Rememberful Bitcoin News.
Sberbank — Russia’s largest state-owned bank — is developing a cryptocurrency exchange in Switzerland. #NEWS
Sberbank — Russia’s largest state-owned bank — is developing a cryptocurrency exchange in Switzerland. #NEWS
The heads of the SEC and the SEC are set to testify on cryptocurrencies before Congress next week.
The heads of the SEC and the SEC are set to testify on cryptocurrencies before Congress next week.
UK’s Royal Mint launches its own gold-backed cryptocurrency, Royal Mint Gold (RMG). #NEWS
UK’s Royal Mint launches its own gold-backed cryptocurrency, Royal Mint Gold (RMG). #NEWS
Altcoin exchanges have been a hot topic recently. Top exchanges earned tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in 2017, despite users of virtually all exchanges running into frequent and significant problems. Such a huge market, combined with the lackluster nature of top providers, creates a prime opportunity for new exchanges to enter the market and potentially grow on the scale of magnitudes. For individuals looking for a slice of the pie, KuCoin Shares (KCS) provides an interesting opportunity. KCS is the fuel behind the KuCoin exchange, a new and quickly growing altcoin exchange striving to rival major players such as Binance. The
Altcoin exchanges have been a hot topic recently. Top exchanges earned tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in 2017, despite users of virtually all exchanges running into frequent and significant problems. Such a huge market, combined with the lackluster nature of top providers, creates a prime opportunity for new exchanges to enter the market and potentially grow on the scale of magnitudes.
For individuals looking for a slice of the pie, KuCoin Shares (KCS) provides an interesting opportunity. KCS is the fuel behind the KuCoin exchange, a new and quickly growing altcoin exchange striving to rival major players such as Binance. The Hong Kong-based exchange officially launched on September 15 and has already grown to be the 17th most active cryptocurrency exchange by volume, recording over US$150 million in transactions in the past 24 hours alone.
KuCoin Shares were initially distributed through a private sale and an ICO as a means of funding the development and growth of the exchange. Like Binance’s token (BNB), KCS can be used to pay trading fees, and doing so rewards users with a significant discount. Unlike Binance Coin, however, KuCoin provides immense value to its KuCoin Shares by sharing 50% of all trading fees with all KCS holders.
KCS is subject to daily dividends, with half of the fees being split among all circulating KCS, which will never exceed 100 million KCS (91 million are currently in circulation). As KuCoin charges fees in the currency being traded, KCS holders will passively accumulate a stack of all coins being traded. Such a portfolio could potentially pay off massively if KuCoin were to achieve a status similar to that of Binance, as the latter’s coins have recently outperformed the overall cryptocurrency market since the exchange amassed huge popularity.
KuCoin Shares is currently trading at US$8.00, with a market cap of over US$727 million – currently the 40th largest listed on CoinMarketCap. At current volume and share prices, each KCS yields an estimated daily return of .02%, which works out to under 8% yearly. While this is not a huge amount, if the exchange were to grow to the size of Binance, that number would be closer to 100% yearly. Of course, this does not account for the inevitable price appreciation of the KCS token itself. Additionally, if exchange volumes as a whole grow at even a fraction of the rate they did in 2017, it is likely that the daily rate of return will naturally appreciate over time.
Another great feature of KCS is its buyback and burn program. Every quarter, KuCoin will use 10% of its profits to purchase and burn KuCoin Shares. This program will continue each quarter that KuCoin is profitable until 100 million of the 200 million coins in the total supply have been burned.
Very recently, there have been issues with the aforementioned daily dividends. Speculators suggest that actual dividends are not paying out as highly as they should be. Supporters of the exchange argue that KuCoin has been growing very rapidly, and there are naturally some growing pains. Any current issues, like ones that emerged in the past, will be addressed and corrected by the team. Another major point of skepticism concerns future dividends. While dividends will never be removed, there are many rumors suggesting that the percentage of fees shared with KCS holders will be reduced from 50% to 15% in either March or April, when the 50% rate is no longer assured.
Regardless, KuCoin as an exchange has been growing at an impressive rate. Many investors are looking to earn a share of the massive profits achieved by cryptocurrency exchanges, and the dividend system provides a huge opportunity for speculators that anticipate exchanges to grow to handle much more activity and volume than what is currently possible. Investors who are bullish on these types of coins may also be interested in COSS, a much smaller coin that also grants regular dividends tied to trading fees from its exchange, Coss.io, to holders.
South Korea saw more than $600 mln of illegal crypto trading to date, citing examples of large remittance trading with Japan and Australia. #NEWS
South Korea saw more than $600 mln of illegal crypto trading to date, citing examples of large remittance trading with Japan and Australia. #NEWS
Leo Blankfein of Goldman Sachs says no to opening their own crypto trading desk, but the bank has already invested in a crypto trading desk in 2015. #NEWS
Leo Blankfein of Goldman Sachs says no to opening their own crypto trading desk, but the bank has already invested in a crypto trading desk in 2015. #NEWS
Photo company Kodak announced it was delaying its token sale by “several weeks” on Wednesday, the day it was originally supposed to launch.
Photo company Kodak announced it was delaying its token sale by “several weeks” on Wednesday, the day it was originally supposed to launch.
The Verge |
Square made an illustrated children’s story to explain bitcoin
The Verge Governments, journalists, experts, and more have issued or written guidance on how to understand bitcoin. But none of these guides are as helpful as Square’s new illustrated story about the birth of Bitcoin that even small children can understand. The … Square shares climb after the payments company launches bitcoin trading for most usersCNBC Square Cash expands bitcoin buying and selling to all usersTechCrunch Square CEO Dorsey says “most” Cash users can now buy bitcoinMarketWatch Business Insider –9to5Mac –Motley Fool all 11 news articles » |
The Verge | Square made an illustrated children's story to explain bitcoin The Verge Governments, journalists, experts, and more have issued or written guidance on how to understand bitcoin. But none of these guides are as helpful as Square's new illustrated story about the birth of Bitcoin that even small children can understand. The ... Square shares climb after the payments company launches bitcoin trading for most users Square Cash expands bitcoin buying and selling to all users Square CEO Dorsey says "most" Cash users can now buy bitcoin |
A lot of interesting things are happening in the United Arab Emirates as we speak. Perhaps the biggest project to date is a completely new city which is home to driverless cars, greenhouses, and villas powered by solar energy. The current cost of building this new city comes to $354 million, although that number may increase in the future. This radical venture has already attracted a lot of positive attention. A Completely Different Kind of City It almost appears as if the UAE is trying to make amends for being one of the world’s largest oil producers. In reality, its production of
A lot of interesting things are happening in the United Arab Emirates as we speak. Perhaps the biggest project to date is a completely new city which is home to driverless cars, greenhouses, and villas powered by solar energy. The current cost of building this new city comes to $354 million, although that number may increase in the future. This radical venture has already attracted a lot of positive attention.
It almost appears as if the UAE is trying to make amends for being one of the world’s largest oil producers. In reality, its production of oil is not the problem, but rather the amount of greenhouse gases the country has emitted over the past few decades. Indeed, the government has acknowledged it is time for some big changes, and they are more than willing to put up a lot of money for specific projects. This is just the latest step in the country’s mission to become a cleaner nation in general.
These past few years, the UAE’s government has attempted to lower the nation’s dependency on fossil fuels. There is a growing focus on developing environmentally-friendly sources of energy. This shift will not be easy, but the UAE may very well be in the best position to make big things happen. While its latest venture may not necessarily become a big success right away, it is evident there are some exciting opportunities to explore.
More specifically, a company called Diamond Developers is working on one of the largest projects in this area to date. It is in the process of building a completely new city 18 miles outside of Dubai’s city center. Unlike any other city in the world today, this new location will produce more energy than it consumes. As such, it has been dubbed a “Sustainable City”, and will set the government back a whopping $354 million. If all goes according to plan, construction of the city and its infrastructure should be complete by 2019.
What makes this Sustainable City so appealing is how it will only produce clean and renewable energy. There will be a very strong focus on solar energy, with solar panels on every villa in the city itself. Moreover, there will be various greenhouses throughout the city, which should help out a lot as well. Last but not least, the city will gladly embrace driverless cars, a technology which is quickly becoming popular all over the world. It is unclear if they will be powered by electricity or another environmentally-friendly fuel.
Construction of the Sustainable City began back in 2013. Constructing a 113-acre city in a place where no services were present beforehand has been a challenge, but things are progressing nicely. Even though the city focuses on driverless cars, most of the neighborhoods will be completely car-free at all times. Many residents will take electric-powered public transport. Horse-drawn buggies are another option for those who prefer a more scenic journey. Every homeowner will get a free electric golf cart or a $10,000 subsidy toward buying a vehicle that meets the city’s guidelines.
The first part of the UAE’s Sustainable City is already in place. 500 villas and 89 apartment buildings have been erected already. There’s also plenty of office and retail space capable of turning this city into a bustling hub of activity. During the ongoing second phase of construction, contractors will build a school, a mosque, a museum, and a mall. With homes starting at “just” $1 million, there seems to be genuine interest in what the UAE attempts to achieve in this location.
A startup develops a new Blockchain protocol to make an exchange reliable for big players. #SPONSORED
A startup develops a new Blockchain protocol to make an exchange reliable for big players. #SPONSORED
The relatively high transaction fees on the Bitcoin network were a major topic of conversation last year, but these fees have been plummeting so far in 2018. According to data from CoinMetrics, bitcoin miners are now collecting less than a third of …
The relatively high transaction fees on the Bitcoin network were a major topic of conversation last year, but these fees have been plummeting so far in 2018. According to data from CoinMetrics, bitcoin miners are now collecting less than a third of the value they were collecting in fees at one point in December 2017.
So what’s causing this decline in the costs of on-chain transactions? Is it as simple as declining demand leading to a lower price? Are there other factors at play? Let’s take a closer look.
In 2017, the congestion on the Bitcoin blockchain led to a bidding war over block space, especially as speculative interest in bitcoin continued to rise over the course of the year.
According to CoinMetrics, bitcoin transaction fees started 2017 at an average of $0.30, but they eventually peaked at over $40 in December. As the price tripled during a month-long stretch from mid-November to mid-December, those who were purchasing bitcoin for the first time simply did not care about how much they were paying in on-chain transaction fees.
This chart from CoinMetrics shows the bitcoin price and average transaction fee.
As the speculative frenzy around the bitcoin asset has calmed a bit in 2018, the number of transactions broadcast to the Bitcoin network has also declined. According to data from Blockchain, the number of transactions added to the mempool per second has declined by nearly 50 percent from the December highs.
The number of transactions added to the mempool per second is at the same levels as May 2016. Data via Blockchain.info.
It’s possible that bitcoin fees are now lower simply because the FOMO around getting some bitcoin before the price goes to the moon has subsided, leading to a decline in demand for block space.
Since transaction fees are denominated in bitcoin, a falling bitcoin price can also mean a decrease in U.S.-dollar denominated transaction fees.
This chart from CoinMetrics shows the level of correlation between transaction fees denominated in bitcoin and U.S. dollars.
Although the reasoning behind the drop in transaction fees seems pretty straightforward, there could also be other factors at play.
One explanation that has been floated on social media is that a large amount of new hashing power has come online, which has increased the frequency at which blocks are found. This would effectively increase the capacity of the network.
The average number of blocks mined per day should be around 144, based on the 10-minute block time target, but around 164 blocks were mined per day in the month of January 2018. However, this is not a new phenomenon.
As BitGo engineer Mark Erhardt recently pointed out on Twitter, Bitcoin has long operated at a rate faster than 10 blocks per minute due to the fact that adjustments to the mining difficulty are only made every two weeks. As more hashpower is added to the Bitcoin network during nearly every difficulty adjustment period, the pace at which blocks are mined increases until the difficulty is eventually readjusted once again.
Having said that, the 164 blocks per day number from January 2018 is a bit more than normal, and 162 blocks were mined per day in December 2017 as well. For 2017 as a whole, the average number of blocks mined per day was around 153, which is near the historical average per day.
So, if an extra 10 blocks were being mined per day in December 2017 and January 2018 (as compared to the all-time average), then there was effectively an increase in the supply of block space by more than 600MB over that time, as blocks have been a little over 1MB in size each.
In addition to the increased supply of block space by way of more blocks mined on a daily basis, there have also been a number of efficiency improvements enabled in terms of how the blockchain is used by those who wish to create transactions. Bitcoin writer and researcher David Harding recently wrote on this topic on the Bitcoin Wiki. Some methods of cutting down on transactions fees mentioned by Harding included transaction batching, Segregated Witness (SegWit), dynamic fee estimation and UTXO consolidation.
Transaction batching is when a payment is sent to multiple recipients via one on-chain transaction. Data made available by outputs.today appears to show an increase in the use of batching over the course of 2017, including an noticable increase starting in late November 2017.
Another article written by Harding indicates this technique could enable transaction fee savings of up to 80 percent.
Another way to lower transaction fees for everyone is to use SegWit, which is a soft fork that has enabled an increase to the block size limit (and thus the supply of block space). That increase to the block size limit is only enabled if users take advantage of the feature. At press time, around 14 percent of transactions were using SegWit.
While there was an increase in SegWit transactions over the weekend, this appears to have been caused by users taking advantage of the currently low fees to move their funds to SegWit addresses.
In addition to batching and SegWit, other methods of using the blockchain more efficiently, such as UTXO consolidation and dynamic fee estimation, may also be leading to generally lower transaction fees.
While fees paid on the network have clearly declined, some bitcoin wallets have not taken advantage of the new state of the transaction fee market.
Relatively new website transactionfee.info allows bitcoin users to check the price efficiency of any recent transaction. Users of the site can also let others know which wallet, exchange or other bitcoin service was used to generate the transaction. This allows visitors to get a better idea of which services are best at estimating an efficient transaction fee price.
On the homepage, digital asset brokerage Coinbase is often listen as a sender of transactions that could have been sent for an 80 to 90 percent lower fee.
According to the site, other bitcoin services that routinely use much larger fees than what is necessary include ShapeShift, Xapo, Electrum and Gemini.
Coinbase has received some criticism due to the fact that the extremely popular bitcoin custodian has not implemented batching or SegWit. Having said that, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong recently tweeted that the company is working on both methods of lowering fees for their customers.
Putting all of this information together, it becomes easier to understand why bitcoin transaction fees have been falling so quickly this year. However, the large number of different variables at play make it difficult to say there is one reason that fees have declined. As these variables change again in the future, fees could rise rather quickly once again.
This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.
Reports of Samsung’s entry into the cryptocurrency mining space is good news for decentralisation. #MINING
Reports of Samsung’s entry into the cryptocurrency mining space is good news for decentralisation. #MINING
Digital payments company Square has rolled bitcoin payments out to most of its Cash App users.
Digital payments company Square has rolled bitcoin payments out to most of its Cash App users.
In a statement from the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), an emergency relief action was filed to shut down AriseBank, which it described as “an outright scam.”In a growing list of enforcement actions by the SEC, the complaint against AriseBank …
In a statement from the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), an emergency relief action was filed to shut down AriseBank, which it described as “an outright scam.”
In a growing list of enforcement actions by the SEC, the complaint against AriseBank stated that the Dallas-based company had used deceptive tactics to raise what they claim was $600 million of its $1 billion goal in just two months. Co-founders Jared Rice Sr. and Stanley Ford are being charged with alleged fraud and issuing unregistered securities during its ICO.
On January 18, 2018, AriseBank had announced the purchase of two FDIC insured banks, KFMC Bank Holding Company and TPBG, neither of which exist. AriseBank also offered customers an AriseBank-branded VISA card to spend any of the 700-plus cryptocurrencies using their purported algorithmic trading application that automatically trades in various cryptocurrencies, in addition to allegedly failing to disclose the criminal background of key executives.
Co-director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, Stephanie Avakian, said, “We allege that AriseBank and its principals sought to raise hundreds of millions from investors by misrepresenting the company as a first-of-its-kind decentralized bank offering its own cryptocurrency to be used for a broad range of customer products and services.”
Avakian continued, “We sought emergency relief to prevent investors from being victimized by what we allege to be an outright scam.”
AriseBank had recently announced it was teaming up with boxing legend Evander Holyfield to help raise money for disaster preparedness. Now, however, a cease-and-desist order has been executed, their office and executives homes have been raided, their assets have been seized, their website is down and their ICO has been stopped.
SEC co-director, Steven Peikin, said, “This is the first time the Commission has sought the appointment of a receiver in connection with an ICO fraud. We will use all of our tools and remedies to protect investors from those who engage in fraudulent conduct in the emerging digital securities marketplace.”
This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.
The DragonChain project has quickly taken the world by storm in the past few months. This Disney-backed blockchain venture has a lot of potential, assuming the team can get their business in order. The project has been lauded as being the “most secure, flexible, and business-ready blockchain platform.” It is quite a high expectation to live up to, but there is no reason to think this particular project can’t succeed. DragonChain in a Nutshell There are a lot of business opportunities to explore when it comes to blockchain technology. DragonChain positions itself as a solution which allows users to retain complete
The DragonChain project has quickly taken the world by storm in the past few months. This Disney-backed blockchain venture has a lot of potential, assuming the team can get their business in order. The project has been lauded as being the “most secure, flexible, and business-ready blockchain platform.” It is quite a high expectation to live up to, but there is no reason to think this particular project can’t succeed.
There are a lot of business opportunities to explore when it comes to blockchain technology. DragonChain positions itself as a solution which allows users to retain complete control of their data. Sensitive business logic and smart contract functionality will be kept proprietary, for obvious reasons. The platform will operate in a scalable and serverless fashion where established programming languages are compatible from day one. This will certainly be appealing to developers looking to get involved with DragonChain and its features.
Even though DragonChain seemingly advertises itself as a magical blockchain platform, its end goals are far more down-to-earth. In a perfect world, DragonChain will compete with the likes of Ethereum. Though it is not a blockchain platform powered by actual dragons, the functionality it provides will pack quite the punch. Considering that this project has been around since 2014, it is evident that a lot of research was done beforehand.
Disney’s blockchain platform was developed throughout 2015 and 2016, before it was eventually launched as an official business-backed venture in 2017. The platform is not fully ready as of right now, but we do know there will be a strong focus on business-oriented use cases and smart contracts. These use cases may include digital identity systems, ticketing, voting, auditing, and payments.
It also seems DragonChain can be used in connection with some of the more innovative financial products. This includes building new peer-to-peer financial derivatives such as futures, bonds, and interest rate swaps. Once all of the technology is in place, we will quickly find out whether or not any of this is actually possible. With the smart contract protocols and APIs currently being developed, DragonChain will reach its full potential sooner rather than later.
The DragonChain roadmap still has plenty of things waiting to be completed. Unlike other projects, the team focuses heavily on training, developing academic programs, and so forth. In March, we will see the commercial version of DragonChain launch on AWS, which will be an interesting stress test. Later this year, the team will implement a reference proof of work algorithm, introduce Heroku add-ons, and launch the commercial Dragonchain dashboard and marketplace. If everything goes according to plan, these features should become accessible by July.