Category Archives: Bitcoin

Bloomberg News

February 9, 2017, 10:44 PM EST February 10, 2017, 12:02 AM EST

Chinas three biggest bitcoin exchanges took steps to prevent withdrawals of the cryptocurrency amid pressure from the nations central bank to clamp down on capital outflows.

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BTC China subjected all bitcoin withdrawals to a 72-hour review, while Huobi and OKCoin suspended them completely, the three venues said in separate statements on Thursday. They all said the measures were in response to central bank requirements. Conversion to and from the yuan is not affected and the curbs will be dropped after updates to compliance systems, the exchanges said.

The Peoples Bank of China told nine bitcoin venues at a meeting in Beijing on Wednesday that it will close exchanges that violate rules on foreign exchange management, money laundering, and payment and settlement. Chinese authorities are scrutinizing the cryptocurrency amid concerns its being used to spirit money out of the country, undermining official efforts to clamp down on capital outflows and prop up the yuan. Demand from investors in Asias largest economy, home to most of the worlds bitcoin trades, has fueled a 160 percent rally versus the dollar over the past year.

Huobi and OKCoin said it will take about a month to upgrade systems in line with new PBOC guidelines. BTC China did not give a timing for when any upgrade would be completed.

The Chinese government is worried about capital flight, said Arthur Hayes, a former market maker at Citigroup Inc. who now runs BitMEX, a bitcoin derivatives venue in Hong Kong. Bitcoin is seen as another way to move money out of China, even though most people trade it for onshore capital appreciation and as another asset in their portfolio.

Read More: This Is Your Company on Blockchain

Bitcoin dropped 7.8 percent on Thursday to $977.39 after the exchange statements. It rose 0.8 percent at 1 p.m. in Hong Kong.

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China Bitcoin Exchanges Halt Withdrawals After PBOC Talks - Bloomberg

Monero: For Black Markets Where Bitcoin Isn't Anonymous Enough Investopedia On the so-called "dark web" black markets exist outside the purview of the law. These online marketplaces have relied on digital currencies to avoid detection and allow for the monetary exchange for illicit goods and services. Most commonly, Bitcoin ... and more »

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Monero: For Black Markets Where Bitcoin Isn't Anonymous Enough - Investopedia

Bitcoin prices retreated Wednesday following reports that Chinas central bank is holding a closed-door meeting with several local cryptocurrency exchanges.

The news, first reported by Bloomberg, revived fears that authorities in one of bitcoins biggest markets are planning to crack down on the digital currency market, said Charles Hayter, founder and chief executive officer of CryptoCompare. Until recently, Chinese authorities had allowed bitcoin trading to flourish with relatively few restrictions.

Bitcoin US:BTCUSD dropped as much as 3% on Wednesday after the news broke. It was down 1% in recent trade, with one bitcoin trading at $1,051. On Tuesday, the worlds largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization traded above $1,1060, its highest level since Jan. 4, when bitcoin traded at $1,100, its highest level in more than three years.

Read: Venezuelan authorities arrest 4 bitcoin miners

Also read: Bitcoin price soars past $1,060 as political worries intensify

Check out: And 2016s best-performing commodity isbitcoin?

Money laundering was one of the topics up for discussion at the meeting, according to the Bloomberg report.

News emerged late last year that Chinese authorities were exploring how to better monitor, and possibly restrict, digital-currency trading to prevent market manipulation and money laundering. In January, Chinas largest bitcoin exchanges announced they had adopted new controls to ensure compliance with local rules in accordance with the wishes of authorities at the Peoples Bank of China, the countrys central bank.

Chinese exchanges also adopted trading fees, leading to a dramatic reduction in local trading volume. Previously, Chinese exchanges had handled nearly 90% of bitcoin transactions thanks in part to their rock-bottom trading fees. U.S. exchanges, by comparison, have always required clients to pay a fee to trade.

The growth of the bitcoin market in China has been sharp, bitcoin experts say. Bitcoin miners based in China are responsible for generating more than two-thirds of the bitcoin networks processing power. Bitcoin miners compete to process pending bitcoin transactions by rushing to solve complex cryptographic puzzles before others. Whoever is first to solve a puzzle blockchain, is rewarded with a cache of freshly minted bitcoins.

The price of a single bitcoin more than doubled in 2016. Bitcoin watchers said a sharp decline in the value of the Chinese yuan USDCNY, -0.0742% inspired some locals to invest in bitcoin to help preserve the value of their assets, or, as some believe, as a means of circumventing the countrys stringent capital controls.

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Bitcoin price falls as Chinese authorities meet with exchanges - MarketWatch

For those that are new to the bitcoin community, it might be confusing why there are two separate subreddits for Bitcoin discussions. An uninformed reader may assume that both places are essentially the same thing, but the two are quite different.

Both subreddits were created to promote Bitcoin discussion and the sharing of Bitcoin news. Theboards were created roughly 5 years ago, r/Bitcoin being the older one by a few months. At first, both communities existed in peace alongside each other, but on August of 2015drama ensued.

During that time, the block size debate was at its peak. There were quite a few solutions that were presented to solve the filling blocks, one of them included doubling Bitcoins blocksize. The moderators over at r/Bitcoin had strong opinions on the subject, as they wanted to avoid hard forks at any cost. The mods believed that a hard fork would only weaken the network and it should be avoided at any cost. Anexample of that is the Ethereum hardfork, the fork that was created because of the reversal of hacked funds resulted in two separate currencies ETC and ETH.

Due to those strong opinions, the moderators began censoring posts that had to do with any talk of block size increase. According to r/Bitcoin those that wanted the block size increase created sock puppet accounts to try and sway the opinion of other readers. As a result, they had no choice but to ban any talk of block size politics that didnt align with their views. Understandably, many readers got frustratedat the fact that their comments andposts were getting removed which led to r/btcs rebirth.

r/btcs subreddits vision is to promote uncensored discussion for any topics relating to Bitcoin. Whether it be block size discussion, or bitcoin price discussions, everything is allowed. Furthermore, the subreddit shows transparency by providing a public moderator log that anybody can look at. It will give info if any posts were removed and for what reason, the subreddit still has rules that all subreddits have to follow which relate to spam, abuse, etc.

Currently the disagreement lies in the implementation of SegWit. It is quite a hot subject that has been receiving both positive and negative attention. On the one side, Segregated Witness presents a great way to increase the capacity of Bitcoin blocks. On the other hand, some argue that SegWit will decrease fungibility and in fact create a sort of debt in the Bitcoin ecosystem.Each side has valid reasons for their arguments, but at the end of the day both want Bitcoin to succeed.

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r/bitcoin VS r/btc - The Merkle

Bitcoin, Gold and Glass Books: Vaultoro Joins Techstars Berlin's Class of '17 Bitcoin Magazine Vaultoro currently has over 4,000 clients from 92 countries that hold more than 1.8 million euros' worth of bitcoin and gold through the platform. By joining Techstars, says Vaultoro CEO Joshua Scigala, the company is putting their plan to integrate ... and more »

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Bitcoin, Gold and Glass Books: Vaultoro Joins Techstars Berlin's Class of '17 - Bitcoin Magazine

Last year, Brendan Eich, former CEO of the Mozilla corporation and designer the Javascript programming language, launched Brave, a Web browser that blocks advertisements by default. Now Eich is rolling out a new Bitcoin payment platform, integrated right into the browser, that he hopes will provide an alternative revenue stream for publishers. He views it asa replacementthe one Brave takes away, which he argues is dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse.

As of September, people using Brave have the option of creating a wallet in the browser, loading it with bitcoins, and sending small payments to publishers based on the anonymized metering of their Web traffic. For now, Brave plays a central role in facilitating the transactions, although it has sought to do so in a way that protects the privacy of Brave users.

When you create a wallet with Brave, you actually share it with a company called BitGo, meaning that you and BitGo each own one key for the wallet, both of which need to be present in order for a payment to go through. After loading bitcoins into this wallet, you specify the total amount of money you would like to spend on your Web browsing. Then, after a month goes by (measured by the days you actually spend using the Brave browser), bitcoin transactionssigned by both you and BitGo trigger the disbursement of that money into a Brave settlement wallet.

Before a website operatorcan collect the funds, itmust go through a verification process with Brave to prove that itsrunning a legitimate business. In return for providing this service, Brave takes five percent of all the donations that come through.

In order to attract people who dont already own bitcoins, or who may not even know what Bitcoin is, Eich and the Brave designers have made the digital currency as invisible as possible in the Brave Payments experience. We try not to put Bitcoin all up in your face, says Eich.

To that end, people have the option of funding their wallets with a credit or debit card. The payment actually goes to Coinbase, the largest Bitcoin exchange in the U.S.But when the money lands in your wallet, it is denominated in Dollars. Eich says you can expect, in the coming months,to be able to pay with Stripe as well.

Although Bitcoin is invisible in the user experience, it is essential to the privacy of the system. According to Eich, the users Brave client is the only place where browsing history gets stored. Normally, sending transactions across the bitcoin network to escrow accounts for known websites would give away information about who is visiting which websites, because every transaction is recorded in a public ledger. However, Brave uses a cryptographic protocol called Anonize(which puts to work zero-knowledge proofs similar to the ones that shield transactions in the digital currency Zcash). Anonize hides the correlation between browsing history and the payments that are received.

We dont want to be a tracker. We dont want that data. Its better that we cant have it than that we could have it and promise to be good,says Eich.

The Brave Payment systemalso leverages a feature of Bitcoin called multi-signature transactions to ensure that Brave cannot misusethe funds in browser wallets. We use this feature to avoid custody of funds. Each user has effective custody of their Brave user wallets funds for the purpose of microdonating to their top publishers, says Eich. The transparency of the Bitcoin blockchain further means that anyone can audit the flow of funds to keep Brave accountable.

Because of the programmability of Bitcoin, it is also possible that Brave could use it in the future to design a fully decentralized version of the browser in which escrow accounts automatically verifywebsites and disbursefunds, rather than relying on Brave to manually intervene.

By adding payments to the Brave browser, Eich is not just giving people a way to donate totheir favorite websites in return for the revenue theyve lost to ad blocking technology. It is the first step in a grandiose plan to completely reformulate the funding architecture of the Web and perhaps even save online publishers.

When Eich describes the online marketing ecosystem, he makes it sound like a dark sewer writhing with parasites and disease. Dip a foot down into the muck and leeches latch on to slurp up every drop of attention they can get. Peel them off, and little poison darts are left to fester under the skin. There are the cookies and tracker pixels that keep tabs on your every move. If youre really lucky, youll catch a bad case of malware while youre down there.

No self-respecting publisher would send their readers down into this dangerous world. And yet they do, because for every victim they offer, the parasites send back a fraction of the blood they suck.

But this isnt going to work forever, says Eich. Part of the blame goes to ad blockers, which saw a 30 percent increase in adoption rates over 2016, according to a report by Business Insider. But there is also the problem of third parties, which carve off so much of the advertising revenue pie that very little actually makes its way to publishers.

The system is not stable. It suffers from these rent seeking parasites, says Eich. Publishers are under stress. I cant name names, but there are a lot of publishers that say they see 18 months to some event where they have to be parceled out to some private equity or sold. And these are big U.S. brands. These are not small online publishers. Obviously the New York Times has Carlos Slim as benefactor and the Washington Post has Jeff Bezos. But not all of them are so fortunate.

If, as Eich says, the entire industry is in a death spiral, when it finally croaks, he wants Braves direct payment model to have matured into a viable alternative.

In December, Coindesk, one of the most prominent Bitcoin news websites, announced that it been verified with Brave Payments as a preferred customer. Obviously, our readership maps entirely with the early adopters for something like a Bitcoin enabled Web browser. So, it made a lot of sense for us. And Ive actually been pleasently surprised at how much weve seen come through, says Ryan Selkis, the managing director of CoinDesk.

But will Brave be as popular among people who are not naturally inclined to enthusiastically latch on to any slightly Bitcoin-related innovation? Since February, Brave has verified 120 publishers. And 37,000 new Brave Payment wallets have been created, holding an average balance of around 8 Dollars, according to the head of communications at Brave.

IEEE Spectrums general technology blog, featuring news, analysis, and opinions about engineering, consumer electronics, and technology and society, from the editorial staff and freelance contributors.

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Can Brave's Bitcoin Payment Platform Save Online Publishing? - IEEE Spectrum

Book Review: Reinventing Remittances with Bitcoin Bitcoin Magazine With the advent of Bitcoin in 2009 came its most obvious use case, namely, making the global transfer of money as simple as sending an email. The success of this has now informed the world of remittance, a billion-dollar market with profound ... and more »

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Book Review: Reinventing Remittances with Bitcoin - Bitcoin Magazine

The price of a single bitcoin on Tuesday touched its highest level in more than a month as populists in the U.S. and Europe threaten the established political order, increasing the appeal of alternative investments like cryptocurrencies, market strategists said.

The price touched $1,060 US:BTCUSD on Tuesday, according to Coin Market Cap. Thats its highest level since Jan. 4, when bitcoin traded as high as $1,100, its highest level in more than three years.

A poll released over the weekend showed Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate representing Frances National Front party in the April presidential election is poised to win the first round of balloting. The news sparked a selloff across European bond markets, and rattled stocks.

Read: Treasurys boosted; Europe election jitters set tone

Bitcoins valuable more than doubled in 2016, largely thanks to Chinese buyers who hoped to protect their wealth from a rapidly depreciating Chinese yuan USDCNY, +0.0073% by using bitcoin to circumvent stringent capital controls.

The U.K.s June vote to leave the European Union, U.S. President Donald Trumps unexpected electoral victory and the rising popularity of far-right candidates in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands have made the political situation in the West appear increasingly precarious, market strategists said.

The dollar gained 0.3% to trade at 6.88 yuan on Tuesday.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss run a bitcoin exchange on which investors trade on average $1 million in bitcoin per day. But is this cryptocurrency safe or a fad?

Previously, the currencys valuation languished in 2015 and 2014 after the collapse of popular bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox effectively ended a speculative bubble that saw the price of a single coin climb to an all-time high around $1,2050 in late 2013.

Bitcoin weakened sharply in January after Chinese authorities announced they would investigate the countrys largest cryptocurrency exchanges to ensure compliance with local laws. Initially, investors feared this could signal a shift to a more aggressive approach by Chinese regulators who had previously left the cryptocurrency world more or less along.

Read: And 2016s best-performing commodity isbitcoin?

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Instead, Chinese authorities appear to have reached an understanding with local exchanges. Several exchanges adopted a 0.2% trading fee to cut down on market manipulation while strengthening controls to prevent money laundering, all in accordance with regulators wishes.

Others are betting that the U.S.s first bitcoin-focused exchange-traded fund now faces an easier path to approval thanks in part to the unexpected electoral victory of President Donald Trump, who has promised to scale back financial regulations. The Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to make a decision by March 11.

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Bitcoin price soars past $1060 as political worries intensify - MarketWatch

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The First Government To Secure Land Titles On The Bitcoin ... - Forbes Forbes The first time that a national government has used the bitcoin blockchain to secure and validate official actions went well. Hawaii to Consider Bitcoin-Friendly Blockchain Bill to Boost Tourism ...CryptoCoinsNews all 2 news articles »

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The First Government To Secure Land Titles On The Bitcoin ... - Forbes - Forbes

Bitcoin company executives and analysts including Irene Katzela, CEO of Chain of Points, firmly believe retailer and merchant adoption is the key to bitcoin mainstream adoption.

Since 2014, the bitcoin industry and market have seen a rapid emergence of bitcoin-accepting merchants. Companies like TigerDirect and Expedia have begun to offer bitcoin as one of their main payment methods.

Currently, bitcoin is perceived more as a store of value and a safe haven asset rather than an actual digital currency. Some bitcoin investors like Roger Ver argue that the development community of bitcoin must work towards transforming bitcoin into a settlement system and digital cash rather than digital gold.

While this approach isnt necessary as bitcoin can be used as both a store of value or settlement system depending on certain users, it is important to understand that limited merchant adoption is restricting the mainstream adoption of bitcoin.

With the integration of various scaling technologies like Segregated Witness (Segwit) that are currently on the verge of activation, bitcoin blocks are set to see at least a 2.1x increase. Considering the average blocksize of 1 mb, a 2.1x expansion of the bitcoin blockchain will appropriately scale the network.

In contrary to what many investors claim, the expansion of bitcoin blocksize will not abruptly bring hundreds of millions users into bitcoin. The user base of bitcoin is not growing at linear rate. Instead, it is demonstrating an exponential growth rate as the digital currency is still at an early stage of adoption.

As Katzela emphasizes, it is important to persuade the general population and consumer base to utilize bitcoin by introducing its benefits and advantages over cash or other traditional forms of payments in existence. Some bitcoin platforms like Purse.io are already targeting the general population or mainstream users by offering 20% discount on products. Some individual merchants also provide special discounts to bitcoin users, as bitcoin significantly decreases credit card fees or financial service fees handled by merchants.

When a user tries to utilize bitcoin for the first time and sees that it is secure, fast, and cheaper than credit card payments or bank transfers due to a merchants effort in providing a discount or a special promotion in appreciation of lowered fees, the adoption rate amongst beginner bitcoin users will drastically increase.

The savings on the merchant side are clear considering the fees incurred by using existing payment methods. An increasing number of merchants pass some of the cost savings onto consumers, in the form of discounts and incentives. As these cost savings continue, consumers will soon realize that virtual currency enables lower prices for goods and services, said Katzela.

An increasing number of merchants are beginning to accept bitcoin as theyre seeing a significant decline in the volatility rate of bitcoin. The digital currency has been demonstrating stability over the past 12 months.

As Katzela explains, the number of merchants accepting bitcoin is increasing but the mainstream user base of bitcoin isnt growing at a similar rate. Bitcoin-accepting merchants that arent taking a step further to convince mainstream users in using bitcoin will only appeal to existing consumer base of bitcoin.

Aiming only to increase the number of merchants that accept virtual currency is only half of the equation for wide consumer adoption. Achieving greater consumer adoption equates making consumers feel safe using virtual currency in their everyday lives, said Katzela.

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Bitcoin Acceptance by Merchants & Retailers Crucial for Mainstream Adoption - CryptoCoinsNews