Author Archives: Amelia Tomasicchio

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Trump Bitcoin – related new project: how will he use the Blockchain?

The newest Donald Trump Bitcoin – related project was announced this week during the DC Blockchain Summit held in Washington.

US regulators and officials explained their goal of increasing the adoption of blockchain technology within the government and the American private sector.

Also, a few representatives of President Trump, talked about the potential use cases of the distributed ledger, commenting that they are developing a new Trump Bitcoin project related to the public policy.

In fact, they underlined the ledger potential to streamline bureaucracy, empower consumers and drive economic growth.

Chief economist for Vice President Mike Pence, Mark Calabria, gave a speech in which he explained how the Donald Trump administration wants to exploit the blockchain technology and what possible applications can have the tech in government and finance, as Treasury Department is conducting a review of the whole American financial system.

“We are approaching this with an open mind. We recognize that we’re not necessarily the innovators, but what we can do is get out of the way and figure out where the government stops you from being innovative.”

Trump Bitcoin project benefits

The co-chairs of the Congressional Blockchain Caucus asserted that they are looking for understaning how the tech could be developed to be used within the public sector.

“We’re very interested in helping to facilitate the deployment of blockchain technology in federal agencies and across the government. Our role is to prod government agencies to look at more efficient ways of doing things,”  said Jared Polis.

Republican co-chair from Arizona, David Schweikert,  argued that one of the main goals is to keep policymakers updated about the technology’s potential .

“How do those of us who do policy not leap ahead and screw up what we don’t know is coming tomorrow? Sometimes those of us who get elected are arrogant sometimes in what we think we know. How do we help our brothers and sisters in congress understand this isn’t just about cryptocurrency? There’s an incredible world out there that’s so much bigger.”

 

Public and private

That said, private sector has a major role to play in the government’s blockchain adoption.

Managing director of financial services at Accenture, David Treat, explained that the public sector is not just a political advertisement.

“It was a completely different dynamic of not being reactive and not being, ‘Tell me what you did, and let’s opine on whether that was good or OK.’ It was actually, ‘We see this thing on the horizon, we know it has relevance – can you teach us?'”

Also, blockchain experts and analysts argued that its adoption by the government might help to normalize it for use in other sectors.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Ether price set its new all time high

Ether price, or the digital currency that fuels the Ethereum blockchain network, reached today its new all-time high.

This token, that’s always been on the edge for a week, hit $32.78 according to CoinMarketCap today, growing about 15% higher than its opening price of $28.65.

At the press time, ether price is trading at $40.88, or its new all time high.

Ether price: new highs

This new achivement coincides with a general growth of the cryptocurrency market that has been rising in value even after the SEC decision to refuse the bitcoin ETF, the first bitcoin investment vehicle proposed by Winkevoss investors.

Ether price rose of about 70% from a low of $17.68 on 10th March to a high of $30.60 on 13th March.

Investors are looking for new alternatives

According to analysts, investors and traders are looking for new alternatives. First of all, bitcoin is having difficulties, for example the block size debate, its calability, the segregated witness related issue and a possibile hard fork on the way.

Bitcoin’s current challenges make the alternatives more inviting and appealing, as said by fund manager Jacob Eliosoff.

Also, Tim Enneking underlined the huge protif that traders could receive from other digital assets.

Right now, in fact, a few altcoins are experiencing new all time higshs, including Dash and Zcash.

On the other hand, however, bitcoin price has reached a new goal too, as its value is above $1000 for more than 31 days.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Bitcoin price: one month above $1000

According to the Coindesk Price Index (CPI) Bitcoin price has reached a new goal, as it is one month that its value is above $1000. 

The digital currency remained above this value despite any situation as the refusal of the bitcoin ETF related proposal by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and the current debate over how to address the bitcoin’s technical limitations.

It was February 14th – is it a coincidence or a sign of destiny that this happened on the Valentine’s day? –  when Bitcoin price first hit $1000, so yesterday (March 14th) it was one month above this price.

During this month, bitcoin reached its all time high, reaching a value of $1,300. Experts argued that this higher price was a consequence of the hope in the bitcoin ETF approval.

But, if it is true that right after the SEC negative decision, the bitcoin price fell of about 30% ($from 1209 to $1022), it quickly rose again and at press time bitcoin is trading at $1256, so more than 25% above $1000.

As explained by Andreas Antonopoulos on his official Twitter profile:

“If you measure bitcoin’s success by the approval of the incumbent and obsolete industry it replaces, you’re doing it wrong”.

Also, currently a few altcoins such as Ether, Dash, Zcash and more are experiencing new highs.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Blockchain voting system: how to vote through the distributed ledger

Recently, a South Korean government used a technology developed by the startup called Blocko to set a blockchain voting system.

The province of Gyeonggi-do decided to use the so-called Blocko’s Coinstack platform to set a blockchain voting system to make decisions on community projects as part of the Ddabok program.

Through this program, citizens can propose their own ideas for aid; then the provincial government can decide to award budgets to fund the best and winning projects.

A few months ago, the same process was conducted by officials in Gyeonggi-do, but holding a vote using traditional methods was too expensive.

But now, thanks to the new partnership with Blocko, Gyeonggi-do organized a blockchain voting earlier this month. This vote was part of a bigger program to look for new alternative methods for approving projects.

Citizens submitted 9,000 votes, in both online and offline voting, selectioning more than 500 community aid projects.

Blocko CEO Won Beom Kim commented:

“We used blockchain and Lua based smart-contracts on our blockchain platform (and) Coinstack to create a dynamic voting process to solve this problem. In this process, offline voters, online voters, and professional representatives all contributed to a fair and deterministic result which resulted in the selection of 527 community projects.”

In a press release, the provincial government celebrated the use of the distributed ledger for the community vote and indicated that blockchain could be used more in the next future.

“We can complement the limits of representative democracy with some direct democracy systems by using blockchains, the technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” said governor Nam Kyung-pil.

This is not the first time South Korea uses the Blocko-provided technology.

Also, back in November 2016, the Korea Exchange (KRX), a South Korean security exchange operator, hired Blocko to develop a smart contract with the main purpose of authenticating and verifying documents.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Bitcoin ETF decision expected by Friday

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has to make an important decision related to the much-anticipated bitcoin ETF, or the bitcoin-based exchange-traded fund.

This decision is expected by Friday, as the SEC has an deadline fixed on March 11st to make the approve or disapprove a proposed rule change that would allow the creation of the first worldwide bitcoin ETF.

But, because the 11st falls on a Saturday, this decision could come before that date, maybe on Friday.

The proposal came three years ago, in mid 2013, by investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

If the fund receives approval, several experts speculated that bitcoin price could grow and maybe this expected approval already drove the bitcoin price in recent weeks, setting new all time highs in the recent period.

In fact, Bitcoin price neared $1,300 in recent days, reaching $1,293.47 on 3rd March.

By the way, bitcoin price kept falling back to $1,300, experiencing a drop on 7th March, when markets drop below $1,200 for a few hours.

Otherwise, if the SEC decides to reject the proposal that would allow the Bats Global Exchange to list the bitcoin ETF, experts said that the digital currency price would be negatively affected.

Phil Bak, CEO atACSI Funds explained that generally the SEC wants to avoid the appearance of “publicly rejecting an ETF”, so if the agency didn’t plan on approving a fund, it would ask for the filing to be pulled ahead before any final decision.

“In this case, the government agency may want to show the world it is unsure about bitcoin. Alternatively, it could also be that the advocates want to support it to the end and let this proposed fund get its day in court, rejection or not.”

In the lack of definitive statements published by the SEC, it’s really easy to understand why a common return of uncertainty has emerged during this week.

Arthur Hayes, CEO at BitMEX, explained:

“I have heard good arguments for and against the ETF being approved. At this point it is a coin toss.”

 

Waiting for the Bitcoin ETF

At the moment people who are waiting for the SEC’s decision canno do anything instead of only watching and waiting for the 11th March deadline.

ETF expert and co-founder at RagingBull,  Jeff Bishop, commented that the SEC could make its decision further past the 11th, also because of the recent price gain.

“I have the feeling they will find a way to delay this even more though. With bitcoin at all-time highs and the SEC having a terrible record for allowing new ETFs to come to market at absolute tops, they will likely push back on this until things cool a bit. It should be up to investors to decide the true price of bitcoin. The more liquidity and options [there are] to trade it, the more transparent and accurate the pricing will be. It should not be up to a government agency to withhold something like this from the public.”

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Blockchain Academy: a new institution in India

Kerala will soon host its own blockchain academy, the second institution to be opened in India.

This became possible thanks to a new collaboration between the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Kerala (IIITM-K) and the Blockchain Education Network (BEN).

This new Blockchain Academy will be focused on innovation and tech consulting. Specifically,  of course the academy will explore the distributed ledger use cases related to banking, healthcare and governance.

The first Indian blockchain academy was organized by Primechain Technologies Private Limited based in Baner, near the well-known city of Mumbai and it offers a few different courses for both developers and curious people who aim at knowing more about the tech.

Recently, a new Kerala enterprise was announced by Dr. Rajasree during the blockchain conference held at the Technopark in Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram, according to an press release.

This speech also featured Senior research scientist for IBM Research Labs, Dr Dilip Krishnaswamy, and Michael Gord of the BEN, who explained about the blockchain benefits through a video conference.

IIITM, or the institution that co-founded this new academy, supports the so-called “Maker Village project” in the Keralan city of Kochi. Maker Village is an electronics incubator that sees the blockchain as a relevant topic related to the development of new IoT solutions for machine-to-machine payments.

India has always been interested in bitcoin and blockchain news.

For example, last week, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) deputy governor Rama Subramaniam Gandhi explained that digital currencies are “being overstated”. In fact, according to him, Bitcoin’s lack of central authority and pseudonymous nature mean cannot replace fiat currencies.

Also, RBI recently published a new research on how they want to digitize the rupee, or the country’s bank-issued currency,  with the main goal of avoiding the use of cash money within the Indian economy.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Peercoin price surged of about 20%

Bitcoin, Ether, Dash and now also the Peercoin price: it seems that the market value of the whole digital currencies world is growing.

Recently, in fact, Peercoin price surged of about 20% in the latest hours.

In fact, at the press time, its value reached $0,477882 (22.49%) or 0.00037581 BTC (20.82%).

Also, Peercoin market cap reached $10 M a few hours ago.

Peercoin was the first digital currency to use the proof of stake  (PoS) consensus system back in 2012.

Peercoin was created back in 2012 by Scott Nadal and Sunny King. Sunny King, who also created Primecoin, is a pseudonym, a common behavior in the crypto community (do you remember who Satoshi Nakamoto is?).

Proof-of-stake’s protocol was created to solve the high energy  consumption of bitcoin.

The proof-of-stake system was also designed to solve vulnerabilities that could occur in a pure proof-of-work system.

For example, with bitcoin there is a good risk of attacks resulting from a monopoly on mining share. As Proof-of-stake becomes the primary source of coin generation, energy consumption decreases over time.

Ethereum and Casper

Now Vitalik Buterin – or the Ethereum blockchain creator –  and his Ethereum community want to exploit this algorithm to improve their technology. So, recently everybody in the digital currency world has heard about the proof of stake and Peercoin system.

Could this be one of the reasons for this Peercoin price growth? Is it a result for a growing curiosity behind the PoS tech?

How to store all digital currencies in only one place

If you want to trade, buy and sell different digital currencies, you may need a multicurrency wallet like the one provided by HolyTransaction.

Usually, if you want to store different cryptocurrencies you need a wallet for each digital currency you have.

HolyTransaction solves this problem as you can store more than 20 digital currencies in one place and within the same login details.

You just have to remember one password and you can have a full access to your digital currencies.

Also, HolyTransaction wallet provides you the following services:

  • Send your digital currencies to any address, even to addresses of other cryptocurrencies with instant conversion on the fly;
  • Receive transactions;
  • Exchange your digital currencies with any supported coins;
  • Make instant transactions between HT users;
  • Get real time exchange rates on the website;
  • Set OTP for additional protection.

Open now your HolyTransaction univeral wallet here. 

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Ether price is reaching its all time highs

Ether price, or the digital currency that fuels the Ethereum blockchain, is approaching its all-time highs set last year.

In fact, price of ether rose of about 60% during last week, hitting $20.67 yesterday, after opening at $13 on February 25th.

Ether price and Ethereum Enterprise

This increase might be the result of the official launch of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a new working group focused on the Ethereum blockchain with important members including Microsoft, JP Morgan, Santader, etc.

This consortium has the main goal of using the ethereum  tech within enterprise-grade blockchain implementations.

So this recent news may have led to the increase of confidence in the technology and in the linked digital currency.

 

Digital currencies are growing

Recently bitcoin price is also growing, reaching its all time highs, together with the altcoin called Dash.

Among the others, bitcoin is undoubtedly the most used and known with a robust trading volume and bullish market sentiment.

Bitcoin has risen to several new highs in recent days, after failing to set new higher levels for more than three years. Also, bitcoin hits parity with the per-ounce price of gold last week.

Dash has rose more than 75% in the last week and upwards of 200% over the last month. In fact, the previously called Darkcoin reached its all-time high of $58.90 on 2nd March.

Multicurrency wallet for differentiated investments

If you want to invest in all these three digital currencies, you need a multicurrency wallet to store bitcoin, dash and ether coins at the same time.

Normally, if you want to have store different cryptocurrencies, you need to have ten different wallets, which is difficult to manage. Instead, thanks to HolyTransaction you can solve this problem, unifying everything in a single account.

For more info and fees (HolyTransaction has a fixed-rate exchange) click here.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Dash Price: why is it growing so fast?

Dash price rose up more than 100% in the past week, hitting a high of $60 today.

Growing by 40% yesterday alone, Dash price is dominating the social media discussions among traders and investors.

For the newbies, dash – originally known as darkcoin – earned its group of supporters and critics in this years, becoming a digital currency very useful to be used for the online shopping.

Why Dash price is growing?

Several experts argued that – behind this price growth – there is a mixture of technical updates and an user experience upgrade. So, the recent increase is the result of years of development.

Others explained that the Dash price increase is the result of the so-called “pump-and-dump” behavior commonly seen in lower-volumes markets.

What is dash?

Dash is a “two-tier network” that relies on miners and masternodes.

Dash uses a chained hashing algorithm approach called X11. Instead of using the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) 256 or Scrypt it uses a sequence of eleven scientific hashing algorithms for the proof-of-work, or the same consesus method used by Bitcoin.

Miners receive 45% of rewards, masternodes receive 45%, and the other 10% is allocated to its decentralized budgeting system.

In fact, it is important to say that dash allows its users to vote where to allocate resources for development, marketing, etc.

The relative scarcity of Dash coins

Of course, one reasons that is having a great impact on the Dash price is its relative scarcity, as  coins are available for trade on major exchanges relative to the total supply of dash.

This scarcity is supported by the use of masternodes, as they require 1,000 DASH that generate income by receiving part of the mining block reward.

Public data suggests that there are 4,000 masternodes today, so more than half of the total Dash coins are pent-up.

Will this growth last in the long-term?

Data shows a big fall during the today’s trading, while the price is trading at about $43.

Many experts seem argue that the Dash price is in the middle of a significant bubble.

If the price will rise, fall or maintain this status is impossible to say.

How to Store Dash

That said, maybe you’re asking yourself how to store Dash in a safe place, as you might want to start trading with Dash.

Well, we at HolyTransaction provide a multicurrency wallet where you can store not only Dash but also other 20 digital currencies within the same login details.

With a 0.01* dash fee per transaction, HolyTransaction is one of the oldest web wallets in the market.

Edited: we decided to reduce fee from 0,04 to 0,01 Dash per transaction.

 

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Best ZCash Wallet: store 20 digital currencies in 1 place

Are you looking for the best Zcash Wallet? Read here the ultimate guide about Zcash and find out how to store your coins in a safe place.

Zcash is one of the latest digital currencies appeared on the market. It is completely anonymous, as Zcash is based on a cryptographic tool called “zk-SNARK” that doesn’t require that the parties involved in a transaction exchange any information.

This means that on the blockchain you cannot read sender, receiver and amount-related information.

Also, another important feature of ZCash is that transactions clear in a fraction of the time, compared with bitcoin, for example.

New features for Zcash

Recently, the Zcash team published a new blog post in which they explained their plans to upgrade functionality of the digital currency that focuses on integrating new innovations into the protocol.

These changes include:

  •  A Payment disclosure feature that allow only people involved in the transaction to read the information embedded into the blockchain;
  •  inter-blockchain transactions with popular public blockchains such as bitcoin and ethereum will be available through a tool called XCAT (Cross-Chain Atomic Transactions).

Once implemented, these new protocol features will allow to issue Zcash tokens – similar to Ethereum-related ones.

The best Zcash Wallet

If you want to invest in Zcash you migh looking for the best Zcash wallet in the market.

Recently HolyTransaction added this cryptocurrency into its platform, allowing you to store Zcash and other 20 digital currencies in only one place, within the same login.

HolyTransaction, in fact, is a multicurrency wallet that provides a safe and low fees wallet where you can store not only Zcash but also bitcoin, dogecoin, litecoin, dash, ethereum, tether, blackcoin, faircoin and gamecredits, among the others.

It is a user-friendly wallet useful both for experts and non-technical users.

Each transaction can be followed on the blockchain thanks to a new tool we recently implemented: when your transaction is confirmed you will receive an email with your transaction ID, so you can track it on the blockchain.

Just like Bitcoin, you can now:

  • Send Zcash to any address, even to addresses of other cryptocurrencies with instant conversion on the fly;
  • Receive transactions;
  • Exchange Zcash with any supported coins;
  • Make instant transactions between HT users;
  • Get real time exchange rates on the website;
  • Set OTP for additional protection.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio