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Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC) provides support to the families of seriously ill children receiving treatment at nearby hospitals. On Tuesday, the RMHC of the Capital Region partnered with BitPay to accept bitcoin donations. “Part of what sold us (eased our novice worries) was knowing that the United Way, Green Peace accepted donations via Bitcoin,” […]

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Boost VC has just closed a new fund to provide a 300 BTC investment to each of the companies in its upcoming startup batch.

The Bitcoin Foundation has hired developer Sergio Lerner as its new bitcoin core security auditor.

Serial bitcion investor Tim Draper has confirmed he purchased 2,000 BTC during yesterday's US Marshals bitcoin auction.

US Representative, Steve Stockman (R-TX) has submitted a new bill that proposes a five-year moratorium on digital currency regulation. The HR 5777 bill, (download the text here) or in full the Cryptocurrency Protocol Protection and Moratorium Act, seeks to hold off any “statutory restrictions or regulations” on digital currencies such as bitcoin for “the five-year […]

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As the 2008 financial crisis gets further in the rearview mirror, what's the next threat to the global economy?

That question was the subject of the presentation by Hyun Song Shin, the relatively new head economist for the Bank of International Settlements (the "central bank of central banks"), at the Brookings Institution on Thursday. You can listen to the full audio of the speech here.

Shin laid out a couple of different global trends that the BIS is looking at. The two big things were 1) the boom in lending that occurs via debt issued on the bond market versus conventional loans from banks, and 2) the effect fluctuations in the dollar have on the global economy.

From Banks To Bond Markets

There are two issues that he's looking at: first, the fact that so much of the credit growth in the economy is coming from capital markets, not necessarily from traditional bank lending (in particular there was a lot of talk about large asset managers buying up corporate bonds). That's a shift from pre-2008 crisis. The common wisdom is that asset managers are benign in the global economy. But Shin doesn't think that's true anymore.

The question is how and if that affects the real economy if there's a big shock to the financial system. On the one hand, he said, large asset managers aren't as leveraged as banks. On the other hand, clients of asset managers are things like pension funds. A huge credit crunch that hits asset managers hard would be bad news for the retirement accounts of a lot of Americans.

Dollar-Denominated Everything

The second issue is how dollar-denominated debt ripples through the global economy.

Dollar-denominated credit to non-US borrowers has skyrocketed over the last decade or so (even more so from outside of the US than domestic lenders). When financial institutions outside the US are dealing with both debt in dollars and debt in local currency, fluctuations in the exchange rate have a big impact.

When the dollar appreciates, on the other hand, things get tight for institutions lending in local currency. Shin thinks this may be behind recent global economic crises: Latin America in the 1980s and Asia in the 1990s.

On top of that, there's a trend of buying corporate bonds with longer and longer maturities (the average is now about 12 years), says Shin, which makes them more sensitive to yield changes.

Once again, everything's fine now, but Shin thinks there's real risk here if there's a big disruption in the dollar market.

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California's Department of Business Oversight is to hold a meeting this month that could determine if the agency will regulate bitcoin businesses.

Like many of you, I’m always looking for new ways to improve how our company works. I’ve found that one of the biggest inefficiencies business leaders struggle to hack is preventing employees from overworking. Many company leaders forget that success isn’t solely determined by the hours logged at the office. As a matter of fact, working long hours is the cause of so much burnout at young, growing companies. Nowhere is this more true than at a tech startup. While longer workweeks are the norm at hot Silicon Valley companies, research has shown time and time again that they negate employee retention, stifle talent recruitment, cripple workplace morale and are the one of the biggest killers of company innovation and productivity. To stop killing our companies, more business leaders, like myself, are doing something radical. We’re shortening the five-day workweek. The 9-to-5, five-day workweek was a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. While it’s better than the six-day workweek our farming ancestors had (and many farmers still do!), it no longer makes sense for today’s information economy. Instead of working five days, my company works a four-day week because we know that work done in the information economy is nothing like manufacturing work. While another hour in the factory might allow you to produce more widgets, one more hour at the MacBook won’t yield $1,000 more in profit. We believe that smart folks can get five days of work done in four. Simple as that. In addition, four days of work allows just enough extra time off for employees to return to work refreshed and excited to get down to business. No matter your company’s size, working shorter weeks can bring about tremendous success. Here’s a blueprint for how you too can successfully implement the four-day workweek. Lead by Example Implementing a four-day workweek starts at the executive level. It’s critical that executive leaders not only support this initiative but also practice it. If your employees aren’t supposed to be working on Friday, that strictly means you don’t work on Friday either. No exceptions. Start by deciding what day will be your company’s “non-work” day and keep it the same each week. We’ve found that Friday is the easiest day to eliminate because naturally employees consider this a signal toward the end of the week and customers typically need less support on Friday. Another important thing to get right from the start is setting expectations around hours worked. If you’re truly committed to giving your employees a four-day workweek, don’t cheat and disguise the week with 10 hour days. Push your employees to smartly prioritize their week, meet their deadlines and clock out after delivering 32 hours of high-quality work. Build in Efficient Systems In the beginning, it will be difficult for employees who are used to working 40-plus hours a week to push themselves to get all their work done in 32 hours. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to do everything you can to set your employees up for success and get their work done in four days. Give your employees every advantage to succeed by creating a system that significantly reduces distraction. Three ways to streamline workflow and keep employees focused on their work is to: Eliminate internal email. Employees spend more than 25 percent of their day reading and answering email, which is essentially doing things that are important to other people instead of completing their own top priorities. It’s a huge distraction that pushes information to your employees instead of encouraging them to efficiently pull the information they need, when they need it. Instead of using email to communicate about work, use a project-based tool, like Asana (or hack your own tool), that encourages employees to autonomously manage, track, monitor, report on and participate in projects that best fit within their work priorities. In addition, offer chatter tools like Convoy, to employees who wish to post ideas, celebrate wins, say happy birthday, post funny videos, etc. If someone has time and chooses to consume these things throughout workweek, they just go to this application instead. Eliminate managers. This may sound insane. But it can be done, and of course, leaders start this movement by recruiting and hiring self-motivated employees who prefer to work autonomously. If you’ve got the right employees in place and encourage them to set their own priorities and communicate with when it’s most convenient for them, you’ll see a significant increase in company productivity and employee morale. Eliminate internal meetings. According to Atlassian, most employees spend 31 hours in unproductive meetings, and attending 62 meetings a month. Last year alone, unnecessary meetings among U.S. businesses resulted in $37 billion of salary costs. Keep communication needs in written form to replace inefficient meetings, instead using your workflow and chatter tools to source project needs or new ideas. If you do need to host a meeting, make it optional for employees to attend based on how they’ve prioritized their week or offer employees remote conferencing ability, like Google Hangout. Set Client Expectations Not only should you set your employees up for success, but also make sure your clients understand the new game plan and that your company’s quality of work will not be affected in any way. Show clients that a four-day workweek is possible because your company: Takes a project-based approach to work. To make your case, show clients how you breakdown the end output into smaller individual projects across multiple team members. For example, developing an application for a client might be broken into four different projects or phases, each with coordinating deadlines and different team members working on each phase. This style of work holds team members accountable for consistently meeting and exceeding deadlines because other team members depend on their efficiency and commitment to complete the overall project. Ensures that team members working on project are 100% passionate about what they’re doing. Explain how allowing employees to select and only work on the individual projects they’re passionate about will increase overall productivity of reaching the final goal.

Bitupcard is a voucher scheme launching in Turkey that makes bitcoin buying as easy as topping up your mobile.

Counterparty, the open source, community-driven, peer-to-peer financial platform built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, announced that its developers have successfully implemented Bitcoin multisignature address handling. Multisignature addresses are addresses associated with more than one private key and require m of n keys in order to spend funds. This enables enhanced security, since private keys […]

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A member of the UK Parliament's Treasury Select Committee has said bitcoin is an "excellent" payment system that doesn't need a new set of rules.

BTC Pool Party is a new Bitcoin mining pool that has gone into operation in the last few months. With so many mining pools and centralization driving several to close, a new pool is almost unheard of. When CCN contacted BTC Pool Party, an interesting person in the Bitcoin mining hardware business turned out to […]

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The Feathercoin price fell 15% this week. This price decline is a continuation of the steady downtrend Feathercoin has experienced since the Feathercoin price rose in anticipation of the altcoin’s switch from the Scrypt algorithm to the ASIC-resistant (for now) NeoScrypt hashing algorithm. Also read: Feathercoin Price Rises Ahead of NeoScrypt Hard Fork Feathercoin Price […]

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The Feathercoin price fell 15% this week. This price decline is a continuation of the steady downtrend Feathercoin has experienced since the Feathercoin price rose in anticipation of the altcoin’s switch from the Scrypt algorithm to the ASIC-resistant (for now) NeoScrypt hashing algorithm. Also read: Feathercoin Price Rises Ahead of NeoScrypt Hard Fork Feathercoin Price […]

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 The US Marshals Service has completed the second auction of Bitcoin seized from the original Silk Road. The auction, consisting of 50,000 BTC, is the latest in a seized BTC sell-off that began in June. The USMC reported that 11 registered bidders placed 27 bids for the bitcoin, down from 45 bidders in June. Coindesk attributes the drop to a smaller bidding window – 6 hours versus 12… Read More

Benjamin Franklin once said that in life, nothing was certain save for death and taxes. That certainty has now extended to Bitcoin. In another sign of Bitcoin’s growing use, the US Internal Revenue Service has pronounced itself on how it is going to proceed vis-à-vis Bitcoin. IRS to Treat Virtual Currency as Property In a […]

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Precious metals and digital money platform, DigitalTangible has partnered with Agora Commodities to allow gold and silver to be stored and verified on the Bitcoin Blockchain. DigitalTangible, which manages the world’s first Bitcoin precious metals trading platform, has developed Bitcoin 2.0 tokens that are verifiable on the Blockchain and allow investors to now buy and sell silver in […]

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James Duschenne, Australian attorney and blogger for SatoshiLegal, quite cheekily responded to the recent pleas by MasterCard to the Australian government against Bitcoin today. Said pleas have culminated in two important ways: the video shared below from MasterCard’s Southeast Asia president Matthew Driver, and a letter to Kathleen Dermody, head of the Australian Senate Economics […]

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The second Silk Road Bitcoin auction for a 30,000 chunk of Ross Ulbricht’s personal bitcoins, which he agreed to have sold, has ended today. The US Marshal’s Service (USMS) is reporting that 11 registered bidders submitted a total of 27 bids; in contrast, the first Silk Road Bitcoin auction had 35 registered bidders that put […]

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