Should All Ecommerce Sites Accept Bitcoins?

Despite major investments by financial giants, and the latest hype around blockchains, for many the world of bitcoins are still notorious with the darker sides of the internet. Namely drug dealing and terrorism, or are simply thought to be the stuff of sci-fi fantasies. Recently, the financial industry has collectively increased their interest for blockchain technology, the ledger that makes up the foundation of bitcoins, and reduces trading costs.

With big time players like Schroders and Aberdeen Asset Management taking the lead, this could suggest that the rise of blockchain technology will transform Bitcoin’s reputation, bringing bitcoins into mainstream businesses. After all, 2015 saw some of the biggest financial companies in the world like American Express and Visa, invest in Bitcoin startups. Looks like bitcoins may become more prevalent on ecommerce sites used for everyday transactions in 2016.

What are the Benefits for Ecommerce Businesses?

Venture capitalist Tim Draper, who has invested in Bitcoin startups states, “2016 should be a revealing year for Bitcoin. I expect the U.S government to finally recognize Bitcoin as a currency.”

If the U.S government recognizes Bitcoin as a currency, then ecommerce business owners would be foolish not to accept bitcoin payments. With more companies taking on bitcoins, and Bitcoin-related startups dramatically increasing in value, 2016 could see an opportunity for more ecommerce businesses to enter the world of bitcoin, but will this new currency really benefit ecommerce businesses?

Read more @ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/should-all-ecommerce-sites-accept-bitcoins/

7 Asian Banks Investigating Bitcoin and Blockchain Tech

Until recently, there was a noticeable lack of interest in bitcoin and the blockchain among the financial institutions of Asia. In fact, banks there were more likely to be issuing warnings about digital currencies than getting involved in any related activity.

It was the fall of Mt Gox in Japan and the Chinese central bank's crackdown on bitcoin exchanges, events that both took place in 2014, that resulted in early barriers among financial institutions in those nations.

However, the recent upsurge in the popularity of blockchain technology in the global finance sector seems to have at least somewhat laid those concerns to rest. Now, the region's banking sector is showing the same growing enthusiasm for the tech's disruptive potential in banking that can be seen in Europe and North America.

Evidence of this sea change can be seen in the number of large financial institutions in China, Japan and Korea that have recently moved to launch or support initiatives involving blockchain and digital currency, and develop proofs of concept around forward-looking applications of the technology.

Read more @ http://www.coindesk.com/7-asian-banks-investigating-bitcoin-and-blockchain-tech/

UN Paper Claims Bitcoin Solutions for Developing Countries Could Be Interpreted as Neo-Colonialism

These questions draw diverse opinions among cryptocurrency observers and economic development experts worldwide. The answers are not immediate, given the youth of bitcoin and blockchain technology, but the journey to finding them promises to be exciting.

Brett Scott, an independent researcher and consultant on alternative finance and financial reform, has authored an analysis of these topics in a paper released this month for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), an autonomous, Geneva-based U.N. research institute. The paper is titled, “How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance”?

Scott, a senior fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab in London, summarizes efforts to use bitcoin and the blockchain in improving some of the world’s most pressing economic problems. He also examines the challenges of financial inclusion within the context of techno-libertarian evangelism and techno-colonial solutionism ideologies.

The potential for bitcoin and the blockchain to empower social and solidarity-based finance has yet to be truly tested, Scott notes at the outset. His 25-page paper is intended as a primer on the basics of bitcoin and the current narratives about its potential to facilitate financial inclusion, remittances, cooperative structures and micro-insurance systems.

Read more @ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/will-bitcoin-blockchain-build-finance-developing-economies/

Bitcoin market surge bolsters Digital X

Fintech firm Digital X has reported a total operating and investing cash flow of $410,000 for the first half of the 2016 financial year on the back of a second quarter increase of 33 percent year-on-year to $746,000.

DigitalBTC, trading as Digital CC, was formerly involved in bitcoin mining, a procedure whereby a company is rewarded with the cryptocurrency for performing calculations that secure the blockchain and confirm the validity of a transaction.Previously, Digital X was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) as DigitalBTC, undergoing not only a name change in October, but a shift in business model as well.

However, the company did not ditch the cryptocurrency altogether, spending over $9.54 million on bitcoins and $623,000 on the cost of running and hosting its bitcoin mining equipment in the three months ending December 31, 2015.

Read more @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/bitcoin-market-surge-bolsters-digital-x/

Two brothers were arrested Friday on computer-related theft

Francis Montecillo, 24, of New Milford already faced computer-related theft charges after his arrest in October. In January, police received information that Montecillo, out on bail, was continuing his alleged "illicit activities," Grewal said.

Police investigated and determined that he allegedly used stolen credit-card information to buy items online and to pay for gym memberships in Paramus for himself and his brother, Kenneth, 22, also of New Milford, Grewal said. Both brothers filled out online gym registration forms using stolen credit card info and showed up at the gym to work out and get photo IDs, he added.

Francis Montecillo also allegedly stole more than $10,000 in bitcoins, an online currency that can be used to buy certain goods and services. After buying the bitcoins and transferring them to a different account, he had his bank reverse the money transfer to the bitcoins seller, Grewal said.

Read more @ http://www.northjersey.com/news/crime-and-courts/new-milford-brothers-charged-in-online-scheme-1.1511798

BitCoin Textbook

University courses usually rely on textbooks. In the case of Princeton's course on Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, the textbook is being based on the course and a complete first draft is now available, for free, online.

The Princeton Bitcoin course sets out to:

cut through the hype and get to the core of what makes Bitcoin unique

by addressing the following questions

How does Bitcoin work? What makes Bitcoin different? How secure are your Bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What determines the price of Bitcoins? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? What might the future hold?

It came about in  response to demand for structured educational materials from computer science students at Princeton University  and was initially taught there by Arvind Narayanan and Joe Bonneau in 2014. Due to its popularity it was then opened up to a wider audience on the Pizza platform starting February 2015, with video lectures presented by Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau and Edward Felten from Princeton University and Andrew Miller (University of Maryland) and then transferred to Coursera in September 2015.

According to Arvind Narayanan the Coursera course, which is the version on which the textbook is based, had 30,000 students. The book was also used by other classes, including Stanford’s CS 251 taught by Dan Boneh and Balaji S. Srinivasan .

Read more @ http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/9432-bitcoin-textbook-.html

Will the Upcoming Mining Reward Halving Impact Bitcoin’s Price?

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.

Read more @ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/will-the-upcoming-mining-reward-halving-impact-bitcoin-s-price-1455126224

Bitcoin Services Show How Being Finance-Agnostic Can Be Beneficial To Consumers

One of the things that confuse a lot of people is the relationship between bank accounts and Bitcoin services linked to this particular financial medium. If a Bitcoin company goes bust, the bank account in question will not be affected. But if a bank goes bust, how will it impact the Bitcoin service? Things are far simpler than most people would assume as there is no reason funds would be gone.

Bitcoin exchanges will let customers add several bank accounts if they prefer to do so. In return, this gives consumers plenty of ways to cash out their Bitcoin balance, should something ever happen to one of their banks. With the financial crisis looming overhead, it is not unthinkable some banks might go out of business in the years to come.

Let’s assume somebody is using the Kraken Bitcoin exchange, and they have a particular bank account associated with that platform. This account has been used to both fund and withdraw the Kraken balance, and nothing has gone wrong with these transactions. Granted, not all banks are lenient when it comes to buying and selling Bitcoin, but let’s assume his particular bank is.

Read more @ http://themerkle.com/news/bitcoin-services-show-how-being-finance-agnostic-can-be-beneficial-to-consumers/

Simplex promises to make it easy to buy bitcoin with credit cards

Simplex, an Israeli startup that enables the purchase of bitcoins via credit cards, has launched with $8.4 million in the bank.

The firm is hoping to bring bitcoin purchasing into the mainstream through an API that makes it easy and risk-free for exchanges, brokers and wallets to add a credit card payment option on their checkout pages and process consumer purchases.


Simplex claims that it offers an alternative to the most prevalent method for bitcoin purchases - wire transfers to exchanges, which could take up to three days and entailed KYC requirements by banks, including providing explanations for purchases as well as copies of IDs.

Nimrod Lehavi, CEO, Simplex, says: "Banks often place additional restrictions on which countries Bitcoin exchange customers can send wire transfers to. For example, it may be difficult for the average US resident to use a wire transfer to buy bitcoins from countries outside of the US like Slovenia, Hong Kong or China. This clearly creates very high friction and makes mainstream adoption of bitcoin far from easy.

keeping the data real by borrowing Bitcoin's Blockchain

Smart Cities no doubt face innumerable problems, but one of the fundamental ones is security. Not just the classic, “I have data I have to store, how do I make sure nobody can get at it?” security problem. A smart city might be reckoned to have an almost opposite problem. To make it work means drawing in increasingly ‘real-time’ data from all sorts of domains, locations and jurisdictions both within and outside the city. How can you ensure that nobody is tampering and altering it to serve their own advantage - misdirecting the traffic systems to steer customers to your shop, as a simple  instance. The scope for naughtiness is endless.

It’s early days but one answer to this one small part of the puzzle may be a technique called Block Chain. This is the ‘distributed ledger’ technology that provides the confidence that makes Bitcoin work.

So it’s interesting that one of prime movers behind smart cities in China (China being a big M2M/IoT hotspot) is a consulting firm called iSoftStone, which has been working on Smart City strategies around auditing, verification and data storage. It has just teamed up with Block Chain specialist Factom to see if the technology can be applied to Smart City development.

The block chain seems to be best described shared public ledger where - in the case of Bitcoin, for instance, all transactions can be verified back to the entry point, such that the receiver knows that the bitcoins due are actually owned by the spender - it’s a sort of virtual audit. The same principles and techniques can be applied to streams of data, so that inputs from one datapoint are referable back to their originating points.

Read more @ http://www.telecomtv.com/articles/iot/smart-cities-keeping-the-data-real-by-borrowing-bitcoins-blockchain-13253/

BTCXIndia Hits New Trading Volume Daily Record of 480 Bitcoins

AllCoinsNews had a chat recently with Kamesh Mupparaju, CEO of Indian bitcoin exchange BTCXIndia.  The Hyderabad-exchange was the first in India with real-time trading and to adopt security measures with the majority of coins in cold storage .The Reserve Bank of India has not always been positive about Bitcoin, only recently iterating its interest in the advent of blockchain technology.

BTCXIndia launched in May 2014 after being founded shortly beforehand by Mupparaju Siva Kameswara Rao ‘Kamesh’. Kamesh was working as a currency trader in Singapore when he learnt about bitcoin and moved back to his native India to start the exchange. He got in contact with a UK based angel investor, together they funded and launched the exchange.

ACN: What is the trading volume of your exchange?

Current volumes are around 200-300 BTC per day and growing rapidly. We hit a new record recently of 480 Bitcoins traded in a single day.

ACN: What types of services do you offer? 

We offer Indian nationals the ability to buy and sell Bitcoin for Indian Rupee (INR) via an open order book. We also offer a wallet service for bitcoin storage, historical charts of the Bitcoin price in India and aim to have the best customer service in the industry.

Read more @ http://allcoinsnews.com/2016/02/04/btcxindia-hit-new-trading-volume-daily-record-of-480-bitcoins/

The Bitverse" - Potential For A Trustless, Decentralized Website Based On The Bitcoin Blockchain

A new project called ‘The Bitverse’ looks to creating websites that cannot be censored or suppressed by anchoring itself to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Author, physicist, ex-Peace Corps member and current software developer Andrew Barisser shared a blog post today on Medium where he talks about his latest project to build what he sees as the beginnings of a decentralized website based on the blockchain. The working title of the project so far is “The Bitverse.” The goal, as Barisser stated, is to:

“Construct(ing) a decentralized website in such a way that it cannot be censored or suppressed. Moreover, the website’s space, its actual pixels, are themselves for sale via a protocol abstracted on top of the Bitcoin Blockchain.”

Barisser’s idea, not dissimilar from Kim Dotcom’s idea for an alternative internet would allow users to own a pixel within a page, allowing a censor-free environment assuming that the rest of the blockchain associated with “The Bitverse” did not allow it. The only messages allowed would be by those owned legitimately by people with Bitcoin addresses associated with those pixels within a page. Any messages wouldn’t be acknowledged. In total, the designed scarcity of the space will be about 1920X1080 pixels.

Read more @ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitverse-potential-trustless-decentralized-website-based-bitcoin-blockchain/