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5 reasons Bitcoin price is rising

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Reasons Bitcoin Price is rising

The bitcoin price keeps rising and it is reaching the value of $700, growing more than 20% during the weekend.
Today, in fact, the Bitcoin price is $695, according to Coindesk and it seems it doesn’t want to turn back.
Experts are trying to provide several reasons for this rise, including the Chinese Domain and the halving of miners rewards.
Below you can read the 5 reasons Bitcoin price is rising so fast:

Halving of Rewards

In July it will take place the event of the halving of the miners rewards: the mining process, in fact, will be rewarded 12.5 BTC per block, instead of the previous amount of 25 BTC.
This process called halving is aimed at preventing a digital currency inflation by reducing the amount of new currency created over time, until it reaches it maximum amount of 21 million bitcoin ever created.

More interests in the Blockchain

Another reason could be the growing interest in the Blockchain by several worldwide companies such as Microsoft, IBM and more.
As the interest in the different applications of the distributed ledger is growing, more and more people start to approach bitcoin too.

Chinese Domain

As we tried to explain into this blog post, one of the possible reasons of the rise of the Bitcoin Price is the increase of the Chinese domain.
In fact, its price in CNY on the local exchange is growing up quickly, reaching more than the current bitcoin price.
Joe Lee, founder at the trading platform called Magnr, explained:
“Capital flight continues as the IMF (International Monetary Fund) is now signalling warnings at the increasing default risk against China’s corporate debt. China’s economy is changing rapidly and debt fueled growth can only be sustained for so long.”

FIAT Currencies Flow

Another reason why the Bitcoin price is growing could be a fiat currencies flow.
This is the point of view of Chris Burniske, who explained:
“What this implies to me is we have lots of new fiat money flowing into bitcoin, and bitcoin’s price action is not being driven by people swapping out of ether, which we’ve often seen before.”

UK out of Europe

Other bitcoin experts explained that another possible reason could be the fear that the UK could leave the UE.
A recent survey showed that 52% want this split, while 33% prefer that it remains.
This is the same thing happened when it appeared that Greece would leave the European Union: for this reason the bitcoin price hit about $300.

Universal Wallet

If you have to different cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, etc., you need to have different wallets, which is difficult to handle.
This is why HolyTransaction create an Universal wallet where you can store all your digital currencies within a single account.
So, do you want to store Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?

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

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Bitcoin price future: it is alive and well

hot air balloon

How many times did you hear about the death of Bitcoin? About 45 according to a recent twitter post we found very funny. 
Well, according to us, Bitcoin seems to be alive and well, and there are lots of positive signs that indicate that this cryptocurrency is not dead as everybody thought.
The Bitcoin price, in fact, is now $549 (according to Bitstamp, or one of the most used exchanges in the world).Update: Bitcoin price is reaching $700 today, on June 13rd, 2016.
This means that the price rose more than 20% in the last 7 days, reaching a 1 year high, as we can see from the Bitcoin price index of Coindesk.

Reason of the Bitcoin Price jump

We tried to understand the reason behind this jump.
Of course it is hard to find a unique answer, but we saw that probably the Bitcoin price was driven by the Chinese demand, testified by the bitcoin price on the Chinese local exchange, which reached a level of $580 when it was priced $520 on the international markets.
Another important reason could be the halving process, as you can read in this insightful analysis.

Positive news about Bitcoin

But there are other reasons to be positive about Bitcoin, as several companies such as Microsoft recently started to develp their own projects related to the blockchain.
Also, several countries such as Japan started to regulate and recognize bitcoin as an official method of payment. Furthermore, Switzerland began to accept Bitcoin for Public Services.


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

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Ethereum Micropayments: better than the Bitcoin ones?

Micropayments are one the most useful and important use-cases for bitcoin, but a similar system could arrive from Ethereum, a decentralized mining network and cryptocurrency created by Vitalik Buterin back in 2013.
Since the creation of Internet, micropayments have been impossible due to high fee costs and a lack of payment systems that could allow payments in decimals.
But with the invention of Bitcoin – so thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto – today there is a way to do micropayments, as the bitcoin has 8 decimals and payment fees are low; so it is now possibile to pay for digital contents and give a tip on the web.
In a study, the Wedbush Securities company predicted that bitcoin micropayments could be a $925bn market within the end of 2025.

Ethereum Micropayments

One of the first project to use the Ethereum network for micropayments was developed by the Heiko Hees, already CEO of BrainBot, a German startup that works in the smart contract and blockchain consulting sector.
His new project is called Raiden Network and could increase the Ethereum capacity.
Hees explains that his “Raiden network will scale up the Ethereum network from 25 transactions per second to more than 1 million transactions”. 
According to him, in fact, Ethereum could be the biggest provider of micropayments because of its speed and because the transactions would cost less than with bitcoin.
A current problem for the bitcoin users is that blocks take up to 10 minutes to be processed.
Conversely, the Ethereum blockchain needs about 15 seconds for each block.

Bitcoin Lightning Network

In bitcoin there is a similar project called Lightning Network that was released in 2015 by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja – but this project is not live yet.
Thanks to off-chain transactions- the developers explained – Bitcoin could become easier to use and bring the technology’s capabilities to the next level – also it could be solve the blockchain scalability solve, they said.
However, users can move the off-chain transactions back to the blockchain anytime they want, giving them the ability to end every interaction.

Multicurrency Wallet

<img src="/images/ethereumwallet.jpg" alt="Ethereum Micropayments" height="264" width="350" />
Normally, if you want to store several different cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Peercoin, etc.) you need to have ten different wallets, which is difficult to manage.
HolyTransaction want to solve this problem, unifying everything in a single account.
So, do you want to store Bitcoin and Ethereum ?  Open here your wallet for free.

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

Amelia Tomasicchio

Red Hat to help blockchain related startups

Yesterday Red Hat announced its idea to start its OpenShift blockchain that aims at helping financial companies with their initiatives related to the disruptive distributed ledger.
Thanks to OpenShift, Red Hat users can create blockchain applications using tools provided by indipendent sellers and with the support of Red Hat’s Openshift Dedicated program.

How Openshift works 

OpenShift Dedicated wants to help the startups related to blockchaintech, fintech ISVs, and traditional financial companies to begin their blockchain-based projects.
“A lot of folks in the market are looking to deploy on the big cloud providers, Amazon, Google, Microsoft. There are many companies offering cloud support”, Tapia commented.
Tapia clarified that OpenShift Dedicated is available on Amazon and will soon be available on Google and Microsoft Azure as well.
During a recent interview, director of OpenShift, Julio Tapia, explained that the company wants to use its own experience in the open source sector related to blockchain technology.
These were his words:
“We want to position ourselves with not only customers and partners, but leverage solutions developed in the entire ecosystem, taking all the innovation going on in the industry, maturing it for an enterprise market and making sure all the solutions can be launched and supported.”

Red Hat with Hyperledger

Previously, in February, Red Hat announced its partnership with the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project, “an open source platform to advance the blockchain digital technology for recording and verifying transactions”, according to the press release.

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

Amelia Tomasicchio

Excel will support Bitcoin Format

The Bitcoin popularity is increasing every day and recently Microsoft Company announced that the company is accepting this cryptocurrency on its online store.
And now it’s the time of Excel, one of the most popular and used spreedsheets, that will support the Bitcoin format.
The Microsoft Office suite, in fact, will include the support for the currency format of Bitcoin within Excel.
This statement was revealed in the Office 365 roadmap that includes all the updates that Microsoft is considering for the Office 365 suite, as well as the new features that will be in the 2016 version of the Office package.
Actually the project is still in a development phase, as you can read below.

 

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Bitcoin Currency Format Support
So, soon you will be able to use Excel to track, calculate and analyze Bitcoin data using native options. This feature will be probably added to Excel 2016, Excel Online, Excel Mobile for Windows and Android. 
Also, it may be possible that the feature will include a native recognition of bitcoin with BTC, introduce the eighth decimal and maybe the Bitcoin logo that will be part of the Unicode Standard, as Unicode Consortium accepted the Bitcoin symbol in November 2015.

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

Amelia Tomasicchio

Disney wants to the develop its private Blockchain

disney private blockchain bitcoin
The Walt Disney Company has announced its decision to develop a private blockchain.
Some days ago, in fact, the company published a job post for a “Disney Private Blockchain Intern” in Seattle, Washington within the Disney Technology Solutions and Services Business office
But the job post has now disappeared, so probably this means that the position has already been occupied.

The job proposal

These are the words of the original job post. 


“The Disney Private Blockchain team assists business segment users and developers research and develop software mechanisms to protect privacy in distributed ledger participation. DTSS Engineering Services (Keystone and DPBC) applications and services. We provide the support, consulting, and solutions to meet the tactical needs of our customer’s business”.


The main goal is security

So, the Disney Private Blockchain team will research and develop a software that aims at protecting privacy, but unfortunately Disney didn’t reveal more details about the blockchain network
We only know that the project is about designing and implementing an access control using blockchain technologies for Disney Corporate, ABC, ESPN, Disney Interactive and Walt Disney Productions.


More companies studying the blockchain

Recently we read about lots of important and worldwide companies who decided to invest in the blockchain and/or in bitcoins
Some examples are Visa, AirBnbPhilipsMicrosoft, Overstock, Hitachi and more. 

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

Amelia Tomasicchio
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How the blockchain could help email security

BitMessage

Every day we send thousands of emails and such communication has become a daily routine and a MUST for any person and company.

But options to secure communications are not so common and strong. Also, the existing services are too difficult for people to use and they should use a trusted channel.

  
This is the reason why it has been opened the open source project called BitMessage, a service who helps to decentralize and encrypt messages and solves the problem of trusting a third party security authority. 
But BitMessage doesn’t use the bitcoin blockchain, but a distributed ledger created by the BitMessage Community itself. 

How it works

Thanks to BitMessage and its wallet, you will be able to create a private key and your contacts will receive a string that look like a bitcoin address. 
This way you will have a long alphanumeric string among your contact lists instead of email addresses, and you need a proof-of-work to send your message, even offline. 
In fact, BitMessage proposes a system where customer uses a hash of a public key that it is the same as the user’s address. “If the public key can be obtained by the underlying protocol, then it can easily be hashed to verify that it belongs to the intended recipient. The data exchanged by the user can also include a version number for forwards capability, a stream number and a checksum”, explained the whitepaper. 

Here you can read the full whitepaper, in which BitMessage is described as a “peer-to-peer message authentication and delivery system” platform.


The invention

BitMessage was opened in November 2012 by Jonhatan Warren, who also created PyBitmessage, or the official instant messaging client for BitMessage.

Technical details

Its source code use Python as a language and the Qt cross-platform application framework; OpenSSL allows its cryptographic functions. BitMessage is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
Unfortunately, it is not available for mobile devices.

Download the latest version here !

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

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Ethereum Launches Homestead

Blockchain project Ethereum has just launched Homestead, the first release of its software implemented at block 1,150,000.
ethereum launches homestead, homestead release
This new implementation comes at a time when more and more financial institutions and startups are revealing their interest in Ethereum and in creating projects related to the blockchain.
Just a few days ago, in fact, we talked about how Ethereum now is bigger than ever.

 

Special advisor at Ethereum Foundation, William Mougayar, explained that Ethereum processes almost 25,000 transactions per day: about 10% of the number of Bitcoin.

“You need to look at the growth of the Ethereum network via the growth of its nodes, sitting at 5,100 versus bitcoin’s about 6,000 roughly. That’s quite significant and shows the stability and global nature of the Ethereum network,” commented Mougayar.

Homestead vs Frontier

 

Homested is preceded by Frontier, that was released in July 2015.
Co-founder of ConsenSys Enterprise, Andrew Key, commented that Homestead will help users to expand their possibility on Ethereum and the simplicity that will allow them to be able to build proof-of-concept products.
Keys said to CoinDesk:

“Homestead’s arrival will begin to demonstrate the next generation of blockchain technology, whereby anything we can dream of, can be accomplished in a decentralized manner using Ethereum.”

 

 

“We’ve seen Microsoft and IBM doing projects on Ethereum. There’s a lot of coders. It’s exciting to see something you were in on in the early stages growing and bearing fruit,” said Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio.

 

Ethereum helps Car Charging

In Germany the startup called Slock is working with RWE on a project to use Ethereum for car charging uses.

This project debuted at the Lift 2016 conference in Geneva, Switzerland and it will play out within 2017.
According to the RWE, customers will use charging stations by accepting a smart contract programmed on the Ethereum blockchain.

 

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

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Ethereum is bigger than ever

During the past months cryptocurrency Ethereum was growing fast, increasing its value and consequently its own popularity.
Today the Ethereum price is about $9 (0.022 BTC) and it undergone very few changes with an almost always upward price.
Just in the last day Ethereum raised its market capitalization by 26%, reaching almost $730 million, representing more than 10% of Bitcoin’s market cap.
This behaviour is truly important as Ethereum is proving to be much louder than the other altcoins, reaching the market capitalization of all the other altcoinsll together, excluding bitcoin.

Microsoft Corporation certified Ethereum

Some days ago a startup who provides Ethereum softwares, BlockApps became the first certified company on Microsoft Azure’s Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS).
Director of Blockchain strategy at Microsoft Corporation, Marley Gray, commented:
“The simple, rapid and flexible one-click deploy of Ethereum blockchain architecture launched on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace enables enterprises and developers to quickly deploy a certified blockchain environment on Azure.”

But, what is Ethereum?

Created in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum is a cryptocurrency and a blockchain platform who provides decentralized services.
  At the moment Ethereum is in the so-called Homestead phase, the second of the six phases of its rollout that they company planned. The other phases will be “Metropolis (Mist release), Serenity (proof of stake Casper plus abstraction, aka Ethereum 1.5), Ethereum 2.0 and Ethereum 3.0 that will focus on scalability”, commented Buterin during a recent interview conducted by Bitcoin.com.
Thanks to Homestead, said Buterin, “the risk of using the Ethereum platform is now substantially reduced”.

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

Amelia Tomasicchio
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Gemalto joins Symbiont to use the Blockchain

Recently we talked about several companies all around the world, like Microsoft or IBM, that are conducting tests about the blockchain and how to introduce it on their business.
Well, today is the turn of Gemalto, a digital security multinational who announced today its interest in the bitcoin technology.
Gemalto has in fact started a new partnership with Symbiont, a well-known blockchain startup that aims at “bridging the gap between the emerging blockchain ecosystem and Wall Street, with the first issuance and trading platform for Smart Securities™”.
According to a new interview with Gemalto’s vice president of business strategy Mark Yakabuski, the blockchain has two potential applications within the market.
These are his words:
“We believe that the first generation of blockchain is going to be driven by the financial services industry. The second generation, we believe the blockchain has the ability to be adopted within the Internet of Things. […] From what I’ve seen, security within the bitcoin and blockchain solutions is certainly in its infancy and there’s a lot of room for growth and improvement. […] But we believe that the solutions built on blockchain will expand quite rapidly, and we want to be a leading security option for our customers as that expands.”
So Gemalto – together with Symbiont – wants to find all the possible applications of the blockchain (like smart and programmable contracts, for example) and also wants to use the Bitcoin technology to improve Gemalto’s existing hardware and APIs.
“Our partners are looking for the level of assurance we provide on our products, and that leads us to believe that these ledgers are going to be adopted by those institutions”, he continued during an interview with Coindesk.
However, it is important to remember that Gemalto already works with some bitcoin exchanges, using its HSMs for cryptographic security.
Furthermore their techs can “adopt to new use cases, and we’re doing what we’ve done across financial industries, which is protecting identities and the transactions they perform”, continued Yakabuski.

About the author: Amelia Tomasicchio is a writer and a journalist of Bitcoin-related news and articles. She started writing about Bitcoin in 2014 and she graduated in Rome with an essay about movie industry related to Bitcoin.

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

Amelia Tomasicchio