Coin News

News that Bitcoin can be tied to the Islamic State circulated on the internet in the wake of the Paris attacks. European Union leaders even held a so-called “emergency meeting” on virtual currencies themselves, reportedly investigating how to better control the currency. To be sure, evidence that the Islamic State uses Bitcoin in any significant manner is non-existent, the claims specious at best. Researcher Nicholas Weaver, from the Berkeley-based International Computer Science Institute, is aware of no evidence that the Islamic State uses Bitcoin. “There was a recent material support plea against a Jihobbiest in the US where, among other […]

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Bitcoin industry startups are facing backlash over a new set of articles in which they have been portrayed as pivoting away from the cryptocurrency.

CoinSource, a bitcoin ATM (BTM) network, announced the first BTM in New York City’s Lower East Side at 61 Delancey Street. Located within the N&N Delancey Smoke Shop, the BTM marks CoinSource's second New York City area installation and joins a national network of bitcoin BTMs stretching from San Diego, Calif. to Las Vegas, Nev. to New York City. The machine is made by San Diego, Calif.-based GenesisCoin. It is a one-way ATM, providing cash for bitcoin only. An Ideal ATM Location “The Lower East Side is one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Manhattan, with hundreds of thousands of visitors per […]

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Coinbase has introduced the first U.S.-issued bitcoin debit card, the Shift Card, in partnership with Shift Payments. The Shift Card is a Visa debit card that currently allows Coinbase users in 24 states to spend bitcoin both online and at physical points of sale at more than 38 million merchants worldwide.

“Merchant adoption has come a long way over the past few years, but it’s still difficult for people to make regular purchases with bitcoin,” notes the Coinbase announcement. “Buying gas at a local gas station or groceries at a neighborhood grocery store with bitcoin has not been possible in most cities in the U.S. Thanks to Shift Payments, it’s now possible to use bitcoin to buy gas, groceries, and much more. With the Shift Card, you can now spend bitcoin anywhere in the world that Visa is accepted.”

Coinbase users living in the states where the service is available can order a Shift debit card for $10 and link it to a Coinbase wallet. When the Shift debit card is used to make a purchase, the equivalent value of bitcoin (based on the current spot price of bitcoin on Coinbase) is debited from the user’s Coinbase bitcoin wallet. For certain transactions, such as gas purchases and dinner bills, Shift will debit more than the purchase amount, and refund the remainder to the user when the final payment amount is settled.

There are no annual fees, no bitcoin-to-dollar conversion fees, and no domestic transaction fees. Coinbase says there are no domestic transaction fees “for a limited time,” which seems to indicate that domestic transaction fees could be added in the future. There is a $2.50 ATM fee and a 3 percent international transaction fee. The daily ATM withdrawal limit is $200, and the default daily spending limit is $1,000.

The card isn’t available to users in New York, Florida, and many other states. Coinbase and Shift Payments say that they are working through legal and regulatory matters in the states where the Shift Card is not yet available.

Shift Payments wants to integrate all payment options available to a user in one debit card. Users can connect a Shift Card to multiple accounts to seamlessly spend all supported payment means, including digital currencies, with the same card.

“The Shift Card works like any debit card today,” notes the Shift website. “Connect your existing accounts and spend Coinbase or Dwolla, immediately and directly, everywhere Visa is accepted.”

The Shift card isn’t the first bitcoin debit card, but the availability of a Visa-branded bitcoin debit card from a major bitcoin exchange and wallet operator is likely to represent a quantum leap in the space.

“At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is make bitcoin easy to use,” Coinbase vice president of business development and strategy Adam White, told Wired. “We want to make it easy to buy and sell bitcoin, and we want to make it easy to spend. A mainstream debit card based on bitcoin is a key element.”

Of course all U.S. bitcoin users already can spend their bitcoin by converting them to dollars and sending the dollars to their bank accounts, but the process is lengthy and probably overly complex for some users.

Therefore, the Shift Card is likely to make Bitcoin much more useful in daily life.

Wired notes that existing Coinbase customers are now likely to start spending more of their bitcoin, rather than just speculating, and new customers will be attracted to the digital currency because they can more easily spend it. Then, merchants will be more motivated to start accepting bitcoin, which could start a runaway feedback loop that will boost the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The post Coinbase and Shift Payments Introduce a Visa-branded Bitcoin Debit Card That Works Everywhere Visa is Accepted appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

As the bitcoin price has risen out of the $200’s over the past month, the price increase has driven another important event: more mining hardware is being brought online.

Miners earn revenue two ways. The first is with the block reward, which is 25BTC approximately every 10 minutes. The other way is with transaction fees. The block reward also acts as the mechanism in which new supply of bitcoin is generated. Because mining tends to reward those that can do the most work, miners deploy increasing amounts of hardware to try to be the first to mine each block. To keep a steady block creation rate, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto put in place a rule that updates the network difficulty every 2016 blocks, or approximately two weeks.

According to Bitcoin Wisdom, the difficulty increase that took place today rose by 10.44%. The last time the difficulty increased by more than 10 percent was on November 5, 2014, when the difficulty increased by 10.05 percent. Further, Bitcoin Wisdom is predicting that the next bitcoin difficulty increase in 2 weeks will be 10.25%. The last time there were two double digit percentage increases in difficulty was August 19, 2014 and August 31, 2014.

But the increase in difficulty makes sense.

The next generation of bitcoin miners have been released by three of the top companies in the space. In August, Bitmain announced the launch of the Antminer S7, which contains the BM1385 ASIC. Each S7 can generate upwards of 4,850 GH/s while only using 0.25 J/GH of power.

In October, the Chinese mining firm BW announced that it was releasing its next stage bitcoin miner, which would contain a 14nm chip. Virgilio Lizardo Jr., head of international at Bitbank, told Bitcoin Magazine that the first batch of servers released would be 48 petahash total. For context, the current network has a hash rate of 550.5 PH/s.

Finally, the original creator of the ASIC miner, Avalon, announced that it was releasing its latest miner, the Avalon6, which would contain the new A3218 mining chip. Each miner would be able to generate 3.65 TH/s of hashing power. While these new miners have just hit the market, it is additional hardware that should come online over the coming weeks.

The reality is simple: As the price of bitcoin increases, the number of people who can make a profit mining increases. That encourages more participation in securing the network, which results in the need for a difficulty increase. As these next generation of bitcoin miners come online, it is expected that the difficulty will continue to counteract the additional hash rate in the network.

Jacob Donnelly is a freelance journalist and a consultant in the bitcoin/blockchain space. He runs a weekly digital currency and blockchain newsletter called Crypto Brief.

The post Mining Difficulty Increases by over 10% Due to Bitcoin Price Increase and next-Generation Chips appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

A group of physicists in Australia's capital city of Canberra are looking away from crypto-based mathematics encryption to work on encryption based on the laws of physics, or more specifically – quantum physics. This form of encryption is deemed ‘unbreakable’.

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CoinDesk is holding a public vote as part of its annual drive to select the most influential people in the bitcoin and blockchain industry.

Bitcoin requires decentralization of miners (or mining pools) and full nodes to achieve what some consider its core property: censorship resistance. As such, the block-size dispute represents a trade-off. Bigger blocks allow for more transactions on the Bitcoin network, but take more time to propagate, favoring larger miners and pools, while the increased data transmission disincentivizes users to run full nodes.

Fortunately, there are proposals to increase Bitcoin's efficiency that reduce the risk of bigger blocks. One of the most promising innovations in this regard, are Invertible Bloom Lookup Table, or IBLTs. First introduced by Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen, this idea was picked up and is currently worked on as a side-project by Linux veteran and Blockstream's Lightning Network developer Paul “Rusty” Russell.

“If we can make this work, it means less bandwidth requirements and less block data, which should be good for network health all over,” says Russell.

Redundancy

So what problem do IBLTs solve?

Typically, all Bitcoin transactions are transmitted from node to node over the peer-to-peer network, to be stored by the mempools (the record of unconfirmed transactions) of individual nodes. When a miner finds a block, it includes (some of) these transactions in that block, and subsequently transmits this block over the same peer-to-peer network. Of course, this means that all transactions in the block are effectively sent over the network twice: once as a transaction, and once as part of a block.

Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, Russell explained:

“We've got redundancy in blocks. Most nodes already know some of the content in that block; they have already seen it. If we can optimize that, we can speed up block transmission. That decreases centralization pressure because miners can get their blocks out faster, while the network works better ... it's all good.”

The Magic of IBLTs

The main problem – the reason we need IBLTs to solve this problem (rather than a straightforward compression algorithm) – is that the set of transactions included in blocks is often not exactly identical as those stored by the mempools of all individual nodes; the biggest difference being the latest transactions transmitted over the network before the block was found. Moreover, the mempools of all individual nodes usually differ from each other a bit, too. This makes it hard to know which transactions a miner included in the new block, without seeing the whole block.

That’s where IBLTs come in. IBLTs combine several mathematical tricks to enable set reconciliation. As such, they basically allow for two slightly different mempools to be compared and harmonized, without actually needing both mempools in full.

This works as follows:

At first, all transactions included in a block are written into a table, where each transaction starts at a different spot in that table. However, there are many more transactions than there is room in the table, so the result is hopelessly overlapping. This makes the IBLT very compact, but also unreadable and undecipherable for anyone who doesn't have access to any transaction data himself.

Anyone who does have transaction data, however, can compare the overlapping transaction data in the IBLT to his own transaction data by filling up an IBLT with his own transactions using similar logic. If both IBLTs end up looking exactly the same, it means all transactions match exactly.

But even if the IBLTs do not end up looking exactly the same, this can still be helpful, as long as the sets of transactions are fairly similar. In that case, the IBLTs can be compared in such a way that all identical transactions cancel each other out. The “leftovers” in the IBLT, then, can often be used to reconstruct the missing transactions.

So rather than needing to transmit full blocks over the peer-to-peer network, nodes can transmit the much smaller IBLTs instead. This requires less data to be sent around and is much faster.

Efficiency

And it gets better. In Russell's design, not even all of the transactions included in new blocks need to fit in the IBLTs. Instead, connected nodes on Bitcoin's peer-to-peer network fine tune which transactions to send to peers. This could increase propagation time and decrease data usage even more.

“Gavin's original idea was that the miner would produce the IBLT, and send every node on the network the same one,” Russell said. “But when we started playing with the concept, it turned out it's very fast to generate IBLTs. So why not have every node do it? Generate IBLTs per peer, because each node has a much better idea of how close its mempool has been to a peer; they're sending this stuff back and forth all the time.”

Moreover, connected nodes can continually learn to understand each other's behavior. So once a node receives an IBLT from the network, and constructs a valid block out of it, it knows how many transactions it was missing. Additionally, it learned over time how many transactions his peer typically differers from him. That difference – the transactions it had to construct plus the usual difference between the two peers – is what the node will include in the IBLT and send to its peer.

As such, the IBLT system can improve over time, limiting the amount of data to transmit over the network to the bare minimum.

“The IBLT must roughly be twice the data size of the transaction difference,” Russell explained. “So out of all the transactions one node didn't know were in a block, plus the transactions that node thought were in the block but weren't... basically double that, and that's how big the IBLT needs to be. So if the differences are small, it will work really well.

“Ideally, if we can cram this thing into two IP packets,” he said. “We are lightning fast.”

Specific details of IBLTs and Bitcoin can be found on Russell's blog and Andresen’s GitHub contribution.

The post How the Magic of IBLTs Could Boost Bitcoin's Decentralization appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Bitcoin trading finds itself in crushing indecision, once again, as the looming macro-economic crisis confounds both bulls and bears. Its not so much about what the Fed will say on December 16, but about what exactly rising rates and a US dollar rally means for bitcoin. Or could this be the onset of the XT co-option blues? 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: 14h15 UTC BTCC 1-Hour Chart From the analysis […]

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Coinsilium, a bloackchain venture investment firm has had the public listing of its shares on ICAP’s Securities and Derivatives Exchange (ISDX) delayed until at least January 2016. Based in the Level39 Fintech Accelerator space in London’s Canary Wharf, Coinsilium advises Bitcoin- and blockchain-based startups, besides investing in them. As reported by Finance Magnates, the firm was scheduled to go public on the London Stock Exchange originally in August 2015. However, Executive Chairman Cameron Parry cited more favorable listing requirements to switch the listing over to ICAP’s ISDX. Coinsilium was launched in 2013 by the founders of Seedcoin. The firm is […]

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Why one of the world's more old-fashioned currencies has suddenly become innovative.

By Andreas Cremer and Laurence Frost

BERLIN/LONDON (Reuters) - Renault's flagship Espace minivan released toxic diesel emissions 25 times legal limits in a Swiss study despite complying with EU tests carried out at unrealistically low engine temperatures, a German green group said on Tuesday.

The tests commissioned by the green lobby group DUH, which have not been independently verified, will add to pressure on carmakers and lawmakers in the wake of the scandal over Volkswagen's admission that it used illegal "defeat devices" to cheat diesel regulations.

Environmental and consumer groups are leading calls for improved European Union tests to bring soaring real-world emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon dioxide into line with legal limits.

The DUH, which had earlier singled out General Motors' Opel brand over results suggesting high NOx emissions outside the regulator's lab, turned its fire on France's Renault in a report commissioned from the University of Applied Sciences in Bern.

When run with a warm or hot engine, a 1.6-litre Espace of the latest Euro 6 diesel generation emitted up to 2.06 grammes of NOx per kilometer, the campaign group said, more than 25 times the EU limit. The vehicle met the statutory 80 milligram cap only with a cold engine after "specific pre-conditioning".

Renault did not respond to calls and messages seeking comment.

GM last month rejected similar DUH findings on its Opel Zafira model, after running its own tests monitored by Germany's TUV certification body.

The VW diesel scandal has drawn attention to a wider pattern of routine test manipulation, short of outright cheating, that is legal under EU rules but which is now acknowledged to be inadequate even by carmakers such as PSA Peugeot Citroen .

Carmakers routinely strip out standard equipment to reduce test vehicles' mass, tape up door joints and fit bald tyres that would be illegal on the road.

Tuesday's DUH findings may shed light on the real-world impact of optimizing engines to pass tests when cold - which would be another tactic allowed by the current regime.

The DUH study was published in cooperation with the Washington-based International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), which commissioned the original investigation that led eventually to the outing of VW.

"It's unbelievable that so-called modern diesel vehicles that damage the air we breathe in this way are on the road today," ICCT co-founder Axel Friedrich said in a statement.

Europe needs a "comprehensive reorganization of the system in which mandatory regular controls on the street are integrated", he said.

EU moves to phase in real-world emissions measurements were watered down in committee last month under sustained German-led lobbying.

Volkswagen admitted in September to rigging U.S. diesel emissions tests, unleashing a scandal that forced out longstanding CEO Martin Winterkorn and may cost the group as much as 40 billion euros ($43 billion) in recall costs, fines and compensation, some analysts estimate.

($1 = 0.9397 euros)

(Additional reporting by Barbara Lewis in Brussels and Georgina Prodhan in Frankfurt; editing by Maria Sheahan and Jason Neely)

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Regular followers of mobile payment technology know that Kenya stands as one of the most successful mobile payment stories, thanks to the widespread use of the M-Pesa mobile payment service in that country. Kenya’s success in this area jumped onto the global spotlight this week thanks to a report on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes.” Whether or not the "60 Minutes" segment, which gave an overview of how average Kenyans are conducting mobile commerce using their smartphones, catapults M-Pesa as a mobile payment service remains to be seen. The report explores the many benefits that mobile commerce can bring to a developing country, but […]

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Cryptocurrency Titcoin and adult payment provider Coinsnap have been announced as finalists at the 2016 XBIZ Awards. The XBIZ Awards are a prominent adult entertainment awards ceremony managed by XBIZ, which publishes news and information on the adult entertainment industry. Over the last couple years, cryptocurrencies and other alternative payment systems have been gaining traction in the adult entertainment industry. One factor in this trend has been Operation Choke Point, a program in which the Department of Justice has teamed up with banks to limit access to financial services for businesses selling certain “high-risk” products like pornography, gambling, tobacco and […]

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