Coin News

One of the many long standing truths about bitcoin is the permanent nature of all send transactions. Once you’ve hit send, there is no way to stop it. Right? Wrong says new start-up BITUNDO who claims that they can at least attempt to get your errant payment back to the original sender. Yes, contrary to […]

The post Undoing the Undoable: Bitundo – Doublespending Bitcoins as a Service appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Seedcoin is encouraging investments in a wider variety of bitcoin startups with its second funding round.

Oversexed and underbanked? Chase Bank recently informed hundreds of porn performers that the bank will close their accounts by mid-May. Apparently Chase has a history of discriminating against sex workers and the adult industry. When banks pulled the same thing on Washington and Colorado’s state-legal marijuana dispensaries, they quickly moved to bitcoin. Banks claimed to be concerned that though the dispensaries were legal to operate by state law, marijuana is still illegal to buy, sell, or own at the federal level. However, the problem with Chase and sex work appears to be reputational. In Colorado, new cannabis vending machines accept bitcoin. And dispensaries have begun taking it in Washington as well. Perhaps this is a viable solution for the sex […]

The post First Pot, Now Porn. Can Bitcoin Save the Adult Industry? appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Experts recently told CNBC that the dollar, not bitcoin, is the future of digital currency.

'The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin' debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday to a packed crowd.

GoCoin CEO Steve Beauregard makes the business case for altcoins in a new interview with CoinDesk.

ello, I’m Calvin Tran, the media producer here at CCN. I’ll be down in California this weekend to take part in the Foundation for Economic Education’s Seminar: Big Ideas on the Big Screen. In conjunction with the Moving Picture Institute, this seminar will feature a variety of speakers and lectures, workshops and film makers from […]

The post Ask Libertarian Film Makers about Bitcoin and the Media appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Xapo, a company that offers online bitcoin wallets, says it's two months away from introducing the first debit card that will let you spend your bitcoins at any place that takes Visa or MasterCard.

 Bitcoin vault Xapo the made news in March after launching an insured, secure repository for big BTC investors. The service, which has gone so far as to bury paper bitcoin keys in underground vaults, has become a big finance darling. Now it's going after the average user by offering MasterCard credit cards directly linked to a Xapo bitcoin wallet. Read More

Xapo claims its card is the first to allow bitcoin users similar spending freedoms to traditional debit cards.

Ayer se proyectó en el festival de cine de TriBeCa el estreno mundial del documental sobre Bitcoin “The rise and rise of Bitcoin” (aunque sin título oficial en castellano, podría traducirse como “Las subidas y subidas de Bitcoin”). El documental cuenta con grandes figuras del panorama Bitcoin y con rodaje de los momentos más notables […]

The post Se estrena el documental sobre Bitcoin: “The rise and rise of Bitcoin” appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

 Things move fast in the world of Bitcoin. Two days ago, we saw the launch of the much anticipated MaidSafe distributed computing network. Their aim was to collect around 8 million USD worth of cryptocurrency over a four week period, build excitement and vest interested parties with its new token, MaidSafeCoin, in anticipation of the network’s completion and launch. Read More

People often discuss Bitcoin in terms of its price volatility: Is it up or down? Is it a good investment or a speculative bubble? 

But at BI Intelligence, we believe Bitcoin's real value is as a payments network. Bitcoin offers merchants and individuals an extremely low-cost, virtually frictionless payments system. Value can easily be transferred around the world without transmitting sensitive information that could be used for fraud, and without forcing merchants to pay exorbitant transaction fees.

In  a recent report, BI Intelligence explains how Bitcoin works, from the moment when local currency is exchanged for bitcoins, to the moment when it reaches the electronic wallet of a receiving party. We look at the key advantages of Bitcoin compared to the legacy players in the payments industry and examine the challenges that Bitcoin faces as a payment network. 

Access the Full Report By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here are some of the key elements from the report: 

• Unlike government-backed currencies, Bitcoin's elegant design places a strict limit on how many units can be created — 21 million. But each coin can be divided into 100 million pieces, which will allow it to scale as a payments technology.
• Bitcoin's daily average transaction volume stands at just $89 million compared to $16.5 billion for Visa and $9.8 billion for MasterCard. 
• In a nutshell, Bitcoin allows for the simple and secure transfer of value online, without intermediaries. There are many players in the Bitcoin ecosystem that help to make this happen, including Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin wallets, and miners.
• Third-party bitcoin payments processors already are stepping in to address flaws such as price volatility and the length of time that it takes the Bitcoin network to clear transactions, allowing merchants to instantly process bitcoin transactions and avoid exchange risk.
• Bitcoin faces other significant threats, though, including fraud and regulation. And right now, too much power is concentrated among a small group of miners, which opens Bitcoin up to further vulnerabilities.
• Despite the barriers, we believe the efficiency and low cost of Bitcoin in comparison to legacy payments tools — including credit cards, money transfer services, and letters of credit — will ultimately prove too tempting for merchants, individuals, and business-to-business applications to resist.

In full, the report:

• Examines the problems Bitcoin was created to solve and the elegant solutions it provides which have clear advantages over the current payments system. 
• Gives an insider's view of Bitcoin with exclusive interviews from Bitcoin Investment Trust Founder Barry Silbert and BitPay's Vice President of Marketing Stephanie Wargo.
• Explores the open questions surrounding Bitcoin pertaining to security, volatility, and regulation and provides potential answers to these questions. 
• Analyzes the players in the legacy payments system which Bitcoin has the potential to eliminate if it catches on as a transaction network. 

For full access to all BI Intelligence's charts and data on the Payments Industry, sign up for a free trial.

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The growing sum of venture capital that has been invested in bitcoin startups is now up to $154m.

Many have proclaimed Mt. Gox dead, yet the ghost of Gox has returned back to haunt the troubled MaidSafe IPO. A few hours prior to press-time, templar77 of the BitcoinTalk forum conducted a blockchain investigation. He claims that it proves 64,000 BTC flowed from a wallet linked to Mt. Gox into an address associated with […]

The post Breaking: Gox Coins Flowing into Maidsafe IPO? appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

itcoin Trader wants to help you earn passive income with your Bitcoin by investing in their cloud mining or arbitrage trading platforms. I know what you’re thinking; “Bitcoin? Investment? Tom, this is another disaster in the making.” Bitcoin Trader understands this concern, and that is one reason they created their Local Representative Network.  The LRN is […]

The post Bitcoin Trader: Investing the Bitcoin Way appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

he Mt. Gox website got updated with a new document. The Tokyo District Court ordered liquidation to begin at the failed Bitcoin exchange. This definitive order follows an earlier announcement made last week, where the bankruptcy administrator said it would be difficult to get Mt. Gox started again. “At 5 p.m. on April 24, 2014, […]

The post Mt. Gox: long investigation pending after court bankruptcy ruling appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

The Irish BTM operator has teamed up with safe deposit facility Merrion Vaults to offer ultra-secure bitcoin storage.

The Silk Road, for all its clever uses of security protections like Tor and Bitcoin to protect the site's lucrative drug trade, still offered its enemies a single point of failure. When the FBI seized the server that hosted the market, the billion-dollar drug bazaar came crashing down. If one group of Bitcoin black market enthusiasts has their way, the next online free-trade zone could be a much more elusive target.

itcoin conferences are on the rise. It seems every week some city is host to a new expo on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. Mostly, these events have several keynote speakers sharing their views on certain aspects of the world of virtual currencies, but some events put focus on the very basics of Bitcoin as […]

The post MIT Bitcoin Expo: free Bitcoin initiation with high-profile speakers appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Regulatory unease hasn't stopped enthusiasm for bitcoin in Russia, where startups and conferences are still going full steam ahead.

 was able to get a sample 1 th/s Bitmine SHA-256 Bitcoin miner to review. I got the miner from BitTech.hk. They are a new company on the Bitcoin mining scene and active on BitcoinTalk. The new CoinCraft A1 chips are powering the miner. They have been popping up in several different 1 th/s miners the […]

The post The Bitmine 1 th/s Bitcoin Miner From BitTech – Review appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Dans un entretien exclusif avec la CNBC, le fondateur et directeur général de SecondMarket, Barry Silbert, a confirmé que la plus grosse société de capital-risque d’origine américaine, New Enterprise Associates, investissait dans Bitcoin.    SecondMarket Dans UNE interview du 21 avril 2014, Barry Silbert, le directeur général de SecondMarket, une entreprise spécialisée dans la gestion de […]

The post New Enterprise Associates, la plus grosse société de capital-risque aux Etats-Unis, investit dans Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Bitcoin core developer Jeff Garzik is taking steps to set up a satellite system that would beam Bitcoin's block chain public ledger down to earth

Bitcoin Battalion Back in December we reported that the United States Air Force has quietly been working on a Bitcoin payment gateway otherwise known as a “snack machine” (yes you read that correctly). We also discussed that “currency is like another class of supply, a commodity required to execute the battle.” Recently, United States sanctions against the Kremlin for annexing Ukraine resulted in MasterCard and Visa suspending certain types of transactions in Russia (apparently due to the OFAC 50% rule). OFAC or Office of Foreign Assets Control under the Department of U.S. Treasury maintains a list of different sanctions programs that it administers here. It has been reported that Visa did resume services with some Russian banks. I found an […]

The post U.S. Navy Preparing Bitcoin Battalion appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

ne of our CCN correspondants, Naomi Brockwell (The Bitcoin Girl), was at the Toronto Bitcoin Expo and was able to meet with the team behind Crypto Swartz, an homage to the late Aaron Swartz, the founder of Reddit and a very vocal, influential and persecuted voice for freedom and transparency who took his own life in […]

The post Naomi Brockwell at the Toronto Bitcoin Expo: Crypto Swartz appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

A 90 percent success rate also means a 10 percent failure rate that can cause major ripples.

Even the very best recruiters are going to make a mistake from time to time. And even a razor-thin margin of error can have a big effect on making sure your company is identifying top talent. Here's the math to prove it.

This logic problem comes from the fortchoming book from Harvard Business Review Press, written by executive search expert Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, It's Not the How or the What but the Who. It goes a little something like this...

Imagine you are able to correctly gauge talent 90 percent of the time. Fernández-Aráoz writes that this would basically be impossible--even the best interviewers and recruiters hit about 70 percent of the time--but for the sake of argument, let's say you are just spectacular.

And let's say you're interviewing 100 people for a position. You probably don't have the time for that, but again: sake of argument.

So what percentage of those candidates will you correctly identify as top talent?

"I've done this exercise hundreds of times, all over the world, with thousands of students, professionals, and executives," Fernández-Aráoz writes. "The responses I typically get from a large crowd usually range from 9 percent to 90 percent. Very few people give the right answer intuitively, and not many more can calculate it.

"The answer is 50 percent."

Wait, what?

Stick with me. If you're interviewing 100 people, 10 of those people will necessarily represent the top 10 percent of talent in that larger pool. Of those 10, you will choose nine to pass on to the next round, and wrongly dismiss one.

You will then have 90 other candidates who are not top talent. You will rightly dismiss both of them. However, since you are only right 90 percent of the time, that 10 percent margin of error will lead you to incorrectly pass 10 percent of that group on to the next round.

So in the end, you'll have nine people who are top performers and nine lesser candidates moving on to the second round of interviews. That's a sobering showing to come from your 90 percent rate.

(Did I mention, Fernández-Aráoz is also a former industrial engineer?)

Okay, now that you're adequately shocked, here's the good news. Just because the numbers work out this way, it doesn't mean you'll be hiring all those people and wind up with nine less-than-ideal hires. (Unless, I guess, if you have 18 spots open for people with similar qualifications and experiences and don't plan on doing any further vetting.)

Instead, the numbers really drill down the importance of the second and third interview process, and making sure your colleagues conducting those are also strong judges of talent. This kind of "filtering" process, as Fernández-Aráoz puts it, should ultimately widdle things down to the right candidate.

If you, a second interviewer, and a third interviewer are all very skilled at gauging talent, by the end, there's only a 1 percent chance that you'll wind up with a low performer in the pool when it's time to make a decision, Fernández-Aráoz writes. That suddenly doesn't look so scary.

tartup Stock Exchange or SSX is now accepting Bitcoin as a payment option in exchange for Stocks in companies listed on the site. SSX has extensive requirements for a company to be listed in an attempt to protect clients. Ian Haet, CEO and Co-Founder of the Startup Stock Exchanges states reasons for accepting Bitcoin in the […]

The post Startup Stock Exchange Now Accepts Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

tartup Stock Exchange or SSX is now accepting Bitcoin as a payment option in exchange for Stocks in companies listed on the site. SSX has extensive requirements for a company to be listed in an attempt to protect clients. Ian Haet, CEO and Co-Founder of the Startup Stock Exchanges states reasons for accepting Bitcoin in the […]

The post Startup Stock Exchange Now Accepts Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

tartup Stock Exchange or SSX is now accepting Bitcoin as a payment option in exchange for Stocks in companies listed on the site. SSX has extensive requirements for a company to be listed in an attempt to protect clients. Ian Haet, CEO and Co-Founder of the Startup Stock Exchanges states reasons for accepting Bitcoin in the […]

The post Startup Stock Exchange Now Accepts Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Gift card provider eGifter has launched a new incentive program for its digital currency users.

Gift card provider eGifter has launched a new incentive program for its digital currency users.

Gift card provider eGifter has launched a new incentive program for its digital currency users.