While growing interest in blockchain technology from companies to governments shows little sign of abating and even the Chinese authorities are looking to create their own digital currency, the power of this technology is also being harnessed for deployment in other industries - including music. Now fintech platform OpenLedger and Danish bitcoin exchange CCEDK are joining forces with MUSE, a music-tailored blockchain, to make monetizing music as easy as new peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms made distributing it 15 years ago.

 Financial technology has never been a more exciting or innovative category — especially in New York City. Oddly, tech is not the driving force in many of these ventures. The Blockchain and Bitcoin notwithstanding, most of what we’re seeing now is financial product evolution and the unbundling of the large bank. Most of these companies could have been built 20 years ago. Read More

Whether the Bitcoin Blockchain has failed or not (one of the core members of the Bitcoin development team suggests that it has), George Howard asserts that the technological innovations developed or advanced because of it, and the spirit of its potential is secure, and will be utilized for continued advances.

Michael J Casey gives some perspective to recent events in the bitcoin world that culminated in the departure of bitcoin developer Mike Hearn.

Today marks the end to the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland and usually that means it's pretty quiet.

While there are a few sessions to go to and people to meet, a large chunk of the 2,500 participants start to travel back to whichever one of the 100 countries they came from. It didn't help that a record-breaking blizzard has crippled the East Coast of America.

It also means that some of the world's most powerful people like Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, took more time to mingle with delegates, journalists, and companies that were looking for a line or a photo op.

After talking in a session about how financial markets need more clarity on how the Chinese authorities are managing their currency, particularly the relationship of the yuan to the US dollar, she went and joined the rest of the delegates in the Congress Hall for the final day buffet.

She was pretty much swamped by people wanting to talk to her and as a media badge holder, it was very difficult for any film crew or writer to get close enough to speak to her.

But after speaking to fellow financiers, Lagarde was ushered to the side by a team of people who built a robot that is holding a newspaper. It looked like this:

What happened next was quite gracious of Lagarde, considering she had several big names waiting to speak to her on the sidelines. Check out a quick Instagram video I took here:

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 Oh, the drama, such drama. Last week, longtime Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn declared “the Bitcoin experiment…has failed,” and resigned from that community with a fusillade of verbal grenades (and a New York Times profile of his dissent.) This in turn provoked a whole torrent of hot takes and reactions, which mostly had one thing in common: contempt for all who disagree. Read More

Bitcoin price made a full retracement of the week’s advance and seems to be finding support at the base of the prior advance. 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 […]

The post Bitcoin Price Plumbing Previous Support appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

A text analysis of Craig’ Wright’s writing by a specialist working with the U.K.-based International Business Times (IBT) has determined that the Australian is most likely not Satoshi Nakamoto. The company used a technique that compares texts written by Wright with anonymous texts believed to be sent by Nakamoto, including the original bitcoin white paper. Both […]

The post Text Analysis Confirms Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Banks are going gaga for blockchain technology, the protocol developed to underpin bitcoin.

It uses complex cryptography and a wide network of records — known as a "distributed ledger" — to eliminate the need for a central bank or middle man to regulate transactions.

Banks have been swarming around the technology, with 42 investment banks signing up to an industry-wide group looking at how to use it and Goldman Sachs declaring in a note that it has the potential to change "well, everything."

The conversation around this complex technology is pretty baffling, even to many of those involved. Everyone I speak to has a different way of describing it and the possibilities of what it could be used for are myriad.

But Goldman has explained why banks are so excited, in its podcast on "The Digitization of Finance." Don Duet, co-head of the Technology Division at Goldman Sachs, nails it by describing not how blockchain works, but what it can do.

Here what Duet says, as per an emailed transcript:

You can see who had it, who owned it, the fact that they actually committed to each other electronically and signed it with cryptology to ensure that it was authorized. You could see all those things, and importantly, again, by having that all being done in a set of digital transactions, it enables it to happen in a much shorter time frame, so it also reduces a lot of what today are the delays which create other types of risk in the settlement cycles, which need to be compensated for in other forms.

So one of the big benefits is pretty simple — transparency. At the moment, things like share registered are siloed in institutions so if you want to find out who owns what, you have to put a query to that institution.

There are other problems too. Duet says:

In order to facilitate the growth of our industry, much of that has been formed around concepts of having multiple sources or, you know, multiple parties owning a definition of truth, so the Bank of New York will own a big part of the reconciling of the ledger of who owns what stocks in the US, and so would other institutions around the world.

But you end up where... you have this situation where you have multiple versions of the truth, which means that everyone needs to reconcile with each other to ensure that they all have the right set of information — who actually owns that asset, when did it get transferred — and it also creates a certain degree of just temporal delay. It’s not possible to be done right away.

With the blockchain, that information is kept across multiple servers — the distributed ledger — all updated simultaneously and all you need to do is check out the blockchain. Much easier.

So the blockchain can reduce admin errors, make things faster, reduces costs, and reduce settlement risk for things like payments and trading. It seems as close as a win-win as you're going to get.

But Duet raises an interesting point in the podcast:

I think that, you know, you could ask the question of, well, why couldn't this have been designed before? And I think that that’s a very valid question. I think part of what we find, or I certainly find personally very exciting about this is just the awareness. I think the awareness that’s happened within the financial community that there is a technological answer that can help drive change and improve our system is just very encouraging.

Software is eating the world and it looks like it's finally eating finance.

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Valery Vavilov, CEO of Bitfury, believes there is a solution to the current bitcoin block size challenge. In a recent video interview at TC Davos, he explained his solution and he also expounded on his belief in the future of bitcoin, taking issue with those who are proclaiming its demise. The solution to bitcoin’s block […]

The post BitFury’s Vavilov Has A Solution For Block Size Challenge, Rebuts Bitcoin Naysayers appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Following a months-long debate on how to scale the bitcoin network, bitcoin mining firms are voicing their support for a newly introduced proposal.