Category Archives: Cryptocurrency

"Lust" is an initial coin offering based on the Ethereum blockchain platform, designed for prostitutes and their customers to exchange money for sexual services.

It uses smart contracts and anonymity features to escrow funding of the parties and keep their identities private, in order to avoid law-enforcement scrutiny and public shaming.

Leaving aside the thorny moral and social questions raised by the currency's intended use, there's the technical matter of how well this would work (and this technical matter wraps around to those moral and social questions).

The wireframe drawings of user interface features pictures of sex workers, selected by "elaborate filters based on skill ratings, age, eyes, hair color and other body parameters." The anonymity dimension of this platform is limited to the (presumably male) customers, not the (all-female) workers.

Likewise, the "smart contracts" favor one side of the bargain: the "key has to be scanned later if they make an agreement and meet otherwise the contract gets automatically closed in 48 hours, and the client gets his Etherium tokens back in the wallet" (note that "his" pronoun for the "client"). The game-theoretical aspects of this aren't hard to unpick: if the "client" has sex with the worker, and then does not scan her (sic) token, the client gets to have sex, and the worker gets nothing. Despite high-minded talk about preventing violence against sex-workers, the major threat-model addressed by these smart-contracts is men who don't feel like they got value for money when having sex, not women who perform sex-for-money and don't get paid for it.

Finally, there's the legal question: the people behind this cryptocurrency claim that "our system is not illegal anywhere in the world." That's just not true. There are plenty of territories in which simply using strong crypto is illegal, and others where having a nexus with the procurement of sex for money is itself illegal, no matter how attenuated the connection.

So, in a nutshell: this is a legally dubious platform designed to help men solve the problem of not being embarrassed when they procure the services of a female sex worker, and to protect them in the event that they choose not to pay for her services, but without any real protection for the sex workers' anonymity or ability to get paid.

Escrow deal based on smart contracts

Our escrow deals based on smart Ethereum contracts facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. An access key is generated from a clients wallet. The partner scans the key and the client gets the service without the intervention of a third party. Etherium tokens are returned back in case of non-performance of the agreement.

Decentralized platform

We are a decentralized online marketplace that enables users to transact without the need for a centralized location or any third-party arbitration. Experience hassle free transactions anonymously without any scams or fake reviews in a completely transparent setup. Decentralisation also implies that it can never be shut down, unlike dedicated servers.

Fully anonymous

You can register without any personal details on our website to connect with most desired body figures in an entirely incognito mode. We defend your privacy with features like cryptography, anonymous mail forwarding systems, digital signatures, and crypto-currencies to ensure smooth transactions.

Law does not prohibit

Whether you live in an extremely conservative country or in one of the most progressive ones, you can access our portal from anywhere at any time in the world. Whats better is, that our system is not illegal anywhere in the world. Since, it can be used everywhere instantly, you can find new partners even if youre visiting some other country or while travelling.

Lust

(via Beyond the Beyond)

Torontos crazy-insane property prices stayed high even through the 2008 crash and its aftermath, but sales volumes of houses of all types plummeted by 40.4% for July 2017-vs-July 2016, new listings are up by 5% over the same period and the average selling price has fallen by 19% since April.

Monsanto is facing over 100 lawsuits in a Federal district court in San Francisco brought by people who attribute their non-Hodgkins lymphoma to exposure to glyphosate in Monsantos Roundup weed-killer, and as part of the discovery process, it submitted internal documents to the court that detailed shenanigans in the companys internal science and its dealings []

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of a Nobel prize in economics, describes the foolishness of enacting further tax cuts for the wealthy in America, and the structural impediments that stand in the way of Trumps pursuit of this foolish goal.

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A new, dubious "smart" cryptocurrency for prostitution / Boing Boing - Boing Boing

Everything is looking calm and quiet in the world of cryptocurrency. That is a more than welcome change after many weeks of price volatility and uncertainty. The Bitcoin price is holding its own around the US$3,175 mark for the time being, whereas other currencies havenoted some gains or small losses. Antshares, or NEO as it is known these days, is clearly the winner of the weekend with a 25.8% gain.

In the normal world of cryptocurrency as we know it, a Bitcoin price gain often leads to altcoins bleeding value. That has been the case for many years now, but it seemslike the trend reverses every so often. More specifically, the recent Bitcoin price gains to US$3,175 and beyond have not caused any major damage toaltcoins yet. Bitcoin Cash is the exception, but that project will face its own struggles for quite some time to come, regardless of how the Bitcoin price evolves. It is still the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap but losing ground quickly these days.

What is rather remarkable is how Ethereum hasgained in value as well. The past few months have not been easy for this alternative currency. Network issues, ICO hacks, and other factors droveitsprice down by quite a bit. Things are finally looking up again for Ethereum, though, thanks to a 7.25% gain in the past 24 hours. Ethereum also has slightly more trading volume than Bitcoin, which could hint at more price gains in the nearfuture.

Prices for Litecoin, NEM, Ethereum Classic, and Dash have all remained virtually unchanged, barring some small losses and gains. Status quo in the cryptocurrency world is a very rare sight to behold, and thislooks to be one of the few times it can actually be witnessed. Rest assured this situation may look very different in just a few hours, but at the time of writing, it is almost a peaceful picture to behold.

That being said, there is one currency which has suddenly catapulted itself into the top 10. We discussed the concept of Antshares now known as NEO not too long ago. The project aims to become the Ethereum of China, which is a pretty bold statement. It is good to see projects with no lack of ambition these days. There have been far too many clones and copycat coins over these past few years; that much is evident. NEO is now the tenth-largest currency by market cap, thanks to a 25.84% gain over the past 24 hours.

There are no boring days in the world of cryptocurrency, even when most top altcoins remain stable. The big news of this weekend is how Bitcoin finally broke itsprevious all-time high and has beenseemingly able to hold its own without much effort. Its nice to see a Bitcoin price ofUS$3,175 and higher, as it has been coming for some time now. With a market cap of nearly US$53B, Bitcoin looks a lot stronger now than ever before. Maintaining this position for an extended period of time will still be a challenge, even for the king of cryptocurrencies.

Next week will be an interesting period to keep an eye on cryptocurrency pricing charts. No major news is expected, but rest assured market manipulators and speculators will try to shake things up once again. It is unclear what this might mean for the Bitcoin price over the next few days, though. Most of the volume pushing itsprice up came from Asia. That volume coulddry up pretty quickly and subsequentlysend prices crashing down again. These price charts will look very different a week from now; that much is almost a certainty.

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Bitcoin Price Holds Firm, Major Gains Catapult NEO Into Cryptocurrency Top 10 - The Merkle

In early June, Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. The headline moment at the event was a wide-ranging and at times combative interview with Megyn Kelly. But Putin quietly made news in another wayhe signaled an official volte-face on the issue of cryptocurrencies, digital financial instruments such as bitcoin.

As recently as a year ago, the Russian government had threatened to jail users of bitcoin for up to seven years. The Kremlin had also toyed with the idea of creating its own digital currency to compete with bitcoin. Many observers speculated that Russia would then make all other digital currencies illegal to force adoption of its coin.

But sometime last year, something changed. Perhaps the Kremlin realized that creating a proprietary digital ruble defeated the purpose of having a dispersed-ledger digital currency. Possibly they observed the huge sums of money being poured into blockchain technology by Silicon Valley, and resolved to make sure Russia didnt get left behind when the technology became popular. (The blockchain is essentially a ledger with thousands of copies that gets updated every time a transaction takes place.)

Or maybe they just woke up to the vast array of possibilities that cryptocurrencies could offer in the service of money laundering.

Putinand the rest of his oligarch friendshave a problem. The Magnitsky Act, which established strict sanctions on named Russian citizens, and the Russian hacking scandal currently consuming American politics, have woken up governments to the colossal amount of ill-gotten Russian cash being invested within in their borders.

Many countries, including France, Switzerland, Ukraine, and Poland, have launched investigations into Russian money passing through their banking systems, while others, such as Cyprus, Greece, and China seem to still be looking the other way. In March, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project published a study entitled, The Russian Laundromat Exposed, revealing the vast and complex banking mechanisms that oligarchs use to skirt international financial controls.

From Putins perspective, the solution to this dilemma could be cryptocurrencies. And the Ethereum platform (which is based on the blockchain model) appears to be the Russians digital currency framework of choice. Ethereum allows clients to create their own digital smart contracts which can have a multitude of uses that transcend mere currency applications. Using Ethereum, for example, a startup recently raised nearly $4 million in an initial coin offering (think IPO) to begin manufacturing zirconium in Magnitogorsk, Russia. Each ZrCoin, issued by the company represents 1 kilogram of synthetic zirconium.

At a forum in Moscow in April, a Russian politician named Andrei Lugovoi sang the praises of the blockchains versatility. He cited a World Bank study predicting that 10 percent of world GDP would be stored with the help of the blockchain as early as this year. He also said he expected a draft bill in the Russian Duma on regulation of cryptocurrencies would be made public in the second half of 2017.

If Lugovois name sounds familiar, its probably because he was one of two men implicated in the 2006 death of Russian spy Alexander Litvinienko in London, via radioactive polonium-210 poisoning. A former KGB officer himself, Lugovoi is now an MP in the far-right LDPR party. Hes also deputy chairman of the Duma committee on security and anti-corruption.

Last year, Lugovoi told a conference that blockchain-based currencies could become the best way to get around U.S. and EU sanctions. This is is [sic] a rare situation where the sanctions policy of the West gives rise to the opportunity for homegrown business to create something new and allow the national economy to move forward, Lugovoi said, according to Newsweek.

And the Russian blockchain community is indeed growing. A conference held in Moscow in May attracted hundreds of people; another is planned for September. And a group of banks working under the supervision of the Russian Central Bank is currently testing a proprietary Ethereum-based masterchain. Not only that, but Russias largest online retailer, Ulmart, is expected to begin accepting bitcoin in September. And another politician suggested setting up a Crypto Valley on the Crimean Peninsula to raise regional funding in the part of Ukraine that Russia annexed in 2014.

At the St. Petersburg forum, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov enthused that Putin had caught the digital economy bug, and that the president had attended a small closed working group on the subject in which he kept them talking about the technology well past midnight. Putin even met privately with the founder of Ethereum, 23-year-old Canadian-Russian Vitalik Buterin on the margins of the conference.

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Its no surprise Putin is excited. Even Ethereums most ardent supporters will admit that once money is in the cryptocurrency loopthat is, after its been exchanged for fiat moneyits devilishly hard to track, by design. Cryptocurrency transactions are anonymous, dont respect national borders, and are now nearly instantaneous. In theory, at least, its the holy grail of money laundering.

As I write this, the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies is still relatively modest, just under $100 billion, approximately what shoe-maker Nike is worth. But the market is growing by leaps and bounds. Ethereums flagship token, the ether, was up 4,000 percent for the year earlier this summer.

Most cryptocurrency transactions are perfectly trackable, thanks to a distributed ledger. (That sort of verification is part the appeal.) But trackable is not attributable. And in order for financial laws to function properly, some level of attribution must be built into the system.

As more governments agree on regulatory regimes to integrate cryptocurrencies into their business, more money will flow into them. Oligarch-sized transactions that would be difficult to impossible now will become more and more possible.

This isnt a problem in countries that operate under the rule of law. The United States and others are already working on laws and regulatory frameworks that will eventually be able to fully accommodate cryptocurrencies and take advantage of their unique properties. For example, its now possible to trade bitcoin and ether as easily as yen and euros.

But what about in kleptocracies like Russia, where laws are bent and molded to facilitate, rather than prevent, corruption? Its not hard to imagine a situation where regulations are either designed to be ignored for the benefit of certain people, or are simply toothless and thus throw the door open to all manner of illicit activity.

The Magnitsky Act has been a thorn in the side of Putin and his cronies for a long time. But as we stand at the threshold of a new era in the world of finance, he may think hes found a way to beat it.

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Why Is the Kremlin Suddenly Obsessed With Cryptocurrencies? - Daily Beast

This is a paid press release, which contains forward looking statements,and should be treated as advertising or promotional material. Bitcoin.com does not endorse nor support this product/service. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the press release.

Launch comes mid-TGE and well ahead of product roadmap

New York, NY August 4, 2017 investFeed, the social investment network that dropped equities for cryptocurrency, has rolled out the first version of its new platform midway through its Token Generation Event. The beta, initially scheduled to be released within 90 days of its August 7th TGE close, was fast-tracked to give participants and potential users a taste of the unique cryptocurrency-based marketplace and a first-look at live tickers and weighted average price charts. The New York based tech company made the controversial pivot from equities to cryptocurrency due to repeated requests from their users, as well as the explosive growth of the $100 billion USD cryptocurrency industry. Their Token Generation Event, initiated July 23rd, is designed to help fund the development of the new platform, as well as provide users a utility token for accessing popular investing ideas, peer-to-peer price predictions, investor insights and Boosting or promoting individual content.

CEO of investFeed, Ron Chernesky said, Our development team has been working around the clock to roll out the first version of the platform and it looks beautiful; its like Facebook, cryptocurrency and the Bloomberg Terminal met for the very first time. One of our goals was to give mainstream users a simple, aesthetically pleasing UX and remove the technical barriers and complicated language associated with blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Several months ahead of the technical schedule outlined in their white paper, investFeeds new platform, thanks to a newly formed data partnership with market leaders, Bravenewcoin.com (BNC), now showcases a list of 235 high-performing, highly liquid cryptocurrencies and their associated price tickers, channels, pairings and weighted averages in USD. Users can now start messaging each other, post comments and share cryptocurrency market insights, and soon access buy and sell functionality directly within the platform.

Just like we linked every top online stock trading brokerage to our original platform, we will begin to form relationships with digital asset exchanges so that users can link their accounts on investFeed and make informed decisions, using the most accurate market data possible. The end-goal is to become the one-stop shop for everything cryptocurrency, and unite a growing community in one of the most nascent industries of our generation.

BNCs CEO Fran Strajnar stated Were always excited to see top tier teams build fantastic products and look forward to supplying further value add data and analytics as investFeeds users demand grows.

In the very near future, more features will be unlocked and added to the new investFeed platform, including instant notifications on user-assigned price alerts, as well as alerts on moves made by peers and high performing traders.

Meanwhile, former top advisor to Ethereum and founding advisor to Lisk, Steven Nerayoff has joined investFeeds advisory board. In 2008, Steve Nerayoff founded Maple Ventures, a venture capital firm primarily focused on emerging technologies including blockchain and cryptocurrency, and is one of the most influential and well-respected advisors in the industry.

###

CEO of investFeed Ron Chernesky is available for interview

About investFeed investFeed is the first incentivized next-generation social investment network for cryptocurrencies. Since the companys inception in 2014, investFeed attracted a community of 15,000+ users, with over 200,000 live feeds, sharing market investing insights. Across Q3 2017, investFeed is pivoting from US equities to cryptocurrencies due to both user demand and the extraordinary growth of blockchain based assets. investFeeds new platform allows the cryptocurrency community to establish professional relationships, promote user content and share rewards-based investing ideas. investFeed is conducting a crowd sale from July 23, 2017 to raise capital for the development of the cryptocurrency-specific platform, and to issue FEED tokens to participants.

Press Contact Email Address justin@investFeed.com Supporting Link https://tokensale.investfeed.com/

This is a paid press release. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to thepromotedcompanyor any of its affiliates or services. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in the press release.

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PR: InvestFeed Showcases First Version of Cryptocurrency-Based Social Investment Platform - Bitcoin News (press release)

Bitcoin might be dividing into two separate blockchains, but its downward slide has so far been contained, signaling confidence the biggest cryptocurrency will come out of the split unscathed.

The debate over how to scale bitcoin came to a head Tuesday as some cryptocurrency miners started using software called Bitcoin Cash and splitting a new blockchain off the old one.Blockchain is the technology used for verifying and recording digital currency transactions.

Bitcoins price should reflect the split by discounting the new coin, according to Charles Hayter, who runs the cryptocurrency data platform CryptoCompare. He likened it to a stock trading ex dividend -- when the buyer isnt entitled to collect a dividend on the shares.

After four days of gains, bitcoin was down $157,or 5.4 percent, to $2,729 at 11:05 a.m. in New York. Earlier in the day, the cryptocurrency fell as much as 8.4 percent,its biggest decline since July 25. Bitcoin cash futures rose 19 percent to $331, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

The price of bitcoin has risen ahead of the split on the expectation that youll get that extra cash from bitcoin cash, so it should drop after the split, Hayter said. This has happened before in other blockchains. Its a trading event where theres number of hoops you have to jump though and people are trying to make a profit.

Bitcoin Cash started gaining traction in the past week, just as miners fended off another split by rallying behind the scaling mechanism known as SegWit2X. Bitcoin Cash wants to increase the block size -- the files in which transactions are recorded -- while SegWit2X would transfer some of the operating power outside of the main blockchain. In other words, Bitcoin Cash would be one lane with bigger cars, while SegWit2X would be two lanes with smaller cars.

The great majority of miners and developers support bitcoin, while ViaBTC, which has almost 6 percent of bitcoin processing power, is the mining pool backing bitcoin cash.

Read More: Bitcoin Moves a Step Closer to Acceptance

Theres a role for both of these coins, said Cathie Wood, the New York-based chief investment officer at ARK Investment Management, which oversees the first exchange-traded fund with indirect exposure to bitcoin. One is much more natural for store of value and the other one for a means of exchange.

Some are less bullish. Ryan Taylor, chief executive officer of Dash Core, the sixth-biggest cryptocurrency, sees little chance that bitcoin cash will succeed in the long term.

First, Bitcoin Cash has not solved scaling. It has merely kicked the can down the road with slightly larger blocks, but still lacks a credible technology to scale to massively larger numbers of users,he said in an email. Second, bitcoin will retain the network of integrated services that make the bitcoin network useful to businesses and consumers.

Bitcoin holders are set to receive the same amount of bitcoin cash as they have in bitcoin if the exchanges and wallets they use support the new coin. Exchanges including Kraken and ViaBTC have said theyll support both, while others like Coinbase and Poloniex have said they wont, citing uncertainty that bitcoin cash will have lasting market value.

Kraken said that its working on crediting accounts with bitcoin cash, and that its sites login function is down due to heavy traffic. While some miners are already using the Bitcoin Cash program, the real differentiation of the two blockchains will emerge when they mine more than 1 megabyte in one block, Hayter said. Bitcoins block limit is 1MB while Bitcoin Cashs is 8MB.

Video: Prospects of Bitcoin Splitting Into Two

Im not as concerned about this except for the administrative nightmare that some people are going to have to go through or have gone through already pulling out of the various exchanges that werent going to support it, ARK Investments Wood said.

Bruce Fenton,founder of Atlantic Financial Inc. and a board member at the Bitcoin Foundation, said both currencies should trade heavily Tuesday.

There are some very large holders who own bitcoin, who dont like bitcoin and do like bitcoin cash, he said. But you also have a lot of people who cant stand bitcoin cash, and as soon as they have the ability to get those coins theyre going to sell them on the market.

It could be a crazy day, he said.

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Bitcoin Slide Looks Limited Even After Cryptocurrency Splits ...

Cryptocurrencies are having a moment. Youve probably heard a thing or two about Bitcoin and Ethereum. Namely, their prices seem to be skyrocketing (or plummeting, depending on the day). Theres more to the story, and as the investing cliche goes: dont buy what you dont know. So lets find out more.

Cryptography has to do with coding to keep data secure, and cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual asset that uses cryptography as a security measure. For that reason, its hard to counterfeit. Bitcoin is one of the first cryptocurrencies to hit the scene. It was launched in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym that could be a person or a group (it was open source and peer to peer). The thing is, theres no central agency (like the government) that issues or regulates these cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin, the decentralized digital currency dominated by white men, seemed on the verge of

Which is why its been such an attractive option for shady business activities, like money laundering. You can buy and sell it just like any other investment, from company stock to Beanie Babies. But while companies have IPOs, or initial public offerings, cryptocurrencies have ICOs, initial coin offerings, and any entity can launch it as an investment. The Atlantic illustrates the problem with not having a central authority regulating these currencies:

Last month, the technology developer Gnosis sold $12.5 million worth of GNO, its in-house digital currency, in 12 minutes. The April 24 sale, intended to fund development of an advanced prediction market, got admiring coverage from Forbes and The Wall Street Journal. On the same day, in an exurb of Mumbai, a company called OneCoin was in the midst of a sales pitch for its own digital currency when financial enforcement officers raided the meeting, jailing 18 OneCoin representatives and ultimately seizing more than $2 million in investor funds. Multiple national authorities have now described OneCoin, which pitched itself as the next Bitcoin, as a Ponzi scheme; by the time of the Mumbai bust, it had already moved at least $350 million in allegedly scammed funds

As they put it, ICOs are catnip for scammers because there are no checks and balances the way there are with IPOs. So if youre going to invest in a coin, which is an iffy enough move as it is, you certainly want to make sure its not just any random cryptocurrency that could just be a scam.

So what about tokens like Bitcoin or Ethereum, which are popular, widely covered options? (And that are actually used as currency.) Are they smart investments?

Some people say investing is like playing the lottery. Thats not entirely accurate, though. Long-term, broad investing, the kind of investing weve advocated here and the kind that will help you build a nest egg over time, is very different from speculative, active trading, which is a lot more like gambling. Cryptocurrency, a volatile, unpredictable investment, falls into that category.

Many people dont invest because it seems overly complicated. But if you want to build wealth,

With active trading, youre taking a guess at how a specific investment (or investments) will trade on a short-term basis. The goal isnt to simply keep up with the stock market like it is with long-term investing; the goal is to make a bunch of money and get rich quickly. And you know, some Bitcoin and Ethereum investors did get rich quickly! Seems like a good deal, right? But the thing is, the price of these cryptocurrencies often swings from one extreme to another. (In one day in June, the price of Ethereum plummeted from $319 to $0.10!)

Plus, any time the value of something skyrockets too quickly, a bubble often follows, and thats exactly what Forbes contributor Clem Chambers predicts:

Crytocurrencies, of which bitcoin is the leader, will fall back in value and more than the fat drop bitcoin has already had.

Despite its reputation for getting constantly hacked, cryptocurrency like Bitcoin remains a hot

Not to mention, theres also the old investing adage, buy low and sell high. If you bought Ethereum right now, youre buying high. If you still need reasons to avoid it, though, the Motley Fool makes a good case for keeping digital currency out of your portfolio: your investment options are limited, there arent any safety protocols, and most of us dont really completely understand how they work. Most people have no clue how Bitcoin or Ethereum work, or understand how theyre challenging monetary theory. Thats a dangerous formula for volatility and potential money loss, writer Sean Williams says.

The bottom line: get rich quick schemes rarely work out well. Sure, people occasionally win the lottery, but for most of us, investing shouldnt feel like playing the lottery. It should be a long game, allowing you to gradually build wealth over time with much less risk.

That said, if youre going to invest in cryptocurrencies anyway (maybe you dont want to replace your entire retirement portfolio, you just want a small taste), heres how to go about it.

Website Coinbase seems to be the most popular option for buying Ethereum, Bitcoin, or Litecoin. Its also the easiest, according to Inc.coms Brian Evans. You have to verify your account and then you can add different payment methods for buying your tokens (bank accounts, wire transfers, credit or debit cards). Evans explains:

Other options for exchanges that will take U.S. dollars for coins are Kraken, and Gemini in the U.S. Typically you will need to verify your account with a drivers license and add other details to expand your buy limits. Since cryptocurrencies are hard currencies, the exchanges dont want to risk getting ripped off, since you cant reverse a cryptocurrency transaction once its done.

These websites will also let you sell your coins when youre ready. If you have extra cash to invest on hand, it might be an interesting experiment. Ive dabbled in day trading myself, just to understand it better, and while I earned a decent return in a short amount of time, I also lost a lot of money after that. Over time, it all evened itself out. Some short-term investors have much better luck; others have much worse luck. The point is, you dont want to put most of your money to work this way.

You might get lucky with these new, shiny investments, but in reality, wealth building is pretty boring: buy some broad, diverse funds and hold onto them over the years. Its not quite as sexy as cryptocurrency, but its probably a safer bet for your hard-earned cash.

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What You Should Know About Cryptocurrency - Lifehacker Australia

investFeed, a social investment network for digital currency traders and enthusiasts, has released the first version of its new platform; a combination of Facebook, cryptocurrency and the Bloomberg Terminal, according to CEO Ronald Chernesky.

The New York-based startup, which launched in 2014, said the social network aims to integrate cryptocurrencies into the traditional financial world and create an access point that is open, transparent, and rewards-based for all our users and content contributors.

The release of the new platform comes nearly a month after the company pivoted from US equities to digital currencies amid strong demand from its 15,000+ user base.

Chernesky said that the companys strong belief in the future of cryptocurrencies prompted our decision to pivot from equities to decentralized digital assets.

We feel that investFeeds future should fully embrace the greatest technological breakthrough since the Internet. We decided to refocus our offering in order to take advantage of the vast opportunities in crypto, including the exponentially-growing number of people globally interested in trading, finding accurate ticker prices, and seeking out peer ideas.

Andrew Freedman, CTO of investFeed, added that the switch from equities to cryptocurrencies will attract a millennial user base that has shown disinterest in traditional investments. Millennials are more excited by this new technology because they feel empowered by the ability to participate in markets without traditional third party interference, he said.

The new investFeed platform combines social network features, such as private messaging and comment posting, information sharing, and digital asset trading analytics and insights.

Through a data partnership with Bravenewcoin.com, the platform also showcases a list of 235 high-performing cryptocurrencies and their associated price tickers, channels, pairings and weighted averages in USD.

The company said it will soon add more features, including buy and sell functionalities, instant notifications on user-assigned price alerts, as well as alerts on moves made by peers and high performing traders.

One of our goals was to give mainstream users a simple, aesthetically pleasing UX and remove the technical barriers and complicated language associated with blockchain and cryptocurrency, said Chernesky.

Just like we linked every top online stock trading brokerage to our original platform, we will begin to form relationships with digital asset exchanges so that users can link their accounts on investFeed and make informed decisions, using the most accurate market data possible.

The end-goal is to become the one-stop shop for everything cryptocurrency, and unite a growing community in one of the most nascent industries of our generation.

More here:
InvestFeed Unveils New Cryptocurrency-Based Social Investment Platform - CoinJournal (blog)

Brian D. Evans

Founder/CEO, Influencive.

Last week, certificate authorities in China quietly formed a partnership with NEO, which was formerly known as AntShares but has gone through a rebrand. The idea was to tie in real-world assets and smart-contracts in China in a major way, much like Ethereum did with their smart contracts but with a few differences.

NEO is currently getting marketed as the Ethereum of China. But they are taking it a step further by tying in real world assets. The big picture vision of NEO is to create an entire smart economy. This is where real world assets tie in and begin to become digitized. Essentially every asset could one day be digitally represented and tied into a smart economy. Their version of a smart economy also involves intelligently automating things like payments.

But when you start automating payments and using things in the realm of AI there are some important things to consider. The first roadblocks and hurdles in creating a true smart economy in places like China would be security issues and the decentralization issue with governments involved.

If this experiment is successful and if the power of China gets behind them, things could get interesting really fast. Having an entire country backing a cryptocurrency and blockchain platform could do wonderful things for the industry as a whole. If NEO is successful in a major way in bringing blockchain directly into mainstream use in China, and as long as the key concepts and purposes of blockchain stay intact it could make for very exciting times for the industry.

NEO is the talk of the cryptocurrency and blockchain space right now since their recent meeting at Microsofts headquarters in Beijing where this news first surfaced. NEO also recently partnered with Coindash, Bancor, Binance, Nest Fund, and Agrello.

If this means that an entire countrys government is about to back and support a blockchain platform and cryptocurrency it will at least make for some exciting times ahead.

Original post:
China is Majorly Experimenting in the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Space with NEO - Influencive

Bitcoin cash, the offshoot of cryptocurrency bitcoin that was created yesterday, is now worth $7.6 billion, according to data provider Coin Marketcap. That pegs the value of all the bitcoin cash in circulation at 17% of bitcoins total market value of $44.4 billion. This makes bitcoin cash the third most valuable cryptocurrency, behind bitcoin and ethereum. It trades under the BCH symbol on most exchanges, while bitcoin retains BTC.

Bitcoin cashs vault up the valuation charts can be explained by its provenance as a fork of bitcointhink of it like the splitting of an amoeba in two. The market value of all the coins in circulationusually referred to as the market cap in cryptocurrency jargonis calculated by multiplying a coins price by the total supply of coins in circulation. When bitcoin cash splintered off from bitcoin, it also inherited the supply of coins in circulation. In other words, there is roughly the same amount of bitcoin cash in circulation as bitcoin, and both cryptocurrencies each currently have 16.5 million units in circulation.

There are slightly more bitcoins in circulation than bitcoin casha difference of 474 coinsbecause when bitcoin cash forked, there was a period of several hours when no new bitcoin cash blocks were mined. In the meantime, bitcoin miners continued to find blocks, introducing new coins to the circulating supply.

A chain split is a slow and confusing event, even with a deadline. Bitcoin cash had a much publicized deadline of Aug 1, 12:20 UTC (or 8:20am US Eastern time) for the split to occur. Yet it wasnt until hours later that the split actually took place.

The reason for this confusing state of affairs is as much about semantics as technicalities. Firstly, the bitcoin cash software uses a particular calculation for time called median time past thats based not on clock time but on the number of blocks mined after the 12:20 deadline. Since there is an element of chance that determines when exactly a block is mined, experts could only estimate when the bitcoin cash software would kick in. In practice, this meant that the bitcoin cash software would only activate about an hour after 12:20 UTC, which was the case.

Once bitcoin cash was activated, the bitcoin cash blockchain stopped growing for several hours, while the bitcoin blockchain continued to add new blocks as normal. This activation happened at 12:37 UTC when both blockchains had just mined block number 478,558this would be the last common block shared between bitcoin and bitcoin cash. All future blocks would send the coins on their independent trajectories.

There was confusion as the bitcoin cash blockchain stalled at block 478,558. What would normally happen is that a new block would have been mined478,559in about 10 minutes. But as hours went by, it became clear that not enough miners were committing processing power to the new blockchain to discover a new block. This was because the new chain also inherited the difficulty threshold for finding a new block from the bitcoin blockchain, meaning a massive amount of processing power would be required.

At this stage, although the chains have split, the new chain didnt yet have any new blocks, so was technically simply a stalled version of the bitcoin blockchain. Most observers in the bitcoin world thought it would take hours, or even days, for miners to devote enough processing power to the bitcoin cash blockchain to discover a block.

But around six hours later, ViaBTC, a Chinese mining pool based in Shenzhen that has vocally supported bitcoin cash, added block number 478,559 to the bitcoin cash blockchain. This block was 1.9 megabytes in sizenearly double the maximum size allowed on the bitcoin blockchain. Compare this to the same block on the bitcoin blockchain, which coincidentally was also mined by ViaBTC, but was only 272 kilobytes in size. Subsequent blocks, however, have been well below 1 MB, reflecting the small number of transactions on the new blockchain.

Two metaphors from the traditional equity markets have been used to describe the creation of bitcoin cash: a stock split or a dividend. But there are good reasons to think that bitcoins split is not like a stock split at all, as this CoinDesk piece suggests. For starters, a stock split doesnt change the assets value; it simply adjusts the quantity and therefore price of the stock on the market. An increase in the number of stocks leads to a commensurate drop in price, without changing the fundamentals of the company in question.

Bitcoins fork doesnt split existing units of bitcoinin fact, the bitcoin price has remained more or less the same throughout (which could be seen as a bullish vote of confidence in the cryptocurrencys continued supremacy). Neither have any new units of bitcoin been created by the fork.

Instead, what happened is more like cloning. Thats because anyone who held bitcoin before the split would now also hold the equivalent amount of bitcoin cash. This makes the bitcoin fork more like a dividend: investors who held on to bitcoin and werent scared off by the fork were now credited with an equal amount of bitcoin cash.

A major cryptocurrency forking, and the market supporting both resulting coins, isnt as weird as it sounds. This already happened with ethereum in July 2016, when a philosophical disagreement among ethereum holders led to a hard fork, creating ethereum and ethereum classic.

Ethereum classic has gained influential backers, such as venture capitalist Barry Silbert. Ethereum classic is traded on a handful of major exchanges. It has a market value of $1.3 billion, or 6% of ethereums $21 billion. As ethereum went on a dizzying rally this year, so did ethereum classic, rising by 16-fold from the start of the year to a peak of nearly $22 per unit in June.

But ethereum classics rally was muted compared to ethereums 40-fold increase over the same period. Nevertheless, its price trades well below that of ethereum, with each unit of ethereum classic trading for just over 0.05 ether.

While the ethereum and bitcoin splits share some similarities such as a contentious dispute over the fundamentals of each protocol, bitcoins split is more significant. Whereas ethereum classic has maintained all the features of ethereum when it splitincluding preserving the transactions that allowed funds to be stolen from the Decentralized Autonomous Organization last summer, which was the root of the disagreementbitcoin cash has significant differences in its underlying programming.

Chief among them is an eight-fold increase in the block size limit, allowing bitcoin cash miners to handle eight-megabyte blocks compared to bitcoins one megabyte. Being able to handle more transactions helps bitcoin cash act more like a payment channel, which is what its proponents are advocating.

One way to get bitcoin cash is to buy it. Its now trading on several major exchanges (heres a list), with the bulk of trading volume taking place on Kraken and Bittrex, according to Crypto Compare.

The other way to get bitcoin cash is to claim it from any bitcoin holdings you owned before the fork. In theory, its simple: All private keysbasically the password to unlocking bitcoin holdingsare identical on both the bitcoin and bitcoin cash blockchains. This means you use the same private key to access funds on both chains. But in practice, this can be tricky.

The most reliable, though fiddly, method is to run a bitcoin cash full node. This is software that downloads the entire bitcoin cash blockchain , which is around 126 gigabytes, and also checks the validity of live transactions on the bitcoin cash network. Import the private keys from your existing bitcoin wallet to the wallet linked to the bitcoin cash full-node. You should then be able to access the new bitcoin cash funds. Check out the detailed instructions, and several other methods, including hardware wallets and paper wallets, in this Bitcoin Magazine piece.

Some exchanges also automatically credit pre-fork bitcoin holders with bitcoin cash. These include Kraken, Bittrex, and Bitfinex. This seems simple, but there can be several drawbacks. You must rely on the exchange to credit the new coins, which can be a slow process, and you may be unable to withdraw the new funds immediately, as Kraken users are currently experiencing.

Some exchanges also apply a discount to the amount of bitcoin cash thats credited, like Bitfinex, which offers 0.85 bitcoin cash for every bitcoin. The discount was applied because the exchange claimed customers were manipulating its peer-to-peer margin financing system to inflate the amount of bitcoin cash they would receive.

Bitcoin cash is now, for all intents and purposes, an asset independent of bitcoin. It must develop its own ecosystem of developers, exchanges, and startups in order to flourish.

Bitcoin cashs price will be an important indicator of its future potential. If it is indeed what bitcoin ought to bea payment system with a large transaction capacity, as its advocates arguethe market should value it above bitcoin at some point in the future.

Another important indicator will be the amount of hash rate or processing power that miners commit to bitcoin cash. There isnt a data source for the hashrate on the bitcoin cash network yet, but we know that miners are crunching 6.4 million terahashes per second on the bitcoin network. That consumes an estimated 15 terawatt hours of electricity a year, putting the bitcoin networks consumption between Turkmenistan and North Korea, if it were ranked with countries.

If miners abandon bitcoin cash because mining it turns out not to be profitable, then bitcoin cash could wither away. As one expert observer of the fork, Andrew Chow, who developed the widely watched BTC Fork Monitor, told me, if that happened, the new chain would simply be dead.

Read more from the original source:
Bitcoin cash is already the third most valuable cryptocurrency - Quartz

The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) has partnered with Gemini, the bitcoin exchange backed by investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, as part of a bid to launch cryptocurrency derivatives trading.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the agreement will find the CBOE leveraging Gemini's data for the launch of dedicated product listings in 2017. Opened to traders in 2015, Gemini is a New York-based exchange offering bitcoin and ether markets, as well as daily auctions of the cryptocurrencies.

The CBOE is still waiting for regulatory approval on the move, the report said, which would provide institutional investors with an avenue to hedge against volatility in the fast-growing cryptocurrency markets. Already, the total value of all cryptocurrencies from just over $10 billion at the start of the year, to a high of $115 billion in June.

Further, the announcement comes at a time when institutional investors are increasingly taking note of this price appreciation, and are seeking to determine opportunities for the technology that fit into their existing business models.

Most notably, it follows a decision by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to grant a license to LedgerX last week that would allow it to clear and custody cryptocurrency derivatives for assets like bitcoin and ether.

Markets trading image via Shutterstock

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Options Exchange CBOE to Launch Cryptocurrency Derivatives in ... - CoinDesk