Thursday, September 17, 2015
DopeCoin Launches GROW Network ‘Pegging’ Crypto to Cannabis
BitPay Hacked for Over $1.8 Million in Bitcoins
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Coin Center: State Bank Supervisors Proposal Good for Lawyers, Bad for Consumers and Innovators
The Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) released its model framework for states to use in designing regulations and made it clear it wants to see state governments take a proactive and rigorous approach to licensing and supervising “virtual currencies” businesses.
The Conference report said:
“…CSBS concluded that activities involving third-party control of virtual currency, including for the purposes of transmitting, exchanging, holding, or otherwise controlling virtual currency, should be subject to state licensure and supervision.”
Coin Center, a Washington based-advocacy group for digital currencies, voiced their objections, saying the conference started out with good intentions but didn’t follow through in this final report.
Peter Van Valkenburgh, Coin Center Director of Research, said:
“Unfortunately, we’ve strong concerns about the vagueness of the language they’ve chosen in this final draft: vagueness that could encumber plenty of innovative but non-custodial companies, whom CSBS likely never intended to be regulated at all.”
Coin Center has taken a balanced approach to regulation in the past, for example, working with and supporting California’s digital currencies regulations.
Van Valkenburgh added:
“We urge any state regulators who are encountering these issues to look for a clearer, more justiciable standard of ‘covered activities’…”
In their report, the bank supervisors call for an iron grip on companies, who must get a license and show state regulators the details of their business plan.
In addition, Coin Center notes, the proposed framework covers too wide a scope and includes businesses that don’t directly hold a customer’s funds.
“Covered activities” in the report include: “Services that facilitate the third-party exchange, storage, and/or transmission of virtual currency (e.g. wallets, vaults, kiosks, merchant-acquirers, and payment processors.)”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Rainey Reitman is currently reviewing the proposal, but notes it is a throwback to a different age:
“At the end of the day, cryptocurrencies are distributed software projects that can be accessed from across the world. They shouldn’t be regulated like brick-and-mortar businesses that serve a specific locality or community.”
The Bank Supervisors justify their proposals by saying:
“Licensing and supervision serve as a mechanism for protecting consumers, ensuring system stability, safeguarding market development, and assisting law enforcement …”
The State Bank Supervisors can make recommendations in a model framework, and despite the fact that the organization carries some weight in the banking community, state governments are not required by law to adopt these proposals.
BitPagos Acquires Argentinian Bitcoin Exchange Unisend
Latin American bitcoin merchant payment processor BitPagos has acquired Argentinian bitcoin exchange Unisend, to provide bitcoin exchange and trading services on its bitcoin purchasing platform Gravel.
BitPagos launched Gravel in August 2014 to enable its users to purchase bitcoin at more than 8,000 Argentinian convenience stores. During that time, BitPagos CEO Sebastian Serraon told Coindesk, “You can go to any location, give them your account in Ripio and the amount of pesos you want to get in bitcoins. Boom: You have some bitcoins.”
The acquisition of Unisend will allow the company to operate a fully operated bitcoin exchange on Gravel. “The big change is that … users of the platform will have a new online exchange market in Argentine pesos and bitcoins, connecting immediately offers for buyers and sellers,” the BitPagos team announced in a press release.
BitPagos empowers small businesses and online merchants to process and facilitate simpler transactions internationally. The company believes that easy-to-use bitcoin exchange platforms could be the main factor that affects the growth of the Argentinian bitcoin industry.
“The acquisition of Unisend and the integration of BitPagos onto the Unisend bitcoin exchange platform will result a significant increase in bitcoin transactions, promoting and strengthening the Latin American and Argentinian bitcoin network,” the BitPagos team announced.
BitPagos raised $600,000 in a seed funding round led by Pantera Capital, Tim Draper, Barry Silber and Boost VC in 2014, to boost bitcoin use in South America. At the time, BitPagos processed around $150,000 per month on average. With the acquisition of Unisend, the company hopes to process around $1 million per month.
First Peer-Reviewed Academic Bitcoin Journal, Ledger, Launches and Issues Call for Papers
Ledger, a new peer-reviewed scholarly journal, will publish full-length original research articles on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, as well as any relevant intersections with mathematics, computer science, engineering, law and economics. Ledger will be published online on a quarterly basis by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, as an open-access journal.
“The journal Ledger invites authors to submit their original research for the inaugural issue of the very first peer-reviewed academic publication devoted solely to the field of cryptocurrencies and its related subtopics,” says the first Ledger Call for Papers. “Ledger is the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to the inherently interdisciplinary subject of cryptocurrencies, and is proud to be supported by its distinguished editorial board.”
The Ledger editorial board includes representatives from MIT, Stanford University, Duke University, Cornell University, Oxford University, and New York Law School, as well as Jerry Brito, executive director of advocacy group Coin Center, and Vitalik Buterin, founder and lead developer of the “Bitcoin 2.0” platform Ethereum.
“I’m happy to say I’ll be serving on the editorial board of this new journal along with a distinguished group of academics and experts,” said Brito on the Coin Center blog. “The quarterly publication will have regular calls for papers and will be published in an open access format with transparent peer-review.”
The transparent peer review process will include the publication of peer-review transcripts with all the correspondence relevant to the processing of the manuscript, including referee reports, author responses and editor comments. Ledger wants to put in place a relatively agile peer-review process, with the first round of reviews complete and returned to the author within six weeks. Papers that require only trivial changes could then move from submission to acceptance within a six-week period.
Ledger welcomes papers of up to 4,000 words detailing new ideas and perspectives on any relevant topic, including, but not limited to, the technical, social, economic and philosophical developments and implications of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, public and decentralized ledgers, distributed consensus and more. The deadline for submissions for the inaugural issue is December 31, 2015, and the journal will consider submissions after that date for subsequent issues on an ongoing basis.
Motherboard reports that the idea of Ledger was born during a discussion between managing editors Dr. Peter R. Rizun and professor Christopher E. Wilmer on the Bitcoin forum bitcointalk.
“I wanted to build an academic and interdisciplinary communication channel that would allow bright minds in economics, sociology, physics, law and political science to contribute at the highest-level towards the evolution of Bitcoin,” said Rizun.
“I’m glad to see Ledger launch,” said Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, “and am looking forward to absorbing the great research that will be published there.”
Ledger will encourage authors to digitally sign their manuscripts, and timestamp the published manuscripts in the blockchain. In a concession to the early underground spirit of Bitcoin, the journal may permit authors to publish under a pseudonym “under extenuating circumstances.” It isn’t clear whether “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” the original Bitcoin whitepaper by the probably pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, would be accepted for publication on Ledger.
In fact, so far all technical contributions and whitepapers on important innovations in the digital currency space, including Ethereum, sidechains, and lightning networks, have been crowd-published outside of the scholarly journal publishing framework. Therefore, it might be argued that Ledger represents a step back to a more centralized and formal, less spontaneous and ultimately less efficient form of research.
However, only publications in formally established and peer-reviewed journals are recognized as valid scientific credentials, so Ledger is likely to stimulate academic researchers to contribute to digital currency innovations. Ledger has adopted the modern trends in scientific publishing – online publishing, open access, no author fees, and agile transparent peer-review – and might become a bridge between research hackers and the scientific establishment.
Photo the.Firebottle / Flickr (CC)
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California's Version of New York's Infamous ‘BitLicense’ Defeated in State Legislature
9 Banking Superpowers Unite Behind Bitcoin’s Blockchain Tech (Op-Ed)
BitRuble? First Russian Cryptocurrency Announced by Qiwi
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Gov’t Funded Blockchain Lab to Open in the UK
Bitcoin 101: What is a ‘Fork’ and How Does it Work?
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