In Blow To US Dollar, BRICS Considers 'Sanctions-Proof' Cryptocurrency. The Head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) Kirill Dmitriev has stated that the BRICS may opt to create their own cryptocurrency for the purposes of global commerce. A cryptocurrency is a digitally based means of exchange wherein the value of said currency is not determined by a central-bank. Most cryptocurrencies can be converted into state-issued currencies (Dollars, Euros, Yuan, etc.) through various foreign exchange services. Currently, one of the biggest issues facing cryptocurrency development is the fact that they are not backed up by any central bank. However, many also see this apparent disadvantage as a possible opportunity, particularly where unilateral Dollar based sanctions are concerned.
While the US Dollar remains the most popular global trading and reserve currency, this is rapidly changing. Related | The Unintended Consequences Of America’s Sanctions Regime In May of this year, China and Russia agreed to begin a process of trade in local currencies. Don't panic, but your Bitcoins may just vanish into the ether next month. The community-driven organization overseeing Bitcoin on Wednesday warned that any Bitcoins received after Monday, July 31, 2017 at GMT-0700 may vanish into thin air or be rejected as invalid. Bitcoin.org said that at the end of the month, Bitcoin confirmation scores – a number that represents the difficulty of altering the associated transaction – may become unreliable for an unknown period.
"This means that any Bitcoins you receive after that time may later disappear from your wallet or be a type of Bitcoin that other people will not accept as payment," the group said. The reason for this "potential network disruption" is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 148 (BIP 148), which describes a "user-activated soft fork" (UASF). It's an effort to implement a code revision referred to as a Segregated Witness, or SegWit, a method for separating signature data from transaction identifier data in a Bitcoin transaction.
The SegWit operation depends on the consensus of Bitcoin miners. Bitcoin Transactions Get Stranded as Cryptocurrency Maxes Out. Bitcoin hit a capacity limit that could hamper dreams of it becoming widely used. For more than a year now, people who use or work on the digital currency Bitcoin have been arguing about how to fend off a looming problem that some leaders in the community say could kill the whole system. This week that problem has become very real. Some people and businesses using Bitcoin have found their funds stranded after trying to send them to other users. The problem is caused by Bitcoin’s design, which is capable of processing at best only seven transactions per second. This week the currency, which is powered by a decentralized network of computers run by people and businesses around the world, hit its capacity limit.
At the time of writing there were about 20,000 Bitcoin transactions waiting to be processed. You can attach a fee to a Bitcoin transaction for priority processing, and some Bitcoin software automatically suggests or sets one that will get you prompt processing. The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment. Massive DDoS attacks on XT users Despite the news blockade, within a few days of launching Bitcoin XT around 15% of all network nodes were running it, and at least one mining pool had started offering BIP101 voting to miners. That’s when the denial of service attacks started.
The attacks were so large that they disconnected entire regions from the internet: “I was DDos’d. It was a massive DDoS that took down my entire (rural) ISP. In other cases, entire datacenters were disconnected from the internet until the single XT node inside them was stopped. Worse, the mining pool that had been offering BIP101 was also attacked and forced to stop. The attackers are still out there. Bogus conferences Despite the DoS attacks and censorship, XT was gaining momentum.
So I didn’t go. Unfortunately, this tactic was devastatingly effective. Now the last conference has come and gone with no plan to raise the limit, some companies (like Coinbase and BTCC) have woken up to the fact that they got played. Shift Card. Bitcoin Program Helping Refugees Who Don’t Have Documentation For Bank Accounts. A new project called Bitnation is hoping to help refugees through their transition by setting them up with an emergency digital ID attached to a bitcoin wallet and a visa card.
Many refugees are put in a tough position by the difficult paperwork requirements needed to open a bank account in most European countries. Their inability to identify themselves or hold funds makes it difficult to start a new life, but Bitnation is hoping to change that. According to a statement posted on the group’s website: Bitnation Refugee Emergency Response (BRER) is a Humanitarian Aid Project of Bitnation to facilitate and provide Emergency Services and Humanitarian Aid to refugees during the European Refugee Crisis of September 2015. Susanne Templehof, founder of Bitnation said at a recent event that this project may help refugees find ways around the roadblocks that are set up for them while entering a new country.
How Bitcoin Could Stop China From Becoming The Next Superpower Bully. Electronic money, or e-money, is to normal money as email is to normal (snail) mail: it’s simply an electronic form of value exchange, but with a key advantage in that most types of e-money are not linked to any particular country or government. Electronic money has made big strides in social acceptance in the last decade. Dutch bank ABN Amro’s CEO recently said that the technology behind electronic money is the next big thing in global banking. The king of e-money today is Bitcoin, created in 2009, shortly after the global economic and banking system shocks known now as the Great Recession. Bitcoin was the brain baby of a mysterious person known as Satoshi Nakamoto, who posted the 2009 Bitcoin white paper on a well-known cryptocurrency forum. His paper described the architecture and function of the new type of e-money that he had invented.
Shortly after, Bitcoin’s first commercial use was to buy some pizza for a guy who had a bunch of bitcoin to spare. Why would anyone use e-money? Bitcoin Is Left a Wallflower as Banks Borrow Some of Its Features to Boost Efficiency. In the depths of the financial crisis in 2009, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto launched a digital currency called Bitcoin that he or she claimed could remove the need to rely on central or commercial banks.
Six years later, financial institutions such as JP Morgan and Citigroup are taking on Nakamoto’s ideas – but ditching the parts of Bitcoin’s design intended to reduce their influence. Instead, banks such as Barclays and Credit Suisse are backing efforts to draw on Nakamoto’s open-source code to build systems that will help financial giants do business as usual more efficiently. The general plan is to build software that apes the way Bitcoin records and verifies transactions in a digital ledger known as the blockchain, but to do it without the digital currency itself, or the way its blockchain is secured and operated by a network of computers owned by various companies and strangers around the world running “mining” software (see “What Bitcoin Is and Why It Matters”). Orders Bitcoin Options Trading Platform Operator and its CEO to Cease Illegally Offering Bitcoin Options and to Cease Operating a Facility for Trading or Processing of Swaps without Registering.
Bitcoin is on the verge of a constitutional crisis. The Bitcoin community is facing one of the most momentous decisions in its six-year history. The Bitcoin network is running out of spare capacity, and two increasingly divided camps disagree about what, if anything, to do about the problem. If these two sides fail to reach a consensus, the Bitcoin network could — according to one side, at least — slowly grind to a halt as the number of transactions exceeds the network's capacity to process them. Even worse, if a fix for this problem is forced through prematurely, it could split the Bitcoin network in two and permanently damage public trust in the network.
The argument is the closest thing the Bitcoin community has had to a constitutional crisis. Bitcoiners are trying to figure out who, if anyone, has the authority to make technical changes to the Bitcoin network's foundations. The Bitcoin network is running out of capacity The Bitcoin network processes transactions in units called "blocks," which are created about every 10 minutes. This New Crypto-Technology Could Make the Stock Exchange Obsolete. Alex Pietroswki, Staff WriterWaking Times It’s public… the stock market is rigged.
Wall Street manipulates the exchanges, like the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), with high-frequency trading schemes, immediate trading algorithms, insider trading, retail investor scams, manipulative buying by foreign governments, and so much more. The NYSE is a festival of corruption, and a tool for concentrating wealth and power that is overtly used to enrich a very small percentage of the world’s people. The crypto-currency revolution is one of the most powerful means the public has to undermine the control systems of a global financial elite who hold the world in bondage with fiat reserve currencies and rigged markets. An evolution in crypto-currency technology is set to be released in September: BitShares 2.0. “Some of the capabilities of BitShares 2.0 include, among other things, a Smartchain which can do more than the block chain, according to BitShares 2.0 proponents.
About the Author. Bitcoin’s Community Faces a Tough Decision about the Network’s Future. In a test of Bitcoin’s ability to adapt to its own growing popularity, the Bitcoin community is facing a dilemma: how to change Bitcoin’s core software so that the growing volume of transactions doesn’t overwhelm the network. Some fear that the network, as it’s currently designed, could become overwhelmed as early as next year. The answer will help determine the form Bitcoin’s network takes as it matures. But the loose-knit community of Bitcoin users is not in agreement over how it should proceed, and the nature of Bitcoin, a technology neither owned nor controlled by any one person or entity, could make the impending decision-making process challenging. At the very least it represents a cloud of uncertainty hanging over Bitcoin’s long-term future. The technical problem, which most agree is solvable, is that Bitcoin’s network now has a fixed capacity for transactions.
Under the one-megabyte-per-block limit, the network can process only about three transactions per second. Meet 3 New ALTERNATIVE CURRENCIES | Economy. (Before It's News) As currencies around the world become more volatile and devalued, alternatives to paper (fiat) money are coming alive. Bitcoin has been the cryptocurrency of choice, but is inherently dangerous, as it’s digital platform can easily fluctuate or disappear entirely. As gold has never lost its purchasing power over thousands of years, sentiment is growing to create a gold-backed currency. The following are 3 companies who have responded to that need: Hayek Dollar The gold storage company known as Anthem Vault has decided to release a new cryptocurrency that is backed by precious metals.
Each “coin” will be valued at 1 gram of gold, and will be called the “Hayek,” after Austrian Economist Friedrich Hayek. “It has the added advantage of making precious metals more versatile on the global marketplace, since physical delivery is not required. After all, is a currency truly backed by gold if you can’t have the gold? Karatbars Gold Cards Good question. BitGold. Bitcoin for Activists - What You Need to Know. Nathan Schneider, Waging NonviolenceWaking Times Among activists one often finds an aversion to even thinking about money.
Associating it with the opponent — who has lots of it — they try to do without money themselves. Often, for as long as they can, they try to organize and resist without it, until burning out, quitting and getting into a different line of work just to keep up on rent. But, as the 19th-century U.S. populist movement recognized, money is also a battleground. Bitcoin (the open-source software and peer-to-peer network) and bitcoin (the currency) first appeared in early 2009 — just after the housing bubble burst. To understand why, I turned to Devin Balkind, founder and director of Sarapis, which promotes the use of free/libre/open-source software among non-profits and popular movements. What do social justice activists need to know about crypocurrency? Cryptocurrency is open-source money. Where does the “crypto” come in? Yes — though in ways we haven’t thought of yet. Darkcoin – Official Website. Home :: Mycelium. LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman Created a Company to Reinvent Bitcoin.
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman announced an unusual new investment late last month. He and other Silicon Valley luminaries, including Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, sunk $21 million into a company that may never have to make a profit to be successful. That company is called Blockstream. Hoffman and others backed it in an effort to give a technological shot in the arm to Bitcoin, a digital currency built upon software that uses cryptographic transactions to prevent counterfeiting without the need for any central authority (see “What Bitcoin Is and Why it Matters”). Blockstream is working on technology that will use the code that underpins Bitcoin to secure other kinds of assets, such as contracts or ownership of stock. The company’s technology could also provide workarounds to shortcomings in the design of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has come a long way since its obscure debut in 2009, and the 13.5 million bitcoins in circulation are worth $4.7 billion. Bitcoin stalls after hitting record prices in 2013 | Technology.
After skyrocketing to more than a thousand dollars in price late last year and attracting global attention, bitcoin, the leading digital currency, has stalled. Figures obtained by Reuters show that while “wallets” – cyberspeak for accounts – are being created at a steady clip, many of them are empty. Analysts also provided Reuters with data that shows liquidity in the cryptocurrency remains limited. Bitcoin, a virtual currency created through a “mining” process where a computer’s resources are used to perform millions of calculations, has been hailed as revolutionary because of its lack of ties to a central bank and its potential as an alternative to credit cards for paying for goods and services.
However, the currency’s volatility has slowed broader acceptance. The price of bitcoin has plummeted roughly 50% so far this year. It most recently traded at $356.26, down from a peak of $1,163 in December 2013. Still, actual retail sales using bitcoin remain paltry. Bitcoin Promoter Charles Shrem Pleads Guilty - Law Blog.