BitConnect Coin Sees Massive Growth Amid a Surge in Adoption

Bitcoin Press Release: Cryptocurrency newcomer, BitConnect Coin (BCC) sees continued growth after announcing previous records in value and market capitalization.

  

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies

reached an all-time high today, passing $60bn as the innovative assets continued to draw robust inflows. This figure reached $63.6bn at one point during the day's trading, according to online data service CoinMarketCap, which represented a weekly, monthly and quarterly increase of roughly 18%, 115%, and 220%, respectively. While analysts cited different variables as fueling these gains, one factor they noted was growing awareness of cryptocurrencies, one that is finding them emerge as a more diverse set of investments than observed previously. Tim Enneking, chairman of cryptocurrency hedge fund Crypto Asset Management, spoke to this development,

stating:

"Cryptocurrencies are finally hitting the general consciousness whereas before they were marginal, with the possible exception of bitcoin."

As the assets draw "increased media coverage," Ryan Rabaglia, head trader for Octagon Strategy, told CoinDesk new investors are coming to space. The growing interest in the space is also being felt at his over-the-counter (OTC) trading desk, which has been seeing a rise in business activity. "Our onboarding rates have experienced a massive spike and our trading volumes, at mid-month, have already increased exponentially compared on a month-to-month basis. We do not see this quieting any time soon," he said. When asked whether his company has experienced an increase in this activity amid the recent rally in cryptocurrency prices, Harry Yeh, managing partner of Binary Financial,

told CoinDesk:

"There's definitely a larger demand, not just for bitcoin, but [for] everything across the board."

Where next?

As for where cryptocurrency prices (and therefore total market cap) will go next, analysts offered mixed views. While the total value (and number) of assets in this space has surged in recent months, it is difficult to tell how much further they can climb without developing compelling value propositions. Yeh offered an optimistic point of view, telling CoinDesk that "we are just getting started". "People still don't really understand that there is a lot more room for this to move because it's a global phenomenon now. Expect more moves up but also some pullbacks like in the last week," he said.

Jacob Eliosoff, a cryptocurrency fund manager, offered a more cautious stance, telling CoinDesk that the market was "reaching the frenzy point". He expressed doubt as to how much longer these values would hold, noting that while nobody knows for sure when a bubble will pop, there are always warning signs. Eliosoff stated that in this case, a "crackdown" on initial coin offerings (ICOs), the process by which developers create new cryptocurrencies to fund projects, would likely spur a downturn. He also asserted that should bitcoin prices see a downturn, the cryptocurrency space could see diminished confidence.

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

  

“I am gonna go make a cryptocurrency company,”

BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen told Steal This Show podcast host Jamie King. “That is my plan.” Mr. Cohen plans to release a cryptocurrency to address Bitcoin’s mining inefficiency when it comes to wasting energy. “There is a loophole,” Mr. Cohen notes. “You can get them to work with proofs-of-work, but then this involves these warehouses burning electricity. But there is a loophole in that, which is proof-of-storage.” Mr. Cohen believes this problem can be solved by using the extra storage space on computers.

“…Instead of computers burning electricity to mine, you have storage space that is implicitly mining because it’s sitting there, and proves it’s sitting there.” The storage space is already “sitting online not doing anything” on desktop computers and cloud offerings with extra storage capacity, according to Mr. Cohen on the podcast. He adds: “There is lots of storage capacity out there, and its value is much greater than bitcoin mining rewards handed out.” Mr. Cohen’s vision for his cryptocurrency involves fusing proof-of-space and proof-of-time. Proof-of-space work when users have an interest in allocating non-trivial amounts of memory or disk space to solve a challenge presented by service providers. Proof-of-space is similar to proof-of-work. They do not, however, use CPU-bound functions.

“There are some technical issues, which adding in proofs-of-time fixes,” Mr. Cohen tells Crypto Insider over text chat, admitting the concept is difficult to explain. “The short of it is that proofs-of-time keep an attacker from making a whole new fake history instantly, a problem caused by the property that mining requires no power.”

Mr. Cohen adds: “’Proof-of-time’ refers to a sequential proof-of-work, like the old saying that one woman can make a baby in nine months, but nine women can’t make a baby in one month.” The main idea is zero waste in mining. “One of the benefits of storage based things is there is a lot less centralization in mining, so there is less concern about a 51% attack.” The good part of this is subtle, Mr. Cohen tells Steal This Show listeners. “There are economic resources that you can apply towards rewards,” he elucidates. “People will spend resources getting rewards. So it will still be wasteful, but there is a waste that has already happened and you’re leveraging that at no additional cost.”

The BitTorrent founder’s specialty might work well applied to the world of cryptocurrency. Mr. Cohen launched BitTorrent to solve problems with bandwidth scarcity in sharing data over the internet, and his platform still today enables individuals to distribute large files sans the need for specialized infrastructure. Before starting on his own cryptocurrency, Mr. Cohen must first tie up loose ends with BitTorrent, Inc., the business wing of his distributed software. “In the next few months, I’m going to devote myself full-time to the cryptocurrency stuff,” Mr. Cohen notes on the podcast. Burstcoin, an altcoin listed on Coin Market Cap, uses what the developers' term proof-of-capacity as its consensus method. It appears to merely be a re-brand of proof-of-space, the latter of which is the term preferred by academic literature.

As Mr. Cohen tells Crypto Insider, critics of Burstcoin lament the developers do not acknowledge Hellman time-space trade-offs in their coding. The coin, they say, attempts to solve problems by relying on a platform called NXT, instead of developing their own innovations. It’s not the first time Mr. Cohen mentioned this plan. The BitTorrent founder presented a talk at the Stanford Blockchain Conference, in which he examined the potential of proof-of-space and proof-of-time in a cryptocurrency. One slide in his presentation reads: “There are massive amounts of unused online storage in the world. [A cyptocurrency] requires no additional power to mine. No potential for ASICs. The available miners are highly decentralized.”

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

As Cryptocurrencies Reach New Highs, The Ethereal Summit Paints A Rich Future

From January 1 to today, the cryptocurrency Ether has gone from $8 to $130
— a 16x return.

Ether is the currency of the Ethereum network, a smart contract platform which currently has a market capitalization of $12 billion. Generally considered the second-most successful cryptocurrency after bitcoin, it has been the launchpad for myriad new tokens that make up the hot “initial coin offering” trend. Even companies such as JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Intel, BBVA, Santander, UBS, Credit Suisse, Accenture, and others have joined an Ethereum enterprise effort. These are remarkable feats for a cryptocurrency not even two years old.

One of the companies doing the most to promote the development and usage of Ethereum around the world is Consensus Systems (ConsenSys), which bills itself as a “venture production studio” devoted to building Ethereum-based software, whether in the form of decentralized applications or private blockchains for the enterprise.

Aside from its unconventional structure, the self-funded ConsenSys, founded by Joseph Lubin who is also one of the co-founders of Ethereum, stands out for the location of its headquarters: in the heart of hipster Brooklyn, in an area once known for underground dance parties at warehouse venues that went only by addresses. In recent years, the neighborhood has gotten trendier, with juice bars, top restaurants and even proper clubs that have actual names. (ConsenSys also has five other offices around the world.)

On Friday, in keeping with its offbeat nature, ConsenSys held the Ethereal Summit, a blockchain event with 650 attendees that, instead of centering like most others, around financial services, shined a spotlight on culture projects. “Blockchain events are either enterprise-focused or IT-focused. We thought, Why not do something culture-focused?” said Amanda Gutterman, ConsenSys’s chief marketing officer. Some of the industries aside from financial services that the

Event aimed to touch on were sustainability, arts, and humanitarian aid.

A panel on financial inclusion

I was invited to speak on a panel about what it’s like for media covering this technology, and in situations like these, since I freelance, the conference often covers my transportation and hotel. Aside from the somewhat atypical speaker lineup, the first clue I had that this wasn’t going to be a normal conference was when my Lyft pulled up to the hotel. Just from the look of it, I knew it would rank as one of the nicest places this budget traveler has ever rested her weary head. (As were the lodgings for this cryptocurrency-related conference.) When checking in, the friendly men at the front desk told me the hotel had Teslas that I should take for a spin. When I demurred, citing the challenge of driving in New York City, they said the Teslas came with chauffeurs. These first few minutes of my trip underscored one of the themes that have recently permeated coverage of the crypto space: that there’s money to be had in this new token-based internet.

Ethereal capped off a week in which the rampantly speculative ICO (“initial coin offering”) market grew by at least $50 million to total just under $470 million over two years, bitcoin's market cap as a percentage of all cryptocurrencies fell below 50% for the first time, the price of ether jumped from $90 to $126, and bitcoin surged from $1,762 to almost $2,000. And it may be just a taste of what is to come, with the largest industry conference, Consensus, organized by trade publication CoinDesk, to be held the next week, and right on the heels of that, Token Summit, a daylong conference dedicated to the new blockchain-based internet. Plus, in the coming days or weeks, the Tim Ferriss podcast, one of the most popular business podcasts, will be featuring a couple of prime guests from the cryptocurrency world.

The excitement over rising prices may have prompted these comments about the frothy ICO markets from one of the first keynotes, London-based Vinay Gupta of Hexayurt Capital, who could not fly to the U.S. due to visa issues and so sent his remarks in a video instead. “My hope for the ICO markets is that people will be extremely well-behaved and well-disciplined so there isn’t a mess for regulators to clean up,” he said to a standing room only crowd. “The price of freedom is to be effectively self-governing. We really, really want people to take that serious message, figure out how to keep those markets clean and then you protect the entire ecosystem.” (It looks like that is already happening to some extent.)

Comments about the bubble-like activity evident across the crypto space peppered the day, which had a packed agenda of panels and presentations on two stages, plus bean bags in both venues for worn-out attendees. “We’re living in a really speculative market right now,” said Jalak Jobanputra, founder and managing partner of FuturePerfect Ventures, adding that the market cap of all cryptos just surpassed that of Netflix. “I’ve been through two bubbles and crashes in my venture career — one was in ’99/2000, and the other was 2008. But as we saw with the internet, we’ll see some real value being created out of the experimentation happening right now.” As for what that would look like, Gupta said Ethereum was “moving toward a system where you can see the entire world reflected in the digital in a simple computing surface.” Comparing it to how maps made geography easier to understand, he said, “So it’s possible to look at the world with the blockchain mapping the geography with the institutions visible as actors. … Then you could get an overview of how the system as a whole, works.”

Underpinning the speakers’ visions of a blockchain future were at least optimistic if not utopian hopes that these new networks would also positively impact society. Joel Monegro, on the investing team at Union Square Ventures, contrasted tokens with stocks. “At a high level, a share of stock in a company means a proportional right to the profits of a business,” he said, adding that this, however, drives the holders to increase profits. “The problem is when companies are driven to increase profitability, they end up creating market failures because they expand too broadly or vertically into new business areas where they find it difficult to compete or amass market power,” he said. “The other problem with equity is it incentivizes the holders of that equity to hold as much of it as possible to concentrate the equity because it represents a perpetual right to profits.”

Tokens, he said, invert those incentives. “A token has financial value when the network or service it represents is being used an increasing amount, so you’re not incentivized to get a company to increase profits but rather incentivized to get as many as people as possible to use the service,” he said. This then leads to the value being distributed more broadly. William Mougayar, a venture capitalist and author of The Business Blockchain who is organizing next week’s Token Summit (and was a recent guest on my podcast), said that everyone has three jobs: First, the traditionally defined job — work you do for a paycheck — and then the work of taking care yourself and your family. “Then the third job was the work given to us by another company,” he said, “whether it’s buying a ticket or renting a car — all kinds of jobs are being given to us, and we’re not being compensated. However, in the future, more and more, the work we’ll be doing, whether it’s passive or active, will be compensated by a token of some sort.”

Other panels and presentations discussed everything from conscientious consumption via supply chains (in which SlaveFreeTrade president Brian Iselin removed his clothes on stage) to getting identity on the blockchain from birth; from whether the media has a responsibility to give a new technology like blockchain positive coverage to what it looks like to have many city functions run on blockchains; from what a decentralized entertainment network looks like to why this may be cryptocurrency’s “Netscape moment" (built, not on bitcoin, but on Ethereum).

The wide range of applications made possible with blockchain technology was reflected in the crowd, which seemed more creative and diverse than most blockchain conferences. On Thursday night, at a pre-conference cocktail party, while enjoying spicy snapper ceviche, black bean taquitos and steak, an economist and  Singularity University graduate talked up his work on Crowdjury, a network that will enable us to serve as arbitrators in other people’s disputes using tokens, and a virtual reality artist showed the art he had created using data from NASA and NOAA.

It was a scene reflected in Lubin’s closing remarks the next day. Remarking on how he majored in computer science and electrical engineering as opposed to economics, he said, “I was a computer nerd growing up on Star Trek … It was obvious to me that the geeks would inherit the earth.” Then, describing how 9/11 represented, for him, a loss of innocence that led him to explore the global economy and conclude that it was morally bankrupt, he talked about how top-down command-and-control methods had gotten society to a certain level of progress but “decentralized economic, social and political systems will be more effective, more fluid and far less susceptible to corruption.”

He finished with, “Many times, people have said to me and other ConsenSys members, You guys are going to dominate, you guys are going to take over the world. The whole point of decentralization, the Ethereum project, the work we do with ConsenSys is the exact opposite. We’re working to enable the planet to better organize itself, and we are building technology that we believe will make it impossible for any subset of actors to take over the world. Welcome to the decentralized future.” A whoop of cheers went up. Across the street, beers, bites, and beats awaited the attendees, who continued spinning up their dreams of the future in the summer night breeze. Ether, having started the day at $97, finished it at $127.

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin Price Breached $2,000, Pundits Coin-Flip What Comes Next

  

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin Price Hits $2,087, Trading in Japan, South Korea for $2,350

  

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Palestine Considers Launching Its Own Bitcoin, But Why Reinventing Wheel?

  

In a bid to free its economy,

Palestine is considering a digital national currency. But with Bitcoin around, is it worth reinventing the wheel?

Using foreign currencies

There are many countries that do not have a national currency and instead use another country’s currency in daily lives. For example, East Timor, British Virgin Islands, Palau and Zimbabwe use the US dollar. Similarly, Montenegro, San Marino and Kosovo use the Euro. The case of Palestine is an interesting one as it uses multiple currencies like the US dollar, Jordanian Dinar and the Israeli Shekel. Now, it has emerged that the Palestine Monetary Authority (PMA) is planning its own digital currency, something of a Palestinian Bitcoin.

Enter the Palestinian Pound

There are a number of digital currencies already in circulation. Bitcoin, of course, is the most popular and widely used of them all. These currencies are not issued by a central monetary authority like a central bank. However, inspired by them some central banks have been mulling the idea of launching national cryptocurrencies as well. We reported that Senegal was introducing a national cryptocurrency as an example. Similar plans have also been discussed with regards to Sweden and China.

A Palestinian currency thus would not be the first or unique in this respect but it does bring to fore an interesting use case: countries that have trouble printing their own currencies due to one reason or another can explore a digital currency alternative. The proposed digital currency would be called the Palestine Pound.

Skirting Israeli curbs

The proposed digital currency can help Palestinians skirt around Israeli curbs that have been imposed and the need for obtaining clearance from them.

Azzam Shawwa, Governor of the Palestine Monetary Authority was quoted by Reuters as saying:

“If we print currency, to get it into the country you would always need clearance from the Israelis and that could be an obstacle, So that is why we don't want to go into it.”

The digital currency would largely eliminate that problem for the Palestinians. According to Reuters another problem that PMA might encounter is the 1994 Paris Protocol, which gives PMA the legitimacy of a central bank but does not allow it to issue currency. The Paris Protocol suggests that the Palestinians use the Israeli currency – The Shekel instead.

Five-year strategy

According to what the PMA governor told Reuters, the Palestine Pound is a part of the bank’s ‘five-year strategy’, which will be published before the end of 2017. The governor also revealed that the digital currency route is a preferred alternative. It would be interesting to see if the Palestinians could pull off a national cryptocurrency in the short to medium term.

However, the governor seems to realize the scope of the wider challenge that awaits him. He revealed to Reuters:

“But it's not only the currency, you have to see the economy also. Issuing (a currency) is something, but you also need the backbone of the currency; reserves, gold, oil and that is part of the business plan.”

Bitcoin to help oppressed

While a national currency for Palestine may or may not happen, countries that do not have their own currencies can always use Bitcoin as an alternative.

As Max Keiser wrote way back in 2013 in RT:

“Bitcoin, like the spiritual leaders who have come before it in the Middle-Eastern desert, is a miraculous gift capable of transforming an oppressed, forgotten people. The Palestinian economy is a multi-billion dollar economy that unfortunately benefits mostly outsiders. But if Bitcoin were adopted as the official currency, Palestinians would be able to shape their own economic destiny and in so doing their sovereign destiny.”

If economic independence is the stated aim of the PMA, then it should probably explore what already exists instead of reinventing the wheel.

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Top 10 Reshuffles On CoinMarketCap: Ethereum vs. Ripple,
Nem vs. Litecoin & More

  

As Bitcoin continues to grow,

some altcoins are not being left behind either. Last week there was an intense competition on the Top 10 of CoinMarketCap with some casualties being posted. It was so engrossing to see some old cryptocurrencies uprooted from their longstanding positions. This registered the fact that no entity has a monopoly over a particular position.

Ethereum lost to Ripple

Smart Contract king, Ethereum in a very surprising circumstance lost its long-held number two spot to snowballing Bank Transfer giant Ripple. Fascinatingly, within the week it doubled its value and it was near twice the value of Ethereum. Rising almost 40 percent, its market cap was over $15 bln. It has now lost almost $2 bln and Ethereum is now closing the gap. Actually, it was the second best-performing cryptocurrency on the top 10 last week.

Yet still, Ripple leads Ether with almost $2 bln in Market Cap. Some analysts in the space are strongly convinced it is likely that it will recover and take back the number two position it nearly monopolized for a couple of years. It remained to be seen since Ripple keeps making deals with banks around the world expanding its portfolios. Anyway, Ethereum with no doubt as well has become a popular smart contract platform.

NEM pushed Litecoin

In a related development, on Thursday fast-growing NEM also pushed SegWit trailblazer, Litecoin to the fifth rank and became the world's fourth most valuable digital currency. This was when the Ethereum Token rose a towering 50 percent in growth rate. It became one of the notorious astonishments associated with altcoins rise since Litecoin, the silver of crypto has been performing awesomely in the market since choosing the SegWit path. Well in this space nothing is no more a bewilderment. NEM now holds more than $2 bln in Market Capitalization. Significantly New Economic Movement (NEM) was the best performing crypto in the week and continues to lead in altcoin growth in 2017. It seems to be attracting more investors to its fold.

Stellar Lumen vs. Monero

Another interesting raging battle is between the radioactivity of Ripple as a result of a misunderstanding, Stellar Lumen, and steadily declining Monero. On Thursday XLM dislodged Monero from the eighth rank but the latter fought back gallantly to take it back on Friday. Alas! This did not last long and the Microfinance Blockchain once again took over on Saturday. At the time of filing this report, the difference in Market Cap between the two was $20 mln. If Monero remains the way it is tanking, the likelihood of gaining back the position is slim. Moreover, Stellar Lumen so far has given all indications it has come to the top 10 to stay.

ByteCoin bites Steem

Among the other things, last week witnessed a newcomer in the ranks of the elites when Bytecoin crashed the gates of the top 10 sending Steem stumbling down below. For four days now Bytecoin has held the tenth position firmly. It is up to them to prove to the community if they have come to stay or not. Meanwhile, Siacoin is barking fiercely to gain entrance to the top as it is now at the eleventh spot. Cointelegraph anticipates a hot week ahead.

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Untraceable Coins Storming Into Top 10 Cryptocurrencies – Bytecoin Surge

Bytecoin, an untraceable privacy-preserving cryptocurrency,

has just seen an astronomical triple-digit percent surge in price. The cryptocurrency soared to the all time high market capitacapitalization44,000,000, before calming down to around $300,000,000 and establishing itself at the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization at the time of writing (according to CoinMarketCap). A symbolic turning point for one of the first untraceable cryptocurrencies launched in 2012.

The price hike happens upon the flourishing investor interest in cryptocurrency markets, and in particular upon the growing public appreciation of untraceable cryptocurrencies that contain privacy mechanisms (other examples are Monero, Dash and Zcash, which have also experienced an increase in value in the recent months). The Bytecoin surge may also be attributed to the announcement of the new features, which include allegedly never-before-implemented untraceable tokens – also known as “digital assets” or “colored coins”.

Bug discovery

Amid the Bytecoin price rise, a cryptocurrency Monero has released a statement disclosing a vulnerability in the CryptoNote protocol, that underlies both Monero and Bytecoin cryptocurrencies. As written in the statement, the bug “allows for the creation of an unlimited number of coins in a way that is undetectable to an observer unless they know about the fatal flaw and can search for it.” The statement does not list Bytecoin as one of the currencies that have updated the protocol following the detection of the bug.

According to the official response from the Bytecoin, its development team has been aware of the vulnerability in April 2017, when during software testing it has discovered that several malicious transactions creating 504 million Bytecoins had appeared in the network – which accounts for 0.2% of the total 183 billion Bytecoin supply.

Questions remain

The development team states that it patched the bug and worked with the mining services to update their software (that validates the transactions in the network), as soon as the bug was found. According to Minergate, the major Bytecoin mining pool, it was contacted by the Bytecoin team in the mid April and “the fix to the mining software has been implemented by adding more checks for the transactions consistency” shortly thereafter.

The updated version prevented blocks with malicious transactions to be mined and thus no extra coins could be created. The questions still remain about the cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets, who are supposedly “safe to stick with the previous version of software”, according to the Bytecoin statement, but “encouraged to update the protocol”.

The rise of token untraceability

In spite of this bug discovery and patching, the CryptoNote-based cryptocurrency markets, including Monero and Bytecoin, has been positive, keeping them among the top 10 by capitalisation. Whether it is because the coin holders are not well-informed of the protocol issues or they are confident of the development teams’ ability to manage these issues, the fact remains that Monero’s and Bytecoin’s capitalizations jointly amount to $750,000,000 at the time of writing, and as a result many early adopters have gone from rags to riches.

With the ICO phenomenon coming into place this may not be all, as new cryptocurrency teams emerge stating their intention to adopt the privacy-preserving CryptoNote protocol. In fact, if the concept of untraceable tokens (untraceable digital assets) becomes a reality this year as promised in the Bytecoin roadmap, the major trends of the crypto world could in theory converge: the booming ICO phenomenon, the increasing capitalisation of tokens created on top of various blockchain platforms, and the growing market interest in untraceability and privacy. We are here to observe and see.

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member