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Financial Services Club chairman Chris Skinner discusses why 2015 marked a turning point for global bitcoin and blockchain discussion.

Fungibility is often held as a crucial characteristic of sound money. But what happens when money has a public record of every transaction, and morally questionable trades can be identified? Is bitcoin headed for a break in fungibility?

The debate about whether Bitcoin is fit to be a currency rather than a payment layer between currencies is as alive as it has ever been. Many of these tensions about what Bitcoin is or should be have been aired and discussed during the blocksize debate and are ongoing.

One essential element of a money which has not particularly been illustrated is how bitcoin might be affected by a significant gap in its “fungibility.”

“[Fungibility] is the idea that a 10 dollar note is the same as any other 10 dollar note. So if you receive a note that was involved in a theft 10 transactions go and the police investigated the theft, then they would have no right to take the note away from you,” according to Adam Back, the inventor of Hashcash.

According to Back, this is an old legal concept, often traced to a 17th century court case in Scotland. In that case, a pair of high value notes marked with a unique signature were stolen and later on turned up at a bank. The owner took the case to court in an attempt to have the bank return the notes to him. The courts ruled that “if notes could be returned to a previous owner after a theft, it could erode confidence in a currency,” since your ownership would be at question and you would have to go and check the newspapers or try to make sure your money has not been claimed as stolen.

While the above briefly illuminates the history of fungibility as a key characteristic to money, it still leaves questions about what might actually happen to a currency if such a crack in fungibility appeared. Kristov Atlas, a bitcoin privacy researcher raised some questions about the importance of fungibility in a recent post saying:

The needs for fungibility are somewhat unclear, in my opinion. Privacy advocates have been talking up fungibility for a while without providing a lot of evidence to back it. Perhaps this is why it has made such a dull impression on people.

Fungibility is a particular concern for bitcoin because bitcoin, unlike cash, sea shells or silver coins, has a cryptographically provable history of ownership. If the identity of a particular bitcoin’s previous owners or the nature of the transactions they engaged in was to be revealed and deemed illegal, could this cause a future where new or unspent ‘virgin’ bitcoins are worth much more than old bitcoins orwhere coins associated with Silk Road transactions lose a great deal of their value?

Such a scenario is not far-fetched. There are various blockchain analytics and compliance companies such as Coinalytics and Chainanalysis which claim to be using artificial intelligence algorithms to group addresses and transactions and thus reveal ‘entities’ in the network. It’s not hard to imagine that someday bitcoin payment processors could automatically compare incoming bitcoins to a “dirty coin” database, to determine their legality and or past connection with illegal trade.

To learn more about these questions and concerns, Bitcoin Magazine spoke with J.P. Koning, an economics blogger with a substantial body of work on the history of money.

BM: Do you know any examples in history where the fungibility of a currency broke? How did that play out?

Koning: Many of the problems faced by those who managed medieval monetary system can be traced to deficits in fungibility.

For instance, England's silver pennies degraded steadily over time through regular wear and tear and also as they were clipp'd and sweated. When the mint issued new full bodied pennies, questions of fungibility emerged. A new penny, after all, had much more silver than a worn penny, and therefore had more intrinsic value. But each were pennies; they both had the same face value. So just as you get good and bad bitcoin, you had good and bad pennies.

The medieval economy dealt with the fungibility problem in a unique way. According to law and custom, merchants accepted all coins at face value. Put differently, they did not differentiate between old and new pennies. Shoppers thus had an incentive to pay with old and degraded pennies rather than use new full-bodied pennies. Why buy a fish with 24 grams of silver when you can pay with just 23 grams? Thus the bad money drove out the good from circulation; this is Gresham's famous law. For centuries, only the worst pennies circulated in England.

In the case of bitcoin, I'm not sure that law or custom would require merchants to accept all bitcoin at the same rate. If they were to differentiate between the two, you'd most likely get the opposite effect; good money would drive out the bad.”

BM: Are you worried about a scenario where bitcoins with close association with a bitcoin address used on the Silk Road are flagged as being high risk for money laundering? What is the worse that could happen to bitcoin in the above scenario?

Koning: That reminds me of the recent euro crisis, where various types of euros threatened to become non-fungible with others. This summer, for instance, Greek euro deposits certainly lost their equivalence to non-Greek euros.

Koning expanded on this thought in a related article, where he wrote:

One of the deep problems facing the euro over the last three years was fear of euro break up. If Greece decided to leave the euro (or was kicked out), a Greek euro would no longer be equal to a German one. In the mind of the markets, euros had ceased to be homogeneous.

In anticipation of potential break up, a tremendous bank run began in which massive amounts of Italian, Greek, Irish, Spanish, and Portuguese euro deposits were converted into German and Dutch euro deposits. This all occurred on the books of the ECB's intra-eurosystem clearing mechanism—Target2. While no limits had ever been placed on Target2 balances (or imbalances), fears that Germans might revolt and try to close the Target2 window led to ever faster withdrawals from the GIIPS.

BM: Bitcoin in some ways is very different than cash, particularly because the identification of each coin is tied to a historical public record of every transaction. I wonder if you know of any examples where such a financial asset suffered from a gap in fungibility. Like the stock of a company, or any other ownership token that would have a transparent history of ownership.

Koning: Bills of exchange and chopmarked coins also had a paper trail. In the case of bills of exchange, the moment that the credit worthiness of a certain cosignatory to a bill of exchange was doubted, it would have started to trade at a much larger discount to par.

Analog versus Digital Money

Koning’s historical insights do paint a picture into how the market might evolve as money’s fungibility changes, but bitcoin is unique and may evolve differently than any money before it.

Many of Koning’s examples were related to a break in fungibility for political reasons, such as the euro crisis which saw runs on banks and demand for more trusted government versions of the euro versus the euros in Greek banks. However, Bitcoin’s fungibility might be threatened by its use in dark markets.

It is no secret that bitcoin has been widely used online to purchase goods on dark markets such as the Silk Road. A report by Kyle Soska and Nicolas Christin from Carnegie Mellon University claims that dark markets had a higher daily bitcoin trade volume than BitPay’s reported $435,000 daily average, in 2014.

"In the short four years since the development of the original Silk Road, total volumes have reached up to $650,000 daily (averaged over 30-day windows) and are generally stable around $300,000–$500,000 a day, far exceeding what had been previously reported," said the report.

Virgin Coins and Bitcoin’s Fungibility

To learn about the demand for newly mined, unspent “virgin” Bitcoins, Bitcoin Magazine spoke with FinTech consultant Bilal Dar. According to Dar, he’s seen “virgin” bitcoin trading at a 20 percent to 30 percent premium to market prices.

The demand for virgin was nothing new ... Having virgin coins had many benefits. A full block of 25 coins mined between 2012 to 2016 would have collectible value. Similar is the value for 50 BTC block ... there are ways of deferring taxes if you have a coin with no or least amount of history. [Though some of this] would require private key swapping and a 'substantial' amount of trust between parties conducting transaction.

So did the value of Virgin coins have anything to do with the possibility of older coins being 'dirty'? No ... It was more of a possibility of 'perceived value' ... People had a lack of understanding, and in some case genuine use cases.

Today he claims that the demand for virgin coins remains, but the supply has increased dramatically. “You can wait for 2 weeks and batches of freshly minted coin from China would be available,” said Dar.

The Foreseeable Future

The impact of a privacy leak or fungibility weakness in Bitcoin is yet to be discovered. After all, a cryptographically provable history of every transaction is an essential part Bitcoin and the blockchain. The good news is that this topic is in the mind of many Bitcoin core developers and pioneers such as Adam Back, Gregory Maxwell and many others.

In a 2014 presentation, Back explained the functionality of something called Blind RSA transactions dating back to the days of digicash, which according to him, are “cryptographically unlinkable" and "payer anonymous.” Another promising discussion may be something called Confidential Transactions, being developed by several core developers at Blockstream.

And of course, many alternative cryptocurrencies have worked on the issue for years, including DASH, Monero, Cryptonote, and Zerocash. How Bitcoin will adapt to this market environment and whether it will evolve beyond this threat to its fungibility remains to be seen.

The post Is Bitcoin Headed for a Break in Fungibility? appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Banks are spending billions to battle cyber attacks, according to the Wall Street Journal. Much of the efforts focus on employees who unintentionally expose information to hackers. Many banks are now banning workers from using USB drives, warning them to be careful about what they post on social media, and telling them not to put “out […]

The post Banks Spend Big To Fight Cybercrime, Heighten Efforts To Supervise Employee Behavior appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Last month, three European Parliament representatives filed a motion seeking to give member-states the power to regulate bitcoin activities.

Blockchains have eclipsed bitcoin in the mainstream media lately, largely due to financial institutions looking for ways to use blockchains. But in addition to these initiatives, some big technology companies are exploring Ripple, Factom and Ethereum protocols, according to Finance Magnates. Microsoft’s Azure cloud service recently acquired Ethereum capabilities, followed by Factom, Ripple and others. […]

The post Factom Price Soars after Integration with Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Blockchains have eclipsed bitcoin in the mainstream media lately, largely due to financial institutions looking for ways to use blockchains. But in addition to these initiatives, some big technology companies are exploring Ripple, Factom and Ethereum protocols, according to Finance Magnates. Microsoft’s Azure cloud service recently acquired Ethereum capabilities, followed by Factom, Ripple and others. […]

The post Factom Price Soars after Integration with Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

In July Bitcoin Magazine reported that researchers and entrepreneurs at the MIT Media Lab had started the development of a new encryption system, dubbed Enigma, based on the blockchain technology. Enigma will enable untrusted and anonymous participants to securely share sensitive information with a third party.

The name “Enigma” is part of the history of cryptography and code-breaking. It was the name of the electro-mechanical encryption system used by Germany before and during World War II, which was broken by a group of notable mathematicians and early computer scientists, including Alan Turing.

Enigma was created by Oz Nathan, a technology entrepreneur formerly associated with the Counter Terror Unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, and Guy Zyskind, a graduate student and research assistant at the MIT Media Lab whose research interests lie at the intersection of data, privacy and Bitcoin. Zyskind’s advisor, Prof. Alex “Sandy” Pentland, is associated with the Enigma team.

The new Enigma is powered by the blockchain.

Enigma is a decentralized cloud platform with guaranteed privacy,” states the Enigma website. “Private data is stored, shared and analyzed without ever being fully revealed to any party. Secure multi-party computation, empowered by the blockchain, is the magical technology behind it.”

In fact, protecting sensitive data is but a part of what Enigma will do. An important and innovative feature of the system is that it will permit analyzing the data stored by the system with external applications while keeping the data itself private and under full control of its owners.

Furthermore, data owners will be able to monetize their data. For example, participants could anonymously sell partial, controlled access to their medical data to pharmaceutical companies that need to run data analysis programs on a wide sample of patients’ data.

“[Enigma] is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private,” states the Enigma whitepaper written by Nathan, Zyskind and Pentland. “Enigma's computational model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation, guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, Enigma uses a modified distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data.

An external blockchain is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system," the whitepaper continues. "Similar to Bitcoin, Enigma removes the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data. For the first time, users are able to share their data with cryptographic guarantees regarding their privacy.”

The Enigma creators won the final round of the Summer Startup Competition organized by the MIT Bitcoin Project in 2014. “The team winning the $5,000 grand prize, Ethos – comprised of MIT Media Lab grad students Amir Lazarovich & Guy Zyskind, along with Bitcoin entrepreneur Oz Nathan – had also won prizes in the two previous rounds,” states the MIT Bitcoin Project’s announcement. “Ethos wowed judges by submitting a working prototype of a decentralized network for storing and sharing personal data, delivering on the ambitious vision they laid out in the first two rounds.”

Bitcoin Magazine reached out to the Enigma creators to find out more about Enigma’s objectives and future plans.

One of our missions with Enigma is to minimize the tradeoff between security and privacy, by enabling people and organizations to share data with each other, while maintaining control over how the data is used, without ever revealing the raw data to anyone,” Nathan told Bitcoin Magazine.

Since July, the Enigma team’s work has been focused on three things:

• The implementation of Enigma;
  
• Formally proving the Enigma protocol in an academic paper, which should be published soon;
  
• Talking with potential users to understand what the most interesting use cases are.

“The most interesting use case we're hearing from potential users is the ability to do data science and machine learning on encrypted data sets. Other use cases include private smart contracts and 'IoT with privacy',” Zyskind told Bitcoin Magazine.

The Enigma team will be launching a beta soon. Interested users can join the waiting list to participate in the beta by signing up for at the Enigma website.

The post Enigma, MIT Media Lab’s Blockchain-based Encrypted Data Marketplace, to Launch Beta appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Dan Schulman became PayPal's CEO in 2014. He started his career at AT&T and held executive positions at Virgin Mobile as well as American Express. The Economist's Matthew Bishop sits down with Schulman at Business Insider's IGNITION 2015 conference to discuss mobile payments, transactions, and how PayPal's recently acquired Venmo is the trendy new payment platform for millenials. 

Matthew Bishop: At the moment there's tremendous excitement about FinTech, a phrase that wasn't even mentioned back in the days when PayPal was invented 10 or so years ago. What do you make of this excitement? Why is it now that, all these years after your company was created, people are suddenly getting excited about digital finance and startups being created all over the place. Is it a threat to you, PayPal? Or is this a great opportunity for you.

Dan Schulman: It's a great opportunity because there's so much secular tailwinds moving into digital and mobile payments. I think it's really interesting that on Black Friday for the first time ever more people shopped online than went in-store. I've spoken to a lot of my colleagues and good friends at a number of different of retailers, post the long weekend, and every one of them are basically saying that this is the year of the so-called "omni channel" around the mobile phone being used online, in-app, and in-store. And I think that secular shift is sort of a penetration of mobile into some part of the shopping journey, it's not just affecting financial services because I do think there'll be more change in financial services over the next five years than we've seen in the past 30 years.

I do think there'll be more change in financial services over the next five years than we've seen in the past 30 years

But this idea of using mobile for retailers to get closer and more intimate with their customers and digital forms of that, and digital payments, and rewards, and couponing, and offers, being a part of that holistic system is really putting a tremendous amount of focus and attention by both consumers and retailers on digital payments.

MB: But there is a sense that if there is this great disruption coming, and certainly at The Economist we've argued that there is going to be a significant disruption of financial services, which side of the fence is PayPal? Is PayPal part of the establishment that's going to be disrupted or are you actually going to be a disruptor? Because some of the newer products like Square and so forth in a sense look like they caught the company maybe back on its heels when it should have been leading that revolution.

DS: I think that sometimes people talk about disruption and I've seen tons of startups come in as disruptors and then disappear. And I think what we need to do as an industry is think about a world that is dominated by mobile and software and not extrapolate from what was. And I think a lot of big companies tend to want to do that. They basically look at what was, they kind of think about the future, and then they extrapolate from where they are. I think what we really need to think about is how do we reimagine the management and movement of money in an era where everyone will have a smartphone.

The bill of materials for a smartphone is dropping down to $30, connectivity costs are coming down dramatically. Everyone has all the power of a bank branch in the palm of their hand. And so in that world of software at scale, theoretically the incremental unit cost of something at scale approaches zero. So that should provide a tremendous opportunity for us to think in new innovative ways to provide just different ways of thinking about the democratization of money. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity for us and also a very important thing for the world. And we'll hopefully talk about financial inclusion and what's happening with that and financial health.

MB: In a sense you've benefited from the early days of the internet where basically the entire mainstream finance industry seemed not to notice it and gave PayPal a free run to get established. In a sense you've benefited from that for awhile, but now we're in this reimagining environment. The question is how do you get your culture as a company to be in the lead of that re-imagination when to some extent you've been growing in that incremental world of seeing the internet build out and gradually take share away from the traditional players?

DS: Yes. I'd argue with that premise, but I can understand why you'd bring that up. But I'd still argue with the premise.

PayPal is one of the original Silicon Valley companies. And there aren't many Silicon Valley companies that have grown to the size that we have right now where we've got 175 million or so customers using our platform on an active basis. We're putting on four to five million new active customers every single quarter onto our platform. We have moved dramatically from being an online company to being a mobile company. We did over a billion transactions on mobile last year. Last quarter our mobile processing volume grew by 40% plus. So we're really a leader in not just online but mobile payments going forward.

I was talking to Mark Andreessen a couple weeks ago and he said, "'You're one of the few companies that I see that has as big a runway in front of you and maybe more than you've had in the past given where everything is going.'" And to me this is about harnessing the engineering talent that we have, and we're one of the very few companies in the world whose sole focus is digital and mobile payments. We're not doing it to sell more hardware, we're not doing it to sell advertising. That is the platform that we are building out. And it gives us a tremendous advantage to have that focus.

MB: Well, payments is obviously an incredibly crowded battle ground with some incredible large companies whether they're from traditional finance like Citigroup, or Amex, or Mastercard, or Visa. Then you've got startups like Square, you've got companies like Apple. There are lots of people really fighting over payments. Given that payments is essentially a utility, it's a business that you could imagine all the revenues from it basically being competed away, why is that so important? And why are there so many big players trying to win that particular battle?

DS: Just think about the central role that payments plays. And it's all digitizing right now. And so customers manage and move their money on a daily basis. It is essential to what we all do.

You look at one of our services Venmo, Venmo is fascinating in terms of how millenials move their money from one person to another person. The typical Venmo user opens their app four or five times a week. It's at the center of how they move their money. There are now, last quarter, over $2.1 billion in volume that was transacted through Venmo, up 200% year over year. And so when institutions see that the data and information that comes from transactions are so valuable in being able to extend other services to those customers.

We do a thing called PayPal Working Capital where we don't look at the credit score or the FICO score of a small business customer. We just look at their history with us. And we extend working capital to them. And what's really interesting, and one step that I'm very proud of, is that 3% of the counties in the US have had 10 or more banks close branches in them. So they're under-meeting income levels. 25% of the billion-plus dollars we've loaned in working capital have come from those 3% of counties. So we're actually replacing what used to be mainstream type of banking, looking at things in new ways.

And one other fact that's really important is those companies that have gotten working capital their average revenues have grown between 21-22% while similar companies are going at 1-2%.

MB: So you've really fixed a hole in the banking system.

DS: Well we've made a difference to merchants for sure.

MB: Do you think I'm right in expecting that all the current revenues that the financial services industry is making from payments are going to be largely erased by competition? Thus it'll need to be the data and using that data in intelligent ways that generate our profit of the future, certainly in consumer finance.

DS: When I first went into financial services people told me not to be too over-optimistic about change. You did an article about the death of cash, and cash has been around in some form for thousands of years. And I wouldn't predict the death of cash at any point. Eighty-five percent of the world's transactions are still in cash right now.

But what I do think is that we are going to re-imagine how money is managed and moved. It is ridiculous that for so many people the things that all of us in this room take for granted, like cashing a check, paying a bill, sending money to somebody that you love, forces over 70 million people in the US and 2.5 billion people around the world to stand in line for like 40 minutes at times to do a transaction. And in the US those who are not well served by the US, 10% of their disposable income is spent on unnecessary fees and interest. That's as much as a family spends on food. That's ridiculous. Technology should fundamentally redefine that. We should make things a lot easier to do, faster to do, and less expensive. We should figure out a way to create a system that busts the paradigm that it's expensive to be poor. And software and mobile should be able to go do that.

MB: Is your bet that as digital finance gets better it actually expands the market? Or do you think we essentially get all the wasted interest payments and fees that people are coughing up? Do they basically get that money given back to them, and therefore there's a much smaller financial services industry? Or is the fact that the services will become so much cheaper and better going to make for bigger —

DS: I think it's going to tremendously expand the pie. There are 2.5 billion people outside the financial system right now, so you have huge leakage for government pay or benefits that go to citizens right now. In some countries that leakage can be as much as 30%. And when you do electronic distribution of those benefits people in those countries think that they've gotten this huge raise. They haven't gotten a raise. You've just taken out the middle man or multiple middle men in the middle there. What financial health typically does is it tends to start to reduce income inequality, it starts to drive some more financial health, and when you have better financial health people will start small businesses, they invest in education for their kids, and that drives economic growth. To me, re-imagining money with a technology bent can be tremendously beneficial from an economic and social perspective throughout the world.

MB: You mentioned Venmo earlier and I think that that's something you acquired not so long ago. And it's an app that's regarded as very cool and state-of-the-art and so forth, with lots of growth. And I think people are often surprised to think that it's owned by PayPal and PayPal doesn't seem so cool and trendy and state-of-the-art compared to Venmo. What do you think it is about PayPal that's going to allow you to win these battles against so many other big, powerful, financial companies but also startups as well?

DS: So first of all PayPal is one of the top 100 global brands in the world. And it is imbued with attributes that a lot of brands would go for which are security, trust, and service. And when you talk about financial transactions that's incredibly important especially as you move into a digital world where when you're doing everything through software and through mobile the number of bad guys who want to come in after accounts you have to have tremendous security and safety. And for that you need gigantic amounts of data and information because our risk algorithms are fed by, this year, some five billion transactions that will go through our platform. And the way that I think about it you know if algorithms are the weapon that you use, data and the amount of data that you have is the ammunition for that. So having that scale is incredibly important.

What we are doing is looking at different segments of the market. PayPal has always been known as an online piece of this. Braintree, which we acquired and is a 100% mobile payments full-stack processor. Most of the leading edge apps these days — Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest — all use Braintree for 100% of their payment processing.

And a company we just bought, Paydiant, is the leading in-app in-store platform.

We're taking all of these things together to create a platform that allows merchants and consumers to look across their whole shopping experience and not just make it a payment but make it an experience.

Venmo is a perfect example of that. Venmo users open their app four or fives times a week, but they only do transactions a couple times a week. But they're always looking at the feed to see what did you buy, what icons did you put on your feed, why did you go and buy that? So the secret sauce of Venmo is that one, it made it simple and easy, but two, it tied into your social network so that sharing payments became an experience and a sharing of part of what your life is. It's very different. You probably wouldn't do that. And we joke inside the company that there's a Venmo line. That line is about 30 years old or so. Below that pretty much everybody is using Venmo. And above that people are using other forms, likely PayPal and other ways.

And we joke inside the company that there's a Venmo line. That line is about 30-years-old or so. Below that pretty much everybody is using Venmo. And above that people are using other forms, likely PayPal and other ways.

But you may not want to share all of your information and so we need to have a service that's tailored for one demographic that can be very different than a different demographic. But what we do want to do is tie Venmo into all of the merchant networks we have so that we can afford more optionality for more Venmo users to do transactions, and that also monetizes the Venmo asset for us.

MB: Is your way ahead going to be more as an acquirer than as a green field developer of new innovations? Because you've done a lot of acquisitions, you've got a lot of capital, and the value of your shares is quite high.

DS: We've spent the last three years kind of re-architecting the software stack inside PayPal, which makes it a lot easier for us to do innovation on our platform right now. We do releases every two weeks. We're a fully agile shop. We have 5,000 engineers internally only focused on the payments piece of this digital payments. So we're doing a tremendous amount of innovation internally.

But to your point, we do have a pretty pristine balance sheet right now: we have some six billion plus of cash, we have no debt on that, and we've acquired four companies in the last year. We acquire companies where it makes sense for us to acquire, where there's a capability that isn't on our product road map or a geography that we'd like to enter, and where we think this could catapult us into that space. We will look, if it makes sense, to acquire.

MB: There is a lot of excitement in the FinTech world about the blockchain, which is the technology underlying Bitcoin. Is that something that you're looking at that you're excited by?

DS: Yes. So I think you separate out blockchain the technology and the protocol from things like Bitcoin, even though a lot of people conflate the two. I think there are a lot of interesting things about the blockchain technology and the promise of what it could be. The problem right now is that you have a lot of so-called currencies tied to this technology. And these currencies fluctuate quite wildly. So Bitcoin can be up and down. And therefore the promise of sort of a friction -ree low-cost mechanism, what you have to do is you have to actually turn that virtual currency or crypto-currency into a fiat currency. Because if you're a retailer and you have a 5% margin and that changing currency value is 10% and one day you immediately need to change it into fiat currency. And those fees take away any of the advantages of that. So we integrate bitcoin through Coinbase into our Braintree platform. So we support it in that way. But right now there's still a lot of questions before I think that will be widely used.

SEE ALSO: Sony CEO Michael Lynton on surviving the 2014 hack, making money in an evolving world, and why 'The Nanny' is a hit in Russia

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NOW WATCH: Mark Cuban explains why downloading Snapchat is a huge mistake

Who influenced the bitcoin/blockchain space most in 2015? We analysed the results of our reader poll and the year's events and here are the results.

 Bitcoin mining firm BTCS, formerly known as Bitcoin Ship has completed a $1.45 million round of financing on December 16, led by Cavalry Fund LP. Originally known as Bitcoin Shop, BTCS was an e-commerce retailer that shifted its business model to bitcoin mining. The company was in need of a cash-boost after a recent SEC […]

The post BTCS Raises $1.45 Million in a Funding Round; Immediately Increases Stake in Spondoolies-Tech appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

  What do you think big data is?  BBC’s technology news presentation – Click, brought its beauty and use to us in 25 minutes of film time. Those involved with the interviewing or creation of the presentation walked through London’s prestigious Imperial College and the Somerset House using the Big Bang Data exhibition as a platform […]

The post BBC’s Click Blockchain Documentary appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

An Australian Blockchain payments company called Living Room of Satoshi has crossed a million-dollar (AUD) milestone in bills and bank transfer payments through its blockchain-based bitcoin payment service. Living Room of Satoshi, named after Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto has now surpassed $1 million in bills and bank transfer payments pipelined through its service. The […]

The post Australian Bitcoin Payments Startup Hits $1 Million Milestone appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Three France-based members of the European Parliament have tabled a motion for a resolution calling “stricter controls over all virtual currency” such as Bitcoin. The trio have even asked to “prohibit” virtual currency exchanges transactions altogether which, in essence, is asking for a ban of all such transactions. Three members of European Parliament, all French […]

The post 3 Members of Euro Parliament Call for Stricter Bitcoin Controls, Prohibit Virtual Currency Exchange Transactions appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Speaking at the Blockchain Agenda in San Diego last week, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne warned that the R3-led blockchain consortium that counts the world’s largest banks as its partners is looking to outlaw the competition and the wider Bitcoin and blockchain community. Bitcoin advocate and CEO of Overstock Patrick Byrne is wary of the R3-led […]

The post Patrick Byrne Is Wary of R3’s Blockchain Consortium appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Rics says lack of housing supply will drive prices up faster than household pay rises with an average 6% rise across the country and 8% in East Anglia

House prices in some parts of the UK could increase by as much as 8% in 2016 as the recovery that has taken hold in London ripples out across the country.

The strong jobs market in Cambridge and the area’s commuter links to London are forecast to put East Anglia at the forefront of growth, with an 8% average rise, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics).