Coin News

Facebook has continued unveiling its Facebook payments platform, adding the desktop option on Wednesday for many users. CCN reported in March how the social media website had introduced payments on its messenger application, and it seems that today it has rolled out a Facebook chat payment integration for desktop. In March, Facebook announced the introduction of a feature in Messenger enabling users to send and receive money. In order to use this service, you must link a Visa or MasterCard issued by a US Bank. Once a debit card is added, you create a PIN. As CCN has detailed: To […]

The post Facebook Challenges Bitcoin? Payment Icon Added To Desktop Users appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.

US retail giant Overstock has reportedly lost $117,000 on its investments in cryptocurrencies during the first quarter of 2015.

By now it's a familiar story that the Great Recession impacted almost everyone in America. Even those who were lucky enough not to lose their jobs likely saw the value of their house plummet. The lost wealth from the Recession's impact on home equity will reverberate across generations. 

But here's what may not be familiar: This lost-wealth effect was much, much worse for black homeowners than for white ones.

A new report from the ACLU shows what racial inequality looks like in the housing market, and how it's expected to get worse over the next two generations.

A big part of the problem is that white homeowners saw a recovery much sooner than their black counterparts. White homeowners' wealth stabilized after 2009, while black homeowners continued seeing a decline. As you see in the chart at the top, black homeowners actually saw their wealth grow slightly more on a percentage basis from 1999 to 2005. But when it fell, it fell much harder. 

 The ACLU explains that this is bad for two reasons. First, there's the obvious reason: It's bad that black homeowners lost more of their home equity than white homeowners. 

But second, when the housing crisis hit, black homeowners had a greater percentage of their wealth tied up in home equity, so a bigger portion of their wealth took a hit. Add that to the fact that black homeowners' home prices didn't recover as quickly, and you've got an increasingly grim story that's going to affect Americans for generations into the future:

Among the sample of people who owned a home at some point between 1999 and 2011, home equity is a more significant proportion of total wealth for blacks than for whites. As such, a typical black household that was subject to a toxic mortgage had fewer resources to fall back on when home values plummeted and interest rates skyrocketed, compared to the typical white household. The significant losses in wealth experienced by black households will likely create ripple effects, hampering the ability of the next generations of black households to catch up to whites in terms of total wealth and home equity values.

This is a projection of what that effect looks like for the children and grandchildren of today's homeowners:

The dotted lines are where the home equity gap would have been without the recession. The bold lines are what the gap is expected to look like with the way the recession went.

This isn't what equality in America looks like. There's little question that this is unfair. The question is what are we going to do about it. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: People in Portland, Oregon are going crazy over these tiny houses

Voat™, a media aggregator like Reddit, wants to be the place on the Internet where you can "have your say™". But that might not be possible if PayPal has its way. PayPal informed Voat administrators that their account had been “limited,” and their funds frozen. The site, entirely funded by user donation, is distressed.  The site creator Atif Colo posted in a stickied thread on the forum’s homepage: The reason given was ‘Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for certain sexually oriented materials or services or for items that could be considered […]

The post PayPal Limits Voat's Account, Site Now Accepts Donations Only In Bitcoin appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.

The NYDFS has officially adopted the BitLicense as of its publication in the New York State Register today.

A deal between a bitcoin exchange and a payments network will see a bitcoin payment option offered to over 20,000 merchants in Japan.

Bitcoin Press Release: Cloudways, a leading managed cloud hosting platform established in 2012, is pleased to announce it is now accepting the P2P currency Bitcoin for all customer transactions. Web apps and stores hosted on Cloudways load on average 100% faster due to special optimizations, utilizing the latest in server load balancing technology. Based on the open source peer to peer internet protocol, Bitcoin has gradually become the most preferred alternate currency in the world. The integration of Bitcoin payment gateway further demonstrates Cloudways’ innovative approach and love for their customers: giving users the payment flexibility they desire. Cloudways now supports MasterCard, PayPal, VISA, and American Express along with the newest addition of Bitcoin for all managed cloud hosting products. […]

The post Bitcoin Now Accepted at Established Cloud Hosting Company Cloudways For All Web Hosting Services appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The NASA Dawn space probe has been going around Ceres for a few months, in closer and closer orbits, and scientists are nowhere close to understanding some of the features seen in the images sent back to Earth. New puzzling features keep surfacing as higher resolution images are taken and transmitted to the baffled researchers.

The post Alien Life Discovered? A Huge Pyramid Rises 3 Miles Above the Surface of the Planet Ceres appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.

Bitcoin price made a new corrective low today of $239 in the Bitfinex chart although the BTC-China low of 1489 CNY made on the weekend remains intact. Price is currently pushing higher - away from the day's low. 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: 16h58 UTC From the analysis pages of xbt.social, earlier today: Massive orders are building up just below $240, so it is possible that price could bounce […]

The post Bitcoin Price Dips Below $240 appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.

Analysis by Steven McKie. Big Data. It’s a popular buzzword that you’ve seen all over the Net the past few years. It’s a very serious billion-dollar industry now — with frontrunners from all different niche avenues of data collection and analytics. With the number of unique data sources available to these data-focused companies, the possibilities for analytics and selling that service to others seems exponential. And, with the rise of worldwide ledger-based systems like that of Bitcoin and other blockchain-based technologies, the lines are blurring between what’s kosher in extrapolating data from the public domain and what isn’t. There are plenty of reasons to gather large amounts of information, especially in realtime. The ability to identify trends, track data from […]

The post The Blockchain Meets Big Data and Realtime Analysis appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Ripple Labs, maintainer of the digital currency Ripple, has announced it will not continue the development of its smart contract project nearly a year after it was announced, saying the “small and nascent decentralization market” is too immature. In a blog post, Ripple Labs CTO Stefan Thomas wrote that the company, which recently raised a $28 million funding round, has no plans to work on Codius, a platform that allows people to build distributed applications, and will instead build its own decentralized apps “manually.” He cited a lack of demand as the biggest reason why the project was closed. “Codius is just a way to make decentralization easier,” Thomas wrote, “it’s an optimization, you don’t need it,” but “If there […]

The post Ripple Discontinues Smart Contract Platform Codius, Citing Small Market appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Ripple Labs, maintainer of the digital currency Ripple, has announced it will not continue the development of its smart contract project nearly a year after it was announced, saying the “small and nascent decentralization market” is too immature. In a blog post, Ripple Labs CTO Stefan Thomas wrote that the company, which recently raised a $28 million funding round, has no plans to work on Codius, a platform that allows people to build distributed applications, and will instead build its own decentralized apps “manually.” He cited a lack of demand as the biggest reason why the project was closed. “Codius is just a way to make decentralization easier,” Thomas wrote, “it’s an optimization, you don’t need it,” but “If there […]

The post Ripple Discontinues Smart Contract Platform Codius, Citing Small Market appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Of the 10 firms to take part in Barclays’ 13-week fintech accelerator program in London, seven are now “exploring opportunities” with the bank, Finextra reports. The Barclays Accelerator program, offered in partnership with the Techstars global networks, includes mentorship and opportunities for financial technology startups to access industry experts, influencers and potential clients. The program, which will soon open also in New York, covers all areas of fintech, from cybersecurity and artificial intelligence to wealth management, investment banking, big data and cryptocurrencies. “At Barclays, we’re embracing the digital revolution, exploring innovations early on so that we can help to shape their development and co-create the future of financial services with these startups,” said Barclays’ chief design and digital officer Derek […]

The post Barclays to Explore Financial Applications of Blockchain, Signs Deal with Bitcoin Company Safello appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Bitcoin hardware wallet provider Case Wallet Inc. has raised USD $1.5 million in an equity seed funding round led by FuturePerfect Ventures, participated in by RRE Ventures, High Line Venture Partners and the Rochester Institute of Technology Fund. The company launched its hardware wallet at TechCrunch NY on May 4, and has been receiving preorders for the first batch of the multisig, multi-factor and credit-card-size hardware bitcoin wallets set to be shipped this summer. With the new financing, the company aims to search for other possible usages for its secure signing device that utilizes biometric data. According to the company, Case already has gained the interest of well-established financial institutions that hope to implement the system to handle sensitive user data. […]

The post Case Raises the Stakes in the Hardware Wallet Marketplace with $1.5M Funding Round and New CTO appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Pompeu Fabra joins MIT, Simon Fraser University and the University of Zurich as universities that have installed bitcoin ATMs.

Vogogo is a payment processor which is not strictly focused on cryptocurrency, but more on its clients. Its other offerings include know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering services for firms transacting in Bitcoin and in general. The company could represent a real disruption for the industry if it starts to gain traction, moving in on the business of companies like CoinBase and BitGo. Today Vogogo announced that it has closed an oversubscribed 12.5 million dollar funding round which was led by a few traditional financial firms: Salman Partners Inc., Clarus Securities Inc. and Beacon Securities Limited. The new funds will be used to […]

The post Cryptocurrency Processor Vogogo Closes $12.5 Million appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.

The Chinese hacker group APT3 is known in the security industry for their previous, large-scale attacks. The group's last big campaign, dubbed Operation Clandestine Fox, was a smashing success that relied on something most people visiting this website will find absurd: people using Internet Explorer.

The post Flash Vulnerability Gave Chinese Hackers Free Access to Networks appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.

In its test of the Bitcoin blockchain for trading shares of private companies, Nasdaq is working with year-old startup Chain.

CCN.LA reported on Monday about the 11th hour Eurozone emergency summit seeking a deal to prevent Greece from defaulting on her debt and toppling the area into an economic tailspin. But the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission, Greece's main creditors, are using the situation to push Greece and her citizens further into an economic corner. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said in a tweet, this morning, that some creditors have not accepted the Greece’s proposals of reform-for-aid as he left for emergency talks in Brussels. The insistence of certain institutions of not accepting parametric […]

The post Greece: Creditors Have Not Accepted Our Proposals appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.

Augur strives to bring prediction markets into the future. The tool, which Director of Operations Jeremy Gardner and Core Developer Joey Krug hope to make prediction markets more accurate than ever, comes with great precedent. But Augur believes, with the power of decentralization and open source technologies, theirs' is truly a paradigm shifting project. The decentralized prediction market has been gaining notoriety in recent months, and was even considered a finalist for the biggest breakthrough technology as voted upon by Singularity University at the Exponential Finance Conference for the XCS Challenge at the Exponential Finance Conference. Other finalists in the Breakthrough category […]

The post Augur Looks To Succeed Where DARPA, The CIA & DoD Failed With An Open Source Prediction Market appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.

A recent attempt to standardize the development of the oldest bitcoin protocol for asset transfer has resulted in a new implementation.

Elías Snær Einarsson and Matthew Roberts, two coders who presently focus largely on cryptocurrency, have entered the security business with a splash, presenting a system called Timechain which aims to eliminate one of the biggest problems for exchanges: private keys having to exist in the same place as the funds being exchanged. Disclosure: the author is nothing of a cryptographer. Please make any corrections in the comments. Roberts is the inventor of Uptrenda, a “significantly more practical and secure” altcoin exchange system. Einarsson is the developer of RedArc, a Reddit archiving system written in Javascript. Before anything else, it should […]

The post Sending Messages to the Future: Timechain Cryptocurrency Security appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.

Elías Snær Einarsson and Matthew Roberts, two coders who presently focus largely on cryptocurrency, have entered the security business with a splash, presenting a system called Timechain which aims to eliminate one of the biggest problems for exchanges: private keys having to exist in the same place as the funds being exchanged. Disclosure: the author is nothing of a cryptographer. Please make any corrections in the comments. Roberts is the inventor of Uptrenda, a “significantly more practical and secure” altcoin exchange system. Einarsson is the developer of RedArc, a Reddit archiving system written in Javascript. Before anything else, it should […]

The post Sending Messages to the Future: Timechain Cryptocurrency Security appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin News.