Why Japan Only Briefly Became Largest Bitcoin Exchange Market
Earlier this week, Cointelegraph reported that the Japanese Bitcoin exchange market surpassed the US to become the world’s largest exchange market by daily trading volume.
However, Japan was only able to briefly hold its trading volume for a few days as China and the US reclaimed their positions in the global Bitcoin exchange market rankings as the two largest exchange markets internationally.
In major online Bitcoin communities and forums, Bitcoin users, enthusiasts, analysts and traders expressed their concerns over utilizing Japan’s trading volume to measure the growth of its Bitcoin market and industry.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2uIKgVo
Source: CoinTelegraph
Overstock Now Accepts Various Altcoins for Payment – Including Bitcoin Cash
Overstock just became the first major retailer to accept bitcoin cash and altcoins at the point of sale for payment. They announced a partnership with Shapeshift.io to streamline the process. Now Overstock customers can transact via Shapeshift’s native API easily using Bitcoin Cash, Monero, Litecoin, Ethereum, and more.
Overstock’s press release provides instructions on how to use the service. The post read, “During checkout, customers will select their preferred cryptocurrency and submit the order before being prompted to transfer the coins, just as they would with any other digital wallet transaction. Overstock will then utilize ShapeShift to convert the cryptocurrencies to bitcoin.”
This move to integrate Shapeshift is not a surprising pivot by Overstock. The company has had a bunch of “firsts” in regards to cryptocurrency adoption and usage. For instance, they were the first major retailer to integrate bitcoin payments back in 2014. They also issued the first blockchain stock with a Series A Preferred offering in late 2016 on the t0 platform.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2uIjvAD
Source: Bitcoin News
Bitcoin Price Will Likely Increase to $5,000 Post SegWit: Reasons and Trends
Previously, Cointelegraph reported that RT host and financial analyst Max Keiser predicted Bitcoin price to “cruise through” $5,000 in the short term.
With the Bitcoin Core development team’s transaction malleability fix and scaling solution Segregated Witness (SegWit) lock-in achieved, the market and investors are expressing their confidence in Bitcoin and its ability to scale.
The certainty and imminence of SegWit activation has definitely acted as a driving factor in sustaining the upward momentum of Bitcon’s value.
Scaling debate on Bitcoin and its block size has been prolonged since 2015 and the activation of SegWit marks a significant milestone in Bitcoin and the first major step towards scaling.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2uIx96G
Source: CoinTelegraph
South Africa to Take “Balanced Approach” to Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Regulations
In response to a question from the opposition party regarding the government’s position regarding the regulation of South Africa’s emerging cryptocurrency economy, Finance Minister Gigaba has revealed many of the government’s intentions and positions regarding cryptocurrency legislation.
Minister Gigaba reaffirmed that while virtual currencies currently sit out of the government’s regulatory apparatus, while a number of institutions are currently exploring the matter and are yet to deliver their determinations. “As noted, the relevant authorities continue to monitor and assess the use of virtual currencies and consult with private sector stakeholders in this regard. Further guidance or regulations may be issued, should the need arise,” Finance Minister Gigaba said.
“The National Treasury together with the SARB, FIC, and FSB have also established an Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group in December 2016, to develop an approach and potential revised policy stance towards fintech, including crypto-currencies, and to deal with fast-emerging fintech matters in the financial sector, like crowdfunding, robo-advice, machine learning and alternate payment platforms.”
Full story at http://bit.ly/2hJrFqX
Source: Bitcoin News
Bitcoin Fees Will Only Rise Now: Lightning Dev Rusty Russell
Lightning Network developer Rusty Russell has issued a damning report on Bitcoin scalability, adding that fees would only rise from now on.
In a blog post Monday about the need to increase Bitcoin’s capacity long term, Russell said that the solutions currently available all fall short.
“Bitcoin can’t scale to meet demand unless demand vanishes and it all fails,” he wrote.
“If Bitcoin is used by 100,000 people today, and we want everyone to use it, we need Bitcoin capacity to grow 75,000 times larger. Yet we’re already struggling with 140GB of storage caused by Bitcoin’s first eight years when it was mainly not being used[.]”
Full story at http://bit.ly/2hIREiB
Source: CoinTelegraph
Fork Wars: Segwit Lock-In and Communication Breakdown
The hard fork happened, and the Bitcoin network split into two different blockchains that share a previous history. The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network has survived an entire week, with five mining pools dedicating hashpower towards this alternative chain. Currently, the Bitcoin blockchain is still 899 blocks ahead of the new BCH chain, and it’s also 54 percent more profitable to mine BTC than BCH. However, this will change on August 8 as Bitcoin’s difficulty is going to increase approx. 7 percent while the BCH chain has been lowered to 17 percent of BTC’s current difficulty.
At the moment there have been 240 BCH blocks mined since the blockchain split and an ‘unknown miner’ has processed more than 83 percent of all the blocks in existence. So far there have been a total of 16 ‘big blocks’ (over 1MB) found on the BCH network with a few large ones being over 4MB. The other mining pools which are dedicating hashpower to the BCH chain include Suprnova, pool.Bitcoin.com, Viabtc, and the Bitclub. These four pools have only found 16 percent of the 240 BCH blocks mined. At press time the BCH chain is processing blocks consistently at a rate of 30-60 minutes per block with some longer intervals here and there.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2hJ0qwW
Source: Bitcoin News
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