Coin News

nanoPay Corporation, a loyalty and payment platform tech start-up in Toronto, has acquired all the assets related to MintChip, a fledgling digital currency developed by the Royal Canadian Mint (RCM), which has been in the coin making business for over 100 years, and likened to Bitcoin - but backed originally by the Canadian dollar. Plans are now afoot to commercialize the technology during 2016 under the new custodians.

For the several days now, there have been rumors circulating the internet about Cryptsy. Speculation runs rampant and other news sites are reporting different theories. In this report, I will list the facts as I know them from sources inside the exchange. I do have a personal opinion on this but a news site is […]

The post Cryptsy: “Our site is [messed] up at the moment” appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

The EU’s top law enforcement agency has announced a new crackdown on the DDoS attack group DD4BC, which demands ransom in bitcoin.

This is a guest post from the Distributed Ledger

The disruptive nature of blockchain technology is easy for people to conceptualize in the field of finance. T+3 interferes in traders being able to maximize earnings – payments shouldn’t take days to process while an email can be sent in seconds. As the first use case in many to come, finance is a perfect use for the blockchain.

But a trend toward new use cases is emerging, and one industry that is ripe for optimization and increased efficiency using this technology is healthcare.

Consider all the sensitive information that is associated with health: identity, diseases, treatments, payment, etc. An individual’s health is one of the most private things they have, yet time and again, data breaches release considerable amounts of information about an individual’s health onto the Web.

Here are two examples of large-scale breaches:

• Anthem: 80 million patient and employee records
• UCLA Health: 4.5 million patients
  In each of these cases, there was a breach on the network and all of the data became available to the hacker. A single point of failure can cause significant harm to patients.

A blockchain can help prevent this with multi-signatures and cryptography. The data is hashed onto the blockchain and then, using multi-signatures, people can gain access only if there is approval from the appropriate number of people. Using this technology, there could be a rule that for patient records to be accessed, the doctor, nurse and patient must all approve; or, perhaps, 2-of-3 have to approve access.

Blockchain company Gem, which just raised $7 million to expand its enterprise platform, has been working with different stakeholders in the healthcare industry to evaluate the need for blockchain technology. Micah Winkelspecht, CEO of Gem, shared with us that, similar to the financial industry, there are multiple stakeholders in healthcare that need to be considered when designing a blockchain application. He claims that true innovation by blockchains will occur where they connect independent parties to a cohesive, shared-write repository.

“The ability to have insurance companies, hospital billing departments, lenders, and patients using one blockchain to manage payments could reduce redundancies across the entire industry,” says Winkelspecht.

He goes on to explain that a blockchain network can solve for more than one problem facing healthcare data technology, payment collection being just one faction.

“If a blockchain can be used to manage the lifecycle of a hospital bill,” he says, “it could be used to manage the lifecycle of a patient’s medical record. Blockchains allow organizations to share access to their network without compromising data security and integrity. Patient records can be created, shared, and appended by multiple parties, introducing efficiency and transparency to a heavily siloed industry.”

Gem’s platform uses multi-signature, Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), and cryptographic keychains to address identity and information access security, which acts as an application layer to a blockchain protocol. A blockchain can then be used to permanently record network activity, which users can index or append based on access rights defined by the identity framework.

Factom and HealthNautica are looking to secure medical records and audit trails. This is done by encrypting the data onto the Bitcoin blockchain with a timestamp to verify its accuracy. The records can’t be changed and, because it is hashed to the blockchain, it can’t be accessed without permission. HealthNautica hopes to improve efficiency of claims processing and certainty that the records have not been changed.

Tierion is another blockchain startup that has built a platform for data storage and verification using the Bitcoin blockchain. The company announced in October of last year that it had completed its first project with the Philips healthcare group. While details of this project are not public yet, Philips global IT innovation lead Arno Laeven told CoinDesk , “We are exploring blockchain in relation to health care just the same as we are exploring many new technologies.”

What’s exciting to many about the blockchain and healthcare interconnection is that it is still such a new field. As companies and healthcare providers see the effect that the blockchain is having on finance, there is bound to be a push toward implementing the same securing and optimizing technology to the healthcare area.

This article originally appeared in the Distributed Ledger, a weekly email newsletter about enterprise blockchain technology. To read more or subscribe, visit thedistributedledger.com

The post Healthcare: Can the Blockchain Optimize and Secure It? appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The North American Bitcoin Conference (TNABC) held in Miami, Florida each January is now in its fourth year and is the most attended and longest running conference for the bitcoin, finance and currency industries. It began in 2012 with 200 first attendees and reached over 2000 attendees last year from over 40 countries. Visionaries like […]

The post The North American Bitcoin Conference Is Quickly Selling Out appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Bitcoin Press Release: ChainHQ is a powerful research tool for companies wishing to track the fast moving and highly disruptive ledger technology space. London, January 12, 2016 – BlockchainBriefing, the world’s leading distributed ledger technology information and news portal, is this week launching ChainHQ, a searchable database which tracks and compiles the latest company and […]

The post Launch of ChainHQ, the World’s First Searchable Database of Blockchain Investments and Market Developments, Documents $1billion of Industry Funding appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Bitcoin price continues holding to sideways trade above 2900 CNY and $440. 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: 15h30 UTC BTCC 1-Hour Chart From the analysis […]

The post Bitcoin Price Consolidating Again appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

According to multiple sources close to Symbiont, the smart securities trading platform has closed a $7 million funding round, valuing the company at $70 million.

In an email to Bitcoin Magazine , co-founder Evan Wagner declined to comment but said that the company will be making a formal announcement in the future.

Symbiont, which found its genesis from the Counterparty project, was founded by former members of Medici, which is now known publicly as t0, an Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) company. According to the company’s website, “Symbiont is building the first issuance and trading platform for smart securities on blockchain technology.”

Smart Securities is a term to describe smart contracts, which are instruments that can be programmed with specific rules. In this case, these smart contracts are programmable versions of traditional securities that are being issued on the blockchain. A smart contract is able to execute the rules it has been programmed to follow without manual interference from any individual or trusted party.

An example that Symbiont describes in a blog post is a corporate bond, which is coded with the bond amount and its date. “When the security is issued, it communicates with the atomic clock and will make payments on the coupon deadline to owners across the blockchain. Friction in clearing and settlement is reduced — it could be T+10 [Trade + 10] minutes — and any errors and counterparty risks are eliminated,” the company describes.

Symbiont was founded when Robby Demody, Evan Wagner and Adam Krellenstein of Counterparty joined with Mark Smith of Money f(x) back in March 2015. Counterparty was one of the early Bitcoin 2.0 projects built on top of the bitcoin blockchain. In essence, it would allow for different financial applications to execute beyond just the peer-to-peer payment network that Bitcoin is. However, it would still carry the same security due to the network strength that Bitcoin has.

The company had previously raised a $1.25 million seed round from investors such as Matt Andresen, former co-CEO of Citadel Derivatives Group, and Duncan Niederauer, former CEO at the New York Stock Exchange.

“It’s good to see more venture capital flow into the Capital Markets segment, which represents a good opportunity for blockchain solutions (theoretically). But let’s not regard any amount raised as a sign of success. We will see some companies that have raised little do well, and we might see some companies fail even if they are raising a lot. We should be more focused on celebrating and understanding the state of deployment, usage, adoption and innovation with actual customers, in order to assess the nature of the dent that the blockchain is making on financial services,” said William Mougayar, a Toronto-based investor and General Partner at Virtual Capital Partners.

Jacob Cohen Donnelly is a consultant and journalist in the Bitcoin space. He runs a weekly newsletter about bitcoin called Crypto Brief .

The post Smart Securities Trading Platform Symbiont Raises $7 Million appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Joe Mucheru, the secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communications and Technology (ICT), resigned from the board of BitPesa, Africa’s largest bitcoin trading platform, and started to offload is shares to prevent any conflict of interest, according to technmoran.com, an African news site. While some Africa bitcoin observers might view his departure as another […]

The post Kenyan Ministry Official Quits BitPesa Board And Sells Shares To Avoid Conflict Of Interest appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

A draft bill submitted to Russia’s legislative assembly, the Duma, is updated to a new draft edition that may be reviewed as early as February. The updated draft is likely to exclude harsh punishments such as imprisonment for trading bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a punishment previously suggested by the Russian Finance Ministry. The legislative initiative […]

The post Russian Legislature to Review Updated Bitcoin-Ban Seeking Bill in February appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Overstock.com, one of the most visible retailers to embrace bitcoin, grabbed the interest of securities traders when it announced a blockchain-based securities platform and later won government approval to issue stocks via the blockchain. To help securities traders learn more about Overstock’s plans with its securities trading technology, Alex Pitti, a writer for Seeking Alpha, […]

The post Overstock Blockchain Securities Platform Presses Onward, with Some Questions Raised appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

One of the biggest events in the annual tech calendar has passed with only a minor presence from bitcoin or blockchain industry firms.

A few days ago Forbes ran a story about Olaf Carlson-Wee who has lived for three years using only bitcoin as currency. The 26 year-old works for bitcoin start-up Coinbase, so he obviously has a personal investment in proving the viability of bitcoin as a currency; even so it’s an impressive achievement. Carlson-Wee began his […]

The post Why Choosing the Right Bitcoin Wallet is Important appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Over the past year, the bitcoin landscape has seen dramatic changes. In the beginning of 2015, the price of Bitcoin was $313.92 and today a quick Google search gave me a price of $456.26.  That’s an increase of about 45.34%. But this article is not about the price of Bitcoin, this article is about why the […]

The post Another Bitcoin Bubble? Think Again. appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.