Coin News

UK banking giant Barclays has signed contracts with two blockchain startups, according to the New York Business Journal.

New details have emerged about Russian payments giant Qiwi's plans to issue its own cryptocurrency.

The American crime comedy-drama Dope, written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, stars Shameik Moore, Tony Revolori, Kiersey Clemon, Kimberly Elise and A$AP Rocky. Produced by Forest Whitaker, Dope’s executive producer is Pharrell Williams and the co-executive producer is Sean Combs. The film's first sentence is: “I just read money as we know it is dead, soon the world is only gonna sell and buy products using Bitcoins…” Main character Malcolm Adekanbi and his friends love the 90s, even though they didn’t live through them. Malcolm thinks records came out in the nineties, like The Blueprint, although they did not. He and his […]

The post Dope Film Review: Of Bitcoin, the Dark Web & The Inner City appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Ripple has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Kefi Labs, the makers of a social photo-sharing app called Ripple.

Blockstream has announced it will launch its first commercial Bitcoin sidechain by early 2016. The sidechain, codenamed “Liquid,” offers instant transactions, providing a fast settlement layer for bitcoin exchanges, brokerages and other industry members.

As its main advantage, Liquid provides instant and secure transactions among all users of the sidechain. While Bitcoin transactions can typically take up to an hour to be sufficiently secured by the blockchain, Liquid offers a similar level of security within seconds.

Blockstream, which received a $21 million funding round last year and employs several Bitcoin Core developers, intends to deploy the sidechain among different exchanges and other Bitcoin service providers. Users with accounts at several of these exchanges will then be able to move bitcoin from one account to another within an instant, instead of having to wait for the transaction to confirm on the blockchain.

Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, Blockstream CEO and co-founder Austin Hill explained the added advantages of using Liquid:

“Liquid is mostly targeted at exchanges, and through them at institutional traders. These traders are the market makers that continually move funds back and forth from one exchange to the other, making use of arbitrage opportunities, as such minimizing spreads and increasing liquidity. These more sophisticated traders look at bitcoin's confirmation times as a negative, and really do need the type of speed of markets that Liquid can offer.”

But it’s not just exchanges and their users that can benefit from Liquid, Hill continued:

“We also have customers that are end users themselves. They buy and sell bitcoin on multiple exchanges for their own customers' needs. A good example of that would be wallet provider Xapo; it is a huge benefit for them to have instant access to all the other markets. Another example could be companies that use bitcoin for remittances. Right now they need to adopt sophisticated hedging strategies to counteract the volatility of bitcoin; instant transactions can obviously even that out.”

Sidechains are basically alternative blockchains that use bitcoin as a currency unit. First conceived a year ago , they allow for bitcoin to move in and out of different “pegged” blockchains. As such, users of a sidechain can transfer bitcoin using varying rule-sets – not just those imposed by the original Bitcoin blockchain (such as the 10-minute confirmation time).

Much like Blockstream's open-source testnet sidechain “Elements,” Liquid uses a “federated consensus” security model to confirm transactions. This holds that bitcoin sent to the sidechain are locked into a typical multisig address on the Bitcoin blockchain, requiring several private keys to unlock. The keys needed to unlock these bitcoin are effectively transferred to Liquid, where they can be used to transfer the pegged value within the sidechain.

As opposed to the Bitcoin blockchain, transactions on Liquid are not processed by miners. Instead, some of the companies using Liquid will act as as functionaries that validate transactions for each other using tamper-resistant hardware boxes with a special software stack embedded. Transactions confirm if a supermajority of these functionaries sign them. While this introduces a minimal level of trust in the system, it’s exceedingly difficult for functionaries to cheat the system, as no one entity is in charge. A supermajority of functionaries would need to be compromised at the same time in order to block transactions or steal funds.

“There have previously been a number of attempts by different exchanges to try and realize something like this,” Hill said. “Customers were asking for it, and these companies wanted to test the benefits. But previously, all attempts to do this included some form of counterparty credit agreements, or agreements to accept transactions with no confirmations. Because of the required trust involved in these kinds of solutions, they were never actually launched. By using a federated consensus sidechain, we can give exchanges the control of their own funds, but with the added functionality of instant transactions.”

The post Blockstream to Launch First, Instant-Settlement Sidechain for Bitcoin Exchanges appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Hard forks are a rather contentious issue in Bitcoin. The controversy surrounding hard forks can be seen most prominently in the context of Bitcoin XT ’s implementation of BIP 101.

While there have been successful Bitcoin hard forks in the past, the problem with hard forks of the Bitcoin blockchain is that they’re, well, hard. Any change to the Bitcoin protocol that requires a hard fork essentially requires near-complete consensus to avoid a potential blockchain split.

For example, there are many individuals in the Bitcoin development community who do not believe that BIP 101’s use of a 75 percent majority vote by miners as a mechanism for enabling a larger block size limit is such a good idea.

Hard forks are difficult, but they have to happen from time to time in order for Bitcoin to grow and evolve. For this reason, some have proposed the idea of scheduled hard forks. This would essentially create a regular update schedule for the blockchain for changes that require a hard fork during the implementation process.

Bitcoin Foundation Chief Scientist Gavin Andresen and Bitcoin Core Contributor Peter Todd were both recently asked for their opinions on scheduled hard forks during the Bitcoin governance panel at Bitcoin Pacifica 2015, and neither of them seemed overly bullish on the concept. For one, Todd noted that the schedule may become useless because it is not set in stone.

“I would point out that -- I would start by at least doing one,” he said. “Trying to go figure out what does a schedule actually look like. You can delay the schedule; it becomes very tricky.”

Todd, who always seems to be able to pick out the flaws in any proposal, also noted that miners could ultimately decide to veto any hard fork they don’t like.

“Let’s look at this from an adversarial point of view,” he said. “If we have a hard fork and some miners decide that the next hard fork they disagree with -- the reality is they can go veto a hard fork.”

A third issue pointed out by Todd had to do with figuring out what would be implemented in each individual hard fork. In his view, there does not exist a good mechanism for coming to consensus, nor measuring it:

“Well, again, we don’t have good methods for this other than to accept that hard forks are hard, and getting consensus is something that kind of needs to happen. Maybe we do need some technological measures, such as miner voting, maybe proof-of-stake voting, but beyond that, it’s really hard to imagine how you actually create durable social institutions when they’re so easily undermined at protocol, almost by design.”

Gavin Andresen also shared his cynical view of regularly scheduled hard forks, mainly pointing out that there could be issues because “people are lazy and they don’t like upgrading.” According to Andresen, this could cause issues related to having proper validation between users on the network. The key point that Andresen made during his comments had to do with making sure that hard forks were hard to pull off:

The post Should Bitcoin Have Regularly Scheduled Hard Forks? appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

European cryptocurrency exchange Yacuna has announced it will close next month.

The Colorado Department of Revenue released data showing recreational pot sales at $59.2 million in August, with medical marijuana dispensaries reaching $41.4 million for a total of $100.6 million in sales overall. “It means that $100 million is going to licensed, taxpaying businesses, creating jobs and helping to build new schools,” Dan Riffle, director of federal policies for the Marijuana Policy Project, told Yahoo News, "Instead of going to cartels and drug dealers — as is the case in the 46 states that don’t regulate marijuana.” In spite of the sales, marijuana businesses haven’t anywhere to put the cash. As […]

The post Colorado Monthly Marijuana Sales Top $100,000,000 with No Banking Partners in Sight appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Mexican retailer Grupo Famsa, a large household and consumer appliance store has, with a partnership with BitPay, started accepting bitcoin. Grupo Famsa, a retail company with revenues of nearly USD $1 billion in 2014 has now started accepting bitcoin as a mode of payment in its online retail store. Headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, Grupo Famsa also retails furniture, clothing and other consumer products along with electronics and household appliances. The retail chain currently operates 421 stores across 78 Mexican cities and 37 cities in the United States. The news was shared by Mexican bitcoin exchange – Bitso, on its Facebook […]

The post Mexican Retailer Famsa Starts Accepting Bitcoin appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Another Latin American e-tailer, Famsa, is now accepting bitcoin for online purchases.

Bitcoin price had fallen away from a resistance level near $250 and 1600 CNY yesterday, and earlier today overshot to the downside by breaching two support levels near $245 and 1573 CNY. At the time of writing, price has returned to the upside and the market must now decide which way. 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: 07h27 UTC BTC-China 1-Hour Chart From the analysis pages of xbt.social, earlier today: An […]

The post Bitcoin Price Whipsawing Below $250 appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Bitcoin Press Release: The first bitLicense in Europe has been granted in Luxembourg to SnapSwap, an innovative payments startup. SAN FRANCISCO, LUXEMBOURG — (12 OCTOBER 2015) — SnapSwap International S.A. announced today that the company has been granted a license to provide services as a regulated payment institution by the Minister of Finance of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The license allows SnapSwap to offer payments, remittances, and currency exchange services utilizing modern cryptographic technologies, crypto-currencies and internet protocols, such as blockchain and open ledger consensus. SnapSwap will start its operations for the European Union out of Luxembourg in January […]

The post SnapSwap Granted the First bitLicense in Europe appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Nearly one year after the release of its white paper, bitcoin technology startup Blockstream has released its first commercial sidechains application.

China posted a trade balance recovery to an audible global sigh of relief from the captains of finance. Some allege that the figures have been cooked in special sauce but, even so, the positive data from the world's economic kitchen has mixed implications. This post is powered by the Bitcoin Trading Network xbt.social - CCN29 and get 29USD off! Economic Indicators World Indexes and Forex Rates   Commodities In the Calendar This Week Mon 12 October US Bank Holiday Tue 13 October Australia Business Confidence (actual:5 previous:1) China Trade Balance (actual:60.3B expected:46.9B previous:60.2B) UK CPI year-on-year (expected:0.0% previous:0.0%) Wed 14 […]

The post Global Economic Outlook: China Trade Balance Mixed appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.