Daily Archives: August 6, 2017

Bitcoin leaped more than 16 percent Saturday into record territory, significantly strengthening against its offshoot "bitcoin cash" amid a hack on the new currency's network.

Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $3,360.87 Saturday, according to CoinDesk, before paring its gains slightly to hover near $3,303, with a market capitalization of more than $54 billion.

The digital currency has now more than tripled in value for the year, and gained about 15 percent in the first few days of August. Bitcoin has broken free of the trading range it's held ever since reaching its prior record of $3,025 in mid-June.

Ari Paul, CIO of BlockTower Capital, attributed the gains to a relief rally after a "relatively uneventful" split, as well as new investors buying bitcoin.

"With SegWit activation and the hard fork in the rear view mirror, bitcoin buyers see a smooth road ahead for the next two months," he told CNBC in an email, referring to a more popular upgrade proposal called Segregated Witness.

Another digital currency, ethereum, climbed more than 12 percent to $250 Saturday afternoon, according to CoinDesk.

Bitcoin one-week performance

Source: CoinDesk

On Tuesday, Bitcoin split into bitcoin and bitcoin cash when a minority of developers went ahead with an alternative upgrade proposal. Investors holding bitcoin at the time of the split should have received an equal amount of bitcoin cash, and were able to trade it Tuesday. However, some major exchanges only began accepting bitcoin cash deposits Thursday and Friday.

ViaBTC, the Chinese exchange that's been the main proponent for bitcoin cash, tweeted at 4:03 a.m. that it temporarily suspended withdrawals due to a " transaction malleability attack" on the bitcoin cash network.

ViaBTC tweeted at 8:44 a.m. that it resumed withdrawals.

Bitcoin cash plunged nearly 36 percent Friday, falling about 9 percent to overnight to a low of $212. It recovered slightly to $223 Saturday afternoon, according to CoinMarketCap.

Bitcoin cash 1-week performance

Source: CoinMarketCap

Bitcoin Magazine pointed out Saturday morning that ViaBTC mining activity which creates more of a digital currency for bitcoin cash dropped to a tenth of what it was in the last few days, while most of the mining activity was concentrated on the original bitcoin.

Excerpt from:
Bitcoin surges above $3K to record, more than tripling this year while 'bitcoin cash' struggles - CNBC

In just four hours of early Saturday trading, the price of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin surged over 9% to a new record. At the time of this writing, one Bitcoin is valued at $3,169.90, well above the previous record of $3,000 set in June .

Bitcoin's total market value is now more that $52 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap, and the return on Bitcoin investments made on January 1 st of this year stands at nearly 220%.

Bitcoin will almost certainly remain a highly volatile asset, but its latest high reflects a major positive development. After years of heated debate over how to increase the Bitcoin networks transaction capacity, major players have finally agreed on a compromise solution known as Segwit2x . That accomplishment is reassuring for those who may have begun to doubt the effectiveness of Bitcoins leaderless governance model .

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The Segwit2x solution also seems to have driven Bitcoin's price higher in a less direct way. On Tuesday, a faction who disagreed with the proposal spun off a so-called fork of Bitcoin, known as Bitcoin Cash , which implemented a different fix. All holders of Bitcoin received matching Bitcoin Cash, which now trades as BCH on exchanges, and has a total current value of $3.75 billion.

However, the price of Bitcoin Cash has declined steadily over the last two days as Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies have surged. That suggests investors are cashing out of the upstart fork, which has sparse support from miners and exchanges, and pumping their gains back into older, more trusted, and more widely-adopted cryptocurrencies.

See more here:
Bitcoin Rockets Past $3000 to a New Record High - Fortune

A group of Chinese cryptocurrency miners who use special software to solve math problems and get bitcoin in return, were longing for their own version of bitcoin. With a spin-off launched this week, they partially achieved their dream.

On Tuesday night, bitcoin cash, an alternative to blockchain technology-based bitcoin, made its debut. The split derived from a three-year civil war in the polarised bitcoin world over the technical direction in which the de-centralised cryptocurrency is going. Some see it as the inevitable outcome of irreconcilable conflicts between bitcoin developers, who maintain the bitcoin software, and miners, many of whom are based in China and use massive computing powers to generate the coin.

You have this one side, which is saying that we need to keep bitcoin as fast, cheap, and efficient as possible those are kind of people that want to be able to pay for coffee in bitcoin and they want bitcoins transaction speed to be better than [that of] credit cards, said Thomas Glucksman, head of marketing at Gatecoin, a Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange.

But there is another camp, which is saying this is very early-stage technology. Lets maintain the security of the bitcoin network first, he said.

One of the biggest supporters of bitcoin cash is ViaBTC, a Shenzhen-based bitcoin startup founded in mid-2016 by Yang Haipo, who had worked as a programmer at tech giant Tencent on its cloud service and defunct Tencent Weibo, Chinas answer to Twitter.

Bitcoin bulls on the run, as value charges through the US$2,000 barrier

Yang is a die-hard advocate of turning bitcoin into a global payment system matching the power of conventional systems like Visa by expanding the capacity of a block, where bitcoin transactions are processed, from one megabyte to eight megabytes.

But critics of bitcoin cash, many of whom are bitcoin developers, argued such scaling would require more hardware and computing power and questioned whether the alternative would garner the popularity of bitcoin without confusing investors.

The rift is simply so wide that it led to the split, Yang said. Its a misunderstanding that we created bitcoin cash. But harbouring massive mining power in China does give prominence to our backing.

bitcoin cash, with similar bottom technology to bitcoin but with larger block sizes, can process about 30 transactions per second, four times more than bitcoin, though still a far cry from the thousands of transactions handled by Visa every second.

Today, China controls about 70 per cent of global computing power on bitcoin mining, thanks to cheap labour, hardware and electricity. Miners pooled at ViaBTC have close to six per cent.

Utility costs brought down by industrial overcapacity and a rising bitcoin price have made large-scale mining farms in China profitable and enabled them to elbow out their foreign counterparts in the market. Built near power stations in remote areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet, theses secretive server farms often feature a web of cables connecting thousands of mining machines that work around the clock under controlled cooling.

Bitcoin has been one of the best performing currencies this year, lately trading above US$2,700 per coin. It has attracted the savings of many Chinese investors, as assets with high investment returns remain scarce on the mainland.

Can Chinas central bank mint an answer to bitcoin?

Chinese authorities, meanwhile, keep a wary eye on the digital currency, and the countrys central bank has explicitly banned Chinese financial institutions from accepting bitcoin as a means of value. Meanwhile, the Peoples Bank of China is investing in developing a sovereign digital currency, although limited progress has been made in that endeavour.

When the split started on Tuesday night, bitcoins price plunged 11 per cent within two hours but later rebounded. The price of bitcoin cash has soared as much as 200 per cent to more than US$700 and now stands at around US$300.

The market is still cautious about the spin-offs future, which depends on how many exchanges allow it to trade and whether miners would dedicate their computing power to the new asset. Even in China, only few bitcoin exchanges have supported it in public.

Its also been a tough week for Yang and his team. Haters of bitcoin cash referred to it as B-cash in an attempt to cut its ties from bitcoin. On Thursday night, ViaBTCs website went dark briefly after suffering overwhelming traffic in what is known as a DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attack.

But Yang seemed to have prepared for it long time ago, as he wrote in a heated debate over bitcoin scaling on a Reddit forum thread eight months ago, Were not at all afraid of DDoS attacks. If you want to attack us, bring it on.

Continued here:
Bitcoin cash and the 'civil war' that is disrupting digital currency ... - South China Morning Post

As the entire community has been laser-focused on the recent hard fork and Bitcoin network split, many people have forgotten about the Segwit2x plan. Miners who participated in the New York Agreement (NYA) have kept their promise and Segregated Witness will lock-in on the network in roughly two weeks.

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A few more changes are coming to the Bitcoin network in the near future. The Segwit2x plan often referred to as NYA is still following its course towards protocol activation of Segwit. At the time of writing, there are 621 blocks remaining for BIP 141 (Segwit) lock-in, and the plan seems to be running smoothly. The vast majority of miners who agreed to the Segwit2x proposal are still following through with at least half of the plan. The second half of Segwit2x intention involves the 2MB hard fork which is scheduled to occur in November.

However, weeks before the recent hard fork, a large portion of the user-activated soft fork (UASF) supporters, and Core developers have been vehemently opposing the second half of the NYA plan. Now that Bitcoin Cash exists, this has caused quite a few people to start envisioning three bitcoins; one that has Segwit only, one with both Segwit and the 2MB block increase, and the 8MB Bitcoin Cash.

On August 4 one individual wrote about his concerns about this outcome on the subreddit r/btc called, Core Devs: it is imperative that you endorse Segwit2x. If you dont, then we can end up with three Bitcoins. Please, have a little humility, avoid another contentious hard fork.

The person believes that if Core developers and many other others refuse to follow through with the second part of the plan, then there could be another chain split. Doubling the block size of the Bitcoin blockchain is NOT the end of the world, and it will come with many benefits as well, explains the threads author. One of the Core Bitcoin repository contributors, Luke-jr, reveals his opinion regarding the 2MB portion of the NYA plan.

Forget it Segwit2x is not going to happen If you want my support, get the proposal changed to something sane, explains Core developer Luke-jr. Then Luke-jr replied to the statement of how doubling the block size would not be the end of the world. Yes, it is, the developer adds.

Luke-jr is not the only bitcoin developer that wont agree to the next part of the Segwit2x plan. This includes Greg Maxwell, Wladimir van der laan, Jorge Timon, Eric Lombrozo, and many others.

After the birth of Bitcoin Cash, Jeff Garzik, one of the lead maintainers of the Segwit2x code, confirms that Segwit2x is still on schedule. When asked on Twitter whether the compromise was going forward because big blockers got their wish with Bitcoin Cash, Garzik responds saying;

Segwit2x and NYA have successfully met all goals so far, and continue as planned.

After August 1st the playing field is starting to get veryinteresting, and because the UASF and UAHF were planned in advance, many Bitcoiners had a feeling something was going to happen. Quite a few UASF supporters believe the UASF movement is what managed to push Segwit. However, these samesupporters seem to have also caused some blowback as well with the UAHF (Bitcoin Cash) plan following shortly after the movement started.

Now even though Segwit2x has a large majority of miner support and lots of businesses and infrastructure behind it, we could still see another split. Theres over three months left for the Bitcoin community to work this out, but some believe its looking dreary already.

What do you think about the upcoming plans for Segwit2x? Do you think its possible we could see three sets of bitcoins? Let us know in the comments below.

Images via Pixabay, and Coin Dance.

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Read more from the original source:
Segwit2x and the Tale of Three Bitcoins - Bitcoin News (press release)

The price of bitcoin has risen sharply, exceeding the $3,200 level for the first time on the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (BPI).

The market advancebegan after 1:00 UTC, when the price of bitcoin climbed above $2,900, market data shows, crossing the $3,000 line around 3:12 UTC.

Markets hit a high of $3,216.02, according to the BPI, and at press time are currently trading at an average of $3,154.94. Per the BPI, bitcoin's price hasn't been above the $3,000 level since June 12.

The price advance also pushed bitcoins collective market capitalization past the $50 billion mark for the first time. According to the BPI, bitcoins market cap is around $52.35 billion at press time.

As might be expected, market volumes jumped along with the price. Data from Bitcoinity showsmore trade volume during the past several hours than at any other point during the past week.

Hot air balloon imagevia Shutterstock

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Link:
Bitcoin Price Surges Past $3,200 to Hit All-Time High - CoinDesk - CoinDesk