Day: April 27, 2018

In a recent tweet, American Internet personality and professional poker player, Dan Bilzerian shared [it’s] “Time to get back in crypto”. He appears to have had an interest in the market for some time with a prior announcement (November 2017) sharing his distribution of currencies in his portfolio.

“For everyone asking, I have 50% Bitcoin, 25% ETH, 15% Monero and 10% Bitcoin Cash,”.

Time to get back in crypto

— Dan Bilzerian (@DanBilzerian) April 23, 2018

Having a diversified portfolio of cryptocurrencies is a form of risk reduction of your digital assets. Allocating a higher proportion of your investment capital to coins that you have a good grip on their underlying technology and potential applications further mitigates risk.

Dan Bilzerian appears confident in the long-term growth of bitcoin, as back in May 2017 he was in the gym and shared,

“I bought a sh**load of Bitcoin today,”.

With a larger adoption of cryptocurrencies with investments from banks like Santander and other corporations such as Mastercard,  bitcoin, and other currencies have the potential for exponential growth.

Even at this time when some people believe that the crypto boat has long left the dock, with the opportunity to invest in the technology having passed, Bilzerian believes he can still make money on it.

Dan Bilzerian isn’t the only bitcoin bull

Cryptocurrencies seem to have captivated the attention of many celebrities and big names.

The poker community, in particular, has shown interest, with many players owning a portfolio of coin. Doug Polk is a well-known name in the poker world who has been following bitcoin for a few years. He recently launched his site CoinCentral and posts youtube content with crypto topics.

Nas is another early adopter of bitcoin after investing in bitcoin wallet Coinbase in early 2014. Shortly after he claimed that bitcoin could be “as big, if not bigger, than the Internet.”. He also awarded bitcoins for high scores in his Nas trivia contest.

50 Cent profited massively from the bitcoin gains of 2017. Trying to stay up-to-date with new payment methods he accepted bitcoin for his 2014 album release  Animal Ambition. After forgetting about his holdings his 700 bitcoins inflated. With bitcoins current value they would be worth around USD 6,553,834.

Cryptocurrencies were and have been a topic of conversation for some time. In November 2017 as bitcoins price rise drew mainstream attention, Katy Perry shared that she obtained advice from Warren Buffett on the market. She later posted on Instagram, a picture of her nails decorated with the logos of five cryptocurrencies.

Image courtesy: Las Vegas – Exotics Racing – Dan Bilzerian

The post Dan Bilzerian Says It’s Time to Get Back Into Crypto appeared first on BitcoinNews.com.

Everyone is “drinking the Kool-Aid,” says former PayPal CEO in the second of his media appearances warning that Bitcoin is a scam #NEWS

ASIC is to extend its guidelines on initial coin offerings over concerns about overseas projects targeting local investors.

XRP’s share of the industry’s total market capitalization doubled in the first quarter of 2018. This was one of the many positive highlights of Ripple’s XRP Q1 report released via a blog post by the San Francisco-based company on April 25. XRP’s share of the overall market volume also increased, driven by listings on 18 new platforms. The report, compiled by Ripple’s head of XRP markets, Miguel Vias, was not all positive, as it also reflected the great drop in the value of XRP by over 70%, which has been among the greatest drops in the market, as well as other challenges.

The Good And The Very Good

While the market capitalization of the crypto industry has gone down since the beginning of the year, XRP’s share of the market cap more than doubled over the first three months of the year. From 3.56% in Q4 of 2017, XRP’s share increased to 7.57% as of the time the report was compiled. This is despite XRP being among the biggest market losers, having shed 73% of its value since the year began. Having begun the year at $1.91, XRP finished the quarter at $0.50. However, since the report was compiled, XRP has risen in value, and it’s currently sitting at $0.84.

XRP’s share of the market volume also increased from 5.3% to 6.9%, buoyed by XRP’s inclusion on 18 new platforms in the first quarter. These platforms include Anycoin Direct, Abra, and Uphold, which has made it easier and more convenient for XRP enthusiasts to acquire XRP tokens. The volume of XRP traded in the quarter was $160 billion, the highest ever.

As stipulated by their smart contract escrows, Ripple acquired 3 billion XRP tokens in the quarter from their escrows. The company, however, only used 300 million tokens, and the remaining 2.7 billion were placed in new escrow accounts which will only become accessible in months 56, 57 and 58. The escrows can only release a maximum of 1 billion tokens per month, which makes it 55 weeks before the new escrows will be accessible to Ripple.

Market participants purchased $16.6 million directly from Ripple, the report further indicated. This was done through XRP II LLC, Ripple’s licensed money services business. The company also made XRP sales worth $151.1 million, which in comparison to the overall market volume was an insignificant percentage. With a market volume of over $160 billion, Ripple’s XRP sales only amounted to 0.095%.

XRP’s popularity as a transfer medium increased significantly, boosted especially by the enlisting of five new corporates into the xRapid product, which utilizes XRP for transfers. The new clients are MoneyGram, Western Union, Mercury FX, IDT, and Cambridge Global Payments.

There Were Challenges Too

The quarter was also not without its challenges, the first being the continued enforcement of stringent rules for the crypto industry that have given investors the jitters. One of the most significant has been in South Korea, where XRP enjoys a huge following. South Korea’s importance to XRP was highlighted when crypto indexing site CoinMarketCap.com announced a decision to exclude data from South Korean crypto exchanges from their calculations. With other cryptos taking an average market cap hit of 7.2%, Ripple’s hit was 19.1%, almost thrice the size.

XRP also took a hit from factors that affected the market as a whole. One of these was the banning of cryptos by some major financial institutions, which excluded a significant group of people from participating in the buying and selling of cryptos. Around the same time, the head of the Bank for International Settlements attacked bitcoin, calling it a combination of a Ponzi scheme and a bubble. With XRP, and Ripple by extension, being geared towards the remittance and international settlements segment, this was bound to affect it.

Data Company Opiria Launches PDATA Token ICO for Monetizing Consumer Data, Raises $2,000,000 to Date

Online data privacy is a trending topic these days. As Big Data evolves to become the gold standard for advertising, more and more individuals are becoming aware that their activities online are being monitored. According to a Pew Research survey, nine out of ten Americans believe that they have lost the ability to protect their private data. Just last week, Facebook announced that personal data from more than 87 million of its users had been improperly shared with data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica in 2016.

Disclosure: This is a Sponsored Article

The reality is that big internet companies can’t be trusted to protect consumer privacy when their business models incentivize them to do the opposite. It’s become increasingly clear that an industry-wide change needs to be implemented.

Enter Opiria – a data and market analysis firm that provides valuable tools that allow companies to create and distribute surveys to their customers in order to get feedback on their products. Opiria already boasts a well-established client base that includes multiple Fortune 500 companies, but they have not yet come close to realizing their fully potential.

The biggest roadblock in Opiria’s path is the fact that consumers aren’t interested in completing surveys all day for no reason – they need an incentive to do so. To solve this problem, Opiria has decided to develop a platform on the Ethereum blockchain that allows consumers TO USE THEIR DATA AS A SOURCE OF PASSIVE INCOME. At the heart of this new platform is the PDATA token – a cryptocurrency that represents data’s value and can be used by companies to purchase said data directly from consumers.

With the blockchain-based Opiria platform, consumers have far more privacy and agency. They can decide with whom to share or sell their personal data and receive fair compensation for it in return, all without having to trust a middleman. EVEN SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS A PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS CAN BE WORTH AS MUCH AS $80 USD! Why should consumers unknowingly give up this information for free when they can be paid a fair market value for it?

Big data isn’t going to disappear. The reality is that companies worldwide desperately need to understand their customers. Opiria estimates that data brokerage is currently ABOUT A 250 BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY and will continue increasing in size over the next several years. Unfortunately, it’s become normal for data brokers to operate discreetly and violate consumer privacy.

To address the problems in the industry, governments are now ramping up regulations for data privacy on the internet. One of the best examples is the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation which becomes enforceable at the end of May and will make it more complicated for data brokers to access consumer data.

The solution is not for data brokers to begin using even more legally questionable techniques to scrape consumer data. The solution is a transparent and decentralized blockchain-based marketplace for the purchase and sale of that valuable data. The solution is a secure, globally available platform that eliminates costly and untrustworthy middlemen. The solution is Opiria.

Opiria launched its token presale on April 20. The price for 1 PDATA token is $0.10 USD. The ICO goal is $35 million USD, and any tokens unsold by May 31 will be burnt. Opiria will launch the network on the Ethereum platform, but the team is developing the project in such a way that it is blockchain agnostic – meaning that it can be easily ported to other platforms. To learn more, visit the project website at opiria.io.

France’s Council of State declares cryptocurrencies “moveable property,” introduces 19 percent flat tax. #NEWS

This week cryptocurrency miners had processed the 17 million coins across both Bitcoin (BCH) and Bitcoin Core (BTC) networks, marking a great milestone within the history of blockchain technology. Now there are only 4Mn BCH and BTC left to mine but it’s still a very long time away until the very last coins are mined.

Also read: Yahoo! Japan Confirms Entrance Into the Crypto Space

80.9% of All Bitcoins Have Been Mined  

According to blockchain data, today both BTC and BCH miners mined the 17 millionth coin per network, and there are only 4 million left to mine. Now individuals may say that only 4 million coins is not much of a supply since 17 million were mined in less than ten years, so they might expect the last coins to be mined shortly. However, that’s not the case for both networks as mining difficulty continues to increase on both chains, and every four years the mining block reward is cut in half. Right now both BTC and BCH networks produce 12.5 coins after every block found, and when the halving takes place the reward will only be 6.25 newly minted coins. The BTC chain is expected to halve its mining reward in roughly 763 days or May 29, 2020, depending on the hashrate. If the networks hashrate grows slower or faster the halving date could change.

BTC and BCH Halvings and the Last Coin Found Will Likely Be Different Time Frames

Further, the mining of the last coins won’t be found very quickly because of mining difficulty changes, which makes it harder for miners to find blocks over time. BTC’s ‘Difficulty’ is a metric used to measure the probability of finding the next block, and the BTC network automatically changes difficulty every 2016 blocks. The BCH chain adjusts difficulty every block to make sure previous 144 blocks take exactly one day. The BTC method of difficulty changes and things like the block reward halving every four years or less, will eventually lead to the last BTC being found on or around the year 2140. The BCH chain may have some different halving times, but as things are today the last BCH may be found around the same year. Although there may be some slight discrepancies on halving and the last coin found time frames between both networks.

For instance, the BCH chain had a different difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) when the chain first separated. Up until November of 2017, the BCH difficulty was a bit volatile; sometimes processing blocks extremely fast and sometimes super slow. This led to the BCH chain mining a touch more coins than BTC, and it has processed more blocks as well. At the time of publication, the BCH chain is 7568 blocks ahead of the BTC chain, and there are 94,000 more BCH in circulation than BTC. However, since the November bitcoin cash DAA hard fork, metrics have leveled out quite a bit and newly minted BCH are mined roughly at the same rate. Before the fork profitability led to miners bouncing back and forth between chains, but since the DAA change profitability has been consistently level as well. At the moment BCH miners are processing blocks at 13.96% of BTC’s difficulty. Several things could happen in the future where halving and difficulty times could become totally different between both networks.  

Satoshi’s Vision Has Come a Long Way — Giving the World the Genius of Proof-of-Work and Digital Scarcity

Even though it’s going to take more than a century for all of the coins to be found, finding more than 80 percent of them is quite the feat. Over the last six months, both chains have seen a phenomenal increase in hashpower, and if this keeps up it will likely lead to much faster halvings and difficulty changes. Additionally, the 21 million cap created by Satoshi Nakamoto cements the power of digital scarcity, which theoretically will keep demand going strong for ages. The cryptocurrencies are divisible by eight decimals and this means that even though there are not enough ‘whole’ coins to go around for every individual on the planet, people will transact with smaller fractions over time. Unlike quantitative easing and the central banking system bailing out the banks by printing mass quantities of fiat — cryptocurrencies are and will always be scarce. 17 million coins found by a network of incentivized miners is a landmark occasion, and we should all celebrate this feat as it shows how far this technology has come in less than a decade.

What do you think about the fact that 80 percent of all BCH and BTC have been mined so far? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments below.     

Images via Pixabay, and Shutterstock.

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

The post 80% of the 21 Million Bitcoins Have Been Mined Into Existence appeared first on Bitcoin News.

France is about to offer relief to amateur cryptocurrency investors, after a ruling by the country’s Council of State.

According to Bloomberg, the creators of Ethereum, Cardano, and OmiseGo, some of the biggest public blockchain protocols and cryptocurrencies, are boycotting the largest cryptocurrency conference, Consensus, after a controversial report about OmiseGo’s surge in price was published on April 26.

OmiseGo Controversy

Consensus 2018 is the leading cryptocurrency conference, hosted by cryptocurrency media outlet CoinDesk. The event, which is often hosted in the second quarter of every year, attracts many of the most influential projects, developers, investors, and public figures in both the financial sector and cryptocurrency industry.

However, Ethereum creators Vitalik Buterin and Charles Hoskinson, the OmiseGo team, and the Cosmos team have announced that they will not attend this year’s Consensus 2018 event after CoinDesk’s reporting about the rise in the value of OMG, which included a section about a fake OmiseGo giveaway.

On April 26, CoinDesk reported that the price of OmiseGo had surged by more than 30 percent after the listing by Bithumb, South Korea’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume. In the article, a CoinDesk author mistakenly linked to a scam OmiseGo giveaway that seized the private keys of users by luring OmiseGo and Ethereum users with a false proposition, such as that sending “0.3 OMG will result in 3 OMG.”

Almost immediately after the technical analysis report was released, the OmiseGo team took to social media:

Please R/T@coindesk article links to a scam website impersonating the #OmiseGO blog. Real blog is: blog DOT omisego DOT network

Please protect your readers and our communities by taking down your article immediately @coindesk. Thank you.

Please R/T #Ethereumspirit https://t.co/sYOYtH6g72

— OmiseGO (@omise_go) April 26, 2018

In the aftermath of the response of the OmiseGo team, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin released a statement of his own and expressed his concerns about quality in cryptocurrency journalism. Buterin emphasized that he would boycott the Consensus 2018 event and encouraged the rest of the community to do the same.

I am boycotting @coindesk's Consensus 2018 conference this year, and strongly encourage others to do the same. Here is my reasoning why.

1. Coindesk is recklessly complicit in enabling giveaway scams. See their latest article on OMG, which *directly links* to a giveaway scam. pic.twitter.com/WDr9uZ8XOw

— Vitalik "Not giving away ETH" Buterin (@VitalikButerin) April 26, 2018

And this is *after* I publicly warned media to be very careful about such things. https://t.co/AxGyapFDAS

— Vitalik "Not giving away ETH" Buterin (@VitalikButerin) April 26, 2018

2. Their coverage of EIP 999 was terrible. They published a highly sensationalist article claiming the chain would split, when it was very clear that EIP 999 was *very far* from acceptance.

This is why pundits need to be replaced by prediction markets, ASAP. pic.twitter.com/6A7OWlx0nR

— Vitalik "Not giving away ETH" Buterin (@VitalikButerin) April 26, 2018

Seriously, is speed really that much more important to you than accuracy?

— Vitalik "Not giving away ETH" Buterin (@VitalikButerin) April 26, 2018

3. Their reporting policies are designed to trap you with gotchas. Did you know that if you send them a reply, and you explicitly say that some part is off the record, that's explicitly on the record unless you go through a request/approve dance first? pic.twitter.com/8in6ZYSPbR

— Vitalik "Not giving away ETH" Buterin (@VitalikButerin) April 26, 2018

Following Buterin’s statements, the OmiseGo team, Cosmos team, and Ethereum and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson publicly stated that they would join Buterin in not attending the event.

“We have decided to join Vitalik Buterin in not attending Consensus2018. We can’t in good conscience support a publication that puts its readers at risk through careless reporting and reacts with hostility rather than humility when the error is brought to its attention. As a community, we will make mistakes as we endeavor to build something that is bigger and better and less fallible than our small selves. One of the most important things we must do if we are to succeed together is to own up to our mistakes and learn from them,” said the OmiseGo team.

Hoskinson, who oversees the development of $7.5 billion blockchain protocol Cardano and $2 billion cryptocurrency Ethereum Classic, also added:

Welcome to the boycott. I'm also not attending.

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) April 26, 2018

Response From the CoinDesk Team

CoinDesk was able to take down the article within hours after publishing it and fix the errors in the report while disclosing that the author had made a mistake. The Verge journalist Adrianne Jeffries stated that although CoinDesk could have been more cautious in covering the cryptocurrency market on that specific occasion, CoinDesk has demonstrated good journalistic practices:

i think coindesk could be more discerning abt covering token madness but 2 complaints in here – that responses have to come in by the deadline and that everything is on the record unless the writer explicitly agrees it is off the record – are standard, good journalistic practice https://t.co/ToaZhzfRol

— Adrianne Jeffries (@adrjeffries) April 26, 2018

Overall, the concerns of Buterin, OmiseGo, and Hoskinson in regards to investor protection and preventing fake giveaway scams from affecting investors within the cryptocurrency market are well justified, and the three communities are pursuing an approach that they consider appropriate to respond to the recent OmiseGo reporting controversy.

But several experts and researchers in the cryptocurrency space, including CoinDesk founding team member Ryan Selkis, offered a soft criticism of Buterin’s uncharacteristic condemnation of CoinDesk, which the creator of Ethereum hasn’t been keen on doing over the past two years, as he admitted in a statement:

Vitalik was wrong in his critique of the editorial team, showed an atypical lack of awareness about the state of content/media, and came across as petty. For someone I’ve admired for precocious maturity, humility, and patience, the spat was surprising.

There’s a new Cryptocurrency project making its way through social media as the best thing since masternodes. FIC Network, for those unfamiliar, aims to revolutionize the fixed income markets through blockchain technology, bringing a wave of new and exciting investment opportunities for cryptocurrency investors. So what is FIC, and what does any of this have to do with masternodes?

Disclosure: This is a Sponsored Article

Masternodes are an investment vehicle that pay investors a passive income for owning and hosting a node, which consists of owning a required number of that blockchain’s tokens on the company’s network. You can think of a masternode as essentially a server on a decentralized network. Masternodes store a real-time copy of the blockchain, thus avoiding the issue of the network having a single point of attack. Masternodes often grant non-financial benefits to their holders, such as voting rights or faster transactions. However, the most appealing incentive to hold a masternode is by and large passive income. As a reward for supporting the network, masternode holders receive returns in the form of newly minted coins. In the current cryptocurrency landscape, no other investments offer competitive passive income rates. Masternode opportunities, however, are limited to just a handful of coins. In traditional markets, passive income options are accessible for a very wide range of capital. Where are these options for non-masternode coins?

This is where FIC Network comes in. FIC is an institutionally-focused fintech project working on merging traditional financial investments with the world of cryptocurrency. This network will offer users the passive income benefits of masternodes through a decentralized, streamlined process that allows users to lend their cryptocurrencies for fixed interest rates. Put simply, FIC allows you to turn Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency holdings into a revenue stream. The potential of this platform is huge—if you could make even more money from your Bitcoin holdings… why wouldn’t you?

FIC Network is a blockchain-based network, designed to create a financial market enabling users from around the world to list, buy, and sell any type of fixed financial income instrument, in both cryptocurrency and fiat currency. Through traditional fiat or cryptocurrency payments, users will have access to bonds, loans, credit default swaps, loan syndication and more traditional investments currently unavailable to cryptocurrency. This is a game-changing development that is completely necessary for a developing space.

What makes FIC stand out is its flexibility as a passive income source. No longer will you need to find tens out thousands of dollars for a Vechain or Dash masternode. You will be able to generate passive income from a wider range of cryptocurrencies beyond staking coins, including Bitcoin. FIC is aiming to allow a wider than ever range of people to earn interest on their crypto assets. In one example, through their creation of ECFs (Expected Cash Flows), FIC Network takes individual packages of smaller debt and repackages these into a single debt pool. In a scenario where ten people owe $1000, FIC Network repackages these into a single debt pool of $10,000 where investors can buy in with as much or as little as they feel comfortable investing. This provides the same passive income stability as masternodes on a much smaller, more affordable scale, opening the doors to a much wider audience.

FIC Network is an ambitious project. Bridging the gap between traditional financial and cryptocurrency is no easy task, but FIC has managed to not only bridge the gap but also streamline it. For example, FIC plans to implement a proprietary decentralized exchange that will allow users to only interact with the cryptocurrency of their choosing – so your Bitcoin loan will show up in someone else’s bank account as the currency of their choice! Thanks to the blockchain, FIC participants will be able to invest in bonds with full transparency and without the need for intermediaries, drastically reducing settlement times and overall cost, allowing for a wider profit margin. The applications for a global fiat and crypto secondary market could put  your finances in your own hands in a way that has never been seen before.

With couple years of development under their belt, the FIC team is proving themselves more than competent on realising their goals. This all may seem too good to be true, but it’s not. It’s a necessary step for the future with cryptocurrency, and it is believed FIC is positioned to dominate this opportunity.

The CEO of Pantera Capital, a $1 bln crypto hedge fund, says it’s “definitely possible” the crypto market could hit “$40 trln” within ten years. #NEWS