Day: January 26, 2018

China’s would-be digital currency investors have found clever ways to circumvent China’s trading ban. #ANALYSIS

Internet monopolies are easy to manipulate it seems. Especially if they are ad revenue driven and don’t really care who or what is advertised. Both Google and Facebook have been a hotbed for scams, phishing websites and malware recently, especially those involving crypto mining.

Cyber security researchers Trend Micro have discovered a surge in Coinhive web miner detections due to a malvertising campaign abusing Google’s advertising platform. According to the report they team discovered that advertisements found on high-traffic sites not only used Coinhive, a popular open source crypto mining script, but also a separate web miner that connects to a private pool.

Ads abused

Google’s DoubleClick advertising platform had been compromised. Malicious ads were served in Japan, France, Taiwan, Italy, and Spain according to the research. As of January 24 the cyber security specialists recorded a 285% surge in Coinhive miners originating from DoubleClick advertisements. The malvertising websites contained two different mining scripts which work in the background, leeching off users’ computer hardware to mine for crypto currency. The target coin is usually Monero as it is anonymous and cannot be tracked back in the blockchain.

According to a Trend Micro blog post;

“The advertisement has a JavaScript code that generates a random number between variables 1 and 101. When it generates a variable above 10, it will call out coinhive.min.js to mine 80% of the CPU power, which is what happens nine out of ten times. For the other 10%, a private web miner will be launched. The two web miners were configured with throttle 0.2, which means the miners will use 80% of the CPU’s resources for mining.”

Other reports indicate that YouTube has also been affected as it runs the same Google ad code. Secutiry researchers commented;

“YouTube was likely targeted because users are typically on the site for an extended period of time. This is a prime target for cryptojacking malware, because the longer the users are mining for cryptocurrency the more money is made.”

Countermeasures

One way to prevent such incursions is to block Javascript from running in the web browser however this may render some legitimate websites unusable. Keeping browsers patched with their latest updates also helps to prevent rogue code however hackers are continually evolving their methods of attack.

As cryptocurrencies become more prevalent the level of sophistication for mining malware will increase. Exchange hacks and coin theft is also becoming more prevalent. Ad driven companies such as Google and Facebook rarely vet their paying advertisers and will only do so after something such as this has happened.

The post Mining Malware Abuses Google Ads and YouTube appeared first on NewsBTC.

Other than NEM, the middle BB is acting as a good support line in most altcoins. Because we were expecting Lumens and EOS to appreciate, we can see the big role the middle BB had in shoring prices.

I anticipate more buy pressure as the week comes to a close but my main focus will be on LTC and let’s see what happens to that double bottoms.

Let’s dissect these charts:

NEM Under-Valuation despite Close below Minor Support Trend Line

Price eventually broke below the minor support trend line but the follow through has not been impressive so far.

In fact after the trickle down, NEM found support at around $0.75 before reversing.

While it did so, notice the double bar reversal candlestick and a bullish candlestick below the lower BB? Does this hold significance in the coming sessions? Yes indeed it does.

While NEM bears would be in charge if prices close below $0.75, our attention will shift to the middle BB and the minor resistance trend line as potential ceilings. I recommend patience at current levels because NEM is trying to find bearing.

Lumens aim at $0.73

The path towards $0.73 is on and despite a tad bit of bear pressure yesterday, Lumens buyers found support at the middle BB and wriggled its way higher.

As mentioned yesterday, last week’s highs will be definitive and all we have to do is what and see what price action has got up its sleeves.

If there is a shift of trend, buyers must close above $0.73 or if not, prices must at least close above the middle BB in our entry chart.

NEO Support is at the Middle BB

We are shifting the odds of this week closing as a bullish candlestick close to 1.

If NEO continues with their higher highs then two things must be happen:

First, prices must close above that very minor resistance trend line in our entry chart and secondly, prices must stay above the middle BB which is our short term support in the sessions to come.

Any close below the middle BB and sellers can begin loading up their positions.

Remember, prices are trending at key Fibonacci retracement level anchoring on last week’s high lows and if bears drive NEO value below the 78.6% Fibonacci, we can just forget about going long.

LTC Prices Oscillating Inside a Descending Wedge

No fireworks as far as LTC price action is concerned and unless some minor but key trend lines are broken in the coming sessions, sellers would still be in charge.

As far as we are concerned, LTC price action is moving tightly within a descending wedge but after yesterday, January 23’s double bar reversal pattern was confirmed as a double bottom.

Now, if we expect buy sparks, we need a convincing break above the resistance trend line otherwise we remain in a downtrend.

EOS Inches Higher

So far, so good and as we can see from the chart, EOS buyers found a trampoline at 38.2% Fibonacci level and chances are they might test $15.

Despite the move up, there have been some obstacles especially after yesterday’s bearish candlestick which threatened to derail our bullish projection.

Because of last week’s higher highs, the best buyers can do this week is perhaps test $15 which is pretty nice. However, chances of clearing $18 are low unless of course something trend changing happens.

All charts courtesy of Trading View

The post Altcoin Analysis: NEO, STELLAR LUMENS, EOS, LTC and NEM appeared first on NewsBTC.

FOMO Moments

Looking at the top 25 cryptos during today’s Asian trading session a clear winner has once again emerged. Markets have failed to gain momentum over the past couple of days and have largely been trading sideways. The top ten by market capacity are all in the red and only RaiBlocks is showing solid gains.

According to Coinmarketcap XRB is up almost 22% in the past 24 hours. After a week of down trending from a high of $20 it has made a comeback from a reversal at $13 yesterday and is currently heading back upwards trading at $17.63 at the time of writing.

News that the launch of its underlying product, the RaiExchange, is imminent would have caused the renewed interest in this altcoin. People have been waiting patiently for the exchange to come online and according to the RaiExchange Twitter feed it will not ne long:

“So close we can taste it.. All of our account management features are now live. Two-factor auth, password management, security logs, session management, password reset, etc.”

Raiblocks is different to most cryptocurrencies as it operates on a ‘block lattice’ as opposed to a chain. Each block contains its own transaction and updates account balances mathematically after each exchange; there is no public ledger with a transaction history.

XRB has a market capacity of $2.3 billion, with 133 million total supply, all of which are already circulating. It is traded heavily on Korean exchange Kucoin which has over 70% of the volume.

The post The leading altcoin of the moment – RaiBlocks appeared first on NewsBTC.

This week the well known Canadian digital asset exchange, Coinsquare announced its plans to launch an initial public offering (IPO) hoping to raise $150 million CAD ($120Mn USD). Coinsquare hopes the funding will help the platform be a direct competitor with cryptocurrency brokerage services like Coinbase and other U.S. based exchanges.

Also read: Russia Finalizes Federal Law on Cryptocurrency Regulation

Coinsquare Plans to Launch Public Shares On the Toronto Stock Exchange

The Toronto-based digital currency platform Coinsquare has seen enormous growth over the past year, according to the company. The exchange considers itself a “coin management system” that enables the trading of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin core, ethereum, bitcoin cash, dash, and litecoin. The company was founded in 2015 by Virgile Rostand, and in 2018 the platform has acquired over 100,000 verified users. Coinsquare has been swapping roughly $10Mn USD worth of BTC, BCH, LTC, and ETH on a daily basis.

Now the firm is shooting for a $120Mn IPO in order to expand the company’s resources overseas. Coinsquare will sell its IPO shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) in order to gain much broader attention. This is in contrast to much smaller cryptocurrency focused businesses in Canada utilizing a reverse takeover (RTO) scheme to be listed on the stock exchanges’ smaller subsidiary TSX Ventures.

“We’re racing, but racing to do it right,” Coinsquare’s Chief Executive Officer Cole Diamond stated in a recent interview.

We’re going to take the old-school route as an IPO to the Toronto Stock Exchange.  

Coinsquare Hopes to be a Strong Competitor to Coinbase

The Canadian exchange plans to expand to other countries like the U.S. and UK by the second quarter of 2018. Additionally, the company announced plans to list ripple (XRP) this February, and each following month the platform will list one digital currency per month. Coinsquare thinks the expansion will help it compete with much larger exchanges in the world.

“The United States and the U.K. market are next,” Diamond explains. “We believe that we will be a strong competitor to Coinbase and other exchanges in the U.S. by the end of the year.”

Being a competitor against the San Francisco based exchange Coinbase will be a tall task for Coinsquare, but the company thinks the expansion and IPO will help. Just recently Coinbase raised $100Mn creating a $1.6B valuation for the firm, and has also begun listing more coins. Additionally, this past December the Coinbase president, Asiff Hirji, said in an interview that the company would likely go ‘public’ some day. “The most obvious path of Coinbase is to go public at some point, but there’s a lot for us to do between now and then, whenever that date is,” Hirji hinted in 2017. Coinsquare’s IPO just may give it a competitive edge against brokerage giants like Coinbase by enabling the company’s growth through public investment.

What do you think about Coinsquare launching an IPO to be listed on TSX? Do you think it can help it compete with Coinbase? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock, and Coinsquare. 

Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.

The post Coinsquare to Launch IPO on TSX — Hopes to Compete With Coinbase appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Priced at just fractions of a cent last November, the TRONIX (TRX)  token was essentially worthless. Come December, however, and it shot up to a peak of around 25 cents, before sliding back to around 6-7 cents in mid-January. With a market capitalization of around USD 6 billion (similar to Dash) Tron sits amongst the top 20 digital assets — inspiring many to ask… well… why?

In Davos at this year’s World Economic Forum, Bitcoin has continued to be a polarizing subject, attracting both criticism and praise from business figures, industry experts, and world leaders.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert J. Shiller had the following to say about the cryptocurrency: “I tend to think of Bitcoin as an interesting experiment, not a permanent feature of our lives. We’re over-emphasizing Bitcoin, we should broaden it out to blockchain, which will have other applications.” Shiller is not alone, other Bitcoin critics have conceded that they do see genuine promise in blockchain, the decentralized technology behind cryptocurrencies. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, believes it can be used to improve Facebook.

Bitcoin itself, however, has not yet convinced the large majority of its staying power, this often due to the token’s lack of stability. It hit a record high when it approached $20,000 in mid-December, but then tumbled rapidly, falling to below $12,000 within a few days. As we’ve seen, the token’s value has continued to shift ever since, with frequent drops and recoveries.

Cecilia Skingsley, deputy governor of the Swedish Central Bank, was also skeptical about Bitcoin during the panel session. “It’s too volatile to be used as money,” she asserted. Adding that digital currencies: “Don’t store value, they fluctuate, and they’re not at a stable rate of exchange”. This is the reason payment processor Stripe gave for its decision to end support for payments using Bitcoin. According to the company: “[Bitcoin] evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange.”

There were, however, others in Davos who saw reasons for optimism. “I think this is one of the most audacious, generous and profound inventions that I’ve witnessed in my career,” said Neil Rimer, general partner and co-founder of Index Ventures SA, during the panel. “We’re nine years into this experiment. It’s gone well at times and quite poorly. It could fail completely and go to zero, but it has accomplished a number of things I think are remarkable.” With regards to regulation, Rimer conceded: “I do think [Bitcoin] needs to be regulated, just like anything I would want to become mainstream should be regulated.”

Cryptocurrencies are a diverse topic, but what’s certain is that the discussions in Davos have further brought it on to the world stage — which can only be a good thing for the cryptosphere. This sentiment is echoed in a statement by Nic Cary, co-founder of cryptocurrency wallet Blockchain, who said: “To us, we are seeing increases in transaction volume and to me, that’s one of the first indicators that more people are using this in their daily lives and that’s really interesting to me.”

The post World Economic Forum: is Bitcoin Too Volatile to be Used as Currency? appeared first on NewsBTC.

Though the Coincheck theft may superficially resemble 2014’s Mt. Gox hack, the impact on cryptocurrencies is not nearly as significant.

Market capitalization, for new and old investors alike, represents a deceptively complex figure. While many suggest that market cap is the proper way to determine the overall value of a coin, the value displayed by a coin’s market cap is a number that can and is easily manipulated by savvy and often unethical development teams.

When inexperienced investors mistakenly base valuations off of a coin’s price per unit, most investors will advise them to instead check its market cap, which is the price per unit multiplied by its circulating supply. While this represents a vastly more accurate approach, it is important to recognize that market capitalization is still an imperfect measurement, as it completely ignores the liquidity and non-circulating supply of the coin.

A major offender when it comes to “market cap manipulation” is Dentacoin. Dentacoin (DCN) maintains a market cap of just over US$545 million. At rank 57 on CoinMarketCap, this is not an unreasonable number for a project of its size and ambitions.

However, DCN’s market cap does not reflect the fact that just 4.5% of all tokens are in circulation. Of the 8 trillion DCN tokens that exist, only 325 billion are currently in circulation. Moreover, more than 90% of the supply is locked up in smart contracts, to be sold in future token sales or rewarded to the founders. The remaining tokens out of circulation are primarily held by the founders. These tokens are not frozen, but have yet to be moved.

Each year from 2018 to 2044, a portion of almost 80% of the total supply will be unfrozen and sold by the developer team. This year, 1.9% of the supply will be unfrozen and sold, increasing the total supply by 152 billion. This increase of over 30% would require US$152 million in new purchases just to maintain the current token price.

The other shortcoming of market capitalization is that it does not account for illiquidity in markets. In smaller, less traded currencies, this oversight has huge implications. For example, there are likely over 100 currencies listed on CoinMarketCap that can see their market cap double with market buys of US$1,000 or less. In the vast majority of cases, when coins rise thousands or even tens of thousands of percentage points in a day, it is due to a relatively minuscule amount of market purchases that have a tremendous impact on the market cap of the coin.

Illiquidity also carries major consequences in the opposite direction. For holders of, again, primarily small coins, market caps can deceive holders into believing that their coin is worth more than it is. Even though one’s bag may grow tremendously, as with the coins pictured above, this does not mean one can sell any meaningful portion of their holdings at that value. It is just as possible that market selling a small amount could cause similarly drastic losses of 80 or even 90% in a day.

Fortunately, the majority of coins do not abuse the faith put in market capitalization by investors and speculators. Beyond this, information regarding total supplies can be easily found in projects’ whitepapers, and understanding liquidity is simply a matter of checking buy and sell books along with a coin’s volume. Market cap, when fully understood, still provides valuable information for traders.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

On January 24, investment ratings company Weiss Ratings released its ratings of 74 cryptocurrencies. While the list is only available for purchase, it was possible to access it for free under a specific subdomain on the company’s site, which allowed many individuals to download, share, and read the list.

While some individuals were elated to see strong ratings for their personal favorites, many more were infuriated and perplexed by the seemingly unresearched or even random grades given. Ethereum and EOS topped the ratings, each receiving a solid B, while Bitcoin was assigned an unimpressive C+.

Founded in 1971, Weiss Ratings has been a respected provider of investment ratings for decades. However, the reputation of the company seems to have diminished rapidly since its peak in the 1990s. Following a 2009 SEC settlement, Weiss Ratings has become, in the eyes of many, a service of questionable merit and legitimacy.

Unfortunately, the cryptocurrency ratings provided by the company are being similarly questioned. Many people are furious that Bitcoin received a lower grade than the B- assigned to Cardano, whose value is almost entirely derived from its whitepaper and team. Even more are enraged that established and respected projects like Counterparty, Monero, Stellar, and Lisk received the same solid C grade as meme coin Dogecoin and vaporware Verge.

Despite the inconsistencies in the report, some investors seem to have placed trades according to the ratings. Steem, which enjoyed a B- rating (and one of just five coins rated above a C+) saw an instant pump of over 30%, rising from US$4.30 to US$5.90. The coin has since continued to appreciate, and currently sits just below US$6.30.

No coin received a B+ or higher, and none were pegged with a D- or lower. Of the 74 coins listed, only 20 did not receive a letter grade of a C, with 5 coins seeing a B, and 15 ending up with a D. The letter grades range from A to E, with each letter corresponding to the “strength” of investment, from excellent (A) to very weak (E).

Perhaps the most unfair rating was assigned to GameCredits, whose atrocious D+ compares the coin to massive pump-and-dump Einsteinium, which received the same grade. Fortunately for GameCredits supporters, the poor rating did not seem to have any meaningful effect on its price. In fact, the coin has recently surged, and has even appreciated over 20% since the ratings went live.

While it was insulting that a project like GameCredits, which has four years of active development, a team of over 100 members, and heavyweight partnerships with industry leaders like Unity, received such an awful grade, supporters of the project appear largely unfazed.

While these ratings did not appear to have a major effect on the majority of coins listed, this event does have larger implications. The role of institutional investors has been a hot topic since more and more entities have entered the fray. If these ratings reflect the capability of institutional traders in the world of blockchain, then traditional investment experience plays a minute role in the ability of a cryptocurrency trader.