Friday, July 31, 2015
Obama Orders to Create World’s Fastest Supercomputer
HackCoin: Bitcoin Hackathon in India Sponsored by Microsoft, IBM and Citruspay
Zone Startups India, BitStreet and Block Chain University are hosting India’s first bitcoin hackathon at the Bombay Stock Exchange in India named “HackCoin Mumbai.” The hackathon will be joined by over a hundred developers looking to build blockchain-based applications for payments, big data and digital experience.
“There are three problem statements – one for each theme,” explained Ajay Ramasubramanian, project head of Zone Startups India. “There are possibilities for the winning outputs to be rolled out into full-scale projects.”
The hackathon is sponsored by Microsoft, IBM and Citruspay, and the executives of these companies will participate in the event as mentors and panelists.
“What we are really excited about is not only that we are the first fintech hackathon in terms of blockchain usage, but also that we are getting a lot of bitcoin experts,” said Raunaq Vaisoha, partner of HackCoin, the facilitator of the event.
Vaisoha added that such an event is important to developers, especially now that large global banks are showing strong interest in blockchain technology and blockchain/bitcoin-based startups.
“This event is very important for the blockchain ecosystem,” Vaisoha said. “If you look at 2014, there was $400 million VC funding in the blockchain. Citibank, Barclays and IBM are looking at it.”
Bitcoin to Ripple Gateway to Shut Down for US Users
Ripple Inc., payment gateway for hundreds of assets and digital currencies has announced the closure of btc2ripple gateway for all US residents starting September 1, 2015.
Btc2ripple gateway is one of the hundreds of gateways on the Ripple Trade platform which is used to purchase or trade BTC to XRP (Ripple’s IOU). On September 1, Ripple will shut down the btc2ripple gateway for all U.S. residents, which will disallow any Americans from purchasing or depositing BTC using Ripple Trade accounts.
In a statement, the btc2ripple team announced, “We are discontinuing the btc2ripple service for U.S. residents. All non-U.S. customers will have full access to our service as usual. Starting Sept 1, 2015, you will not be able to make BTC deposits to your Ripple Trade account or make BTC withdrawals from your Ripple Trade account.”
If any U.S.-based accounts hold BTC on or after September 1, all bitcoin will be forfeited.
The majority of Ripple Trade users are based in the United States, and so the closure of btc2ripple may lead to a large decline in bitcoin/xrp trading volume on its platform.
Accenture Executives Propose Replacing Bitcoin with a Closed Blockchain
Writing on CIO Journal, a Wall Street Journal blog for corporate technology executives, Owen Jelf and Sigrid Seibold , respectively global managing director of Accenture’s capital markets practice and managing director of Accenture’s digital capital markets efforts, weigh in on the fashionable debate about the blockchain as a system vs. bitcoin as a currency.
Not surprisingly, the two Accenture writers propose to do without bitcoin as a currency, but they are bullish about the potential of the blockchain in financial markets.
“Blockchains present an enormous opportunity for the world’s banks and financial institutions, which have moved quickly to make investments in it,” they say.
Accenture, a Fortune Global 500 company, is the world’s largest consulting firm as measured by revenues and has scores of high profile clients in the banking, financial and regulatory sectors.
“The bitcoin protocol supports a highly decentralized currency validated through anonymous consensus on a public ledger held by entities around the world,” note the Accenture representatives. “But that objective introduced trade-offs, including a costly proof-of-work algorithm, public transaction data and a validation scheme that adds latency to the transaction process, by design.”
Bitcoin enthusiasts would disagree, and argue that the distributed anonymous consensus model used in the Bitcoin blockchain is not a bug, but a feature – and a breakthrough innovation. In fact, the Bitcoin blockchain represents the first solid, working implementation of distributed consensus – for the first time, everyone can agree on what transactions took place, and who owns what, because everything is recorded on a tamper-proof public ledger that doesn’t need a central server and can’t be controlled by any central authority.
Of course, that is precisely the reason why the authorities and the banks don’t like Bitcoin. Today, governments and financial institutions recognize that the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin can offer huge cost savings, efficiency, and operational benefits to financial systems – distributed ledger technology could save banks $15 billion-$20 billion per annum by 2022 according to a recent Santander Innoventures report – but it’s in the nature of power to oppose what it can’t control.
The two Accenture representatives offer their solution: “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.”
In other words, Bitcoin should disappear and be replaced by a closed blockchain. The new blockchain proposed by the Accenture writers is not “permissionless” like the Bitcoin blockchain, where everyone can download the software and participate without asking anyone’s permission, but a “permissioned” blockchain restricted to vetted participants.
New York Times technology and finance reporter Nathaniel Popper, author of “Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money,” noted that a permissioned blockchain could be jointly run by the computers of the largest banks and serve as the backbone for a new, instant payment system without a single point of failure. The new blockchain, decentralized but closed, would offer the benefits of the current Bitcoin network without relying on end-users for its operations.
Of course, the governments and the banks tend to enthusiastically support the idea of a permissioned blockchain without the troublesome bitcoin. But the Bitcoin system works, and the features that the Accenture writers propose to eliminate could be the very features that make it work. Other solutions to the issues mentioned by the Accenture writers, for example Lightning Networks, could be more effective.
Photo Michael Gray / Flickr
New Ethereum Foundation Executive Director and Board Members Signal a Reboot for Ethereum
One of the strengths of Ethereum is its decentralized nature, giving it a wider, more stable base. There are Ethereum project teams in different parts of the world, including Amsterdam, Berlin, Switzerland and Brazil. (For example, Geth was deployed by the Amsterdam team while Eth was produced by the Berlin team.)
If there is a center to Ethereum, it would be in the beautiful town of Zug, Switzerland, home of the Ethereum Foundation that overseas the project’s finances, manages the funds raised in the Ether sale and determines the long-term vision and direction of Ethereum.
Stephan Tual, chief communications officer for the Ethereum project, told Bitcoin Magazine that the new executive director and board members represent a fresh start, a way to reboot the organization.
“[W]e had a very clear goal to recruit from verticals that were varied, ranging from the world of manufacturing, IoT, education, politics, health, finance and more,” he said. “Basically, anywhere where Ethereum could be embedded and make a difference.”
The new foundation executive director is Ming Chan, a Swiss-born Chinese American MIT computer science and media arts graduate, who has extensive experience working with educators, scientists and inventors to found and grow innovative new business ventures.
The new board members are Vitalik Buterin (president of the board), Lars Klawitter, Vadim Levitin, and Wayne Hennessy-Barrett.
For day-to-day decisions an “executive” consisting of Stephan Tual, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke is in charge, with assistance from Aeron Buchanan, Jutta Steiner, Kelley Becker and Frithjof Weinert.
How’s the Launch Going So Far?
The launch so far is going far better than expected. The main Ethereum blockchain is in play and already users can access their pre-sale wallets, mine ether at the full reward rate, and use or deploy decentralized applications on the main network.
“We’re delighted with the stability of the network so far, as results have exceeded expectations and more and more developers are generating the Genesis block and joining the network,” Tual said. “Real time statistics on the network health can be viewed at http://ift.tt/1G8ygzy ”
“So far the Frontier launch has been exceptionally smooth, due in large part to our intense Olympic test phase, as well as our robust user-guides and the tutorials written by dedicated members of our community,” Ethan Wilding, resident Ethereum philosopher and co-founder of Ledger Labs told Bitcoin Magazine. “This is, however, a development release, and so a willingness to use the command line is required.”
“Most of the questions we’ve had since this launch are from general users eager to learn how to mine ether and get wallet access on the Ethereum platform using command line; we’re always happy to help,” he said. “As our platform is tested further and made even more robust, we will continue to improve upon the user-experience by introducing our graphical user-interfaces for such operations in a future release.”
Bitcoin Magazine will continue to follow this story and keep you informed on new developments.
Photo Roland Zumbuehl / Wikimedia Commons
Visa Europe’s Initiative: The ‘Apple App Store’ for Bitcoin Startups
Mark Karpeles Soon To Face Mt. Gox Criminal Fraud Charges
Trees: Bitcoin-Powered Drone Delivers Cannabis to Your Doorstep
JUL 31 DIGEST: Former Mt Gox CEO Faces Fraud Charges; Ethereum Finally Launches
BTC-to-Ripple Gateway to Shut Down for all US Customers
How Innovation in Crypto-Crowdfunding is Empowering Micro Investors
Thursday, July 30, 2015
‘People Are Just Too Stupid to Use Bitcoin Right Now’ (Op-Ed)
National Science Foundation Awards Research Grants on the Science and Applications of Cryptocurrency
The National Science Foundation has awarded research grants on the science and applications of crypto-currency, with approximately $1 million awarded to date. The NSF initiative is part of the “Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace” program for cybersecurity research and development to minimize the dangers of cyber technology, promote education and training in cybersecurity, establish a science of cybersecurity and convert promising cybersecurity research into practice.
The NSF grant has been awarded to Emin Sirer at Cornell University (grant information here), Elaine Shi, Michael Hicks, Jonathan Katz and David Van Horn at the University of Maryland (grant information here), and Dawn Song at the University of California-Berkeley (grant information here).
Emin Sirer, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, researches operating systems, networking and distributed systems. His current projects involve a novel secure operating system and system infrastructure for high-performance cloud computing applications.
“We plan to investigate the fundamental principles of cryptocurrency protocols, develop programming language support for smart contracts, and open-source secure systems infrastructure for cryptocurrency services, such as exchanges,” Sirer told CoinTelegraph in reference to the NSF grant.
Elaine Shi, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center, and the principal investigator for the largest NSF grant at the University of Maryland, launched the world’s first undergraduate laboratory course that combines “smart” contracts – computer programs that can automatically execute the terms of a contract – and cryptocurrency.
“Smart contracts will shape the future of our financial transactions and e-commerce,” Shi said after the laboratory course. “They carry out high-value financial transactions, so their security is particularly important. We learned many lessons from this lab, including it is very tricky to write a safe cryptocurrency contract.”
“We believe that our research can help establish cryptocurrency as a prominent research area, and make a big impact in shaping the future of financial transactions and e-commerce,” Shi told CoinDesk referring to the NSF grant.
Dawn Song, a professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley, researches security and privacy issues in computer systems and networks, including software security, networking security, database security, distributed systems security, and applied cryptography.
The NSF project wants to establish a rigorous scientific foundation for cryptocurrencies by leveraging cryptography, game theory, programming languages and systems security techniques. Expected outcomes include new cryptocurrency designs with provable security properties, financially enforceable cryptographic protocols whose security properties are backed by enforceable payments in case of a breach, smart contract systems that are easy to program and formally verifiable, as well as high-assurance systems for storing and handling high-value cryptocurrencies and transactions.
This is one of the first large research grants on digital currencies awarded by a government. Earlier this year, the U.K. government launched a new research initiative to bring together the Research Councils, Alan Turing Institute and Digital Catapult with industry in order to address the research opportunities and challenges for digital currency technology, and decided to increase research funding in this area by £10 million ($14.6 million USD).
Five Recommendations for Bitcoin Companies to Ensure Compliance with the Department of Justice
This is a guest post by Eugene Illovsky, a partner at Morrison & Foerster in Palo Alto. He advises on corporate compliance and represents companies in their interactions with government investigatory, enforcement, and prosecutorial authorities.
What compliance expectations does the Department of Justice have for businesses entering the virtual currency space? How can a company meet those expectations to stay out of trouble with DOJ, or at least mitigate the effects of any criminal inquiry on it as well as its executives, employees and investors? A recent speech by the Criminal Division head, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, provides critical guidance on DOJ’s “approach to the emerging virtual currency landscape” and expands on its view that “compliance and cooperation from exchanges, companies and other market actors can ensure that emerging technologies are not misused to fund and facilitate illicit activities.”[1]
DOJ’s View of How Virtual Currencies Are Used
DOJ is skeptical. While it knows virtual currency has “many legitimate actual and potential uses,” its enforcement stance is informed by the observation that “the inherent features of virtual currencies are exactly what make them attractive to criminals.”[2] For instance, virtual currency systems “conduct transfers quickly, securely and with a perceived level of anonymity,” have an “irreversibility of payments made in virtual currency and lack of oversight by a central financial authority” and have the “ability to conduct international peer-to-peer transactions that lack immediately available personally identifiable information.”
Virtual currency thus “facilitates a wide range of traditional criminal activities as well as sophisticated cybercrime schemes.”[3] For instance, “online black markets” on the dark web offer a “wide selection of illicit goods and services” paid for in virtual currency, including “more traditional crimes such as narcotics trafficking, stolen credit card information, and hit-men for hire.” But there has also been “a significant evolution in criminal activity.” Virtual currency has funded “the production of child exploitation material through online crowd-sourcing.” It has been used to “buy and sell lethal toxins over the Internet,” to make payments in “virtual kidnapping and extortion” and to allow “near-instantaneous transactions across the globe between perpetrators of phishing and hacking schemes and their victims.”
Virtual Currency Businesses as Financial System Gatekeepers
DOJ views these issues as a relatively small-scale problem now, because “[f]ew virtual systems currently can accommodate” the sort of “large-scale money laundering schemes involving government-issued currency.” But “as virtual currencies become more mature and better understood by criminals,” DOJ expects “an increase in both individualized criminal activity and large-scale money laundering enterprises.”[4]
This means “companies and individuals operating in the virtual currency ecosystem are at a crossroads.” This is their chance “to help virtual currency emerge from its association with criminal activities.” But in order to “ensure the integrity of this ecosystem and prevent its penetration by crime, the industry must raise the level of its game on the compliance front.”
The government is thus enlisting this emerging business community as financial system gatekeepers. DOJ often notes that the country’s banks “are our first line of defense against fraud, money laundering, terrorism financing and violations of sanctions laws.”[5] It expects nothing less here: “Virtual currency exchangers and other marketplace actors comprise the front line of defense against money laundering and financial crime.”[6]
And DOJ is not kidding. AAG Caldwell bluntly says, “industry participants are now on notice that criminals … make regular use of” virtual currencies. Robust compliance programs in virtual currency businesses are thus “essential to keeping crime out of our financial system.” At a minimum, raising “the level of its game” will require the industry to exhibit “strict compliance with money services business regulations and anti-money laundering statutes.”
The Costs of Compliance—and of Noncompliance
DOJ expects virtual currency businesses “to take compliance risk as seriously as they take other business risk.” And they must think about compliance broadly. On other occasions, AAG Caldwell has noted that compliance efforts “are too often behind the curve” and fail to “prevent tomorrow’s scandals” because they “target the risk of regulatory or law enforcement exposure of institutional and employee misconduct, rather than the risk of the misconduct itself.”[7] DOJ wants the focus to be on the broader “compliance risk” and not the narrower regulatory risk.
What about the cost? DOJ “recognize[s] that new entrants in emerging fields may find that compliance requires a significant expenditure of resources” and promises to be “context‑specific” in analyzing the adequacy of compliance frameworks.[8] Nevertheless, “a real commitment to compliance is a must, particularly given the significant risks in the virtual currency market.” The bottom line: “In the long run, investment in effective compliance programs will be well worth it, especially in the event a company has to interact with law enforcement.”
That “interaction” with law enforcement may well involve DOJ deciding whether to indict a company (and individuals) or give it some kind of break. As AAG Caldwell says, “[i]f a money services business finds itself subject to a criminal investigation,” DOJ will look to the so-called Filip factors in its Principles of Prosecution of Business Organizations. In particular, it will examine “the existence of an effective and well-designed compliance program” (Filip factor 5) and “a company’s remedial actions, including steps to improve upon an existing compliance program” (Filip factor 6).
As for Filip factor 5, “effective anti-money laundering and other compliance programs must be tailored to meet the circumstances, size, structure and risks encountered” by the business. For instance, “virtual currencies, with their perceived anonymity, pose risks that money transmitters such as Western Union do not face.” The risks in the virtual currency arena may be difficult to deal with, but DOJ’s view is simple: “Industry participants must address those risks, even when it may be costly to do so.” Filip factor 6 requires that a company fix a problem if one occurs. That means not only that it must patch any hole in the compliance program, but also “replace responsible management,” “discipline or terminate wrongdoers,” “pay restitution,” and “cooperate with the relevant government agencies.”[9]
Recommendations
Here are some specific steps for emerging virtual currency businesses to consider when ensuring their compliance efforts align with DOJ’s guidance and expectations:
It’s Never Too Early. Anticipate compliance issues as soon as possible in the company’s lifecycle. Develop a compliance system at the same time that you are refining your product or service (and well before you interact with customers).
People, People, People. It’s hard to understand cryptocurrencies, and even harder to explain them well to skeptical law enforcement personnel. Make excellent compliance people part of your initial team and include them in important decision-making.
Money, Money, Money. There must be the financial commitment to compliance that is required in this industry space. While DOJ seems sympathetic to the “significant expenditure of resources,” it will not likely go easy on those whom it concludes have skimped.
Think About the Technology’s Regulatory Future. The technology of, and related to, your virtual currency will shape the government’s expectations. Take bitcoin for example. Unlike dollar bills, say, every bitcoin carries its own transaction history. The blockchain is a public ledger of all bitcoin transactions. And new products are being refined that can analyze that blockchain and seek to determine every place a bitcoin has been and perhaps even who transferred or held it. It may become possible to give bitcoin a risk score, since those of suspicious provenance (for instance, those having once been through a mixer or in a dark wallet) could be separated from those that are squeaky clean.
Instill a High-Integrity Culture Now for the Company You Will Become. The government has high expectations for those it views as running “gatekeeper” businesses. The regulatory bar is bound to get even higher as large banks and financial institutions — with their established and highly professional compliance staffs — develop their own virtual currencies. As “gatekeeper” businesses grow, they face pressures to be “ethical” and not simply to meet legal and regulatory minimums. Adopt a broad view of compliance risk that focuses on the risk of misconduct and on reputational risk and then communicate that view clearly and compellingly in the onboarding process.
Conclusion
Emerging virtual currency businesses will face progressively higher compliance expectations from DOJ. They can maximize their potential market value by acting early in their lifecycles to install compliance systems and instill a high-integrity culture that will enable them to meet those expectations.
[1] Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell Delivers Remarks at the ABA’s National Institute on Bitcoin and Other Digital Currencies in Washington D.C. on June 26, 2015 (“June 26 speech”).
[2] June 26 speech.
[3] June 26 speech.
[4] June 26 speech.
[5] Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell Speaks at Treasury Roundtable on Financial Access for Money Service Businesses in Washington D.C. on January 13, 2015 (“[f]inancial institutions that have money services businesses as customers have a particular responsibility to be attuned to the risks involved and not turn a blind eye to suspicious conduct”).
[6] June 26 speech.
[7] Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell Delivers Remarks at the Compliance Week Conference in Washington D.C. on May 19, 2015.
[8] June 26 speech.
[9] Principles of Prosecution of Business Organizations.
Accenture: Blockchain Has Great Potential, Currency Needs to Go
Boozy Brit Buys £300 worth of Pizza in Bitcoin Blunder
JUL 30 DIGEST: Rick Perry Wants to Give Bitcoin ‘Regulatory Breathing Room’; Bitcoin Shop Rebrands
UK Prime Minister David Cameron Backs ‘Ambitious’ FinTech Manifesto
Former White House Advisor: Elimination of ‘Double-Spend’ is Bitcoin’s True Innovation
Former NYDFS Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky Denies BitLicense Cronyism Allegations
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Leading Global Bitcoin Adoption, HashingSpace Corporation Uplifts to the OTCQB
Bitcoin Press Release: US Based HashingSpace Corporation Announced it has been uplifted to a higher reporting status on the OTC Market. HashingSpace will now be listed as OTCQB: HSHS. HashingSpace provides scalable datacenter and technology infrastructure for the global adoption of Bitcoin including Bitcoin ATMs and hosted ASIC mining.
WENATCHEE, WA / July 29, 2015 / HashingSpace Corporation (OTCQB: HSHS), a company focused on the global adoption of Bitcoin, announced today that it has officially been uplifted to a higher reporting status. HashingSpace will no longer be listed on the Pink Sheets and has been moved to OTCQB status.
HashingSpace Corporation submitted all the mandatory documents and has successfully met all of the initial requirements to receive this upgrade. The upgrade became official on July 23, 2015.
“We are pleased to learn that we have been upgraded to a higher status,” stated Terry Taylor, Chief Financial Officer of HashingSpace. “This upgrade reflects on our plan to bring better value to our shareholders. This shows that we are current in our SEC compliance reporting and will undergo an annual verification and certification process. Providing accurate information to our investors is a top priority.”
Included in our new OTCQB designation will be real-time level 2 quote display. Quotes can be found at www.otcmarkets.com
Weekly OTC Market Reports summarizing the activity in our security will be available.
All company information, including stock trading, filings, and market data related to the company, is reported under the new upgrade, OTCQB: HSHS.
HashingSpace Corporation’s business will provide a wide range of services to include:
· HASHHOSTING Servers fully managed and specifically set-up for ASIC MINING
· CLOUDHASH Cloud mining servers that can be rented with full hashing power
· HASHMINING Our own Mining Farm
· HASHATM Owner and operator of Bitcoin ATM machines
· HASHWALLET Bitcoin consumer wallet for bitcoin banking and transactions
· HASHPOOL Public Stratum and P2Pool (Web/IOS/Droid)
· HASHTICKER Free Ticker for tracking Bitcoin Value (Screen Saver/Web/IOS/Droid)
· HASHVAR A wholesaler of Bitcoin servers and Bitcoin ATM machines
About HashingSpace Corporation
HashingSpace Corporation is a Bitcoin ASIC mining company, hosting provider, and service provider of blockchain transactional services. HashingSpace’s high density datacenters are designed to meet the demanding power and cooling needs of client hosted Bitcoin mining gear with unparalleled pricing, cooling and green energy. The Corporation is continuing to expand its datacenters to satisfy the shortage of low cost hosting facilities catering to the Bitcoin and blockchain mining and transactional verification services industry specifically.
HashingSpace Corporation manages HashWallet, a Bitcoin wallet; HashPool, a Bitcoin
mining pool; and HashATM, the owner and operator of Bitcoin ATM machines. The company is a wholesaler of Bitcoin mining servers and Bitcoin ATM machines. Bitcoin businesses interested in reselling HashingSpace products and services are invited to reach out to HashingSpace Corporation for more information.
HashingSpace Corporation is headquartered in Wenatchee, Washington. For more information, visitwww.hashingspace.com.
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements may not be currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase HashingSpace services should make their purchase decisions based upon features currently available. For more information please visit http://ift.tt/1Bkk5H0 or call 1-855-HASHING (427-4464).
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are based on the current plans and expectations of management and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks that could significantly affect the Company’s current plans and expectations, as well as future results of operations and financial condition. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
For more information please visit: http://ift.tt/1Bkk5H0
Company Contact:
HashingSpace Corporation
5042 Wilshire Blvd. #26900
Los Angeles, CA, 90036
855 – HASHING (427-4464)
Investor Relations:
Email: ir@hashingspace.com
This press release is for informational purposes only. The information does not constitute investment advice or an endorsement by Bitcoin Magazine or BTC Media, LLC. Bitcoin Magazine does not certify the accuracy of the above information provided by HashingSpace Corporation.
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Over 2 Years Old Valuable Bitcoin Alternative CryptoBullion (CBX) Announces Unprecedented PoSP Algorithm and Expansion Into Chinese Markets
Bitcoin Press Release: Over 2 years old, CryptoBullion is pleased to announce an unprecedented Proof-of-Stake-Participation algorithm and expansion into emerging Chinese markets. Designed to be rare and valuable, less than 1 million CBX are in circulation, with a variable annual interest rate of over 2% for stakers.
FLORIDA, USA / July 29, 2015 / CryptoBullion (CBX), launched in June of 2013, is an exclusive cryptocurrency with less than 1-million units in circulation (21 times more rare than Bitcoin). CBX has successfully completed its distribution phase and has reached the planned stage where its money supply grows by 2% per year. This economically sound annual increase mirrors the supply fundamentals of precious metals, positioning CBX as the “platinum” alternative to Bitcoin’s gold, the “Digital” Precious Metal as it is known. It is how this 2% interest is distributed that sets CBX apart from all other cryptocurrencies.
Relentlessly striving to make CryptoBullion the most appealing cryptocurrency, Team CBX is dedicated to keeping CryptoBullion on the leading edge of cryptocurrency technology. In line with its mission, Team CBX has announced the start of development work on the innovative PoSP (Proof-of-Stake-Participation) algorithm to replace the existing Hybrid PoS/PoW. The implementation of PoSP (accompanied by a detailed technical white paper) will coincide with a new release of the ‘CBX Vault’ wallet software. This updated Vault will also feature chat functionality (via IRC) and a full Chinese translation set, as Team CBX is gaining interest from emerging Chinese markets with the assistance of their new Chinese liaison.
PoSP will maximize network security via a pay-for-work policy that operates using a highly energy efficient alternative to Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW). PoSP will insure that a 2% annual interest rate is always paid to the network, regardless of how many CBX are being staked at any given time allowing for a considerably higher interest rate to be awarded to those staking their CBX (consistently running the CBX Vault software).
So what does this all mean for both the savvy and curious CryptoBullion investor, today, and in the future?
“These developments will galvanize a stronger and more united community while attracting new members through innovation. CryptoBullion will provide a low cost of entry and fair-pay-for-fair-work structure that is welcoming to any individual who desires to participate. Compensation will encourage decentralization by rewarding individuals to take control of their finances, while removing the paradigm of competition with mining farms and pools that have monopolized and centralized Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies” – Team CBX.
PoSP version 1.0 and the new CBX Vault are projected for release in Q4 of 2015. CBX is currently priced at a very attractive rate, relative to its future potential, and available at several exchanges including Cryptsy.
To learn more please go to: http://ift.tt/1ezNdzp
To trade Bitcoin with CBX please go to: http://ift.tt/1zTRxgk
For latest news follow CBX on bitcointalk: http://ift.tt/1Ky3vqV
Media Contact:
Name: Chris ‘elambert’
Email: elambert@cryptobullion.io
City and Country location: Florida, USA
This press release is for informational purposes only. The information does not constitute investment advice or an endorsement by Bitcoin Magazine or BTC Media, LLC. Bitcoin Magazine does not certify the accuracy of the above information provided by CBX.
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Bitcoin PR Buzz has been proudly serving the PR and marketing needs of Bitcoin and digital currency tech start-ups for over 2 years. Get your own professional Bitcoin and digital currency Press Release. Click here for more information.
Skype Co-founder Funds Blockchain Based Startup Marketplace
Purse.io Sees Record New Users and $24,000 in Purchases on Amazon Prime Day
It wasn’t just regular consumers who were able to benefit from the much-anticipated Amazon Prime Day. Purse.io, the escrow service that connects users with bitcoin to users with Amazon gift cards, saw a significant amount of growth leading up to the big day.
“We had the highest number of new users in a single week,” Andrew Lee, CEO of Purse, said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine. There were a total of 2,145 new users during the week.
However, the people weren’t just signing up and then forgetting about the website. Instead, they were actively participating on the site, purchasing goods. What surprised the team, though, was that it wasn’t just prime purchases that people were making.
“There was a lot of hype around the Prime Day event, but when we look at the specific orders, users didn’t just order necessarily prime deals but whatever they needed to buy,” Lee told Bitcoin Magazine.
All told, Prime Day was a success for Purse. During the week, there were a total of 1,050 total transactions made on the site. On Prime Day itself, approximately $24,000 was spent on the site.
How Purse.io Works
One of the benefits of bitcoin is that it is money for the Internet. The problem for many users is that Amazon does not yet accept it. Purse enables a trusted exchange where a user with gift cards is able to exchange the value on those cards for bitcoin.
And there is a lot of available money on gift cards. According to a New York Post article, $44 billion has been left unused on gift cards since 2008. And that number is continuing to grow. There are billions of dollars of unused Amazon gift cards.
Purse enables the user to sell their gift cards for bitcoin, usually at a discount anywhere from 5 percent to 50 percent. These gift-card holders buy an item for the bitcoin holder. The bitcoin is then held in escrow, and when the purchase is completed and the item is delivered, the bitcoin is released to the gift-card holder.
Purse has become quite a success among bitcoin users. According to Lee, more than $500,000 is transacted on the website each month, with more than 45,000 users spending more than $2 million through the site over the past year.
Purse Going Forward
Purse announced Tuesday a series of changes to its platform, including a complete redesign and a new shopping cart to enable the easy addition and removal of items. These moves are an effort to increase the likelihood that people will use bitcoin to make purchases.
“Bitcoin commerce needs to make economic sense for everyone involved in a transaction. It’s only a matter of time before we see large retailers, such as Expedia or Overstock, exit Bitcoin. They have already cited low usage,” said Lee in a blog post titled Bitcoin Commerce is Broken. “We’ll be introducing solutions [that] will allow consumers to spend bitcoins at any merchant with a discount, and a whole lot more.”
Bitcoin’s Largest Publicly Traded Company Bridges Gaps to the Banking Industry
As Bitcoin usage grows worldwide and attracts the attention of more governments and regulators, the complexities of ensuring compliance across different jurisdictions become greater and greater. Many quickly growing Bitcoin startups struggle with this issue and lack the knowledge base to ensure that compliance is sufficient.
Taking it a step further, even if local regulations in an area are relatively lax, operating a financial services business without a bank account can prove tremendously difficult. And due to the fact that Bitcoin businesses are considered high risk and banks operate very conservatively, obtaining a local banking partner can be very difficult.
“If we look at what’s going on the U.K., the country is very laissez-faire with regulation, but the banks won’t work with the Bitcoin companies because their risk levels are much lower,” one NY-based Bitcoin executive said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.
Vogogo is a risk-management and payment processing specialist that has taken the approach of integrating their technology to the back-end of bitcoin companies technology, enabling the Bitcoin companies to operate with a level of risk management and compliance that the banks find appropriate. By gaining access to the banks through Vogogo, Bitcoin companies can then offer their users around the world better options to conveniently and quickly convert fiat money into digital currencies and back again.
The San Francisco-based exchange Kraken announced that it would be entering Canadian borders in a partnership with Vogogo.
“We see a lot of opportunity for Kraken in Canada and we’re counting on Vogogo’s expertise in risk management and payment processing to make it possible for Canadians to move their dollars safely and efficiently to and from Kraken,” CEO Jesse Powell said in a prepared statement.
In addition to Kraken, Bitstamp also partnered with Vogogo to help it expand into both Canada and the United States.
“Bitstamp has partnered with the risk management and payment processing specialist Vogogo to support its expansion into the U.S. and Canadian markets. This will allow our customers to explore a revolutionary new technology in a safe and compliant manner,” said the Bitstamp team in an announcement on their blog.
Vogogo Speeds Up Market Penetration
The value for both Kraken and Bitstamp: Vogogo already has the technology, the team, the know-how and the necessary partnerships with traditionally risk-adverse banks. To attempt to develop these requirements on their own would have taken Kraken or Bitstamp a significant amount of time and resources with no guarantee that they would have ever has found success. Consider how long it has taken any bitcoin exchange to get a bank behind it.
“We’re excited, but perhaps more importantly, we are focused on working with Kraken and playing our part in enabling and accelerating their growth. We will continue to provide secure, effective and compliant access to global banking and payment networks allowing Kraken to look forward and focus on being the very best at their business,” said Vogogo CEO Geoff Gordon in a statement announcing the Kraken partnership.
It is very hard to run a business without a bank. By partnering with Vogogo, Bitcoin companies that are going to increasingly come under the auspices of regulators will be able to more rapidly get their operation rolling due to the relationships Vogogo has. Further, they’ll be able to get funds into their exchanges much more simply.
“We’re looking forward to providing fast settlement and liquidity that will enable the Canadian market for bitcoin and Bitcoin businesses to flourish,” said Kraken’s Powell in a statement. Faster market penetration allows for that.
London Mayoral Candidate Wants to Track £17 Billion City Budget in Real Time on the Blockchain
Felix Online, the student magazine of Imperial College London, has published an interview with the Respect Party candidate for mayor of London, George Galloway.
The Respect Party is a left-wing U.K. political party founded in 2004 as an offspring of the Stop the War Coalition, opposing the Iraq War. The Party has been compared to “anti-establishment” political parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain.
Galloway, a controversial politician who appeared in the Big Brother reality show in 2004, joined the Respect Party after having been expelled from the Labour Party.
The Felix Online interview covers many topics of interest to London residents. Galloway is determined to “run Uber out of town” and formulates radical proposals for solving social issues.
“On the housing area for example, we intend to purchase any house that is unlived in for a year to tackle the prevalence of hundreds of thousand of properties in London that are not actually being bought as houses but bought merely to park mainly foreign money beyond the reach of their own regulators and media and so on, and this is simply unacceptable,” says Galloway.
In foreign policy, Galloway supports the Palestinian side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is “a strong supporter of Europe and strong opponent of the way that Europe is currently run.” On immigration, he thinks that London is a great city because it’s a multicultural city in which the minorities are now the majority.
Galloway’s Mayor’s Chain will be especially interesting to Bitcoin Magazine readers.
“I’m going to put the entire £17 billion budget online in real time in blockchain and this will allow the public in to see exactly what’s coming in and exactly what’s going out, and where it’s going to, and make representation about it,” says the London mayoral candidate.
In the proposed plan, every detail of the budget approved by sessions of the council would be logged on a special blockchain called the Mayor’s Chain. The rule would be that if an item is not registered on the Mayor’s Chain, it doesn’t exist and cannot be paid. This would ensure that everything is fully transparent from the start.
“So for example if the mayoralty transferred today 50,000 pounds for such and such a service, members of the public instantaneously can say, ‘I know that that same service could be provided much more cheaply,’ and we’ve identified that we can make very substantial savings in the budget, perhaps 900 million pounds saving, just by public participation,” says Galloway. “So we’d be the only government in the entire world whose entire budget was transparently online and influenceable, and I think it might just set a trend.”
Galloway may be a controversial politician, and he might not have much chance of becoming the next mayor of London, but his Mayor’s Chain proposal seems a real killer app that could – and should – be adopted by cities and nations worldwide. The citizens could look up all bids, contracts and expenses on a public tamper-proof blockchain, vote on proposals for the allocation of public funds (perhaps via small token payments from registered addresses), and spot corruption and inefficiencies immediately.
It would be a real, disruptive, world-changing killer app.
Photo Vince Millett / Flickr
Microsoft and MIT Explore Unique Applications of the Bitcoin Blockchain
Microsoft New York and MIT Media Lab presented a 70-minute report called #Blockchain4good this week.
Speakers included Brian Forde, MIT Media Lab director of digital currency and former senior technology adviser at the White House, and John Paul Farmer, director of technology and civic innovation at Microsoft. They led discussions on using the blockchain for fraud-free voting, storage of identities, response to natural disasters and a public ledger of properties such as land.
Other speakers, including Chelsea Barabas, Ann Sim, Ryan Shea and Peter Kirby, focused on introducing the blockchain’s capability to decrease the amount of money spent annually on identity theft and records.
Civic Infrastructure
Sim, from international design and consulting firm IDEO, introduced the idea of frictionless transfer, wherein people around the world could donate small amounts of bitcoin for day-to-day tasks or to fund public/nonprofit organizations.
This summer, IDEO hosted a thematic incubator called Bits + Blocks Lab focusing on trust, transactions and participation. Six teams and 25 design entrepreneurs worked together to create various prototypes targeting different applications of the blockchain. Some of the prototypes on frictionless transactions included donation tug of war and image unlocking app through donation.
The main application that these teams and IDEO have looked into is creating a transparent voting/complaint system to develop more efficient civic infrastructure. Sim proposed that by using the bitcoin blockchain, citizens will be able to instantly report on improvements needed for public infrastructure and match government funds to allocate budgets accordingly.
This digital interaction between citizens and the government will create a transparent and unforgeable request-recovery system for public infrastructure. Furthermore, citizens would be able to track public funds of cities and even countries to check whether government funds are being allocated properly, and whether the budget is being distributed to various projects.
Sim introduced an idea called The Dandelion, which was proposed by Princeton University students who identified a park that needed a playground structure.
“Students planted a Dandelion with petals that have addresses on them. As people donate small amounts of money, the image of the playground started filling in, and the very block was being visualized,” explained Sim.
Blockchain for Identity Storage
Bitcoin blockchain-based passcard identity Startup Onename co-founder and CEO Ryan Shea led the discussion on how blockchain could be used to store identity and solve identity problems.
“There are billions of people around the world that do not have access to government-issued I.D. documents. This includes 25 percent of African-Americans in the U.S., hundreds of millions in India and refugees around the world,” Shea said. This is the result of the inefficient manual operation of governments and includes a long list of places where identification is needed, such as bank accounts, housing, government benefits and voting, he said.
All government identifications, such as passports and driver licenses, currently are delivered in a physical form. They are all printed, laminated, sealed and covered manually, which requires a lot of human labor and money to sustain.
“Approximately $25 billion (USD) are lost annually due to identity theft,” Shea said. “That’s because we don’t have a very good way of authenticating who you are, and relying on these physical documents and personal identifiable information.”
The blockchain, however, allows anyone to record data on transactions, which is unforgeable and transparent. Therefore, it is cost-efficient and time-saving for both the producers and the citizens.
For example, if a person were asked to show his personal identification documents in the middle of the street and the information is stored on the blockchain, he/she can simply go onto a platform that decodes blockchain information and show the identification quickly.
Photos courtesy of Digital Currency Group Inc.
Microsoft Hosts bitcoinless Bitcoin 2.0 Event for 'Social Good' (Op-Ed)
Will ‘Lighting Network’ Strike Bitcoin? (Op-Ed)
JUL 29 DIGEST: Lawsky Denies Working in Bitcoin Space; CoinTape Lets Users Find Optimal Transaction Fee
Blythe Masters: Bitcoin Tech has ‘Gigantic Potential’
Binary Options Bring ‘Immense’ Opportunity for Bitcoin Users
Hornet: High-Speed Protocol for a Fully-Encrypted & Anonymous Internet
US National Science Foundation Awards 3-Year Grant for Cryptocurrency Research
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Benjamin Lawsky: ‘I’m Doing No Work in the Digital Currency Space’
The former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) and the creator of the much maligned BitLicense revealed today that he’s not working in the digital currency space.
“I’m doing no work in the digital currency space,” said Benjamin Lawsky at the America Banker Conference in New York City.
“The rules are clear,” Lawsky explained. “I can’t work in the Bitcoin space on anything related to my work at NYDFS or BitLicense.”
When Lawsky announced in May that he was stepping down, he revealed that he would be launching his own legal consultancy. The New York Post had reported that Lawsky “plans to advise companies on financial matters such as cybersecurity and digital currencies like bitcoin, a new sphere of regulation he helped spearhead in New York.”
The final version of BitLicense was released on June 3 as a way to regulate the businesses. The arguments against it were that it put too high a financial burden on young startups in the city.
Many opined that Bitcoin businesses might simply leave New York rather than deal with the hassle. ShapeShift, the company founded by Erik Vorhees, announced on CNBC that the business would be leaving New York entirely.
While Lawsky was clear on not working in the digital currency space, he did leave himself a small opening when he said that if he ever does have clients in that space, he won’t be able to do anything with regard to BitLicense. According to him, there is a lifetime ban on his ability to work with companies on BitLicense.
The leadup to the BitLicense had many parties interested, but it was revealed at the conference that the largest audience watching the BitLicense announcement was from China and Russia.
Photo New America Foundation / Flickr
Settling the Block Size Debate
This is a guest post by Eric Lombrozo, the Co-CEO and CTO of Ciphrex Corp., a software company pioneering decentralized consensus network technology. Lombrozo is also a founding member of the CryptoCurrency Security Standards Steering Committee and has been a longtime contributor to the open source Bitcoin core development effort.
Introduction
In the last few months, a contentious debate has arisen surrounding the issue of a hardcoded constant in the consensus rules of the Bitcoin network. While on the surface it appears to be a simple enough change, this single issue has opened up a veritable Pandora’s box.
What is the block-size limit and why is it there?
When the Bitcoin network was first created, several assumptions had to be made regarding what kind of computational resources a typical Bitcoin node would have. Among these resources were network bandwidth, storage space and processor speed. If blocks were allowed to grow too big they would swamp these resources, making it easy to attack the network or discourage people from running a node. On the other hand, if blocks were too small, network resources would be underutilized unnecessarily, keeping the number of transactions too low. Despite the fact that available computational resources vary widely between devices and computer technology continues to evolve, for the sake of simplicity, a size was chosen: one megabyte.
It all comes down to economics
The block size limit is, at its core, an economic decision. It balances transaction load with availability of computational resources to handle the load. Block space is subject to the same economic principles of supply and demand as any other scarce resource.
In the early days of the Bitcoin network, it was expected the transaction load would remain well below the proscribed limit for some time. However, it was anticipated that eventually blocks would fill up as more and more nodes joined the network. In order to deal with scarcity, a transaction fee was introduced into the protocol design. The idea was that a fee market would naturally develop, with those wanting their transactions to get more highly prioritized for processing offering to pay higher fees. Until fees could sustain the network, an inflationary block reward subsidy which halves every 210,000 blocks (about once every four years) would provide incentive for miners to continue building blocks.
The problem is that there’s sort of a chicken-and-egg situation inherent in this. As long as block space is abundant, there’s little incentive to develop the proper infrastructure to accommodate a fee market. Until recently, most of this infrastructure has assumed abundance. Block space scarcity requires a significant change to how we propagate transactions. However, these problems are only now starting to get addressed as we start having to deal with scarcity.
As the block reward subsidy continues to decrease over time, fees will become more and more important as a means for paying for the network. Blockchains are expensive to maintain – and block space isn’t free. Someone needs to foot the bill. Removing scarcity by increasing block size shifts the costs from transaction senders to validator nodes – the very nodes upon which we vitally depend for the continued secure operation of the network.
But isn’t the block size limit about scalability?
A major misconception that has arisen around this issue is that this is all about being able to scale up the network. Scalability is indeed a serious concern – recently there’s been some significant progress in addressing this via noncustodial offchain payment channels, but it is tangential to this discussion and beyond the scope of this article. The block-size limit is about economics, not about scalability. Hopefully, we can clear up this misconception once and for all.
In computer systems, scalability is the property of a system to be able to continue to operate within design specifications as we increase the amount or size of data it must process. Since computational resources are finite, any real-world computer system has limits beyond which it will no longer behave desirably.
A maximum block size was imposed on the Bitcoin network to make sure we never surpass this limit. Undesirable behavior isn’t merely a matter of annoyance here – the security of the network itself is at stake. Surpassing the operational limit means the security model upon which the network was built can no longer be relied upon.
One of the assumptions in this security model is that it is reasonably cheap to validate transactions. Beyond a certain block size, the cost of transaction validation grows beyond what the honest nodes in the network can bear or are willing to bear. Without proper validation, no transaction can be considered secure.
Raising the block size limit can only securely increase the number of transactions the network processes as long as the limit still remains below the point where validation starts to fail.
Can’t we make optimizations to the software to reduce validation cost?
Yes, we can. There are a number of areas that could still be improved; among them are block propagation mechanisms, compression or pruning of data, more efficient signature schemes, and stronger limits on operation counts. Many of these things are indeed good ideas and should be pursued. Everything else remaining equal, reducing the cost of validation can only improve the network’s health. However, barring a major algorithmic breakthrough along with a substantial protocol redesign and/or a sudden acceleration of Moore’s Law and Nielsen’s Law, there’s a hard theoretical limit to how much we can really do to reduce costs.
Even given these optimizations, the computational cost of validation grows at a greater-than-linear rate with block size. Roughly, this means that multiplying the block size by X raises the cost of validating the block by a factor larger than X. We’d still be many orders of magnitude shy of being able to satisfy global demand if we expect to include each of everyone’s transactions in the blockchain and also expect the network to continue to function properly. Block space is inherently scarce.
At what point does validation start to fail?
There is strong evidence we’re quickly nearing this point if we haven’t already passed it. The computational cost of validation is increasing at a far faster rate right now than the cost of computational resources is decreasing. In addition to the superlinear complexity inherent in the protocol, the protocol design has two fateful errors that further compound the problem: It assumes miners will properly validate blocks and that clients will be able to easily obtain reasonably secure, short proofs for their transactions that they can check for themselves.
But don’t miners validate blocks?
Sometimes. That’s the first error. They have at least some incentive to do so. However, miners don’t get paid to validate blocks. They get paid for finding nonces that make blocks hash within a target, aka proof-of-work. It doesn’t really matter who validates the blocks they build upon. They do lose their rewards if their own block is invalid or they mine atop an invalid block, but as long as those who are feeding them blocks almost always feed them valid blocks, it can actually be rational to cut corners on validation to save costs. The occasional invalid block might statistically be more than offset by the cuts in nominal operational expenses. This scenario has something of a tragedy of the commons element to it.
Particularly costly for miners is propagation latency. The longer it takes them to receive, validate, and propagate a new block, the higher the chance someone else will beat them to it. Also costly for miners are maintenance and support for validation nodes to make sure they correctly adhere to the consensus rules. Then there’s the actual cost of the computational resources required to run the node. And even if the miner is willing to incur all these costs, a software bug could still cause them to mine an invalid block. And all the above would be true even without adding mining pools to the picture, which greatly amplify validation errors.
These concerns are not merely hypothetical musings. This scenario has already come to pass. Around July 4, 2015, a network fork occurred exactly for these reasons, which caused many clients, websites and online services to accept invalid blocks. Rather than putting up with the costs of validation themselves, they were relying on the miners to validate for them…and the miners themselves were not validating. The costlier validation is, the more likely such scenarios become.
Unfortunately, the protocol currently lacks a means to directly compensate validators securely. If we could do this it would likely lead to a much more robust and secure economic model.
Why can’t clients validate the blocks themselves?
While the resource requirements to run a full validation node are still within the capabilities of modern servers, they have greatly surpassed the capabilities of smaller devices, particularly mobile devices with intermittent or restricted network connections. Even most desktop and laptop systems are already heavily taxed by having to validate one megabyte blocks – and the need to run one’s own validation node greatly degrades the end-user experience.
The second fateful error in the protocol design is the assumption that despite it not being practical for most users to run a full validation node, they’d still be able to request from other nodes reasonably secure, short proofs that the blocks and transactions they’ve received are valid. But a satisfactory mechanism for this has so far failed to materialize. This issue is greatly exacerbated when miners also fail to do proper validation. Instead, most clients are currently relying on centralized services to perform the validation for them – and sadly, the July 4, 2015 fork demonstrated that even with good intentions, these centralized services cannot be counted upon to always properly validate either.
What can we do about all this?
Like it or not, the era of block space abundance is coming to an end. Even if after addressing all the above concerns we agreed it was safe to raise the size limit, sooner or later we’ll bump up against the new limit…probably sooner rather than later. And if we raise it without carefully addressing the above concerns as well as the enormous risk associated with incompatible changes to consensus rules, we risk nothing short of a collapse of the network security model, making the issue of block size moot.
Regardless of whether – and when – we ultimately end up increasing the block size limit, we are already dealing with scarcity. Nodes that relay transactions on the network are already being forced to prioritize them to reduce memory load and avoid denial-of-service attacks. Spam attacks are already causing some blocks to fill up. A fee market is already starting to develop. I trust human ingenuity to find a good way forward presented with these challenges.
Regarding validation costs, I’m hopeful that eventually we’ll be able to make it cheap and efficient for everyone to properly validate – or at worst, develop mechanisms for securely outsourcing and enforcing validation. This will require substantial reengineering of the protocol – and perhaps of the Internet itself. Even if this is still a few years off, given all the major developments occurring in this space I believe it will eventually happen. For now, I would strongly urge caution when doing anything that further increases validation costs.
Photo Tiger Pixel / Flickr
Bitcoin-Friendly Payment Processor Stripe Raises New Funding, Partners with Visa and American Express
Payment processor Stripe has raised new funding from Visa, American Express, Sequoia Capital and other investors, valuing the company at $5 billion, The New York Times reports. The new funding comes six months after a previous funding round of $70 million, at a $3.5 billion valuation. Stripe didn’t disclose the amount of new funding, and said only that it was “less than $100 million.”
American Express and Sequoia Capital were existing investors in Stripe, but Visa and venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are new investors, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The most interesting aspect of the deal is the acquisition of Visa, one of the world’s largest credit card companies, as an investor and a partner. Stripe and Visa announced a partnership to improve digital transactions, and expect to collaborate on initiatives such as payments security, as well as software like website “buy buttons.” Stripe, currently available in 25 countries, hopes to take advantage of Visa’s global reach to expand its international presence.
“As Stripe thinks about the best ways to move the overall payments ecosystem forward, the biggest determinants on the financial side are the credit card networks,” Patrick Collison, co-founder and chief executive of Stripe, told The Times. “We hope to continue working closely with them.”
“Stripe is not competing with the card networks,” added Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital and Stripe board member. “The fact that Visa has chosen to invest in Stripe, not in PayPal, is of absolutely huge significance.”
In fact, PayPal, which recently separated from its former parent company eBay and is now an independent company, is positioning itself as a competitor and an alternative to credit card networks. Stripe, on the contrary, collaborates with the major credit card networks and positions itself as a complementary service.
Stripe launched in September 2011 to challenge legacy payment processors and now processes billions of dollars a year for thousands of businesses, from newly-launched start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. The company focuses on mobile payments, one of the fastest growing segments of the payments sector. Forrester Research estimates that Americans will spend $90 billion through mobile devices in 2017. Stripe takes 2.9 percent of most transactions processed via its platform, plus a flat commission of 30 cents per charge.
Stripe is known as a bitcoin-friendly company. The company, which first started testing bitcoin in March 2014 with an open beta program, launched operational support for bitcoin in February.
“We want to enable merchants to add new payment instruments as easily as possible, and are really happy we’ve been able to provide Bitcoin support to Stripe Checkout users with just one extra line of code,” said Collison.
American Express and Visa haven’t been overly bitcoin-friendly so far – and MasterCard has been openly and bluntly opposed to Bitcoin – because the three credit card networks understand very well that bitcoin could start eating their lunch someday soon. However, it appears that all three companies are exploring uses of bitcoin and the blockchain. Funding and collaborating with Stripe could be a way for American Express and Visa to gradually integrate selected aspects of bitcoin and blockchain-based fintech into their own operations.
Photo TechCrunch / Flickr
Bitcoin & the Ancient Hundi System in Thailand (Op-Ed)
Ethereum Project Opens Up New ‘Frontier’ for Developers
You could hear a pin drop at the recent Toronto DEC_TECH conference as Vitalik Buterin told a standing-room-only crowd about his remarkable journey to build Ethereum – a decentralized open source peer-to-peer web-based platform – that he calls “the foundational platform for everything.”
Buterin has been called a “crypto-anarchist visionary,” and at the age of 21 he has already beat out Facebook’s Mark Zuckerman to win the World Technology Prize for software development and invented the Ethereum blockchain.
At the DEC_TECH event, Buterin shared his “Launch Roadmap” for the release of different components of the Ethereum project:
- Frontier – soon! (we now know it’s July 29/30)
- Homestead – 2 to 4 months
- Metropolis – 4 to 8 months
- Serenity – 6 to 12 months
- Virtual Machine upgrades – 1 year, 2 months
- Scalability – 2 years
Ethereum launch – how it will happen
The launch of Ethereum will take place late July 29 into early July 30, depending on what part of the world you’re in.
This will be the launch of the first component – “Frontier” – named after the American Wild West, where programmers will fight to survive in a relatively primitive and unexplored environment.
It is expected any day now, but the Ethereum team, to its credit, is waiting to ensure that all systems are well-tested and coordinated before hitting the “on” button.
Anthony Di Iorio, Ethereum co-founder, explained that the Frontier stage, will be mainly for the developers.
“The majority of focus and current goal of Ethereum is to get the tools into the hands of developers and to show them how they can create the products end users will eventually value,” he said. “Less time and resources have been spent explaining Ethereum to end consumers, enterprises, and institutions.”
Bitcoin Magazine asked Stephan Tual, chief communications officer for the Ethereum project, what kind of response they are expecting from developers on July 29/30. He explained:
“In terms of users for Frontier, it’s impossible to tell of course,” he said. “We have 15K followers on Twitter, and receive about 100K page views on our website per month. Frontier is a very technical launch targeted at developers and we expect the user base to grow slowly from there.”
On his blog, Tual explains why the Ethereum launch is not really a launch at all:
“Frontier is now feature complete and its codebase has been frozen for two weeks. As a team we are currently reviewing the final steps for the release, not all of them technical. There will be no countdown – Ethereum is not something that’s centrally ‘launched,’ but instead emerges from consensus. Users will have to voluntarily download and run a specific version of the software, then manually generate and load the Genesis block to join the official project’s network.”
Ethereum Crowdfunding
Di Iorio was involved in the initial crowdfunding for Ethereum and told Bitcoin Magazine that at the time, in September 2014, it was the most successful crowd sale in history (over $18 million USD was raised). Now it is still the third most successful of any crowdfunding venture to date.
“The key with the crowdsale of ether was to make it available to as many people as possible and to build a global community,” Di Iorio said. “We’ve always been about inclusiveness and considered the project a community-led effort.”
Ether is the currency that goes with Ethereum, but unlike bitcoin, is not meant to be a general means of payment, but a specific funding device for the Ethereum project.
Ethereum has No Headquarters
Although Toronto was the birthplace of Ethereum, it would be hard to say where the company’s center is, and that’s part of the plan to stay decentralized. There are members of the Ethereum team in Switzerland, London, Amsterdam, even Brazil.
When Buterin was asked at DEC_TEC “Why do you do it?” he said, “To make things better for people, simpler and easier to use. I do it because it needs to be done.”
Ethereum Announces Official Launch Date
Bitcoin Focused HashingSpace Corporation Announces New Ticker Symbol “HSHS”, Files 8-K, and Completes Reverse Merger
Bitcoin Press Release: US based HashingSpace Corporation (OTCQB: HSHS) is pleased to announce it has completed a reverse merger, and a ticker change from the old ticker MLSOD to HSHS. HashingSpace provides a wide range of services to the Bitcoin and blockchain communities including hosted ASIC mining and Bitcoin ATM’s.
WENATCHEE, WA / July 27, 2015 / HashingSpace Corporation (OTCQB: HSHS), a Bitcoin ASIC mining and hosting company, announced today that it has completed a reverse merger transaction with Milestone International Corporation. HashingSpace completed its’ 8-K filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. HashingSpace will be traded on the OTC Markets with the symbol HSHS. The reverse merger was completed on July 10, 2015.
HashingSpace Corporation merged with Milestone International Corporation as part of a reverse merger agreement for 120,000,000 shares of common stock, and 600,000 shares of Series A Preferred Stock.
US based HashingSpace Corporation’s new ticker symbol (HSHS) reflects the company’s growth strategy and brings value to our shareholders. HashingSpace provides hosted Bitcoin ASIC mining, Bitcoin cloud mining solutions, and Bitcoin ATM’s, among other essential services, to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
“This transaction enables HashingSpace to fully capitalize on our fast growth as a Bitcoin and blockchain services and hosting operation. The merger we completed helps our company position itself as a leader in the Bitcoin/blockchain services revolution,” shared Timothy Roberts, Chief Executive Officer of HashingSpace Corporation. “This is another major step in the implementation of our business plan to become a major provider of crypto currency and transactional verification mining solutions.”
“We are pleased to receive approval from FINRA on our name and ticker change. We believe this ticker symbol change will foster a stronger and more recognizable brand for the company. The new symbol more accurately reflects who we are as a company. These changes reflect our expectations for future growth of the company and our desire to provide our shareholders with maximum value. It also helps our investors to see our strategic focus and long-term goals to become an industry leader in the Bitcoin services industry. We will continue to offer new Bitcoin innovations as we further build our brand and robust suite of services.”
All company information, including stock trading, filings, and market data related to the company, will be reported under the new ticker symbol, HSHS.
HashingSpace Corporation’s business will provide a wide range of services to include:
· HASHHOSTING Servers fully managed and specifically set-up for ASIC MINING
· CLOUDHASH Cloud mining servers that can be rented with full hashing power
· HASHMINING Our own Mining Farm
· HASHATM Owner and operator of Bitcoin ATM machines
· HASHWALLET Bitcoin consumer wallet for bitcoin banking and transactions
· HASHPOOL Public Stratum and P2Pool (Web/IOS/Droid)
· HASHTICKER Free Ticker for tracking Bitcoin Value (Screen Saver/Web/IOS/Droid)
· HASHVAR A wholesaler of Bitcoin servers and Bitcoin ATM machines
About HashingSpace Corporation
HashingSpace Corporation is a Bitcoin ASIC mining company, hosting provider, and service provider of blockchain transactional services. HashingSpace’s high density datacenters are designed to meet the demanding power and cooling needs of client hosted Bitcoin mining gear with unparalleled pricing, cooling and green energy. The Corporation is continuing to expand its datacenters to satisfy the shortage of low cost hosting facilities catering to the Bitcoin and blockchain mining and transactional verification services industry specifically.
HashingSpace Corporation manages HashWallet, a Bitcoin wallet; HashPool, a Bitcoin
mining pool; and HashATM, the owner and operator of Bitcoin ATM machines. The company is a wholesaler of Bitcoin mining servers and Bitcoin ATM machines. Bitcoin businesses interested in reselling HashingSpace products and services are invited to reach out to HashingSpace Corporation for more information.
HashingSpace Corporation is headquartered in Wenatchee, Washington. For more information, visitwww.hashingspace.com.
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements may not be currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase HashingSpace services should make their purchase decisions based upon features currently available. For more information please visit http://ift.tt/1Bkk5H0 or call 1-855-HASHING (427-4464).
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are based on the current plans and expectations of management and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks that could significantly affect the Company’s current plans and expectations, as well as future results of operations and financial condition. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
For more information please visit: http://ift.tt/1Bkk5H0
Company Contact:
HashingSpace Corporation
5042 Wilshire Blvd. #26900
Los Angeles, CA, 90036
855 – HASHING (427-4464)
Investor Relations:
Email: ir@hashingspace.com
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Stripe Partners with Visa for ‘Digital Payment Improvements’
US Presidential Candidate Using Bitcoin to Fight ‘Two-Party Monopoly’
Monday, July 27, 2015
HP: Blockchain Can Make IRS ‘Most Disrupted’ Entity of All
Coinbase CEO: Bitcoin Will Replace Dollar within 15 Years (Op-Ed)
Russian Bank Refuses to Pay Half Million Dollar Ransom in Bitcoin
Bitcoin Price Analysis: Bulls Eyeing $300 (Week of July 27)
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