Day: November 21, 2017

Wealth managers are being inundated with calls about Bitcoin, according to a recent report, and most are saying that owning some is a good idea.

After all the FUD and insanity, JP Morgan is considering adding Bitcoin futures trading to their platform.

Almost all Americans grow up playing organized sports. Some of us are lucky enough to play the same sports in adulthood. But, a vast majority of former sports players don’t make it to the pros. In fact, the odds of turning pro in the new millennium are paper thin for a few reasons.

Disclosure: This is a Sponsored Article

The first is, although many kids start out playing sports, the individual along with their family doesn’t realize the effort it takes to continue playing on a professional level. The type of discipline must usually start even as early as nine or ten years old or at least in high school.

Secondly, some players are either exhausted before their time comes to turn pro, and they chase other interests. Or they have an illness or are injured sometime during their play rendering them unable to play the game professionally.

Although all of this keeps a vast majority of players from playing professionally, the methods of scouting players in this century have changed as well. Due to a new brand of scouting that includes genetics with traditional scouting methods, new methods of scouting has begun as early as pop warner football years.

But research by Odds of Success Study show that only 256 players are chosen per year from a pool that originated from one million high school students. The odds of joining the NBA are slimmer at 1 in 11,171. A Scholarshipstats.com study shows that WNBA has an even slimmer chance at 1 in 12,114. The National Collegiate Athletic Association has shown baseball players have better chance at 1 in 2451.

New infrastructure is needed to maintain the new structure of sports scouting. Sportyfi wants to change the way we view, participate, and remunerate sports players by changing the world of sports financing. By implementing a blockchain solution, Sportyfi believes that it can broaden the base of professional sports players. With a team of sports advisors and Blockchain professional advisors, Sportyfi wants to provide more opportunity in the world of sports by providing a platform for younger athletes and potential investor groups and individuals.

Sportyfi is fortunate to have on their team Peter M Moricz as Blockchain Business Development Advisor. Peter has a background as a runner in CBOT before he started trading for himself in 1998. In the years 2000 to 2014 he began trading futures in Europe, mainly Rotterdam and London. From 2015 to 2016 he became VP for compliance at JP Morgan Private Bank in London.

Given his background in compliance, Peter understands the opportunity the blockchain can provide: “I found it really exciting that through Smart contract and Blockchain we can give greater opportunities to any young athletes or teams around the world to help them achieve their true potential.”

The team also has the immense fortune of working with Charlie Shrem who is a well known Bitcoin advocate that started investing in Bitcoin back in 2011. He is also known for his help in founding the Bitcoin Foundation. Also Director of Business and Community Development at Jaxx, he joins a well diversified team of Blockchain and Sports advisors for the Sportyfi team.

Together the team anticipates the token sale of SPF on November 21st which was delayed a week due to the Segwit 2x fork. Even though the fork was cancelled the team will keep the date of the token sale consistent.In the meanwhile the whitepaper is available for reading providing more insight before the token sale.

Bitcoin has shrugged off all bad news this year, including the recent hack of Tether. Price could soar past the $10,000 mark by year end, says billionaire.

As Black Friday frenzy is coming up, you’ll be happy to know that SimpleFX has prepared something special for the occasion. This year it’s not only about cheaper clothes and electronic equipment – you will have the opportunity to trade at a 50% discount on the spread value, no matter if you choose forex, indices, commodities, precious metals or equities.

You don’t need to worry about opening hours or standing in lines. Just open a transaction between 22:05 UTC on 23rd November and 21:55 on 24th November, 2017 – and that’s it. The spread value will be discounted automatically. Cryptocurrency pairs are not included in the promotion.

But that’s not all. SimpleFX is offering a 70% discount on tickets for the Cryptocurrency World Expo, a major industry event which will take place on 1-2 Dec 2017 in Warsaw, Poland. It’s a great opportunity to get to know the current trends and network with other traders, so we want you to be a part of it. We have also been nominated as the Best Cryptocurrency Trading Platform, so keep your fingers crossed for us.

You can start preparing for the celebration already –  just click here to add funds to your trading account. Interested in the tickets? – get them here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact SimpleFX team at [email protected] The team will answer all the questions you might have.

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The post Black Friday 50% OFF spreads at SimpleFX appeared first on NEWSBTC.

It’s no secret that not everyone in the world of bitcoin shares the same opinion. Heated debates, and all out flame wars, play across social media every day. But what happens when the debate goes beyond mere words, and individuals resort to dirty tricks such as hacking and vote rigging? That’s exactly what’s been taking place on r/Bitcoin, Reddit’s most popular bitcoin board, with over 430,000 users, according to one redditor.

Also read: Someone Just Helped Themselves to $600k of Bitcoin Cash from Segwit Addresses

He Who Controls Information Controls the World of Bitcoin

Moderators on the thousands of subreddits that make up the so-called “front page of the internet” have a range of powers at their disposal. These include deleting and pruning threads and banning users found to have been in contravention of the site’s rules. The vast majority of these unpaid admins perform their duties diligently and tirelessly. But what happens when moderators overstep the line and abuse their privileges?

According to the appropriately named censorship_notifier, such behavior is rampant on r/Bitcoin, with one or more mods routinely using their enhanced access to control the flow of information. While such antics may sound trifling and the stuff of message board bickering, the world’s most popular Bitcoin subreddit is relied-on by hundreds of thousands of people for information. Underhand tactics do nothing to advance the cause of bitcoin and sully the community’s reputation.

Busted by a Bot

Ironically, the behavior that certain r/Bitcoin moderators stand accused of wasn’t detected by a human whistleblower – it was uncovered by a bot. The Censorship Notifier Bot (CNBot) trawls Reddit boards to detect threads that are deleted and to uncover data that points to censorship. After redditor BashCo revealed large-scale vote manipulation on r/Bitcoin a week ago, the CNBot was despatched to investigate. Reddit threads attain visibility through upvoting. Conversely, when threads are downvoted en masse, they all but disappear from view.

The first thing the CNBot detected is that posting threads containing the words “censoring” or “censorship” on r/Bitcoin automatically resulted in thread removal. A lengthy post on r/btc – Reddit’s other primary bitcoin board, and one typically frequented by bitcoin cash supporters – delves into the matter in forensic detail. It explains:

The bots which were downvoting comments and posts on /r/Bitcoin and upvoting posts on /r/btc began their attack on 11/14/2017 at around 18:00 utc. A similar unusual pattern of voting appeared on /r/btc around the same time the day before, though less dramatically. The bots seemed to be pushing people to buy Bitcoin Cash in such a blatant way that it even left a bad taste in the mouths of Bitcoin Cash supporters.

The post then outlines compelling evidence to show bot-orchestrated vote-rigging and widespread censorship. The individuals behind the campaign don’t appear to have stopped there however, for censorship_notifier continues:

We also noticed that an extremely high number of /r/Bitcoin and /r/btc users were reporting that they themselves were hacked and part of the bot attack. We identified 35 such users, but the highest number of votes seen on a single thing indicate between 250-300 accounts involved with the attack.

Mods Are Gods

Not content with merely presenting the case for unethical moderator behavior, censorship_notifier goes on to point the finger of blame, identifying redditor nullc who also happens to be CTO of Blockstream. Elsewhere on r/btc, users have accused the Blockstream team of having “waged a distortion campaign in this very sub”. The same poster opines: “Blockstream, Inc. and Core have aligned BTC against everyone who wants peer to peer electronic cash. They did this by setting very high fees, through SegWit, which isn’t even much of a capacity increase”.

The merits of bitcoin cash, bitcoin core, and segwit are another debate for another time. It would be fair to say, however, that every bitcoiner, whatever their preferred chain, board, and scaling solution, should be entitled to speak their mind without risk of censorship.

So What Now?

Censorship_notifier’s lengthy exposé finishes by saying: “After the massive amount of research we put into this, we believe that at least one moderator of /r/Bitcoin must have been either aware of the bot’s plans (and allowed it to place blame on others), or have executed the attack themselves…We encourage the Reddit admins to carefully review our claims and to validate them. If our claims here are true, surely some type of strong action is warranted.”

One of bitcoin’s greatest strengths is that it is censorship-resistant. Bitcoiners from all sides of the spectrum would do well to heed this as they engage in debate on Reddit and elsewhere. Criticize? Sure. Flame? If you must. Downvote? Go on then. Delete, censor, hack, and manipulate? Hell naw. We’re better than that.

Have you experienced comments being censored or deleted on r/Bitcoin? Let us know in the comments section below.

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The post Forum Wars: r/Bitcoin Mods Accused of Hacking and Vote Manipulation appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Many in the digital currency community see regulation as a bad thing, but are actually some benefits.

Ben Lawsky, the former New York Superintendent of Financial Services who spearheaded the BitLicense regulatory framework while in office, has joined startup Ripple’s board of directors.

The Ethereum Foundation’s lead developer for the Casper upgrade, Vlad Zamfir, uploaded the first version of the protocol’s code to GitHub on Tuesday.

Mining is an ancient trade that has not only survived until modern times, but thrived. Golden Alliance is giving ordinary people a chance to share in the profits of its mines.