Day: March 29, 2018

The Peoples Bank of China (PBoC) held its 2018 National Currency Gold and Silver Work Video and Telephone Conference on March 28 where among all things currency related the continuation of strict regulations on cryptocurrency was announced.

Conference Establishes Strategy to Protect Yuan

Deputy Governor of the PBoC Fan Yifei attended and delivered a speech in which measures to protect the value of the Yuan were outlined.

Though much of the time was dedicated to acknowledging the accomplishments of the PBoC through the previous year there were other points on the agenda, one of which was the development of the PBoC’s own digital currency and the control of unofficial ones.

Speaking of the government developed digital currency Fan said “Efforts were made (by the PBoC to strengthen the management … steadily promoted the development of the central bank’s digital currency,” and then later in the speech when naming objectives for the coming year he called for the bank to “solidly promote the R&D of the central bank’s digital currency,”

As he moved on to measures to protect the value of the Yuan he talked extensively about detecting and eliminating counterfeit currency in the system as well as the need to “carry out rectification of various types of virtual currencies”

Though he never spoke outright about Chinas regulatory stance on cryptocurrency the absence was emblematic of the government’s strict though often self-conflicting stance.

Do What I say, Not What I do

Once a dominant market for Bitcoin China’s crackdown on both foreign and domestic cryptocurrency has been extensive. Banning ICOs, crypto related websites and freezing accounts used in digital trading have all become standard practice in the country.

PBoC governor Zhou Xiaochuan has been clear that the country does not recognize digital currencies as it does traditional fiat saying the “The banking system does not accept it.”

At the same time, the PBoC is planning its own ‘official’ digital currency called DCEP (Digital Currency for Electronic Payment) which will be in development through to 2019. The currency will strictly suit the needs of the country according to Xiaochuan, who elucidated by saying it should focus on “convenience, rapidity, and low cost in a retail payment system while taking into account security and protection of privacy.”

China has even bucked the trend that most other countries with stringent regulatory policies have established. That of damning cryptocurrency while embracing blockchain and distributed ledger technology. Xiaochuan has warned that the expansion of the emerging technologies could have a negative effect on consumers and cause financial instability.

Yet the Government has sponsored crypto and blockchain related research and development for years and just last week sent a delegation to Australia to study how blockchain can be used to advance the countries fintech industry.

It seems China’s fear is not of the developing technology but, of developing technology creating an alternative to the Yuan and of the hundreds of billions in lost revenue that may result from people bypassing the official currency in favor of a global decentralized digital one that allows them to spend how, where and when they wish.

The post China is Still Planning to Launch its Own National Cryptocurrency appeared first on NewsBTC.

OKEx has halted token withdrawal and futures trading amid irregular activities that pulled down bitcoin futures price significantly.

Mailchimp just became the newest in a growing list of social media platforms to ban cryptocurrency related advertising, citing excessive fraud related to the industry.

Mailchimp Says Discussion is Acceptable

The email-based advertising platform that features an adorable monkey in a cap has said no to cryptocurrencies across the board. According to Futurism. Mailchimp activated a policy on Feb. 29 that shuts down any account related to blockchain or ICO activity.

The companies new Acceptable Use Policy states that the company “does not allow businesses involved in any aspect of the sale, transaction, exchange, storage, marketing, or production of cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies, and any digital assets related to an Initial Coin Offering, to use MailChimp to facilitate or support any of those activities.”

Futurism asked Mailchimp to clarify this policy by asking if it was going to cancel accounts where there is simply the discussion of blockchain or ICO related business and if not how they were going to discern between those accounts and ones that are actively advertising. To whit they received this response

The promotion and exchange of cryptocurrencies is too frequently associated with scams, fraud, phishing, and potentially misleading business practices at this time. It’s important to note that this update to our policy does not prevent the discussion of related topics in messages sent through our platform. For example, journalists and publications may send cryptocurrency-related information as long as they’re not involved in the production, sale, exchange, storage, or marketing of cryptocurrencies.

Mailchimp Joins a Growing List

In the past few months, social media platforms have been lining up to ban cryptocurrency adds often times in direct conflict to their own or at least their leaderships beliefs and interests.

Facebook was the first major player to institute a ban in January just at the beginning of what has turned out to be a massive scandal involving their own privacy practices. As we now know Facebook supplied the personal information of millions of users to Cambridge Analytica.

Twitter followed suit even though CEO Jack Dempsey is also CEO of Square a company that is indelibly linked to the success of Bitcoin which he himself is invested in and bullish on. Still, on March 27 Twitter announced that it would “be cutting out advertising of initial coin offerings and their token sales as well as global cryptocurrency wallet platforms if they are not publicly listed on select stock exchanges.”

Google, the worlds biggest company is also set to follow suit. As of June 2018 “Google’s updated financial services policy will rule out all related cryptocurrency advertising through its AdWords service.” Again Google referred to user protection as the reason behind the ban.

The post Mailchimp Bans Cryptocurrency Ads Following Twitter and Facebook appeared first on NewsBTC.

Today may well go down in crypto lore as ‘Red Friday’. The third dip has come and it has been lower than before, the lowest point so far this year as total market cap dropped below $253 billion. The selloff continued this morning in Asia as Bitcoin plummeted to a low of $6,800. Many altcoins have also dropped back down to third quarter 2017 price levels. Every single one of them is in the red today and none look like showing any gains in the short term.

As predicted in an op ed on NewsBTC a few days ago, if the last low of $275 billion on March 18 is broken then it will go lower. Total market cap has fallen back to late November levels but the difference this time is that the sentiment is still bearish whereas in late 2017 crypto markets were extremely bullish.

The FUD and bad news has kept rolling this week with more exchange closures in Japan, more social media ad censorship, and more regulation and taxation. That is without taking into consideration the effect that Bitcoin futures have had on the market as the whales can now short it and further manipulate the markets. 2018 has not been a good year for cryptocurrencies and we are left wondering if it will fall further.

The biggest losers in the top 25 on the day according to Livecoinwatch.com are Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, Monero, Nem, VeChain, Icon, Lisk, Bitcoin Gold and Nano – all sliding by over 14%. A couple of altcoins have been a little more resilient over the past 24 hours and they include EOS, Dash, and Ethereum Classic. By resilient we mean a fall of single figure percentages. Only one crypto currency has made gains over the past 7 days and that is Tron.

On Red Friday all markets are showing a loss of 13.7% in 24 hours, which equates to over $40 billion dollars being taken out of cryptocurrencies. Over the month of March things look even worse with a loss of over 44% and over $200 billion from the overall markets. The big question remains, are we at the bottom yet?

The post Asian Cryptocurrency Trading Roundup: Red Friday Selloff Continues appeared first on NewsBTC.

Key Points

• Bitcoin cash price struggled to move higher and declined sharply below the $700 level against the US Dollar.
• There are two key bearish trend lines forming with resistances near $750 and $850 on the hourly chart of the BCH/USD pair (data feed from Kraken).
• The pair may continue to struggle, and it could even trade towards $600 in the near term.

Bitcoin cash price faced a lot of heat and declined sharply against the US Dollar. BCH/USD even traded below he $700 level and it remains at a risk of more losses.

Bitcoin Cash Price Downside

There was a lot of increase in selling pressure, resulting in a push below the $750 support in bitcoin cash price against the US Dollar. The price declined heavily and even broke the $700 level. A low was formed at $679 from where a minor correction was initiated. At the moment, the price is well below the $750 level and the 100 hourly simple moving average.

There are many bearish signs on the chart with a daily close below $750. An initial resistance is around the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the last decline from the $898 high to $679 low. More importantly, there are two key bearish trend lines forming with resistances near $750 and $850 on the hourly chart of the BCH/USD pair. The first trend line is very important since it is near $750 pivot level. Moreover, the 50% Fib retracement level of the last decline from the $898 high to $679 low is also around the trend line.

Therefore, any upsides are likely to be capped by the $720 and $750 levels. On the downside, the price may soon break the $650 level for more losses.

Looking at the technical indicators:

Hourly MACD – The MACD for BCH/USD is gaining downside momentum in the bearish zone.

Hourly RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI for BCH/USD is now around the 30 level.

Major Support Level – $650

Major Resistance Level – $750

Charts courtesy – Trading View

The post Bitcoin Cash Price Technical Analysis – BCH/USD Crashes Below $700 appeared first on NewsBTC.

Monero devs think a re-released paper is causing unnecessary stir, but also believe it will help move the crypto’s privacy tech forward.

In Part II of three on “How do we design tokenized ecosystems?” Trent McConaghy takes us through an explanation of the practice of engineering the theory, practice and tools to analyze, design, and verify tokenized ecosystems

Bitcoin has dropped below $7,000, reaching a month-low since Feb. 7 while the cryptocurrency market is seeing a major sell-off.

Kik social messaging platform plans to partner with Unity Technologies to spread its Kin cryptocurrency to game developers. #NEWS

Ubank launches a Token Sale for Ubcoin Market, a peer-to-peer ecosystem that would allow its users to become crypto investors simply by selling real goods and receiving cryptocurrency in exchange

The team behind the mobile payments app Ubank expands its business and launches a blockchain ecosystem called Ubcoin Market. Its participants would be able to easily sell and buy real goods in exchange for cryptocurrency. The Token Sale is listed and favorably reviewed on foundico.com, icobazaar.com, and other rating platforms.

Ubcoin Market bridges the gap between crypto and real worlds. On one hand, those who are not well-versed in blockchain will be able to become crypto investors in an easy and safe manner, and, on the other hand, experienced members of the decentralized universe will be empowered to spend their crypto wealth without converting it to fiat currencies.

Ubcoin Market offers a solution for two clear-cut and objective opportunities. The first opportunity stems from almost 2 billion digital citizens, many of whom are keenly interested in cryptocurrency but have their path to crypto investment hindered by technological and legal barriers: mining is expensive and changing fiat money to cryptocurrencies is a cumbersome process. The second issue is the one faced by more than 23 million cryptocurrency owners who are not able to easily spend their crypto investments due to restrictions imposed by governmental and financial organizations.

“If people want to sell their goods, they know where to go — eBay, Taobao, Etsy (60% of all internet users sell and buy goods on similar peer-to-peer platforms, according to Internet Retailer 2017). We do not compete with those platforms for users who want to receive fiat money. Our goal is to give consumers an easy way to become investors in crypto coins by using a peer-to-peer mechanism that is very familiar to them, — says Felix Khachatryan, Ubank’s CEO. “You put up your goods — a laptop, a car, an item of clothing, whatever — for sale, sell it, receive tokens, and then hold them as investment or means of payment or change it to any major cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum. And that’s it, now you are a crypto investor. Same way, you can buy anything you see on Ubcoin Market using the crypto wealth you’ve accumulated without exchanging it to ‘real’ money.”

The Ethereum-powered platform will promote peer-to-peer interaction by cutting out the middleman; provide a completely legal marketplace by developing an AI technology for pre-screening seller postings for potential infringements of reason, morality, safety, and due care; and cultivate an open community by making the API available for adapting the platform for local needs and by engaging third-party providers as well.

Ubcoin Market will be integrated into Ubank — the leading mobile payments app in the Eastern Europe that has been pre-installed by Samsung and Fly on their smartphones.

Ubank was launched in 2013. It received an $8 million investment from Runa Capital fund. As of today, the app has 2.5 million monthly active users, has been downloaded by more than 16 million users around the world and it processes 20+ million transactions a year.

The team behind Ubank and Ubcoin Market consists of 50+ highly skilled tech professionals, world-class top managers, and experienced marketing officers.

Felix Khachatryan, founder and CEO at Ubank and Ubcoin, is an expert on mobile applications, SaaS, and payments. Jan Mazhar — founder and investor of Ubcoin — is a VP of Product Development at FLY Mobile, one of the top 5 smartphone brands in Russia. Andrew Lee, another founder and investor of the project, is a Commercial Director of Union Services, with 20+ years of experience in global markets and mobile industry. Stan Danysh, Ubcoin’s COO and Ubank’s managing partner, is a former deputy chairman and Head of Operations at MDM bank, one of the leading private banks in Russia. Alexandr Putilin, CTO and Chief Blockchain Developer of the project, is a software engineer with 15+ years of experience in commercial development. Marina Lerner, CMO at Ubcoin and Ubank (since 2013), is a former Head of Brand Management at HeadHunter Group, one of the most valuable Russian Internet companies (Forbes, 2018).

The advisory board is an impressive collection of global business professionals, thought leaders of their fields, and long-term partners of the Ubank team. Yama Bassam is an American entrepreneur, an angel investor with over a decade of national and international finance and banking executive experience, and a member of FINRA since 2003. Maxim Filin is a senior executive at Motorola (Russia and CIS products), with years of experience working at the top industry companies dealing with mobile devices, networks, and technologies. Evgeniy Pavlov is Head of Sales and Business Development at Bitfury in Russia, CIS and the Eastern Europe. He has been involved in selling and market-launching new mobile products for more than 13 years. Oleg Bud manages smartphone portfolio for emerging markets at Samsung. He has been working with innovative mobile devices and services for more than 15 years.

After the Token Sale and the launch of the MVP in Russia and in the Eastern Europe, Ubcoin Market plans on unfolding a global expansion, starting from the Middle East and South Korea (2019 2Q), South and South-East Asia (2019 3Q) and Latin America (2019 4Q). For now, the platform is planning to target individual users, but in mid-2019 is going to start working with small and medium-sized businesses.

About Ubcoin Market

Ubcoin Market is a blockchain project developing a smart ecosystem for easily investing and exiting cryptocurrency by buying and selling goods and services. Ubcoin Market was founded by the same team that founded Ubank, the leading mobile payments app in Eastern Europe that has been working since 2009 and, as of today, has 2.5 million active users, more than 16 million downloads around the world, and has been pre-installed by Samsung and Fly. To learn more about the vision and the structure of the project visit its website and read is whitepaper.

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.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) trading platform Alphacat has announced that they will be listed on the popular cryptocurrency exchange Bibox on March 28th.

To celebrate, Bibox is giving away 16 million Alphacat (ACAT) tokens to people who use the platform to trade ACAT over the next week.

Details for this fantastic giveaway can be found here: https://bibox.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002403954

For some, this is a surprising announcement but in reality, it’s a match made in AI heaven: the projects dovetail nicely with each other due to the fact that they are both AI-focused.

Alphacat’s robots utilize AI to make market predictions while Bibox is an AI-enhanced encrypted digital asset exchange.

This is big news for the Alphacat project: Bibox is a top 20 exchange (it’s currently ranked 17th in terms of 24-hour volume) and is growing fast, so being listed with them will result in the ACAT token becoming more readily available to cryptocurrency investors worldwide.

Bibox boasts an all-star team that consists of experts in blockchain, finance and AI. They have also released an easy-to-use app – available on both iOS and Android – that focuses on security, stability, professionalism, and efficiency.

They use state-of-the-art distributed cluster architecture and an incredibly safe microservices splitting design. Add to that, their innovative memory matching system of megabits per second and it’s understandable why Bibox is climbing the ranks of cryptocurrency exchanges so quickly.

A lot of people in the west haven’t heard about Alphacat yet because they are a Chinese project that has largely flown under the radar.

Here is a bit of background information about the project:

Simply put, Alphacat will be the world’s first robot adviser marketplace to focus solely on cryptocurrencies. Their platform consists of robots that utilise both artificial intelligence (AI) and ‘big data’ to predict the future price of specific cryptocurrencies.

The team’s stated goal is to make it easier for anyone to invest in cryptocurrency markets by offering people an easy-to-use advisory service with unrivaled levels of accuracy.

Their AI robots calculate the likelihood that a particular market will increase, and to date, their price prediction for Bitcoin has an accuracy of 60%. At present, there is no other prediction platform on the market with this level of accuracy.

The Alphacat platform will go live in Q3 of this year. To begin with, it will focus solely on Bitcoin but, in time, Alphacat will have price predictions for popular altcoins such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and NEO.

There really is no boundary to the number of markets that this technology can be applied to, however, and the team has stated their plans to add many more altcoins to their platform over time.

This is another step towards Alphacat’s goal to become the dominant force in AI-powered prediction trading. Their incredibly ambitious team will release the potential game-changer prediction platform later this year.

If Alphacat wasn’t on your radar before, this is definitely a project to look out for in 2018.

Media Contact

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alphacat_io

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Alphacat.io

Medium：https://medium.com/@Alphacatglobal

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Website：www.alphacat.io  

Email：[email protected]

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.

Cryptocurrency mining — the process in which computing power is used to solve algorithms, in turn producing coins — is becoming increasingly more common on college campuses across the U.S, especially in those where electricity is included as part of their tuition.

Meet Joey Dilliha, an 18-year-old freshman at Western Kentucky University who claims he’s making $30 a week cryptocurrency with his Bitmain Antminer. “I believe more people should be doing it,” Dilliha told MarketWatch. “It’s a super fun, and cool cheap way to be introduced to the market of mining.” Dilliha, who bought his rig for $250 on eBay, has turned a profit of $180 so far.

University-Based Mining

According to cybersecurity firm Vectra, some 60% of mining traffic originates from computers with IP addresses linked to colleges and universities, with health care being the next highest industry for mining traffic at only 3%. This is likely because mining requires a lot of electricity, leading students and crypto-enthusiasts to take advantage of the endless supply of free power available in university provided housing.

“Students are more likely to perform crypto mining personally as they don’t pay for power, the primary cost of crypto mining,” head of security analytics at Vectra, Chris Morales said.

The total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network consumes as much electricity as 2 million U.S. homes — up to 215 kilowatt-hours of energy per transaction; and mining a single Bitcoin can cost anywhere from $3,000 to nearly $10,000 in some states, depending on the cost of electricity in the region (according to data from Morgan Stanley).

Some schools have explicitly outlawed the practice. For example, this January Stanford University warned students that mining has “compromised systems, misused university computing equipment, and personally owned mining devices using campus power.”

“Per university policy, Stanford resources must not be used for personal financial gain,” the blog post read. “As such, community members are prohibited from using university resources (including computing equipment, network services, and electricity) for cryptocurrency mining activities outside of faculty sanctioned research and course work.”

At Western Kentucky University, Dilliha said his mining set-up is banned, but not because it’s using the university’s power, because it’s a fire hazard. “On dorm room check days, I have to turn it off and put a blanket over it,” he said. “However my RA [resident advisor] loves to come in and talk about it with me.”

University students across the county have shown an increasing interest in cryptocurrencies since the price of Bitcoin shot up at the end of last year. According to recent information gathered by the Student Loan Report, one in five students report using their student loan money to buy cryptocurrency.

The post Across the US, Students Are Using University-Supplied Power to Mine Cryptocurrencies appeared first on NewsBTC.

The owner of the international company Varalen Trading Corp. (VTC) K. Varalen shared his plans for the upcoming years during and interview. He said that over the years his team has achieved excellent results in developing software for leading prime brokers in the Forex industry and now has plans to launch own broker.

Presenting the strategy for developing a new business, he defined the name of his offspring as “Capital Markets”, explaining that the company will not legally become part of the brand of Varalen Trading Corp., but will be an independent organization. It is already known that the head office will be located in Hong Kong, and the executive team will include experienced exchange specialists and analysts. Main concept for the broker will be based, just as in VTC, on open and loyal policy.

Mr. Varalen stressed that he has all the necessary technological resources. In particular, he focused on innovative transaction processing technology – an ECN system that guarantees direct communication with liquidity providers and high execution speed.

“I have always seen the prospect of business development in this direction. The forex market is surprising in its essence, as it opens huge opportunities for investments. However, it requires deep knowledge, because not having them means to lose from the start. Me and my team has been working work in the sphere of trading solutions development for many years, and it [gave] us invaluable experience. It is important to say that we not only help IB brokers to solve problems with the trading process, but also analyze each individual problem in order to prevent it from appearing in the future. So, Capital Markets specialists are well-informed, armed, and will offer our future traders competitive terms of cooperation, “said the owner of Varalen Trading Corp. K.Varalen.

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.