hedge funds investing in them. Hedge Fund Alert recently reported that the number of hedge funds investing in digital currencies is exploding. The publication quoted CPA Corey Mclaughlin, managing member at Auther Bell, who said:

Ive been in the hedge fund space since 1998, and Ive never seen anything like it in volume of launches in a particular area. Its just crazy.

Matt Stover, founder of MG Stover & Co,shared the sentiment. This is the first time I can remember where we have had a hard time keeping up with the sales calls, he said.

Institutional investors are surprisingly interested in cryptocurrencies, according to hedge fund lawyer Karl Cole-Frieman. I wasnt expecting so many institutional players to be interested in the asset class, he was quoted saying. Recently, news.Bitcoin.com reported that hedge funds are quietly investing in bitcoin. With this years explosive gains in the price of bitcoin, Hedge funds that offer cryptocurrency exposure are seeing windfall gains.

Among client funds administered by MG Stover & Co., 12 of them are running digital-currency strategies. The firm has also made agreements to service 25 more, the publication detailed. Arthur Bell is working with about 15 fund managers on cryptocurrency funds and expects to take on 20 more in the near future. Meanwhile, Cole-Frieman & Mallon has helped set up 7 cryptocurrency funds this year and has 17 more in the pipeline. Altogether, 62 new cryptocurrency hedge funds will be brought the market by these three firms alone.

Among the new entrants, there are both those simply taking long bets on bitcoinas well as those devising hedge fund-like strategies, such as capturing the arbitrage among various currencies, the publication conveyed. Bitcoins value has risen over 200% this year.

I think the majority of these cryptocurrency [funds] are trying to ride the opportunity du jour, noted Neal Berger, founder of investment advisory firm Eagles View Capital. Its an access point for people who cant buy it themselves or dont want to learn how to do it.Former Goldman Sachs executive Matthew Goetz, co-founder at Blocktower Capital, described:

Its a wildly inefficient market where alpha potential is abundant more than anything weve seen in our careers. We think its a rare opportunity for investors. Its not often theres a new capital market being born in front of you.

How do you think the many hedge funds entering the space will affect the price of bitcoin? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock

Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.

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Hedge Funds Investing in Cryptocurrencies 'Exploding' 62 in Pipeline - Bitcoin News (press release)

"Lust" is an initial coin offering based on the Ethereum blockchain platform, designed for prostitutes and their customers to exchange money for sexual services.

It uses smart contracts and anonymity features to escrow funding of the parties and keep their identities private, in order to avoid law-enforcement scrutiny and public shaming.

Leaving aside the thorny moral and social questions raised by the currency's intended use, there's the technical matter of how well this would work (and this technical matter wraps around to those moral and social questions).

The wireframe drawings of user interface features pictures of sex workers, selected by "elaborate filters based on skill ratings, age, eyes, hair color and other body parameters." The anonymity dimension of this platform is limited to the (presumably male) customers, not the (all-female) workers.

Likewise, the "smart contracts" favor one side of the bargain: the "key has to be scanned later if they make an agreement and meet otherwise the contract gets automatically closed in 48 hours, and the client gets his Etherium tokens back in the wallet" (note that "his" pronoun for the "client"). The game-theoretical aspects of this aren't hard to unpick: if the "client" has sex with the worker, and then does not scan her (sic) token, the client gets to have sex, and the worker gets nothing. Despite high-minded talk about preventing violence against sex-workers, the major threat-model addressed by these smart-contracts is men who don't feel like they got value for money when having sex, not women who perform sex-for-money and don't get paid for it.

Finally, there's the legal question: the people behind this cryptocurrency claim that "our system is not illegal anywhere in the world." That's just not true. There are plenty of territories in which simply using strong crypto is illegal, and others where having a nexus with the procurement of sex for money is itself illegal, no matter how attenuated the connection.

So, in a nutshell: this is a legally dubious platform designed to help men solve the problem of not being embarrassed when they procure the services of a female sex worker, and to protect them in the event that they choose not to pay for her services, but without any real protection for the sex workers' anonymity or ability to get paid.

Escrow deal based on smart contracts

Our escrow deals based on smart Ethereum contracts facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. An access key is generated from a clients wallet. The partner scans the key and the client gets the service without the intervention of a third party. Etherium tokens are returned back in case of non-performance of the agreement.

Decentralized platform

We are a decentralized online marketplace that enables users to transact without the need for a centralized location or any third-party arbitration. Experience hassle free transactions anonymously without any scams or fake reviews in a completely transparent setup. Decentralisation also implies that it can never be shut down, unlike dedicated servers.

Fully anonymous

You can register without any personal details on our website to connect with most desired body figures in an entirely incognito mode. We defend your privacy with features like cryptography, anonymous mail forwarding systems, digital signatures, and crypto-currencies to ensure smooth transactions.

Law does not prohibit

Whether you live in an extremely conservative country or in one of the most progressive ones, you can access our portal from anywhere at any time in the world. Whats better is, that our system is not illegal anywhere in the world. Since, it can be used everywhere instantly, you can find new partners even if youre visiting some other country or while travelling.

Lust

(via Beyond the Beyond)

Torontos crazy-insane property prices stayed high even through the 2008 crash and its aftermath, but sales volumes of houses of all types plummeted by 40.4% for July 2017-vs-July 2016, new listings are up by 5% over the same period and the average selling price has fallen by 19% since April.

Monsanto is facing over 100 lawsuits in a Federal district court in San Francisco brought by people who attribute their non-Hodgkins lymphoma to exposure to glyphosate in Monsantos Roundup weed-killer, and as part of the discovery process, it submitted internal documents to the court that detailed shenanigans in the companys internal science and its dealings []

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of a Nobel prize in economics, describes the foolishness of enacting further tax cuts for the wealthy in America, and the structural impediments that stand in the way of Trumps pursuit of this foolish goal.

Web technology has matured considerably in the last decade, and developers are continually in demand. If youre looking to add some skills to your resume, or are just interested in exploring the possibilities of the web, check out this Interactive Web Developer Bootcamp.In this course, youll get a comprehensive overview of full-stack development using modern []

Even if you only use your PC for web browsing, media playback, or light document creation, default software can sometimes come up short. To give your Windows PC a bit of a boost, weve compiled a variety of helpful, paid apps that can enhance your user experience and make you more productive.In thePremium PC Power []

Many people find it easiest to learn things by doing them. If youre looking to give a doer in your life an interesting, hands-on project, check out these tech-focused DIY kits:DIY AT-AT Cable Organizer & Card Case ($32.99)With this kit, you get to put together a wooden replica of an AT-AT that keeps cables, pens, []

Read more:
A new, dubious "smart" cryptocurrency for prostitution / Boing Boing - Boing Boing

In early June, Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. The headline moment at the event was a wide-ranging and at times combative interview with Megyn Kelly. But Putin quietly made news in another wayhe signaled an official volte-face on the issue of cryptocurrencies, digital financial instruments such as bitcoin.

As recently as a year ago, the Russian government had threatened to jail users of bitcoin for up to seven years. The Kremlin had also toyed with the idea of creating its own digital currency to compete with bitcoin. Many observers speculated that Russia would then make all other digital currencies illegal to force adoption of its coin.

But sometime last year, something changed. Perhaps the Kremlin realized that creating a proprietary digital ruble defeated the purpose of having a dispersed-ledger digital currency. Possibly they observed the huge sums of money being poured into blockchain technology by Silicon Valley, and resolved to make sure Russia didnt get left behind when the technology became popular. (The blockchain is essentially a ledger with thousands of copies that gets updated every time a transaction takes place.)

Or maybe they just woke up to the vast array of possibilities that cryptocurrencies could offer in the service of money laundering.

Putinand the rest of his oligarch friendshave a problem. The Magnitsky Act, which established strict sanctions on named Russian citizens, and the Russian hacking scandal currently consuming American politics, have woken up governments to the colossal amount of ill-gotten Russian cash being invested within in their borders.

Many countries, including France, Switzerland, Ukraine, and Poland, have launched investigations into Russian money passing through their banking systems, while others, such as Cyprus, Greece, and China seem to still be looking the other way. In March, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project published a study entitled, The Russian Laundromat Exposed, revealing the vast and complex banking mechanisms that oligarchs use to skirt international financial controls.

From Putins perspective, the solution to this dilemma could be cryptocurrencies. And the Ethereum platform (which is based on the blockchain model) appears to be the Russians digital currency framework of choice. Ethereum allows clients to create their own digital smart contracts which can have a multitude of uses that transcend mere currency applications. Using Ethereum, for example, a startup recently raised nearly $4 million in an initial coin offering (think IPO) to begin manufacturing zirconium in Magnitogorsk, Russia. Each ZrCoin, issued by the company represents 1 kilogram of synthetic zirconium.

At a forum in Moscow in April, a Russian politician named Andrei Lugovoi sang the praises of the blockchains versatility. He cited a World Bank study predicting that 10 percent of world GDP would be stored with the help of the blockchain as early as this year. He also said he expected a draft bill in the Russian Duma on regulation of cryptocurrencies would be made public in the second half of 2017.

If Lugovois name sounds familiar, its probably because he was one of two men implicated in the 2006 death of Russian spy Alexander Litvinienko in London, via radioactive polonium-210 poisoning. A former KGB officer himself, Lugovoi is now an MP in the far-right LDPR party. Hes also deputy chairman of the Duma committee on security and anti-corruption.

Last year, Lugovoi told a conference that blockchain-based currencies could become the best way to get around U.S. and EU sanctions. This is is [sic] a rare situation where the sanctions policy of the West gives rise to the opportunity for homegrown business to create something new and allow the national economy to move forward, Lugovoi said, according to Newsweek.

And the Russian blockchain community is indeed growing. A conference held in Moscow in May attracted hundreds of people; another is planned for September. And a group of banks working under the supervision of the Russian Central Bank is currently testing a proprietary Ethereum-based masterchain. Not only that, but Russias largest online retailer, Ulmart, is expected to begin accepting bitcoin in September. And another politician suggested setting up a Crypto Valley on the Crimean Peninsula to raise regional funding in the part of Ukraine that Russia annexed in 2014.

At the St. Petersburg forum, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov enthused that Putin had caught the digital economy bug, and that the president had attended a small closed working group on the subject in which he kept them talking about the technology well past midnight. Putin even met privately with the founder of Ethereum, 23-year-old Canadian-Russian Vitalik Buterin on the margins of the conference.

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Its no surprise Putin is excited. Even Ethereums most ardent supporters will admit that once money is in the cryptocurrency loopthat is, after its been exchanged for fiat moneyits devilishly hard to track, by design. Cryptocurrency transactions are anonymous, dont respect national borders, and are now nearly instantaneous. In theory, at least, its the holy grail of money laundering.

As I write this, the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies is still relatively modest, just under $100 billion, approximately what shoe-maker Nike is worth. But the market is growing by leaps and bounds. Ethereums flagship token, the ether, was up 4,000 percent for the year earlier this summer.

Most cryptocurrency transactions are perfectly trackable, thanks to a distributed ledger. (That sort of verification is part the appeal.) But trackable is not attributable. And in order for financial laws to function properly, some level of attribution must be built into the system.

As more governments agree on regulatory regimes to integrate cryptocurrencies into their business, more money will flow into them. Oligarch-sized transactions that would be difficult to impossible now will become more and more possible.

This isnt a problem in countries that operate under the rule of law. The United States and others are already working on laws and regulatory frameworks that will eventually be able to fully accommodate cryptocurrencies and take advantage of their unique properties. For example, its now possible to trade bitcoin and ether as easily as yen and euros.

But what about in kleptocracies like Russia, where laws are bent and molded to facilitate, rather than prevent, corruption? Its not hard to imagine a situation where regulations are either designed to be ignored for the benefit of certain people, or are simply toothless and thus throw the door open to all manner of illicit activity.

The Magnitsky Act has been a thorn in the side of Putin and his cronies for a long time. But as we stand at the threshold of a new era in the world of finance, he may think hes found a way to beat it.

See the original post:
Why Is the Kremlin Suddenly Obsessed With Cryptocurrencies? - Daily Beast

Cryptocurrencies are having a moment. Youve probably heard a thing or two about Bitcoin and Ethereum. Namely, their prices seem to be skyrocketing (or plummeting, depending on the day). Theres more to the story, and as the investing cliche goes: dont buy what you dont know. So lets find out more.

Cryptography has to do with coding to keep data secure, and cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual asset that uses cryptography as a security measure. For that reason, its hard to counterfeit. Bitcoin is one of the first cryptocurrencies to hit the scene. It was launched in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym that could be a person or a group (it was open source and peer to peer). The thing is, theres no central agency (like the government) that issues or regulates these cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin, the decentralized digital currency dominated by white men, seemed on the verge of

Which is why its been such an attractive option for shady business activities, like money laundering. You can buy and sell it just like any other investment, from company stock to Beanie Babies. But while companies have IPOs, or initial public offerings, cryptocurrencies have ICOs, initial coin offerings, and any entity can launch it as an investment. The Atlantic illustrates the problem with not having a central authority regulating these currencies:

Last month, the technology developer Gnosis sold $12.5 million worth of GNO, its in-house digital currency, in 12 minutes. The April 24 sale, intended to fund development of an advanced prediction market, got admiring coverage from Forbes and The Wall Street Journal. On the same day, in an exurb of Mumbai, a company called OneCoin was in the midst of a sales pitch for its own digital currency when financial enforcement officers raided the meeting, jailing 18 OneCoin representatives and ultimately seizing more than $2 million in investor funds. Multiple national authorities have now described OneCoin, which pitched itself as the next Bitcoin, as a Ponzi scheme; by the time of the Mumbai bust, it had already moved at least $350 million in allegedly scammed funds

As they put it, ICOs are catnip for scammers because there are no checks and balances the way there are with IPOs. So if youre going to invest in a coin, which is an iffy enough move as it is, you certainly want to make sure its not just any random cryptocurrency that could just be a scam.

So what about tokens like Bitcoin or Ethereum, which are popular, widely covered options? (And that are actually used as currency.) Are they smart investments?

Some people say investing is like playing the lottery. Thats not entirely accurate, though. Long-term, broad investing, the kind of investing weve advocated here and the kind that will help you build a nest egg over time, is very different from speculative, active trading, which is a lot more like gambling. Cryptocurrency, a volatile, unpredictable investment, falls into that category.

Many people dont invest because it seems overly complicated. But if you want to build wealth,

With active trading, youre taking a guess at how a specific investment (or investments) will trade on a short-term basis. The goal isnt to simply keep up with the stock market like it is with long-term investing; the goal is to make a bunch of money and get rich quickly. And you know, some Bitcoin and Ethereum investors did get rich quickly! Seems like a good deal, right? But the thing is, the price of these cryptocurrencies often swings from one extreme to another. (In one day in June, the price of Ethereum plummeted from $319 to $0.10!)

Plus, any time the value of something skyrockets too quickly, a bubble often follows, and thats exactly what Forbes contributor Clem Chambers predicts:

Crytocurrencies, of which bitcoin is the leader, will fall back in value and more than the fat drop bitcoin has already had.

Despite its reputation for getting constantly hacked, cryptocurrency like Bitcoin remains a hot

Not to mention, theres also the old investing adage, buy low and sell high. If you bought Ethereum right now, youre buying high. If you still need reasons to avoid it, though, the Motley Fool makes a good case for keeping digital currency out of your portfolio: your investment options are limited, there arent any safety protocols, and most of us dont really completely understand how they work. Most people have no clue how Bitcoin or Ethereum work, or understand how theyre challenging monetary theory. Thats a dangerous formula for volatility and potential money loss, writer Sean Williams says.

The bottom line: get rich quick schemes rarely work out well. Sure, people occasionally win the lottery, but for most of us, investing shouldnt feel like playing the lottery. It should be a long game, allowing you to gradually build wealth over time with much less risk.

That said, if youre going to invest in cryptocurrencies anyway (maybe you dont want to replace your entire retirement portfolio, you just want a small taste), heres how to go about it.

Website Coinbase seems to be the most popular option for buying Ethereum, Bitcoin, or Litecoin. Its also the easiest, according to Inc.coms Brian Evans. You have to verify your account and then you can add different payment methods for buying your tokens (bank accounts, wire transfers, credit or debit cards). Evans explains:

Other options for exchanges that will take U.S. dollars for coins are Kraken, and Gemini in the U.S. Typically you will need to verify your account with a drivers license and add other details to expand your buy limits. Since cryptocurrencies are hard currencies, the exchanges dont want to risk getting ripped off, since you cant reverse a cryptocurrency transaction once its done.

These websites will also let you sell your coins when youre ready. If you have extra cash to invest on hand, it might be an interesting experiment. Ive dabbled in day trading myself, just to understand it better, and while I earned a decent return in a short amount of time, I also lost a lot of money after that. Over time, it all evened itself out. Some short-term investors have much better luck; others have much worse luck. The point is, you dont want to put most of your money to work this way.

You might get lucky with these new, shiny investments, but in reality, wealth building is pretty boring: buy some broad, diverse funds and hold onto them over the years. Its not quite as sexy as cryptocurrency, but its probably a safer bet for your hard-earned cash.

Read more:
What You Should Know About Cryptocurrency - Lifehacker Australia

This picture taken on April 7, 2017, shows a man walking past a signboard informing customers that bitcoin can be used for payment at a store in Tokyo.

AFP/Getty Images

If you owned bitcoin prior to Aug. 1 and slept in a little that morning, you would have woken up to find your stash had doubledsort of.

Before Aug. 1, there was a single bitcoin currency simply called bitcoin, or BTC. Like most cryptocurrencies, bitcoin avoided having a central bank that verified transactions by maintaining a constantly verified ledger of transactions that was distributed across thousands of computers. This ledger is called the blockchain, and up until Aug. 1, there was only one of it. That day, at 8 a.m. Eastern, an alternative coin called Bitcoin Cash, or BCC, was born when the bitcoin blockchain split in two. Bitcoin Core, as the original currency is now called, and Bitcoin Cash have identical ledgers until Aug. 1. Now each currency maintains a separate ledger, and since cryptocurrencies are represented by their blockchains, that means bitcoin has effectively split in half, giving each user a bank account filled with both currencies.

The question of why bitcoin split is a deeply political one, as much about the philosophy of what bitcoin should be as it is about practical concerns of payment speed and per payment surcharges. As David Z. Morris described in Future Tense in June, the dispute centers on the maximum size allowed for any block in the blockchain. This is a technical point, but you can think of it as arguing over how many transactions are allowed on one page of the ledger. The original limit, imposed by pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto either as doctrine or temporary fillerdepending on whether you support BTC or BCCwas 1 MB of data. This low limit is leading to delays in the amount of time it takes a transaction to be verified, which is itself leading to higher surcharges for premium verification. (For a primer on how this all works, click here.)

If transaction time were the only issue, though, there wouldnt be a three-year-long flame war and a battling subreddits, one for each coin. There are two other issues. One is that the BTH folks think that allowing larger blocks hinders small players from mining bitcoins, centralizing power in the hands of large mining entities. Bitcoin was created as an alternative to centralized currencies, however, so greater centralization is a serious accusation. Point for BTC.

BTC has proposed a size increase of its own, one that comes with an even greater philosophical change. Segregated Witness, also known as SegWit2x, aims to fit more transactions on one page of the blockchain ledger by doubling the size of the page (that is, doubling the blocksize limit), and by reserving all space on the page for transactions. Right now, each page (each block) contains transaction details (Alice gave Bob 2 BTC), and signatures (I, Alice, agree to give Bob these 2 BTC). Instead of making the page much longer, SegWit2x wants to create more space on the page by erasing the signatures and reserving that space for transactions. Many believe this proposal changes the fundamentals of bitcoin more than BCC does, and in terms of structure of the chain, they are right. Thats why some supporters of BCC oppose the name alternative coin, they view what theyre doing as closer to Satoshis vision than BTC. Point for BCC.

However, the Highlander there can be only one approach is a false choice. To understand why, we need to look at the recent history of another cryptocurrency, Ethereum. Back in June 2016, $50 million were siphoned away from the Ethereum blockchain by some clever thieves. However, the thieves werent quite as clever as they thought. Because of the way they drained the money, they had to wait 28 days before they could withdraw it and, presumably, retire to some tropical locale. In that time, Ethereum made a hard choice, one that Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, called the single most important moment in cryptocurrency history since the birth of Bitcoin. Rather than let the thieves make away with the money, a large portion of Ethereum users forked the blockchain so that the transactions that stole the ETH never happened.

A lot of people were upset by this. It violated the spirit of the blockchain. The purists split off and started their own cryptocurrency called Ethereum Classic (ETC). A year later, both currencies are still used (though ETH is worth far more than ETC) and are fairly stable. In fact, their combined value is greater than the original value.

The same thing seems to be happening with bitcoin. According to Quartz, BCC is already the third most valuable cryptocurrency, behind BTC and ETH. And, just like the Ethereum split, the BTC-BCC market is worth more than the original market was. However, while there can be more than one currency, thats not to say there will be. It took six hours for the first BCC block to be mined, a process which usually takes about 10 minutes on BTC. That block was 1.9 MB, larger that BTC would allow, but the next block on BCC was only .04 MB, stoking fear that not enough miners had adopted BCC. Whether the achievement of BCCs debut as a new cryptocurrency is a Pyrrhic victory for the founders or a resounding success will hinge on the answer to that question.

Read more:
Bitcoin Has Split Into Two Cryptocurrencies. What, Exactly, Does That Mean? - Slate Magazine (blog)