Thursday, September 10, 2015
Rumor Mill: New Reserve Currency May Rock U.S. Dollar in October (Op-Ed)
Bitcoin Exchange Celery Partners with Vogogo Inc. to Expand to Canada
New York-based bitcoin exchange Celery has integrated the products of Vogogo risk management and bank/payment verification platform to enable Canadian residents to exchange between bitcoin and fiat currencies. Celery was founded in 2013 and has been funded by Draper Associates and BoostVC.
Celery supports more than 10,000 users in the United States and has processed more than $2 million in volume since its launch in early 2015.
Due to its success in the U.S., the company has decided to launch its services in Canada with the integration of Vogogo’s bank verification API and risk-management technologies.
“This release marks the first expansion of Celery outside the U.S. Vogogo’s unified payments, risk and bank verification API enabled Celery’s Canadian integration to be straightforward and exceptionally fast. Snowbirds, Canadian professionals and businesses who make cross-border payments in U.S. and Canada, now have a new and highly-accessible bitcoin-based option,” said Celery co-founder Divya Thakur.
Over the past few months, leading bitcoin startups and exchanges, including BitPay, ChangeTip, Genesis Global Trading and Zinger, have integrated the technologies and APIs of Vogogo to protect themselves from money-laundering attempts with advanced decision-making technology.
“Vogogo continues to position itself as a pivotal partner to the crypto industry’s largest and most influential companies as well as new, smart and dynamic organizations like Celery which are scaling rapidly and experiencing significant growth. We’re immensely excited to be working with each of these groups and helping to solidify the global crypto ecosystem,” said Vogogo CEO Geoff Gordon.
ShapeShift Closes 1.6 Million Funding Round
John McAfee to Run for US President after Creating Own ‘Cyber Party’
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Nick Szabo on ‘Permissioned Blockchains’ and the Block Size
In many recent articles, Bitcoin Magazine reported the trend toward private, “permissioned” non-Bitcoin blockchains, supported by Accenture and Digital Asset Holdings CEO Blythe Masters, among others. Permissioned blockchain developments for banks and financial operators have been started by giant Swiss bank UBS, Bitcoin exchange itBit and more.
Permissioned blockchains would offer the advantages of digital currencies powered by public blockchains – fast and cheap transactions permanently recorded in a shared ledger – without the troublesome openness of the Bitcoin network where anyone can be a node on the network anonymously.
Instead of anonymous miners, only banks and vetted financial operators would be allowed to validate transactions in permissioned blockchains.
While Wall Street seems determined to go ahead with permissioned blockchains, it’s wise to bear in mind one simple fact: Bitcoin works. While closed, permissioned blockchains might theoretically work tomorrow, Bitcoin works in practice today, and perhaps the chaotic anarchy of the Bitcoin network is the very reason it works.
That’s the opinion of former Bitcoin Foundation director Jon Matonis, who is persuaded that private, permissioned blockchains might fall short of their objectives. “It could end up being very similar to centralized payments networks we have right now, without the benefit of the network effect of bitcoin,” he said.
Now, legendary cryptographer Nick Szabo has weighed in on current issues in the Bitcoin space, including permissioned blockchains, in an interview published in International Business Times titled “Nick Szabo: If banks want benefits of blockchains they must go permissionless.”
“[Bank] bureaucracies are so heavily invested in the expertise and importance of local regulations and standards that it’s extremely difficult for them to cut the Gordian knot and implement seamless global systems,” said Szabo. “So they keep trying to re-inject points of control, and thus points of vulnerability, into blockchains, e.g. through ‘permissioning’; but this nullifies their main benefits, which come from removing points of vulnerability.”
On the contrary, according to Szabo, the banks should embrace the crowd-sourced power and resiliency of permissionless blockchains like Bitcoin.
In his book “Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the inside story of the misfits and millionaires trying to reinvent money,” The New York Times technology and finance reporter Nathaniel Popper argued that Szabo is the most likely person behind the pseudonymous identity of Bitcoin’s inventor Satoshi Nakamoto. A recent interview with Adam Back – another legendary cryptographer – underlines the key contributions of Szabo in the developments that led to Bitcoin. Szabo’s positions are taken very seriously within the Bitcoin community.
In the International Business Times interview, Szabo also weighs in on another very hot topic: the block size. Szabo is against Gavin Andresen’s BIP 101 proposal to increase the maximum block size from the current 1 megabyte to 8 megabytes, and double it every two years after that until it reaches 8,192MB. Andresen didn’t just submit a proposal, but actually launched Bitcoin XT as an alternative to Bitcoin Core, which angered other Core developers and notable members of the Bitcoin community.
According to Szabo, a large increase in block size would sacrifice security for performance.
“If you reduce the redundancy of messages to allow for larger block sizes, beyond the growth of limiting-resource technology, that reduces the automated integrity that makes Bitcoin distinctive in financial IT,” he says.
Among the proposed block-size tweaks currently on the table for discussion, Szabo prefers Bitcoin Core developer Peter Wuille’s proposal, BIP 103, which would increase the block size limit by only 17.7 percent per year starting in 2017.
In 2001, Szabo spoke of smart contracts that solved the problem of trust by being self-executing, and having property embedded with information about who owns it. For example, the key to a car might operate only if the car has been paid for according to the terms of a contract.
Now, Szabo expects emerging “Bitcoin 2.0” smart contracts platforms like Ethereum to have a disruptive impact on financial and legal systems, comparable to that of Bitcoin itself. “[E]ventually more so, since Ethereum’s more flexible and general language can facilitate a much wider variety of commercial and other formal relationships.”
Spend Bitcoin Online at Any Merchant that Accepts VISA with E-Coin’s New Virtual Debit Card
E-Coin wants to make managing your personal finances easier with their debit card that allows you to pay for goods and services instantly by converting bitcoin into U.S. dollars, euros or British pounds.
Since 2014, E-Coin’s physical debit cards have allowed users to pay for goods and services in person wherever VISA cards are accepted. Today, E-Coin is announcing the release of a virtual debit cards. Now, anyone can create an account online and receive a virtual VISA card number that they can use to instantly spend bitcoin online at any merchant that accepts VISA. This announcement opens up thousands of new places that bitcoiners can shop online and pay with bitcoin through E-Coin. E-Coin virtual debit cards can also be used with other payment networks including PayPal and eventually ApplePay, according to the company.
E-Coin’s uses a multi-signature wallet to store each customer’s bitcoin. Every personal wallet is issued with three keys, generated and stored on different devices, providing increased security and fraud protection.
The London-based startup has already reached 25,000 customers and is available in 173 countries. The company plans to expand its reach to more countries and will soon be accepting more currencies.
E-coin representative Dmitry Lazarichev told Bitcoin Magazine that promoting bitcoin means that using bitcoin has to become more user-friendly than it is now:
“E-coin is dedicated to the widespread adoption of bitcoin and wants to make things as easy as possible for potential users. Ultimately, we believe that the blockchain and the current financial infrastructure should be merged.”
Users can load up to USD$20,000 onto their E-Card and withdraw up to USD$3,000 in cash daily. The company uses BitGo’s multi-signature security and is insured by XL Group.
E-Coin’s app is coming to iTunes and Google Play soon and will enable contactless payments on certain mobile devices, according to the company.
Bitcoin XT Users Allegedly Suffering Coordinated Hack Attack
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SEP 9 DIGEST: ShapeShift Raises $1.6 Million; Nick Szabo Says Banks Need Permissionless Blockchains to Survive
New Chip Cards May Actually Increase Credit Card Fraud, Hurt Merchants
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Instant Cryptocurrency Exchange ShapeShift Raises $1.6 Million
ShapeShift announced today that it had completed its fundraising of $1.6 million USD. ShapeShift is an exchange that allows users to transfer Bitcoin for dozens of other cryptocurrencies without any accounts or personal information being shared.
Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group and Roger Ver were the lead investors in this round. Bitfinex, Bitcoin Capital led by Max Keiser and Simon Dixon, Mardal Investments, Bruce Fenton, Trevor Koverko, and Michael Terpin also invested in the funding round.
“ShapeShift demonstrated an entirely new way to think about asset exchange,” said Zane Tackett, Director of Community and Product Development at Bitfinex, in a statement. “We’ve known Erik for a while now and he’s knocked it out of the park with this one.”
According to the company, the exchange has experienced 100x growth since its launch in August 2014. In July, it had over $2 million in USD-equivalent volume, which was a record for the company.
What makes ShapeShift unique is that exchanges are instantaneous and require no personal information. Further, ShapeShift doesn’t actually hold any of the currencies; it simply facilitates the trade from one coin to the other. At present, there are over 40 different digital currencies. This means that ShapeShift offers over 940 different trading pairs. That is greater than any single exchange on the market.
However, one type of currency cannot be traded. ShapeShift has a strict “no fiat” policy, which means that if a user wanted to buy bitcoin with US dollars, they’d be unable to. Instead, the user would have to first buy it from another company and then they could trade on the ShapeShift exchange.
Mega Suffers Hostile Takeover by Chinese Fraudster, Hollywood and New Zealand Gov’t
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