South Korea Will NOT ban Cryptocurrencies After all?

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.

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Converging on Cryptocurrencies #6

Altcoins:

The Winklevoss twins' cryptocurrency exchange has gotten the NY regulators go ahead to trade ethereum.

Bitcoin:

Coinkite, a web based bitcoin wallet, has been forced to shut down due to repeated DDOS attacks.

The bitcoin network could consume as much electricity as Denmark by 2020.

One of the cofounders of Mozilla is offering to pay ad viewers in bitcoin.

You can now use bitcoin to buy games on Steam.

The Swiss city of Zug will accept bitcoin for public services.

Craig Wright presents some evidence he is the creator of bitcoin. This stirred some controversy to say the least.  Doubts.  Serious doubts.

It seems he chickened out or was only ever a scam.

The quest to find Satoshi Nakamoto continues then.

Blockchain:

Ruminating on blockchains and distributed ledgers.

Using the blockchain for medical trials.

Converging on Cryptocurrencies #5

AltCoins:

GridCoin is an attempt to incentivize doing BOINC related science computing. This is something I discussed with friends at LBNL a couple years ago. The timing is...amusing.

The Bank of England has paid for the development of RSCoin, a centrally controlled cryptocurrency.  It matches, really well actually, what I predicted for a 'cryptodollar' would be from the US.

Bitcoin:

There was a big mix up about whether or not Microsoft would be accepting bitcoin.

Quickbit, a bitcoin trading platform, had a cyberattack and will be down for an extended period. No funds were supposedly lost though.

Crime:

BitcoinWisdom Ads Remover is a Chrome extension implicated in stealing bitcoins from transactions.

Law enforcement actually really likes bitcoin because it allows for tracking the transactions very clearly due to its public ledger (blockchain).

Regulation:

Bitcoin issuers in Russia face seven years in prison.

Misc:

Should we fear a cashless world?

Cyrptocurrency Users (Bitcoin!) in Russia Face 7 Years in Prison

The Russian Ministry of Finance is planning an amendment to the criminal code to establish severe penalties for those who issue the Bitcoin cryptocurrency or other ‘money substitutes’.

According to an unnamed governmental source speaking to Interfax [Russian], those found guilty of facilitating technological currencies will go to prison for up to four years, whilst managers and directors of institutions which issue them could be imprisoned for up to seven years.

The former version of the code’s amendment set the maximum penalty for these infractions at a year of corrective labour for individuals, or two years for those participating in a group effort.

The financial penalties have also been upgraded for Bitcoin-issuers – 500,000 roubles (about £5000 or $7,200), or a sum representing up to three years’ worth of salary (or income) for an individual or organisation. Managers will face fines of 1-2.5 million roubles, or income equivalent to 2-4 years.

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RSCoin: The Bank of England's Cryptocurrency

The Bank of England is working with researchers at University College London to design a Bitcoin clone of its own that can be centrally controlled.

A recent MIT Technology report claimed that the UK’s central bank had reached out to university researchers to help it create a cryptographically secure digital currency. The resulting system has now been revealed, and is named RSCoin.

The RSCoin system, developed by Sarah Meiklejohn and George Danezis, employs cryptography to obviate counterfeiting and tampering. Unlike other mechanisms, the digital ledger used by the new cryptocurrency is handled exclusively by a central body. The report explained that RSCoin will only be made accessible to central bank users in possession of a specific encryption key.

Meiklejohn added that eventually third-party institutions (i.e. commercial banks) would be selected by the central bank to join the ledger. She detailed that these collectives would help the central bank process new transactions and submit them for inclusion in the central bank-owned ledger. The developer also noted that RSCoin differs notably from Bitcoin due to its centralised design and ability to handle huge volumes of transactions.

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CheapAir now Accepting AltCoins Like LiteCoin and DogeCoin

Last November CheapAir became the first airline to accept Bitcoin and then later, the first to let travelers book hotel rooms and Amtrak train seats with the digital currency.

Since then its Bitcoin sales have topped $1.5 million, an amount that exceeded the company’s initial expectations, Jeff Klee, CEO of CheapAir, tells Forbes.com.

CheapAir is hardly alone. In the last twelve months or so, Bitcoin has inched and then pushed its way into mainstream commerce, prompting such companies as Dell , Overstock, Expedia EXPE -0.54% and Dish Network to start accepting the currency. Dish, in fact, processed its first Bitcoin payment last month when Austin and Beccy Craig, the stars of a new documentary film “Life on Bitcoin,” used it to pay their monthly cable bill. Ebay may soon join that list, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal last month: it has been quietly to integrate the virtual currency into its Braintree payments subsidiary, sources told the WSJ.

CheapAir, though, is leaving all these companies in the dust and moving into new territory – at least for a mainstream brand – by accepting payments in Litecoin and Dogecoin. It will process the payments via GoCoin.

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(a bit late) Facebook Approves First Cryptocurrency Tipping App

Facebook has approved two new cryptocurrency tipping apps, according to the small team of dogecoin enthusiasts that developed them.

Lead developer Alejandro Caballero announced on reddit that the social networking giant has approved both his Doge Tipping App, which is restricted to dogecoin, and his Multicoin Tipping App, which got the official nod just this morning.

The latter allows 14 altcoins to be used to reward posts on Facebook in a very real sense, rather than merely giving them the standard ‘like’. The full list reads: dogecoin, digibytes, einsteinium, fedoracoin, mintcoin, reddcoin, quark, worldcoin, vertcoin, karmacoin, earthcoin, trollcoin, HTMLcoin and donationcoin.

This is not the first time digital currencies have appeared on Facebook. CoinDesk reported last month on QuickCoin’s wallet app that allows users to send bitcoin to anyone on their contacts list as simply as messaging. However, the new apps look to be the first dedicated tipping services on the platform.

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