Start investing in bitcoin and earn up to 45% ROI Monthly

Start investing in bitcoin and earn up to 45% ROI Monthly

  

Trade Coin Club TCC

Start investing in bitcoin and earn up to 45% Return On Investment  This is what Trade Coin Club can offer you when you sign up for the “Senior Trader” account.  You see, Trade Coin Club wants to make you money as the company makes money and they are willing to cut you in on the action.

Secure your position fast here:

https://office.tradecoinclub.com/register/chuck212

All you have to do is sign up and invest using bitcoin and you can start building a nice little nest egg for your future.

What Is Trade Coin Club?

Trade Coin Club was registered on August 2, 2016, in Belize. The site is registered as private enterprise

The Product

Trade Coin Club doesn’t offer any retail cable products for sale but offers residual income opportunities.

The Opportunity

There are several ways for you to make money. One of the ways is by the compensation plan. Within this structure, there are three levels you can join.  The first level is the “Apprentice” which requires you to invest 0.25 to 0.99 BTC. Once you set up your account you can then begin to earn 0.35% ROI daily. The ROI is good for 8 months and the company is hoping that with the extra funds you might want to step up to the next level which is “Trader”.

Secure your position fast here:

https://office.tradecoinclub.com/register/chuck212

To Learn more, check this page as there much more info. http://hive.pe/80

There are 3 Trading options. No need to recruit or sponsor anybody

1). Apprentice – 0.25 btc gives back up to 0.99btc

2). Trader – 1btc gives back up to 4.99btc

3). Senior trader – 5btc.

All options come with a membership processing fee of 0.05 BTC. At the “Trader” level you invest 1 to 4.99 BTC. Once you have everything in order and your funds in the account, you are guaranteed to receive 0.4% ROI. Now with the “Trader” account, you are granted the 0.4% ROI for 12 months instead of 8 months you get with the “Apprentice”.

Next, you can sign up for “Senior Trader” with an investment of 5 BTC. Now you can invest more if you want, but the minimum is 5 BTC in order to be in this category. In the “Senior Trader” compensation plan you are guaranteed 0.45% ROI daily for one full year.

The only thing you need to be aware of when signing up to join the compensation plan is the 25% maintenance fee on ROI that is mandatory to be paid every four months. If you want to refer people, you earn some bonuses. It is not compulsory to refer people at all: To earn through the company’s referral program. The referral program goes down eight levels deep, you can be sure to earn a little extra cash while still collecting your daily ROI. How much you make all depends on what plan you signed up for.

If you are an “Apprentice” you will earn 10% for those you recruit on level one. You will then earn 3% for those in level two and 2% for those you recruit who are placed on level four. Once you get that ranking you can fill up all eight levels. Apprentice only allows you to go down to level four, while Trader only allows you to go down as far as level 6. Other compensations are also available

Gift items such as Rolex watches, Car Awards, Traveling and international training opportunities. You make your money work for you and also enjoy time freedom in grand lifestyle.TradeCoinClub The Worlds First Licensed Top 10 Auto-Trading Cryptocurrency Platform. Join us in pre-launch to be a pioneer. Contact me asap to join.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about –
TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin Is Bigger Than Ever, And Here’s Why That Matters

Bitcoin Is Bigger Than Ever, And Here's Why That Matters

Why You Should Open A Roth IRA Today

  

The Bitcoin symbol.

The money you've been using all your life is backed by a government of some sort, and it exists in a tangible way. Bitcoin is neither tangible nor backed by anyone, but it's still worth a great deal to some people. This digital currency began circulating on the internet in 2009 with each Bitcoin worth just a tiny bit of "real" money, but right now a single Bitcoin is worth more than $2,000. Bitcoin is fascinating from a technological standpoint, but it's also fueling online crime and violence because of the anonymity it offers. Here's how Bitcoin works and why you should care.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is what's known as a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that exists only as data. You probably have money in the bank that is digital, but those digits equal physical currency. Not so with Bitcoin. Bitcoin also has no centralized regulation nor innate legal framework. As such, the value of Bitcoin is dictated entirely by the market, and the market is hot right now.

Bitcoin is stored in a digital wallet, which you can save locally on a hard drive or phone, or online with any number of Bitcoin exchanges. Saving your Bitcoins locally is like keeping all your money under the mattress. If something happens to the digital wallet, all your money is toast. Sending and receiving money is handled by pointing your Bitcoin client or web exchange toward a Bitcoin address, which every wallet has. A few minutes later, the Bitcoin will leave your wallet and show up in another. Web sites accept Bitcoin are rare, but they are out there. Spending it in real life is considerably more tricky, but again, there are a few system in place to manage it.

Is Bitcoin really anonymous?

Transactions are at the heart of Bitcoin — it's powered by what's known as a blockchain. You can view blockchain information for any wallet address, too. You don't necessarily know whose wallet is whose, but you know what's in them because it's a public ledger. Perhaps you've heard about "mining" Bitcoin? That's when you use a computer to crunch numbers for the blockchain. This is how transactions are verified, and in return, you get some Bitcoin. It used to be easy to mine Bitcoins, but the difficulty increases substantially over time. Now, you need a server farm to earn much this way.

The blockchain info for a WannaCry wallet with $41,000 in Bitcoin.

The "proof of work" model for the blockchain has been of great interest to organizations that want nothing to do with Bitcoin. A blockchain database is by its very design resistant to tampering and can be managed in a distributed manner. Both Senegal and Tunisia use blockchain-based national currencies. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also hopes to use blockchain technology to help poor people without access to banking save and spend money.

How is Bitcoin involved with Ransomware?

So, Bitcoin could do a lot of good things, but you often hear about it in negative contexts. The anonymous aspect of Bitcoin has drawn cybercriminals to the digital currency. Ransomware attacks started occurring a few years ago as the price of Bitcoin shot upward, and the WannaCry ransomware made news just a few weeks ago. When your computer is infected with ransomware, it encrypts your important files and demands a Bitcoin payment to a specific address in exchange for the key. It's not like criminals can ask you to wire some easily traceable money to their bank account, so Bitcoin is the perfect solution. After a few hops in the public blockchain, the money is essentially clean.

Bitcoin is very much the wild west of international finance. Security firms have reported that some cryptocurrency from ransomware attacks ends up in the hands of North Korea, which is barred from many traditional financial markets by international sanctions. The same has been said about terrorist groups and organized crime, which risk having assets seized in traditional banks. All those ransomware payments are just the tip of the criminal iceberg, too. Numerous Bitcoin exchanges have also been the victim of hacking and fraud, which has led to Bitcoins being stolen from users. That money is just gone—there's no FDIC to refund people when Bitcoin is stolen.

What does Bitcoin mean for the economy?

Despite all these issues, Bitcoin is surging in part because more people are using it. Bitcoin fans believe steadfastly that it's the future. Regular people are becoming interested in cryptocurrencies, but it's still too complicated for mainstream adoption. If that ever happens, we could see a lot more highs and lows in the global economy as Bitcoin's value swings. And it does… a lot.

If you'd bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010, you'd be worth $35 million right now. However, if you bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin in early 2014, you'd have only had a quarter as much buying power a year later. Imagine being paid in Bitcoin, and then finding your money was only worth half as much a few days later. Economies with that kind of inflation are not stable, but Bitcoin has the advantage of operating alongside regular government-backed money. Almost no one has all their assets in Bitcoin.

Is Bitcoin going to last?

As a backdrop to all this, programmers are arguing over how best to manage Bitcoin going forward. There are calls to "hard fork" the currency, which could lead to two competing standards. That would cause even wilder swings in price. Whatever the the long term ramifications of these decisions, Bitcoin (or whatever cryptocurrency it becomes) isn't going anywhere.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about –
TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin Ransomware Education – VMola

Bitcoin Ransomware Education – VMola

VMola Ransomware Is Not A Big Threat

It is evident cyber criminals continue to explore the ransomware market for as long as they possibly can. VMola is one of the more recent strains of malicious software that asks its victims to make a Bitcoin payment. It does not appear to be one of the most sophisticated forms of malware, though. Then again, the developers may still make good money from this ransomware strain regardless.

It is good to know not every type of ransomware will cause a lot of damage. To be more specific, the VMola strain does encrypt computer files and displays a ransom message to its victims. However, it is not the biggest threat users will ever encounter, as the people responsible for this malicious tool have not put a lot of effort into creating this threat by any means.

To be more specific, the VMola ransomware makes no bones about what it expects its victims to do whatsoever. Once the tool infects a computer and encrypts all the files, it will display a very simple ransom message. In fact, there is no GUI associated with the message, nor are there links to click. Victims have to manually send 0.1 Bitcoin to the address provided in the note. Users will have to copy this address as well, as there is no payment button whatsoever.

Although the Bitcoin ransom in question is quite small compared to other types of ransomware, it should not be paid by victims in the first place. Considering how all victims who pay the money will need to include their email address along with the transaction ID, there is no reason to think victims will receive the decryption key. That is always one of the downsides when paying a ransom, as there is no guarantee of getting the decryption key whatsoever.

Luckily, it appears it is relatively easy to get rid of this ransomware without paying the Bitcoin demand. In fact, users can restore data from a previous backup. Most ransomware developers delete the shadow volume copy on the infected device right away, yet this malicious tool has no interest in doing this. That is another clear example of how this malicious tool is nothing more than an amateur attempt to make some quick money.

Given the fact that VMola has no fancy coding under the hood either, it will only be a matter of time until a free decryption tool is created. For now, such a tool does not exist, although using a proper anti-malware tool should get rid of the infection as well. Moreover, security experts believe VMola has only one decryption key for all victims, which should make it a lot easier to crack the encryption as well.

As we expect from ransomware these days, VMola is distributed through spam campaigns laden with malicious email attachments. This method of distribution has been quite successful over the past few months, and criminals have no reason to change a winning formula whatsoever. Never open an email from a sender you don’t know, and even if you do, make sure not to download the email attachment whatsoever. 

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about –
TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Why the Netflix Model is the Future for Enterprise Blockchain

Why the Netflix Model
is the Future for Enterprise Blockchain


What's a blockchain?

Why not use a distributed database? What's a smart contract? What the hell is chain code? Among blockchain industry participants, you'll get different answers and different views to all of these questions (and much more). Almost weekly, we read new blockchain white papers proposing new unique functionalities to solve a problem in a slightly better or different way. Of course, this amount of experimentation and research can only be good for the long-term growth and maturity of our industry, but it’s also made it extremely complicated for potential buyers to make determinations about what fits their needs best.

Although the term "blockchain" has generally been used as the umbrella name for a very broad collection of new technologies, it seems to me that our industry has not yet gone through the necessary objective scrutiny to separate the good, from the bad (and the ugly). Right or wrong, there seem to be some common themes among enterprise companies that became apparent over the course of 2016.

This is not a comprehensive list, but a few worth highlighting:

  1. Companies are looking to build using permissioned blockchain networks (whether as an interim solution or a long-term outcome)
  2. In many contexts, it will be important to maintain transaction privacy
  3. Current transaction performance on the public bitcoin and ethereum networks is insufficient
  4. Smart contracts provide an elegant framework to automate shared business processes.

Ethereum examined

In considering these challenges and how to solve them, a large number of companies have migrated their efforts to ethereum.It's by no means a perfect solution, but arguably because of its flexibility and because of the organic community of developers surrounding it, it remains unparalleled in the industry.

Rather than look at ethereum as one network, however, many consider it as a template to model, improve, customize and implement in difference contexts. Ethereum technology, therefore, has found its way into multiple networks serving multiple purposes, although imperfectly. To better achieve this outcome, I would argue that ethereum needs some rearchitecting to allow for multiple network implementations. In its current form, it was designed (and continues to be improved upon) as a protocol to power a single global network.

Incompatibility

Having come to the same realization, a number of companies have created versions of ethereum that fit their needs – in many cases with band-aid fixes that can only be described as temporary and imperfect. Among those companies, there are both startups and large organizations, most of which are primarily interested in one vertical problem set that impacts their industry and their business.

This has led to unnecessary fragmentation and incompatible modifications being made to the ethereum protocol in all these various versions. Contrary to the initial vision of ethereum (of being a general purpose protocol), many of these implementations are being built as single-purpose solutions to power specific industry applications.

As companies get closer to production, this problem is becoming more evident to those involved. Drawing parallels from the web services ('cloud') industry, I’m convinced that we’ll see a new trend this year. Rather than end users building their own customized infrastructure, and essentially managing their "full stack", a small number of providers will focus on offering modular infrastructure that can be leveraged with little effort by the companies solving challenges at the application layer.

Action ahead

This reorganization of the industry (infrastructure vs app) will allow for specialization and better long-term improvements to the underlying software while maintaining standards of compatibility. In the same way that Netflix is built using Amazon Web Services, mature companies emerging in this space will partner with infrastructure providers to scale their businesses more efficiently.

Ideally, as we work towards this model, the resulting infrastructure frameworks will allow for deployments that are fully compatible with 'public ethereum', while also enabling deployments that include custom functionalities required by the user.One of the great benefits I foresee from this model is that new proposed ideas, which today end up as competing protocols, could become alternative modules compatible with a standardized framework. This will make it easier for companies to adopt improvements without having to rebuild from scratch. Luckily, this isn't wishful thinking. Some of us are already on our way to making this real.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about –
TCC-Bitcoin.

 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Blockchain-The Invisible Technology That’s Changing the World

Blockchain
The Invisible Technology That's Changing the World

Large swaths of your digital life will soon run atop a blockchain foundation just beneath the surface and you may not even realize it.

 

Blockchain isn't a household buzzword yet,

like the cloud or the Internet of Things. It's not an in-your-face innovation you can see and touch as easily as a smartphone or a package from Amazon. But when it comes to our digital lives—every digital transaction; exchange of value, goods, and services; or private data —blockchain is the answer to a question we've been asking since the dawn of the internet age: How can we collectively trust what happens online?

Every year we run more of our lives—more core functions of our governments, economies, and societies—on the internet. We do our banking online. We shop online. We log into apps and services that make up our digital selves and send information back and forth. Think of blockchain as a historical fabric underneath recording everything that happens exactly as it occurs. Then the chain stitches that data into encrypted blocks that can never be modified and scatters the pieces across a worldwide network.

Blockchain always has an immutable "ledger" that you can see, verify, and control. At the same time, it has no single point of failure from which records or digital assets can be hacked or tampered with. Because of its distributed-ledger technology, blockchain has applications across every kind of digital record and transaction. And in 2017 we'll begin to see them explode.

First up are the big banks and tech giants. Big business will always drive innovation, and the rise of blockchain-based smart contracts (read on for more explanation of them) turns blockchain into a middleman to execute all manner of complex business deals, legal agreements, and automated exchanges of data. Companies such as Microsoft and IBM are using their cloud infrastructure to build custom blockchains for customers and experiment with their own use cases. On the academic side, researchers are exploring blockchain applications for projects ranging from digital identity to medical and insurance records.

At the same time, dozens of startups are using the technology for everything from global payments to music sharing, from tracking diamond sales to the legal marijuana industry. That's why blockchain's potential is so vast: When it comes to digital assets and transactions, you can put absolutely anything on a blockchain. A host of economic, legal, regulatory, and technological hurdles must be scaled before we see widespread adoption of blockchain technology, but first movers are making incredible strides. Within the next handful of years, large swaths of your digital life may begin to run atop a blockchain foundation—and you may not even realize it.

Beyond Bitcoin

Blockchain is the data structure that allows bitcoin,

the market-proof cryptocurrency, to thrive through a combination of decentralized encryption, anonymity, immutability, and global scale. It's the not-so-secret weapon behind the cryptocurrency's rise, and to explain how blockchain came to be, we have to begin briefly with the legacy of bitcoin. On Oct. 31, 2008, bitcoin founder and still-mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto (a pseudonym) published his famous white paper introducing the concept of a peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic cash system he called bitcoin. The bitcoin blockchain launched a few months later on Jan. 3, 2009.

For Jeff Garzik, it started the way many a buzzy idea in the tech community has over the years: with a post on "news for nerds" and OG tech aggregator Slashdot.org. Garzik is the CEO and co-founder of enterprise blockchain startup Bloq but has spent years as a bitcoin core developer. He was also recently elected to the Board of Directors of The Linux Foundation (as the first member with a blockchain and cryptocurrency background).

In July 2010, Garzik was working on Linux at enterprise software company Red Hat when what he calls "The Great Slashdotting" occurred. One viral post introduced programmers, investors, and tech nerd-dom at large to the concept of Bitcoin, and by extension, to Blockchain. Garzik had always been fascinated with the goal of making seamless digital payments work on a global scale and across borders. When he realized how bitcoin's underlying technology worked, he said it "knocked him on his bum."

"I had already thought to myself about how someone might create a decentralized version of PayPal. When Elon [Musk] and Peter Thiel and the other founders created PayPal, they had this vision of a global ledger that could easily and cheaply add entries between users like a database entry. That vision met reality with banking laws and cross-border friction, with legal hurdles and regulations not only in the U.S. but around the world. It made that kind of decentralized global currency impossible, or so we thought.

"Bitcoin turned all of that on its head," Garzik went on. "From an engineering perspective, the proof of work was this very elegant way to elect a leader, the block creator, in this decentralized and potentially adversarial system. Bitcoin layered on top of that engineering a set of economic and game theory incentives that paid you in the script of the system itself, creating this virtuous cycle where it's in your best economic interest to follow the consensus rules and create the longest, strongest chain possible. I didn't realize until that post on that day how elegantly it could be done."

It's important to understand why bitcoin and blockchain are not the same thing. In Garzik's TEDx Talk, he described bitcoin as "an organism." It has layers, like other software. On top of the bitcoin blockchain is billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency, but beneath that is a ledger just like any other blockchain. The underlying ledger works without the currency and can be used to securely transfer any digital asset over the Internet. The currency, on the other hand, doesn't work without the ledger. Garzik said bitcoin was just the first demo application of what blockchain can do. In this case, it built a monetary revolution on the back of an all-seeing ledger, one that's everywhere and nowhere at once, and gave the cryptocurrency its power.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
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Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Blockchain for Beginners

Blockchain for Beginners

  

People often get bogged down in technological complexity

when trying to understand blockchain, but the basic concept is a simple and universal one. We have facts and information and we don't want access, copied, or tampered with, but on the internet, there's always a chance it could be hacked or modified. Blockchain gives us a constant—a bedrock we know won't change once we put something on it and where a transaction will be verified only if it follows the rules.

The Nakamoto white paper explains the basics of "mining" data into a block, then using a hash (a time-stamped link) to chain those blocks together across a decentralized network of "nodes" that verify each and every transaction. The other key innovation in the white paper is using what's known as the proof-of-work (PoW) model to create distributed "trustless" consensus and solve the double-spend problem (ensuring cryptocurrency isn't spent more than once).

A "trustless system" doesn't mean it's a system you can't trust. Quite the opposite. Because the blockchain verifies each transaction through PoW, this means no trust is required between participants in a transaction. Where does the proof-of-work come from? The miners. A P2P network of bitcoin "miners" generates PoW as they hash blocks together, verifying transactions that then go into the ledger. In the 2016 book Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World, authors Don and Alex Tapscott explain Nakamoto's Bitcoin model about as succinctly

as one can:

"Bitcoin or other digital currency isn't saved in a file somewhere; it's represented by transactions recorded in a blockchain—kind of like a global spreadsheet or ledger, which leverages the resources of a large P2P network to verify and approve each bitcoin transaction. Each blockchain, like the [bitcoin blockchain] is distributed: it runs on computers provided by volunteers around the world. There is no central database to hack. The blockchain is public: anyone can view it at any time because it resides on the network… and the blockchain is encrypted… it uses public and private keys (rather like a two-key system to access a safety deposit box) to maintain virtual security."

Note that nothing is completely unhackable, particularly when you don't use it as intended. Blockchain's security works not only because it's encrypted but also because it's also decentralized. Victims of the biggest blockchain breaches and cryptocurrency heists (Mt. Gox in 2014 and Bitfinex in 2016) were targeted and pilfered clean because they tried to centralize a decentralized system. Another recent blockchain security incident, the DAO hack, came down to exploited loopholes in smart contracts written atop an established blockchain, Ethereum, not within the blockchain itself. Blockchain's underlying security and encryption model is a sound one. How that security is executed is a story for another feature.

So we've explained how the network functions and how security works, but how do the blocks actually connect to one another? Why does a blockchain get stronger the longer it gets? Where does the immutability come in? The Tapscotts' explanation continues:

"Every ten minutes, like the heartbeat of the bitcoin network, all the transactions conducted are verified, cleared, and stored in a block which is linked to the preceding block, thereby creating a chain. Each block must refer to the preceding block to be valid. The structure permanently time-stamps and stores exchanges of value, preventing anyone from altering the ledger… so the blockchain is a distributed ledger representing a network consensus of every transaction that has ever occurred. Like the World Wide Web of information, it's the World Wide Ledger of value… This new digital ledger can be programmed to record virtually everything of value and importance to humankind: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, financial accounts, medical procedures, insurance claims, votes, provenance of food, or anything else that can be expressed in code."

The concept of immutability is maybe the most crucial to understand when trying to wrap your head around blockchain and why it's important. An object that once created can never be changed has infinite value in our editable, ephemeral digital world. Harking back to the "strength in numbers" principle, the more nodes a blockchain is distributed over, the more stronger and more trusted it becomes. It's verification on top of verification to infinity. Bloq's Garzik talked about how the network effect of blockchain is key to its immutability, and why it's the reason the public bitcoin blockchain is still the most popular and trusted blockchain out there:

"The immutability factor is very much dependent on the network effect," said Garzik. "You see that with bitcoin very specifically. The cost of creating a new digital asset is essentially zero. Therefore you have to demonstrate an overwhelming amount of value in overcoming that network effect if you want to convince someone to switch away from the bitcoin blockchain, which not only has a good track record but high-security from a technical perspective. Security and immutability are a direct function of the economics—how much investment there is in the ecosystem, and how many people are using it."

Public vs. Private Blockchains

People within the industry talk a lot about public versus private blockchains. On a basic level, public blockchains are cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, enabling peer-to-peer transactions and, therefore, a revolution in seamless global payments. Private blockchains (those being built by distributed ledger consortium R3, for example) use blockchain-based application development platforms such as Ethereum or blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platforms such as those offered by Microsoft and IBM, running on private cloud infrastructure.

Brian Forde, Director of Digital Currency at the MIT Media Lab, likens public versus private blockchains to the relationship between an open-source technology, such as Linux, and companies like Red Hat that build on that tech for enterprise use. Public blockchains like bitcoin were the open-source movement that started it all, and private blockchains such as R3 are taking that technology and commercializing it for businesses.

"A private blockchain is an intranet, and a public blockchain is the Internet. The world was changed by the Internet, not a bunch of intranets. Where companies will be disrupted the most is not by private blockchains but public ones," said Forde.

Bloq's Garzik echoed a similar thought when explaining the difference between public and private blockchains, but he uses the open-source analogy a bit differently. Bloq bills itself as a "Red Hat for blockchain" of sorts, but its platform is built atop the bitcoin blockchain rather than a private or "permissioned" one. (Permissioned blockchains include an access control layer governing who can participate in the network.) Garzik's biggest question when looking at cloud providers and others building private blockchains and BaaS offerings is: Who's running that network?

"On the private and permissioned side, it's very much a question of who the referees are. I use that term specifically because what blockchains really provide is a neutral, level playing field for the execution of rules," said Garzik. "Those rules are applied to transactions that the actors create from that network. For bitcoin, it's rules like the monetary supply; the number of transactions that can fit into a block. All of that forms the economic incentives and ultimately consensus rules that everyone in the network complies with and cross-checks to create this system of checks and balances.

"Some of the other blockchain networks, whether it's [open-source project] Hyperledger, Ethereum, or a bank chain [such as R3] are opening the question of trust and trust shifting," Garzik went on. "It's less about the technology, and much more about a rapid, near real-time adjudication of rules between actors on a network. That's what blockchains do."

Once you understand what a blockchain is and how it works, the next question an everyday tech user would have is how it'll affect them. If you're not a business that's building a blockchain-based product or service, why should you care? As Don Tapscott explained it in Blockchain Revolution and in a 2016 TED Talk of his own, it's because blockchain brings us from the Internet of information into the "Internet of value." From his TED talk:

"For the past few decades, we've had the Internet of information," says Tapscott. "When I send you an email or a PowerPoint file, I'm actually not sending you the original; I'm sending you a copy. That's great, and it has democratized information. But when it comes to assets; things like money, financial assets like stocks and bonds, loyalty points, intellectual property, music, art, a vote… sending you a copy is a really bad idea. If I send you $100, it's really important that I don't have the money afterward.

"Today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries; middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit companies, and so on to establish trust in our economy," Tapscott continued. "These intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from identification and authentication of people through to clearing, settling, and record-keeping… they capture our data, which means we can't monetize or use it to better manage our lives, and our privacy is being undermined… so what if there were not only an Internet of information, but an Internet of value. Some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody, and where every kind of asset from money to music could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged, and managed, all without powerful intermediaries."

That, in a nutshell, is blockchain.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about –
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Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

India Local Politicians Criticize Government’s War On Cash, Bitcoin

India Local Politicians Criticize Government’s War On Cash, Bitcoin

  

Indian politicians have described Bitcoin as a “ransom finance platform” while criticizing the government’s digital economy reforms.

In a meeting of the country’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance quoted by the Economic Times, several local representatives “raised questions” about Bitcoin’s treatment in light of the WannaCry cyberattack.

“Members feared that it (Bitcoin) could become a parallel instrument for cycling black money and dodgy transactions and also a source of terror financing,” the publication reports quoting unnamed sources. A further participant, Dinesh Trivedi, reportedly continued that “today data is the new oil and Bitcoin is the ransom finance platform.” India has traditionally taken a highly precautionary stance to digital currency, with warnings from government and the central bank-fuelled by considerable press coverage of criminal cases involving Bitcoin. Nevertheless, consumers and politicians alike appear to be more concerned about Delhi’s war on cash and plan to link transactions to participants with biometric technology.

BJD member Bhartuhari Mahtab is said to have asked at the meeting:

“How can the government decide whether an individual must use cash, credit cards or other modes of transactions?”

India saw a huge spike in Bitcoin trading last week. In line with the majority of economies tracked by Coin Dance, the traders set a new high of 58.6 mln rupees for the week ending May 27.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin correction sees nearly $4 billion wiped off value of the cryptocurrency as price falls 19%

Bitcoin correction sees nearly $4 billion wiped off value of the cryptocurrency as price falls 19%

  • Bitcoin's price has fallen over $520 from the record high hit on Thursday last week.
  • Around $3.4 billion has been wiped off the value of bitcoin since Thursday.
  • Bitcoin experts still see the price rallying after the correction.

Nearly $4 billion has been wiped off of the value of bitcoin

in the past four days after a correction that has seen the cryptocurrency's price fall almost 19 percent from its recent record high. On May 24, bitcoin hit an all-time high of $2.791.69. But on Monday, the digital currency was trading at an intra-day high of $2,267.73, marking a more than $520 drop or 18.7 percent decline since the record high, according to data from CoinDesk. "The correction was actually quite brief, the prices today are still higher than that of a week ago," Bobby Lee, CEO of BTCC, a major bitcoin exchange, told CNBC by phone.

"I think the pullback was just a profit taking, a correction from the skyrocketing prices of last week." Bitcoin's market cap fell from $40.49 billion on Thursday to around $37.08 billion on Monday, a roughly $3.4 billion decline in value. Last week, Nicola Duke, a technical analyst at analysis platform Forex Analytix, told CNBC that $2,800 could mark a level of resistance where bitcoin pulls back. The analysis appeared to be correct with bitcoin reaching within $9 of the price before falling to the lower levels on Monday.Still, Lee thinks the correction is temporary and the price rise will continue because "the macro situation hasn't changed". Some major factors have been supporting bitcoin's major rally this year

including:

  • Japan legalizing the cryptocurrency for payments.
  • A resolution to the "scaling debate" within the bitcoin community. Transactions were taking longer than ever to process and the broader community was trying to figure out a way to boost the capacity of the Bitcoin network. A solution was created and backed by major parties within the community.
  • Start-ups raising funds through a so-called initial coin offering or ICO, which is helping to drive alternative cryptocurrencies.

Longer term, proponents of the digital currency are excited about the prospect of the broader sector which could potentially rival fiat currencies. Investors appear to currently be positioning for another price rise in bitcoin. Total active margin trading long positions have risen from 18,576.54 bitcoin on Thursday, to 21,168.90 bitcoin on Monday, according to data from CryptoCompare. Margin trading involves borrowing funds in order to buy or sell bitcoin. The rise in long positions shows that traders are expecting a rise in the cryptocurrency.

There is still a lot of bullishness in the market with some calls for the price to reach as high as $6,000 this year. "There is a lot of fresh liquidity flowing into Bitcoin, thanks to a surge in interest among investors in Asia, notably Japan and Korea, coupled with a resolution to the scaling debate. I would not be surprised to see the bitcoin price doubling again to around $6000 by the end of the year," Aurelien Menant, CEO of Gatecoin, a regulated cryptocurrency exchange

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin Exchange Woes See Almost $50 Mln Pass Through LocalBitcoins

Bitcoin Exchange Woes See Almost $50 Mln Pass Through LocalBitcoins

  

LocalBitcoins set a new all-time trading high of $45.7 mln
last week as Bitcoin almost hit $3,000.

Data compiled by Coin Dance confirms the week ending May 27 was the P2P marketplace’s busiest ever with $45,710,741 changing hands. Unlike previous records, the latest high was the result of a broad trend across all LocalBitcoins markets as traders rushed to cash in on Bitcoin’s steep climb. While not yet shown by the statistics, trading likely tailed off equally as steeply through Saturday as prices corrected below $2,000.

An additional factor accounting for steep rises in “banked” countries could well have been exchanging slowdowns, especially the problems faced by Coinbase, driving traders to less lucrative but considerably faster options such as marketplaces. Depending upon the country, LocalBitcoins traders will have faced rates of over $3,000 per coin or even higher. Last week, Cointelegraph reported that in South Korea, even official exchanges were quoting up to $4,500 for one Bitcoin. LocalBitcoins, meanwhile, also appeared to be suffering technical difficulties on Sunday, resolving them without giving specific details to users.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member