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At the Barclays Emerging Payments Forum, Silbert met with 38 institutional investors representing more than $250bn in investment capital.

Former Facebook and AOL executive Chamath Palihapitiya discussed the importance of attracting tech-savvy, business-minded users to bitcoin.

This is a translation of the statement made by the Financial Superintendence of Colombia, translation provided by our Spanish Editor Adrián Calvo.  His Spanish language article on the subject can be found here.  Make sure to check out our Spanish coverage of Bitcoin news and other Cryptocoins news at Noticias Sobre Bitcoin. The key point […]

The post Translation Of Statement From The Financial Superintendence of Colombia: Risk Of The Operations Made With “Virtual Currencies” appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

In the future, will we tip with dogecoin, spend 'loose change' with litecoin and making big payments with bitcoin?

Xidax, a boutique PC builder operating out of Salt Lake City, has just snagged the honor of becoming the first enthusiast builder to accept peer-to-peer digital currency Dogecoin for payment.

Satoshi Nakamoto remains an obscure figure to most people that are involved in cryptocurrencies. As the creator of Bitcoin, he is the reason we are all here. You would not be reading this article if it weren’t for him. Heck, I would not have written this text, and we would probably think virtual currencies could […]

The post Satoshi Institute reveals Satoshi’s Bitcoin history appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Despite fears Colombia would ban bitcoin outright this week, regulators have issued only a warning.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen set Twitter tongues wagging yesterday when he dismissed Warren Buffett's skepticism about Bitcoin by suggesting that Buffett was just an old white guy crapping on a technology he didn't understand.

Andreessen, an investor in Business Insider, has a quick wit, so it's likely he was trying to amuse some conferencegoers rather than actually insult Buffett.

But the remark triggered another firestorm of discussion about Andreessen, Bitcoin, and Warren Buffett's own suggestion — made back in the dot-com bubble — that the reason he didn't invest in technology was that he didn't understand it.

Some in the tech elite have taken Buffett's suggestion to mean that, by his own admission, Buffett lacks the expertise or brainpower necessary to understand technology. 

I, on the other hand, have always assumed that Buffett made the "I don't understand" remark with typical self-deprecating-but-knowing Buffett charm — as in, "All you people piling into dot-com stocks must be much smarter than I am, because I just don't get it!"

In other words, I believe that, in typical Buffett fashion, Buffett understood everything he needed to understand about technology in the late 1990s, which is that technology investors had gone stark raving mad. 

Similarly, I suspect that Buffett has a perfectly sophisticated understanding of Bitcoin.

I think that when Buffett deemed Bitcoin a "mirage" earlier this month, it wasn't because he is too dopey to understand Bitcoin. It was because he understands that the inherent value that Bitcoin fanatics think Bitcoin has is entirely in the eye of the beholders.

This doesn't mean that Buffett thinks Bitcoin's price will crash or that anyone speculating in Bitcoin is an idiot. It just means that Buffett doesn't think Bitcoin has any intrinsic value and that he himself has no interest in speculating in it. And he's right about that, by the way. Bitcoin doesn't have any intrinsic value. It could trade at $0.01 or $1 million. Both "values" are perfectly defensible.

As for why Warren Buffett doesn't (usually) invest in technology, the Oracle himself explained this in detail back in 1999, when just about every other investor on the planet thought it was he who was stark raving mad.

In one of the best articles ever written about markets, published in Fortune in November 1999, Buffett had this to say about why he didn't invest in "innovation." The answer boils down to:

1. the relatively limited longevity and defensibility of competitive advantage (the "moat" created by Microsoft's global monopoly in the late 1990s hasn't helped it much in the 2000s), and

2. the difficulty of identifying the few winners in advance and being able to buy them at reasonable prices

Yes, you can characterize this explanation as Buffett's "not understanding technology." But it would likely be more accurate to say that what Buffett doesn't understand is not, in fact, technology, but the prices other investors are willing to pay for technology.

Here's the Oracle from November 1999, five months before the dot-com crash:

I thought it would be instructive to go back and look at a couple of industries that transformed this country much earlier in this century: automobiles and aviation. Take automobiles first: I have here one page, out of 70 in total, of car and truck manufacturers that have operated in this country. At one time, there was a Berkshire car and an Omaha car. Naturally I noticed those. But there was also a telephone book of others.

All told, there appear to have been at least 2,000 car makes, in an industry that had an incredible impact on people's lives. If you had foreseen in the early days of cars how this industry would develop, you would have said, "Here is the road to riches." So what did we progress to by the 1990s? After corporate carnage that never let up, we came down to three U.S. car companies--themselves no lollapaloozas for investors. So here is an industry that had an enormous impact on America--and also an enormous impact, though not the anticipated one, on investors.

Sometimes, incidentally, it's much easier in these transforming events to figure out the losers. You could have grasped the importance of the auto when it came along but still found it hard to pick companies that would make you money. But there was one obvious decision you could have made back then--it's better sometimes to turn these things upside down--and that was to short horses. Frankly, I'm disappointed that the Buffett family was not short horses through this entire period. And we really had no excuse: Living in Nebraska, we would have found it super-easy to borrow horses and avoid a "short squeeze."

U.S. Horse Population

1900: 21 million
1998: 5 million

The other truly transforming business invention of the first quarter of the century, besides the car, was the airplane--another industry whose plainly brilliant future would have caused investors to salivate. So I went back to check out aircraft manufacturers and found that in the 1919-39 period, there were about 300 companies, only a handful still breathing today. Among the planes made then--we must have been the Silicon Valley of that age--were both the Nebraska and the Omaha, two aircraft that even the most loyal Nebraskan no longer relies upon.

Move on to failures of airlines. Here's a list of 129 airlines that in the past 20 years filed for bankruptcy. Continental was smart enough to make that list twice. As of 1992, in fact--though the picture would have improved since then--the money that had been made since the dawn of aviation by all of this country's airline companies was zero. Absolutely zero.

Sizing all this up, I like to think that if I'd been at Kitty Hawk in 1903 when Orville Wright took off, I would have been farsighted enough, and public-spirited enough--I owed this to future capitalists--to shoot him down. I mean, Karl Marx couldn't have done as much damage to capitalists as Orville did.

I won't dwell on other glamorous businesses that dramatically changed our lives but concurrently failed to deliver rewards to U.S. investors: the manufacture of radios and televisions, for example. But I will draw a lesson from these businesses: The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.

 SEE ALSO: Bitcoin Could Go To $1 Million

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The CEOs of Kraken and BTC China emphasized the need for building consumer trust today at CoinSummit.

At least the IRS knows what it thinks of the virtual currency. (For now, anyway)

When it comes to virtual currency Bitcoin, there's a lot of confusion about what it really is. Some say it's a commodity. Others think it’s a currency. Now the Internal Revenue Service weighed in.

Prompted by concerns over how to tax the fledgling virtual currency, on Tuesday the IRS indicated that that Bitcoin isn't currency--at least for tax purposes. Instead, the federal agency declared it property. So if your business accepts payment in Bitcoin, trades it, or sells it, there's a new set of regulations you need to follow.

The IRS is adding its voice to states and municipalities struggling with how to regulate the currency for businesses and consumers, and the ruling may help to legitimize the cryptocurrency for the many businesses rushing to embrace it.

"There are no free rides, and this is similar to how the IRS taxes people on the barter system," says Scott Cheslowitz, a partner at accounting firm Rothenberg & Peters in Great Neck, New York.

Here are the main points: The IRS has decided that, for tax purposes, it will not treat Bitcoin like currency, which similarly depreciates or increases in value. Instead, the IRS will tax Bitcoin as either a capital asset or tangible asset. Capital assets are things like stocks, bonds, or investment properties. Tangible assets are things like inventory, machinery, or your company's buildings.

While the value of both types of assets can rise and fall, the tax rates are pretty different. Generally speaking, you'd pay the ordinary tax rate on the sale or exchange of Bitcoin held as a tangible asset--say you were paid in it. By contrast, you'd pay the lower capital gains rate of about 15 percent to 20 percent on transactions for Bitcoin held as an investment, for example if you obtained it on an exchange.

The same treatment goes for losses. If your Bitcoin has depreciated since you've held it, you'd get a tax write off.

That's pretty important for owners of Bitcoin, whose value is currenty around $600, but which has traded over $1,000 within the past few months.

Remember, if your business pays employees in Bitcoin, you'll also have to issue a 1099 for any contract work you pay for worth $600 or more.

Similarly, if your business, or part of your business, mines and trades Bitcoin, you'll be liable for self-employment taxes on earnings. And if you're paying your employees in Bitcoin, the IRS says that pay is now subject to withholding taxes based on the virtual currency's fair market value.

The IRS also says its rules are backward looking, so you could be subject to penalties for improper tax treatment of Bitcoin income in prior years.

"The IRS is interested in collecting revenue and regulating and creating rules and laws for people who want to avoid taxes with Bitcoin," says Ed Mendlowitz, a partner at WithumSmith+Brown, an accounting firm in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Nobody likes the taxman, but for entrepreneurs and consumers eager to validate Bitcoin and bring it into the mainstream, the IRS notice goes a long way toward achieving those goals.

"The IRS is legitimizing and recognizing Bitcoin," Mendlowitz says.

While there are currently many different countries around the world making their own recommendations when it comes to how Bitcoin should be regulated, the reality of the situation is that most central banks and regulators are looking to the United States for guidance on this matter. Although many Bitcoin entrepreneurs in the United States have […]

The post BTC China CEO: Most Countries Will Defer to US on Bitcoin Regulation appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Bitcoin ATM pioneer Lamassu says it is on track to ship 200 bitcoin machines by May.

Adam Draper and Brayton Williams launched Boost.vc in 2012 at a time when the accelerator market was beginning to burst at the seams with new entrants — some would say it was nearing saturation. In an effort to differentiate their approach and attract quality startups amidst the growing noise in Accelerator Land, the Boost founders decided to put a premium on experimentation. For the… Read More

The Bitcore team has been developing Cosign: A Multisignature Wallet. This technology would provide additional layers of security to protect Bitcoins. This wallet would allow for a multi-signature wallet to validate all transactions before they are sent, thus significantly reducing theft that occurs within businesses that deal with digital currencies. Let’s say we have a […]

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After a stormy few weeks, the ship of bitcoin seems like it's beginning to right itself. Regulators are beginning to refine their thinking around the currency, and new startups based on the cryptocurrency keep raising money. The latest of these is Circle Internet Financial, which has raised $17 million in a Series B round of funding and just launched a limited release of its first products. Read More

Binary options offer an easy way to hedge bitcoin volatility and several operators stand poised to fill the demand.

Digital currency firm Circle  is rolling out a product in limited release it hopes will someday prove the "Skype" of Bitcoin.

The group, headed by Jeremy Allaire, co-developer of the Flash media player, announced Wednesday it had closed a $17 million Series B financing round.

Those funds will mostly be put toward developing a suite of services that will allow customers to store digital assets in a cloud, and subsequently transferred, spent, or received with the ease of an SMS or instant message, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said.      

"The metaphor for the user interface is not so much like a wallet or bank account, but much more similar to sending and receving emails texts, like Skype — but in the context of digital assets," Allaire told BI Tuesday. "The metaphor is less 'I'm buying and selling,' or storing some money and more 'It’s really powerful to use, I can use it with my friends, especially as more business establishments start accepting it. We expect Bitcoin will go viral."

Allaire said he hopes to steer Bitcoin away from what he called its heavily "alphamale geek" userbase, while positioning Circle as a trustworthy name in the Bitcoin ecosystem as it recovers from the collapse of MtGox, once the largest digital currency exchange in the world. 

"We have a lot of focus on the security we're putting around it, which is really the key — we're effectively a custodian of digital assets, so there's a significant trust burden." He added he expects news laws and regulations to further help ease consumer concerns about handling digital currency. 

So far, the product is by invitation only, and Allaire said its roll-out will be relatively slow.

Investors in the latest funding round include SecondMarket's Barry Silbert, Pantera — a Bitcoin hedge fund that itself just got a huge cash infusion — and a former official at banking security service SWIFT.

SEE ALSO: Bitcoin Tax Expert: New IRS Ruling Creates Significant Burden For Digital Currency Users

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The Singapore-based bitcoin and altcoin payments processor has raised additional funding.

The IRS has ruled Bitcoin should be treated as property instead of currency for tax purposes.

What does this mean for Bitcoin users?

We turned to Tyson Cross, a San Diego-based the lead attorney at BitcoinTaxSolutions. We previously spoke with Cross about how to file Bitcoin income presuming the IRS would not come in with guidance prior to April 15.

Now we know how the IRS feels: Through this ruling, every Bitcoin transaction — including anytime you sell Bitcoin — can now be taxed, just like a capital asset, Cross says. That means you must track virtually every transaction you make. As he explained to us in an email:

Users will have to track their transactions and determine the amount of their taxable gain each time.  It's quite a burden.  The rules on taxing foreign currency provide an exception for "personal transactions" for that very reason. It would be great to have that exception (or something similar) apply to bitcoins as well. 

The only mitigating factor here, he says, is that this guidance is not likely to be final: the IRS called for additional public comment on the issue, a sign the government is amenable to reconsidering its position, Cross said.

Next step is for the Treasury Department to start develop regulations in the taxation of virtual currencies. That typically begins with a request for public comments, which was included in the notice. Tax professionals can then identify issues and advocate possible solutions.  So between now and the issuance of actual regulations (which takes years), there's ample opportunity to shape the tax treatment.

The other main takeaway for the somewhat average Bitcoin user is fairly straightforward: If you mine Bitcoin, they count as income right away, separate from the time you may end up selling them, a transaction that is also taxable.

There is a whole separate set of conclusions for those paying and receiving wages in Bitcoin, namely that it's subject to federal income tax withholding, FICA tax and FUTA taxes, and must be reported on a W-2.

You can view the full guidance here »

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Agora Commodities has sold over $10m-worth of gold and silver for bitcoin since accepting the cryptocurrency last year.

With cryptocurrencies becoming increasingly popular in Poland, a new bitcoin exchange, Bitmarket.pl, was launched there this month.

Since late 2013, Bitcoin has rarely been off the World’s Front Pages, it seems that everyone has an opinion and many of them are far from positive. The bankruptcy of Mt gox in Tokyo, which may, or as it turns out, may not, have lost up to $400,000. The Silk Road arrests, and charges leveled […]

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There's a fundamental rift over what bitcoin should become. Many of the currency's original proponents?call them crypto-libertarians?see it as a step toward an entirely new economy, one that can't be influenced by an overweening federal government or rapacious financial industry. Meanwhile, some of the new entrants to the bitcoin universe?venture capitalists and entrepreneurs?have a much different vision.

After last week's Chinese bitcoin hoax, a litecoin flash crash and DDoS attack at exchange Huobi went almost unreported.

Big stories often take some time to emerge. When they see the light, it’s usually just the tip of the iceberg. Mt. Gox was like this and CryptoRush is just the same. Another leak appeared today, this time from one of the exchange’s support workers. One month of hacking DogeyMcDoge has been working for CryptoRush […]

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Today's Mt. Gox updates bring in the Japanese Police to find missing bitcoins, and add some mysterious tweets.

The IRS finally released guidance on how it plans to tax bitcoin. Here's what it means.

Credit: Flickr user olarte.ollie The Bitcoin protocol is strong cryptographically (to the best knowledge so far), and we wish the world encompassing its network and users were as secure. In this article, we will review several classes of attacks, how a feature of the Bitcoin protocol in conjunction with online wallets will help prevent them and we’ll end with an overview of why fraud detection is a difficult endeavor. To avoid any confusion, in the context of this article, “fraud” refers to a transfer of funds to a destination not authorized by their legitimate owner. Double spending or transaction malleability have been covered extensively elsewhere. Pretty much everyone reading this article will know Bitcoin transactions are technically irreversible and this makes […]

The post Fraud Detection in the World of Bitcoin appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Canadian bitcoin exchange Vault of Satoshi is now a fully licensed Money Services Business in its home country.

In a historic ruling, the IRS said Bitcoin is property, not currency, and will be taxed as such. Here’s what you need to know

If you have been involved with Bitcoin, both acquiring and spending coins, chances are you have told someone you know about it. Understanding Bitcoin or any Cryptocurrency for that matter can be very challenging for someone who has not been involved with it and has heard very little about it. When first trying to explain […]

The post How To Explain Bitcoin To Any Generation appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

BitPay, Blockchain, Coinbase and Ripple are thinking big when setting goals for their operations in 2014 and beyond.

Prominent bitcoin angel investors made the case for increased collaboration, emphasized the value of unique ideas at CoinSummit.

Bitcoin is around since January 2009 and it has during that five-year period has climbed dramatically in value, but where is it going from here? Five years isn’t a long time in the greater scheme of things and indeed there may be a problem in analysing data this close to the source but on the […]

The post Bitcoin: Top economist’s views and predictions appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

CoinDesk reviews the ups and downs of auroracoin's official launch, and what they mean for country-based digital currencies.

(Official press release) Reddit and Dogecoin will soon be careening through countless left turns alongside NASCAR #98 driver Josh Wise in this spring’s race at Talladega. The initiative to raise $50,000 began when members of reddit’s NASCAR community identified Josh Wise as a talented underdog(e) in need of a sponsor.  The Dogecoin community had just […]

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