China’s bitcoin miners have long embodied a contradiction. Cryptocurrency trading is illegal in the country; initial coin offerings, used to fund new blockchain projects, are banned; and Chinese banks can hardly touch the stuff. And yet somehow the country has remained the epicenter of global cryptocurrency mining, home to more of the computing power used to mint new bitcoin than any other country.Now the Chinese government has proposed to ban mining.
Google is cracking down on cryptocurrency-related advertising.The company is updating its financial services-related ad policies to ban any advertising about cryptocurrency-related content, including initial coin offerings (ICOs), wallets, and trading advice, Google's director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, told CNBC.That means that even companies with legitimate cryptocurrency offerings won't be allowed to serve ads through any of Google's ad products, which place advertising on its own sites as well as third-party websites.This update will go into effect in June 2018, according to a company post.
South Korea has been flirting with banning cryptocurrency trading for some time now. However, now it appears the country is backtracking. Bloomberg reports that South Korea's regulators have indicated that they will continue to support "normal" trading of the cryptocurrency.In late 2017, South Korea, which is the third largest market for cryptocurrency, began cracking down on Bitcoin traders. It banned initial coin offerings and stopped allowing anonymous cryptocurrency accounts. At the beginning of this year, South Korean officials announced an outright ban on cryptocurrency trading was in the works. Many cryptocurrencies were priced higher on South Korea's exchanges than in the rest of the world, and officials in the country thought of it as gambling. There was also the fear that cryptocurrency trading could lead to tax evasion.Apparently, South Korean regulators have worked out their concerns, because Choe Heungsik, the governor of South Korea's Financial Supervisory Service, has said that his organization is trying to normalize cryptocurrency trading. This is a big shift in rhetoric against digital currencies.
Jolted by the global investment craze over bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, U.S. lawmakers are moving to consider new rules that could impose stricter federal oversight on the emerging asset class, several top lawmakers told Reuters.Bipartisan momentum is growing in the Senate and House of Representatives for action to address the risks posed by virtual currencies to investors and the financial system, they said.Even free-market Republican conservatives, normally wary of government red tape, said regulation could be needed if cryptocurrencies threaten the U.S. economy.“There’s no question about the fact that there is a need for a regulatory framework,” said Republican Senator Mike Rounds, a Senate Banking Committee member.Digital assets currently fall into a jurisdictional gray area between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and individual states.Much of the concern on Capitol Hill is focused on speculative trading and investing in cryptocurrencies, leading some lawmakers to push for digital assets to be regulated as securities and subject to the SEC’s investor protection rules.“The SEC is properly the lead on the issue,” said Republican Representative Bill Huizenga, chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets which will hold hearings on the issue in coming weeks.
The tumble in cryptocurrencies that erased nearly $500 billion of market value over the past month could get a lot worse, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s global head of investment research.ost digital currencies are unlikely to survive in their current form, and investors should prepare for coins to lose all their value as they’re replaced by a small set of future competitors, Goldman’s Steve Strongin said in a report dated Feb. 5. While he didn’t posit a timeframe for losses in existing coins, he said recent price swings indicated a bubble and that the tendency for different tokens to move in lockstep wasn’t rational for a “few-winners-take-most” market.“The high correlation between the different cryptocurrencies worries me,” Strongin said. “Because of the lack of intrinsic value, the currencies that don’t survive will most likely trade to zero.”
A man sued T-Mobile on Sunday, claiming that the company’s lack of security allowed hackers to enter his wireless account last fall and steal cryptocoins worth thousands of dollars.Carlos Tapang of Washington state accuses T-Mobile of having “improperly allowed wrongdoers to access” his wireless account on November 7th last year. The hackers then cancelled his number and transferred it to an AT&T account under their control. “T-Mobile was unable to contain this security breach until the next day,” when it finally got the number back from AT&T, Tapang alleges in the suit, first spotted by Law360.After gaining control of his phone number, the hackers were able to change the password on one of Tapang’s cryptocurrency accounts and steal 1,000 OmiseGo (OMG) tokens and 19.6 BitConnect coins, Tapang claims.The hackers then exchanged the coins for 2.875 Bitcoin and transferred it out of his account, the suit states. On November 7th, the price of Bitcoin was $7,118.80, so had the hackers cashed out then, they would have netted a profit of $20,466.55.Tapang goes on to say, “After the incident, BTC price reached more than $17,000.00 per coin,” but given the volatility of bitcoin prices, the hackers may not have benefited from the soar.The suit alleges T-Mobile is at fault partly because the carrier said it would add a PIN code to Tapang’s account prior to the incident, but didn’t actually implement it. Tapang also states that hackers are able to call T-Mobile’s customer support multiple times to gain access to customer accounts, until they’re able to get an agent on the line that would grant them access without requiring further identity verification. The complaint also lists several anonymous internet users who have posted about similar security breaches to their own T-Mobile accounts.
A sharp fall in the value of Bitcoin may cause other cryptocurrencies to crash, but is unlikely to have a significant impact on traditional assets, according to new research published in the journal Economics Letters.Researchers from Anglia Ruskin University, Dublin City University and Trinity College Dublin examined the performance of three established cryptocurrencies - Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ripple - and analysed their relationship with a variety of other financial assets such as gold, bonds and stocks.The study found that Bitcoin prices affect Ripple, with a spillover of 28.37%, and Litecoin (42.3%), while the highest spillover from a cryptocurrency to a "traditional" asset was Bitcoin to Forex (FX), at 15.25%. In reverse, the highest price spillover from traditional assets to a cryptocurrency - Forex (FX) to Bitcoin - is only 4.18%.The study also found that the volatility of cryptocurrencies is significantly higher than that of other assets, and that Ripple and Litecoin have limited influence on Bitcoin, proving that Bitcoin is the clear leader in the cryptocurrency market. The research also suggests that Ripple and Litecoin have seen their values increased thanks to the rapid growth of Bitcoin.Co-author Dr Larisa Yarovaya, Lecturer in Accounting and Finance at Anglia Ruskin University, said: "We identified that cryptocurrencies are relatively isolated from other financial assets, but are interlinked with each other."This means a decrease in the price of Bitcoin is unlikely to decrease the price of gold, or negatively affect the stock market of US, but the strong links between Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies mean that those markets will fall.
As China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies broadens to bitcoin miners, some of the industry’s biggest players are shifting operations overseas.Bitmain, which runs China’s two largest bitcoin-mining collectives, is setting up regional headquarters in Singapore and now has mining operations in the U.S. and Canada, Wu Jihan, the company’s co-founder, said in an interview. BTC.Top, the third-biggest mining pool, is opening a facility in Canada and ViaBTC, ranked No. 4, has operations in Iceland and America, their founders said.The moves underscore how China’s once-dominant role in the world of cryptocurrencies is shrinking as policy makers clamp down.
We’re excited to announce that customers will be able to buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase. You can read more about Bitcoin Cash on our FAQ page.Sends and receives are available immediately. Buys and sells will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will take a few hours.
In yet another backflip worthy of the Moscow Circus, a Russian minister has said that the country will never legalize bitcoin, just seven months after another government minister said it was considering making it legal.Minister of Communications and Mass Media Nikolai Nikiforov made the statement Monday, saying that “bitcoin is a foreign project for using blockchain technology, the Russian law will never consider bitcoin as a legal entity in the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.”
President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday crypto-currencies were risky and used for crime, as Russia’s central bank said it would block websites selling bitcoin and its rivals - a change of tone from a month-old promise to legalize the market.
Bitcoin qualifies as money, a federal judge ruled on Monday, in a decision linked to a criminal case over hacking attacks against JPMorgan Chase & Co and other companies.
U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan rejected a bid by Anthony Murgio to dismiss two charges related to his alleged operation of Coin.mx, which prosecutors have called an unlicensed bitcoin exchange.
Murgio had argued that bitcoin did not qualify as "funds" under the federal law prohibiting the operation of unlicensed money transmitting businesses.
But the judge, like her colleague Jed Rakoff in an unrelated 2014 case, said the virtual currency met that definition.
The European Commission is proposing the creation of a database that will hold information on users of virtual currencies, which will record data on the user's real world identity, along with all associated wallet addresses.
A Miami-Dade judge ruled Monday that Bitcoin is not actually money, a decision hailed by proponents of the virtual currency that has become popular across the world.
In a case closely watched in financial and tech circles, the judge threw out the felony charges against website designer Michell Espinoza, who had been charged with illegally transmitting and laundering $1,500 worth of Bitcoins. He sold them to undercover detectives who told him they wanted to use the money to buy stolen credit-card numbers.
But Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Teresa Mary Pooler ruled that Bitcoin was not backed by any government or bank, and was not “tangible wealth” and “cannot be hidden under a mattress like cash and gold bars.”
“The court is not an expert in economics, however, it is very clear, even to someone with limited knowledge in the area, the Bitcoin has a long way to go before it the equivalent of money,” Pooler wrote in an eight-page order.
The judge also wrote that Florida law – which says someone can be charged with money laundering if they engage in a financial transaction that will “promote” illegal activity – is way too vague to apply to Bitcoin.
“This court is unwilling to punish a man for selling his property to another, when his actions fall under a statute that is so vaguely written that even legal professionals have difficulty finding a singular meaning,” she wrote.
The ruling was lauded by Bitcoin experts who believe the ruling will encourage the use of the virtual currency, and offer a roadmap to governments across the world that have struggled to understand and regulate it.
A delegation of American executives flew to Beijing in April for a secret meeting just blocks from Tiananmen Square. They had come to court the new kingmakers in one of the strangest experiments in money the world has seen: the virtual currency known as Bitcoin.
Against long odds, and despite an abstruse structure, in which supercomputers “mine” the currency via mathematical formulas, Bitcoin has become a multibillion-dollar industry. It has attracted major investments from Silicon Valley and a significant following on Wall Street.
Yet Bitcoin, which is both a new kind of digital money and an unusual financial network, is having something of an identity crisis. Like so many technologies before it, the virtual currency is coming up against the inevitable push and pull between commercial growth and the purity of its original ambitions.
In its early conception, Bitcoin was to exist beyond the control of any single government or country. It would be based everywhere and nowhere.
Yet despite the talk of a borderless currency, a handful of Chinese companies have effectively assumed majority control of the Bitcoin network. They have done so through canny investments and vast farms of computer servers dispersed around the country. The American delegation flew to Beijing because that was where much of the Bitcoin power was concentrated.
When Mark Karpeles, the CEO of what was once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, said that the company had gone bankrupt because 800,000 bitcoins (worth nearly half a billion dollars at the time) had been hacked, he wasn’t exactly lying. He wasn’t exactly telling the whole truth, either, but there was an intriguing element of fact.
At least 80,000 had been hacked before Karpeles even took over the company, and that initial cyber theft began a spiral of trouble that may have led directly to the firm’s financial collapse.
This week The Daily Beast obtained internal emails, contracts,, and other documents related to the implosion of Karpeles’s company, Mt. Gox. Along with information provided by a former employee who handled accounting for the firm, the documents reveal previously unreported details about how Mt. Gox failed, and why.
In December 2014, Microsoft added Bitcoin as a payment option, courtesy of Bitcoin processor BitPay, for a variety of its gaming and mobile content. On Saturday, a simple message titled “Microsoft Store doesn’t accept Bitcoin” was spotted on Microsoft’s website, and naturally some interpreted that as meaning support for the digital currency had ended. We asked Microsoft for clarification, but the company only got back to us today — with an explanation that it was all a mistake.
Microsoft has silently removed support for Bitcoin in the Windows 10 Store, despite the fact that the company adopted the digital currency in late 2014 with much fanfare.
Although an official statement from Microsoft is not yet available – we’ve reached out to the company for a word on this and will update the article when we get it, an update made to the Windows Store FAQ reveals that Bitcoin is not accepted anymore when buying content from Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile stores.
“Microsoft Store doesn't accept Bitcoin. You can no longer redeem Bitcoin into your Microsoft account. Existing balances in your account will still be available for purchases from Microsoft Store, but can't be refunded,” the update, which applies to Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile, reads.
