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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
Value of Bitcoin: the digital currency’s higher price
The value of bitcoin has grown a lot in the last period, reaching its all-time high set back in 2013.
According to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index, at the moment the value of bitcoin is less than $30 below the maximum ever value of $1,165.89 reached on November 30th, 2013.
This latest rise comes after bitcoin’s longest ever period at over $1,000, and a period of average volatility during the recent few months.
Also, this high might reflect the traders and investors confidence in an industry field that has been recently affected by the Chinese central bank’s plan to restrict the Chinese bitcoin exchanges environment, with the result of several of them to temporarily stop any withdrawals of the digital currency.
Click here to better understand what gives Bitcoin value with an infographic.
Another possible news to having an influence on the value of Bitcoin is the currently SEC decision on the Winklevoss brothers’ bitcoin ETF – an event that some experts explained that traders are already pricing in a potential approval.
On March 11st we could see the approval of the first bitcoin ETF within the U.S.A. market, opening the virtual currency to a larger group of investors.
However, many experts in the industry cannot see a high propension of financial regulators to approve this move.
For more charts about the Value of Bitcoin in the past, click here.
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Europe Bitcoin report published by the EU Parliament. Read it here.
Below you can read the full Europe Bitcoin research published by the European Parliament a few days ago.
It is related to the blockchain technology and digital currencies, exploring distributed ledger use cases including digital payments, patent protection, smart contracts and online voting.
This research provides an educational point of view for EU’s legislative members, so probably we will experience a new Bitcoin regulation in the next future.
Researchers who works at the EU Parliament have studied several aspects of the distributed ledger in the past.
For example, a working group sponsored by the Parliament studied how the blockchain’s power to secure data could provide transparency during elections.
“Although blockchains are not the solution for every problem, and even if they will not revolutionize every aspect of our lives, they could have a substantial impact in many areas, and it is necessary to be prepared for the challenges and opportunities they present.”
“Europe Bitcoin” paper
The research suggests a few possible approaches for the European lawmakers, who recently approved the creation for a new task force focused on blockchain and digital currencies.
Also, the paper suggests more future explorations by saying that regulators could regulate and yield legal legitimacy to digital currencies transactions. More and more countries are regulating bitcoin and other virtual currencies during the last few monts.
The document’s authors explained also that this revolutionary techbology could provide many benefits to European citizens, even if it seems to be applicable only in a few cases.
“While the most idealistic and revolutionary visions of blockchain development will probably remain no more than visions, even moderate implementation of blockchain may still promote some degree of redistribution and transparency,” explained the authors in the document.
Click here to read the full Europe Bitcoin document for free.
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Blockchain Regulation in Europe: everything you need to know
Today I want to explain you everything you need to know about the Blockchain Regulation in Europe.
Recently, in fact, the executive arm of the European Union government revealed that is working on the blockchain to “support” distributed ledger-based projects.
According to this new official press release published on February 7th, the Commission is looking for growing its efforts on supporting more projects related to the distributed ledger technology (DLT).
The European Commission is “actively monitoring Blockchain and DLT developments” and is working on exploring “DLT benefits and challenges as well as fields for application in financial services”.
Also, the official press release explained that the Commission wants to “pilot projects to foster decentralised innovation ecosystems and help reshape interactions between consumers, producers, creators and among citizens, businesses and administrations to the end benefit of society”.
A task force for Blockchain Regulation
Last year, the European Parliament also created a new task force led by the Commission, to study the blockchain.
This task force has not only the goal of studying the blockchain but also to support projects related to the ledger and studying a way for a blockchain regulation.
The European Commissioner for Digital Single Market and Vice President of the European Commission, explained:
“The Commission is already supporting distributed ledger tech-enabled projects (DECODE, D-Cent, MyHealth MyData). Support activities are going to increase in the coming months (e.g. Decentralised Data Management). A study will be launched to investigate how DLT can help in reshaping public services and preparing for EU specific DLT actions to address relevant EU challenges.”
Ansip also said that the Commission will collaborate with the Parliament to organize blockchain events and workshops.
“The Commission will organise a kick-off conference with the European Parliament on Demystifying Blockchain and a series of workshops to look at Blockchain developments and use case applications”.
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