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Bitcoin price declined to $240 (Bitfinex) and 1500 CNY (BTC-China) where it found support at its reliable 200-period moving average. A bounce higher is underway and analysis looks for its target and outcome. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3 hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? Join now and receive a $29 discount using the code CCN29. Bitcoin Price Analysis Time of analysis: 05h00 UTC Bitfinex 1-Hour Chart From the analysis pages of xbt.social, written 05h00 UTC, prior to the current advancing wave: In the 1-hour Bitstamp chart, above, price has declined to the […]

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Elliptic, a bitcoin analytics and storage startup based in London, thinks it's just made a huge breakthrough that could make banks way more interested in bitcoin.

The company has created a sophisticated bit of software that it says can identify where a bitcoin has come from. That's a big deal for banks, which have a legal obligation to find out where the money they hold is coming from to ensure they're not holding proceeds of crime.

Bitcoin isn't untraceable — every transaction is recorded on a public ledger called the blockchain. But the digital wallets that carry out transactions are anonymous, making it extremely difficult to actually make sense of the data. You could do some digging around and make a guess, but it's hard and time-consuming.

That means banks have been wary about holding bitcoin — if they take a bitcoin that's just been earned selling drugs in a dark web market like Silk Road 2.0, or that has passed through a known money-laundering service, they could end up in huge trouble with regulators.

Elliptic says its tool, built by 4 PhD holders, can make a hugely accurate guess as to who each wallet belongs to — and it can do so in real-time. Using machine-learning, its software crunches through the web and dark web, skimming references to wallets and other digital clues to build up a picture of the owner.

Tom Robinson, Elliptic's cofounder, told Business Insider the tool could be a "game changer for the institutionalisation of bitcoin." If banks can satisfy anti-money laundering regulation then they can start to think about handling bitcoin. The tool was created after conversations with dozens of lenders.

Elliptic has today released a visualisation tool showing the flow of bitcoin between entities over the entire six- year history of bitcoin, naming the 250 largest entities where bitcoins are sent to and from.

Later this year, the company will launch a API of its software, meaning banks will be able to effectively bolt it on to their existing systems and use it. Kevin Beardsley, an analyst at Elliptic, said around five banks have already signed up for the API. (He didn't say which ones.)

In an emailed statement on Thursday, Elliptic's CEO James Smith said “if digital currency is to take its legitimate place in the enterprise it inevitably must step out of the shadows of the dark web. Our technology allows us to trace historic and real-time flow, and represents the tipping point for enterprise adoption of bitcoin.

He added: "We have developed this technology not to incriminate nor to pry; but to support businesses’ anti-money laundering obligations. Compliance officers can finally have peace of mind, knowing that they have performed real, defensible diligence to ascertain that their bitcoin holdings are not derived from the proceeds of crime.”

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NOW WATCH: 'Shark Tank' investor Daymond John reveals the one thing in business more important than money

Bitcoin could change derivatives, in particular settlement, trading and securities issuance according to some individuals, among whom are bankers and technologists. Alex Batlin, who has been a vocal supporter of banks adopting Bitcoin related technologies, told attendees of the IDX Derivatives Expo in London that blockchain technologies will change banking.  “Blockchain technologies can make banks more efficient – for example through instantaneous settlement rather than the days it takes at present, lower costs and lower operational risk,” according to Alex Batlin, chief technology officer for innovation at UBS. The simple lesson for banks is that if we don’t do it […]

The post Bitcoin Could Change The Derivatives Market, Says UBS Banker appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Ben Parker, co-founder of IRIN, a humanitarian news service spoke to CoinDesk about bitcoin's potential in fragile states.

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 Belinky, head of Santander InnoVentures told Business Insider at MoneyConf in Belfast this week. Belinky 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 according to Forbes, 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, global head of R&D innovation 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 Belinky 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 Belinky said 2 more are close to completion. A source told Business Insider that one of these is a startup working on blockchain technology. Belinky declined to comment.

Belinky 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."

Belinky 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. Belinky 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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NOW WATCH: Forget the Apple Watch — here's the new watch everyone on Wall Street wants

25 years ago, the Internet was just a gleam in some techies eyes, as a new age of technology was dawning. Many readers of this article will not remember an age before Facebook, Yahoo and Google, but yes, the Internet did exist without them. There was a time when there were no search engines, social networks, or even ESPN. Maybe you see the next 25 years being the Era of Bitcoin and its digital technology, taking the baton from the Internet and going to the next level? The only problem is you need some funding for your Bitcoin innovation to […]

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Greece is on the verge of leaving the Euro. Whilst Eurozone capital markets are likely to deliver an initially muted response, we will see a long-term re-valuation of the price of peripheral Eurozone bonds and stock markets as investors price in the risk that other countries may, in time, follow Greece. The comments from Tom Elliott, International Investment Strategist at deVere Group, one of the world’s largest independent financial advisory organizations, come as the Greek debt crisis is reaching a climax following Thursday’s failed crunch talks with the Eurogroup finance ministers. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Greek saga […]

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