Coin News

The first release for the alternative bitcoin implementation of Bitcoin Classic has been published.

Digital Asset Holdings CEO Blythe Masters has revealed that financial regulators are keen on the potential of blockchain technology, the same technology that underpins Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that several authorities seek to regulate. Blythe Masters, CEO of New York-based blockchain startup Digial Asset has claimed that blockchain technology is proving to be favorable for financial […]

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Nigel D Solkhon, Interim CEO of ISITC Europe has released a report on the inaugural meeting of the Blockchain Working Group in London.  Founded in 1992, ISITC London is a not-for-profit voluntary organization with a series of “work stream” projects planned in 2016 that includes: blockchain, regulation, standards and industry engagement. As an organization, they […]

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Align Commerce, a San Francisco, Calif.-based cross-border payments service provider, has established a “China corridor” to allow businesses to easily send and receive payments to and from Asia’s largest economy. With the value of bilateral trade between the U.S. and China surpassing $555 billion in recent years, businesses in both countries will now reap the […]

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The first complete draft of an upcoming Princeton University textbook on bitcoin has been made freely available for download.

Bitcoin price made a return to the previous wave high today and now looks to have resumed an advance. Or has it? 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 […]

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Earlier this week Bitcoin Magazine reported that the Linux Foundation announced technical updates to the new Hyperledger Project, a formal open governance structure, as well as new members from across the industry.

The Hyperledger Project wants to develop a new open source blockchain separated from the Bitcoin blockchain. Digital Asset Holdings, the fintech startup headed by the financial superstar Blythe Masters, contributed its Hyperledger mark, which it had acquired in June with the purchase of San Francisco-based digital fintech company Hyperledger.

The Hyperledger team, now part of Digital Asset Holdings, developed distributed ledger technology for private blockchains, without a built-in digital currency, to allow financial operators to clear and settle transactions in real time, using a proven consensus algorithm capable of thousands of transactions per second.

The placeholder domain hyperledger.com now redirects to the official Hyperledger website hyperledger.org.

The updated list of Hyperledger founding members consists of 28 top companies in the technology and financial services space. It appears that the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project is moving very fast and is on its way to becoming a leading force in the blockchain technology development space.

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation wants to be the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption.

The technology of the original Hyperledger team is independent of Bitcoin, and many companies in the new Hyperledger Project support radical alternatives to Bitcoin. For example, Accenture and Digital Asset Holdings CEO Masters, among others, expressed support for private, “permissioned” non-Bitcoin blockchains.

“To be used by financial institutions, including capital markets firms and insurers, blockchains must supplant the costly methods introduced by Bitcoin with a mechanism that guarantees security, privacy and speed without paying for anonymous consensus,” said two Accenture executives in July.

In other words, Bitcoin should disappear and be replaced by a closed blockchain. So is Hyperledger a first step in that direction?

Bitcoin Magazine reached out to the Linux Foundation for clarifications and further explanations.

"The Linux Foundation believes a shared infrastructure that is open to critical inspection and collaboration will be pivotal in driving global adoption of blockchain for distributed ledgers," Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told Bitcoin Magazine. "I’m extremely bullish about how the developers involved in Hyperledger Project are openly looking at various architectures, concepts and technologies, aiming to integrate code from a variety of sources to build a neutral technology that can work for all."

Zemlin also answered some specific burning questions about the nature, plans and policies of the Hyperledger Project.

Bitcoin Magazine: Does the Hyperledger Project support a specific (existing or planned) digital currency for payments and financial applications?

Zemlin: No, the scope of the Hyperledger Project is limited to the development of the underlying blockchain fabric that can support a broad range of use cases. Applications and domain-specific frameworks are outside the scope of the project, but will obviously be encouraged to leverage the project's deliverables.

Bitcoin Magazine:Is the Hyperledger Project a replacement for Bitcoin and/or other existing cryptocurrencies?

Zemlin:This project’s mission will be to build and advance a general purpose blockchain framework that can be used across industry sectors, from financial services to retail to manufacturing and more. There is ample room in the market for cryptocurrencies and even multiple implementations of the blockchain, but everyone stands to lose if these don’t interoperate and work together. The hope would be that the fabric produced by the Hyperledger Project can satisfy a broad set of use case ranging from cryptocurrencies, supply-chain visibility, asset transfer, IoT, business contracts and so much more. We'll see thousands of applications and many uses cases, but open source and industry-wide collaboration are essential to realizing the full potential of distributed ledger technology.

Bitcoin Magazine:Do you plan to implement full programmability with a Turing-Complete scripting language to support transactions and smart contracts of arbitrary complexity?

Zemlin: One of the proposals on the table in the technical community supports execution of code written in any language. However, the community has not yet reached consensus on this point.

Bitcoin Magazine: What's your position on the privacy issue?

Zemlin: It is important to realize that the Hyperledger Project is hosted by the Linux Foundation, but the community that has gathered to support and lend their resource and expertise to develop this key technology is just now coalescing and does not yet have a singular point of view.

The Hyperledger Project continues to unfold. Bitcoin Magazine will follow further developments.

The post Hyperledger Project Looks at Options to Build Blockchain Technology with IBM, DTCC, SWIFT, and Others appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The reward for mining Bitcoin is expected to see the second halving in its history later this year, potentially in June or July.

Bitcoin, a deflationary store of value as opposed to reserve currencies and fiat-money, has had its total supply limited to 21 million bitcoins since the original code released by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Unlike fiat currencies that can be printed at will by central banks, the total supply of bitcoins is fixed by the consensus rules of the system. Because of its deflationary nature, the digital currency is often compared to precious metals such as gold, which also undergo a resource-intensive creation or mining process.

This process of mathematically securing transactions in a block of chains called mining requires a tremendous supply of computing power and electricity. In exchange for securing the Bitcoin network and processing transactions, the protocol currently rewards these miners with 25 bitcoins for every block of transactions found. However, this reward for miners will soon be cut in half from 25 bitcoins to 12.5 bitcoins. This “halving” will occur at block 420,000, which is expected to be mined in the middle of 2016.

Surge or Stability?

The decline of miner’s reward simply means that the Bitcoin network will begin to generate bitcoins at a much slower rate. If the demand for bitcoin remains constant through the year while the supply is cut in half, simple economics dictates that the price should rise until there is a new equilibrium between supply and demand. Whether or not this supply change is already a factor in the price of bitcoin is a point of disagreement.

Some argue that the Bitcoin community has been fully aware of the halving of miners’ reward for a long time and that the actual decline in the supply of bitcoins will not surprise most Bitcoin enthusiasts and traders in the community.

Historically, halving of miner’s reward has had no substantial effect on the price of Bitcoin. On November 28, 2012, the first time the miners’ reward was halved, there was no visible impact on the value of Bitcoin, which was worth around USD $13.40 per bitcoin.

This occurred when block 210,000 was solved.

Considering the historical result of the “halving day” and the increasing awareness of Bitcoin, it is difficult to predict whether the price of Bitcoin will surge or maintain its stability after the halving of miner’s reward.

As Bitcoin security expert and author of Mastering Bitcoin Andreas Antonopoulos explains, the impact of halving on the price of Bitcoin depends on a wide range of factors, including the difficulty and transaction volume of Bitcoin.

“I can't predict price. No one can. Anyone who does, even for 10 minutes, is lying,” said Antonopoulos. “The reward halving will change the inflation rate in Bitcoin. How that affects the overall economy depends on the conditions of all the other parameters in the economy: price, adoption, transaction volume, hashrate, difficulty, investments, other currencies, world market conditions, etc.”

The post Will the Upcoming Mining Reward Halving Impact Bitcoin’s Price? appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

21 Inc has launched a free web app that can help bitcoin users determine what level of fee will ensure a transaction is confirmed.

AutoPartsWay, a New York, N.Y.-based auto parts e-commerce retailer serving the U.S. and Canada, has become the first major auto parts online retailer to accept payment in bitcoin. The announcement marks another major retailer that accepts bitcoin, supporting the use of bitcoin as a currency for consumer purchases. The company offers a large selection of […]

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Princeton University’s first complete draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook, all 308 pages of it, is now available ahead of the book that is due to be published by the Princeton University Press in 2016. The first draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook, is now freely available [PDF]. The book is aimed at computer science students, […]

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An international crime syndicate that siphoned money from ATM machines via cloned debit and credit cards was busted by authorities in India. Investigations revealed that the stolen cash was converted to bitcoin before being dispersed to members of the crime syndicate. An international crime racket involving key members in India and the United Arab Emirates […]

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