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—this is not financial advisement, simply my opinion and thoughts. Most of my personal savings are in some form of cryptocurrency so please take whatever I say with a grain of salt. After all, the more people who join crypto, the more it will increase in value— Before I bombard you with weird ideas and, … Continued

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Bitcoin Cash is gradually trying to maintain its position above $1,000 – at the time of writing, it is valued at 1,068.87. Along with Litecoin and Dash, it is the only cryptocurrency in green in the top 10 list. One certain event can be linked to its increasing price: the Gemini exchange. Winklevoss Twins Considering BCH

The post Bitcoin Cash is Up 5% on the Day in Contrast to Market Retreat appeared first on CCN

Bitcoin Cash is gradually trying to maintain its position above $1,000 – at the time of writing, it is valued at 1,068.87. Along with Litecoin and Dash, it is the only cryptocurrency in green in the top 10 list. One certain event can be linked to its increasing price: the Gemini exchange. Winklevoss Twins Considering BCH

The post Bitcoin Cash is Up 5% on the Day in Contrast to Market Retreat appeared first on CCN

The cryptocurrency market has been highly volatile throughout this week, as major cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash have continued to move in between $340 billion and $380 billion. Is Bitcoin Ready to Move? Today, on March 11, the cryptocurrency market recorded a minor recovery after dipping below the $350 billion mark. Briefly,

The post Cryptocurrency Market Stalls at $380 Billion, is Bitcoin Ready to Climb Up? appeared first on CCN

The cryptocurrency market has been highly volatile throughout this week, as major cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash have continued to move in between $340 billion and $380 billion. Is Bitcoin Ready to Move? Today, on March 11, the cryptocurrency market recorded a minor recovery after dipping below the $350 billion mark. Briefly,

The post Cryptocurrency Market Stalls at $380 Billion, is Bitcoin Ready to Climb Up? appeared first on CCN

With bitcoin, ethereum and other big name digital currencies regularly making the news for their role in controversies and developments, it is often easy to overlook the rest of the cryptocurrency market, even those rising in prominence like as IOTA. With a market cap of around $5 billion, it is currently the eleventh most valuable

The post IOTA Cofounder is Optimistic for the Cryptocurrency’s Future Amid Global Expansion appeared first on CCN

What is XRP? How is it different from bitcoin? CoinDesk looks at the tech behind the crypto market's third-largest asset.

What is XRP? How is it different from bitcoin? CoinDesk looks at the tech behind the crypto market's third-largest asset.

• Bitcoin holders (or "hodlers" as they call themselves) are heaping abuse on a lawyer whose job is to sell bitcoin recovered from a massive 2014 cryptocurrency theft. The sales are depressing the price.
• These people are ridiculous.
• Bitcoin represents nothing except its price, and the price reflects supply and demand.
• Complaining about sales that depress the price of bitcoin is therefore like complaining about bitcoin itself. 

LONDON — Nobuaki Kobayashi, the trustee for the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange Mt Gox, has had a rough week. Here is a typical comment about him on Reddit's r/Bitcoin page:

"Nobuaki Kobayashi is some kind of special moron selling the bottom of a correction pushing the price down even further."

Kobayashi is in charge of liquidating the assets of Mt Gox and repaying the exchange's thousands of users, many of whom thought they lost everything when Mt Gox collapsed in 2014. To make those creditors whole, Kobayashi is selling Mt Gox's remaining Bitcoin assets and handing them the cash equivalent of what they lost, or at least a percentage of it. The good news for Mt Gox customers is that so far he has generated $400 million — most of the value that was stolen.

No good deed goes unpunished, however. 

Bitcoin "hodlers" ("hodl" is a self-knowing typo for "hold") are angry at Kobayashi because, as this chart from Bitcoin enthusiast @matt_odell shows, the Mt Gox sales have been so massive they appear to have either caused or contributed to the Bitcoin crash that halved the price since Christmas.

And Kobayashi isn't done yet.

He has another $1.9 billion to sell, according to Bloomberg.

The more he sells, the lower the price goes, the angrier the hodlers get. 

That anger is misplaced, however. All they are complaining about is the fundamental condition of bitcoin itself. They are complaining about the clearing price of supply and demand. They are ridiculous.

But first, the backstory:

In 2014, Mt Gox was the largest bitcoin exchange on the planet. It handled 70% of all trades at its peak. It was hacked by unknown thieves who stole 850,000 bitcoins, or about 7% of all bitcoin outstanding at the time. It was valued at more than $450 million — back then.

Time passed.

The value of bitcoin has massively increased. In 2014, one bitcoin was worth $600. Today the rate is around $9,000, a 1,500% increase. 

About 200,000 coins were recovered, unstolen, from the Mt Gox mess. That was a stroke of luck for creditors, because those 200,000 coins are worth more now than the 850,000 coins were worth at the time of the hack. They are now worth enough — more than $2 billion — to pay back everyone who lost bitcoin in the 2014 theft.

Hooray!

But no.

Every time Kobayashi sells a piece of the Mt Gox horde, the massive scale of the sales tanks the price of bitcoin.

"Nobody can be this clueless," says Reddit user michelmx. "Like an auction, Why even use an exchange? ridiculous," adds ChildishForLife.

A big part of their complaints is that Kobayashi sold the coins on an exchange, getting the spot market price. The angry hodlers say he should have used an auction process or perhaps quietly placed chunks of the horde in private sales, not via an exchange. That way, they say, the horde could have been sold incrementally so that the price would not go through the sudden collapses (that make them all poorer).

This is ridiculous.

In the long run, it doesn't matter whether bitcoin are sold privately in swaps that never register on major exchanges. Ultimately, if you dump an extra 200,000 coins onto the market the extra supply will depress prices. This is literally the lesson that central banks learned in the 1920s, when the Weimar Republic thought it could get away with printing extra bank notes without anyone noticing. The mere existence of supply sets the price, not the manner in which it is sold.

Bitcoin is only a price. It is not a physical object, nor a claim on an underlying asset, nor a currency backed by a bank, nor a commodity that has a use-value beyond its price. It is only a price, and the price reflects only supply and demand for bitcoin. Bitcoin is merely a string of code that represents a fluctuating price. There is nothing to complain about, because bitcoin is literally made of nothing. Except its price.

Complaining about sales that depress bitcoin is therefore the same thing as complaining about bitcoin itself.

Some bitcoin market observers are beginning to realise this. The best comment on the Mt Gox crash came from curioustraveler123:

"So if bitcoin wants to grow up we can’t whine about stuff like this. Let’s say somebody is tasked with selling 200k shares of XYZ company. They’re going to sell it on the market, receiving market prices. They’re not going to find an OTC buyer because they don’t want to tank the price."

"This is just the market being a real market. Someone is dumping coins? Market reacts. Someone is buying coins? Market reacts."

"Yes, this shows that the order books and liquidity for the major bitcoin exchanges are very low. That’s not a good thing. It means anyone with a relatively small accumulation of coins can tank the market at any time."

"But it is what it is, and complaining that a lawyer tasked with converting coins to fiat at market prices did exactly that is ridiculous."

SEE ALSO: OF COURSE governments won't give up control of money - that’s why crypto is crashing

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• Ocado is working on multiple top secret projects based on robotics, according to its CTO.
• Some projects are kept secret even internally to "protect our future," CTO said.
• The company has publically talked about working on a humanoid robot called SecondHands.

LONDON — Online grocery business Ocado has super-secret internal projects that even many staff don't know about, according to its chief technology officer.

Paul Clarke told Business Insider at Retail Week Live this week in London: "We’re reasonably secretive about things internally too. We have projects that are on a ‘need to know’ basis. It’s done on a project by project basis. It’s an important part of protecting our future."

Asked what Ocado needs to protect itself from, Clarke said: "The way that we look at it, rather than obsess about looking out at who’s trying to do what we’re doing, I think what we obsess about it constantly trying to move the puck to somewhere better and different.

"That’s where the self-disruption comes in. What we have now is great — how can we make it better?"

Ocado is an online-only grocery business in the UK but has been trying to position itself as a technology business that can help other businesses get into online delivery. In recent months it has signed deals to provide its technology to France's Groupe Casino and Canada's Sobeys.

"We expect to sign multiple deals in the medium term," Clarke told BI. "We’re talking to people on literally every continent around the world apart from Antarctica and a couple of warzones."

Clarke said that "not very much is public" of what Ocado does, adding: "We own all of the intellectual property for all of the technology we use, particularly now that we’ve got our own robots, and we need to look after that, especially as we’re going to make it available to other people. We just have to be sensible about what we can talk about and what’s appropriate to talk about."

Ocado has publically disclosed that it is working on a human-like robot called Second Hands that is intended to help humans with tasks around warehouses.

Clarke said: "We took delivery of the first robot a few months ago. We’re putting it through its paces. It’s doing very well."

"We’re subjecting it to DARPA type challenges. What can it do, what happens when it fails, if it falls over can it pick itself up? We’re putting it through its paces like that."

Ocado has also been working on a new generation of grocery picking robots, called SoMa, and experimenting with driverless cars.

Clarke said: "We have multiple robotics streams underway, not just the swarm Robotics but picking and packing, and other parts of the business that I can’t talk about but that’s the direction of travel as part of our relentless drive to automate more and more."

“I’ve been there 12 years and quite frankly there really is never a dull moment. You don’t join Ocado for a quiet life. That’s what keeps it exciting. We would not keep the quality of talent we have if there were not big challenges to move on to."

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