25 Feb
0
“Blockchain can help governments”, says Blockstream CEO
According to Blockstream CEO, Austin Hill, blockchain technology will be able to help government regulatory agencies.
During a recent inverview with Bloomberg TV, in fact, Hill stated that blockchain “is a fundamental shift in how the underpinnings of how finance work, moving much more to an open, permission-less innovation platform. I think people are beginning to realize that some of the underpinnings of our finance system have not changed in 20 years. Wire transfers, international remittances, post-trade settlement, the entire way that banks and finance organizations do netting, a lot of issues around how stock and assets are traded and actually tracked which led to some of the problems in 2008 of systemic risk”.
What Blockstream is?
Austin Hill and his team have developed a blockchain “sidechain” technology to link the bitcoin blockchain to the other existing public and private blockchains.
“We want to power interoperable markets that are fair and accountable. Openness, accountability and public ledgers should be the norm and should not require users to sacrifice privacy. We seek to empower users with trustable and secure financial mechanisms via public auditability of their transaction history without disclosing more than is necessary for the integrity of the blockchain”, reports their official website.
Recently Blockstream has announced $55 million in series A funding to further enhance their sidechain technology, expand their operations globally, and support new industry partnerships, bringing their total investments in the company to $76 million.
“We’re changing how the actual ledger works. It offers huge cost savings for financial organizations in the area of regulatory compliance, trust with other organizations because right now there’s a huge amount of reconciliation that has to occur where everyone has their own copy of the ledger and no one agrees”.
The Bloomberg TV journalist asked him if he is worried about the regulatory environment, so Hill answered that it is not a problem as regulators only want to remove risks:
“This technology offers some of the best potential to actually remove systemic risk. And a lot of regulators around the world are beginning to realize that, so they’re looking at their own solutions even at the national government level to say if we do support fiat currency issued on a blockchain, what is the right technology to do so?”
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24 Feb
0
Japan wants to regulate Bitcoin as Currency
Yesterday we read about the decision of an American judge to define bitcoin as property, as according to him bitcoin is a “intangible personal property rather than a currency”.
This is a very important matter on which lots of words have been spent since Satoshi Nakamoto invented this cryptocurrency. In fact, this definition has a lot of implications on how bitcoin is regulated, especially in terms of VAT and taxation in general.
Well, today Japanese regulators stated the decision to propose bitcoin among the methods of payments, so to define the digital cryptocurrencies as conventional currency.
In fact, Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) wants to make “revisions to legislation that would classify digital currencies as fulfilling the functions of currency”, reported Coindesk.
At the moment Japan recognizes bitcoin as a property and not as a currency, but:
“Under the FSA’s proposed definition, virtual currencies must serve as a medium of exchange, meaning that they can be used to purchase goods and services. They must also be exchangeable for legal tender through purchases or trades with an unspecified partner”, said an article by Nikkei.
This possible modification might be submitted during the current legislative session of the Japanese legislature which runs from 4th January to 1st June, even though this it is not official yet.
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.
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23 Feb
0
“Bitcoin is Property, Not Currency”, stated California Bankruptcy Court
Some days ago an American judge for the Northern District of California stated that bitcoin is a property and not a real currency.
This happened during a case in which US Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California heared HashFast, a bitcoin mining service that declared bankruptcy in 2014.
The case sees a fiduciary suing the HashFast promoter, Mark Lowe, because he wants his 3,000 BTC bank, amount that is said to have been illegally transferred to Lowe himself.
Bitcoin: property or currency?
The main problem turned to be the classification of bitcoin as a currency or a property: should bitcoin be considered as a currency, Lowe would have to return the 3,000 BTC at the value they held when he received them (almost $360,000).
But judge Dennis Montali on February 19th decided that bitcoin is a property, so Howe must return about $1.3m.
These were his words:
“I understand how the parties acted, but that doesn’t make them dollars”.
Montali said that he would return to the question, if required and Lowe would transfer the 3,000 bitcoins or the equivalent dollar amount.
Pasted cases and decisions
Previously the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) stated that bitcoins are a commodity too. But in October, 2015, the European Union’s Court of Justice decided that bitcoins are a currency and they are tax free so exchanges don’t have to pay VAT.
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.
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22 Feb
0
Barclays is using the Blockchain to help people in Africa
“The Blockchain could be the most significant innovation for Africa”, said Barclays.
Some days ago the well-known worldwide legacy bank Barclays stated that the blockchain could be the most useful technology innovation for the African continent.
“Blockchain could be the most significant social and political innovation to impact Africa in 100 years”, said Arian Lewis, head of Open Innovation at Barclays. “People in Africa do banking on their mobile phones, but our talent base is all built on bricks and mortar banking”, she continued.
Bitcoin is very popular in Africa
Also, on February 19th, Quartz Africa, a news website based in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, released a new report in which they revealed that bitcoin is very popular in Africa because it provides more accessility than banking services, even if this country has been “late to the fintech party”.
“I think the banking sector in Africa is going to be disrupted faster than anywhere else in the world”, said Lingham. “What you have with bitcoin and blockchain is a trustless method of operating. You don’t need third parties like banks operating as trust brokers anymore. It’s all built into the code. The way mobile leapfrogged fixed lines communications in Africa; blockchain will leapfrog a lot of the financial infrastructure that exists today”, commented Vinny Lingham of Civic startup in the report.
For this reason Barclays decided to start financing a blockchain startup based in Cape Town called Consent, a platform that uses the blockchain to store medical records.
Dream Bitcoin Foundation
Among the several startups who work in Africa, the nonprofit Dream Bitcoin Foundation (DBF) is one of the most important as it aims at facilitating the use and “acceptance of cryptocurrencies as an alternative form of payment by providing an online cryptocurrency exchange platform and merchant solutions”.
Its founder, Philip Agyei Asare, wants to raise “Bitcoin funds for projects that will build a bright future for Africa [in particular Ghana] by bringing together all young, ambitious and self-determining entrepreneurs and enabling them to achieve their dreams, without the need for government assistance”.
To do so, in March, 2015, DBF also organized a Bitcoin-focused event called Coinfest.
Bitcoin in Kenya
To prove the Bitcoin huge potential in Africa, we want to quote a short documentary, shoot in Kenya by filmmaker Tomer Kantor.
In 2014 he filmed Bitcoin in Kenya with his own IamSatoshi Production.
This video tells the story of MPesa, a service launched in 2006 that allows people to transfer value using their mobile phones in a peer-to-peer way.
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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.
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17 Feb
0
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.
16 Feb
0
Royal Bank of Canada wants to use the Blockchain
A good news comes today when Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) confirmed that it is doing tests on the blockchain to improve its consumer rewards and loyalty.
Royal Bank of Canada has $343 billions of assets and now they want to expand their market using the blockchain.
In fact, during a new interview, Linda Mantia, RBC’s EVP of digital, payments and cards, commented that RBC wants to use the blockchain, focusing on “applications for capital markets, cross-border payments and smart contracts”.
These are her words:
“If you look at every major advancement enabled by technology, there’s always hype. Eighty percent of the money won’t make it, but the last 20% can be massive,” she said.
Bitcoin for loyalty and rewards
According to an interview conducted by Coindesk, she explained the value of the blockchain technology for the RBC’s loyalty project.
In fact, Mantia said that the blockchain would improve the loyalty value for their customers.
“We’ve always said, ‘Your points, your money’. So we don’t lock people into the rewards store. We also let in certain merchants like Best Buy, so clients can use our points to buy from them. We were moving pretty aggressively to let our clients think of it as another form of cash.”
In addition to this, Mantia commented that RBC wants to enlarge their payment products and wants to take advantages from privacy and anonimity of Bitcoin.
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.
15 Feb
0
European Union wants to monitor virtual currencies
On February 2nd the European Commission announced the decision to propose a new regulation for digital currency exchanges and wallet service providers.
In charge of this will be the European Council that has a mandate to do so by next June.
The objective of the new rules will be “to help identify the users who trade in virtual currencies” and also put an end to “the anonymity associated with such exchanges“,
These were the words of Valdis Dombrovskis during yesterday’s press conference:
“By June at the latest we will propose measures to have better control of payment forms such as virtual currencies and anonymous pre-paid cards.“
Dombrovskis continued by saying that the Commission wants to control and maybe prohibit transactions from high-risk countries that enter the EU: “In June the Commission will come up with an EU blacklist of such countries“, he said.
Dombrovskis previously commented: “We must cut off terrorists’ access to funds, enable authorities to better track financial flows to prevent devastating attacks such as those in Paris last year, and ensure that money laundering and terrorist financing is sanctioned in all Member States. We want to improve the oversight of the many financial means used by terrorists, from cash and cultural artefacts to virtual currencies and anonymous pre-paid cards, while avoiding unnecessary obstacles to the functioning of payments and financial markets for ordinary, law-abiding citizens”.
So this initiative clearly aims at fighting the potential use of virtual currencies by terrorists or criminals, although there isn’t so much evidence of such use.
In fact, a few days ago Europol concluded that there is no connection between Bitcoin and terrorism: “Despite third party reporting suggesting the use of anonymous currencies like Bitcoin by terrorists to finance their activities, this has not been confirmed by law enforcement”, said Europol.“Virtual currencies and their underlying technologies can provide faster and cheaper financial services, and can become a powerful tool for deepening financial inclusion in the developing world,” said IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, who presented IMF paper at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, during the panel Transformation of Finance.
A conclusion of the report is that virtual currencies fall short of the legal concept of currency or money. While acknowledging that there is no generally accepted legal definition of currency or money, the authors note that both are associated with the power of the state to issue currency and regulate the monetary system.
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12 Feb
0
‘We’re All in on Blockchain’, says IBM
“We are all in on Blockchain”: these were the words of IBM Director John Wolpert during the today Blockchain Conference in San Francisco. According to Wolpert the blockchain needs a more collaborative approach, which is not always guaranteed by the blockchain developers.
So it seems that the worldwide company IBM wants to ensure itself a leading role in the market solutions related to the blockchain.
In fact, IBM is working on the Hyperledger Project, an open-source blockchain led by The Linux Foundation. Presented in December, this project stars thirty companies including ABN Amro, CME Group, Red Hat and several blockchain startups.
“It’s amazing how many smart and genius people are behind bitcoin, but they miss some logic here. You don’t need to go from trusted to trustless on everything. I think that’s an honest disagreement. The Internet is a permissioned walled garden. Anyone heard of ICAAN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers]? It’s permissive, but it’s permissioned”, said Wolpert.
Hyperledger Project’s goal, he continued, is to be an evolution of the first generation projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that gather all the best projects that leverage on the blockchain together with all the stakeholders that will potentially use such technology. This is necessary if we want to have a widely used transactional protocol.
“It has to be immutable and modular. It can’t be this is the consensus algorithm, this is the token, all of that has to be modular. It has to be scalable. Interledger-ing is important. You have to inter-op between chains and different things”, he said.
During his speech Wolpert also emphasized IBM’s experience in consensus algorithms and distributed computing during the last 30 years.
It’s thanks to such experience that IBM was able to conduct the Hyperledger Project, that Wolpert sees as the only way to bring all the different stakeholders to the same table and make them work together to build and open-source blockchain platform that can be used in many different areas, as it is for Linux.
“We’ve been doing projects on every kind of blockchain. We’ve been doing that for a couple years and now we have a whole unit. We announced [we worked with] the Linux Foundation […] At that point, we went all in on blockchain”.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.