Month: August 2017

This week the student loan organization, Lend EDU, published a report that details virtual currency company complaints are up 5,971 percent this year according to data pulled from the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau database. Also Read: Bitcoin Is Becoming a Popular Investment for Middle-Class Americans Determining Virtual Currency Consumer Complaints Bitcoin and virtual currencies have been extremely popular this year and have grown immensely in value. This has led to more mainstream cryptocurrency usage and digital currency businesses being swamped Read more …

Famed investor Andrew Left, who makes his money betting that the shares of companies are overvalued and due for a fall, has a fresh target in his sights: a bitcoin fund. Left makes the case that Bitcoin Investment Trust GBTC, +8.41%, an investment fund run by Grayscale Investments and designed to track the stratospheric ascent of the world’s most popular digital currency, bitcoin BTCUSD, +0.46% is exorbitantly overvalued relative to its underlying asset and poised to tumble. Bitcoin Investment Trust Read more …

The state of Illinois has begun work on a new blockchain pilot focused on the digitization of birth certificates. Working with blockchain identity startup Evernym, the tools being designed would, if put into production, allow parents and doctors present at the time of birth to officially log the birth on a permissioned blockchain. The tools being developed build on work done by a task force within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), according to an official statement. But the project, which forms part Read more …

When charted, bitcoin’s rapid gains resemble how stocks surged into the tech bubble before collapsing. David Ader, chief macro strategist at Informa Financial Intelligence, matched a graph of the Nasdaq Telecommunications Index at its peak in 2000 to bitcoin’s five-year run to all-time highs. “This is the price chart for an overly frothy market, in my opinion. I just don’t see anything quite as comparable to this in bubblelicious terms,” said Ader, a former top-rated bond market strategist. Bitcoin climbed Read more …

Bitcoin’s price briefly passed above the $4,800 mark for the first time today. According to data from CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index (BPI), the price of the cryptocurrency hit a high of $4,802.74, before falling back to levels seen over the past few hours of trading. At press time, the price of bitcoin is trading at roughly $4,762, per data from the BPI. The push above $4,800 continued gains seen earlier today, when bitcoin once again crossed $4,700 to hit a new all-time Read more …

Eight days. That’s how long it took bitcoin BTCUSD, +3.11% back in April 2013, to rise from $100 for a single bitcoin to $200. Fast forward four years and the cryptocurrency has reached an all-time high of $4,791.75 and has been scaling $100 milestones in a matter of hours on a routine basis. On Tuesday morning, the price of a single bitcoin was around $4,400; by Tuesday afternoon it had shot up to briefly top $4,700 for the first time. Read more …

BTC-e, the bitcoin exchange charged by US authorities last month with a host of money laundering crimes, has launched a new website weeks after its original one was seized by law enforcement. The site is accessible through the domain btc-e.nz, though it appears that users in some parts of the world, including the U.S., are not able to log in. CoinDesk was able to access the domain through the use of a virtual private network, or VPN. For now, users appear to be limited Read more …

Chinese mining pool F2Pool no longer supports the controversial scaling agreement Segwit2x. Though the proposal has garnered support from many large bitcoin companies and the majority of mining pools, many take issue with its aim to boost bitcoin capacity by way of a hard fork, a mechanism that could lead the cryptocurrency to split into separate blockchain networks. Tension has been high with developers already hotly debating the merits of the hard fork (a grassroots movement has sprung up in opposition as Read more …

Blockchain-born companies understand that they must align with all values of this technology, and strive to be: democratic, open-source, honest and fair. These values must be present in all aspects of their business – communication can’t be an exception. If they ignore such angles, users may peg them as being just another unidirectional, closed, reactive company, like most traditional companies tend to be. Can you imagine 10 years ago, a multinational’s CEO answering questions from all types of consumers on Read more …

On Aug. 30, Ernst & Young (EY) launched its newest project dubbed “Tesseract” for autonomous vehicle fleet management. The firm is one of the leading providers of assurance, tax, transaction, and advisory services worldwide. The integrated mobility platform is designed to digitally log vehicles and trips onto a Blockchain, and to facilitate multi-party vehicle ownership. According to EY’s global automotive and transportation head, Randy Miller, the project will improve the management of shared-use vehicle ownership and the future of autonomous Read more …

Several major banks have joined a project called Utility Settlement Coin (USC) that is intended to facilitate the issuance by central banks around the world of currencies using Blockchain technology. The USC platform will also make it easier for international banks to settle various transactions with each other, through the use of collateralized assets on a custom-built Blockchain. The new member banks as of late August 2017 are Barclays, Credit Suisse, HSBC, State Street, MUFG, and CIBC. The USC platform Read more …