Coin News

Things are not looking good in Venezuela. Food is reportedly tough to procure or inflated, and the country’s minimum wage puts people beyond poverty. Recently, individuals have reported the Venezuelan government has taken a strict stance on foreign currencies, including Bitcoin. The Venezuelan government has not released official figures regarding the lack of availability of basic products in the country. A leaked government study, however, has shone light on the question. Alongside scarcity, Venezuelans are enduring the rising cost of food, with the monthly cost of an average Venezuelan family’s basic food needs increasing 19 percent in July, according to […]

The post The Situation In Venezuela Has Gone From Bad To Worse, Bitcoin's Growth Slow appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Bitcoin Press Release: London based BSAVE is a unique savings account that allows users to securely store Bitcoins, while receiving daily interest payments. A BSAVE account is directly connected to users’ Coinbase wallet allowing fast and simple deposits and withdrawals. Having raised over $400 000 in seed capital, BSAVE is the ideal saving solution for Coinbase users and Bitcoin enthusiasts worldwide. London based BSAVE introduces a new platform that enables users to profit directly from their dormant bitcoins and offers a profitable saving solution that suits both short-term and long-term savers. BSAVE users begin to accrue competitive interest within the […]

The post BSAVE To Launch Next Generation Of Bitcoin Savings After $400 000 Seed Investment appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

A former policeman involved in investigating the crime website Silk Road is sentenced to six and half years in prison for stealing $700,000 of the virtual currency Bitcoin.

The Australian government is set to look at how the country's central bank and securities regulator oversee bitcoin activities.

London-based BSAVE has completed a $400,000 round of funding for seed capital and has announced a savings account for users who can directly connect it to their Coinbase wallet to store Bitcoins while earning interest payments every day for their savings. BSAVE has announced a new platform that enables users to gain savings from their bitcoins by offering a savings account. Daily interest is credited to each user’s account at the end of a 24 hour period, and the savings account is also a zero-balance account, the company says, with no penalties imposed if the user wishes to withdraw his […]

The post BSAVE.io Gains $400,000 Investment, Announces Coinbase-Linked Bitcoin Savings Account appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Jackson Palmer, an Adobe marketing product manager, created Dogecoin as a side project

On Thursday, Kaye Scholer, the New York City-based law firm specializing in life sciences and financial services, held a seminar for many of its clients as an introduction to Bitcoin both as an asset as well as a technology.

Intended as an introductory session, the seminar included topics talking about what virtual currency is, the federal and state regulations and financial opportunities associated with Bitcoin, among other topics.

The presenters were Evan L. Greebel, a partner at Kaye Scholer; Keith McGowan, a partner at BDO; Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder and president of Gemini; Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder and CEO of Gemini; and Peter Van Valkenburgh, Research Director at Coin Center. The event was moderated by Kathleen Moriarty, a partner at Kaye Scholer.

“Kaye Scholer is a market leader in representing companies and entrepreneurs in the fintech space. Evan Greebel, Kathleen Moriarty and I joined that fintech team in July and are bringing our own Bitcoin and blockchain expertise to bear in New York, Silicon Valley and beyond," said Gregory Xethalis, counsel in the Corporate Division at Kaye Scholer, in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine. "The event was an opportunity to introduce our practice, and Bitcoin itself, to Kaye Scholer clients who are in the process of learning what Bitcoin will mean for Wall Street, both as an asset class and a technology.”

Van Valkenburgh explained in simple terms how the bitcoin blockchain works, including how the mining fee helps secure the network, and the risks that overregulation could have on the sector. The Winklevoss brothers touched on the long-term possibilities for Bitcoin both as a technology as well as an asset. Tyler Winklevoss explained how bitcoin could replace gold as a store of value because humanity may begin mining metals in space, where there is an oversupply of the same precious metals humans value for scarcity.

Overall, there were 65 attendees at the event ranging from individuals at large financial institutions (some that have already been active in the space), private hedge and private equity fund advisers and fintech professionals.

And while Kaye Scholer is the law team that has worked with the Winklevoss brothers on Gemini and the ETF, this was not an event to advertise Gemini.

“While trading professionals certainly would have an interest, it wasn’t a Gemini pitch so much as a Bitcoin informational session,” explained Xethalis.

This event is the first in a two-part series. While this event focused on the Bitcoin blockchain, the firm is holding a second one to focus in on blockchain technology as a whole.

“Tonight was intended to be an introduction to Bitcoin as an asset and technology,” Xethalis explained. “We are hosting a roundtable on November 5th that will include panelists from premier Wall Street companies that are exploring the blockchain and investors in blockchain-focused companies. That seminar will focus on the financial systems adoption of blockchain technologies for routine and complicated financial transactions.”

Jacob Donnelly is a full-time product manager and freelance journalist covering stocks, business, and bitcoin. He runs a weekly digital currency and blockchain newsletter called Crypto Brief.

The post Kaye Scholer Holds Bitcoin Seminar with Winklevosses to Educate Financial Professionals appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

A fund to invest in the world’s first ever Bitcoin mining company through an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in Australia, which recently went live on the online investment platform BnkToTheFuture, has secured pledges amounting to almost US$3m (£1,933,609) - representing 82% of its target - to invest in Bitcoin mining company Bitcoin Group Limited.

Coinprism , the colored coin startup that created the Open Assets protocol as experimented with by NASDAQ and Overstock , has announced Openchain.

Openchain is an open-source distributed permissioned ledger with optional “anchors” into the Bitcoin blockchain. It is designed to solve Bitcoin's scalability and compliance issues as encountered by financial institutions, while still enabling several of the use cases offered by the Bitcoin blockchain.

While Bitcoin's blockchain currently offers a trustless public ledger, and is secured by a record amount of hashing power, existing financial institutions are often unable to make use of these properties. Most importantly, Bitcoin has proved to be a challange from a regulatory perspective, as regulators often require financial institutions to offer a level of accountability that Bitcoin cannot give them.

“Public ledgers like Bitcoin have been problematic for financial institutions as transaction validation is delegated to a group of potentially unknown parties – the miners – while financial institutions are often legally required to vet every transaction going through them,” Coinprism founder and CEO Flavien Charlon said in a statement. “Openchain has been designed with these requirements in mind, and offers full control on transaction validation.”

Openchain allows each company or institution to deploy its own version of Openchain, for internal use. Within these companies or institutions, each level of the organization can transact on the corresponding level of their Openchain, using their unique digital signatures.

As such, higher levels within the organization have access to higher levels of the ledger, and are able to set permissions for lower levels. These lower levels, in turn, have access only to the lower levels of the ledger.

This, in effect, replicates the existing structure of an organization onto a blockchain-like system, while incorporating some of the advantages of blockchain technology such as transparency and auditability.

Additionally, Openchain allows different organizations to transact conceptually similar to how financial institutions currently conduct business. Essentially, several companies or institutions can set up mutual gateways through an API, connecting their Openchain ledgers.

This allows these organizations to create an account on the other Openchain, acting as a mutual liability. Once a transaction is validated by both parties, the accounts on both Openchain ledgers are adjusted simultaneously.

“Openchain features a powerful hierarchical account system, a hybrid between a file system and a double-entry accounting system,” Charlon said. “This lets the administrator of an Openchain instance define their business rules, such as anti-money laundering and know your customer regulation, by setting various permissions on accounts, with different levels of granularity.”

Because the distributed permissioned ledger uses a simplified and trust-based consensus mechanism, it exceeds Bitcoin's capabilities on a technical level. While Bitcoin is currently limited to a handful of transactions per second, Openchain offers several orders of magnitude more transactions than that. On top of that, Openchain's transaction validation is virtually instant.

Meanwhile, Openchain offers immutability by publishing “anchors” into the main Bitcoin blockchain at regular intervals. It can then benefit from the security and irreversibility of Bitcoin while keeping transaction costs to a minimum.

“While proof of work is central to building a fully autonomous, decentralized currency such as Bitcoin, it actually becomes a burden when you start tokenizing assets,” Charlon explained. “With Openchain, we have taken all the key characteristics of a Blockchain like immutability, auditability and programmability, but removed the legacy of proof of work. This allowed us to build an extremely efficient and scalable platform with no compromise.”

The post Coinprism Launches Open-Source Permissioned Ledger With Bitcoin 'Anchors' appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

We've collected a few interesting tidbits you may have missed from the latest State of Bitcoin report.

Bitcoin price has been drawing a horizontal path for the past two days and looks ready to take direction. Whichever way the market chooses in the short-term, today's analysis considers the bigger picture. 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: 15h22 UTC BTC-China 1-Day Chart From the analysis pages of xbt.social, earlier today: One moving average (200-day) and a line study of the 1-day chart. The BTC-China chart favors this kind […]

The post Bitcoin Price Almost There appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

The federal government is sure to be looking for a teenage hacker and two of his friends now that they've gone public with a rather embarrassing fact: by pretending to be a Verizon employee, they were able to get personal information about CIA Director John Brennan.

The post Teen Hackers Socially Engineered Way Into CIA Director's Private E-Mail appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Wall Street banks will eventually accept the technology behind bitcoin, even if it takes five or 10 years.

That is according to Blythe Master, the chief executive of Digital Asset Holdings, and one of the biggest names in the business.

Bitcoin is a digital currency, the value of which fluctuates wildly. It is the technology behind it - the so-called blockchain - which gets finance executives really excited.

“The motivation for firms to open their eyes… is a combination of fear and greed,” she said Tuesday October 20 at The Economist’s Buttonwood conference in midtown Manhattan.

Masters was one of a group of JPMorgan executives who helped create the market for credit default swaps in the 1990s, and later went to head its global commodities division.

 She said that banks are in “a difficult revenue environment" and are trying to cut jobs to reduce costs. 

“That’s not a sustainable situation,” she told the audience.

Blockchain technology has the potential to simultaneously reduce costs and risks. It could help automate complex back-office tasks currently carried out by humans, and help cut the risk of errors.  

Big banks are alive to the potential of the technology. There are now 22 banks involved in an alliance to draw up industry standards and protocols for using the blockchain in banking.

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Leading bitcoin platform, multi-signature vault service provider and bitcoin merchant payment processor Coinkite has launched a new API feature called “Advanced Send Command,” which allows bitcoin developers to send a transaction with powerful additional parameters required for specialized bitcoin applications.

Coinkite’s new command enables users to send a payment for up to 1,000 bitcoin addresses at once. This service called “Multisend” has been designed to help the company’s supporting startups to send mass payments to its customers in a traceable way.

UTXO Control

At the request of its customers, Coinkite has introduced a new service called “Send Advanced,” to allow users to have complete control over specific Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) involvement in a new transaction.

“[Users] can isolate the deposits of a specific customer [of yours.] Use the exact funds they deposited in the next steps of the money flow. This way, if their deposit does not confirm, [user's] account is not “contaminated” with unconfirmed inputs that don’t relate to [user’s] honest customers,” the Coinkite team toldBitcoin Magazine.

Faster Bitcoin Transactions

Currently, Coinkite processes transactions faster than any other wallets in the Bitcoin space. With an objective to ensure a faster official confirmation time for transactions by having the miners to accept, verify and confirm transactions more quickly than other transactions in the network, Coinkite has released a custom miner’s fee feature via its API.

Bitcoin transactions can be processed and accepted in certain platforms which settle transactions offline, through a series of basic verifications. However, miners in the bitcoin network must mine the block which includes the transactions to broadcast it throughout the network and officially confirm its validity.

Previously, the Coinkite exchange automatically calculated a minimum miner’s fee for each transaction, primarily based on the size of the transaction. With the release of the platform’s new API, Coinkite has introduced a new feature called the “Fee Mode,” to give its users some control to determine the amount of miner’s fee in a transaction.

The Coinkite exchange will now offer three options to determine the miner’s fee:

1. Pay the minimum fee : For casual transactions.

2. 2x/3x/5x minimum : “Pay twice / three-times / five-times the minimum fee. This should get your transaction into the blockchain faster. At peak times, we’ve seen 2x be the entry price.”

3. 5/10/50 basis points : “Pay a few basis points (0.05%, 0.1% or 0.5%) of the amount of the transfer.”

The Fee Mode feature is also applicable in all Coinkite API-based applications, simply by implementing the fee-mode function. Additionally, developers are given the ability to dictate an exact custom amount of miner’s fee for its users, using the Advanced Send feature.

Most users of the main Coinkite platform may not benefit greatly from the newly introduced Fee Mode feature, as the majority of the Coinkite bitcoin wallet users are individuals sending casual payments on the bitcoin network. However, Coinkite’s merchants and online businesses could use the Fee Mode feature to send quick and secure transactions to suppliers and its supporting businesses.

Furthermore, a large part of Coinkite’s bitcoin vault platform’s user base is made up of well-established corporations and bitcoin companies. Corporations which need to send large payments on the bitcoin network can now use the Fee Mode feature to send secure payments two times faster than before.

The post Coinkite Processes Transactions Faster than Any Other Wallets in the Bitcoin Space appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

With China accounting for 80% of the global bitcoin trading volume, it was only a matter of time before the country’s own authorities paid heed to the cryptocurrency. In a recent publication on October 13, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has, in no uncertain terms, claimed that we have entered the “post-Bitcoin era,” and “Can no longer ignore its revolutionary changes” despite people thinking bitcoin and block chain technology is or was not stable. The publication began with the CAC taking note of the deeming of bitcoin as a commodity by the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). […]

The post China’s Cyberspace Administration Acknowledges Bitcoin appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

The Spanish Tax Authority has probed at least one bitcoin-friendly business for information on the way it handles digital currency payments.

Zero Hedge is contending that Bitcoin is on the precipice of the “2nd coming of the Bitcoin bubble.” According to the popular online financial website, “China’s increasing crackdown on its -until now lax - capital controls has spurred demand for alternate ‘currencies’ that remain out of the control (for now) of governments…” ZH recalls how Bitcoin increased in price amid Grexit worries. In the wake of the media frenzy and European uncertainty, Bitcoin has fallen in price. ZH believes that there is a distinct possibility that China could invest even a fraction of its $22 trillion in Chinese deposits into […]

The post Is The Bitcoin Price Rising Due To Chinese Demand Or The New Winklevoss Exchange Gemini? appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Santander is taking the threat posed by new financial technology, or fintech, startups very seriously.

Speaking at online lending conference LendIt Europe on Wednesday, Mariano Belinky, head of Santander's fintech investment fund InnoVentures, said the bank has run business-by-business analyses to see if startups would kill its various operations. 

He said: "No one thinks this is just an interesting fad, everyone understands the deep and lasting implications that will occur in the banking sector.

"[But] no one thinks this is what kills banks. We had that discussion a while back and actually did a business model by business model analysis.

"The answer is this is something we ought to understand. In some cases it's ok to ignore it and see what happens, in others we should be the first movers and catch this opportunity and start working with fintech. Santander's strategy to be top 4 or top 5 in whichever geography we work in. That means in some cases in the UK we see ourselves as a challenger bank."

Santander has been among the most active banks in embracing startups and new technologies. The bank has set up two investment funds and is actively experimenting with the blockchain technology that underpins bitcoin.

$100 million (£65 million) fund InnoVentures has to date made 5 investments, most recently backing blockchain startup Ripple and online lender Kabbage.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Santander is taking the threat posed by new financial technology, or fintech, startups very seriously.

Speaking at online lending conference LendIt Europe on Wednesday, Mariano Belinky, head of Santander's fintech investment fund InnoVentures, said the bank has run business-by-business analyses to see if startups would kill its various operations. 

He said: "No one thinks this is just an interesting fad, everyone understands the deep and lasting implications that will occur in the banking sector.

"[But] no one thinks this is what kills banks. We had that discussion a while back and actually did a business model by business model analysis.

"The answer is this is something we ought to understand. In some cases it's ok to ignore it and see what happens, in others we should be the first movers and catch this opportunity and start working with fintech. Santander's strategy to be top 4 or top 5 in whichever geography we work in. That means in some cases in the UK we see ourselves as a challenger bank."

Santander has been among the most active banks in embracing startups and new technologies. The bank has set up two investment funds and is actively experimenting with the blockchain technology that underpins bitcoin.

$100 million (£65 million) fund InnoVentures has to date made 5 investments, most recently backing blockchain startup Ripple and online lender Kabbage.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This is what 2,000 calories actually looks like

Former U.S. federal agent Carl Force has been sentenced to 78 months in prison. The sentence is substantially more than the four years of prison time sought by his attorneys while less than the 87-month prison sentence requested by U.S. prosecutors. After pleading guilty to bitcoin theft and extortion during the government investigation of dark web drug marketplace Silk Road, rogue federal agent Carl Force IV has been sentenced to six and a half years in prison after admitting to charges of money laundering, extortion and obstruction of justice. Force’s defense claimed mental health issues in seeking leniency for his […]

The post Corrupt Silk Road Agent Carl Force Gets 78 Months in Prison appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Carl Force, a DEA agent who helped bring down online black market The Silk Road whilst also plundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin will be spending the next 78 months in prison, a judge decided today.

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Carl Force, a corrupt federal agent who worked undercover at bitcoin-accepting drug marketplace Silk Road, was sentenced to 78 months in prison today.