Thursday, May 7, 2015
Is The P2P Era For Cryptocurrency Exchange Coming To An End? (Op-Ed)
MAY 7 DIGEST: Cryptor Trust Launches Blockchain Investment Company, FinCEN to Examine Crypto-related Businesses.
Art Law Expert: ‘The Blockchain Can Unlock the True Potential of Digital Art’
Top 5 Ways to Own and Trade Gold with Bitcoin
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Music Copyrights Stored On The Bitcoin BlockChain: Rock Band 22HERTZ Leads The Way
5 Things You Can Do With ‘New’ Bitcoin Fax (Op-Ed)
Silk Road Similarities: Court Gives Kim Dotcom 'Some' Funds Access (Op-Ed)
Coinzone to Launch a European Bitcoin Service with Banking Relationships
European Bitcoin payment processor Coinzone officially announced in a recent blog post that the company will be launching a Bitcoin wallet for its European customers. The announcement follows the recent launch of the company’s Bitcoin processing platform in the Czech Republic.
Like many others, Coinzone’s Bitcoin wallet will allow users to send, receive, buy and sell bitcoin on both mobile platforms and web browsers. Currently, the company is focusing on building country-specific features to allow users to withdraw and deposit through local banks.
CEO Manuel Heilmann stated, “We’ve developed Coinzone Wallet in response to an overwhelming demand from users seeking a wallet that stores their sensitive information locally in Europe.”
Heilmann added that there is a growing European demand for bitcoin, which means more consumers want a simple and secure way to make transactions.
For the past year, Coinzone has focused on offering payment gateways fully localized for each country that the platform supports, “compliant with all regulatory and data privacy laws.” Although the payment gateway will remain as one of its core services, Coinzone has a global vision to transform into a full-stack Bitcoin solution for the European market.
Launch at the Czech Republic
On April 20, Coinzone launched its Bitcoin merchant services in the Czech Republic, fully localizing the entire platform to allow merchants to settle all transactions, with local banking partnerships, in Czech koruna.
“The Czech Republic was a natural extension for our payment gateway due to the strong infrastructure that already exists within the country,” Paul Sylling, chief marketing officer and vice president of user experience told Bitcoin Magazine.
“Merchant adoption is growing fast, especially in Prague, and with eight ATMs, consumers have easy access to bitcoin,” he said. “We also look at other factors. The Technical University has a long-standing reputation for producing highly talented individuals that will start businesses and contribute to the growing economy.”
He also added that Coinzone tracks wallet downloads, search volume, and its own internal analytics, for which the Czech Republic always ranks near the top.
“In terms of banking partners, we don’t disclose them publicly, although it is our policy to have two relationships in place before launching in a country,” he said.
Coinffeine Launches Technical Preview of Peer-to-peer Bitcoin Exchange
The Spanish Bitcoin startup Coinffeine has launched a technical preview of its peer-to-peer (P2P) Bitcoin exchange. For the first time in a P2P exchange, users can experience an automatic and secure exchange similar to that offered by traditional exchanges, but with all the advantages of the P2P.
This version is intended to enable independent users and banks to try the application at an early stage, integrate it into their services and operate as Bitcoin exchanges. Anyone interested can download the application and, once it is installed, can begin to buy and sell bitcoin with other Coinffeine users.
Although the Coinffeine Technical Preview is fully functional, they decided to go step-by-step in this early stage and distribute a version that is configured to be used on a Testnet or test blockchain.This way, users can try it without spending actual bitcoin.
“From today, the Bitcoin community can try Coinffeine, the first P2P Bitcoin exchange without arbitrators,” said Alberto Gómez Toribio, CEO of Coinffeine. “This is the same version that we are offering to our bank partners and customers. Users will have to wait a little longer to use it with real bitcoins, but we are sure the wait will be worthwhile. We hope to transform Coinffeine’s relationships with banks and payment processors into services that give them added value.”
To test the platform, users can download it from the Coinffeine website. Just as users do not need to register to use BitTorrent, they do not need to register or provide any identification to use the application; they just install it and use it.
Coinffeine is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
The new version also introduces a new user interface, which is very different from its previous public appearance.
“Few Bitcoin products invest sufficient resources in design and usability. Our team continues to grow, and we have recently added an expert in this field to our team. He has been in charge of the transformation of Coinffeine’s user experience, and the result is something completely new,” said Gómez. “Coinffeine’s intention is to combine the concept of a wallet and exchange in the same product. It is a concept we believe have a great potential, and therefore we leave the following steps to the imagination.
“Coinffeine is a desktop wallet like Armory or Electrum with which you control your money safely,” Gómez added. “This allows the company to avoid disclosing MSB, because we do not touch the money or the bitcoins from our users. We have learned much from the P2P industry and we want to apply many of these concepts to the FinTech ecosystem.”
The release concludes the period of private testing that started December 18th, where Coinffeine presented the first alpha version of the platform in a public event in Madrid and a limited number of users joined the private user experience program.
Prior to the release of the 1.0 version, they will evaluate the creation of a similar private testing program, but with real bitcoin and money.
Coinffeine, a desktop application
Coinffeine is a desktop application that has been defined by those who have tried it as the “BitTorrent for Bitcoin.”
The application works as a wallet, which allows users to store bitcoin safely and to connect an OKPay account – a payment processor similar to PayPal – to buy and sell bitcoin with other users.
The main difference with other P2P Bitcoin exchanges, such as LocalBitcoins or BitSquare, is that these exchanges function like eBay, i.e. with the need to establish contact with another person, agree on the price, and pay, trusting that the user will receive the bitcoin. In Coinffeine, the process is automatic, safe and without arbitrators; the experience is the same as using an exchange as Bitstamp or Coinbase.
“In LocalBitcoins or BitSquare you can’t do trading efficiently because you can’t keep orders in the market that run automatically. In these markets, when a user opens an order that corresponds to yours, you must intervene. Some platforms incorporate persons acting as an arbitrator in a dispute, which makes the process a little safer, but much slower and expensive,” said Gómez.
In addition, with Coinffeine you do not have send your bitcoins to a platform to operate, as in Bitstamp. Instead, they remain at all times in your wallet, and only you have control over them.
Coinffeine’s design is similar to BitTorrent: It works between users. This means that the user does not have to register or provide personal information to use the application – he or she can simply download it and use it.
Coinffeine also is open source and the entire source code is available to anyone who wants to review it on Github.
Brief history of Coinffeine
Coinffeine is a Bitcoin startup based in Madrid. It was founded in 2014 by four Spanish engineers with previous experience working together on projects related to distributed systems and big data.
It was the first company in the world that was founded using bitcoin as social capital. The potential of Coinffeine’s work has been recognized at conferences such as CoinSummit. The Spanish organisation ICEX recently selected the startup as one of the 12 Spanish companies with most international outlook to be presented in Silicon Valley.
Photo by Freepik
BitGold Announces a Bitcoin-like System for Gold Storage and Payments
BitGold Inc. has announced the public launch of the BitGold platform, a software service that connects gold storage with payment networks, resulting in a banking-like platform for gold.
The announcement refers to the BitGold platform as a “new global operating system for gold.” In fact, BitGold is a digital payments platform that connects gold stored in real-world vaults with online payments.
Though the BitGold press release emphasizes that BitGold is not a cryptocurrency like bitcoin, there are similarities. In particular, the BitGold platform allows for the quick settlement of gold trades so that a users’ gold is easily acquired and accessible across various payment networks such as SWIFT, Visa, MasterCard, Interac, SEPA, UnionPay, Discover, American Express and others – including bitcoin.
BitGold payment fees are higher than those of bitcoin payment processors but lower than most alternatives.
Thus, BitGold provides some of the advantages of bitcoin payments – faster and cheaper digital cross-border transactions – combined with the advantages of gold as a store of value, and can be seen as a Bitcoin-like system for gold. BitGold seems likely to become an appealing option for those who trust gold more than bitcoin.
The BitGold website states that the company views gold as a security switch for a world that is increasingly digital, and implemented security features to protect users’ accounts and identities, such as secure vaults, full insurance with Lloyds of London against theft or loss, military-grade encryption (RSA 4096 and AES256) to secure users’ accounts and personal information, and multi-factor authentication measures.
BitGold claims that it offers the most competitive rates in the industry for buying and selling gold, and is the only platform that allows users to spend from their gold account.
“At BitGold we have a mission to democratize global access to gold for stable savings, and to make gold useful in micro-transactions using the Internet or mobile phones,” said co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Josh Crumb. “No matter where you live in the world, gold has held value over time relative to costs like food and energy that we require as humans, making it one the most important savings tools for most of the human population. We believe that by broadening access to a commodity-money that holds value we can help combat the rise in wealth inequality and the short-termism.”
BitGold is a Canadian corporation with offices in Toronto and Milan and a network of secure vaults for gold storage, operated in partnership with The Brink’s Company, a global leader in security-related services for banks, retailers and a variety of other commercial and governmental customers. Users can choose where in the world they want their gold physically stored. The company’s financial statements are audited by PriceWaterhouse Coopers.
BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes. New users are provided with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold, the ability to make and receive instant gold payments, and a debit card for spending gold at traditional points of sale. Customers can fund their accounts with local-currency by using a network of ATMs. BitGold will not initially be available to U.S. residents, and will be unavailable to residents of sanctioned countries.
“We are excited to unveil the BitGold platform, an architecture and technology that’s taken years of careful planning and execution, which now allows users to seamlessly use gold again as a store of value and medium for payments,” said co-founder and CEO Roy Sebag.
“As a global asset, gold is recognized in nearly every culture as a long-term protector of value, but has been a poor medium of exchange compared to the advances in money technology,” Sebag said. “We felt that gold needed the modernization and mobilization that’s now happening in the global payments revolution. We have built a financial services platform that is as close to being counterparty-free as possible, enabling economic transactions within the existing global financial system to be settled in full reserved gold bullion.”
The term “BitGold” may be confusing because it is also used by Bitreserve. Previously, it was used by cryptographer Nick Szabo for the cryptocurrency that he proposed before Bitcoin.
Old Vault Door / CC BY 2.0
Bitstamp Determined to Extend Global Footprint, Sets Sights on North America
MAY 6 DIGEST: Ripple Labs Fined $700K, CoinCard Announces World's First Crypto-Based Credit Card
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