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Ryan Zagone, whose title is Head of Research for the Business Development Team at Ripple Labs, was recently elected to work to work on a team within the Federal Reserve. The team is called the “Faster Payments Task Force Steering Committee,” and Zagone’s election is part of an ongoing effort on the part of the […]

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A spectacular Bitcoin price surge has advanced to near $260 (Bitfinex) and 1638 CNY (BTC-China). The parabolic advance has left the market wondering about the next move and at the time of writing a bout of profit-taking has set in. The wave seems to be topping out in a familiar ending diagonal, whereby successive smaller […]

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JoyStream, the world’s first bitcoin-based BitTorrent client is set to have an alpha release for a limited amount of pre-signed users on the Bitcoin Testnet soon. Founded by Dr. Bedeho Mender, JoyStream attempts to improve the levels of bandwidth contribution and the lack of incentives for content providers known as seeders in the original BitTorrent client, by rewarding JoyStream’s seeders with micropayments using multiway payment channels in bitcoin. Users who choose to download content in the JoyStream client are known as leechers, and are required to pay the seeders directly in bitcoin, in exchange for downloading files or streaming large HD audio or video files. The unique feature and payment system of JoyStream provides the seeders with an opportunity to […]

The post JoyStream: a BitTorrent Client that Incentivizes Seeders with Bitcoin appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

In March/April 2013, the exchange rate of bitcoin soared as a consequence of harsh capital controls introduced in Cyprus. Many people came to the conclusion that governments and banks couldn’t be trusted with their hard-earned savings, and started looking for alternative ways to store value, out of reach of predatory central banks. Bitcoin came to the rescue, and its price shot up as many people rushed to take money out of their saving accounts and buy bitcoin instead. The recent spike in the exchange rate of bitcoin, which went up 10 percent in the last 24 hours – something unheard of in the last few months of relative stability – has been linked by many analysts to the more and […]

The post Grexit’s Significant Impact on Digital Currencies appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Coinbase users can now send bitcoin payments without being exposed to the digital currency’s volatility Users with a fiat wallet (must be verified in order to get it) allows use of Bitcoin’s global payment network without being exposed to the price of the digital currency. Coinbase’s Instant Exchange deducts an equal amount to the bitcoin the user wants to send, effectively exchanging the two. The service is similar to one offered by Coinbase to bitcoin-accepting merchants. As of today, Instant Exchange is available for users with a USD, EUR, or GBP wallet. After typing the bitcoin address and chosing a fiat wallet, users can hit the “Instant Exchange” button, and then send. A bitcoin amount equal to the fiat selected […]

The post Coinbase Launches Instant Exchange to Help Users Avoid Bitcoin Volatility appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Last month Bitcoin Magazine reported that Bitcoin Tracker One, the first Bitcoin-based security available on a regulated exchange, started trading on Nasdaq Stockholm. Now, Bitcoin Tracker One, a product launched by the Swedish company XBT Provider AB, is available to investors in 179 countries via Interactive Brokers. Bitcoin Tracker One is an “Exchange Traded Note” (ETN) designed to provide investors with convenient access to the returns of the underlying asset, U.S. dollar (USD) per bitcoin, less investor fees. The average dollar exchange rate of bitcoin from the exchanges Bitfinex, Bitstamp and OKCoin provides the underlying reference price. A detailed breakdown of the value of Bitcoin Tracker One is given here. Interactive Brokers LLC (IB) is a U.S.-based online discount brokerage […]

The post Bitcoin Tracker One ETN Now Trading Worldwide via Interactive Brokers appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The SEC has settled with Sand Hill Exchange, an experimental stock market that used bitcoin as a medium of exchange.

Goldman Sachs will soon offer consumer loans online, as some established competitors wonder where else the banking giant will surface.

Watch out fintech companies, there's a new, moneyed competitor in town.

After nearly 150 years of catering to the wealty elite and helping fast-growing startups either go public or sell themselves to larger competitors, Goldman Sachs is finally getting into the consumer lending market, and will soon offer small personal loans.

It may not be that surprising that white shoe investment bank Goldman Sachs is getting involved in making consumer loans. After all Goldman, along with Morgan Stanley, were re-chartered as a bank holding companies 2008. At the time, the move was largely seen as a strategy for accessing federal bailout money in the aftermath of the financial crisis. So by offering loans to consumers, Goldman is simply becoming more of a bank.

What is more surprising is that Goldman, also a wholesale bank that serves as an underwriter for some of the most promising alternative finance technology IPOs, will be competing with alternative lending technology platforms that facilitate similar types of loans. It’s also an investor in some of the most promising alternative finance companies out there.

While its entry into consumer finance is a sign that that market is ripe for some new players, and lends validation to many companies that are already there, it raises questions for some potential competitors about where Goldman will appear next.

Most recently, Goldman served as underwriter for Lending Club in its 2014 initial public offering. Lending Club, which uses a marketplace approach to financing, primarily makes consumer loans for consolidation of debt, and has recently gotten involved in lending to small businesses.

Over the past few years, Goldman has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in an assortment of payments and alternative finance companies including Square, Bluefin Payments, Bill Trust, Revolution Money, as well as newly public OnDeckCapital, an Inc. 5000 company. It’s also ventured into digital money, including the bitcoin startup Circle Internet Financial, venture capital research company CB Insights reports.

In an internal memo from Goldman in May, when it hired Harit Talwar, an executive from Discover Financial Services, to head up is online lending division, the bank talked about its opportunity to participate in disrupting traditional finance, including with small business loans.

“The firm has identified digitally led banking services to consumers and small businesses as an area of opportunity for GS Bank,” the memo reads. “The traditional means by which financial services are delivered to consumers and small businesses is being fundamentally re-shaped by advances in technology, maturity of digital channels, use of data and analytics, and a focus on customer experience.”

Details of how the loan product will be made available to consumers are a bit thin, although according to the New York Times, which first reported the story, the loans could be for between $15,000 and $20,000, and will be made available either through an app, online, or via a prepaid card, or a combination of all three. A Goldman spokesman said in an email the bank had not decided on timing for the launch.

Certainly consumer loans are a big market. Non-revolving debt, which excludes credit card debt, currently stands at about $2.5 trillion for 2015, compared to $1.8 trillion in 2010. That's according to CEB TowerGroup principal executive advisor Brian Riley, who cited Federal Reserve data.

By comparison, revolving debt for credit cards, where many banks have also sought their fortunes in the past, stands at about $850 billion, which is essentially flat compared to 2010.

“There is room for growth, and [consumer loans] does fit within the traditional banking space,” Riley says, adding that Goldman will have to continue developing more products and services in order to appeal to a consumer clientele.

In addition to personal and small business loans, Goldman could get involved in student loans and even auto loans, Riley says.

Still, the prospect of Goldman establishing itself in small business lending has some of the entrenched alternative finance players leery.

“The boat has already left the docks, and there are some really respectable players in this space,” says David Goldin, founder and chief executive of small business lender AmeriMerchant, of New York. “Unless Goldman Sachs has no problem losing money for the next three to five years, they have a long road ahead of them.”

It is commonly said that the Cypriot financial crisis of 2013, in which the Central Bank literally emptied the bank accounts of everyday people, is responsible for the first serious rise in the price of Bitcoin. In response to the forced closure of one of the Cypriot banks and the emptying of thousands of bank […]

The post Bitcoin Rising: Will it Take More than Movies and Crises? appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Note: the following interview was conducted with Bytecoin developer Harry Ullman via e-mail, as a recorded audio interview was beyond the privacy considerations of the Bytecoin development team. The author does not currently possess any Bytecoin. When did you discover Bitcoin? Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that I’m one of the first people who discovered […]

The post Will Bytecoin Eventually be the Peferred Currency for DarkNet? – An Interview with Harry Ullman of Bytecoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Bitcoin’s biggest problem is still the threat of a 51% attack, according to Dr Dirk Haubrich of the European Banking Authority (EBA).

Gift card app Gyft and Bitcoin infrastructure provider Chain will transact gift cards on the blockchain, cutting fraud and costs and making new payment innovations possible for retailers and consumers.

Coinbase has announced the launch of its Instant Exchange, which will allow users to buy and sell bitcoin whilst protecting them against the digital currency's price volatility. Users with euro, dollar or pound Coinbase accounts will be able to purchase or sell bitcoin directly on the company's website. Once their instant buy or sell order […]

BitCasino.io holds a number-matching lottery with juicy BTC prizes exclusively for CryptoCoinsNews.com readers! All you need to do to be eligible to participate in it and win ultimately is just try to correctly guess five numbers from 1 to 36 in the Lucky 5 ball lottery, post these numbers in the comments below, and provide […]

The post BitCasino.io: Win Juciy Bitcoin Prizes Exclusively for CCN Readers appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Can the block chain revolutionize over-the-counter (OTC) securities trading? A team of Toronto-based entrepreneurs thinks it can, and they are developing a decentralized securities processing platform. Their platform, Equibit, will allow investors and securities issuers to do business without any third parties. If successful, this peer-to-peer electronic equity system will revolutionize securities trading. Equibit is a block chain based securities register that manages OTC equity, warrants, partnership units and more. The system includes a shareholder communication system, plus the ability to issue BTC-denominated dividends and distributions. Equibit will manage functions typically performed through transfer agents and central depositories. Hence, the […]

The post Will The Block Chain Revolutionize OTC Securities Trading? appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Magnr, formerly BTC.sx, is now offering interest bearing blockchain-based bitcoin saving accounts.

Banks mostly aren't interested in bitcoin, but they are interested in the software that runs the digital currency — the blockchain.

Banks run on systems that were in some cases built decades ago and as a result are slow, costly and cumbersome. The blockchain — the program that lets people send bitcoin to each other and records those transactions — doesn't have these legacy issues.

The blockchain keeps a public record of transactions, spread across a distributed network, and allows much quicker transfer of balances. As a result, sending bitcoin is faster, cheaper and more transparent than sending traditional currencies.

That makes it attractive to banks looking to soup up their money transfer businesses, but the technology also has potential in other areas — distributed ledgers could be used for "smart contracts" when banks make loans, for example, recording who's borrowed what across a public network.

"We have internally identified 20 to 25 use cases where this technology can be applied," Mariano Belinkey, head of Santander InnoVentures told Business Insider at MoneyConf in Belfast this week. Belinkey reeled off international money transfers, trade finance, syndicated lending and collateral management as some of the areas where blockchain technology could be applied.

Santander, the world's tenth biggest bank and the second largest in Europe, is one of several lenders investigating how to use the blockchain in traditional banking. UBS has set up a blockchain research lab in London, Goldman Sachs has invested in bitcoin startup Circle and Nasdaq is also experimenting with the technology.

It's pretty clear why the banks are doing all this. As well as making their systems smarter, it could save them a huge amount of money. A report co-authored by Santander earlier this month estimated that blockchain technology could reduce banks' infrastructure costs by up to $20 billion (£12.8 billion) a year.

Julio M Faura, head of innovations at Santander, told Business Insider: "For us, the first obvious space to explore all of this in is payments, particularly international payments. Later on we think smart contracts have the potential to transform many of the other things we do.

"We still haven’t made anything official, we haven’t announced anything publicly, but we have an internal team working on this. We’ve done some proof of concepts."

Faura is heading up a team in Santander dubbed Crypto 2.0 — referring to cryptocurrencies — which is carrying out experiments with the blockchain and digital currencies.

Santander InnoVentures, which Belinkey heads, is the Spanish banking giant's $100 million (£64 million) fintech investment fund, launched last year. The fund has made 3 investments so far and Belinkey said 2 more are close to completion. A source told Business Insider that one of these is a startup working on blockchain technology. Belinkey declined to comment.

Belinkey told BI: "We’re very excited about distributed ledgers and blockchain technology. They really have the potential to disrupt many of the basic processes we have underlying our transactional products."

"What we see as the foundation use case, which is international payments, we don’t really need a coalition of 50 banks to make it work. We have ten major geographies. Just us connecting our ten major geographies will allow 100 million customers to make instant payments worldwide. If we partner with two or three banks similar to us we’ve got pretty much global coverage."

But Faura adds: "This thing will only be interesting if many banks take part and collaborate. We are talking and experimenting with several banks."

Belinkey chips in: "It’s like having the first phone — there’s no point, you can’t ring anyone."

He adds that while Santander is very keen to explore the possibilities of blockchain, we won't be sending cash over blockchain networks any time soon. Belinkey says that "while getting to a working prototype could be something that we do within months, getting to an actual product that regulators say is good to go and the compliance guys like — that will take a while."

Stephen Pair, CEO of bitcoin company Bitpay, told me during our interview at MoneyConf that he's in conversation with several banks about the potential of blockchain and related technologies. But he said: "I’ve been in and around banks for a while and they take years, even with software that’s well known and well understood."

Pair thinks it will be at least 5 years before any banks seriously adopt a version of blockchain technology.

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According to European Central bank Governing Council member Erkki Liikanen, Bitcoin “isn’t subject to the most basic principles governing payment systems,” such as know-your customer, and this is “problematic.” According to Liikanen, Bitcoin’s “continuity of operations and contingency planning are problematic,” and fluctuations in Bitcoin value “impose additional costs” The Governing Council Member claims payment […]

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