Latest News On Cryptocurrencies

This year’s incredible bitcoin rally has raised a lot of interest in the cryptocurrency and created huge demand from people to learn everything they can about the phenomena. One academic institution which tries to answer this call is New York University (NYU). Bitcoin 101 at NYU The Stern School of Business at NYU was the first major US academic institution to offer a course in cryptocurrencies to its graduate students back in 2014. Now the school plans to offer a new option for undergraduates to learn about the field as well, NYU professor David Yermack told the Financial Times. This new course is likely to be a highly sought one among NYU undergrads. Starting out with just a few dozen students, the graduate course accommodated 100 this year with many more applying to get in, and is expected to reach about 300 graduate students next year. “We are moving it to our largest auditorium, with capacity for 350 students,” the professor exclaimed. Challenges NYU Plans to Launch ...

With all eyes on bitcoin’s meteoric break of $10,000, less attention has been paid to the price milestones recently established on leading international markets. In recent weeks, the CAD, AUD, NZD, and SGD pairings also surpassed $10,000, whilst a single bitcoin exceeds 500,000 RUB in Russia, 1 million JPY in Japan, 10 million KRW in South Korea, and 100 million IDR in Indonesia. The Price of Bitcoin Exceeds 1 Million Yen in Japan 1 Million Yen, 100 Million IDR – Bitcoin Sets New Price Milestones on International MarketsAs Japan is currently host to more than 60% of global trading volume, reaching the seven-figure milestone on the JPY markets is a big deal for bitcoin. According to the website Crypto Compare, bitcoin broke above one million JPY at approximately 7 pm on the 25th of November EDT. The current JPY/BTC price as of this writing approximately (1:30 am November 29th EDT) is roughly ¥1,300,000 Seven hours after bitcoin broke above one million JPY, the South Korean bitco...

A new fund-of-funds announced this week is aiming to raise up to $100 million via an initial coin offering (ICO). Called the  Apex Token Fund , the key idea is that tokenization gives buyers a way to cash out their investment early on, without diminishing the underlying principle. Speaking exclusively to CoinDesk in a telephone call, Joseph Bradley, a fund co-founder, said: "The whole idea of applying a blockchain to this type of structure is it unlocks liquidity between the vintage and harvest date of raising the fund." Under the scheme, each token will represent a proportional piece of equity in the fund. Once the tokens are distributed to investors, they can start trading those tokens on exchanges. If one of the underlying funds spikes or drops in value and an investor wants to exit their position, they can do so without the need to follow the lockup rules typical at traditional hedge funds. The fund tentatively plans to run a presale of the token...

Willy Woo sounds like a high stakes altcoin gambler. He's often looking for insane 100x to even 1,000x gains, and he's willing to stomach the kind of volatility that could wipe out three-quarters of his portfolio's value over a couple of weeks. And while everyday investors might be bewildered by those concepts, it's not too surprising for Woo, given his background. While now best known for his innovative philosophies on cryptocurrency, Woo got his start in the trading world buying derivatives during the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis — he started shorting bank stocks right before the banks collapsed. And that experience gave Woo a pretty solid understanding of how to trade markets when they're at their most volatile. Plus, with a background coding as a teenager, it's no wonder Woo was drawn to cryptocurrency. It was right around the time bitcoin hit the $1 billion mark that Woo got interested in crypto, shortly after moving to Bali, where, as he...

Bitcoins’ remarkable recent rally to all-time highs has triggered warnings of a speculative bubble in the making, but Indians — seasoned traders and novices alike — are rushing in unfazed. Registrations at leading Indian Bitcoin exchanges have doubled in recent weeks, spiking up trading volumes, as the price of the decentralised crypto currency breached $10,000 a unit on Tuesday. “We are flooded with requests,” said Vivek K, assistant vice president, technology, at Delhi-based Bitcoin exchange Coinsecure. “In the past week alone, we have seen double the number of registrations. Signups are happening at full capacity.” Other leading exchanges including Zebpay, Unocoin and Bitxoxo, too, are seeing a surge in signups and trade volumes. The enthusiasm is understandable. The price of Bitcoin, or BTC, swelled to about Rs 7,51,500 apiece on November 28 from about Rs 3,16,200 on August 30, a nearly 140% increase in three months. Bitcoin’s closest crypto currency rival, Ether, which, too, i...

After a day of tepid approaches toward the total, the price of bitcoin rose above $10,000 on CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index (BPI) for the first time in history today. Having scaled to $9,000 this weekend, the world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization hit a new high of $10,044 at 1:45 UTC, market data shows. The move came after exchanges in South Korea saw trading above that threshold yesterday and today, though U.S. exchanges had yet to mark the milestone. However, at press time, domestic exchanges including Coinbase's GDAX exchange, Paxos's itBit exchange and Gemini, were all posting spot prices above the $10,000 mark. With the move, bitcoin is now up more than 900 percent on a year-to-date basis, with prices climbing 230 percent since a low of $3,000 in mid-September. The meteoric rise has pushed the combined market value for all cryptocurrencies to a new high. Bitcoin's market capitalization is now close to $170 billion, additional mark...

After Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Diamond and Super Bitcoin, another forked-coin Lightning Bitcoin is coming on the way. Initiated by an European team, Lightning, the project will become the first forked-coin that adopts the DPOS consensus mechanism. Fork at Block 499,999 The new project Lightning Bitcoin (LBTC) will fork at block 499,999 on or around December 23, 2017. Why lightning? The team aims to make Bitcoin transfers as fast as lightning, or at a maximum of 24 million transactions a day. How can that happen? The answer is the DPOS mechanism, according to the project’s proponents. The POW mechanism has long been discussed as the cause of mining centralization and network congestion. Daniel Larimer, author of Delegated Proof-of-Stake Whitepaper explained that miner tycoons control block time to maximize their interests, which will ultimately along with all POW systems be controlled by the fiat system. As such, the Lightning team employs DPOS mechanism that gives voting rights ...

A recent  analysis  regarding supply and demand suggests that the end of the  Bitcoin  bull run will come not as a result of lack of buyers but because of an overabundance of supply. The supply, according to the analyst, will come through new and varied ways to trade Bitcoin and from Bitcoin hard forks. The analysis stems from the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, when any company with .com in its name instantly received a huge market boost. However, the end of the dot-com bubble occurred when a huge number of new .com IPOs flooded the marketplace, many of which were unstable business models. For a while the market absorbed them, but when the market finally corrected it pulled the rug out from all of those businesses and only the strong survived. Whence Bitcoin supply? One of the most important (and most repeated) features of Bitcoin is its limited supply. Ask anyone even remotely familiar with the cryptocurrency and they’ll tell you that only 21 mln Bitc...

With all the news of  adoption and mass appeal , people need to remember that despite Bitcoin price  breaking $10,000 , less than one percent of the world’s population actively uses it. There is a lot of noise around the digital currency, but it is still  a small fish  in the global economy. Many have likened Bitcoin to the  dotcom bubble , waiting to burst as people throw money at it like the companies back in the emergence of the Internet. But Bitcoin is not a company, it is a technology, and it sits on the precipice like email did in 1994. The Killer App Back in 1994 email was globally adopted by around 0.25 percent of the population. However, it was invented in 1972 by Arpanet engineer Ray Tomlinson. It was, for a very long time, the only ‘killer application’ for the Internet. It all sounds quite familiar. Bitcoin,  invented in 2008 , was mostly a toy for tech geeks and anarchists who saw a revolution in money as the global economy collapsed...

So long have the central banks across the globe held a massive monopoly over the most important resource, money. They have built their rules and shaped their fortunes, but now, there is an upstart digital currency challenging all this, and no one is really sure of how to handle it. The emergence of Bitcoin as a real player, a  real threat , has caused many to take sides. From the  Wall Street Banks  who are either in  Jamie Dimon’s corner  or the other more accepting side, Bitcoin divides thoughts. Central banks are big players when it comes to shaping the global economy, and they have had to make their own minds up when it comes to Bitcoin. But it is not only Bitcoin that they are considering, there is also talk of “Why not us?” as many of them look to create their own version of Bitcoin. US: “But how will we monitor you?” T he over-eyeing US has a problem when it comes to Bitcoin because the digital currency offers up much more anonymity when it co...

Joseph Grundfest, commissioner for the Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC ), and now Stanford Law professor, says that  Initial Coin Offerings  are an almost comedic violation of securities law, and should absolutely be regulated immediately. He’s so convinced, in fact, that he has been contacting the current administration to pursue them. He said: “ICOs represent the most pervasive, open and notorious violation of federal securities laws since the Code of Hammurabi… We’re waiting to see a whole bunch of enforcement actions in this space, and we wonder why they haven’t happened yet. I hope what they are doing is planning on a sweep of 50 ICOs.” Legal trouble The SEC has already  pursued action  on fraudulent offerings, and  other nations  have strictly forbidden or  warned  against ICOs as well. However, the SEC has remained relatively unflustered, with the notable exception of the statements regarding the DAO. The new investm...

Samsung SDS has announced a lucrative agreement with the  Korean  government to create a new  Blockchain  technology-based platform for welfare, public safety and transportation by 2022. The hope is to increase transparency for the government services.   While the nation has  banned ICOs , they have been embracing Blockchain technology. The need for technological change has become increasingly clear, as the world becomes technologically interconnected. Hong Won-Pyo, CEO of Samsung SDS said: “Samsung SDS’ Blockchain technology and consulting capabilities will contribute to Seoul’s leap as a top-rate global city.” Blockchain for public sector The nascent technology has become a basis for new government systems to create a combination of  security and transparency . Because Blockchain technology presents a systematic approach to creating and controlling data, governments are rushing to utilize it for  solutions . Samsung SDS has alre...