Coin News

The operator of two unlicensed digital currency exchanges has been ordered to pay more than $68,000 after a lengthy investigation by the US SEC.

A new decentralised marketplace called Bitmarkets has introduced privacy enhancing features and a novel escrow system.

It appears a tug of war between the bulls and the bears, stalemated for a while, is finally being tilted toward the bears. For several days now, in the shorter term time frames, there has been a preponderance of evidence or clues, that the market wanted to go lower.  As markets are known to do, it […]

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Bitcoin services are emerging in Latin America with more emphasis on the average consumer than exclusively the bitcoin consumer.

Innovative Bitcoin alternative FibreCoin has in just eight weeks launched several exclusive safety features; their most recent project ZeroTrust offers an exclusive end to end privacy solution now available to the public. Among Fibre’s other innovations to optimize security for cryptocurrency adopters are FibreConnect, FibreDark, FibreOS and FibreLock to combat keyloggers by using a security pattern similar to that used for Android. FibreCoin is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) cryptocurrency allowing FibreCoin adopters to enjoy ongoing hands-off profits when storing FibreCoins in the wallet. Fibre is a part of Blocknet and implements Dark Gravity Wave for difficulty re-target, a block speed of 60 seconds and 5% PoS annual interest. FibreCoin has met with large early success and is already accepted on six […]

The post Bitcoin Alternative FibreCoin Launches FibreLock, Anonymous ZeroTrust And Secure Operating System Fibre OS appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The year-long investigation into BTC Trading, Corp has finally come to an end. BTC Trading, Corp was the company behind BTCT.co and litecoinglobal.com. Both sites offered . The SEC has fined BTC Trading, Corp. (BTCT.co) and Ethan Burnside for violating the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, and the Investment Company Act […]

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The year-long investigation into BTC Trading, Corp has finally come to an end. BTC Trading, Corp was the company behind BTCT.co and litecoinglobal.com. Both sites offered . The SEC has fined BTC Trading, Corp. (BTCT.co) and Ethan Burnside for violating the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, and the Investment Company Act […]

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U.S. securities regulators on Monday ordered the operator of two exchanges to resolve claims that he failed to register them

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. securities regulators on Monday ordered the operator of a stock exchange, which allowed clients to use Bitcoin to trade in certain securities, to pay $68,000 to resolve claims that he did not register the exchanges.

Ethan Burnside and his company BTC Trading Corp operated two online exchanges through which account holders could buy, sell and trade securities of companies in the virtual currency business between 2012 and 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

Burnside and BTC neither admitted nor denied the charges.

Burnside agreed to be barred from the securities industry but will be able to reapply after two years. His lawyer could not be immediately reached for comment.

The exchanges had solicited more than 10,000 users who had opened online accounts and executed more than 425,000 traders, the SEC said.

The settlement requires Burnside to pay $58,387 in profits and interest, and a penalty of $10,000.

(Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

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A lot of banks and consultancies have now released their outlooks for 2015. There's a lot to look forward to. The US economy is more healthy than at any time since the crisis, and the UK is following close behind.

But not everything is exactly rosy. Analysts and economists are pointing to some major crisis threats that could derail the warm, Christmassy glow of recovery.

Here are the three bearish scenarios likely to be keeping investors up at night over 2015.

A Chinese Credit Crisis

The possibility of a rapid slowdown and crash for China could have been included in any list of risks for at least the last six years. So far, it's the dog that didn't bark, and people who keep forecasting it have looked more like doom-mongers than wise sages. But economist Michael Pettis thinks the idea of hard and soft landings is misplaced, and that it's better to think of it as the two ways the Chinese authorities could decide to deal with an inevitable growth slowdown:

Beijing can manage a rapidly declining pace of credit creation, which must inevitably result in much slower although healthier GDP growth. Or Beijing can allow enough credit growth to prevent a further slowdown but, once the perpetual rolling-over of bad loans absorbs most of the country's loan creation capacity, it will lose control of growth altogether and growth will collapse.

China's credit growth has been extremely fast, and with Beijing cutting interest rates and Chinese equities going parabolic, it certainly doesn't look much like the state is gently managing the situation. In a separate post, Pettis offers this ominous warning: 

I have studied most of the major growth miracles of the past 100 years (and directly experienced some), and in every case there have been pessimists that predicted a difficult adjustment process with much slower growth. ... that the pessimists have always been wrong, it always turned out that they were wrong because actual growth turned out to be much worse than they predicted.

Pettis does not expect that the government will handle the slowdown in a disorderly way. But for more pessimistic observers, a major slump could see the world deprived of a major source of demand, which there's precious little of anywhere at the moment.

Here's a chart from Nomura showing that Chinese debt has accumulated very rapidly since the global financial crisis:

An Old-Fashioned Emerging Market Debt Crisis: 

Claudio Borio, current head of economic and monetary analysis the Bank of International Settlements, think the strong dollar is going to threaten the debt burdens of emerging nations — and cripple growth there. There's some basic but powerful logic here. In a lot of countries around the world, particularly in the developing world, it's common for companies and banks to borrow in dollars. So although their day-to-day business might be denominated in pesos, or dinars, or francs, their debt levels depend on how strong that currency is against the dollar.

So when the dollar falls, it's good news! Your debts are getting smaller in real terms. You need to earn less of your domestic currency to repay them. When it rises (like it's doing now), that isn't good news at all! You need to earn more and more to pay back your debts.

This wouldn't be the first crisis in emerging markets linked to the strength of the US dollar: the Asian crisis in the late 1990s and the Latin American crisis of the 1980s were both spurred by dollar bull markets. Andy Xie, the former Morgan Stanley economist, noted that the coming strength of the dollar would be unpleasant for emerging markets.

What's more, this year's Geneva Report (an annual study) noted that there is a lot more debt in emerging markets than there was at the start of the crisis. While emerging nation stock markets have barely grown (they're actually smaller than they were in 2007), debts have surged.

Debt crisis, in other words, is a bigger systemic risk than an equity collapse in emerging markets:

Euro Crisis Round Two

Europe really can't handle any more big shocks. The currency union is struggling to generate any visible growth or inflation, and this is meant to be a recovery. It really seems unlikely that the eurozone could weather any major negative economic surprises without slumping into recession and deflation.

Maybe the most obvious catalyst is back in Greece: the current government has to nominate a president in February, and it doesn't look like it has the votes. To install a president, the coalition would need the support of 180 MPs, not the 155 that it currently has.

If it can't get the votes, a snap election would be won by left-wing radical party Syriza (based on current polls). The party is in favour of serious bondholder haircuts and abandoning the bailout deals that have been negotiated with international authorities. That would almost certainly send bond prices crashing and yields surging for Greece like they did in during the crisis (rapidly raising the cost of issuing debt). Syriza aren't the only new anti-austerity party leading in southern Europe: Podemos are in the lead in Spain.

Here's Citi's global outlook for 2015 on the rise of anti-establishment parties on both the left and right in Europe:

Future developed country elections will likely continue to see the popularity of new — and not so new — anti-establishment parties, from France’s National Front to Greece's Syriza to Spain's up-and-coming far-left Podemos, increasing the risk of fragile multi-party coalitions and reducing the already limited political capital of  leaders. In our view, the appetite for political alternatives will endure for many years to come, and their public support could increase in the event of a triple-dip European recession.

Podemos has captured the public debate in Spain, and is dipping in and out of first place in political polling:

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The security of Blockchain.info, the popular Bitcoin wallet, has been often covered by the news recently. For example, there have been several reports of users losing their funds after using Blockchain.info through the Tor network. In response, the company temporarily blocked all Tor exit nodes, and then started using HSTS as well as providing a […]

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The bitcoin price has remained flat, but traded volume has declined sharply over the last week.

Bitcoin solutions developer Airbitz has developed a mobile wallet that now supports deterministic transaction signatures. The transaction signatures support the RFC 6979 standard. To understand why this is significant, here is some background on signatures and why they are necessary. Bitcoin uses elliptic curve digital signatures which require a random value with every transaction. Multiple […]

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“Fiat” is a dirty word in the Bitcoin world, and perhaps that’s not the best thing, insinuated Coinapult backer Lawrence Lenihan in a recent interview with CoinDesk. Worse, many people are offended by the idea of traditional venture capital firms getting involved in anyway, because, they say, the entrepreneurs are then not loyal to their […]

The post The Next Level For Bitcoin Entrepreneurs: Understanding Money, Says Financier Lawrence Lenihan appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

BitPay, the world’s largest payment processor, announced this past Thursday that they had opted to integrate with DriveWealth, a mobile investment platform that is available around the world. With the inking of this deal, DriveWealth becomes the first financial services company to allow users to fund their accounts using bitcoin. Bitcoin’s borderless and growing international […]

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Happy Sunday, and welcome back to another Bitcoin New in Review, where we feature some of the biggest stories of the week here on CryptoCoins News. This week, (30 November – 7 December) MasterCard attacked bitcoin in Australia, the bitcoin mining difficulty actually decreased, the second Silk Road bitcoin auction ended, and more. Keep scrolling […]

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