Coin News

The story of the rise and fall of bitcoin exchange Mt Gox and its CEO, Mark Karpeles, could find its way to the silver screen.

The controversial group behind several bitcoin 'stress tests' has confirmed next week it will push ahead with its biggest so far.

In the distant reaches of the Universe, exploding stars and supermassive black holes are bending the very fabric of spacetime. It’s hard to wrap our brains around such tremendous forces, but we may be able to quantify them, in the form of gravitational waves. A new European Space Agency mission marks humanity’s first bold attempt to do so in outer space.

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GameCredits, a cryptographic payments platform for gamers and game developers is set to integrate digital currencies including its own altcoin called GMC in three video games, one of which was released on September 2. “GameCredits is the first free open source gaming currency made by gamers for gamers and game developers,” explained the GameCredits team. The company believes that the integration of cryptocurrencies in video games could help increase digital currency adoption, and spur mainstream adoption for many alt-coins. “We at GameCredits are breaching this chasm and are baldly exploring those uncharted waters – all in the name of providing crypto currencies the mainstream adoption they deserve,” GameCredits Monetization Expert Silvio Gucek explained. The video game industry is one of the […]

The post GameCredits to Integrate Digital Currencies in TurboCharged Racing and Other Video Games appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

GameCredits, a cryptographic payments platform for gamers and game developers is set to integrate digital currencies including its own altcoin called GMC in three video games, one of which was released on September 2. “GameCredits is the first free open source gaming currency made by gamers for gamers and game developers,” explained the GameCredits team. The company believes that the integration of cryptocurrencies in video games could help increase digital currency adoption, and spur mainstream adoption for many alt-coins. “We at GameCredits are breaching this chasm and are baldly exploring those uncharted waters – all in the name of providing crypto currencies the mainstream adoption they deserve,” GameCredits Monetization Expert Silvio Gucek explained. The video game industry is one of the […]

The post GameCredits to Integrate Digital Currencies in TurboCharged Racing and Other Video Games appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Bitcoin trading has picked up the pace as price moves more urgently around the chart, yet, in a smaller range. 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: 15h27 UTC OKCoin 3Month Forward 15-Minute Chart From the analysis pages of xbt.social, earlier today: Price activitiy is increasing but the range of motion has decreased during the past ten days. There is no sure sign in the chart of any specific directional move […]

The post Bitcoin Trading More Active But Going Nowhere appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

In April, Bitcoin Magazine reported that Bitcoin exchange itBit had filed for a banking license in New York. Later in May, itBit was granted a trust charter by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYFDS) under New York State banking law, the first such charter granted to a digital currency company by the NYDFS. ItBit also announced the successful completion of a $25 million Series A funding round. On September 2, itBit announced the appointments of Daniel “Danny” Alter as the company’s new general counsel and chief compliance officer, and Kim Petry as chief financial officer. Petry was previously CFO of global operations and technology at Broadridge Financial Services and, before that, served as CFO and vice president of […]

The post itBit Hires Former NYDFS General Counsel Daniel Alter, Pushes Ahead with Bankchain Project appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The Bitcoin network took a hit yesterday as CoinWallet ran its “stress pre-test” for about thirty minutes resulting in a “2-day delay and a 50 MB backlog” according to CoinWallet CCO James Wilson. Reports are still coming in but it seems like most bitcoin exchanges and wallet companies were able to take the test in its stride. Wilson also told Bitcoin Magazine today that the company will be running a major stress test on the Bitcoin network on Thursday, September 10 starting at 10 a.m. GMT. The purpose of these stress tests is to see if the Bitcoin network can handle a barrage of very small transactions that will act like a DDOS attack but most observers see this as […]

The post CoinWallet Begins Pre-test of Bitcoin Network, Schedules Largest Stress Test to Begin on September 10 appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

A candidate running in Canada's upcoming federal election says he wants to give bitcoin an equal footing with the dollar.

AT&T has confirmed it is not intentionally blocking customers from using their bitcoin ports, contrary to some allegations in recent days. DSLReports.com, a website that reviews ISPs and conducts Internet speed connection tests, reported yesterday that AT&T confirmed that the company does not block the bitcoin port 8333 or attempt to block bitcoin nodes for its customers. Any customer experiencing a problem should contact AT&T customer care, the company stated. The situation would not be worth mentioning except for the fact that the topic has generated discussion on various websites, DSLReports noted. On Tuesday, a Reddit post stated: AT&T has […]

The post AT&T Confirms it’s Not Blocking Access to Bitcoin Ports appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

In 2008, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan went before Congress and admitted he had been wrong to hold interest rates at low levels for an extended period, because those low rates caused a housing bubble which — when it burst —  crippled the US and European economies.

The low rates had let the banking sector give mortgages to millions of people who couldn't pay them. Greenspan had ignored warnings about this for years.

With the economy in tatters around him, Greenspan finally admitted he had screwed up:

"I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

... “This crisis,” he told lawmakers, “has turned out to be much broader than anything I could have imagined."

Seven years later, we're back where we started.

The Fed and the ECB have kept interest rates near zero for years, trying to prop up weak economic growth in the West. Low interest rates have fueled warnings about bubbles in European housing, private tech equities, and, obviously, Chinese stocks. 

Despite that, the International Monetary Fund is urging central bankers to continue holding rates down in its report on the global economy ahead of the G-20.

In it, the IMF gives 10 reasons for the central bankers in the world's biggest economies to keep interest rates at record lows.

These range from record low commodity prices, and weakening growth in China to low productivity in Western countries.

They're all pretty worrying and form the basis of a plea to keep monetary policy free and easy. Raising rates now would only make this worse, argues the IMF:

In most advanced economies, output gaps are still substantial, inflation is expected to remain below target, and monetary policy remains constrained by the zero lower bound. The expected boost in economic activity from lower oil prices has not materialized, and lower energy costs are keeping inflation low. Hence, monetary policy must stay accommodate to prevent real interest rates from rising prematurely.

The report is important because two of the big central banks, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, have warned the market that they expect to do the opposite of what the IMF wants — they want to raise rates soon. 

In the case of the Fed, while this could be as soon as this month, market turmoil is making the prospect of a rate hike less likely according to Citi:

Analysts have been debating about how much the Fed really cares about movements in the market, but we'll only know for sure when the central bank publishes its decision on September 17.

Or as Bank of America Merrill Lynch puts it: "If they don’t hike, it’s an admission that Wall Street threatens to reverse the recovery on Main Street."

The IMF's reasons, and the market turmoil, highlight one of the big psychological problems with central bank policy at the moment — There's never going to be a perfect time to raise rates.

There'll always be a market that's volatile, or a country in distress or an economic indicator that disappoints, which will make rocking the easy money boat unpalatable. But these are short-term factors.

It's a quirk of the brain known as "myopic loss aversion." The short-term incentives to keep rates low are more powerful than the medium-term ones that suggest a hike is necessary, because people associate low rates with decent economic growth.

This is good marketing from the loose policy team, but ultimately hard to prove as these charts from BAML show:

There's always going to be a reason to keep rates low, even during benign economic times. It was one of the mistakes the Fed made before the 2008 financial crisis.

The problem, as we all found out along with Alan Greenspan, is that low rates can also be associated with financial instability which hurts growth more than low rates help.

The build-up of the housing boom and bust, which imploded the banking sector and led to the crisis response of even lower rates, was caused in part by 12 rate cuts after 2001 from 6.5% to 1%. The short-term boost to the economy was wiped out by the financial collapse in the medium term.

And we're back there again.

Low rates force money managers to take extra risk to get a decent yield on their investments. Anything that isn't interest on cash — stocks, property, tech companies — suddenly looks like a better bet than cash savings. Prices in non-cash assets go through the roof, leading to the kind of booms and bubles we saw in 2000 and 2008.

The OECD warned in June that this has led to investors seeking looser terms on deals (covenant protection) in return for better rates.

It's a mark of desperation. Low rates knock out a lot of financial business models that need a historically normal base rate to work.

Bond guru Bill Gross said it best on Wednesday:

"The Fed is beginning to recognize that 6 years of zero bound interest rates have negative influences on the real economy – it destroys historical business models essential to capitalism such as pension funds, insurance companies, and the willingness to save money itself."

The next financial crisis might not happen in the banking sector, but rather the insurance and fund industry. These guys are responsible for about $100 trillion of assets according to the OECD report so, if and when it happens, everyone will feel it.

While the debt markets react instantly to central bank policy, it generally takes about 12 to 18 months for an effect on the real economy.

Who knows whether the Brent crude oil price will still be hovering around $45-$50 a barrel in 2017, or $100. Or if China will be in full meltdown mode then or not. Or if Britain will be booming or in a recession.

They're obvious and scary but shouldn't take precedence over less obvious and scarier things when considering a rate rise.

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NOW WATCH: You've been rolling your shirtsleeves wrong your entire life

An interactive timeline providing a detailed history of bitcoin-related events in India to date.

There are many notable hackers around the world. We at Hacked have put together a list of the 10 most notorious hackers of all time. 

The post 10 Most Notorious Hackers of All Time appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Like pretty much every other major bank at the moment, Barclays is very interested in the potential of the blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin.

The Sunday Times reported this week that Barclays is planning to let charities accept bitcoin later this year, leveraging its partnership with bitcoin exchange Safello that was announced earlier this year.

I sat down with Barclays Chief Design and Digital Officer Derek White, who oversees bitcoin and blockchain at Barclays, to discuss what else the bank is planning to do with this technology.

"As a heritage organisation we can either embrace disruption or be disrupted," White told me at Barclays Techstars Accelerator in Whitechapel, east London. "We’ve chosen to embrace disruption. We're increasingly becoming a technology financial services company, not a bank with a technology division."

One of the technologies White is most excited by is the blockchain.

The blockchain is the software that both powers and regulates cryptocurrency bitcoin. Transactions are signed off by the parties involved using the software, then added to the blockchain, a long string of code that records all activity.

Once other transactions are added on in front of an exchange, the transaction is stuck there forever and can't be changed, in the same way you can't change a brick once it's been built into a wall.

The blockchain uses open ledger technology, meaning all of these transactions are free for anyone to look at and not siloed in some private data centre in Canary Wharf.

White says: "We fundamentally believe that the world is shifting from closed to open — closed architecture to open architecture, everything moving to the cloud; closed networks to open networks; closed systems to open systems."

On the blockchain, anyone can theoretically check to see if someone's using stolen bitcoin and this adds a level of transparency to the system.

On top of that, the blockchain is quicker and cheaper than the systems banks use right now to send and receive money — that's why they're interested.

Barclays has two bitcoin "labs" above old branches in Notting Hill and Old Street that are open to bitcoin and blockchain entrepreneurs, businesses, and coders.

White says: "The blockchain community, a little over a year ago, started saying they needed a place to gather. Some would say they're the anarchists. We said, why don’t you come use our space? So we invited them in so we can learn together.

"It’s a new technology, we know a little bit about it but we wanted to learn more from the creators of it. They could see our genuine interest in the technology and they could see we weren’t looking to just sponsor, we were looking to shape."

As well as working with startups, the bank is experimenting with the technology internally. White says: "We looked at how many experiments we wanted to do internally with the blockchain. The first wave led to 22 experiments, we've now got over 45 experiments our businesses want to do."

Santander is conducting similar experiments. Mariano Belinky, head of Santander's investment arm InnoVentures, told Business Insider earlier this year that the bank is experimenting with 25 use cases for the technology.

Enabling charities to take bitcoin is just one expression of Barclays' tinkering. White says: "This is everything from identity, to corporate payment solutions, to treasury, to supply chain, to core payments."

Barclays bankers are also directly mentoring 3 bitcoin startups out of the current cohort of 10 companies on its current Barclays Techstars Accelerator programme, a 15-week scheme meant to help fintech startups grow.

UBS is doing something similar, with Business Insider revealing recently that the bank's CIO, Oliver Bussmann, is directly mentoring blockchain startups based in Canary Wharf's fintech space Level39.

White singled out one of the current Barclays Techstars crop, Everledger, for particular praise. The startup uses blockchain technology to keep a record of diamond ownership in a bid to try and stamp out fraud and theft.

White says: "It starts with diamonds, but what it actually has is application for anything that requires documentation, anything that needs to be insured. You move from diamonds, to watches, to yachts, to art — once it’s embedded in the blockchain, it’s there."

On the day I visited, members of the Treasury were also at the Whitechapel site, appropriately meeting in a room called "Coin".

White says: "We’re working with HMT to share how we see the blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and bringing to life potential use cases that we are exploring.

"The UK policy makers and regulators are both very much on the front foot of wanting to understand this. They want to understand it to make sure they’re protecting UK citizens are putting the right regulation around it."

Ultimately, White says, Barclays is "seeking to become the connector in this ecosystem."

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NOW WATCH: You've been rolling your shirtsleeves wrong your entire life

The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested six teenagers for allegedly using a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) tool to disable websites. DDoS attacks flood servers or websites with massive amounts of data, making them inaccessible to users. The NCA coordinated the investigation, Operation Vivarium, with assistance from officers from various police forces. The suspects deployed Lizard Stresser, which they purchased using alternative payment services such as bitcoin to remain anonymous. The suspects targeted a leading national newspaper, a school, gaming companies and some online retailers. Victims: Amazon, Microsoft and Sony The companies hacked included Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and […]

The post U.K. Police Arrest Six Teens For DDoS Attacks; Teens Paid With Bitcoin appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Google changed its logo, and the Internet did what it does: it opined.

The post What The Internet Thinks Of The New Google Logo appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.