Day: November 1, 2017

Why the central bank of Australia does not see pressing regulatory issues involving the virtual currencies and Blockchain in the near term?

The next big digital currency may not use a Blockchain at all, as other solutions emerge.

Computer and wallet security are vital for owners of any cryptocurrency. Funds can be stolen in the strangest of ways, including hijacking of your computer’s clipboard.

New charges have been filed against a New York businessman accused in September of defrauding investors through two initial coin offerings (ICOs).

While startups tend to measure ICO success by how much money they have raised, investors, on the other hand, care more about how well the newly issued token they bought performs in the secondary market — and for many the results so far have been disappointing.

Making ruthlessly short work of the gap between $6,000 and $7,000, Bitcoin is poised to top yet another historic milestone. Having just celebrated its ninth birthday with a bang, the digital currency has shown no signs of a hangover on the day after. It’s been on an absolute rampage since and doesn’t seem to be stopping just yet.

The uncertainty surrounding the August hard fork, and potential Chinese ban seem a distant memory as the price has to continued to rise of late. At the time of writing, the cost of a single Bitcoin is a staggering $6,852 – an all-time high for the digital currency-cum-commodity. Potentially positive news from China, and the tease of institutional cash pouring in via the CME future’s market poised to launch by the end of the year seems to be driving the price ever-closer to the psychological milestone of $7,000.

This has year has, without doubt, been Bitcoin’s. However, Satoshi Nakamoto’s experiment has had to face more than its fair share of challenges since the start of 2017. Early rejections by the US Securities and Exchange Commission cast its Wall Street adoption in doubt in March and rising transaction fees across the network began to severely limit BTC’s use in business. Bitcoin entered the summer dogged by infighting amongst its developers and the threat of being overshadowed by Ethereum was real.

Then came the insanity of August. The hard fork. The sell off and immediate rebound. The hottest investment of 2017 just couldn’t be stopped. The market rallied and the original Bitcoin remained on top. The fear and uncertainty provoked by malicious hard forks seemed silly with new highs being set most weeks of August. The market had spoken. It had chosen Bitcoin.

Then there was the China blip. The eastern power managed to end Bitcoin’s parabolic summer growth with one legislative stoke. However, it wouldn’t be for long. The price quickly rebounded as good news poured in from elsewhere alongside the dawning realisation that Bitcoin was made to ruffle some feathers. It shouldn’t be surprising that authoritarian regimes didn’t get it. That was literally the point.

In the wake of the response to the Chinese crackdown of September, the anti-fragility showed us a new beast; a tougher, more weathered Bitcoin. A seasoned rider who’d seen the worst and remained resolute on their quest. Now, with institutional money poised to pour in from the prospect of crypto future’s markets and the an influx of cash from those flogging off their various coin-split dividends, it seems likely that we’ll be posting plenty more generic, teary-eyed “look how far we’ve come” posts in the near future.

Image: ShutterStock

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Living a healthier life might just get easier as Blockchain creates opportunities to learn more about foods’ origin, healthfulness.

The 23-year-old creator of the world’s second most valuable blockchain outlined a new vision for the network at a conference on Wednesday.

A renowned distributed systems professor is soon to launch a new blockchain project, one that seeks to expand the scope of the technology.

The campaign is expected to raise 70,000 ETH, which equals 21.5 million U.S. dollars as of two days before the start. Confideal’s ICO features a generous incentive program that enables early investors to receive a 25% bonus in CDL tokens. The token generation event will last for 20 days.

Changing the token market for the better

In an effort to reduce fraud and encourage responsibility and accountability in the token market, smart contract management platform Confideal has announced the start of their transparency initiative. A hash (which is sometimes called “digital fingerprint”) of the project’s whitepaper PDF file will be saved inside the ICO smart contract as a read-only variable and will be available on Etherscan.

During the ICO and continuing after its conclusion, the PDF file itself will be available for download at Confideal’s website, which will enable any user to calculate the hash of the file long after ICO and compare it against the hash inside the ICO smart contract. If so much as one byte is changed, the hashes will not match. Along with ensuring the integrity of the ICO’s main document, Confideal will be maintaining a special webpage where reports on the project’s ongoing progress will be published.

An Environment of Cooperation

Confideal has been working tirelessly to develop an easy to use platform that will deliver maximum value to its users. To that end, they have entered into several strategic cooperative agreements designed to deliver increased security and data integrity, more flexible payment capabilities, and expanded features and functionality.

The entire team would like to express their gratitude to the following companies for their invaluable contributions and future plans to cooperate with the Confideal platform:

• Bankex
• Bitcoinist
• Law
• Center
• Byzantium
• Cryptonomica
• district0x
• Gamity
• Hacken
• ICOPromo
• IMMLA
• SmartDec
• WealthMan

About Confideal

Confideal enables businesses and individuals to create Ethereum smart contracts through a user-friendly interface that requires no programming skills. A fully functional version of the platform is already available and currently supports two-party interaction, like conventional agreements. The team is already working on more complex scenarios that will include multi-party transactions and contracts that are triggered by data from third-party services (for example, freight companies) and various devices (Internet of Things integration). One of the features that are listed on the project’s roadmap, the arbitration module, is expected to be rolled out early 2018.

The platform is targeting multiple sales channels and the business model includes C2C and B2C interactions (transactions between individuals and between a business and a customer), as well as B2B and B2B2C (contracts that involve multiple business participants and customized complex use cases for large eCommerce companies that sell goods and services to consumers). The monetization model is currently based on a flat 1% fee (waived for CDL token holders who pay in tokens), but the pricing principles may be adjusted in the future.

In multiple independent ICO reviews, Confideal’s campaign has been highly rated, evaluated as “stable” and recommended to long-term investors (ICOrating.com, ICObench.com, ICObazaar.com).

For more information about Confideal, please visit confideal.io or chat with the team in Telegram.

The post Confideal: MVP, 13 Cooperations with Other Companies, 12 External Advisors, 5000 Subscribers-Contributors, Transparency Initiative. 2nd November – ICO Start. Time to Contribute to Success! appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Living in the age of the internet has come with a lot of advantages, but with those benefits also come certain dangers.  Most, if not everyone, has used their personal information online.  Whether that was to create a Facebook page or to make a shopping purchase, that information is still floating around on the internet.

A recent study conducted by Javelin Strategy and Research showed that $16 billion was stolen from 15.4 million U.S. consumers in 2016, compared with $15.3 billion and 13.1 million victims a year earlier. In the past six years, identity thieves have stolen over $107 billion.  Hackers love to take advantage of the vast amount of data that is relatively easily accessible online.

With the amount of money being stolen only increasing every year, it has now become critical to find some way to keep personal information private.  Thankfully, there is a new technology that is becoming increasingly popular that may change both how we interact on the internet as well as how information is stored.

Blockchain for Safety

Blockchain technology, which is characterized by decentralization, is taking the internet by storm.  Its popularity primarily stems from the growth and success of the online currency, Bitcoin. Each block of information has a history connected to it and no transaction can occur without being recorded in the system.  It functions as a shared form of record keeping.

Because all the information is interconnected and the transactions are transparent, it becomes nearly impossible for hackers to break into the system and steal data, due to the fact that they are unable to add or remove from the blockchain without the activity being recorded.

The benefit of blockchain technology comes from the fact that it functions on a decentralized network.  There is no centralized location where all the information is stored because the information is spread across the entire network.  This distribution allows the encrypted information to be processed and stored privately, allowing access only to the parties who are involved.

Protecting Identity

One company is taking advantage of this technology and is seeking to increase the privacy of the user’s online identity.  SelfKey is an identity management ecosystem that puts the customer in full control of their own data.

Through blockchain technology, the company is able to issue token “keys” to customers.  These keys are encrypted through blockchain and it is up to the user to decide who they want to share their information with.  Because users never overshare data, this leads to increased online privacy.

Users only share what is absolutely necessary to make the purchase or complete an application. Information is only stored on the user’s device and not in a cloud or database and is therefore inaccessible in the absence of user permission.  Due to the transparency of blockchain technology, SelfKey can verify transactions and confirm the legitimacy of sources, while also protecting the individual.

The company promotes efficient and maximum privacy due to the decentralized nature of blockchain.   SelfKey acts as a virtual wallet, with multiple applications, including managing bitcoin accounts, applying for a new bank account and investing in real estate, among others.

Ecosystem Functions

One way that startup companies are utilizing blockchain is through ICO’s, or “Initial Coin Offerings.”  ICO’s are basically unregulated crowdfunding for millennials.  Investors will buy into the company in exchange for cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin or other virtual funds, all of which employ blockchain technology.

By buying in, they will either own a part of the company, or will receive some sort of product related benefit.  Probably the most popular ICO service is “Ethereum.”  By using Ethereum, you are buying and selling blockchain tokens that companies produce: “Etherum wants to create an ecosystem where everything works together seamlessly as part of its vision for a ‘world computer’ – and that includes the tokens required to power it.” 

SelfKey is currently in alpha testing, with their public ERC-20 token sale to be announced soon.  In a time where your internet identity is constantly at risk, SelfKey is proving their worth as they seek to become the leading identity validation blockchain platform.

The post How Blockchain Technology Can Help Increase Your Internet Privacy appeared first on NEWSBTC.