Month: December 2019

Bitcoin 2020 — Blockchain’s New Year Resolutions

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Most of us believe in the “New Year — New Me” rhetoric: I’m going to lose weight, quit smoking, eat healthy, stop being lazy, spend more time with family and whatnot. Yet, losing weight usually only turns into losing motivation instead. But then, it doesn’t really make sense to laugh at our absurdities, as we humans have plenty of them. Not when it comes to New Year’s resolutions, at least. I mean, we can mostly agree that it’s just a hefty to-do list for the first week of January. Now,…

XRP Price Lost 66% Against BTC in 2019 — Will the Pain End in 2020?

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Bitcoin (BTC) price has seen a significant increase in 2019 (by more than 100%), while altcoins are actually down significantly from the beginning of the year.  Moreover, most altcoin/BTC pairs have been hitting new lows, and many of the coins are still trending downwards, looking for potential support. Crypto market daily performance. Source: Coin360 One of these coins is XRP (XRP), which has seen a decrease of 50% over the year, going from $0.39 to $0.195. Will 2020 be a similar year for XRP and altcoins, or can we see…

Ethereum Network Overcame Intentional Attack Affecting Parity Nodes

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The Ethereum (ETH) network was apparently the target of a coordinated attack, according to several analysts. Following reports that some Parity Ethereum nodes lost sync with the network, on Dec. 31, core blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technology said it believed there was an attack underway and subsequently released network upgrades to protect against it.  According to cryptocurrency security consultant Sergio Demian Lerner, the attack was implemented in a simple way, wherein “you send to a Parity node a block with invalid transactions, but valid header (borrowed from another block). The…

Bitcoin’s Next Decade Will Be Shaped by Derivatives

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The last five years have been a test phase for bitcoin derivatives, which began tentatively when Bitmex eased into life in 2014. Now, as the cryptoconomy prepares to enter a new decade, derivatives products will play a pivotal role in price discovery. 2020 will be a big year for bitcoin and for the futures markets where billions of dollars will be won and lost, and the next bull market will begin. Also read: South Korea Imposes $69M Tax Obligation on Crypto Exchange Bithumb A Year of Bitcoin Derivatives Is Dawning…

Turkish Bank’s Blockchain Platform for Digital Gold Transfers Goes Live

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Turkey’s Istanbul Clearing, Settlement and Custody Bank (Takasbank) announced that its blockchain-based, physical gold-backed transfer system is now live. Turkish Takasbank launched BiGA Digital Gold to provide banks with a blockchain-based system for the issuance, repayment and transfer of digitized gold, according to an announcement on Dec. 30.  The BiGA system — first announced in September 2019 — enables participating banks to use blockchain tech to transfer digital assets representing a quantity of physical gold. Each asset represents a gram of gold that is physically stored in vaults of the…

First China-Based Blockchain ETF Awaits Regulatory Approval

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Penghua Fund, an asset management firm based in the Guangdong province of China, has filed an application to list a blockchain-centered exchange traded fund (ETF) in China. Shanghai Securities News reported that if the application is approved, which is currently under review by China Securities Regulatory Commission, this would mark the exchange traded fund as the first one of its kind in the country that is solely focused on blockchain. The application by Pengua Fund, which currently holds over $80 billion in clients’ assets, is under consideration according to a…

Google Kicks Crypto App Metamask Out of Android Play Store

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Just when we thought that the anti-crypto ban YouTube made recently was a mistake as Google claimed, the technology giant strikes yet again. This time, Google took the banning spree to the Play Store – another extremely popular platform that happens to be the official app store for billions of Android operating system-powered devices across the globe. As with the YouTube witch-hunt, the ban was focused on crypto apps, leading to the suspension and consequent ban of a popular decentralized crypto app called Metamask. The app, which essentially adds an…

What Is a Cryptocurrency? We Need Clearer Definitions

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This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world. Dr Gina C Pieters is an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, and a Research Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge. She has been researching cryptocurrencies since 2015. There is an unresolved debate over how to define decentralization in a distributed ledger system, even though decentralization of peer-to-peer payments was…

BitMEX Ends Year With Additional 13K BTC in Its Insurance Fund, Up 61%

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The BitMEX Insurance Fund has added nearly 13,000 BTC in 2019, reaching a total of just over 33,491 BTC as of Dec. 30. This is equivalent to 0.19% of the total Bitcoin in circulation, based on the data available at Blockchain.com.  The fund, which the cryptocurrency exchange set up to ensure that liquidation orders related to leveraged positions are filled, ended 2018 with almost 20,800 BTC. This means that the fund has seen a 61% increase since the start of 2019. How does the BitMEX Insurance Fund work? Crypto derivatives…

Former French IT Company’s Executive Accused of Stealing $1.2M in Bitcoin

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The co-founder of an IT company in France has recently been accused of stealing Bitcoin worth 1.1 million euros. The company, which started in 2013, had a conflict between leadership executives that resulted in a decision to oust the company’s chief executive. Although the exec-turned-businessman continued to seek a new position outside of France, he allegedly started formulating plans to take revenge on the IT company and turned into a hacker. Investigators involved in the situation detailed that between December 2018 and January 2019, he was able to grab 182…