Day: August 6, 2017

According to a new post on the forum Bitcointalk, the now defunct BTC-e exchange says it has control over some its servers and bitcoin wallets. At the moment, operators of the trading platform detail they are evaluating the balances.

Also read: Segwit2x and the Tale of Three Bitcoins

BTC-e Reveals They Are Assessing Wallets and Balances

Over the past few weeks, news.Bitcoin.com has reported on the BTC-e exchange and how it was seized by U.S. law enforcement. We further detailed how the operators of the exchange released a public message, describing the FBI takedown and the possibility of customers getting their money back. According to the message, some of the “purses” were taken by the FBI so there could be a portion of funds that will be unavailable to BTC-e traders.

On August 3 the trading platform’s operators left a message in Russian stating;

We were able to access our databases and purses [wallets], we are currently assessing the data and bitcoin balance sheets, this information will be made public before the end of next week.

Other Members of BTC-e Partner Businesses Arrested

The U.S. Justice Department and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), have seized the trading platform’s domain and claim the exchange has broken money transmission laws. Further, the indictment of the alleged BTC-e administrator, Alexander Vinnik, includes a $110M penalty against the BTC-e exchange for money laundering and illegal money transmission.

BTC-e has also mentioned in its latest public message that employees from a particular company called, Mayzus Financial Services Ltd, have also been arrested for being tied to the “money flow.”

Traders who kept money on the exchange who were not involved with illegal activities are not pleased with the U.S. government’s intervention. The message from BTC-e is a hopeful sign that some traders may get their funds back. At the time of writing U.S. law enforcement has not yet revealed how much money was confiscated from the exchange. If BTC-e reveals how much they have left, and how much the FBI seized next week, traders should get a better idea of the true extent of losses.

What do you think about the latest statement from BTC-e? Do you think they will return the money to customers? Let us know in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock, BTC-e, and Bitcointalk.org.

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that enables near-instant, low-cost payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: transaction management and money issuance are carried out collectively by the network. Read all about it at wiki.Bitcoin.com.

The post After FBI Takedown: BTC-e Exchange Says They Still Possess Databases and Wallets appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts around the world have been showing a lot of love for OmiseGo lately. This may have something to do with how the token is abbreviated to OMG, which is fun. OmiseGO is an interesting, albeit ambitious project that aims to bank the unbanked by using Ethereum-based financial technology. Now is as good a time as any to delve deeper into this project.

OmiseGO Is Not Exactly Reinventing The Wheel

OmiseGO is not the only project seeking to bank the unbanked using cryptocurrency technology. A lot of startups have been doing the exact same thing, including some of the recent successful cryptocurrency ICO projects. There will be fierce competition in this particular industry, which is both good and bad at the same time. It puts a lot of pressure on all teams working toward this goal, yet very few if any of them may actually succeed. Whether or not OmiseGO will do so remains to be seen.

The project itself is set up in a rather interesting way. OmiseGO uses public Ethereum-based financial technology so it can be used in traditional digital wallets. The team aims to enable real-time P2P value exchanges and payment services. All of this will be done on a global scale, rather than through localized efforts. Furthermore, the project will focus on both fiat currencies and decentralized currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others.

Bringing financial inclusion to the unbanked population is not easy. This is not due to a shortage of people, as there are nearly 2 billion unbanked individuals on the planet today. In most cases, that situation arose from existing problems such as individuals lacking access to birth certificates or an income. However, not everyone wishes to be included in the financial system either. A lot of people value the concept of living off the grid and not relying on global financial services.

There is also a fundamental problem in the traditional financial world. Not only are services somewhat subject to privileges for the middle class, there is also a severe lack of communication and coordination between service providers. According to the OmiseGO team, using a decentralized exchange on a public blockchain may alleviate a lot of those concerns. In their mind, anyone should be able to access any type of financial transaction in a decentralized and affordable manner. Its entire ecosystem will also remain hooked into the Ethereum mainnet.

In addition, there is also an OmiseGo white label wallet SDK to be taken advantage of. This project should allow for convenient integration of payment solutions on the network in the future. Digital wallets have slowly been gaining traction all over the world, and this project is looking to capitalize on that momentum. It will also create new opportunities for wallet service providers to focus on exchanging decentralized currencies and fiat money through its network.

The popularity of OmiseGo is currently on the rise. Although it is possible this is merely the result of someone artificially pumping the OMG price, the token sees a fair amount of trading volume. Right now, one OMG is valued at $3.03, which is quite a high value considering there are nearly 100 million tokens in circulation. There are over 140 million tokens in total. It is an intriguing project to keep an eye on, although one should never be fooled by initial successes.

State Street’s former blockchain lead breaks down how he views developments in the blockchain market – and why there are four opportunities.

Bitcoin Weekly Price Overview

The spring and summer of 2017 have seemingly been defined by the vast amount of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) flooding the cryptocurrency world. Some projects had more merit than others, and some were just looking to make a quick buck. Poor project leadership and delivery have largely given ICOs in general a bad name. However, I do not think that they are all bad.

In Defense of ICOs

At a recent Bitcoin and Blockchain meetup I attended in Chicago, one of the members mentioned he was making an ICO to distribute tickets to an event. The ICO would be completely free and he just felt it would be a fun way to distribute tickets. Everyone — myself included — chuckled at the ludicrousness of it all. “Another ICO? Ha!” I thought to myself. ICOs have become somewhat of a joke among many in the cryptocurrency community, and yet they continue to attract asinine amount of investments.

I want to make it clear that I am not defending scam ICOs and empty projects. Rather, I am defending the idea of ICOs themselves. We do not have to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, especially since ICOs are genuinely clever ways to raise money in a distributed manner.

In my opinion, the ICO concept is not too different from what we see in GoFundMe or Kickstarter. A company or individual promises a product, creates a pitch about it, and announces that they require funding to make the product or service a reality. As a side note, I would like to point out that Kickstarter and GoFundMe projects also have instances where companies or individuals are unable to deliver their products or services, so that is not exclusively a cryptocurrency problem.

Where ICOs and Kickstarter or GoFundMe projects differ wildly is the middleman. With Kickstarter and GoFundMe, the platforms themselves take a cut of all donations and pledges. ICOs’ pledges go directly to the relevant businesses, projects, or individuals. They are more efficient in this regard and have less overhead for their startup costs. Cost reduction usually correlates to a higher success rate.

ICOs also allow people who may not have been able to invest using traditional means to become part of a company. In fact, that is the promise offered by all of cryptocurrency. With traditional investing, one must be approved for a brokerage account by providing details regarding one’s net worth and assets before he or she can even begin to purchase and trade shares. In contrast, cryptocurrency just requires that one have enough money to purchase the amount one wishes to buy. In the case of ICOs, they simply require that one has the necessary cryptocurrency — usually Ethereum — to participate. This kind of market freedom is a liberating experience for investors and companies alike. As long as investors are legally eligible to participate and they have the crypto to back it up, everything works well.

I do not deny that there is a lot of dumb money bloating the cryptocurrency space, but just because there are some bad or dishonest projects does not mean ICOs themselves are bad ideas. They are helping to free the market, which means they are helping to free the world.

Cryptocurrency is becoming a lot more popular these days. One site used for general information on most cryptocurrencies is also growing in site traffic, rivaling more traditional investment sites. Coinmarketcap is currently the go-to platform for cryptocurrency trading and exchange information. Remarkably, the site is now ranked higher than the likes of the Wall Street Journal.

Coinmarketcap Outranks WSJ.com by a Small Margin

Looking at individual website statistics on any given day can sometimes produce interesting results. For example, one would expect the website of the Wall Street Journal to be incredibly popular. Alexa statistics confirm that is the case, especially among internet users in the United States. The latter aspect is not entirely surprising, as most WSJ readers reside in the U.S. Overall, WSJ.com is the 555th most popular website in the world, which is very impressive.

This is especially true considering how difficult it has become to maintain a top position on Alexa these days. The game is constantly changing as to how site traffic is measured and sites are indexed. Getting anywhere close to the top 1,000 is a massive challenge, especially if you want to keep your website profitable at the same time. Some sites certainly do a much better job at this than others; that much is blatantly obvious. However, WSJ.com has been facing some stiff competition from a competitor they would not necessarily expect.

https://t.co/g4mMxMjIU6 is now more popular than https://t.co/luRFUL8eqA pic.twitter.com/EqnWIkyiUI

— Adam Ludwin (@adamludwin) August 4, 2017

While Alexa statistics are by no means the ultimate popularity metric for websites, they provide some interesting insights. According to the platform, Coinmarketcap is currently ranked higher than WSJ. com. To many people, that comes as a major surprise, considering that the Wall Street Journal has been around for decades. Cryptocurrency, on the other hand, only emerged a few years ago. Anything that is still relatively new and exciting often has a better chance of becoming more popular in a short span of time. That could partially explain why Coinmarketcap is currently ranked as the 547th most popular website in the world.

Looking a bit closer at these statistics, we can clearly see WSJ.com has suffered from a popularity downtrend throughout 2017. It is possible that the presidency of Donald Trump and his campaign against the media and “fake news” has something to do with it. A lot of people scrutinize mainstream media for virtually any story they bring to the table these days. This certainly does not affect just the Wall Street Journal, but it is possible this trend will only get worse as more time progresses.

Coinmarketcap, on the other hand, has grown in popularity by leaps and bounds. Things have certainly taken a positive turn for the site in 2017. Given the popularity and price surge of currencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, and Ethereum, that is not entirely surprising. Coinmarketcap is the go-to place to learn about price data, exchange volume, and other important information pertaining to cryptocurrencies. It is not entirely surprising to see them becoming a lot more popular these days, though whether or not this trend can be maintained remains to be seen.

Comparing two sites in completely different industries often makes very little sense. However, it shows that people are slowly looking for different information sources where both news and cryptocurrency are concerned. It is certainly possible cryptocurrency will stick around for a longer period of time, even though not everyone at WSJ might see it that way. Media sites have been paying more attention to cryptocurrency as well, which could paint an interesting future picture for both WSJ and Coinmarketcap alike.

Goldman Sachs has predicted that Bitcoin is headed for $3,700, and it seems we’re well on the way there.

Australian cryptocurrency trader Jack Kingston has claimed that he lost $430,000 worth of the digital currency Bitcoin at the exchange BTC-e after the US authorities have gained control of the exchange.

Bitcoin Cash Weekly Price Analysis

Finally, the SEC has published guidance for its stance on ICOs, but the vague concepts may not be enough for a new breed of financial professional.