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BitGo co-founder and CEO Mike Belshe remembers when the fascination with computer engineering that began for him in childhood made its most emphatic statement and claim on his life.

He had just left old warhorse Hewlett-Packard, his first job out of college, to join Internet browser pioneer Netscape as it was poised to launch its initial public stock offering in 1995. (His departure was rather too sudden to suit the sensibilities of his “HP Way” bosses, but that’s another story.)

Commencing to work almost non-stop through long days and nights “not because of deadlines, but because I loved it so much,” Belshe was driving across town with fellow computer geek and visionary Rob McCool one day when they were simultaneously awe-struck by the same sight: a large billboard with “http:” sprawled across its face, followed by a web address.

“Whoa!” McCool exclaimed. “I never thought I would see that.”

“The billboard spoke to him,” Belshe remembers. “That’s when I realized that what we were doing really matters.”

This theme of engagement with things of import is a recurrent theme in Belshe’s life. It partly explains the intriguing mix of five-star companies and start-ups dotting his resume. After HP and Netscape, Microsoft was another major stop; from there he migrated to Google just in time to help lead the development of Chrome. He stayed there for a half-decade.

Start-ups included Good Technology, Remarq and his own Lookout Software with partner Eric Hahn. All of them were successes in their own right, though it was neither money nor conventional pride that drove Belshe’s journeys along the tech frontiers of his day. It has always been more about using his supple intelligence and imagination to help bring something interesting and important into the world, most always with highly technical solutions that ultimately filter down into the usefulness and parlance of everyday users who have no particular technical skill.

And now there is Bitcoin security company BitGo, steadily picking up market share as the first “multi-signature” wallet in the Bitcoin world. The platform makes use of Belshe’s problem-solving and programming ingenuity to bring greater ease and utility to the thorny problem of securing bitcoins.

It is a kind of gift, this ability to bridge the worlds of software engineering via complex, exacting code and an end product that the proverbial Iowa Grandma can manage with ease from the comfort of her kitchen table.

As Belshe himself freely admitted in a recent plain-spoken blog post at belshe.com, Bitcoin isn’t anywhere near reaching Grandma yet.

“Bitcoin in Denial” ran the headline on his post, which conveyed a “Slow down, this is gonna take a while” message to those who envision Bitcoin triumphing over fiat currencies and the credit card industry and reaching Grandma by next week or next year. But if anyone will eventually be able to carve the road to her, it will be Belshe.

Two decades into a tech career that he remembers being ignited by a computer magazine that his electrical engineer father brought home, he now finds himself at a mid-career sweet spot. With deep experience behind him, industry contacts and resources galore, and still copious energy, he is committed to making Bitcoin the most secure digital asset tool ever devised without its users, in his words, “having to learn how to operate a digital asset vault.”

Belshe co-founded BitGo in 2013, just a year after discovering Bitcoin and loading up on a bunch of coins for himself and various friends on a dedicated offline laptop he kept under his couch. “With Bitcoin’s price going up, I realized I had a staggering amount of money just sitting there on a laptop. I was following best practices, but I felt scared enough to look for a better way to store all these coins.”

A quick survey found him surprised that there really weren’t any better security mousetraps at the time, so he set about to invent one. Anyone who knows Belshe could have predicted it wouldn’t take him long.

BitGo launched the world’s first multi-signature wallet last August, created by Belshe himself using a “P2SH” protocol that was developed by Gavin Andresen, chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation and Bitcoin’s lead core developer at the time.

While his service won’t quite reach Grandma yet, it has given Bitcoin holders an unparalleled means of securely holding their funds without fear of either being hacked or suffering some human error of forgetfulness or misplacement. It turns out, by the way, that error is a far more common cause of lost bitcoins than is the more feared specter of malevolent hackers.

We wanted a system that doesn’t depend on anyone else and wasn’t vulnerable to theft, a lost hard disk or paper wallet, or a forgotten-and- now-gone password,” Belshe says. “The challenge is always this: How do you improve security in a way users understand?”

Belshe & Co. appear to be meeting that challenge with growth figures ($1 billion transacted in the third quarter) and a corporate profile for which less substantive startups would no doubt hand over a good portion of their Bitcoin vaults. P2SH or pay to script hash addresses have grown more than 84 percent over the past 90 days, and BitGo controls the majority share of market for P2SH Bitcoin addresses.

It’s all big-time fun, which is one crucial metric Belshe applies to virtually all his professional endeavors. But even more important, if he were advising young people just launching their careers, is this: “Do something that matters.”

One gets the sense that having fun and doing things that matter have become almost one and the same thing for Belshe. That’s just one more sweet spot in a career from which the Bitcoin world is now benefiting in ways that matter greatly to it.

This post originally appeared in yBitcoin.

The post BitGo’s Mike Belshe on Doing What Matters appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

F2Pool, the world's largest Bitcoin mining pool, maintains that changing its code to allow bigger blocks through BIP 101 or Bitcoin XT is not an option.

Wang Chun, the operator of the China-based pool controlling some 20 percent of hashing power, dismissed the idea of an exponential growth rate of the maximum block size for 20 years leading to 8-gigabyte blocks.

Asked by Bitcoin Magazine, Chun said: “We cannot predict what will happen years into the future, and we think a first step to 2 megabytes should be enough for now.”

The block-size dispute – which represents a tradeoff between thenumber of transactions the Bitcoin network can handle and its decentralization – might reach a critical juncture over the next weeks. A large segment of Bitcoin's development community will discuss the issue at the upcoming Scaling Bitcoin workshop in Hong Kong in the first week of December, while several prominent Bitcoin companies have stated they intend to change their code to allow for bigger blocks that same month.

Chun, too, believes that raising the block-size limit is an urgent matter, explaining:

“I think it is urgent, because the transaction volume is increasing on the blockchain, and if the price rises in near future, it will push the transaction volume to be even higher. I think the max block size should be raised as soon as possible, but it should not be raised too much. Two megabytes is preferred as the first step.”

One possible solution, BIP 101, is programmed to increase the maximum block size to 8 megabytes if a threshold of 75 percent of mining power accepts the change. Once activated, this limit is set to double every two years for 20 years, ultimately leading to an 8-gigabyte block-size limit.

This patch, which is designed by former Bitcoin Core lead developer Gavin Andresen, was implemented in Bitcoin XT, the alternative Bitcoin implementation run by Google veteran Mike Hearn. BIP 101 is also favored byseveral prominent Bitcoin companies, as well as Slush Pool.

Switching to BIP 101 or Bitcoin XT is a bad idea; we will never do that,” Chun reiterated his earlier position. “After a meeting with some other Chinese pools earlier this year, we proposed an 8-megabyte limit, because we thought Gavin's initial 20 megabyte proposal was too big for us. I always thought 2 megabytes would be better as a first step, but I did not want to offend Gavin with a 10 times smaller proposal. Gavin then answered us with BIP 101, which due to its steep growth curve is essentially 8 gigabytes, so it’s done. I don’t trust Gavin anymore – nor Hearn for that matter.”

On the Bitcoin development mailing list, Chun recently suggested raising the maximum block size in accordance with the block halving. As such, the block-size limit would be raised to 2 megabytes as soon as possible, followed by an increase to 4 megabytes halfway through 2016, up to 32 megabytes by 2028.

Alternatively, Chun said he would be willing to implement an incremental increase to 8 megabytes over four years, as proposed by Blockstream CEO and hashcash inventor Dr. Adam Back. This “2-4-8” option seems acceptable to a significant segment of the Bitcoin Core development team, as well as some prominent industry members.

And even though Back proposed 2-4-8 as a temporary solution, Chun suggested that it could even be more than that.

We do not necessarily consider an 8 megabyte block-size limit a temporary solution. We don’t know what will happen moving forward. But we definitely think 8 megabytes is enough for the foreseeable future. Presumably, at least for the next three to four years.”

The post Bitcoin Mining Pool F2Pool (Discus Fish) Maintains: BIP 101 Not an Option appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has today charged Homero Josh Garza, founder of GAW Miners and ZenMiner with securities fraud and conducting a Ponzi scheme. According to a press release by the SEC, Garza is alleged by the SEC to carry out the fraud through his two Connecticut-based companies GAW Miners and ZenMiner by falsely claiming to produce bitcoin hashing power that GAW did not own. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut today. An excerpt from the SEC charge read: In reality, GAW Miners and ZenMiner did not own […]

The post SEC Charges Josh Garza with Securities Fraud, Alleges Bitcoin Ponzi Scheme appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

On November 19, the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) published Goldman, Sachs & Co.’s patent application 20150332395 or “Cryptographic Currency For Securities Settlement.” Described are “ [...] methods for settling securities in financial markets using distributed, peer-to-peer, and cryptographic techniques ” using a cryptocurrency named SETLcoin. The application lists Paul Walker and Phil J. Venables as the inventors of the technology.

Paul Walker is the co-head of technology at Goldman and a member of the Board of Directors of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). According to Nathaniel Popper’s book “Digital Gold” and his adaptation for American Banker, “When Goldman Sachs Began Flirting with Bitcoin,” Walker led a panel to educate the banks clients about virtual currencies. Popper writes that Walker, “indicated that the bank was taking a hard look at how the blockchain might be used to change basic things about how banks do business.”

Phil Venables, managing director and chief information security officer at Goldman Sachs has been described by American Banker as an “outspoken industry leader.”

The patent application addresses chain of custody of an asset, counterparty risk and settlement through a cryptocurrency called SETLcoin. The patent describes a colored coin scheme referred to as a PIC or “Positional Item inside Cryptographic currency”:

[...] For example, dollars available on the SETLcoin network represented by, e.g., PIC ‘USD’ may be authoritatively issued by, for example, the U.S. Treasury.”

SETLcoin, an amalgamation of “settlement” and “coin,” boasts near instantaneous execution and settlement:

[...] cryptographic currency transactions are independently and extemporaneously generated, verified, and executed within the network, without the risks associated with traditional clearing houses that can delay settlements for several days .”

Further, the application defines a cryptocurrency or “cryptographic currency” as a

[...] digital medium of exchange that enables distributed, rapid, cryptographically secure, confirmed transactions for goods and/or services.”

The patent goes on to describe an “atomic commitment protocol” and “fungibility engine.” The patent also explains how a settlement cryptocurrency would also make credit checks obsolete.

The Complexity of Asset Ownership

According to the patent application, SETLcoin ownership can be used to prevent fraud, including float fraud such as kiting. One of the earliest cases (if not the earliest) of ownership fraud at Goldman Sachs dates back to 1884 as detailed in an article for the New York Times, “Note Brokers ’ Responsibility ” from March 19, 1886 and further highlighted in the book “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World.”

A forged note for $1,100 endorsed by a Carl Wolf was sold by Goldman to a Frederick E. Douglas. Wolf then "ran away." Douglas was unsuccessful in suing Goldman to recover his losses. “Money and Power” notes that this was one of the first legal examinations of the role and responsibilities of a financial intermediary.

A more recent examination of the complexities of asset ownership (and unwinding of shares) was detailed this summer by Bloomberg in ”Banks Forgot Who Was Supposed to Own Dell Shares.”

The Depository Trust Company (DTC), the central securities depository subsidiary of DTCC, according to their website:

provides settlement services for virtually all broker-to-broker equity and listed corporate and municipal debt securities transactions in the U.S.”

Patrick Byrne, the CEO of e-commerce firm Overstock, has written about DTCC in “The DTCC’s CNS naked short selling residue” and most recently the clearing debacle in “Goldman Sachs Internal Memo (Yesterday): ‘Easy to Borrow List to be Discontinued.’

Byrne sued Goldman Sachs and others for allegedly naked short selling his company’s shares. That is “clearing operations at the banks intentionally failed to locate and deliver borrowed shares for clients shorting stocks.” It is somewhat ironic here because it appears that Goldman’s cryptocurrency application could prevent the very same behavior it allegedly participated in according to the lawsuit.

Byrne embraced cryptocurrency as a result and started the Overstock subsidiary tØ which is also using digital currencies and blockchain to settle trades and asset ownership.

According to tØ’s website they provide:

radical transparency and true settlement (which) combine to grant real, unambiguous ownership -- nearly instantly. If you buy it, you own it. It's that simple .”

Trustless

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are lauded for their trustless nature -- that is to say, there is no reliance on a trusted third party. Goldman’s patent filing however allows for the possible introduction of an “authoritative source” such as the Securities and Exchange Commission:

...there are no prior ownership rights when an SETLcoin is first issued; therefore, [...] {In addition to} [...] one or more trusted nodes [...] a government entity, {such as} the Security Exchange Commission, or other entity {can} [...] verify and authentic the issuer's transaction.”

Blockchain Cometh

Goldman Sachs and IDG Capital Partners co-led a $50 million strategic investment round in Bitcoin company Circle in late April of this year. This was the first publicly announced cryptocurrency investment by Goldman. However, as reported by CB Insights, Goldman’s investment activity into fintech startups has been intensifying.

According to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), Goldman is the fifth largest bank holding company with $859.93 billion in assets as of June 2015. The cryptocurrency technology patent was filed prior to Goldman’s membership in R3 CEV. R3 is working on a common blockchain standard for its members (which includes many of the banks listed in FFIEC).

Goldman’s thoughts on Bitcoin were broadcasted at it Talks@GS in “The Evolution of Bitcoin” and podcast “Exchanges at Goldman Sachs” in Episode 16, The Future of Finance.

Photo Bjoertvedt / Creative Commons

The post Goldman Sachs Files Patent Application For Securities Settlement Using Cryptocurrencies appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The Scaling Bitcoin workshops are gearing up for their second phase. After the initial conference in Montreal in September, Bitcoin's engineering and academic community will gather in Hong Kong later this week to discuss how best to scale up the network to allow for more than a handful of transactions per second.

To get a feel for what to expect from the workshop, Bitcoin Magazine spoke with Pindar Wong, co-founder of Hong Kong's first licensed ISP and the Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong planning committee chair, and MIT Digital Currency Initiative's Neha Narula, Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong program chair .

BM: What do you hope to accomplish in Hong Kong?

Wong : “With these conferences, we're trying to foster the educational and technical understanding that the scaling Bitcoin discussion is both broad and nuanced. In doing so, we hope to help build community, not by controlling the dialogue, but by synchronizing it by focusing on facts, not opinion. By using the scientific and academic approach we're trying to foster collaboration.”

Narula : “One of the amazing things about this workshop is that we're actually going to get specific plans. We're going to have presenters talk about the BIPs [Bitcoin Improvement Proposals] that they have created, their designs, their ideas and their implementations. And we're even going to get some test data and experimental results.”

BM: Is this more specific approach the biggest difference as compared to the first edition in Montreal?

Narula : “I think so. One major goal of phase one was community building, and really getting people together in one place who haven't had a lot of opportunity to talk to each other face-to-face. This time we're really trying to focus on the question of scaling Bitcoin; what are the strategies and techniques we can use to do that? The presentations are all directly related to the question of how to realize more transactions per second on Bitcoin's blockchain, including solutions like layering protocols.

Wong : “Another concrete difference, the main reasons we began this process, is that we recognized that it would be much easier for the Chinese Bitcoin community to participate in Hong Kong. So we'll have Chinese miners, pool operators, ASIC providers, and also those who host facilities. So all the diverse voices, that we don't normally have, that we normally don't see on the development mailing list, will be there. That's the thing that I am most excited about.”

BM: Are you expecting a concrete scaling solution to come out of this conference?

Narula : “I think it's important to note that this conference is not about forcing anyone to do anything. It's about providing the atmosphere and the space for this kind of discussion to happen. Instead of this discussion happening through the media, or through IRC, or on forums, it can actually happen in part face-to-face.”

Wong : “We're basically a platform. We've been very clear at the beginning that we're not about making decisions, because it's not up to us. That said, it would be great if the workshops could help to achieve this notion of consensus. Obviously, given that Bitcoin is essentially a bottom-up structure, where everyone has their own points of view, consensus is not something that you can impose. It has to emerge, so we hope that having the dialogue, the communication, and this idea of collaboration might help.”

BM: But not everyone will make it to Hong Kong, of course. The most notable example being Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen.

Narula: “Before phase one there was a lot of outreach activity ... it was the first time we've had all the five Core developers come to an event. It was a very precious opportunity for everyone to come together and have an understanding for where everyone's coming from. Similarly, for phase two, we've done outreach to all the key players, to make sure that they feel welcome, including Gavin. But I think that the distance is a bit much for him at this point. And we do recognize that it's a long way to come.

And it is up to anyone to decide to come – or not. That's why we've also made sure there are good online mechanisms. Most of the heavy talks are early in the morning to make sure that those on the American east coast can tune in to the live-stream and contribute through IRC.”

BM: How big a part will the block-size dispute play?

Wong : “The block size is just one dimension. There are many different approaches to scale Bitcoin, such as layer two mechanisms that were touched on in phase one in Montreal. Even the issue of 'What does it mean to scale Bitcoin?' is not really settled; different people have different views.

But yes, as opposed to phase one, we will look specifically at the block-size parameter in Hong Kong. We're also looking at the testing that has been done in between phase one and phase two, and we've set up a cloud infrastructure at the conference hall, so people who have developed code and want to test it can do so.”

BM: One common criticism against the first workshop in Montreal was that there wasn't really any result to show for. Some even allege that the conferences are a stalling mission, in order to prevent the block-size limit from being increased and win time for alternative scaling solutions to be developed.

Wong : “Whether we're stalling or not is in the eye of the beholder. I do know that the volunteers who have come forward to organize these conferences, like myself, are all working as fast as we can.

The more substantive point is: Did phase one achieve what we said phase one would achieve? And did the period in between phase one and phase two achieve what we originally intended it to achieve? I would say that we've had mixed success.

From a community-building perspective and from an educational perspective, phase one was phenomenally successful. However, I do recognize that in terms of the technical consensus, we're still in relatively early days. There is a lot of testing to be done. In some sense, therefore, phase two is really phase 1.5; we are half a phase behind. I take a lot of responsibility for that. I thought this would be the right amount of time and the right amount of space that people would need, but that might have been a bit optimistic. It would have been better to have more time between phases.”

Narula : “I think it's important to note that this is an ongoing process. I only got involved after phase one myself, but everyone I spoke to about that conference said it was one of the best Bitcoin conferences they've been to. That was in part because it was really about the technical discussions, not just a sales pitch from various companies, and VCs [venture capitalists], and things like that.

We intend the second phase to be really about the community and the piece of software that they're building, too. Because Bitcoin really is an amazing system. But, unfortunately, it's also extraordinarily complicated, and there are a lot of moving pieces. That's why we need things like this conference. Let’s work on it.”

Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong will take place on the 6th and 7th of December. For the full schedule, tickets, online participations, and more information, visit scalingbitcoin.org

The post Scaling Bitcoin Gears up for Hong Kong appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Bitcoin trading saw the bulls make a second unsuccessful attempt on the $380 and 2480 CNY level today. Frustrated, the market sold off to support at $355 and 2300 CNY. 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 Trading and Price Analysis Time of analysis: 14h30 UTC Bitstamp 1-Hour Chart From the analysis pages of xbt.social, earlier today: Price was sold off and found support at the level of the previous consolidation that acted as spring-board for the […]

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It’s officially December and the spirit of the holidays was seen in one Microsoft holiday commercial where the PC manufacturer took time to embrace Apple to spread the festive cheer.

The post Video: Microsoft Ends PC-Mac War with Apple, for the Holidays appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

As mobile payments and cryptocurrency have made strides providing an alternative to traditional banking in Kenya, legal conflicts have emerged among mobile currency providers and Safaricom, the nation’s dominant telecom service. Kenyan legal authorities may need to clarify how anti-money laundering/know your customer (AML/KYC) and other regulations will be enforced and who will enforce them.   BitPesa, a bitcoin payments and remittance service which uses the Safaricom telecom, and Lipisha, the payment gateway for both BitPesa and M-Pesa, are suing Safaricom in Kenya, according to International Business Times. Safaricom stopped Lipisha from processing M-Pesa transactions and later reinstated it as […]

The post Telecom/BitPesa Legal Tangle Over AML Threatens Mobile Payments In Kenya appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Convenience store chain FamilyMart will accept bitcoin at nearly 3,000 locations in Taiwan after striking a deal with local wallet provider BitoEX.

According to a report (paywall) by the Wall Street Journal, tech start-ups are revolutionizing the lending industry by finding alternative ways to judge someone's credit worthiness in the case of people who've never had a loan, credit card, or other revolving credit accounts. Instead of looking at payment histories that don't exist, the start-ups take a look at the user's cell phone habits. An app is installed on the potential borrowers phone and then authorized to collect all sorts of data from it. Branch is one of the companies involved in this. Founded by former Kiva (a microlending platform focusing […]

The post Smartphone Habits Can Determine Credit Worthiness In Developing World appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

  A new working paper titled “Should Cryptocurrencies Be Included in the Portfolio of International Reserves Held by the Central Bank of Barbados” suggests the Barbadian Central Bank to hold a small portion of Bitcoin as a part of its foreign currency reserves. The paper is authored by two economists – Winston Moore and Jeremy Stephen who previous worked at the Central Bank of Barbados and currently lecture at the University of West Indies. The complete working paper can be read or downloaded here. [PDF] The paper notes that Barbados maintains a peg against the US dollar, making it necessary […]

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Bitnation, a governance service that provides block chain IDs and bitcoin debit cards to refugees, has teamed with the government of Estonia to provide public notary services on the block chain, according to the International Business Times. Beginning in December, people utilizing Estonia’s e-residency program will be able to notarize marriages, contracts, birth certificates and more on the block chain. Estonia’s e-residency program allows anyone to use its online identity service, regardless where they live. The partnership could extend Bitnation’s role as a sovereign entity whereby open source protocol provides a sovereign jurisdiction. Susanne Templehof, Bitnation CEO and founder, said […]

The post Bitnation To Provide Block Chain Notary Services To Estonia’s E-Residency Program appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Good morning! Here are the 10 things you need to know in markets this Tuesday.

China’s manufacturing PMI report for November has come in below expectations, at a more than 3-year low. According the government, the index slipped to 49.6 in November, missing expectations for an unchanged reading of 49.8. Anything below 50 signals contraction.

Asian markets are mixed despite the reading. China's Shanghai Composite is down 0.19% at time of writing (6.40 a.m. GMT/1.40 a.m. ET), but the Hong Kong Hang Seng is up 1.98%, and Japan's Nikkei is up 1.34%.

European manufacturing data is coming. Between 8.45 a.m. GMT (3.45 a.m. ET) and 9.00 a.m. GMT (4.00 a.m. ET) we'll get manufacturing PMIs from Italy, France, Germany, Greece, the Eurozone, and the UK. We're also due unemployment figures from Germany, Italy, and the Eurozone.

The Bank of England's annual Financial Stability Report and stress testing results will be released shortly. Together they map out the vulnerabilities of Britain's banking system to prepare for the worst. This year's stress test — which war games nightmare scenarios on bank's balance sheets — is a global recession driven by a crash in China. There are fears the results could force Lloyds to trim its dividend.

Morgan Stanley is about to make deep cuts to its fixed-income business. That's according to Bloomberg's Ambereen Choudhury, Michael J. Moore and Hugh Son, who report that the cuts will take place over the next two weeks, citing two people with knowledge of the plans.

The International Monetary Fund has officially designated the Chinese yuan a global reserve currency. That means that it joins an elite group of currencies — the dollar, the yen, the euro, and the pound — in the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket.

Brazil's leading investment bank may need to sell itself to survive in the wake of a corruption scandal and the arrest of its co-founder and former CEO. BTG Pactual's stock has been crippled by the investigation into Andre Esteves, with the shares falling by about 30% in a matter of days.

Samsung announced on Monday that it's replacing its president of mobile communications — the latest sign of change at the electronic giant's ailing smartphone business. According to Bloomberg, Samsung will replace its former president of mobile communications, Shin Jong-Kyun, with Koh Dong-Jin, who was part of the Galaxy S6 and Note 5 business. The move was announced as part of Samsung's annual year-end management reorganization.

Brazil filed a 20 billion Brazilian reais ($5.2 billion, £3.4 billion) lawsuit on Monday against BHP Billiton and Vale to clean up what it says was its worst environmental disaster, caused by the collapse of a tailings dam. The governments of Brazil and those of two states hit by the damburst sued iron ore operator Samarco and its co-owners, the world's largest miner BHP Billiton and the biggest iron ore miner Vale.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is preparing to impose new regulations on banks operating in the state to prevent money laundering and the financing of militant groups. The new rules, which Cuomo plans to propose this week, will force a chief compliance officer to certify whether a bank maintains systems to detect and prevent illicit money transfers. 

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Good morning! Here's what you need to know on Tuesday.

1. British MPs will vote on Wednesday on whether to launch air strikes against Islamic State in Syria. It comes after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn granted his party a free vote on the issue after much speculation.

2. The FTSE 100 money manager Aberdeen Asset Management released its final results, and the big takeaway is that investors are terrified by the possibility of crashes in Asia and emerging markets.

3. President Vladimir Putin has called the downing of a Russian jet a "huge mistake" and claimed that Turkey was protecting its oil trade with Islamic State.

4. Hackers have staged cyber-attacks on three Greek banks and demanded a ransom in bitcoins, a virtual monetary unit, to stop their disruption.

5. Nikkei Inc. will use its $1.3 billion purchase of the Financial Times to build a global digital powerhouse by using data to win new clients and by harnessing the British newspaper's skill at getting subscribers to pay for content, its chairman has said.

6. Google representatives have met Israeli officials to discuss a censorship initiative that would see "inflammatory" Palestinian videos blocked from YouTube.

7. Apple is rumoured to be considering ditching the traditional 3.5mm audio jack in the next iPhone because it's too wide – meaning many headphones could become obsolete.

8. The White House is proposing to offer governors individual reports about refugees in their states. Governors have sought to block Barack Obama from placing Syrian refugees in their states following the Paris terror attacks.

9. ISIS is said to be preparing a "backup" capital in Libya in case Raqqa, the Syrian city which the group see as their de-facto capital, falls. 

10. The estimated number of adolescents dying of AIDS in the Asia Pacific region has more than doubled since 2005, experts said on Monday, warning of a "hidden epidemic."

And finally ... London's largest luxury flat in the country's hedge fund capital of Mayfair has gone on sale for £15.95 million.

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