Day: September 16, 2017

Worldcore announces an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), as part of their wider expansion plans.The company envisions to become a worldwide reference for the financial tomorrow, by integrating its successful payment solution into the blockchain sector of economy.  WRC token will become your pass to the new world. Worldcore ICO starts on October 14 of 2017. … Continue reading WORLDCORE PAYMENT INSTITUTION ANNOUNCES ICO

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There has been a recent terror attack in London on the Tube. Homemade explosive devices detonated on a train car, injuring many. This attack was likely either orchestrated or inspired by the so-called Islamic State, and is just another example of its heinous ideology. World leaders have condemned the attack and offered their deepest sympathies to the UK and all the victims. United States President Donald Trump has chosen to take this opportunity to call for the internet to be “cut off.”

Deep Misunderstandings About the Nature of Both Free Speech and the Internet

The recent attack is nothing short of tragic. Acts of terrorism are cowardly, and it will take an international effort to keep everyone safe. However, Donald Trump seems to have found his scapegoat for this attack and is taking no time to move on it. He feels the internet is to blame for this and other terror attacks.

In a series of tweets, Mr Trump suggested Scotland Yard could have prevented the attack, then fixed his sights on what he called a “recruiting pool” for terrorists: the internet. There are a plethora of problems with this statement. The internet is a medium for many things, both legal and illegal. This is the nature of a large network facilitating information sharing. To throw the baby out with the bathwater just because people can do illegal things seems naive and shortsighted. I want to be clear, I have no sympathy for anyone conducting illegal activity online. However, suggesting to “cut off” the internet because of those individuals is ridiculous. 

Trump’s statement also suggests that he has very little insight as to what the internet actually is or how it works. How anyone, including a nation as powerful as the United States, could “cut off” the internet is beyond me. It is a network spanning the entire globe and low earth orbit. The only thing that comes to mind would be an outright attack on all servers both foreign and domestic, or the forceful closing of ISPs worldwide. Both of these things are incredibly un-American – not to mention unpractical – things to do. Even if either happened, would we even be able to go back to a time without the internet after having known it and relied on it for our daily lives? How could we live with such a blatant attack on not only convenience and connectivity, but also our freedom of speech?

I really want to try and give Mr. Trump more credit, since I understand the nature of tweets requires brevity. Perhaps 144 characters meant he had to sacrifice some clarity to get a point across. However, it is really hard to believe he does not have an adversarial view of the internet, since this is not the first time he has suggested shutting down the internet in some capacity. In December of last year he suggested closing down the internet. He said he would ask Bill Gates to “close it down” to prevent terrorism recruiting. The fact that he would ask one man to close down the internet further demonstrates his infantile understanding of what the internet is or how it works.

While I wish I could say this impressive lack of understanding means the internet is safe, it still worries me. The internet as a network may be almost impossible to tear down, but freedom of speech is definitely vulnerable. Whether through firewalls, censorship, or disbanding net neutrality, it is entirely possible for nations to limit freedom of speech online.

Just recently news.Bitcoin.com reported on JP Morgan executive Jamie Dimon calling bitcoin a “fraud” and claiming he would fire any employee from his firm who traded the digital currency for being “stupid.” Now it seems JP Morgan has been caught red-handed purchasing a bunch of XBT shares, otherwise known as exchange-traded-notes, that track the price of Bitcoin.

Also read: Bitcoin Proponents Respond to JP Morgan Executive’s Statements

After a Few Harsh Statements from Executive Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Ltd., and Morgan Stanley Purchase Bitcoin ETNs

According to public records of Nordnet trading logs, the two associated firms JP Morgan Securities Ltd., and Morgan Stanley bought roughly 3M euro worth of XBT note shares. Interestingly after the recent regulatory crackdown in China, and the statements from JP Morgan’s senior executive Jamie Dimon talking trash about bitcoin, his firm bought the dip on September 15. In fact, out of all the companies on the list, like Goldman Sachs and Barclays, the JP Morgan team of buyers purchased the most XBT notes.

Bitcoin exchange-traded-notes (ETNs) are a popular investment vehicle for mainstream investors and financial management firms who want exposure to bitcoin. A few institutions offer ETNs, among them Denmark-based Saxo Bank, which sells notes called the “Bitcoin Tracker.” These bitcoin-based ETNs track bitcoin price movements against the Euro and USD. Bitcoin ETNs have done extremely well over the course of 2017 following suit with bitcoin’s meteoric price spike.

JP Morgan Applies for Blockchain Patent 175 Times

JP Morgan doesn’t just purchase bitcoin notes, but is also heavily involved with the ‘blockchain fever’ that has infected banks across the world. The financial firm has applied for a “bitcoin alternative” patent with the U.S. over 175 times in 2013. The company is also working on an ethereum-based blockchain alongside, according to people familiar with the matter, working with Zcash development as well. With the ethereum project called “Quorum,” JP Morgan has its own Github repo that explains how the permissioned blockchain does not need consensus mechanisms like Proof-of-Work (POW) or Proof-of-Stake (POS).

Former JP Morgan Executives Leave the Firm for Bitcoin and Blockchain Projects

Additionally, former JP Morgan executives are all about blockchain technologies these days and even bitcoin. The veteran commodities trader, Daniel Masters, joined JP Morgan right after graduating college and in 2014 announced he was starting a bitcoin-based hedge fund. Another former JP Morgan mogul, Blythe Masters, started her own blockchain startup Hyperledger which is now run by the Linux Foundation. Masters is still heavily involved with the blockchain project and has a seat on the governance board.

Whether Jamie Dimon wants to admit it or not his firm was trading bitcoin-based notes after his statements. Further, over the past few years, JP Morgan cannot hide the fact that they are infatuated with blockchain technology, just like the hundreds of other financial institutions hoping they won’t be replaced.

What do you think about JP Morgan Securities Ltd. purchasing bitcoin-based exchange-traded-notes? Let us know in the comments below. 

Images via Pixabay, Bloomberg Markets, IamNomad, and Zerohedge. 

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The post After the Boss Calls Bitcoin a ‘Fraud’ — JP Morgan Buys the Dip appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Unverified notice surfaced, detailing how China is going to block its Bitcoin exchanges.

Price analysis for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin

The much-anticipated Token Creation Event for BlockMason’s Credit Protocol has been bolstered by a dramatic development. A recently updated version of BlockMason’s token sale website confirms rumors that a number of large purchasers have bought a portion of the Credit Protocol Tokens prior to the opening of the token sale to the general public, ending … Continue reading BlockMason Token Creation Event Backed by Large Private Purchases

The post BlockMason Token Creation Event Backed by Large Private Purchases appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Earlier this year, QUOINE launched Qryptos, a new cryptocurrency trading platform. Qryptos is a very peculiar exchange which supports many different cryptocurrencies. The platform specializes in listing new coins with negative trading fees to generate initial liquidity. Negative fees are rather uncommon in the world of cryptocurrency exchanges.

Qryptos Provides Liquidity in a Different Way

Although Qryptos was officially announced in June of this year, very few people have paid attention to this platform so far. That is rather remarkable, especially considering how this fully digital, crypto-only platform is doing things very differently. When the exchange adds a new currency to trade, it will temporarily offer negative fees on all trades. That means people will get paid to trade said currencies and bring some liquidity to this platform. It is better than 0% trading fees, but for some reason, it is not catching on quickly.

To many people, there may not necessarily be a reason to use Qryptos over any other platform. There are plenty of cryptocurrency-only trading platforms in the world today. Qryptos has a small list of actively-traded cryptocurrencies right now, although the negative fee rate is pretty interesting to take note of. After all, virtually all other cryptocurrency trading platforms charge fees. There are a few exceptions across Asian exchanges, though not all of those platforms are accessible to Western users. However, Qryptos may prove to be a different creature altogether.

The platform has another intriguing feature as well. The company launched a beta desktop client earlier this year, which makes accessing the platform slightly more convenient. The company aims to make trading convenient and efficient regardless of one’s previous exchange with cryptocurrency. Catering to both novice and advanced cryptocurrency users is a smart approach, although the platform’s success remains to be determined at this stage.

The company is fully compliant with all Know Your Customer and anti-money laundering requirements in Singapore, where it is based. That is a good start, as cryptocurrency exchanges often face additional scrutiny from regulators. It seems unlikely Qryptos will suffer a similar fate, assuming the company stays away from listing ICO tokens in the future. After all, those ICOs are the downfall of major cryptocurrency exchanges in China right now. Companies in other countries may be affected by these issues as well moving forward.

What is interesting to note is how Qryptos utilizes a similar trading engine to QUOINE. Providing efficient trade execution solutions is one of this company’s top priorities right now. Qryptos aims to facilitate up to one million transactions per second at peak performance, which will not be all that easy to achieve. However, it shows the company is focusing on scalability first and foremost, which is something several other exchanges seemingly lack right now.

It is an intriguing incentive structure which may set Qryptos apart from the rest of the pack. Every market trade completed by market makers will result in being rewarded with 50% of the taker fee collected by Qryptos itself. This taker fee is also fixed at 0.15%, which makes the platform far more competitively priced to some other solutions. It will be interesting to see how Qryptos shapes up in a year from now. There are some definite advantages to this platform in its current form.

Various countries around the world are exploring the option of creating national digital currencies. A digital version of the US dollar or euro, for example, would be rather interesting to see. However, a central bank-issued digital currency is not all that easy to create. There are specific technical requirements to take into account. In fact, such currencies may not even warrant the use of a blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT).

Central Bank-Issued Digital Currency Requirements

A central bank-issued national digital currency is nothing like cryptocurrencies we know today. Unlike Bitcoin and altcoins, a national digital currency comes with a high degree of centralization. The way coins are generated and distributed would be fully controlled by a specialized entity. It would be no different from how central banks issue regular money, but they would do so in a very different manner where these currencies are concerned.

Indeed, central bank digital currency – also known as CBDC – entails a lot of requirements which must be adhered to. Firstly, such currencies need to be resilient, which has proven to be problematic already. Resiliency is closely connected to scalability and transaction processing in this regard. As Bank Underground mentioned, CBDC infrastructure needs to be capable of processing thousands of transactions every single second. That will be a major challenge.

To do so, the correct infrastructure will need to be built. While most people assume CBDC will be issued using a blockchain or distributed ledger technology, that may not necessarily be the case. In fact, neither of these technological concepts lend themselves for use by central bank digital currencies. Any brief outage or delayed upgrade would have catastrophic effects and potentially cripple this new digital economy for some time to come.

Keeping scalability in mind, ensuring CBDC can be used commonly across an entire nation will be a tough ordeal. This is especially true in countries such as the US, simply due to their sheer size and number of residents. In the Eurozone, a digital euro would make very little sense, considering it would be used across many countries simultaneously. Such an infrastructure may not necessarily be feasible to roll out with current technology, although it remains to be seen how such ventures will be tackled moving forward.

The bigger concern is interoperability. Using a blockchain or DLT makes little sense in this regard, as all parties are working on their own private solutions. If different blockchains for different currencies cannot communicate with one another, there is not all that much point in using CBDC in the first place. While these digital currencies coexist with regular money, cross-border solutions will need to be facilitated somehow. Once again, that’s not all that easy to achieve.

CBDCs are still in their infancy right now, and for all we know they may never come to fruition. It is certainly an idea worth exploring, for all intents and purposes. However, there are so many different requirements to take into account, coming up with proper technical solutions will be challenging. Even if these currencies come to market, they will never rival cryptocurrencies any more than they already do.

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High speed Internet provider, Cajutel is using Blockchain technology as a tool to raise capital for the development of Internet services in Guinea Bissau and Guinea.

Kim Dotcom has always been an interesting figure in the history of the internet. Some of his previous business ventures have gotten a lot of attention, for better or worse. Dotcom is also a big fan of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, which will be incorporated in his upcoming BitCache service. He is not too worried about the current Bitcoin price situation either, as his opinion is that “everybody will use crypto.”

Kim Dotcom Remains Bullish on Bitcoin

It is good to see individuals such as Kim Dotcom keep the bigger picture in mind in tumultuous times. The current Bitcoin price trend is a good reason to see the cryptocurrency markets as bearish. Some projects may even want to reconsider their affiliation with Bitcoin when prices are dropping like flies. However, it is simply one of the growing pains cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin will have to deal with along the way.

K.im and Bitcache will introduce crypto to hundreds of millions of new users. Don't worry about #Bitcoin price. Everybody will use crypto

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 14, 2017

Dotcom confirms BitCache will introduce cryptocurrency to hundreds of millions of users in due time. Contrary to what cryptocurrency enthusiasts may think, Bitcoin and altcoins are still very niche markets right now. It does not take trillions of dollars to move markets by any means. Just one piece of news from a country representing 12% of all Bitcoin trading volume has been enough to send prices plummeting in short order.

Assuming Kim Dotcom can successfully launch BitCache and evade further governmental scrutiny, he may be one of the individuals to put Bitcoin on the global map. There is a dire need for more companies and service providers that are willing to experiment with cryptocurrency payments. The year 2017 has been pretty rough in that regard. Some retailers have reneged on their Bitcoin positions during the first half of 2017. With the current price drop looking worse by the hour, it is not unlikely some other retailers would do the exact same unless things pick up again.

At the same time, people often forget Bitcoin sees this bearish cycle virtually every year. The year 2017 started incredibly strong, but a correction was coming at one point or another. Anyone who expected something else has been sorely mistaken in this regard. Unfortunately, it appears the correction has been a lot steeper than originally predicted. Dropping from US$5,000 to US$4,000 was considered to be super bearish over a week ago. Right now, people are hoping that US$2,800 does not break, but it remains to be seen how things play out.

For his part, Kim Dotcom has no plans to go back on his idea to use Bitcoin and potentially other cryptocurrencies for BitCache and K.im. It will be interesting to see what these two services will bring to the table once they launch. Though it is unclear when that will happen exactly, it goes to show there will be a light at the end of this long and dark tunnel. There will also be other services enabling cryptocurrency payments moving forward.

Bitcoin is still in a good place right now even though the weekly price chart looks anything but positive. Now is a good time to detox from one’s obsessive cryptocurrency disorder and stop looking at the charts for a while, though we know just how hard that may be. Things will eventually settle down and Bitcoin will come out a lot stronger for it. These cycles occur on a regular basis and this time will be no different. The only question is how long it will take until the price recovers sufficiently to begin reaching for a new all-time high.

Researchers at RMIT speculate on the potential impact of blockchain technology, theorizing it could undo centuries of business thinking.