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A former New Jersey police officer is reported to have plead guilty to attempting to sell stolen bitcoin mining hardware, according to NJ.com. Vincent Saggese, 34, is reported to have admitted to meeting an undercover agent last year where he is alleged to have tried selling computer equipment including bitcoin mining equipment from KnC Miner. […]

The post Ex-Cop Caught in Undercover Sting Pleads Guilty to Selling Bitcoin Mining Hardware appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Bitcoin prices recently neared $600, showing their resiliency after falling to lows of $480 in the aftermath of the Bitfinex hack.

Five years ago, when the US auto industry was just beginning to recover from the Great Recession, there was widespread speculation that the old model of the car business was broken, and that only the new economy could come to the rescue. 

And with good reason. The US auto market had cratered, plunging from a peak of over 17 million to a devastated 10 million in yearly sales.

Both General Motors and Chrysler had been bailed out by the federal government and gone bankrupt. Ford saw its stock price fall to less than $2 a share. Gas had spiked to over $4 a gallon in some parts of country. Credit, the lifeblood of the car business, had been wiped out.

Meanwhile, Apple was on a path to become the world's most valuable company. Facebook was tasking over the media landscape. And Tesla, after suffering a brush with financial death in 2009, looked like the most innovative company of four wheels.

Silicon Valley and California in general was suddenly filled with new and futuristic ideas about transportation, from Google driverless cars to numerous electric-car startups. Detroit, by contrast, was lurching toward the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history (it would come in 2013), and its great automakers looked to be crippled dinosaurs, completely out of step with the times.

The US auto industry was a problem to be solved, and Silicon Valley specialized in solutions. 

A doomed industry?

"The automobile industry is in the middle of a fundamental transformation," wrote former Intel CEO Andy Grove in the Wall Street Journal in 2009. "There is a lot of information available on how companies have dealt with major changes in their business environments, but little is known about the transformation of entire industries."

"History shows that most companies do not deal well with transformation." he continued. "One reason has to do with senior managers. They usually 'don't get it.' They have a difficult time accepting that the future will be vastly different from the present because they rose to power in the old business environment. They excelled in the old environment and didn't acquire skills necessary to operate in the new."

Fast forward to 2016 and the senior mangers in Detroit that Grove worried about have deepened their engagement with Silicon Valley and the technology industry to an unprecedented degree. General Motors already had a venture-capital arm before it invested $500 million in Lyft and bought Cruise Automation for its innovative self-driving tech.

Ford had such a solid connection with Microsoft that outgoing CEO Alan Mulally was discussed as a successor to Steve Ballmer; the company also put $182 million into software startup Pivotal earlier this year. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has teamed up with Google to create driverless minivans. And all the automakers have a Silicon Valley presence, which enables them to scout emerging technologies and act on them quickly.

An auto sales boom in the US that started in 2013 and set a record in 2016 with 17.5 million new cars and trucks delivered has fueled Detroit's engagement, as has the broad realization among the car maker's executive teams that this is their opportunity to disrupt themselves and profit from the experience. Cheap gas, an improving employment picture, and ample credit means that Detroit is selling pickups and SUVs and raking in cash. The game plan is to take some of those winnings and send them in search of rapid innovations that Motown can't create on its own.

Not-so-smooth sailing

At the same time, Silicon Valley has started to encounter some investor turbulence. Startups with hefty valuations don't see IPOs as a way to pay back their investors. That leaves getting acquired as an option, but a level of saturation with social networking and apps might have set in. 

The Detroit automakers aren't in the market for messaging apps, but they are looking for technologies that can future-proof them, or advance the process of making cars smarter. In conversations with people in the auto industry, there's a sense that the tech sector has begun to figure out that Motown has money and wants to spend it.

The signals from the top are also strong. "We’re going to disrupt ourselves, and we are disrupting ourselves, so we’re not trying to preserve a model of yesterday," GM CEO Mary Barra said in a BI Interview in 2015. "And when you think of the assets the company has — the scale, the control of the vehicle platform, the ability with embedded connectivity, the knowledge we have of just every aspect of the vehicle and how we’re putting it together now — I think there’s a lot of plus signs, and we can lead."

That attitude was echoed by Ford CEO Mark Fields, who BI also interviewed. "It's a very exciting time at Ford, because we are transitioning from an auto company to an auto and a mobility company," he said. "Mobility for us, at the very simplest level, is to allow people to live, play, and work where they want. How do we help enable them to get around to do that? And there's a lot of talk around technology companies disrupting the auto industry. Our approach is very simple: We're disrupting ourselves."

Birds of a feather

So how did this reversal come about? Even if Detroit isn't really in a position to rescue Silicon Valley — Silicon valley doesn't really need to be rescued — then why is the dinosaur now so enthusiastic about participating in its own disruption?

Simple: Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the early 20th century, a hotbed of entrepreneurship, fascinated with the most high-tech contraption of the time — the automobile. True, over the decades the culture of the auto industry has become stratified and bureaucratic, but despite that, the car itself has been steadily improved. Detroit has never backed off from technology, and the engineers and executives who have chosen to work for Ford or GM are still excited about new stuff.

When they look at Silicon Valley, they see a place ruled by engineers, a contemporary version of Detroit's own origin story. And that's why Silicon Valley and Detroit's newfound mutual admiration could be the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship that stretches from the Bay Area to the banks of the Detroit River.

SEE ALSO: General Motors CEO Mary Barra: 'We are disrupting ourselves, we’re not trying to preserve a model of yesterday'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This $5 billion factory is the key to Tesla’s future — and it’s in the middle of the desert

An ex-cop in New Jersey indicted last year for trying to sell stolen bitcoin mining equipment has reportedly plead guilty. Regional news service NJ.com reported today that Vincent Saggese plead guilty to official misconduct and receiving stolen property after being caught in a sting operation last year. Saggese was charged in April 2015 after attempting […]

Last week’s Bitfinex hack, in which Bitcoin’s leading exchange lost almost 120,000 bitcoins valued some $70 million USD at the time,...

The post How to Secure Bitcoin Exchanges, or Why All Hope Is Not Lost appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

This explainer looks at the Hong Kong-based digital currency exchange Bitfinex, which was hacked last week.

The burgeoning online gaming industry is turning its attention to incorporating digital currencies, including bitcoin, into various...

The post Counterparty and Bitcoin Apps Have Fun With Crypto appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The many uses and proposed uses for blockchain technology include smart contracts, decentralized payment systems, insurance claims, supply...

The post Is Blockchain-Powered Copyright Protection Possible? appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Three Bitcoin Core developers, Alex Morcos, Suhas Daftuar and Matt Corallo, have announced a month-long “Hacker Residency” for established developers with, preferably, bitcoin experience. The event is organized by Chaincode Labs, “a New York City-based research and development group that explores cryptocurrencies and other peer-to-peer decentralized systems” according to their website. The lab is further […]

The post Bitcoin Core Ramps up Efforts to Compete with ETH appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Since Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June, there have been several discussions surrounding London losing its spot as a leading global fintech hub. The topic became particularly interesting after Paris Europlace, which promotes French finance plans, chose to travel to London to entice financial firms and professionals. The French government agency, Business […]

The post Britain’s Lead as Fintech Sector Hub Still Shaky Post-Brexit appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

CoinOffering has become the very first registered company to offer legal cryptographic shares in the form of tokens on the Ethereum blockchain linking the virtual and legal worlds. In a press release, CoinOffering explained that it is a unique project that incorporates the Ethereum blockchain and regulated economy. CoinOffering states that legally registered companies now […]

The post CoinOffering Links Virtual and Legal Worlds with Shares on the Ethereum Blockchain appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

The airline was back online after a number of hours Monday, but the outages were so widespread that it's had to cancel even more flights to deal with the ripple effects.

Attorneys Jason Weinstein and Alan Cohn discuss their work with the Blockchain Alliance, a coalition of blockchain and cryptocurrency companies and law enforcement agencies including Interpol, the FBI, the SEC, Europol.

International law firm Steptoe and Johnson launches a multidisciplinary blockchain practice that serves companies affected by the new technology in industries as varied as energy, intellectual property and government affairs.

A restaurant in Portsmouth, N.H. now accepts bitcoin, according to Free Keene, a pro-decentralization and pro-bitcoin organization in New Hampshire, which is a very independence-minded state in the U.S. Keene, N.H. is the base of a “free state” movement in New Hampshire. The restaurant, called Street, is in the west end of Portsmouth, and it […]

The post Major Portsmouth Restaurant Accepts Bitcoin; Supporting New Hampshire’s ‘Free State’ Movement appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Fintech Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

The equity research arm of the bank released a note last week that reiterated the potential benefits of blockchain technology for financial services and outlined which global banks are well positioned to take advantage of the technology.

Credit Suisse noted that blockchain technology can help banks cut costs, better manage risk, more cheaply and easily achieve compliance, and target new sources of revenue. 

• Goldman Sachs. The bank sees blockchain as one of the most important developments in technology, according to Credit Suisse. It is well positioned to benefit from blockchain thanks to a combination of significant investment in technology, an open minded approach to innovation, and select investments in blockchain startups, including payments firm Circle. Goldman Sachs was one of the founding members of the R3 consortium which aims to investigate and develop blockchain-based solutions for use in financial services. 
• JPMorgan. Like Goldman, JPMorgan's significant spend on technology and related talent put it in a good position to benefit from blockchain, according to Credit Suisse. It has been testing a blockchain based system to make USD transfers between London and Tokyo since February this year, which could start being used for live transactions later this year. JPMorgan is also a member of R3, the Hyperledger Project, an non-profit organization dedicated to blockchain based collaboration, and has invested blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings. 
• Santander. The Spanish bank 's VC arm has invested in blockchain-based startups Ripple, Elliptic, and Digital Asset Holdings. It's currently testing a cross-border payments app based on the technology. However, Credit Suisse notes that the bank likely has more pressing concerns in the form of profitability issues.This means it will likely take longer for Santander to reap the benefits of its blockchain strategy. 

Blockchain technology, which is best known for powering Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is gaining steam among finance firms because of its potential to streamline processes and increase efficiency. The technology could cut costs by up to $20 billion annually by 2022, according to Santander.

That's because blockchain, which operates as a distributed ledger, has the ability to allow multiple parties to transfer and store sensitive information in a space that’s secure, permanent, anonymous, and easily accessible. That could simplify paper-heavy, expensive, or logistically complicated financial systems, like remittances and cross-border transfer, shareholder management and ownership exchange, and securities trading, to name a few. And outside of finance, governments and the music industry are investigating the technology’s potential to simplify record-keeping.

As a result, venture capital firms and financial institutions alike are pouring investment into finding, developing, and testing blockchain use cases. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, have begun researching the technology in-house, or have helped fund startups with products rooted in blockchain. 

Jaime Toplin, research associate for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on blockchain technology that explains how blockchain works, why it has the potential to provide a watershed moment for the financial industry, and the different ways it could be put into practice in the coming years.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Spending on capital markets applications of blockchain is expected to grow at a 52% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2019, according to Aite Group, to reach $400 million that year.
• Banks and major financial institutions are working both collaboratively and independently to develop blockchain tech. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, like R3 CEV or Chain. And many are investing in the technology on their own as well.
• Putting blockchain to use for real-world transactions is likely not that far off. If working groups' tests are successful, firms could be using it to transact real value as early as the end of this year and we could see widespread industry application within the next few years. 

In full, the report:

• Examines the funding increases that are pouring into blockchain
• Assesses why blockchain is becoming so popular and what factors are driving up increased research and development
• Explains in full how blockchain technology work and what assets make it valuable and vulnerable
• Identifies pain points in the financial industry and profiles how various firms are using blockchain to solve them
• Demonstrates the challenges to mainstream adoption and their potential solutions

To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of blockchain technology.

Join the conversation about this story »

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Fintech Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

The equity research arm of the bank released a note last week that reiterated the potential benefits of blockchain technology for financial services and outlined which global banks are well positioned to take advantage of the technology.

Credit Suisse noted that blockchain technology can help banks cut costs, better manage risk, more cheaply and easily achieve compliance, and target new sources of revenue. 

• Goldman Sachs. The bank sees blockchain as one of the most important developments in technology, according to Credit Suisse. It is well positioned to benefit from blockchain thanks to a combination of significant investment in technology, an open minded approach to innovation, and select investments in blockchain startups, including payments firm Circle. Goldman Sachs was one of the founding members of the R3 consortium which aims to investigate and develop blockchain-based solutions for use in financial services. 
• JPMorgan. Like Goldman, JPMorgan's significant spend on technology and related talent put it in a good position to benefit from blockchain, according to Credit Suisse. It has been testing a blockchain based system to make USD transfers between London and Tokyo since February this year, which could start being used for live transactions later this year. JPMorgan is also a member of R3, the Hyperledger Project, an non-profit organization dedicated to blockchain based collaboration, and has invested blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings. 
• Santander. The Spanish bank 's VC arm has invested in blockchain-based startups Ripple, Elliptic, and Digital Asset Holdings. It's currently testing a cross-border payments app based on the technology. However, Credit Suisse notes that the bank likely has more pressing concerns in the form of profitability issues.This means it will likely take longer for Santander to reap the benefits of its blockchain strategy. 

Blockchain technology, which is best known for powering Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is gaining steam among finance firms because of its potential to streamline processes and increase efficiency. The technology could cut costs by up to $20 billion annually by 2022, according to Santander.

That's because blockchain, which operates as a distributed ledger, has the ability to allow multiple parties to transfer and store sensitive information in a space that’s secure, permanent, anonymous, and easily accessible. That could simplify paper-heavy, expensive, or logistically complicated financial systems, like remittances and cross-border transfer, shareholder management and ownership exchange, and securities trading, to name a few. And outside of finance, governments and the music industry are investigating the technology’s potential to simplify record-keeping.

As a result, venture capital firms and financial institutions alike are pouring investment into finding, developing, and testing blockchain use cases. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, have begun researching the technology in-house, or have helped fund startups with products rooted in blockchain. 

Jaime Toplin, research associate for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on blockchain technology that explains how blockchain works, why it has the potential to provide a watershed moment for the financial industry, and the different ways it could be put into practice in the coming years.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Spending on capital markets applications of blockchain is expected to grow at a 52% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2019, according to Aite Group, to reach $400 million that year.
• Banks and major financial institutions are working both collaboratively and independently to develop blockchain tech. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, like R3 CEV or Chain. And many are investing in the technology on their own as well.
• Putting blockchain to use for real-world transactions is likely not that far off. If working groups' tests are successful, firms could be using it to transact real value as early as the end of this year and we could see widespread industry application within the next few years. 

In full, the report:

• Examines the funding increases that are pouring into blockchain
• Assesses why blockchain is becoming so popular and what factors are driving up increased research and development
• Explains in full how blockchain technology work and what assets make it valuable and vulnerable
• Identifies pain points in the financial industry and profiles how various firms are using blockchain to solve them
• Demonstrates the challenges to mainstream adoption and their potential solutions

To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of blockchain technology.

Join the conversation about this story »

Lottery players worldwide will soon be able to compete for winnings in games that operate transparently over the Internet and receive payment immediately in cryptocurrency. Players will have access to full information on draws, wins and other transactions within the system. The system provides transparency of all processes, which indicates it offers fair play. Kibo Partners […]

The post KIBO to Provide Integrated Lottery Games Built on Ethereum Smart Contracts appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

So the deed is done. The Bitfinex exchange has reopened in read-only mode. BTCUSD positions have been closed out at 604.1, and a haircut of 36.067% has been applied to all customer balances.