Day: December 20, 2017

In one day Bitcoin has seen a significant drop, Bitcoin Cash has spiked, the SEC has stepped in and a company has cashed in on a crypto company name. #ANALYSIS

GDAX, the digital asset exchange run by Coinbase, has resumed trading of bitcoin cash hours after its initial – and tumultuous – effort.

The launch of Blockchain Foundation of India is particularly interesting given the legal ambiguity of Bitcoin and Blockchain in India. #ADOPTION

In the wee hours of December 19, Youbit was dealt a death blow in the form of another hack. The exchange, which was also hit in April, is closing down in the fallout of the most recent attack.

The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back

As revealed on its website, South Korean exchange Youbit has been forced to terminate its services after suffering another hack. The hackers ran off with 17% of Youbit’s funds, enough to drive the exchange into bankruptcy.

The exchange did not clarify just how many funds were taken from its hot wallets, but luckily, all remaining coins were kept offline in cold storage paper wallets. With the remaining funds, Youbit has promised to redeem 75% of all account balances, leaving the remaining reimbursements to be determined after the exchange reaches a settlement.

Hack, Rinse, Repeat

This is not the first time hackers have dealt a crushing blow to Youbit’s hot wallet reserves.  

Back in April, when it still bore the name Yapizon, the exchange lost 3,186 Bitcoin in a similar attack. The funds, worth around US$5 million at the time, are now valued at over US$55 million.

The South Korean National Intelligence service believes that North Korean hackers were behind that attack, as well as a separate hacking of South Korea’s largest exchange, Bithumb, back in February. The Korean Internet and Security Agency is currently investigating Youbit’s most recent attack.

News of this attack will no doubt raise eyebrows in the international community and at home in South Korea, and time will tell whether or not this hack was another plot by North Korea to fuel its economy with cryptocurrencies.

Google ranks websites in their search engine results with PageRank, while Nebulas will provide Blockchain users a way to find the most relevant information in the Blockchain world with Nebulas Rank. #SPONSORED

#Hodl. Or do not. There is no try. #PRICE ANALYSIS

The number of Bitcoin hard forks in existence today is a lot larger than most people think. In fact, there are probably half a dozen projects out there people have not even heard of yet. Bitcoin Interest is not your average hard fork, though, despite the currency being distributed to Bitcoin holders at a 1:1 ratio come January. It’s a very different project that doesn’t even aim to replace Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Interest is an Interesting Creature

Although any project using the term “Bitcoin” will be heavily scrutinized, it doesn’t mean such concepts cannot be successful in their own way. The team behind Bitcoin Interest has come up with a rather interesting plan to create a new ecosystem without competing with Bitcoin directly. It’s still peer-to-peer electronic cash with full decentralization, but it will promote holding onto one’s coins first and foremost.

The Bitcoin Interest project rests on three critical pillars. Technology and community are obvious focuses, as both are vital to any cryptocurrency these days. It is the savings aspect that will intrigue a lot of people, as it is something we don’t see in Bitcoin itself. By parking their coins, users will earn interest. It sounds very similar to how proof-of-stake works, and it may turn out that way when the code is revealed to the public.

According to its website, users will earn BCI coins through two separate rewards schemes. The more significant reward is issued to miners for keeping the network alive. A small portion of each block will be sent to the interest pool, which is referred to as “enhanced proof of work”. The interest pool reward will start at 1.08 BCI and will be cut in half as more blocks are found on the network. It’s an interesting approach, to say the very least.

Unlike what one would expect, Bitcoin Interest has no fixed interest rates. It all depends on how many coins are parked overall as well as by yourself. This is pretty similar to how most staking rewards are issued in a normal proof-of-stake ecosystem. However, there are two interest “cycles” to choose from. There are both weekly and monthly periods available, which opens up a lot of interesting opportunities.

As a result, the weekly interest pool will collect 30% of each block reward. The monthly pool, on the other hand, will claim 70% per block. It is an interesting scheme, although no one should be surprised if most miners aren’t too happy about this at first. After all, they risk missing out on a significant amount of money. With 30% claimed for one pool and 70% claimed for the other pool, it is evident storing coins for the long term will yield better results.

At the same time, there is no indication that Bitcoin Interest will be limited to this interest-only model anytime soon. Miners will be able to mine this new currency at a much lower difficulty than Bitcoin itself. Moreover, the developers want to nullify any advantage gained by ASIC miners and promote GPU mining first and foremost. It seems Bitcoin Interest will rely on the Equihash algorithm to achieve all of this. We have seen other Bitcoin hard forks embrace this algorithm as well.

We are closing in on the end of the session in the bitcoin price space for Europe on Wednesday and – yet again – we’ve had something of a wild ride in the markets. Numerous fundamental inputs, ranging from exchange issues to reports of manipulation, are driving volatility right now and exactly where the day is going to take us as we move forward remains to be seen.

One thing we can be sure of right now, however, is that volatility is a good thing for our intraday efforts.

When we get the sort of volatility we are seeing right now, it means we – in turn – get plenty of opportunities to jump in and out of the markets. With our risk management parameters in place, the more opportunities we get, the better.

So, with this all said, let’s put some levels in place that we can use to jump into the markets when we get any movement this evening.

As ever, take a quick look at the chart below before we get started so as to get an idea where things stand right now and where we’re looking to enter if we get any signals. The chart is a one-minute candlestick chart and it’s got our key and primary range overlaid in green.

As the chart shows, the range we are looking at for the session this evening comes in as defined by support to the downside at 16572 and resistance to the upside at 16773. If we see price close above resistance, we’ll try and get in long towards an immediate upside target of 16850. Looking the other way, if we get a close below support, we’ll get into a short trade towards a downside target of 16500.

Let’s see how things play out and we will update our levels first thing in the morning.

Charts courtesy of Trading View

The post Bitcoin Price Watch; Here’s Where We’re Looking Tonight appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Escape games booking service powered by blockchain technology announces its Escape Token Sale to boost the blooming quests’ global industry with innovative VR-baked user experience  

Vienna, December 20, 2017 – “Escape” games booking service announced its initiative to deploy world’s first decentralized quests’ aggregator with online booking and payment system. Escape will develop a secure marketplace based on smart contracts as part of global quests’ industry revolution. Escape utility Token will unite the community of quests enthusiasts and VR entertainment on the basis of blockchain.

Escape token platform fueled by the self-titled token will contribute to quest games popularization by reaching more fans, providing high-level services, developing the original content and creating disruptive technology for the integration of VR quests into different facilities.
Escape project implies building an affiliate network to ensure quest technologies global transfer as well as reducing costs for scaling new high-tech quests worldwide.

“According to projections, the quest industry will continue to grow and develop rapidly, though some issues such as constantly increasing CAC, quest reps user intoxication, ideas depletion and product stagnation remain the reasons for the global market scaling mere inhibition.
Escape token will develop the world’s first aggregator of escape games with an internal motivation system based on blockchain, which will bring together existing and new locations. Our Labs in Vienna, St. Petersburg and Moscow will simultaneously launch quests reservation service with a rating and ranking system and Escape marketplace offering new scenarios of quests and riddles to reinvent the industry within blockchain framework and smart contracts. Escape VR quests are already launched in St. Petersburg based on our Malta laboratory recent quest experience developments”, – claims Sergey Kartintsev, Escape CEO.

Escape Tokens can be used by:

• • Players – to pay for games, certificates and discount cards to reduce the price of the games;
• • Partners/quest rooms – to motivate players within loyalty program and lower aggregator commission;
• • Platform – to motivate players within loyalty program;
• There will be two ways of tokens usage in our ecosystem:
  1. As a compensation for aggregator services for platform participants
  2. As a “loyalty card” providing its holder with different discounts and bonuses.

Escape Token pre-sale will begin on the 23-rd of January, 2018, locking up 9-th of February.

Website: https://www.escapetoken.com/#first

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

With so many different altcoins available these days, most people won’t even remember Feathercoin. Although this cryptocurrency has a bit of a checkered history, one of its lead developers has announced he will make a return in 2018. In addition, he has unveiled some interesting plans for this currency, which will celebrate its fifth birthday next year.

What’s Next for Feathercoin?

For those people who have been involved with cryptocurrency for more than five years, the name Feathercoin will ring a bell. This coin was created back in the day when the number of altcoins could be counted on one’s fingers and toes. It was also the era in which Namecoin and Peercoin were still talked about regularly, something that is not the case now. Feathercoin was just one of the few altcoins which existed back then, even though it triggered a domino effect.

More specifically, Feathercoin was one of the first Litecoins to garner great support, and it was the beginning of the Influx of Litecoin Clones. Although Feathercoin borrowed a lot of traits from Litecoin, it was not a copycat project by any means. Instead, it was a Litecoin hard fork, developed by Bushstar and a few other people. Feathercoin’s start as a hard fork came after trying to use it as a separate currency first, but the failure to create a genesis block prevented that from happening.

Once the launch actually happened, the mining difficulty was so low that an insta-mine occurred almost immediately. Close to 6 million coins were mined within the first three weeks, which remains controversial to this day. Later on, the currency was added to BTC-E, although that development is still subject to a lot of speculation as well. Despite those issues, Feathercoin survived, yet it was seemingly semi-abandoned some time ago.

Big was everyone’s surprise when Bushstar suddenly announced his return to the Feathercoin development scene in 2018. Although people knew he was still around, no one had any high hopes for Feathercoin until this week. Although it remains to be seen what Peter Bushnell can bring to the table in this regard, rest assured there are a lot of people out there who have held an FTC balance to this very day.

Returning to Feathercoin proper in the new year to start work on the 0.13 release. The 0.13 codebase gives us the latest soft forks and will then allow us to join other services like Lightning Network, BarterDEX and others that make use of newer tech. #Feathercoin #FTC

— Peter Bushnell (@bushstar) December 17, 2017

According to the tweet above, Bushnell has some big plans for this altcoin. More specifically, he is looking to integrate Lightning Network functionality at some point. That is pretty interesting, although the updated Feathercoin will be based on Litecoin’s 0.13 codebase, by the look of things. This would mean Feathercoin would also receive native SegWit support in the next few months, which will yield some interesting results.

Additionally, Bushstar says he wants to make Feathercoin compatible with BarterDEX. As most people should know by now, atomic swaps are a big part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem right now. Litecoin is a currency often involved with such swaps; thus, it makes a lot of sense to bring similar functionality to Feathercoin. How all this will play out in the coming months remains to be determined, though. It will be pretty interesting to see this coin rise from the ashes; that’s for sure.