Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Solving Bitcoin Liquidity Issues in India
PayPal Announces Launch of PayPal.Me Peer-to-peer Payments Similar to Square Cash or Bitcoin Wallets
Receiving money from a friend, client or anyone else on PayPal just got a little bit easier. Today, the company announced the launch of PayPal.Me, a personal, vanity PayPal link that makes it easy to remind people to send you money.
The idea behind the peer-to-payment service is to erase the awkwardness of getting repaid by someone. Instead of having to ask them, a user could just send his or her friend a PayPal.me link and the friend would be able to pay using their own PayPal account. It minimizes the need for conversation about something that could, theoretically, make someone uncomfortable.
PayPal.me has launched in 18 countries, including the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Canada, Russia, Turkey, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland. Payments between two users in the U.K. will be completely free. For U.S. customers, there are no transfer fees when funds are deducted from a bank account or existing PayPal balance.
According to PayPal, there are $51 billion in IOUs from friends and family due to the hassle in chasing down debts. The company believes PayPal.me will mitigate that problem.
The structure of the URL is: paypal.me/username. PayPal has also allowed users to amend how much money they should be receiving from the payer by adding an amount at the end of the URL. For example, if someone owed $40, the URL would be: http://ift.tt/1LIlt7H.
While there are many applications for paying people, such as Square Cash and Google’s Android Pay, PayPal remains the largest payment platform on the Internet; therefore, its barrier of entry for paypal.me is smaller. Because each username is unique, it is likely that new ones will fill up quickly.
While PayPal.me doesn’t appear to let users transmit bitcoin, the company has had a more favorable approach to the currency than other legacy financial institutions. PayPal announced in September 2014 that it would allow merchants to start accepting bitcoin through its Braintree application through a partnership with Coinbase. It is rumored that PayPal is investigating further utilization of the blockchain as a way of decreasing fees and increasing the speed of transactions.
Preliminary, Simplified Implementation of Bitcoin Lightning Network Released
Lightning networks are considered a promising innovation in the Bitcoin space, which would make the Bitcoin system much more scalable and able to process transactions at a high rate and low cost, and are suitable as an alternative to existing payment networks.
In February, developers Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja proposed a decentralized Bitcoin Lightning Network where related transactions can take place instantly on “micropayment channels” off-chain, and only the final settlement is processed by the blockchain. According to the authors, lightning networks would enable Bitcoin scalability, efficient micropayments, and near-instant transactions. The Lightning Network white paper, a work in progress, has recently been updated.
“The payment network Visa has achieved 47,000 peak transactions per second on its network during the 2013 holidays, and averages hundreds of millions per day,” note the developers in the white paper. “Currently, Bitcoin supports less than 7 transactions per second with a 1 megabyte block limit.”
It seems evident that as long as the transaction rate supported by the Bitcoin network remains that low Bitcoin won’t be able to achieve the global reach of existing payment networks like Visa. That’s the main reason for the current – and heated – discussions about raising the block size. In a recent interview with MIT Technology Review, Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen warned that the Bitcoin network might soon become oversaturated, and people might just stop using Bitcoin because transactions would become either unreliable or expensive.
“Looking at the transaction volume on the Bitcoin network, we need to address it within the next four or five months,” said Andresen. “As we get closer and closer to the limit, bad things start to happen. Networks close to capacity get congested and unreliable. If you want reliability, you’ll have to start paying higher and higher fees on transactions, and there will be a point where fees get high enough that people stop using Bitcoin.”
That’s what prompted Andresen to launch the Bitcoin XT alternative to Bitcoin Core, with 8 megabyte blocks, which is polarizing the Bitcoin community and could result in a “BItcoin civil war.” But lightning networks could achieve the same scalability and sustainability without requiring dramatic modifications to Bitcoin Core.
“With a network of instantly confirmed micropayment channels whose payments are encumbered by timelocks and hashlock outputs, Bitcoin can scale to billions of users,” note the developers in the white paper. In a presentation at the SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar, Poon and Dryja argued that lightning networks could make Bitcoin capable of processing billions of transactions per day and handling the volume of all global electronic payments on a single blockchain without custodial risk of theft.
The implementation of lightning networks would require appropriate tweaks to Bitcoin core. A soft fork, described in Appendix A of the white paper, has been proposed to enable near-infinite scalability. “To mitigate malleability, it is necessary to make a soft-fork change to bitcoin,” note Poon and Dryja. “Older clients would still work, but miners would need to update. Bitcoin has had several soft forks in the past, including pay-to-script-hash (P2SH).”
Implementing the malleability soft fork will take time, but in the meantime developers are beginning to build stand-alone implementations of lightning networks for development and testing. In May, Blockstream hired developer Rusty Russell to work on lightning networks.
“[W]e can have a network of arbitrarily complicated transactions, such that they aren’t on the blockchain (and thus are fast, cheap and extremely scalable), but at every point are ready to be dropped onto the blockchain for resolution if there’s a problem,” said Russell. “This is genuinely revolutionary.”
In August, developer Mats Jerratsch launched a preliminary, simplified lightning network implementation dubbed “Thunder Network.” Jerratsch’s implementation, written in Java and available as open source code on Github, is less watertight than the full Lightning Network proposal, but doesn’t require a fork and can be used now as it is.
“The initial proposal of the lightning network required some new features, that required at least a [soft fork], pushing any real implementation many months or even years into the future,” notes Jerratsch . “I, therefore, changed the channel design of the initial paper such that it can be implemented with the tools currently available in bitcoin. While such a channel does no longer work in a completely trustless manner, it is a good trade-off to start implementing LN. Most importantly, it allows deployment of software using something similar to the future LN implementations for now.”
“I think there is a lot to be done, before LN (or similar) is even remotely useful,” said Jerratsch in a Reddit discussion. “My main goal is to start the process of implementing these changes, such that we may experience LN anywhere soon.” Jerratsch added that lightning networks won’t arrive in time to make any difference in the block size debate.
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Monday, August 31, 2015
Commonwealth Virtual Currencies Working Group Issues Statement about Bitcoin’s Potential
This week, the Commonwealth Virtual Currencies Working Group made up of Australia, Barbados, Kenya, Nigeria, Singapore and Tonga, together with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, concluded a three-day conference in London with a consensus: “Member states should consider the applicability of their existing legal frameworks to virtual currencies and where appropriate they should consider adapting them or enacting new legislation to regulate virtual currencies.”
The group has come up with the consensus because it recognizes the benefits and the disruptive nature of bitcoin and other digital currencies in the financial sector. The conference was joined by experts from the banking sector, academia, virtual currency operators, users and law enforcement agencies, to discuss the unique applications and the risks of criminal misuse.
One of the main members of the Commonwealth Virtual Currencies Working Group, Aminiasi Kefu, Tonga’s acting attorney general explained:
“From Tonga’s perspective, virtual currencies are a phenomena that has already arrived. Today, real estate, buildings and businesses held or owned by individuals resident in Tonga are being advertised for sale on the Internet for virtual currency, namely bitcoin.”
The Working Group received presentations from nine groups involved with virtual currencies, including the U.K. Digital Currency Association, BitPesa, Bitt, Bankymoon, Ripple Labs and Minku.
Many experts and representatives explained to other member states that the decentralized nature of virtual currencies, specifically bitcoin, has been the solution to economic inequality and remittances worldwide.
Bankymoon CEO Lorien Gamaroff explained the importance of virtual currencies in severely underbanked regions such as Africa.
“In Africa, around 80 percent of the population doesn’t have access to banks and are mainly engaged in a cash economy,” said Gamaroff.
Photo The Commonwealth / Flickr (CC)
Barclays to Begin Offering Bitcoin Payments for Customers, Beginning with Charities
Barclays is about to become the first mainstream bank to openly and directly support bitcoin transactions, The Sunday Times reports. The Daily Mail echoed the news for its huge readership.
Barclays has been experimenting with Bitcoin and working with digital currency start-ups for some time. Speaking at the Morgan Stanley European Financials Conference in London, Barclays’ CEO Antony Jenkins warned the “banking sector has not yet felt the ‘full disruptive force’ of technology – but it will.” He elaborated on the growing concern among financial institutions that faster, cheaper payment systems will start to seduce their consumer and business customers in the coming years. In June, Barclays signed a deal with Bitcoin company Safello to explore financial applications of the blockchain technology that powers Bitcoin.
Barclays is not the only bank to express interest in Bitcoin’s technology and launch internal experiments and pilot projects. In fact, as recently reported by Bitcoin Magazine, major banks including Citi, UBS, Santander, BNP Paribas, and BBVA are taking serious note of Jenkins’ warning and committing resources to preliminary blockchain studies.
Now, as reported by The Sunday Times, Barclays plans to test the virtual currency, allowing people to make donations to charities in bitcoin. The bank has gone into partnership with a bitcoin exchange and aims to begin the experiment by the end of the year. Derek White, chief design and digital officer at Barclays, said: “Barclays is enabling the bitcoin exchange to help charities accept bitcoin.”
Barclays has two sites in Notting Hill and Old Street, London, dedicated to researching Bitcoin and blockchain technology, with a combined capacity of 75 staff, and is also operating a blockchain workspace in a revamped warehouse in Whitechapel, east London. The bank “is inviting start-ups, academics, and the government to work at the space to connect with others that are interested in the Bitcoin and blockchain community,” said White.
With this move, Barclays will be the first major bank to help selected customers to receive bitcoin payments directly in their bank accounts, establishing an important precedent. Focusing on charities first seems a very smart decision, which can shield Barclays from the potential regulatory and image problems, giving it time to prove the value of Bitcoin in a context that can’t be easily criticized. It can be expected that, after this first initiative focused on charities, Barclays could consider gradually allowing ordinary business and residential customers to receive bitcoin payments.
The Sunday Times mentions that a Bitcoin company was included in the trade mission to southeast Asia led by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron a few weeks ago, which underlines the rising status of Bitcoin in Great Britain. On the trade show, Cameron enthusiastically praised the Innovate Finance Manifesto: 2020, issued by Innovate Finance, which aims to advance Great Britain’s standing as a leader in financial technology (fintech) innovation both domestically and abroad and create 100,000 jobs in U.K. fintech.
The manifesto is focused on generic fintech innovation and doesn’t mention Bitcoin- and blockchain-based digital currencies explicitly. However, Great Britain is on its way to becoming a global hub for bitcoin and other digital currencies, with both the government and Bank of England having made recent moves designed to stimulate the development of digital fintech.
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Sunday, August 30, 2015
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