3 May
0
Bitcoin officially recognized in Japan
Japan is going to officially recognize bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Previously in March, the Japan Times announced that the Japanease Cabined approved some bills that would help banks to expand their business related to fintech.
The cabinet also recnognized the importance of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, so it aims at recognizing them as method of payment, so the government is going to bring digital currencies under the overview of the Financial Services Agency (FSA), who also control the Yen.
This system will also provide a registration of exhchanges to avoid money laudering and to protect the bitcoin users, specially after the Mt. Gox debacle back in 2014, when the company was handling 70% of all bitcoin transactions.
This way, Japan has just given virtual currencies legitimacy, and we hope this news will allow lots of other countries to do the same in the near future.
The open-minded Japan
To be honest, this news is not so shocking, as in February the Japanese regulators stated the decision to propose bitcoin among the methods of payments, so to define the digital cryptocurrencies as conventional currency.
Multicurrencies Wallet
Bitcoin is the most important and popular cryptocurrency at the moment, together with Ethereum.
So you may need an online walletwhere you can store your bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
Here you can store several digital currencies as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Blackcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin and more.
Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.
19 Apr
2
15 Oddest Places where Bitcoin is accepted
Nowadays you can buy almost everything with bitcoin.
As well as lots of e-commerce and famous worldwide brand that accept Bitcoin all around the world.
Recently we read about the news about Overstock, for example.
Also, you will find out there are several other shops where you can buy your favorite items with Bitcoin.
Below you can read the full list of the oddest places where bitcoin is accepted (for several of them you can buy a gift card for bitcoins on gyft.com).
TOP 15
- CVS – pharmacy shop
- Victoria’s Secret – Lingerie Shop
- BitcoinTravel – marketplace that provides accommodation, apartments and more
- Pembury Tavern – Pub in London
- Old Fitzroy – Pub in Sydney
- The Pink Cow – Restaurant in Tokyo
- Zynga – Mobile gaming
- OkCupid – Online dating site
- EZTV – Torrents TV shows provider
- PizzaForCoins.com – pay for your pizza
- Whole Foods – Organic food store
- Bitcoincoffee.com – Buy your favorite coffee online
- A Class Limousine – Newark (N.J.) Airport
- Fiverr.com – Freelance jobs for $5
- Seoclerks.com – SEO work
Recently we read about the news about Overstock, for example.
Also, you will find out there are several other shops where you can buy your favorite items with Bitcoin.
Multicurrencies Wallet
If you want to buy somenthing with Bitcoin you must have an online wallet, of course.
Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.
4 Apr
0
How to study with Bitcoin payments
Bitcoin at University
From now on students from all around the world can pay with bitcoin for their university – if they decide to move in Prague.
In fact, the CEVRO Institute University in Prague has announced that it will accept bitcoin among their allowed methods of payment.
Recently the Greek University of Nicosia, Draper University of California, the University of Cumbria and King’s College in the UK started to accept the cryptocurrency.
Why in Prague
The University rector Josef Šíma explained to Cointelegraph:
“As a first school in the Czech Republic we have opened unique Oxford style PPE (Philosophy, Politics, Economics) taught by a team of Czech and foreign professors in English and accepted many foreign students from US and Canada to India and China. One of them asked about the possibility to pay his tuition in bitcoin. And because we have hosted in past several lectures and conferences about this exciting new phenomenon and as a part of the PPE, and we will have courses dealing with alternative monetary schemes, free banking and cryptocurrencies, it was a really easy decision.”
The Prague University, in fact, was the first university to create the PPE class to allow its students to study the connections between Bitcoin and philosophy, politics and economy.
Fees in bitcoin will be calculated based on the current bitcoin price.
Bitcoin worldwide recognition
The acceptance of bitcoin by public institutions could be an important step for the recognition and the increase in popularity of Bitcoin.
“We do not want merely to teach about the beauty of markets, modern technologies and innovation, we want to be innovators ourselves! We want to actively use most modern technologies and offer our students new opportunities which technologies made available” Šíma explained.
Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.
11 Mar
0
Philips announces its own Blockchain Lab
The Dutch multinational company Philips decided to open its own Blockchain Lab, a group of experts whose focus is the decentralized ledger.
After a half year of researches on the Blockchain, in fact, Philips announced its objective to use the distributed ledger technology for healthcare uses.
To do so Philips launched a call for developers and experts coming from the startup ecosystem who can submit their own CVs and apply “to work on several blockchain use cases”.
The call for talents from now on will be continuosly open, which supposedly indicates an evergoing interest of the company in developing new projects based on this disruptive technology.
It’s always worth to remember that the innovation brought by the blockchain doesn’t impact the financial system only, but potencially has relevant implications in many aspects of our lives, including the secure transmission of information regarding our health.
Just a few days ago, for example, we talked about Guardtime, a blockchain platform that is now working together with the Estonian eHealth Foundation to develop a blockchain network that aims at securing one million patient medical records.
The Philip Blockchain lab is located in the company’s headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Head of the Blockchain Lab, Arno Laeven, commented:
“As a company committed to innovation you need to constantly explore new and emerging technologies and their application in areas where they might have an impact and added value. Our aim is to learn if blockchain technology could potentially add value to the process of data exchange in the healthcare industry.“
Previous Statement
On October 2015, Philips Healtcare interest was announced in a Twitter post published by Wayne Vaughan, CEO of the blockchain startup Tierion, who reported that his company has been the first blockchain project within the Philips research perimeter on the subject.
Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.
8 Mar
0
Ethereum used for Car Charging in Germany
A German power company, RWE, started a partnership with the Ethereum-based startup Slock.it, to develop proofs-of-concepts (POCs) using the Eth blockchain.
Germany supports green power
On May 2011 the German Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen announced the government’s decision to close all the nuclear power plants within 2022.
During an interview conducted by the BBC, in fact, Mr Rottgen commented:
“It’s definite. The latest end for the last three nuclear power plants is 2022. There will be no clause for revision.”
So, RWE, company who provides coal and nuclear energy infrastructures in Germany, has now decided to invest money in a new sustainable energy and in an Ethereum project to reduce expenses.
To do so, RWE created a working team to test the blockchain technology to aim at trim costs by lowering expenses related to energy transmission.
Car Charging with Smart Contracts
In a recent interview conducted by CoinDesk, RWE Carsten Stöcker commented on a possible application of the blockchain: electric car charging stations that use smart contracts to authenticate users and manage the billing process.
“We would like to solve the problems and really push electric vehicle deployment forward by looking into establishing a seamless and affordable electrical charging infrastructure.”
This project debuted at the Lift 2016 conference in Geneva, Switzerland and it will play out within 2017.
According the RWE project, customers will use charging stations by accepting a smart contract programmed on the Ethereum blockchain.
Through this system users will save money thanks to a payment that is connected to the consuption of electricity during the charging, instead of paying according to the time connected to the station.
“What’s really exciting here is that people are going to be able to use smart contracts to contract with a machine directly, rather than contracting with a human being or a corporation,” he said to CoinDesk.
Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.
19 Feb
1
Burger King accepts bitcoin
The well-known fast food company, Burger King, has started to accept bitcoin among its allowed payment methods, but only in Arnhem, Netherlands.
Located in the city center of Arnhem, this Burger King venue will accept bitcoin and anyone that will pay with in this way will receive a second burger (a whopper) for free.
Another interesting news is that Burger King will host bitcoin meetups to increase the number of people who know what bitcoin is.
But, why Arnhem?
Since the opening of the Arnhem Bitcoinstad (also known as Arnhem Bitcoincity), the number of merchants who decided to accept bitcoin increased exponentially, and now Arnhem has 100 shops (including malls, coffee shops and restaurants) where people can spend their cryptocurrency.
In fact, yesterday (February 18th) Arnhem Bitcoinstad stated:
“The project Arnhem Bitcoincity has reached a new milestone: There are now 100 venues that accept Bitcoin in Arnhem. The Burger King in the city center is the latest to join the project. For Bitcoin enthusiasts Arnhem is like heaven as you can practically pay everything with bitcoins.”
Growing bitcoin enthusiasm
Bitcoin enthusiasm is growing fast in Arnhem and merchants have started to keep bitcoin instead of converting them immediately.
“When this project started, all merchants converted their bitcoins to euros immediately through the payment processor BitKassa, but a growing number of merchants now keep their bitcoins, since they can pay some of their supplies with bitcoins themselves at other merchants who accept Bitcoin as well. For instance a restaurant owner who pays for his bread at a bakery that also accepts bitcoins,” Arnhem Bitcoinstad team commented.
Life on Bitcoin
Maybe you have watched the documentary Life on Bitcoin, or maybe not, but all around the world there are a lot of cities where you can at least survive using bitcoin as the only payment method.
In fact, Life on Bitcoin shows how a young married couple could live and travel everywhere with payments only in bitcoin.
Of course, there is still a very long way to go but this couple has proved that it is already possible to conduct a normal life with the crypthocurrency.
For about 100 days, Austin and Beccy Craig decided to eliminate from their life credit cards and cash, relying only on bitcoin and they found several merchants who decided to accept bitcoin in exchange for meals and ground transports.
Life on Bitcoin has also inspired another travel: the one by Felix Weis, a 27 years old programmer who started to live for a whole year using only bitcoin. Felix writes about his adventures on his blog and he also shooted a documentary.
Where to live using bitcoin: CoinMap and BitMap
There are a lot of startups who decided to create platforms where you can read about all the restaurants and shops who accept bitcoin.
One of this is CoinMap, who reports more than 7000 shops all around the world. It is a web platform so you can use it from your laptop.
But, if you prefer a mobile app instead, you can download BitMap, available for IOS or Bitcoin Map for Android.
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.
18 Feb
0
How the blockchain can improve the Australian voting system
Flux Party is a new Australian political party that wants to renovate the voting system by using the blockchain.
In fact, they have proposed a new token-based political system based on the Bitcoin technology.
The Flux Party has more than 500 members and its objective is to have six senators on ballots during the next election that Australia will hold in September/October.
How it works
A special feature of this party is that its members are free of its own policies and they can vote for or against a legislation at the bidding of token holders.
“If they didn’t have to be senators, if they could just be software or robots they would be, because their only purpose is to do what the people want them to do”, commented the Flux Party co-founder Max Kaye.
So the bitcoin token could be used by the Flux members for voting but also for trading with other people.
Too old for the Internet era
Australian Flux party is clearly suggesting that the current democratic system is too old for the Internet age and for this reason they want to redistribute the political power by using Bitcoin.
Their own website states: “Our current system doesn’t work well enough; politics gets in the way of policy. Flux is an incremental upgrade to democracy designed to redistribute political power, maximise participation, remove bad policy, and empower voters.”
The Flux Party system will allow voters to be able to set their votes to experts on these issues.
A revolutionary but not so new idea
The idea of a blockchain-based voting system is very revolutionary and it is not developed only by the Fluxa Party.
In fact, Nasdaq and the Bitcoin Foundation have worked both on their own voting systems throught the blockchain technology.
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.
9 Feb
0
Infographic: What is Bitcoin Mining?
Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.
29 Dec
1
Infographic: A basic overview of storage practices
Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.
14 Dec
0
Infographic: Bitcoin Popularity Worldwide
Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.
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