Day: December 21, 2017

Litecoin founder Charlie Lee recently liquidated his stack of the very coin he created. A prominent figure in the cryptosphere, he has often been met with a mixture of praise and criticism for his vocal online presence.

Charlie Lee: the Man, the Legacy, the Controversy

In 2011, Charlie Lee founded Litecoin, what many began to brand as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. Charlie Lee envisioned his creation as a Bitcoin alternative that would be easier to mine, faster to send, and cheaper to transact than its brother currency. Little did he know at the time that his creation would actually outperform Bitcoin in 2017, appreciating by 7,500% over the course of the year.

In the aftermath of this meteoric runup, Charlie Lee decided to unburden his wallet of all his Litecoins. Writing about his choice in a December 20 Reddit thread, Lee revealed that he had either donated or sold all of his Litecoin holdings over the past week, save for a handful of physical Litecoins that he intends to hold on to as collectibles. In the post, Lee stated that “Litecoin has been very good” to him, so he no longer needs to rely on its success for his financial stability.

Bearing the name SatoshiLite on Twitter, Lee has become one of the most popular and vocal personalities in crypto. He has accrued over 399,000 Twitter followers and actively weighs in on popular and controversial topics within the community. Couple this social media presence with his time as a lead engineer at Coinbase, and you can see why he has become one of the more admired figures in the crypto community at large.

Ironically, those aspects of Lee’s background also make him one of the most controversial figures in the sector. After Litecoin was added to Coinbase back in May, some people accused Lee of having influenced that decision. He’s also come under fire for allegedly overhyping Litecoin and manipulating its price with promotional tweets.  

The latter criticism, in part, informed Lee’s decision to relieve himself of his holdings. He indicated that it had become too much of a “conflict of interest” for him to hold Litecoin amidst its recent success. In Lee’s words:

…whenever I tweet about [the] Litecoin price or even just good or bads [sic] news, I get accused of doing it for personal benefit. Some people even think I short LTC! So in a sense, it is conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence….there will always be a doubt on whether any of my actions were to further my own personal wealth above the success of Litecoin and crypto-currency in general.

The Future of Litecoin

Lee implored Reddit users to not inquire about the number of coins he had liquidated, and he added that “the amount of coins was a small percentage of GDAX’s daily volume and it did not crash the market.”

He also made it clear that, while he will no longer hold his brainchild currency, he will continue to work on it and nurture its growth. By spending the majority of his time developing Litecoin further, he expects “to be rewarded in lots of different ways, just not directly via ownership of coins.” He concluded by adding that he believes focusing solely on the currency’s development is the best way to promote Litecoin’s maturation.

Perhaps this move will make Lee’s opponents ease up on him. But if his Reddit post is any indication, it may serve to invite new speculation as critics begin to ask why a supposed believer in crypto’s future has opted to liquidate the majority of his holdings. Maybe he’ll catch a break, or maybe Charlie Lee is just a magnet for controversy.

PressCoin is a special ICO. In order to get your hands around the size of this business opportunity, one has to take a step back.

This article explains how the PressCoin tokens will grow over the next five years to service a $100B+ economy, and how to think about the size of the market opportunity that this presents.

The Broken News Media Economy

The role of the rise of Facebook and Google in the downfall of journalism, nd the weakening of democracies around the world is now well understood. In March 2016 Emily Bell, Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School delivered a speech with the title, “The End of the News as We Know It: How Facebook Swallowed Journalism”.

Emily’s words rang clear and were widely reported. In the 20 months since her verdict on the fate of journalism was delivered, her idea has dug in.

The news media economy, a vital instrument in the flow of unbiased and useful information about our world, has become completely dependent on Facebook and Google for its survival. And the industry appears to be helpless to respond. In the 2016 Presidential election shameless propaganda peddled by script kiddies in Macedonia took center stage.

The two giant platform companies, Facebook and Google, supply the vast bulk of internet traffic to news sites, even as they take the lion’s share of the revenue from content they are simple linking to.

This new normal  is not just destroying the news industry, it is also cannibalising the advertising industry. Nearly 30% of the global ad industry (~$560B) is now digital (at about $170B) and around 60% of this is now controlled by Facebook and Google through fully automated online marketplaces. What’s more, nearly all the growth in the digital ad market (the remaining 70% and growing), is moving entirely into Facebook/Google.

In summary the news media industry has been hemorrhaging for two decades, and there are no scalable solutions in sight. And it is as a result, ripe for disruption.

News Industry Innovation Has Stalled

Sadly the depth of the crisis has also stalled innovation.

A wave of VC funded media startups between 2012-2015 showed some promise, but now even these are struggling to thrive, Buzzfeed, Vox and Vice have stalled in their growth trajectory. The industry has shown itself both unable to figure out new business models, and unable to unite to face down the Facebook/Google duopoly.

On the other hand, at least everyone now knows that this is an incredibly important problem. And being a very large market, a successful strategy here is an obvious place for a very disruptive and high risk/reward ratio solution to thrive.

PressCoin provides an entirely new system wide approach to solving this crisis.

“The value of PressCoin isn’t a single platform or revenue stream. PressCoin is a protocol, shared infrastructure and services, reference implementations, and an open developer ecosystem coupled with a startup accelerator program.

PressCoin extends reach into the regular money (or fiat) world by powering PressCoin Wallets, Payment Services, and APIs using partner Swiss-bank real-time crypto/fiat trading platform CointypeX.” – Presscoin.com

PressCoin as the Crypto-Economy for News

What is the new PressCoin economy?

At its heart, PressCoin will be a set of platforms, partners, plumbing, and business functions which will service all actors in a new digital news media eco-system.

Publishers, journalists and editors, curators, commenters and moderators, readers, subscribers, news agencies, merchandizers, digital agencies, PR and media agencies, politicians, citizen reporters, pollsters, advertisers, NGOs, neighborhood organizations, activists, investors and entrepreneurs – indeed all actors in the eco-system will be able to access PressCoin markets and use them to ply their craft.

PressCoin’s platforms will also have deeply embedded markets to enable the principle actors – publishers –  to work and collaborate with each other and take on the platforms together.

To fix today’s broken world – not just the broken news industry – but the broken democratic institutions that have been be failed by the world’s news publishers. Publishers, in turn, will be drawn into participating in the PressCoin economy in three ways:

• Access to state of the art data-driven publishing technology designed to deliver a quality logged in mid-funnel experience to readers;
• The opportunity, through trading in PressCoin to own a share of the platform technology through an ERC20 Smart Contract linking Token ownership to share ownership in PressCoin Plc.
• Access to engaged pool of PressCoin economy readers who can bring additional value to their publications through active participation.

And using PressCoin’s NEWS tokens as the glue to bind them together, inside the PressCoin eco-system publishers will be able to trade in their lifeblood – content, advertising and web traffic.

NEWS Utility and the GDP of the News Economy

This is where the Utility of the NEWS token comes into its own as a disruptive agent for change.

As its use grows – initially to reunite a divided and beleaguered industry –  the demand for the currency will build organic liquidity – bringing wealth back to publishing companies and enabling them to invest in and improve the quality of their content.

Over the past decade, the platform giants have made digital advertising a borderless, global market.

This will accelerate PressCoin’s growth as PressCoin will compete on the same basis – first at the edges, working with early adopters – most likely independent publishers, bloggers and niche news organisations.

And as the GDP of the new PressCoin based economy grows larger publishers will come on board as they realise they have to upgrade their legacy publishing technology or die.

And as the economy grows the value of NEWS itself will become an indicator of the health of the business within it. If the amount of business going on is high, the GDP will grow, if not it will be low.

Governments often seek to inject liquidity into markets by way of printing money.

The ICO process follows the same principle, stimulating economic activity within the ecosystem by providing a means for industry players to transact with each other and collectively grow their wealth.

The Math – PressCoin Growth Projections

The size of the news media, global advertising, and related ecosystems economy is estimated to be anywhere between $650 to $1T in size, depending on how many related (adjacent or vendor) industries one counts.

The goal of PressCoin is to take 5% of this market over the next 5 years – addressing $30B to $50B in opportunity.

And each dollar of revenue, when it moves through an economy composed of interrelated members, has a follow-on economic effect of creating more transactions as the money changes hands in the exchange for new goods/services.

This is measured as the velocity of money, and tends to be higher in more active economies. The sum total of all this transactional activity forms the basis of the utility of the PressCoin cryptocurrency.

In this way PressCoin plans to create high levels of organic, utility-based demand and consequent liquidity in PressCoin token markets. PressCoin’s initial listing on the CointypeX exchange will take place within days of the close of its ICO, once all investor tokens have been distributed.

The post The NEWS Utility Token – Addressing $100B Of Ecosystem GDP appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Bloomberg reports that sources inside Goldman Sachs say the firm intends to set up a desk to trade Bitcoin and other digital currencies. This would likely have far-reaching effects as other investment banks rush to catch up. #BREAKING NEWS

What would #decentralized world look like? 🤔 #INTERVIEW

New cryptocurrency laws are expected to be introduced to the Russia’s national legislature on Dec. 28.

Many of you may have had friends and family asking about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies since their meteoric rise this past year. Even after you answered their questions, many of these people probably did not buy in. Perhaps they didn’t see its value, or perhaps they were scared by prices and volatility. If they won’t buy it, some may have wondered if giving crypto as a holiday gift is a good idea. Maybe not, I would argue.

If it’s a small amount, definitely not bitcoin

Perhaps the granddaddy of all crypto will always be Bitcoin. Even though it is well above US$15K a coin, many still believe it is still severely undervalued. However, Bitcoin can still pose many problems for gifts that are smaller.

For example, my group of friends largely has about a twenty dollar limit for gifts. This is not because we are cheap, but rather that there are many of us. Between gifts for family and friends, it can rack up. For this reason, I would never get my friends Bitcoin at this time. The fees are just too high, and I would not feel comfortable stranding their gift in a paper wallet, telling them, “Maybe one day the fees will be low enough to move that twenty.”

Now, Dogecoin as a smaller denomination gift might be a different story…

If they aren’t technically savvy

Let’s face it. With cryptocurrencies, money is now technology. Currently, cryptos are not all that user-friendly. There are horror stories of people losing millions of dollars by throwing away hard drives, forgetting keys, and letting other forms of data decay ruin their holdings. This, coupled with the various scams and other pitfalls for the non-tech literate population, makes crypto potentially more of a hassle than it’s worth for some gift recipients. They may not thank you, and they may just be needlessly confused about what a private key is, why their public key is so hard to remember, or why the paper wallet you gave them has two QR codes on it.

Even with detailed instruction, many recipients may not know what the heck to do with themselves or, worse, may not understand that throwing away that paper wallet or not backing up mobile wallets can effectively lower the circulating supply of cryptocurrencies.

But if you just have to get someone a cryptocurrency-related item…

Buy them a book about it

The best way to get people into this space is by educating them. Talk with them, take them out to dinner, but most importantly, provide them with tools for self-education. For this, I recommend books and a PDF of the Bitcoin whitepaper. If they’re a visual or an audio learner, maybe send them a link to Andreas Antonopoulos’s YouTube channel. Better yet, watch those videos with them. Cryptocurrency is about community and education. Helping someone see the value in it beyond the skyrocketing prices will help them be a more loyal and enthusiastic user. That’s good for all of us, but especially them.

In short: Give your friends and family the gift of your cryptocurrency knowledge, and let them make the decision to buy or not to buy on their own. Forcing cryptocurrency upon someone who cannot use it or does not want it is less than ideal for everyone.

A bizarre twist on white hat hacking saw a media outlet hire security workers to hack exchanges and expose security flaws. #NEWS

SimpleFX, a Cryptocurrency & Forex broker is not slowing down its pace. At the beginning of December, the company won the award for the Best Cryptocurrency Trading Platform 2017 at the Cryptocurrency World Expo. Shortly after that, SimpleFX launched their highly anticipated mobile trading app, a Simple but Powerful platform for trading Forex, Crypto & much more.

When you open the app, the first thing you notice is the faster loading time. By the first few clicks, you can see that it’s easy to use and fully responsive. SimpleFX is known for listening to its customers and this is clearly reflected in how the app suits the needs of both Forex and Crypto traders. The company decided to design UX/UI completely from scratch to make sure it matches exactly what the customers have been asking for.

Seasoned traders will notice the design of the app resembles Crypto exchanges trading apps, another step taken to make trading simple as never before. When you scroll down, you will see the aggregated shoutbox, a feature which has been abundantly popular among SimpleFX customers.

We have also asked the SimpleFX Team to comment on the app:

“We are very excited to introduce the SimpleFX trading app. We have decided to launch the trading app before rebuilding the Webtrader as over half of our retail clients trade online using mobile devices. Moreover, our clients have been inquiring about a trading app that would be easier to use than MetaTrader 4 platform for trading CFDs. Therefore, we are happy and proud to finally deliver what they have been asking for.

We have been gathering and implementing new ideas & features for the app for the past two years. We hope that our clients will truly enjoy using our app. As always, any feedback will be greatly appreciated. This is why we have launched a bug bounty program: if you think that something should work better or differently, we’re eager to reward your efforts to keep SimpleFX trading as competitive as always. In the upcoming months, we are also planning to rebuild the SimpleFX Webtrader to match the SimpleFX app standards.”

Click here to download SimpleFX app for Android devices.

The post SimpleFX Launches Brand New Trading App! appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Business Waste, a leading waste management company in the United Kingdom, recently announced that it will start accepting cryptocurrencies as payment. The move makes Business Waste “the first in [the waste management] business sector in the world to accept them,” according to spokesperson Mark Hall.

Paying for Waste Removal with Crypto

Business Waste broke the news on its website this Monday, December 18. Besides Bitcoin, the firm plans to accept Ethereum and Litecoin for its commercial waste contracts.

As Bitcoin and crypto gain more mainstream traction, Business Waste feels that it’s in the company’s best interest to accommodate the budding payment method.

“Individuals and companies are trading in Bitcoin and other virtual currencies all over the world,” Mark Hall stated, “so of course we’re going to accept it from our customers.”

The move is an attempt to keep up with the pace of crypto’s public adoption. “It’s not a publicity stunt,” the blog post stresses, “and it’s not taking advantage of the current surge in Bitcoin value.” Rather, the company believes that its choice is a “logical business decision.”

If you’re one of Business Waste’s UK clients and you don’t use cryptocurrencies, don’t worry – you won’t be left behind. The firm will still accept traditional forms of payment, such as cash, checks, bank transfers, debit/credit cards, etc.

Business Waste’s cryptocurrency payment option makes it the latest on a growing list of companies that will incorporate Bitcoin and friends into their business models. In the UK specifically, Virgin Galactic and RE/MAX London both allow their clients to foot their bills using crypto.

This development comes just days after Andrew Bailey, head of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, warned potential investors about the possible pitfalls of getting involved with Bitcoin. Wary of the currency’s volatile, unregulated nature, he likened Bitcoin investing to gambling, stating that individuals should be prepared to “lose [their] money” if they buy in.

While little currently exists in the way of crypto-related legislation in the UK, the government is rolling out a game plan to include exchanges and wallets under established anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing regulations. The government hopes to effect the anticipated rules within the coming months.

FINRA, a self-regulatory authority for the financial industry in the U.S., has issued a new warning about cryptocurrency-related stock fraud.

The meteoric rise of Bitcoin’s fiat value is doing what it took geeks more than 20 years to accomplish. #ANALYSIS

Crowdfunding has become a very important fundraising tool across various sectors including startups and non-profits. However, with the rising popularity of blockchain technology and the concept of ICOs, many new projects are increasingly adopting crowdsales and crowdlending as the preferred method of fundraising. But the rise in trend has also created uncertainties regarding the authenticity of the campaigns among the contributors, which has started to pose a huge challenge to genuine projects and businesses.

Now, Crowd-genie is a platform which is introducing a safe and secure business lending solution that makes it easier for small businesses to borrow funds in the time of need. The platform has various safety features in place to ensure reliability. In addition, it also holds a license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which puts Crowd-genie in the league of very few platforms of such standing. We interacted with the team behind Crowd-genie to gain some insights into the industry sector and their operations.

NewsBTC: Why is licensing so important? How difficult is it to get in Singapore? 

Crowd-genie: Being registered and licensed are two different stories. As peer to peer lending platform involves enormous monetary transactions, a securities license is crucial for regulated lending activities. It’s never an easy task and the application process requires time and effort. In order to get the MAS “Dealing in Securities” license, it took us few months to go through our internal operation processes with the regulatory board, to convince them that our platform is credible.

In general, apart from the minimum capital required, we are required to have a solid compliance manual to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing activities, and protect the interest of borrowers and lenders by having an Escrow Agent who manages all funds. Lending activities also need to be recorded and submitted to MAS on a regular basis.

NewsBTC: Can you please explanation of how reputations coin work?

Crowd-genie: The biggest concern that any lender has is the risk of default. Hence, the borrower should be rewarded if they have excellent past payment history, by lowering the interest rate. For each repayment, from the borrower to lenders, we will incentivise on-time payment by adding CGCOIN “Credits” to the borrowers’ wallets. This will be a spendable asset that will be tracked separately in the Digital Passport. The more CGCOIN Credits earned, the higher their reputation, and that in turn, will increase their chances of getting higher investments from more lenders and/or a lower interest rate. This will add an additional data point to our AI credit assessment system which will add greater depth to our credit assessment. Similarly, for the lenders, CGCOIN could be given to reward speed of deal closure or engagement in the Crowd Genie ecosystem.

NewsBTC: Why is there a need to create a token-based lending platform? 

Crowd-genie: Token-based lending was created in order to build a private capital hub for Asia Pacific using smart contracts to enable lending without borders more efficient, cheaper and safer. Our ultimate goal is to build an Asset Trading Exchange that will democratise trading and allow investment in infrastructure, stocks, cryptocurrency, and bonds across Asia. Although our existing P2P digital loan business is incredibly innovative in the Singapore financial sector, it would have been impossible to scale and offer Asia-wide asset trading before blockchain technology was introduced. To build and scale an asset exchange with pre-blockchain technologies would be prohibitively expensive, and potentially unfeasible due to issues of transparency and trust.

NewsBTC: How will the funds raised be utilized?

Crowd-genie: In order to build towards our vision of becoming the first Asia wide Asset Exchange on Blockchain, we need funds to expand our current loan book to make it more established. Secondly, we need funds for regional expansion and we foresee that there will be costs incurred for the relevant licenses in other countries. Thirdly, we need to recruit more experts to build up the entire ecosystem, a solid and well supported one.

NewsBTC: Who are your team members?

Crowd-genie: Our team consists of experts covering the aspects of payment security, technology, debt capital, cryptocurrency, and business development. Me myself was the board advisor at Anchanto e-commerce, brand management head at P&G and Principal Consultant at Innosight before founding Crowd Genie. Our co-founder, Mr. Bikash has more than 20 years of retail banking experience with Standard Chartered and he was the former COO of Standard Chartered Korea.

 NewsBTC: Anything you would like our readers to know? 

Crowd-genie: Yes, they can keep an eye out on the development of the platform. We will be working according to the Roadmap / Expansion plan as shown below.

More information about Crowd-genie and its ICO is available at – https://www.crowd-genie.com

The post NewsBTC Interviews the Crowd-genie Team appeared first on NEWSBTC.