roadrunner

Earlier this month, Bitgrail’s principal Franceso Firano attempted to reopen the Italian cryptocurrency exchange after $170 million in losses and during their legal sorting out. An inside job or software hack, that hasn’t had an official determination, and fingers are still pointing between the exchange’s charismatic operator and crypto devs. International heavy law firm Bonelli Erede effectively petitioned to have the exchange remain offline, instituting bankruptcy proceedings, and the Court of Florence recently agreed. Also read: DOJ Crypto Investigation Tanks Prices, Fundstrat Welcomes Adult Supervision Bitgrail Shuttered by Court of Florence “This morning,” a post on the exchange’s website read earlier this month, “following the re-opening, we were notified of a deed by the court of Florence requesting the immediate closure of Bitgrail and this situation will persist until a decision is made by the courts, about the precautionary suspension request made by the Bonelli law office on behalf of a client […] Even though we don’t agree with this decision, we are obliged to respect the law and to suspend any Bitgrail business immediately.” This week the court indeed made a decision. “We have temporarily disabled the Bitgrail exchange pending further notice,” came what appears to be a rather final Tweet from, presumably, the embattled exchange operator Franceso Firano on May 2nd. It’s what remains of communication since an injunction was filed to prevent Mr. Firano from reopening. The exchange was halted, temporarily, and that decision was formally upheld as bankruptcy proceedings loom. Representing more than 3,000 exchange complainants is the international firm Bonelli Erede. Its team is a veritable who-is-who of Italian legal pros: Partner Monica Iacoviello, Giuseppe Sbisà, with assistance from senior associates Gianpaolo Ciervo and Alessandra Frigerio. Nano user and Foundation coordinator Espen Enger has also contributed to efforts. Bonelli Erede is a two-decades old consortium of sorts, formed from successful firms responding to merger and acquisition pressure at the present century’s turn. The result is a legal powerhouse of over 400 lawyers, half a dozen offices scattered throughout Europe, and revenues of something like €150 million. Uphill Battle, Especially for Exchange Users And so it is Mr. Firano facing a colossal uphill battle that might very well be moot at the time of publication. Bitgrail could be relegated to so much toast, burnt … done. It doesn’t help that Mr. Firano, once known as “The Bomber” for his outbursts and ribald commentary, has been radio silent since the beginning of May. The tone early that day weeks ago was one of optimism, as Mr. Firano floated ways to attempt making looted users whole. The then-latest scheme involved opening the exchange to generate the requisite revenue. And so he attempted to open, announcing he was “pleased to announce the re-open of our exchange! Given the probable overload of servers, it is possible that in the first hours there may be slowdowns in the functionality of the site.” Mere hours later, the opening was halted pending a more definitive hearing. The Court of Florence in recently upholding that initial stoppage has frozen all assets, tipping off formal bankruptcy proceedings. Typically trustees are appointed to look over books and accounts, and then whatever remains is divvied up according to creditors, victims, etc. The process could take years and yield pennies on the dollar returns. So far, no criminal charges have been filed. All this suggests Mr. Firano being pushed out, along with his proposals for a new crypto and to have devs roll back the blockchain. The Nano Foundation insists losses were the result of bugs on the exchange side of things, and the Nano project will soldier on. Is formal bankruptcy the correct remedy here? Let us know what you think in the comments below. Images via Pixabay, Twitter. Now live, Satoshi Pulse. A comprehensive, real-time listing of the cryptocurrency market. View prices, charts, transaction volumes, and more for the top 500 cryptocurrencies trading today. The post Bitgrail Exchange Ordered Down Indefinitely as Italian Court Upholds Halt appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

There’s a new card game called ‘Bitcon’ that’s been introduced on Kickstarter that allows people to experience the cryptocurrency investment fever for amusement and laughs. The strategy game was created by two cryptocurrency investors who were tired of hearing about people doing unbelievable things like selling their home or using their student loan money to go ‘all in’ on a portfolio of digital assets. Also read: Project to Build Satoshi Statue Gains Support in Kiev Win Big or Lose it All Playin ‘Bitcon’ Two guys named Brandon and Sam who call themselves the ‘two stupid investors,’ created a tabletop card game that replicates cryptocurrency investing called ‘Bitcon.’ Basically, players are dealt a hand of five cards each and players draw cards in sequence to find out if the market goes up or down, or maybe even collapse. Alongside cards that move the market, there are also other action cards like the ‘Reverse the Market’ card which changes the direction of the current market trend. There’s also the ‘Cash Out’ card which can enable a player to cash out and cause the next player to pick up the remaining cards. Moreover, each deck of Bitcon cards has three ‘Pop’ cards — a card that serves as market collapse warning and when the last card is used the bitcoin market crashes and the game ends. The two creators who designed the Bitcon card game say they kept hearing about individuals doing wild and unbelievable things to obtain bitcoin. Then soon scouring Reddit forums and social media their game concept became an amusing simulation showcasing the risks and rewards tied to cryptocurrency investments. “If you like fast-paced strategy games, laugh at people that sold their house to buy bitcoin, or simply want to show grandma how to lose all your cash online,” explains the creators of Bitcon. Buy Bitcon — You’ll soon be addicted to losing all your money. A Representation of What it Feels Like Riding Markets Up and Down The Bitcon creators say they wanted to create a game that allows the “thrills of being a big money investor with zero risks.” According to the Kickstarter campaign, a Bitcon strategy tournament can be roughly fifteen minutes of gameplay. “Bitcon is our perfect representation of what it feels like riding markets up and down, using strategy to protect yourself but also attack opponents, and be ready to cash out your position before your investment is fully lost,” Its 15 minutes of pure strategy, pace, and gambling. Betting addicts we’ve found you a solution. Bitcon is not the first Kickstarter card game campaign featuring a bitcoin-esque theme as news.Bitcoin.com reported on Bitcoin Empire back in January of 2017. The game featured many cryptocurrency luminaries within the industry and even a Pepe the frog playing card. However, the Bitcoin Empire funding on Kickstarter was unsuccessful as the team didn’t meet the £5,000 goal. What do you think about the Bitcon card game? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comments below. Images via the Bitcon Kickstarter campaign. Did you know Bitcoin.com has an awesome podcast network? Check out the ‘This Week in Bitcoin’ series and ‘Humans of Bitcoin’ by listening to our very own podcast. The post There’s a Bitcoin Themed Card Game On Kickstarter Called ‘Bitcon’ appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

An initiative to erect a monument of Satoshi Nakamoto in Ukraine’s capital is gaining momentum and support. The idea is to place the statue right where the red Karelian stone figure of Lenin used to stand, before it was taken down almost five years ago. The project is said to be part of a global campaign to build Satoshi monuments around the world. Also read: Slovenian City Unveils World’s First Public Bitcoin Monument Nakamoto on the Pedestal of Lenin A monument of Satoshi Nakamoto may soon greet residents and visitors of Kiev, capital city of Ukraine. The project to erect a statue of the unknown creator of bitcoin and the blockchain technology has been gaining support. The plan is to place the figure on the intersection of Kiev’s main “Khreshchatyk” Street and the “Taras Shevchenko” Boulevard. The targeted spot is not a random place. Several years ago it was occupied by the monument of Vladimir Lenin, the communist founder and leader of the Soviet Union. His statue was toppled down and destroyed by angry protesters in December, 2013. The act was one of the memorable events during the Euromaidan demonstrations which lead to dramatic political changes in Ukraine. The empty space, opposite the “Bessarabsky” Market, has since turned into a site for political expression and artwork. At the height of the civil unrest in February 2014, opposition activists put a golden toilet on the pedestal as a symbol of the rampant corruption in their troubled and divided country. One of the numerous accusations against the then president Viktor Yanukovych was that he had gold toilets installed in a country estate near Kiev. The people behind the project plan to initially design a virtual Satoshi monument. The digital statue will be visible through a mobile app, when the smartphone is turned towards the pedestal, as reported by the outlet Delo. The Ukrainian VR/AR and robotics company Raccoon World has promised to materialize the virtual reality concept. The organizers also intend to file a petition with the Kyiv City State Administration and apply for permission to build a real, physical monument. They plan to raise the necessary means through a crowdfunding campaign. In the meantime, the virtual statue project has been supported by the Ukrainian entrepreneur Alexander Soroka, founder of the investment platform Startup Network, who has already donated 1 bitcoin (BTC). A Global Initiative, a Blockchain Republic According to local media reports, the installation of the statue in Kiev is part of a global initiative to erect Satoshi monuments around the world and create a so called “Blockchain Republic.” In case the city authorities reject the petition, the authors of the project say they’ll be looking for another location to place the symbolic figure. Not long ago, a similar initiative was realized in Slovenia, as news.Bitcoin.com reported. In March, the city of Kranj inaugurated a monument dedicated to bitcoin and blockchain – the first in the world, according to local authorities. The installation is in the form of a large bitcoin logo placed in the middle of a roundabout. The crypto theme of the monument has been chosen by the citizens of Kranj. Would you support a project to build a bitcoin monument or a Satoshi statue in your city? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Delo.ua. Bitcoin News is growing fast. To reach our global audience, send us a news tip or submit a press release. Let’s work together to help inform the citizens of Earth (and beyond) about this new, important and amazing information network that is Bitcoin. The post Project to Build Satoshi Statue Gains Support in Kiev appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

This week, a number of companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange revealed their plans to enter the crypto exchange business. They include one of the most popular budget-managing app operators, an entertainment conglomerate, one of the largest music labels, and a medical corporation. Also read: Yahoo! Japan Confirms Entrance Into the Crypto Space Money Forward Budget-managing app operator Money Forward Inc (TYO: 3994) made two crypto-related announcements this week. Launched in 2012, the company “has grown rapidly to become one of the hottest financial technology startups, with its namesake application now boasting 5.5 million users,” the Japan Times described. The company announced on Wednesday the establishment of a wholly-owned subsidiary, Money Forward Financial Co. Ltd., adding: Money Forward Financial Co., Ltd. (‘MF Financial’) will start media related to blockchains and virtual currencies from the summer of 2018 and aim to establish a virtual currency exchange office within 2018. Money Forward “is known as a pioneer in developing a digital kakeibo (household bookkeeping) app, where users can keep track of financial accounts for banking, credit card, e-wallet and point services,” the news outlet added, noting that “The company’s free app for the Android platform has won the best finance app award on Google Play for three consecutive years since 2013.” Another announcement made on the same day is the plan to partner with 20 crypto exchanges in Japan and overseas to provide accounting solutions for crypto traders. Citing that it is already cooperating with Bitflyer, Coincheck, and Zaif crypto exchanges, the company says it is now in the process of collaborating with Btcbox, Bitbank, Quoine, and Fisco. Drecom Drecom Co. Ltd. (TYO: 3793) engages in the development and marketing of entertainment content for mobile and PC. The company announced on Wednesday partial amendments to its Articles of Incorporation, adding a number of businesses it plans to start including crypto businesses. The amendments will be presented to shareholders at the next annual meeting. The amendments state that the company plans to enter the “virtual currency exchange” business, particularly the “Planning, operation and management of exchanges relating to virtual currencies.” Furthermore, the company plans to offer cryptocurrency settlement services. Yamane Medical Corporation Yamane Medical Corporation (TYO: 2144) operates in the nursing and personal care sector. The company “operates a home care center for elderly people under the Nagoya Residence name in Japan. The company’s care center offers off-site, accommodation, housing services, etc., as well as safety confirmation and lifestyle consultation, on-site day, emergency response, and medical services,” Bloomberg describes. Local media reported on Friday that the company is planning to submit partial amendments to its Articles of Incorporation to add a number of crypto-related businesses. According to Minkabu Press, “system provision and consultation related to virtual currency” will be added as well as a “virtual currency exchange business.” Adways Adways Inc (TYO: 2489) is a Tokyo-based global mobile app marketing company whose main business includes an ad agency, an ad network and a third party tracking tool. On Thursday, the company announced the partial amendments to its Articles of Incorporation which will be presented at the next annual shareholder meeting. “The company shall make efforts to engage in the following businesses,” the amendments read. Under “virtual currency related business,” the company wrote, “virtual currency exchange business based on funds settlement law.” This law went into effect in Japan in April last year which legalized cryptocurrencies as a means of payment in the country and requires all crypto exchanges to register with the country’s Financial Services Agency (FSA). Avex Avex Inc (TYO: 7860) is an entertainment conglomerate and one of the largest music labels in Japan. The company was founded by Max Matsuura, Japanese talent manager, record producer, songwriter, and radio personality. Avex manages J-pop talents such as Ayumi Hamasaki and internet sensation Pikotaro. The company has also expanded into other business areas such as anime, video games, and live music events. On Thursday, Avex published amendments to its Articles of Incorporation to add “virtual currency exchange” as a new business venture. The amendments will be presented at the company’s next meeting of shareholders. Daiwa Securities Group One of Japan’s largest securities brokerage firms, Daiwa Securities Group (TYO: 8601), also hinted at the possibility of entering the cryptocurrency space in the future. President and CEO Seiji Nakada told Sankei newspaper this week that, regarding cryptocurrency, “there is enough possibility of becoming a highly useful platform if conditions such as legal maintenance are in place.” While noting that the price movements of cryptocurrencies “are unstable and subject to speculation,” he emphasized: There will be times when major companies have to enter to improve the environment. Japan currently has 16 fully licensed crypto exchanges. Another 8 exchanges’ applications are being reviewed by the FSA. Furthermore, the agency revealed recently that about 100 more companies are interested in entering the space. Do you think more public companies should launch crypto exchanges? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Money Forward, Daiwa, Drecom, Yaname, Adways, and Avex. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. The post Six Japanese Public Companies Plan to Launch Crypto Exchanges appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

The Japanese tax authority has for the first time revealed the number of high-income taxpayers who declared cryptocurrency profits in the year 2017. Out of the total number of taxpayers with miscellaneous income of 100 million yen or more, excluding public pension, 60% of them reported income from crypto transactions. Also read: Yahoo! Japan Confirms Entrance Into the Crypto Space Declaring Crypto Income The Japanese National Tax Agency announced on Friday the number of people with 100 million yen (~US$914,000) or more miscellaneous income that includes income from cryptocurrency transactions, according to local media. Nikkei elaborated: It is the first time that the agency announced the result of the counting of virtual currency related declarations. The tax agency revealed that 21.98 million people filed income tax for the year 2017. Last year, “The number of taxpayers with miscellaneous incomes of 100 million yen and over from sources other than public pensions jumped from the previous year’s 238 to 549,” according to Jiji Press. Of these 549 people, more than 60% or 331 of them “gained income from cryptocurrency transactions,” the news outlet conveyed. The “total income [reported for all taxpayers] was 41.4988 trillion yen [~$379 billion] (up 3.4% from the previous year),” the Sankei Shimbun detailed, noting that the “declared tax payments amounted to 3.0207 trillion yen [~$28 billion] (a 4.6% increase), which was the highest in 10 years.” According to Nikkei, tax reporting of crypto transactions is challenging because each crypto exchange reports transaction data differently. According to industry stakeholders, some exchanges do not separate purchase and sale transactions and “there may be upper limits on the number of transaction records that can be acquired,” the publication added. 55% Tax Possible The National Tax Agency released guidance on how cryptocurrency profits are taxed in December last year. “In Japan, profits from cryptocurrency trading are categorized as miscellaneous income,” Jiji Press explained. The Japan Times described: If you earn ¥200,000 [~$1,828] or more from cryptocurrency trading, you must pay tax. There are seven tax brackets based on taxable income. Those earning 1.95 million yen (~$17,823) or less are taxed at 5 percent, the news outlet described, adding that the highest tax rate is 45 percent for taxpayers who earn more than 40 million yen (~$365,600). However, the publication pointed out that “your income is also subject to a residential tax of 10 percent. Together, the maximum tax rate is 55 percent.” What do you think of how Japan taxes crypto transactions? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock and the National Tax Agency. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. The post 331 High-Income Traders Declared Crypto Profits in Japan appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

There’s a new Point-of-Sale (PoS) service the Bitcoin Cash community has been talking about called, Bchpls.io, an app that enables any brick n’ mortar merchant to accept BCH with just two devices by providing a customer screen, and a cashier view. Bchpls is currently in open beta which means the public can test the software at their own discretion, so news.Bitcoin.com decided to test the program’s feature services. Also read: Chinese Exchange Launching Southeast Asian Crypto Trading Hub Giving the New PoS System Bchpls.io a Test Run This week we decided to test out a new PoS system specifically designed for merchants who want to accept Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at any physical location. The application called Bchpls.io is free, and there are no servers needed as all it takes is an internet connection and two devices (cashier & customer). Merchants can accept the funds into any wallet of their choice and set up the name of their business on the invoice. Funds are sent to a one-time-only address as a new address is used for each sale so incoming revenue is kept private. Setting Up a Store Name and Fiat Currency Pair for Pricing When entering the website users are greeted with a purple-orange themed page that asks the user to sign up. After hitting the register tab the merchant enters a valid email address and sets a strong password to set up their account. The next screen asks the merchant to add the store name and the fiat currency they wish to use to calculate BCH invoices. Following this step the user has to tether a Bitcoin Cash wallet to the store account and Bchpls uses the Xpub (extended public keys) to generate a receiving address on the cashier side. Tethering a Wallet to Bchpls.io With Extended Public Keys Using the Bitcoin.com Wallet simply create a new wallet with the store’s name and go to the section called “wallet information.” The next screen will reveal the BCH wallet’s Xpub keys, after scrolling down to the bottom. Tap the Xpub section and the Bitcoin.com Wallet will automatically copy and paste the extended public keys. Paste this text into the Bchpls page where it says ‘derivation path,” and hit next. After that, the merchant is all set, and a page is created which shows information for an access key, cashier screen, and the customer screen. Both screens provide a URL with a QR code created on the invoice page. Unfortunately, there is no address section yet available to copy and paste, as the invoice only supplies a QR code that needs to be scanned. After the merchant set-up is complete the account holder simply registers a sale on the platform which calculates a new invoice every time. Merchants can also cancel the invoice as well before it is paid just in case there happened to be an error during the process. The Softwares’ Roadmap and Monetization Plans The Bchpls developer explains in the future they plan to monetize by adding custom features or the “ability to operate more than one PoS session at the same time.” Down the line, Bchpls plans to add products management, custom designs, receipts, multiple PoS, and a merchant directory. Currently, the beta program is not open source nor does it offer a client-side (trustless) option but the developer says he will provide these things soon. “This is not available on Github at the moment — It is currently a hosted service — The site does not store any private keys or BCH on your behalf,” explains the Bchpls developer. “You provide your Xpub (public key), then any orders made will be made directly to addresses generated from your Xpub.” Note that this is not an e-commerce payment gateway solution, it is a POS system for a brick-and-mortar setup. It is also not a solution for people who want automatic settlement into Fiat. It only settles in BCH directly into your wallet — The client-side-only implementation will be open sourced once it is ready. Bchpls is yet another application that helps promote Bitcoin Cash infrastructure and adoption and most BCH proponents seem to like the platform. Some individuals will likely wait for a more reliable release and others will also wait for a client-side open source version. All in all, Bchpls was extremely easy to set up and any brick-and-mortar business could start using it at their shop. What do you think about Bchpls.io? Let us know your thoughts about this PoS system in the comment section below. Images via Shutterstock, BCHPLS.io, and Jamie Redman. Did you know Bitcoin.com has an awesome podcast network? Check out the ‘This Week in Bitcoin’ series and ‘Humans of Bitcoin’ by listening to our very own podcast. The post Bchpls.io Enables Free Bitcoin Cash Point-of-Sale Platform appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

The Satoshi Revolution: A Revolution of Rising Expectations Section 3: Decentralization Chapter 8, Part 3 The Centralization of Crypto and the Banality of Evil First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals… If we scrutinize the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about the actions of the collective whole. For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members’ actions. –Ludwig von Mises In 1963, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote a book Eichmann in Jerusalem, about “the banality of evil,” which redefined that concept forever. Evil is not usually committed by sadistic monsters, she argued, but by ordinary people who relinquish personal responsibility for their actions and obey the orders or rules of a corrupt system. (Here, evil is defined as deliberately and callously inflicting great harm on innocent people.) Arendt reached this conclusion while reporting for The New Yorker on the trial of high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which occurred in Israel. As a German Jew who fled the rise of Hitler, she should have been appalled to be in the same room with Eichmann. Instead, Arendt was fascinated by him. There was no guilt, no rage, no sense of responsibility, nothing exceptional. As her book explained, Eichmann kept repeating that, “He did his duty…; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law.” He was also assisted by a vast network of average people—clerks, railroad workers, low-ranking soldiers—who sent innocent others off to prison or worse fates, without a second thought. It was the law. Cryptocurrency confronts the banality of an economic system for which the word “evil” is not too strong a word. Opening with Arendt may seem like hyperbole, but it captures something important. The central banking system and the other economic controls imposed by government seem benign because they are so familiar; people grew up with them. And bank clerks can be very pleasant as they demand Know Your Customer data; if the customer objects, they answer “I am doing my job, and it is the law.” Nothing benign occurs in the system. Hard-working people are robbed of their wealth through measures like inflation and the monopoly of fiat currency; food is taken from the mouths of children; innovators who could produce a better world are shackled; in some nations, people die for want of nourishment or medical care. Venezuela is an extreme example of economic evil, as well as an example of the remedy. When the economy collapsed in 2014, many people’s lives were ruined while many others survived by using the only alternative they had to worthless fiat: cryptocurrency. President Nicolas Maduro was well aware of the dynamic. That’s why he issued the first-official state crypto—the Petro—which was announced last December (2017). The Petro is doomed, of course. When centralized in Maduro’s hands, it will become just another form of fiat. But the Petro indicates one of the main ways the economic system will try to defuse the threat of crypto—namely, centralize crypto by either issuing coins or regulating a few institutions approved to handle it, such as exchanges. Two main factors in how long the Petro will last are the centralization of power, and how many average people will accept the official status quo because it is (or will become) the law. These are the people who will work in the financial system, or turn in a neighbor for mining, or vote to ask for regulation. They are the banality of economic evil, without which the system could not exist. Methodological Individualism The harm done to freedom by those who act against decentralized-market crypto is more than just a denial of financial independence to others. Free-market crypto fortifies some of the most important concepts of liberty. One of them is “methodological individualism,” which is the exact opposite of what Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Instead of individuals relinquishing their responsibility for actions to an institution, like central banking or the military, individuals are entirely accountable for their own behavior. The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises rested much of his philosophy on methodological individualism. He declared that, ultimately, only individuals exist; only individuals act. Even within the dynamics of a collective, such as the state or society, it is individuals who comprise the structure and carry out all actions. Mises famously stated, “The Hangman, not the state, executes a criminal.” Individuals who look at the hangman [and] see the state in action do so only because they have created an abstraction known as ‘the state’ in order to provide a context. The hangman may be pressured to perform his job, but the performance is ultimately his choice. Equally, people never truly see or hear a group conversation. All they see or hear are individuals speaking, and then they label the sum of the exchange as ‘a group conversation’.” Mises argued that collectives-such as family or society–were valuable abstractions that people used to describe their interactions with others within a specific context. He did not deny the worth of many collectives. Quite the contrary. He explained, “Methodological individualism, far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation. And it chooses the only method fitted to solve this problem satisfactorily.” Individualism was the key to understanding collectives. What does this have to do with cryptocurrency? The most difficult area in which to implement methodological individualism is finance, which is one of the most powerful collectives in existence. Central banks, tax agencies, and reporting forms are ubiquitous types of evil. Governments do not produce any wealth. And, yet, they need vast amounts of it to finance bureaucracy, the military, and the other centralized trappings of power. This means governments need to steal vast amounts of wealth. But to do so directly would cause resistance. So they issue fiat and bonds, and force all finance to go through institutions they control. For a long time, for most people, there was no viable path around the centralization. And, Then: Cryptocurrency Free-market crypto is methodological individualism writ large in an essential area of life. Methodological individualism is an incredibly powerful challenge to the centralized control of economics. It was designed to be so. The concept arose in response to the theory of social holism that became popular in the early twentieth century. Social holism claims that systems must be viewed as wholes rather than as collections of their parts. It maintains that a collective has a dynamic that differs from the sum of its parts. In short, the collective is greater than the individuals who comprise it. Marxists often accuse those who espouse methodological individualism of being atomistic, or unable to bow to the greater social good. Some go so far as to assert that the individual, and not society, is the true abstraction. That is, individuals do not exist without society. As Mises observed, “The notion of an individual, say the critics, is an empty abstraction. Real man is necessarily always a member of a social whole.” Karl Marx argued this point by using a Robinson Crusoe example. An individual who had been born and immediately abandoned on a desert island, he contended, would not be a human being at all. His point was that human beings are social organisms-social constructs, if you will-who cannot be lifted from their defining context and still remain human. Reversing Misesian logic, Marx claimed that society created its individual members. To create the “right” type of people, all social institutions had to be thoroughly regulated for the social good, however that was defined. The brutal conformity of communism is an example of centralization. So is the expression, “I was only following orders.” Classical liberals argued that a person raised in utter isolation would still be a human being with human characteristics. For example, he would have a scale of preferences, and he would act to achieve the highest one first. Without social interaction, of course, huge parts of the person’s humanity would never develop. But this would not make the individual less human. Collectives do not define humanity. Human beings define collectives. Conclusion Coerced centralization is so inculcated into the culture that it is considered to be normal and healthy. Public schools, central banks, public works, tariffs, …many people cannot envision society through any other lens. But coerced centralization demands that people surrender their moral compass to a collective authority. It is the source of Arendt’s banality of evil. Methodological individualism is the cure, especially through the dynamics of a free crypto, which is implemented through decentralization. But how does a decentralized society create the free-market institutions valued by Mises? The answer is another key concept of liberty: spontaneous order. [To be continued next week.] Reprints of this article should credit bitcoin.com and include a link back to the original links to all previous chapters Wendy McElroy has agreed to ”live-publish” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of posts planned to conclude after about 18 months. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”. Read it here first. The post Wendy McElroy: The Centralization of Crypto and the Banality of Evil appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Cryptocurrency markets have had a rough week over the last seven days as many digital assets lost quite a bit of value most had gained two weeks prior. Currently, markets are seemingly consolidating and have remained somewhat stable over the last 24-hours. At the moment Bitcoin Core (BTC) values have been hovering around $7,470-7,560 during the last few hours. Meanwhile, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) prices are steadily holding just above the $1K region at $1,038 per BCH at the time of publication. Also Read: Bank in Argentina Launches BTC Settlement Services A Crazy Volatile Week in Crypto-Land Filled With Lots of FUD It’s been another crazy week in the world of cryptocurrency markets as most of the recovered gains most digital assets gathered from three weeks ago have been erased. Trade volume has been considerably low for nearly every market as the $13Bn worth of trades is less than half the volume we saw two weeks ago. Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts witnessed the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) initiated a probe earlier this week that aims to look for manipulation in Bitcoin market values. Interestingly enough those watching order books watched thousands of cryptos being sold at market rates just before the mainstream media announced the DoJ probe, which to some traders that phenomenon indicated actual manipulation from the very organization’s initiating the probe. Cryptos have been in a bear market since the year started. Bitcoin Cash Market Action Bitcoin Cash markets have been seeing some losses over the past few days since our last markets update. Today’s trading sessions show BCH prices hovering around $1,038 as the past 24-hours have seen a drop of about 1 percent. Over the last seven days, BCH markets are down 13 percent with today’s trade volume hovering around $538Mn. Top exchanges trading the most BCH on May 26 are Okex, Hitbtc, Lbank, EXX, and Huobi. The top currency swapped with BCH today is BTC as the asset captures 44.8 percent of trades today. This is followed by tether (USDT 29.9%), USD (15.5%), KRW (7%), and the ETH (1%). BCH/USD Technical Indicators Looking at the 4-hour and 1-day charts for Bitfinex (BCH/USD) shows some mixed signals and deep consolidation. Right now RSI levels are around 39, showing oversold conditions, and the MACd shows convergence around -5 revealing momentum may pick up today. However, the two Simple Moving Averages (SMA) trend lines are still spread with the 100 SMA below the long-term 200 SMA. This indicates a continued bearish outlook as the path to resistance looks to the downside. May 26, 2018, BCH/USD Bitfinex. Bulls have eaten through lots of resistance over the past 24 hours and need to push past $1,070 for smoother seas. The next pitstop will be around $1,125 as BCH bulls will need to break this zone. If the bears continue relentlessly beating crypto-markets there are some solid foundations on the backside of BCH order books. Going downwards we will see pit stops at 950 and 900 per BCH if prices happened to drop that low going forward. Beyond that books become much thinner. The Top Cryptocurrency Market Performances This Weekend Overall most cryptocurrency markets are seeing some slight recovery today and consolidated behavior. Bitcoin Core (BTC) markets are up a hair at 0.61 percent for the intra-day but over the past seven days, markets are down 8.8 percent. BTC’s current weighted price average is $7,560 as BTC bulls are trying to break above current resistance. The second highest market cap held by Ethereum (ETH) is up today 0.42 percent and the price hovers around $605 per ETH. Ripple (XRP) markets are up 1 percent as one XRP is priced today at $0.62 cents. Lastly, the fifth position is still held by EOS, and out of the top five, it has improved the most seeing a 2 percent gain today. EOS is averaging around $12.65 per token at the time of publication. Top ten cryptocurrency valuations on May 26, 2018. The Verdict: Uncertainty Remains The verdict this week is similar to our last markets update as traders still seem uncertain to where the ‘Good Ship Crypto’ will take them. 2017 was a wild ride but 2018 has been nothing but FUD, regulations, and bearish market sentiment. Even exciting developments and positive developments this spring have not been able to lift markets beyond the $10K region for weeks on end. Currently across social media, forums, and big trading groups on Telegram the sentiment remains uncertain over the course of the short term but long term sentiment continues to be bullish. Where do you see the price of BCH, BTC, and other cryptocurrencies headed from here? Let us know in the comments below. Disclaimer: Price articles and markets updates are intended for informational purposes only and should not to be considered as trading advice. Neither Bitcoin.com nor the author is responsible for any losses or gains, as the ultimate decision to conduct a trade is made by the reader. Always remember that only those in possession of the private keys are in control of the “money.” Images via Shutterstock, Trading View, and Satoshi Pulse. Want to create your own secure cold storage paper wallet? Check our tools section. The post Markets Update: Bear Market Adds Cryptocurrency Trading Uncertainty appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

European cryptocurrency holders have reason to be cheerful. Slowly but surely it’s becoming easier to spend BTC, BCH, and a range of other cryptos throughout the continent, with payment services like Wirex and Paytomat leading the charge. It’s now possible to spend bitcoin in hundreds of restaurants and stores throughout Eastern Europe, as well as anywhere that accepts Visa in the whole of mainland Europe and the UK. Also read: SA Central Bank Comes Up With Another Nickname for Cryptos – “Cyber Tokens” Wirex Rolls Out Its New Crypto Debit Cards When crypto debit cards were cancelled in Europe last year, with a Visa subsidiary to blame, tens of thousands of cryptocurrency holders were left clutching worthless pieces of plastic. But as crypto companies have forged new alliances with payment processors, crypto debit cards have started to return, and hopefully this time they’re here to stay. In the past two weeks, Wirex has begun dispatching physical cards to UK and mainland European customers who were on its waiting list. News.Bitcoin.com had a chance to put one of the cards to the test, topping it up with BTC and then spending it in-store and online, and was impressed with the results. Processing a cryptocurrency payment with Paytomat A full review of the Wirex crypto debit card follows below, after a quick look at what Paytomat have been up to. The cryptocurrency payment system supports 11 cryptos including bitcoin cash and zencash, and has support from over 330 restaurants and stores at present, mostly in Eastern Europe. It’s since expanded into Western Europe, however, with a launch that took place in an Amsterdam soup kitchen earlier this month. Paytomat CEO Yurii Olentir said: “Amsterdam is one of the most crypto-friendly places, so we chose it for our kick-off in Western Europe. With millions of tourists visiting every month, cryptocurrencies can be a very convenient payment method. For example, a transaction in Bitcoin Cash takes just a couple of seconds and the fee is miniscule.” In total, Paytomat supports BCH, ZEN, XEM, DASH, WAVES, LTC, ETH, NANO, DCR, XZC and BTC, and as a video demonstration shows, paying for a meal with bitcoin cash is quick and easy: A Quick Look at the Wirex Crypto Card in Action I applied for a Wirex card weeks ago, and succeeded after several failed attempts at address verification. At one point I feared I was never going to convince their KYC I lived where I claimed to live, but a stamped bank confirmation letter finally did the trick. The team’s customer support was helpful throughout, to their credit. Last week, Wirex announced that its cards were finally ready to ship. Mine arrived in a beautifully packaged sleeve that folds out to reveal the slogan “The most versatile payments card in the world” accompanied by a heart emoji face. If I thought the presentation was good, the activation turned out to be even slicker. With the Wirex app already installed on my phone, all I had to do was hold the card in proximity to the device and the NFC chip automatically extracted the last four digits of the card and the CVV number. I clicked the verification email link and that was it: my card was good to go. Wirex accepts BTC and LTC, but no BCH or ETH unfortunately. Hopefully they’ll add more cryptocurrency support in due course. For now, I fired over some BTC, and not long afterward a notification informed me that my coins had arrived. A Few Hiccups, But Otherwise Impressive For users who don’t already have cryptocurrency to hand, Wirex enables you to top up your card using your existing bank account; transfers reportedly clear within a few hours. With my BTC loaded, I tried to transfer the balance to GBP so I could spend it, but accidentally swapped into LTC instead; the process is a little confusing. At the second time of asking, I worked out how to complete the swap, and within seconds my litecoin had been exchanged for British pounds. My daughter had been pestering me to buy more reading credits for her iOS app, and so my first £10 of crypto went on purchasing virtual gems. I planned to test the card at a restaurant next, but when it came to pay the bill realized that I didn’t know the PIN for the Wirex card, and was forced to use an alternate method to settle up. Back home, I searched through every submenu of the Wirex mobile app and desktop platform to find where the PIN number was located. I got there, eventually, though it wasn’t intuitive at all. This minor grumble aside, the card works perfectly, and there’s even 0.5% in cashback to be earned on all purchases – paid in BTC. Every time you use your Wirex card, you’re credited cashback in satoshis Naturally, Wirex make their cut in terms of the exchange rate you’re offered every time you switch from fiat to crypto and vice-versa. This is still preferable to having to cash out crypto through Localbitcoins.com or similar every time you need to spend money in the “real world.” On first impressions, the Wirex card looks very good. My only concern is that now my kids and girlfriend have a direct line to my bitcoin, I fear for my crypto. Do you use a crypto debit card and if so what’s your experience of it? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Wirex, and Paytomat. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. The post Spending Bitcoin in Europe Is Getting Easier Thanks to Wirex and Paytomat appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Instant crypto-denominated salaries and blockchain-based social security payments feature in Saturday’s Bitcoin in Brief. Reports about these promising developments in the labor market and the public sector come from Australia. Also, the Slovak tax authority intends to use blockchain technology for more efficient tax collection. Also read: Bitcoin in Brief Friday: Luxury Jets, Cheap Air Tickets Now Offered for Bitcoin Cash Crypto-Based Hiring Platform Supports Instant Pay Option A new employment service offers to cut out banks and pay workers in real-time using cryptocurrency. Another feature will rate employees using a blockchain-based reputation and review process, designed to ensure that higher quality work gets paid better. The “Pay As You Go” system has been launched recently in Australia. Sergei Sergienko, the entrepreneur behind the project, claims that instant salary payments are possible with cryptos, tokens, and thanks to the underlying technology – blockchain. His “global job platform” Laborx is developed to do exactly that – pay employees while they are working, so that everyone can start spending on the way home. “The way for people to be remunerated is based on pre-Industrial Revolution kind of wages – you spend the time in the factory, and you get paid,” he said, quoted by Business Insider Australia. “If you look around, everything else has changed. And it’s really, really weird that the way people get paid for their services, for their time, for their work, has not gone through any revolution of sorts,” Sergienko noted. The businessman, who owns a successful labor hire, staffing and training company called the Edway Group, believes that the revolution comes in the form of the “Labour-Hour Tokens” (LHT) and the hiring ecosystem of Laborx, which is now live in beta version. Using it, companies can hire anyone – from top experts from around the world, to local fruit pickers – and pay them instantly with cryptocurrency. “A fair hour’s pay for a fair hour’s work” has been promised. Laborx also features a tokenized reputation system. Its developers say that it combines dozens of candidate data points and stores the information on a blockchain. The platform is said to ensure job seekers get their best market rate, while also eliminating payment delays and disputes. “If your reviews are consistently good, you can charge more per hour for your services. And the person who hires you knows you’re worth it,” Sergei Sergienko explains. Other cryptocurrency projects to be trialing this model include time-based “knowledge transfer” service Whenhub, founded by Dilbert creator Scott Adams. Distributed Ledger to Be Used For Welfare Delivery While the private sector has been developing a crypto-hiring platform, Australian authorities have been planning to employ blockchain technology to improve the welfare payments delivery in the country. The intentions were made public recently by the Digital Transformation Agency, a government body tasked with the digitization of public services and government institutions. The project to put social security payments on blockchain will pilot the wider implementation of the technology. “Our plan is to look for use cases across the Commonwealth with an initial focus on the welfare payment delivery system. Then, working with our digital service standard, we’ll conduct user research with a view to having a prototype by the end of next financial year,” said DTA’s acting CEO Randall Brugeaud during the Cebit Australia conference in Sidney last week. Recently, The DTA received AU$700,000 from the 2018-19 budget to probe the implementation of distributed ledger technologies in the public sector. Brugeaud commented that the funds will give his agency an opportunity to explore innovative ways to securely and efficiently deliver government services using blockchain. Slovak Tax Authority Eyes Blockchain for Efficient Collection The Financial Administration of Slovakia aims to become a pioneer in blockchain technology implementation. The tax authority in Bratislava intends to use it to streamline its processes and procedures. The main objective is to make tax collection more efficient, the president of Finančná Správa, František Imrecze told Hospodárske Noviny. The technology, which underpins most cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, will be implemented in Slovakia’s taxation system to initially process about 2 percent of all tax payments, the publication details. The use of blockchain technologies is expected to increase the trust of taxpayers and protect their personal data. Authorities also hope to increase the transparency of tax collection, reduce red tape and minimize costs, Imrecze explained. Members of the local crypto community and the non-government sector are not sure about the prospects of the project. According to Martin Lindák, analyst with the liberal think-tank F. A. Hayek Foundation, the transparency and security of blockchain applications are there only when they are decentralized. A blockchain lacking this key feature would be just an overpriced database for the public administration, Lindák warned in conversation with the newspaper. Do you think crypto and blockchain technologies can be successfully implemented in public services and labor relations? Tell us in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock. Make sure you do not miss any important Bitcoin-related news! Follow our news feed any which way you prefer; via Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, RSS or email (scroll down to the bottom of this page to subscribe). We’ve got daily, weekly and quarterly summaries in newsletter form. Bitcoin never sleeps. Neither do we. The post Bitcoin in Brief Saturday: Crypto Hiring and Blockchain Welfare, From Down Under appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Cryptocurrencies don’t meet the requirements of money, according to the South African Reserve Bank which has decided to call them by a different name. It’s one that does not imply either currency or cryptography. “We prefer to use the word ‘cyber-token’,” said a high-ranking official of the central bank in Pretoria, adding another entry into a long list of substitutes favored by financial authorities over the original term. Also read: The Government Dilemma: How To Tax Something One Pretends Does Not Exist Cyber Tokens – But Why? It’s not unusual for officials around the world to refrain from uttering the word. For many of them, “cryptocurrency” probably sounds like a bad omen. Central bankers are the worst – “crypto” is usually a “no-no” in their financial vocabulary. But the spread of cryptocurrencies has forced policy makers and government experts to demonstrate some linguistic ingenuity. Many now speak more and more often about them with artificially invented synonyms. The list of generic terms is growing and we owe the latest entry to the South African Reserve Bank. “We don’t use the term ‘cryptocurrency’ because it doesn’t meet the requirements of money in the economic sense of the stable means of exchange, a unit of measure and a stable unit of value,” the central bank’s Deputy Governor, Francois Groepe, told reporters in Pretoria this week. “We prefer to use the word ‘cyber-token’,” he added, quoted by Bloomberg. The popularity of cryptocurrencies has been growing exponentially around the globe and South Africa is no exception. Regulators in the country, like many of their colleagues abroad, are finding it hard to keep up with the pace of crypto progress. SARB has recently set up a special unit tasked to review its position on “private cryptocurrencies.” The main goal is to prepare a policy framework that would lay the foundation for the future regulatory regime to govern the fintech sector. As part of the discussions on the upcoming crypto regulations, a self-regulatory approach has been proposed by legal experts working with the industry. Whether the SARB team will listen to these calls is yet to be seen. So far, authorities in the country have mostly discussed cryptocurrencies in the context of taxation. In April, the South African Revenue Service announced it expected all crypto gains to be reported by taxpayers. Obviously, the fact that “cyber tokens” like bitcoin are not regarded as currencies is not an obstacle to collecting taxes on their transactions. A Long List of Nicknames Government officials and central bankers invent nicknames for cryptocurrency probably because they fear that using the original term would amount to an unwanted recognition of the decentralized digital money. At the same time, they seem to turn a blind eye to the fact that taxation is a recognition of both their existence and their characteristics as means of exchange, unit of account and store of value. Nevertheless, the long list of synonyms continues to grow. Authorities in Ireland have recently clarified their position on crypto taxation. For the sake of objectivity, the Irish revenue service has referred to digital coins with their real name – cryptocurrencies. Despite that, decentralized cryptos have been denied currency status, with one notable exception – bitcoin is currency only for VAT purposes. Russia has been preparing its crypto regulations for quite some time. Of the three draft laws that hit the floor of the State Duma this week, only one mentions and defines cryptocurrency directly. In the other texts, and during the preceding discussions, cryptos and tokens have been called “digital money,” “digital financial assets,” “digital rights,” “other property,” “electronic property,” “money surrogates,” and what not. “Virtual currency”, however, remains by far the most popular generic term among politicians and financial officials around the world. It has been used in place of the colloquial and original “cryptocurrency” in countries, unions, and organizations, including the US, the EU, the IMF, Mexico, Malta, the Philippines, and many more. Why do you think government officials and central bankers avoid using the term “cryptocurrency”? Share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Bitun. Do you agree with us that Bitcoin is the best invention since sliced bread? Thought so. That’s why we are building this online universe revolving around anything and everything Bitcoin. We have a store. And a forum. And a casino, a pool and real-time price statistics. The post SA Central Bank Comes Up With Another Nickname for Cryptos – “Cyber Tokens” appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Investigations are all about the crypto ecosystem, but a recent report regarding a US Department of Justice price manipulation crackdown was widely said to be the cause of market caps falling, and by a lot. Fundstrat, the ecosystem’s favorite financial professional crypto bull, is on record as welcoming government regulation, what it calls “adult supervision.” Also read: Bitcoin Use Case: Limiting Government Growth Fundstrat Welcomes Adult Supervision of Crypto Legacy media, thanks to a Bloomberg article, ran wild with fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) this week, regarding a supposed US Department of Justice investigation of price manipulation. Weaker hands in response effectively sent bitcoin core (BTC) well below $8K, heading for 7, and the entire crypto market cap slid accordingly. Debate about regulation in the US and around the world has raged the entirety of cryptocurrency’s near decade-long life. Bitcoin licensing in New York, senate hearings, G20 central bankers urging global crypto laws, the requisite jockeying and lobbying for exclusive access to regulators, taken together, seems to be slouching toward something major coming down from financial minders. And well-publicized recent hacks haven’t helped confidence. There seems to be a new initial coin offering scam daily. Rumors the DOJ is teaming with US bitcoin futures regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and possibly patching-in the US Securities and Exchange Commission can spook animal spirits, of course. Anecdotal evidence abounds. Add to that six rather frightening words, when strung together by regulators, that make speculators’ ears perk, “neither confirm nor deny an investigation” becomes all the evidence anyone needs to dump positions. Even large exchange Bitfinex has been subpoenaed by the CFTC. The ecosystem’s favorite bull, Thomas Lee of Fundstrat, in a client letter, put a finer point on happenings: “These stories have pressured the crypto market, as regulatory action (and related headline risk) reduces risk appetite and also is a further deterrent for near-term inflows from new investors. However, these actions signal that adult supervision is coming to crypto and adding such oversight incrementally improves the structural integrity and legitimacy for crypto-currency investor. In other words, in order for institutional investors to be more actively engaged in crypto markets, such adult supervision is a necessary precondition.” Regulation is an Anathema to Bitcoin Prior to welcoming crypto regulation, Mr. Lee ate a giant, warm slice of humble pie following his Consensus conference bump prediction of many thousands in BTC price increase. Just the reverse, of course, happened, and Mr. Lee, to his credit, reappeared on as many shows to take his medicine. He acknowledged getting it badly wrong, but ultimately attributed the decline due to unforeseen regulatory rumors and, ironically, saturation at the conference of hype. In a slide presentation graphic, Fundstrat continued to use “welcome,” as in crackdowns being “welcome and also widely anticipated.” On price specific manipulation investigations, they urged “this probe is again, a very welcome development.” To crypto enthusiasts, they are decidedly torn. On the one hand, nearly everyone will agree bitcoin was developed to essentially leave government regulatory environments. Government regulations are not issued out of benevolence toward the hoi polloi. No, rather they’re instead an effort to pick winners and losers in terms of which sector of businesses lobbied the hardest, greasing wheels of states in their direction. Regulations enforce burdens often on startups, insulating more established and connected businesses from too much competition. Corruption, then, can and does become institutional. Present day banking is proof enough. Bitcoin, in Satoshi’s vision, releases adopters from financial cartels, at least in theory. To invite regulators goes against everything crypto stands for. On the other hand, regulation does seem to be inevitable. And if it is, shouldn’t the ecosystem get out in front? Seems rational enough, and that’s a generous reading of Mr. Lee and Fundstrat’s comments. Nevertheless, the company remains bullish on bitcoin core (BTC). They point to Coinbase in particular and its staggering growth to 20 million customers, and BTC related wallet downloads of more than 3.5 million. They do, however, hold to a degree of caution if headlines remain negative and mining rewards/price reach parity. Do you think regulation of crypto is inevitable? Let us know what you think in the comments below. Images via Pixabay, Fundstrat. Now live, Satoshi Pulse. A comprehensive, real-time listing of the cryptocurrency market. View prices, charts, transaction volumes, and more for the top 500 cryptocurrencies trading today. The post DOJ Crypto Investigation Tanks Prices, Fundstrat Welcomes Adult Supervision appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

According to regional publications in Russia, the alleged BTC-e mastermind and prisoner in Greece, Alexander Vinnik, has allegedly confessed to charges of fraud and money laundering on May 24, 2018. Reports reveal a signed document details that Vinnik admits to committing financial fraud between 2011-2017 through the BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange. Also read: This Week in Bitcoin: Ghost Scares Markets, Facebook Mulls Coin Russian Federation Receives an Admission of Guilt from the Alleged BTC-e Mastermind Alexander Vinnik Russian media sources such as Interfax and Vinnik’s lawyer, Ilias Spirliadis, have reported that Alexander Vinnik has signed a paper that admits to wrongdoing, in regard to money laundering and other cyber crimes. The publication Crime Russia explains that the Russian Federation’s Prosecutor General’s Office received the admission document and passed it on to higher law enforcement officials in Moscow. The document appears to be a “full confession” to financial fraud using the BTC-e exchange between 2011-2017. The fraudulent activities had caused Russian residents to lose upwards of 750 million rubles ($12.4Mn USD) the document details. Further regional media sources report that Vinnik also confessed to other crimes tethered to computer hacking. Sources say this document may give the Russian Federation the means to extradite Vinnik. The United States government had previously attempted to extradite Vinnik to the U.S. but the motion was challenged. Photo of the accused BTC-e administrator Alexander Vinnik. The Russian citizen has been dubbed the ‘Russian Cryptocurrency King’ by the media. Vinnik’s Lawyer Ilias Spirliadis: The Russian Federation Will Likely Follow Up With Another Extradition Attempt Last week officials from the Greek prison where Vinnik is locked up, uncovered a plot that aimed to kill Vinnik. The suspect now has “special security measures,” including not eating and drinking products given to him from unfamiliar individuals. It’s still uncertain at the moment what Greek court officials will do if Russia attempts to extradite Vinnik again after his admission. The document is now in the hands of officials from the police department in the Ostankino district of Moscow. Vinnik’s lawyer Ilias Spirliadis confirmed the admission document was legitimate and also emphasized that the Russian Federation will likely submit another request for extradition. What do you think about Alexander Vinnik Confessing to Money Laundering Crimes? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comments below. Images via Pixabay, Crime Russia, and AM 880 The Biz. Now live, Satoshi Pulse. A comprehensive, real-time listing of the cryptocurrency market. View prices, charts, transaction volumes, and more for the top 500 cryptocurrencies trading today. The post Alleged BTC-e Mastermind Confesses to Russian Money Laundering Charges appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

In the heady days of 2017, Revolut Ltd promised it would continue to add cryptocurrency choices for its customer base. The future promise was made after its rollout of onboarding bitcoin core (BTC), litecoin (LTC), and ether (ETH) to eager users. Just this week, the England-based company made good by further adding bitcoin cash (BCH) and ripple (XRP). Also read: Bitcoin Use Case: Limiting Government Growth Revolut Adds Bitcoin Cash and Ripple to its Crypto Offerings In a series of questions and answers format for their unconventional press release this week, the company asked itself “Why did you only add XRP and BCH?” The answer was “Simple – these were the two most popular cryptocurrencies our community wanted, so we rolled up our sleeves and made it happen.” They went on to stress how they’re looking to do even more crypto-related service in the future, asking customers “make some noise and let us know what you want us to add next. We’ll take care of the rest.” London’s Revolut kept its promise. Following eager anticipation of its initial embrace of three cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, LTC), and successful implementation, the skyrocketing financial technology company announced this week it is now implementing bitcoin cash (BCH) and ripple (XRP) to its basket of cryptos. The three year old digital bank has a popular prepaid debit card, peer-to-peer payments platform, and both currency and cryptocurrency exchanges for its two million customers. To stay competitive, Revolut operates a loss leader fee structure for many of its services (free). Its proprietary application allows fiat-to-crypto in over two dozen government currencies, serving at over 100 countries worldwide. The company’s backend transactions are managed by crypto exchange heavy Bitstamp. Open and Available to Everyone “With hundreds of thousands of customers now actively exchanging cryptocurrencies in the app,” Revolut explained in a cheeky announcement, “the popular view was that we needed to add more digital currencies in addition to bitcoin, litecoin and ether. After months of debate and hard work, we’re extremely proud to welcome XRP and BCH to the Revolut app, which means you can now instantly exchange any of our 25 supported fiat currencies directly into XRP and BCH.” And even though many establishments balk at direct crypto commerce and trade, Revolut customers will be able to use either their Mastercard or Visa regardless. Revolut does all the conversions instantly which could go a long way in enabling the currency aspect of cryptocurrency. Premium customers are provided a concierge-like service along with 1% crypto cashbacks. “We have always believed that the world of cryptocurrencies should be open and available to everyone, and not reserved for the tech savvy and digital currency enthusiasts,” the company detailed. “So, back in December, we launched a product that would allow millions of our customers to instantly buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies at the touch of a button. No exchanges. No private keys. No cold storage. Just instant exposure at your fingertips.” Do you think Revolut will dive more? Let us know what you think of this subject in the comments below. Images via Pixabay, Revolut, Bitstamp. Now live, Satoshi Pulse. A comprehensive, real-time listing of the cryptocurrency market. View prices, charts, transaction volumes, and more for the top 500 cryptocurrencies trading today. The post 2 Million Revolut Customers Get More Cryptocurrency Access appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Chinese exchange Zb.com has set up a branch in Thailand with a plan to turn it into the regional crypto trading hub in Southeast Asia. The move came as the Thai government finalizes the country’s regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings. Also read: Yahoo! Japan Confirms Entrance Into the Crypto Space Creating Regional Hub Dawei Li. (Photo credit/Matichon) Chinese cryptocurrency exchange and wallet provider Zb.com recently announced that it has set up a full-fledged branch in Thailand, called Zbthailand (Zbth), with the aim for it to become the regional crypto trading hub in Southeast Asia, according to local media. Zb.com already has a presence in China, the US, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, and South Korea, Matichon publication detailed, adding that Zb.com currently has over 3 million customers. According to Coinmarketcap, Zb.com lists 59 coins with a 24-hour trading volume of $160 million. Dawei Li, the exchange’s co-founder, told the publication: The company plans to expand its digital currency trading platform in Thailand…in addition to providing knowledge and understanding of blockchain technology and investment in digital assets to Thai investors, including recruiting strategic partners to attract more foreign investors to invest in Thailand. The new exchange offers the trading of 16 cryptocurrencies against the Thai baht, BTC, and ETH. The supported cryptocurrencies at the time of this writing are BTC, LTC, BCH, ETH, ETC, EOS, QTUM, NEO, SNT, AE, ICX, ZRX, EDO, FUN, MANA, and TZB. “All transactions fees are 0.1%,” according to the new exchange’s website. In November last year, Zb.com partnered with licensed Japanese exchange Quoine and Chinese bitcoin mining solution provider BW.com “to support and facilitate liquidity across isolated cryptocurrency & fiat markets,” the companies jointly announced. Thailand’s Crypto Regulatory Framework The decree to regulate cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) went into effect in Thailand on May 14, putting the Thai Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in charge of the regulation and “requires sellers and operators of such assets to register with the SEC within 90 days,” Reuters details. The last day for registration is August 14, according to Matichon publication. The Commission is expected to issue the regulations by the end of June after holding a public hearing. SEC secretary-general Rapee Sucharitakul was quoted by Reuters: Offerings of digital tokens will not be allowed until the regulations are announced. According to Rapee, the public hearing will take approximately 2-3 weeks “because investments in digital tokens are complicated and carry high risks.” What do you think of Zb.com setting up a hub in Thailand? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Matichon, and Zb.com. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. The post Chinese Exchange Launching Southeast Asian Crypto Trading Hub appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

First it happened to verge. $1.8m of cryptocurrency swiped in a matter of hours. Then to bitcoin gold, plundered in an $18m double spend attack. Then to verge again, this time to the tune of $1.7 million. Along the way, monacoin is also believed to have been hit. Someone is methodically working their way through Proof of Work coins, controlling their hashrate, and then launching 51% attacks. Other PoW teams are now on high alert for signs that their coin could be next. Also read: Caspian Partners With Bitmex to Offer All-In-One Portfolio Services Following a Spate of Attacks, PoW Teams Batten Down the Hatches 51% attacks, in which a malevolent miner controls the majority of the network hashrate and then uses it to force through fraudulent transactions, are commonly discussed but rarely encountered. That all changed on April 4 when verge was hit by a 51% attack. At the time, the incident was put down to the general fog of incompetence that surrounds verge; the exploit was quickly patched and everyone moved on. Then, just over a month later, verge was hit again along with bitcoin gold and possibly monacoin too. The spate of attacks has caused a crisis of confidence in Proof of Work coins and forced their development teams on the defensive. Although called a 51% attack, in reality it’s often possible to control the network with a much lower hashrate. Because verge uses five different hashing algorithms, for example, the attacker was able to reduce the mining difficulty for just one algorithm and focus all their firepower on that, armed with just one fifth of the hashpower they would otherwise have needed. The second time around, they modified their attack slightly and targeted verge with a dual blast using two different algorithms. Bitcoin gold, meanwhile, was targeted due to its equihash algorithm, the same one used by such coins as zcash and komodo. The Cost of Staging a 51% Attack Following the run of 51% attacks, teams have rushed out updates to reassure the community that their coin is safe, and to deter would-be attackers. The cost of attacking ethereum classic has been estimated at $70m, for example, and estimates have been made for doing the same with the top 10 PoW coins. BTC is priced at $2.2 billion to attack, whereas zcash comes in at $87m. In his blog post, Husam Abboud claims that “If a zCash miner with +8% of Nethash [switches] to mine Bitcoin Gold, he is +51% BTG nethash, that brings the cost of 51% attack on BTG to 580 ZEC/day ~$200k”. Because bitcoin gold has a much lower hashrate than coins such as zcash, it is a far easier target to pick off. Now that the feasibility of double spending a recognized PoW coin has been proven, aspiring attackers are calculating the costs of renting hashing power from a provider such as Nicehash and using it to take over a target of their choosing. This is one of the dangers with an altcoin using an existing algorithm: it’s easy for an attacker to switch from mining one to another at the flick of a switch, leaving low hashrate PoW coins vulnerable to hostile takeover without warning. There’s a Storm Brewing PoW teams are hitting back, and have enacted various measures to thwart future attacks. On request, Binance has upped the number of confirmations required to deposit equihash-based coins onto the exchange. The more confirmations that are required, in theory, the more likelihood there is of detecting and thwarting a 51% attack. Maidsafe, meanwhile, has proposed a new consensus mechanism called PARSEC, though some believe it may be vulnerable to other threats such as Sybil attacks, which are a recurring theme with staking algorithms. For the coins that are committed to remaining with Proof of Work, most of which descended from Bitcoin at some point in time, it’s a case of remaining on high alert for possible signs of foul play. One PoW altcoin team has set up a script to constantly monitor their hashrate. In the event of a spike of over 10%, they will be automatically notified. Should the newly added hashrate emanate from an unknown pool, or be in danger of tipping an existing pool over 50%, they have a large quantity BTC on standby with Nicehash ready to purchase their own firepower to counter the attack. It’s a high stakes game and PoW teams can’t leave anything to chance. No one wants to be the next bitcoin gold. Do you think the spate of 51% attacks is over for now, or is there more trouble ahead? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. The post Proof of Work Coins on High Alert Following Spate of 51% Attacks appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

The Monetary Authority of Singapore has warned eight digital token exchanges operating in the country over unauthorized securities trading. The regulator also stopped an initial coin offering, prompting its issuer to return all funds received from Singapore-based investors. Also read: Yahoo! Japan Confirms Entrance Into the Crypto Space Eight Token Exchanges Warned Singapore’s central bank and financial regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), announced on Thursday that it has “warned eight digital token exchanges in Singapore not to facilitate trading in digital tokens that are securities or futures contracts without MAS’ authorisation.” Without naming the eight platforms, the announcement states that under the Securities and Futures Act (SFA): If the digital tokens constitute securities or futures contracts, the exchanges must immediately cease the trading of such digital tokens until they have been authorised as an approved exchange or recognised market operator by MAS However, MAS did not indicate that these platforms are engaged in suspicious activities or that there are complaints about them, unlike a few other regulators that recently issued warnings about exchange platforms. This week, the Ontario Securities Commission issued a warning on five unlicensed crypto firms it had received complaints about. In March, French regulator Autorité des Marchés Financiers warned of 15 unauthorized crypto investment platforms and Belgium’s Financial Services and Markets Authority started publishing a list of crypto platforms showing signs of fraud. ICO Issuer Warned Amid Growing Market In addition, MAS “also warned an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) issuer to stop the offering of its digital tokens in Singapore.” According to the announcement, MAS has assessed that this issuer’s “tokens represented equity ownership in a company and therefore would be considered as securities under the SFA.” Citing that the tokens are offered “without a MAS-registered prospectus, which is a SFA requirement,” the regulator revealed: The [ICO] issuer has ceased the offer and has taken remedial actions to comply with MAS’ regulations. It has also returned all funds received from Singapore-based investors. However, the central bank “declined to name the ICO and it is not clear how much was taken from investors or when the offering was issued,” the Strait Times reported on Thursday. Recently, news.Bitcoin.com reported that Singapore has emerged as a mecca for token sales, especially for companies from China and South Korea where ICOs are banned. Earlier this month, digital asset banknote manufacturer Tangem launched smart bitcoin banknotes at the Megafash Suntec City store in Singapore. Lee Boon Ngiap, MAS’ Assistant Managing Director (Capital Markets), confirmed that “the number of digital token exchanges and digital token offerings in Singapore has been increasing.” He clarified: We do not see a need to restrict them if they are bona fide businesses. But if any digital token exchange, issuer or intermediary breaches our securities laws, MAS will take firm action. What do you think of MAS’ warnings? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Financial Tribune, and MAS. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. The post Singapore Warns Eight Unauthorized Token Exchanges appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

On May 23 the cryptocurrency portfolio and risk management platform Caspian Tech announced a partnership with the Seychelles based trading platform the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange (Bitmex). The move aims to bring Caspian closer to being an all-in-one platform with access to multiple exchanges. Also read: Bitcoin in Brief Friday: Luxury Jets, Cheap Air Tickets Now Offered for Bitcoin Cash Full Stack Portfolio Management Firm Caspian Partners With Bitmex The firm Caspian is making partnerships across the cryptocurrency ecosystem in order to become an all-in-one institutional, investor-focused portfolio management system. This week the firm partnered with Bitmex so now Caspian customers will have a unified trading module with more liquidity. Additionally, the firm provides Order and Execution Management System (OEMS), Risk Management System (RMS), and a Portfolio Management System (PMS). Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of Bitmex, says the collaboration with Caspian makes sense because “Bitmex employs the latest in multi-factor security, inside and out.” Bitmex offers quite a bit of liquidity as in the last 30 days the exchange has managed to swap $3Bn in trade volume. The firm offers leveraged trading and futures for multiple cryptocurrencies and claims to have “300 percent more Bitcoin/USD liquidity than any other platform.” Robert Dykes, CEO of Caspian, believes the company can leverage the firm’s multi-factor security – which is an issue of increasing interest to the company’s target market. “Our aim at Caspian is to drive exponential growth in crypto-trading participation amongst institutional and sophisticated investors,” Dykes explained during the announcement. Bitmex states they have 300 percent more Bitcoin/USD liquidity than any other cryptocurrency trading platform. Caspian Has Also Partnered With the OTC Fund Octagon and the Gemini Exchange Essentially Caspian is a joint venture tethered to the firm Tora which provides an OEMS global trading platform alongside a blockchain firm called Kenetic. The company says its main mission is to offer sophisticated traders bank-grade security and trading technology. This month Caspian has been making partnerships with market makers like Bitmex as the firm recently partnered with Octagon, Asia’s largest OTC crypto-fund, and the Gemini exchange on May 4. The news follows many cryptocurrency exchanges looking to offer institutional grade financial services within their platforms while Caspian hopes to provide a Swiss army knife of exchanges. What do you think about the Caspian services partnering with exchanges to offer a sophisticated trading service for institutional investors? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comments below. Images via Shutterstock, Caspian, and Bitmex. At news.Bitcoin.com all comments containing links are automatically held up for moderation in the Disqus system. That means an editor has to take a look at the comment to approve it. This is due to the many, repetitive, spam and scam links people post under our articles. We do not censor any comment content based on politics or personal opinions. So, please be patient. Your comment will be published. The post Caspian Partners With Bitmex to Offer All-In-One Portfolio Services appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Bitcoin in Brief today features a couple of announcements adding to the growing number of bitcoin cash adoptions. A luxury cryptocurrency concierge now accepts BCH for the items it offers to the crypto rich – a logical step, according to its founder. An online travel agency is introducing three new coins to its payment options, including bitcoin cash, after “a huge uptick in the number of customers requesting alternative currencies”. Also, a cold wallet for institutions hits the market soon. Also read: Bitcoin in Brief Thursday: Main Street Adopts Bitcoin Ahead of Wall Street Luxury Purveyor White Now Accepts Bitcoin Cash A US-based luxury crypto concierge service is now accepting bitcoin cash (BCH). The White Company, founded by former executive at Formula 1 and LVMH, Elizabeth White, offers high-end products and luxury brands, including fine watches and sports cars. It has become the latest business to take advantage of the benefits of BCH payments, which include substantially lower transaction fees. This business is trying to fill the market niche for services to those rich customers who want to acquire luxurious items, like private jets, Lamborghinis, and famous artworks, in a more discreet way. That’s why the White Company accepts only cryptocurrency. It all started with payments in bitcoin core (BTC), litecoin (LTC) and ethereum (ETH). However, the exponential growth of the business, of crypto wealth, in general, and the growing popularity of bitcoin cash, in particular, have led to the introduction of BCH payments. It comes as a recognition of the lower transaction fees and faster processing times of the bitcoin cash network, in comparison to legacy cryptocurrencies. The New York headquartered company has also decided to discontinue the LTC option. Noting that “trust is vital in this space,” Elizabeth White was quoted as saying: “I have watched with interest both the growth and the early-adopters of bitcoin cash and I can see that the White Company and BCH are natural partners.” And, according to a corporate press release, the partnership represents a logical next step for the development of the business. Cheapair Introduces Payments in Three Cryptos, including BCH Online travel agency Cheapair.com has also announced it is now accepting bitcoin cash for booking flights and hotels. “It’s official!” the California-based company said in a post on Twitter, confirming it has added BCH to the available payment options, along with two other cryptocurrencies – litecoin (LTC) and dash (DASH). “Help us spread the word #cryptocurrency fans!” tweeted the agency, which also accepts bitcoin core (BTC). According to Cheapair, the list of the supported cryptocurrencies has been expanded in response to customer demand. The company noted the development of a number of new cryptocurrencies aimed at avoiding some of the challenges that have emerged with BTC, whose network has previously been stressed by higher transaction volumes. In different ways, bitcoin cash, litecoin and dash all promise improved transaction potential over their predecessor, being either faster or with lower fees attached, Cheapair explained. “Our cryptocurrency customers tend to be very vocal about what they want, something we appreciate very much. Over the last six months, we’ve seen a huge uptick in the number of customers requesting alternative currencies, so we’ve worked hard to integrate the three that were most requested,” Cheapair CEO Jeff Klee commented. Klee added that the company has already streamlined the process of converting the accepted cryptocurrency to fiat money, which is then paid to airline and hotel suppliers. “That made adding litecoin, bitcoin cash, and dash a relatively minor endeavor for our development team, but a huge benefit for our crypto customers,” he said. Bitun Releases Cold Wallet for Institutions An enterprise-level cryptocurrency cold wallet hardware has been displayed at the 2018 Global Summit in Japan this week. Developers at Bitun, a private bank of blockchain assets, claim that their product is different from any traditional cold wallet. It is completely isolated from the internet and employs a military anti-corrosion technique. The hardware CPU adopts the Secure Boot and Efuse mechanisms, combined with data encryption chips, they said. The security level is recognized by licensed exchanges, according to a PRnewswire report, quoting Bitun representatives. The cold wallet also incorporates technologies such as NFC, face and iris recognition, and it’s verified simultaneously with the smart authorized device for signature. The user can also complete the multi-level approval in the signature process on the mobile hotspot APP. The official release of Bitun’s cryptocurrency cold wallet is scheduled for July this year. What are your thoughts on the stories in today’s edition of Bitcoin in Brief? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Bitun. Make sure you do not miss any important Bitcoin-related news! Follow our news feed any which way you prefer; via Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, RSS or email (scroll down to the bottom of this page to subscribe). We’ve got daily, weekly and quarterly summaries in newsletter form. Bitcoin never sleeps. Neither do we. The post Bitcoin in Brief Friday: Luxury Jets, Cheap Air Tickets Now Offered for Bitcoin Cash appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

One of the largest energy suppliers in the Czech Republic has recently announced plans to start accepting cryptocurrency from its customers. The bitcoin payment option should be available as early as next month, its management said. The company is about to join a growing number of Czech businesses processing crypto payments by introducing them to the energy sector. Also read: Poll: Bitcoin More Popular With Czechs than the Euro Reaching Out to the Young People The firm in question, Pražská Plynárenská, is not new to the concept of diversification. It is one of the major suppliers of natural gas in the Czech Republic, serving 420,000 homes and businesses. The company is also an electric and heating utility which installs photovoltaics and gas-operated boilers, its website shows. According to its Bloomberg overview, Pražská Plynárenská is engaged in assembling and maintaining telecommunications equipment, servicing motor vehicles, and many more business endeavors, including IT services. The latest project – bitcoin payments. “In June, we are opening a payment gateway, which will automatically transfer our bitcoin payments into regular currency, so that we don’t have to speculate with cryptocurrency. But if anyone wants to pay in an alternative way, we want to allow them to do that,” said Pavel Janeček, chief executive officer of the Prague-based company. According to Hospodářské Noviny, Pražská Plynárenská will pioneer cryptocurrency payments in the country’s energy sector. Janeček also said that the introduction of bitcoin (BTC) as a payment option will make his company more attractive for the younger generation. This is obviously a priority as the management has also organized rentals of cars running on eco-friendly CNG especially for Youtube vloggers. “We are trying to reach out to the young customers,” he reiterated, those who buy everything with their mobile phones. Crypto Payments on the Rise in the Czech Republic A growing number of Czech businesses are turning to cryptocurrencies as an alternative and modern payment option. Although for some companies this might be merely a marketing move, with few of their customers paying in crypto and the merchants immediately converting the coins to fiat, others are more serious about cryptocurrency. Last year, the largest online retailer in the country, Alza.cz, started accepting bitcoin (BTC) on its platform, as news.Bitcoin.com reported. According to Jan Sadílek, head of internet marketing at Alza.cz, the number of orders and the crypto turnover have increased significantly over the past months. Customers are paying with cryptocurrency for a variety of products, including the popular hard wallet Trezor offered by the Czech-based Satoshilabs. Since February this year, Alza also accepts litecoin, praised for faster transactions and lower fees. Other examples include several Subway stores and the Paralelní Polis café in Prague, which is popular among members of the Czech crypto community. According to the local press, it is actually accepting only cryptocurrency for your coffee. On the other hand, several banks have been trying to block crypto-related transactions of Czech businesses. One of them, Mbank, has explained its restrictive policies with an argument often used by traditional financial institutions around the world – money laundering concerns. Others, like Komerční bank, have imposed strict controls on operations associated with cryptocurrency. Raiffeisenbank has alerted its clients that transactions with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are unsafe. However, a survey conducted earlier this year indicated that the popularity of digital coins is growing in the Czech Republic now, when the fiat koruna is free-floating again. Czechs are more inclined to store value in cryptocurrency than in euros, according to the February Ipsos poll among 525 people. When asked about their intentions to acquire foreign cash, twice as many respondents said they were interested in buying bitcoin rather than acquiring US dollars. Do you expect more utility companies to introduce crypto payments in the near future? Share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock. Make sure you do not miss any important Bitcoin-related news! Follow our news feed any which way you prefer; via Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, RSS or email (scroll down to the bottom of this page to subscribe). We’ve got daily, weekly and quarterly summaries in newsletter form. Bitcoin never sleeps. Neither do we. The post Czech Utility Company Introduces Crypto Payments appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Japan’s GMO Internet announced that it will unveil its flagship bitcoin mining machine, called GMO miner B2, equipped with the 7nm chips on June 6. Interested customers can register now for the upcoming information session. Also read: Yahoo! Japan Confirms Entrance Into the Crypto Space Launching on June 6 The wait for 7nm bitcoin mining products from Japanese internet giant GMO may be nearing to a close, as the company announced Thursday: GMO Internet Group will launch GMO miner B2, which is our own high-performance computer for mining (mining machine), on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. We will mass-produce the world’s first mining machine equipped with a cutting-edge 7 nm process based semiconductor chip (7nm mining chip; ‘GMO 72b’), which will be shipped at the end of October 2018. Illustration of GMO miner B2 provided by GMO. The company has been working on research and development of the 7nm mining chip since September last year. GMO has been using “store-bought mining computers” for its mining operation launched in December, as news.Bitcoin.com previously reported. Now it is ready to start producing its own mining equipment made with this 7nm chip, which GMO will use for its in-house mining operation as well as offer “the others to potential customers who are planning to mine,” the company confirmed. While GMO has not released images of the real mining hardware, the company has provided some illustrative images of the GMO miner B2 currently in development. Illustration provided by GMO. Interested Customers Can Register Now “An information session for potential customers considering the purchase of GMO miner B2 will be held on Wednesday, June 6 in Shibuya, Tokyo, and we will explain the details of GMO miner B2, such as price and performance,” GMO’s announcement reads. There will also be an information session for the company’s cloud mining service on the same day. The sessions will be in Japanese. Registration is open to both interested customers and institutional investors. “Customers who have not registered in advance will be refused admission,” GMO emphasized. Furthermore, GMO Internet no longer plans to use an initial coin offering (ICO) for the sale of its 7nm mining boards as announced in October last year. A representative of the company told news.Bitcoin.com, “for this mining machine sales and cloud mining, we don’t plan to utilize ICO.” How powerful do you think GMO’s 7nm miners will be? Do you want to buy one?Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock and GMO Internet. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. The post Date Set: Japan’s Internet Giant GMO Will Launch 7nm Bitcoin Miner on June 6 appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Employees of a regional police department in Ukraine were recently caught mining cryptocurrencies using the department’s resources, according to the court document. They had been mining for four months before they got caught and their mining farm seized. Also read: Yahoo! Japan Confirms Entrance Into the Crypto Space Police Mining Farm Discovered Employees of the National Police of Ukraine reportedly set up a cryptocurrency mining farm in their workplace and mined cryptocurrencies for four months before they were caught, local media reported this week. The employees work at the Rivne Oblast regional police headquarters’ Communications Department. This information was revealed in the Rivne City Court document number No. 569/8710/18, Finclub reported. Ukrainian news agency Glavcom elaborated, “In April of this year, employees of the Department of Homeland Security of the Police Headquarters in Rivne Oblast identified the [crypto mining] equipment at the office of the Communications Department,” adding: The same day, the investigator of the regional administration removed from his colleagues two wooden frames, which featured eight graphics cards, six power units, two hard drives, a motherboard and a complete system unit. The Investigation “A pre-trial investigation in the criminal proceedings under Part 1 of Article 185 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine on the fact of theft of electricity” has already begun, the publication detailed, noting that the court decided not to reveal the cryptocurrencies mined. The investigation “established that from the beginning of 2018, officials of the Communications Department…abused their official position, acting in contravention of the interests of the service,” the news outlet quoted the court document. The employees unilaterally used the electricity of the region “for their own purposes, for the proper functioning of the equipment for the extraction of cryptocurrencies, which caused significant damage to the interests of the State Enterprise of the Rivne region,” the court document details. 368.media described: The policemen are charged with the theft of electricity belonging to the management of the National Police in the Rivne region, which they used to extract cryptocurrency, but it is not known how much electricity they used. In Ukraine, there is currently no regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies despite having multiple proposals. However, Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, Oleg Churiy, recently revealed that the central bank is working on a bill to regulate them. What do you think of these police officers mining cryptocurrencies at work? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. The post Police Officers in Ukraine Caught Secretly Mining Crypto at Work for Four Months appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Tezos was conceived as a governance-based blockchain to rival Ethereum, but it’s become more synonymous with protracted legal battles and internecine conflict. As the latest class action lawsuit drags its way through the courts, the Tezos community has petitioned for an end to all the legal turmoil so that everyone can move on. Also read: US Justice Department Investigates Price Manipulation in Bitcoin Market Tezos Community Prepares an Amicus Brief Tezos community leaders are sick of all the lawsuits, so much so that they’re preparing to go to court themselves – to put an end to all the courtroom battles. The Stop The Class Action Lawsuits Against Tezos petition, which is to be filed in a San Francisco Court, asserts that the class actions filed by various other Tezos investors have no merit and should be dismissed. They write: We do not feel the plaintiffs have been sufficiently harmed to warrant a class action against the program, which further delays and encumbers it by creating large legal difficulties which becomes self-fulfilling and induced by the very plaintiffs themselves who complain of delay. We denounce the plaintiffs as having done more harm to Tezos than the delays inherent in software and network development. Don’t Fight, Just BUIDL In essence, the Tezos community members behind the petition want to draw a line under the sand and move on. Their goal is to show the court that it is highly unlikely that the plaintiffs can form a class. If enough people denounce the class, and there are just six plaintiffs claiming they can form a class, the plaintiff’s case becomes much more difficult. The plaintiffs have claimed that they are speaking on behalf of the entire Tezos community…but it appears that a significant portion of that community demurs. “Everything else appears to be on track for the project now, just the looming threat of legal action limits the foundation’s ability to speak,” explained Shaun Belcher, a board of directors member with Tezos Commons Foundation. He believes that what is at stake has ramifications, not only for Tezos, but for the future of blockchain projects in general, adding: “We must understand that the Tezos class action case could set a precedent for all ICOs, past and future. If the community can prevail, not only will it help Tezos but it will immunize other blockchain projects from facing a class action, because failure here against Tezos would discourage law firms in the future.” Bitcoin Suisse Also Washes Its Hands of Class Actions Last week, Bitcoin Suisse AF, a BTC brokerage, also filed a motion seeking to dismiss itself from the Tezos class action lawsuit is has been named in, writing: Bitcoin Suisse submits that it is not properly named as a defendant in the Tezos litigation because of its lack of contacts with both California and the United States sufficient to establish personal jurisdiction and because the alleged, limited currency conversion services it provided, solely in Switzerland, prior to the alleged Tezos ICO, and its alleged post-ICO conduct, cannot establish liability under Sections 5 and 12(a)(1) of the Securities Act. With a betanet launch of the Tezos blockchain planned for late June, the race is on to clear the air of all impediments that could further delay proceedings. Before that can happen though there’s still code to audit, tokens to list on exchanges and countless other development tasks to tick off. Meanwhile, the class action lawsuit rumbles on while the Tezos community grows ever weary. Do you think the Tezos community have a chance of dismissing the class action lawsuit? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock, and Tezos. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. The post Tezos Community Petitions to End the Class Action Lawsuits appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Coinjar has announced the launch of a cryptocurrency exchange that will exclusively offer AUD currency for fiat pairings. The exchange currently offers AUD and BTC pairings for bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple. Also Read: US Justice Department Investigates Price Manipulation in Bitcoin Market Coinjar Launches New Australian Cryptocurrency Exchange Australian-founded cryptocurrency company Coinjar has announced that it has launched a cryptocurrency exchange exclusively offering fiat pairings in AUD. Coinjar exchange currently provides support for BTC, ETH, LTC, and XRP pairings. In addition to AUD pairings, all supported altcoins are available to trade against BTC also. The company is offering tiered accounts to users, with free accounts being charged a 1% fee for both orders that make and take liquidity from the order books. ‘Trader’ and ‘Premium’ accounts are also available for $500 AUD and $5000 AUD annually respectively – offering significantly discounted trading fees in addition to enhanced support services. ‘Institutional’ accounts are also available to traders who are able to make a volume commitment. With regards to storage and security, Coinjar claims to store “At least 90% of our customers’ digital currencies […] offline in geographically redundant secure locations,” adding that “Wherever practicable, we also use multi-sig technology to protect digital assets that must be stored online.” AUD Markets Lacking Major Exchanges In recent weeks, Coinjar was announced as a finalist for Fintech Australia’s ‘Excellence in Digital Currencies/Wallets/Exchanges’ award – an award to be given as part of the not-for-profit organization’s 2018 Finnie awards. According to Cryptocompare, the AUD bitcoin markets are highly centralized – with approximately 91.5% of trade 24-hour trade occurring on BTCMarkets. The second most active exchange is peer-to-peer trading platform Localbitcoins – with accounts for a further 4.75% of trading volume. As of this writing, Cryptocompare estimates the AUD markets to the be the 15th largest fiat pairing against BTC by trading volume, with a 24-hour trading volume 288.4 BTC – or 0.05% of global trade. As per Australia’s regulations, Coinjar is registered with the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre. Do you think that Coinjar will be able to rival BTCMarkets’ apparent dominance of the AUD/BTC markets? Share your thoughts in the comments section below! Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Coinjar At news.Bitcoin.com all comments containing links are automatically held up for moderation in the Disqus system. That means an editor has to take a look at the comment to approve it. This is due to the many, repetitive, spam and scam links people post under our articles. We do not censor any comment content based on politics or personal opinions. So, please be patient. Your comment will be published. The post Coinjar Launches Cryptocurrency Exchange Supporting AUD Pairings appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article

Two Bitcoin Cash (BCH) proponents, Javier Barrera and Andrés Rivera, believe the evolution of cryptocurrency will be bolstered by the BCH network so they recently developed a payment processor called Bitek.co. The company offers merchant processing with payable invoices, and accounting services as the Bitek platform provides merchants with the ability to accept BCH and convert all or a percentage of the funds into Colombian pesos. Also Read: Markets Update: Stormy Weather Continues to Plague Cryptocurrency Traders Bitek: Promoting the Use of Bitcoin Cash in Columbian Markets There’s a new payment processor for the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network called Bitek.co — a system that allows merchants from Colombia to accept BCH and convert to pesos immediately if they choose. The business model is similar to the Bitpay service as Bitek offers BCH-based merchant processing, invoices, and accounting services its customers. Bitek also offers a community section on their website for merchants who want to announce they accept BCH. In order to use Bitek merchant who are interested need to register and fill out the necessary information for a payment gateway and receiving deposits in BCH and Colombian pesos. Bitek’s founder Javier Barrera recently spoke at the Satoshi’s Vision Conference in Tokyo, and detailed how his team is integrating BCH into Colombia’s retail market. Moreover, earlier this week Javier Barrera and Andrés Rivera explained their passion for Bitcoin Cash in an interview with the Latin American publication Diariobitcoin. The founders explain they believe BCH is a better Bitcoin and “it is the asset that best fits with the definition and the philosophical line proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto.” Bitek plans to educate residents in Colombia with meetups and educational programs throughout the region as the firm tells Diariobitcoin: The objective is to promote the use of Bitcoin Cash in the national market. BCH Meetups and Bitek’s Plan to Launch a Marketplace Barrera explains that Bitek has three benefits for merchants looking for a BCH payment gateway such as accounting, liquidity with a remuneration in Colombian pesos, and protection from cryptocurrency volatility as BCH deposits can get the equivalent in pesos the same day. The exchange rate is based on estimates stemming from local exchanges and trading platforms like Bittrex. Just like other cryptocurrency payment processors, merchants have the ability to convert 100 percent of their funds into pesos or a fraction. Bitek plans to launch a marketplace as well that facilitates trades between buyers and sellers and payments made with Bitcoin Cash. Further Bitek has detailed it has been in talks with BCH-based firms such as Centbee and Nchain concerning future collaborations. The startup has also organized BCH meetups on a weekly basis at popular venues like the Revellion Cultu-Bar. Bitcoin Cash supporters seem pleased with another addition to the slew of companies offering BCH infrastructure services. What do you think about the Bitek payment service? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comments below. Images via Shutterstock, and Bitek.co Want to find out how much Bitcoin Cash is worth in real-time or convert your portfolio into USD check out Bitcoin.com’s Bitcoin Cash Converter here! The post BCH Payment Processor Bitek Allows Colombian Merchants to Convert to Pesos appeared first on Bitcoin News. View the full article