Coin News

Politician Mark Clear returned a $100 bitcoin donation after a state campaign finance regulator declined to authorize the contribution.

Bitcoin Self-Regulation: What the MPAA Can Teach us Bitcoin Exchange Self-Regulation: What the MPAA Can Teach us Act 1, clean up our act. Let’s face it: When people tell us bitcoin is a scam we come to its defense. Critics often point to the explosion of alternative (alt) coins as proof that anybody can make one and there is no barrier to entry. True, no problem so far. But then the on-line exchanges will be happy to advertise and market the coin. Some might argue that this is an example of “pump and dump” schemes as it benefits them as well. I think it’s not unreasonable to see their point. On the other side, those that run these exchanges might […]

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This week the popular funding platform Bountysource announced that it will accept Bitcoin for developer and software funding efforts. Bountysource is a funding platform for open-source software, and is a place where users can improve the projects they are passionate about by creating or collecting bounties and pledging to fundraisers. By using the platform, developers can earn money from fundraisers, project donations and bounties for closing issues in open-source software. Many Bountysource users have been requesting Bitcoin support for funding endeavors, and it has finally become a reality. By providing Bitcoin support, users can now pay and earn with BTC for all types of payments, while also having the ability to cash out in Bitcoin. In addition, users will also […]

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Cinco de Mayo 1862 – Mexico’s army came to an unlikely victory over the French at the Battle of Pueblo. Today, Mexico’s army of Bitcoiners are fighting to revolutionize the financial system. Mexico is a key market for Bitcoin because Mexico is the fourth largest destination for remittance payments, totaling about 22 billion USD in 2013 according to the World Bank. Currently remittance payments are packed with fees in all parts of the process; using Bitcoin can drastically reduce these fees. Remittance payment fees from the US to Mexico are some of the lowest in the world. Fees of payments going to Africa can reach over 10% but fees of money sent to Mexico can be lower than 2%, although […]

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Digital currency exchange Moolah released a preliminary audit today in response to calls for added transparency.

Desde que comenzó la caída en picado de Mt. Gox, dos puestos de la junta directiva de la Fundación Bitcoin han estado vacíos. Mark Karpeles, CEO de Mt. Gox, dimitió de su cargo el pasado mes de febrero en un momento de incertidumbre sobre la situación de su empresa y su capacidad para resolver los […]

The post Bobby Lee, Brock Pierce y Vinny Lingham optarán a dos plazas en la junta directiva de la Fundación Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Top bitcoin companies used this weekend's Bitcoin Job Fair to scout for sales, development and marketing talent.

Bitcoin Magazine is now offering a reduced price per magazine onAmazon USA,Amazon Germany andAmazon UK. We are now only charging 5USD, 3.11 GPG and 3,65 Euros per magazine when purchasing directly through Amazon.com. As we are currently printing our 20th Issue, Issues 1 through 20 are available on Amazon for you to enjoy. Since we first released our first print magazine issue, the Bitcoin currency has grown to a significant level of prominence.  We encourage you to purchase back issues on Amazon.com and then in turn sign up for a subscription to regularly receive copies of our newest issues! We encourage you to renew your subscription in full for another year OR start up a subscriptionTODAY! As the Bitcoin currency continues […]

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Sources say the demise of China's FXBTC will not have a widespread impact on the local bitcoin economy.

Former Goldman Sachs partner and current Fortress Investment Group CIO Michael Novogratz says the smartest guys in the room have all turned their attention to Bitcoin.

In an interview Monday with Bloomberg Television's Stephanie Ruhle at the 2014 Sohn investing conference, Novogratz explained how Bitcoin has grown to capture the imaginations of programmers from its libertarian roots:

There are in best estimates somewhere 30,000 individual programmers working on Bitcoin. My college roommate lives down in Barbados. He was the smartest guy that we went to school with [Novogratz graduated from Princeton — ed.]. He full time works on derivatives of Bitcoin. So there’s this open source community where there’s huge brain power, let alone all the VC money that’s going in. And so from Marc Andreessen and his company to Benchmark… there’s lots of smart money going in. I’ve never seen a small project with more human capital going into it, and so I kind of want to bet just on that alone."

Ruhle pressed on him whether Bitcoin could simply flame out. Novogratz responded by saying it would lead to the "democratization of finance." 

I think you’re going to see things like peer-to-peer lending. The banks are – their biggest I think threat is the same thing that’s happened in so many other industries now happening to the finance industry, right? The Internet disintermediates large players and I think Bitcoin is just one of the threats that the finance industry the way we know it has coming against it.

Fortress is sitting on $13 million-worth of Bitcoin. In February, the firm became the first publicly-traded company to file Bitcoin holdings (they were listed as losses).

Full clip:

Follow along with our live blog of Sohn 2014 here »

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Before one is to get involved in Bitcoin, it is imperative to understand what makes Bitcoin unique. Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer currency that does not rely on a central government, central company, central bank, and doesn’t have a central point of failure. Bitcoin is also a trustless system where individuals involved in the ecosystem take their own precautions to protect their bitcoin without placing trust in a centralized entity to do so. Along those lines, Bitcoin, in its purest form, does not look like the traditional payment structures that are used most today. So, why do I bring up these traits of what makes Bitcoin unique? Unfortunately, as with most innovative and unique systems, humans tend to want to […]

The post Do Not Let Bad Businesses Hijack Your Bitcoin appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The first ever Bitcoin Job Fair was held at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, CA. This landmark event symbolizes the growing job market surrounding the Bitcoin ecosystem.  For individuals looking to start a career in the alternative currency space, this job fair presents massive opportunity with a diverse set of Bitcoin businesses. To get the scoop on what it’s like to work in the Bitcoin world and to find out what it takes to get the job, I decided to reach out to one of the first and most established businesses in the Bitcoin world, BitPay. With over 30 employees and several years under their belt, I felt that BitPay would provide excellent insight for individuals that […]

The post BitPay at the Bitcoin Job Fair, Working for Bitcoin appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Ripple’s Susan Athey and Blockchain’s Peter Smith shared their thoughts on cryptocurrencies at TechCrunch's Disrupt NY 2014 event.

Ripple’s Susan Athey and Blockchain’s Peter Smith shared their thoughts on cryptocurrencies at TechCrunch's Disrupt NY 2014 event.

This morning, Pfhub reported that Alderman Mark Clear of Wisconsin had returned a Bitcoin donation accepted by his political campaign for State Assembly.  The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) had previously ruled not to allow Bitcoin or any Digital Currency donations given their value fluctuation and non-negotiable value status.  Though people in the GAB have […]

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Bitcoin leaders gathered at MIT this weekend to teach students how to get involved in the bitcoin economy.

The Union Square Ventures founder says the bitcoin protocol has bigger potential in key fields like Internet identity.

A central conceit of Bitcoin evangelists is that the cryptocurrency could be most useful to "the global unbanked."

These are the 575 million individuals in mostly emerging markets who lack access to basic financial services, even a bank account.

It principal, the advocates are correct. The time it takes to process a Bitcoin transaction — about 10 minutes — is far faster than the three days in the regular banking system. It's also usually cheaper. 

But a new survey from trade association GSM shows that even the most promising emerging market electronic payments technology, mobile money, has only just begun to break out, meaning it could take years to unseat cash as the payment method of choice in the developing world.

Mobile money can be used for just about anything. You can buy stuff at a grocery store. You can send and receive money to and from friends and relatives. You can pay and tip your taxi driver. And you can buy phone minutes. To upload or withdraw cash, you need only walk to a mobile money agent. 

The granddaddy of mobile money is a service called M-Pesa. Launched in Kenya in 2007, the service was an overnight sensation, and is now used by much the adult population there. Its success is chalked up to close collaboration between the Kenyan government and Safaricom, the unit of Vodafone that operates M-Pesa, that allowed the service to spread. It also began life as a pilot program for microlending, which allowed developers to realize users were tapping the service to send and receive payments instead. After this, there was a huge marketing push.

Here's what the homescreen of M-Pesa looks like:

Here's an M-Pesa stand in downtown Nairobi. This is where you withdraw and deposit money.

Africa and the Middle East processed $5.7 billion in mobile money volume last year. No other country has come close to Kenya in terms of mobile money adoption. Check out this chart showing volume breakdowns. Eastern Africa dwarfs all other regions. East Asia and Pacific, represented by Indonesia, appears to be the next closest. The rest of Africa barely registers.

GSM's data data show a strange phenomenon. The number of registered mobile money accounts nearly tripled to 203 million in June 2013 from 71 million in June 2011. And the number of active users — those who made at least one transaction with the last 90 days — nearly doubled from 2012 to 2013. There are now 218 different providers beyond M-Pesa worldwide. 

But of the 203 million registered users, East Africa accounted for 34%, with the vast majority of those being in Kenya. And the number of active mobile money accounts totals just 61 million — barely 30% of total registered users. 

Here's the chart:

"Activating customers remains a challenge for a large number of services," GSM says. "Even when customers are aware of the service, they may not necessarily understand how they would benefit from using it. Using mobile money represents a significant behavioral change in economies where almost all payment transactions are conducted in cash."

In fact, over-the-counter services, where a mobile money agent performs the transactions on behalf of an unregistered walk-in customer, are now the fastest-growing segment of active mobile money users, at a 102% annualized rate, most of it in South Asia. 

These services "offer a compelling value proposition for unbanked customers, a segment where literacy levels are often very low and where people tend to be more suspicious of new technologies."  

Within Kenya, M-Pesa has become so ingrained that competitors have struggled to make inroads, meaning innovation has stalled out.

"Some people have been using M-Pesa for three, four five years, and are reluctant to take on new services," Mustafa Golam, a consultant for Nokia in Kenya, told BI. "There's a lot of technology-phobia — very few people will actually try it because they're happy with M-Pesa."

GSM also found that remittances — another key Bitcoin selling point — remain a "marginal service" among mobile money providers, though more seem to be adding them. Providers said they processed fewer than 50,000 international remittances in the month they were surveyed. "While a large number of providers are interested in launching inter- national remittance, major barriers continue to slow down the uptake of this product," GSM says. Instead, the fastest growing transactions type is bill pay. The largest service overall remains buying more mobile minutes. Here's a breakdown of how mobile money was used in a single month:

By GSM's reckoning, many citizens of the developing world have only begun orienting their commercial lives around the promise of mobile money. So it's not surprising that Bitcoin's rollout in the developing world has been sluggish. Here's a chart (used with permission) from a new Coindesk report showing the breakdown of Bitcoin vendors by region:

But as with most Bitcoin proponents, those looking to expand its reach into remain utterly undeterred by any of this. Mainly they argue that the same things holding mobile money back will allow Bitcoin to come in. 

"Countries where there may be 3 mobile money operators with roughly the same number of subscribers, if that’s the case, then [mobile money] not used widely," Pelle Braendgaard, the outgoing head of Kipochi, a Bitcoin payments app targeted at developing markets, told BI. "As a user, if I want to send money to anyone, I have to have an account with each of these services, so it's just not very practical."

He also observes smartphone use is steadily increasing — and indeed Safaricom now says 67% of mobile phones sold in Kenya are smartphones. 

What's more, M-Pesa now faces an "innovator's dilemma," in that it's too big and too entrenched to act upon what's on the horizon, Braendgaard continued. 

"It's a transitory solution, it’s not a permanent solution," he said. "It’s been very effective but it's extremely primitive — it's showing it's age...I don't know how long it will take but I just don't see a particularly large future for it."

Aditya Khurjekar, a former Verizon exec, agrees that services like M-Pesa will prove temporary in the long run. Even if it's not Bitcoin itself, a Bitcoin-like payment "rail" that uses a network of computers to confirm transactions  will take over, not just in Africa but everywhere. 

"It is a business model problem," he told BI. "I think what Bitcoin — the cryptocurrency infrastructure, the technology —  does is it makes these artificial constraints irrelevant.  It doesn't matter geography you’re in, whatever the local bank consortium you're in, how quickly they have to settle money, it doesn't really have to follow these artificial constraints."

As with most things Bitcoin, it's simply too early to expect a substantial expansion in emerging markets. M-Pesa caught lightning in a bottle thanks in large part to massive backing from a multinational conglomerate. Given that Bitcoin is premised on doing away with such entities, it will likely have to wait a long time to compete.

SEE ALSO: SATOSHI'S REVOLUTION: How the creator of Bitcoin stumbled upon something much, much bigger

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 Peter Smith of Blockchain.info and Susan Athey of Stanford University took the stage at Disrupt NY to update everyone on the state of bitcoin. In the last few months, Mt. Gox collapsed, bitcoin has lost half of its value. Can bitcoin survive following the current reality check? According to our two experts, bitcoin as a whole is here to stay. But Mt. Gox may have shown us that there is a wrong way… Read More

When people say that currency is only the first app of Bitcoin, this is the kind of stuff they’re talking about. Most Internet users are now used to the idea of logging into other websites with their Google, Facebook, or Twitter accounts, but BitID is a new application that would allow anyone to easily login […]

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Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, global finance has been witnessing a change. At first, the advent of cryptocurrencies was largely invisible to the financiers and movers. This happened because, like all successful changes, it started small and then grew, and grew. Bitcoin has more and more traders coming on board, and its recently […]

The post Bitcoin: Cryptocurrencies and the Technology Tsunami appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Presenting the IRS a Real Use-Case Scenario to Teach Them About the Possible Unintended Consequence the Alt-Coin Mining Taxes I just finished my taxes. I  feel like I was just punished for being on the cutting edge of computer and monetary science. That will teach me – why would I want to be part of an innovative technology in the USA?  How dare I? Before I relate my experience and interpretations, know up front, I’m not a tax expert. I’m only indicating how I interpreted the rulings. Your professional tax person might advise differently so don’t use this story as any kind of tax advice. I doubt any IRS researcher actually took time to sit down with an actual alt-coin […]

The post IRS Tax Rulling May Have Just Killed Alt-Coin Mining appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The firm says it is Australia’s first dedicated investment fund for the digital currency.

The Bitcoin price decline has resumed after bulls staged a weak rally to levels around $450. Last week’s Bitcoin analysis forecast a retracement to this area and, like clockwork, early Monday trade is showing signs of pushing to our interim target at $400. Takeaway Within limited parameters, pattern analysis shows that for practical purposes the […]

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Here are a few of the projects seeking a more private way to bitcoin.

The exchange has suffered a server attack, but says clients' bitcoins and data are safe.

LocalBitcoins.com a été victime d’une attaque samedi 3 mai 2014. D’après l’annonce officielle, l’ensemble des données personnelles et des bitcoins seraient en sécurité. oilà maintenant un peu moins de 24 heures que le service LocalBitcoins.com est indisponible. Le site aurait été victime d’une attaque le samedi 3 mai 2014. En ce moment même, l’équipe serait […]

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A division within the Department of Defense is investigating whether the digital currency bitcoin is a possible terrorist threat.

usammen mit Oliver Flaskämper, dem Chef der ersten Bitcoinbörse Deutschlands sprechen wir über Mt.Gox, Bitcoin.de und die Zukunftsaussichten des Bitcoin.     Herr Flaskämper, wie haben Sie, als größte Bitcoinbörse Deutschlands die Thematik um Mt. Gox gesehen? Wie sicher ist Bitcoin.de? Eigentlich könnte man annehmen, dass es einen freuen würde wenn ein Wettbewerber die Segel […]

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Cryptocurrency centered financial companies are getting pretty fancy. Vancouver-based Newnote Financial recently mutated from a business resource exploration company, Winrock Resources, to an integrated platform built around cryptocurrencies. Ever since, the company developers have been furiously working on a number of unique new projects. To kick off the ambitious integrated platform, it recently launched  a national television campaign, a […]

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Bitcoin is one of various modern technologies Defense is interested in as potential security and terrorism threats.

A German bank is the first mainstream financial institution to offer the Ripple network's payment features to its customers.