Relief and Disbelief – Bitcoin Reacts to Sudden ‘2x’ Suspension

Relief and Disbelief - Bitcoin Reacts to Sudden '2x' Suspension

Relief and Disbelief – Bitcoin Reacts to Sudden '2x' Suspension

The tweets came fast and furious, almost quicker than the articulation.

After months of anger and debate, a group of businesses and mining firms that use bitcoin’s software to provide services suddenly shuttered an attempt at changing its rules. Scheduled to be introduced in mid-November, the Segwit2x software had emerged as a controversial bogeyman, a cloud of uncertainty over bitcoin’s future, that quickly gave way.

Among those who had for months spoken out against the proposal, and what they perceived as a broken understanding of how protocol development should proceed, euphoria was evident.

"Segwit2x hardfork has been called off! Common sense prevails," exclaimed litecoin creator Charlie Lee. “Put a fork in it, it’s done,” tweeted author Andreas Antonopoulos.

Developer Akin Fernandez, one of a legion of bloggers who have stood staunchly against the proposal, tweeted succinctly:

“Bitcoin wins.”

Indeed, the strongest voices in the initial reaction were those who had joined a long-simmering protest movement called "NO2X," which accumulated the support of dozens of companies and users, who displayed their opposition by adding a prefix to their social media names.

The social media behavior, launched in the wake of Segwit2x’s announcement in May, did much to highlight the differing perspectives of the proposal.

An open-source software that requires a diversity of stakeholders to agree to its rules to operate – bitcoin’s major companies, developers and mining pools have each taken a different view of development and how decisions about updates should be made.

Forged in an invite-only meeting, criticisms of Segwit2x came largely from developers, many of whom didn’t necessarily object to the idea larger blocks were needed, but a culture that had sprung up around startups that largely lacked a frame of reference for how network changes had been made, or even the various ways in which changes could be made.

As such, the news could be read as a culmination of a debate that began in 2015, when former bitcoin maintainer Gavin Andresen sought to galvanize interest in a block size change. Since then, several attempts have been made to tweak this aspect of the software.

However, despite its stakeholder support, Segwit2x now joins bitcoin classic, bitcoin unlimited and bitcoin-xt as proposed softwares to fail to gain adoption based on the idea.

Unexpected relief

That said, even many of Segwit2x's advocates were relieved the agreement was suspended.

"I am glad it is over," said Guy Corem, a former miner who signed the original Segwit2x agreement in May. "It was the right call."

Others hinted at the hostility their public support had brought, and the tactics used by supporters of the "NO2X" segment. Members of the group were often criticized for disparaging remarks and attacks made against Segwit2x supporters.

"I guess I can now pay more attention to more fruitful technical pursuits than following the news and fighting trolls online," said Segwit2x developer Jean-Pierre Rupp.

The acrimonious debate has been almost non-stop on social media channels such as Reddit and Twitter, at the peak leading to alleged death threats.

Due in part to this environment, there was a sense the Segwit2x proposal was not as welcomed by the community as participants had originally expected.

"We're relieved. The goal of the NYA was to bring the community together and keep the majority of the users on the same chain for at least a little while longer," Peter Smith, CEO of cryptocurrency software provider Blockchain, wrote in a blog post.

Others argued much the same – that a hard fork to increase the block size makes sense, but only if the agreement achieves support from all corners of the ecosystem.

"We are big fans of increasing the block size, as our customer really get impacted by the fees, but we want to see it done in a responsible way that brings the entire community together, and takes into account more voices," said Coins.ph founder and CEO Ron Hose.

New solutions

Still, there's a strong sense that bitcoin still needs to scale, somehow, in the future, as it seeks to accommodate new users.

“We'll either bring bigger blocks to people [with bitcoin], or we'll bring the people to bigger blocks [on bitcoin cash],” developer Peter Rizun told CoinDesk.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the news that a block size increase would not be pursued was highly praised by supporters of the Lightning Network, a proposed off-chain microtransaction network that seeks to move bitcoin transactions off the blockchain itself.

"Now that 2x is officially donezo, excited to get back to work building long term solutions like Lightning!" Lightning CEO Elizabeth Stark tweeted.

However, while the news today could position Lightning as a likely solution, the big advances that appear needed to get the network off the ground are now likely to come under scrutiny.

On display at Scaling Bitcoin, a two-day technical conference at Stanford University this weekend, were the challenges yet to be solved with the technology. This includes ensuring privacy in transactions and better understanding the economics of their interactions.

As noted by Hebrew University's Aviv Zohar, presenting new work on the subject, larger blocks may ultimately be needed to optimize the network.

In this way, speculation is already building that Lightning will not be enough, or that it will take too long to take off. As such, some think that businesses will embrace alternative protocols such as bitcoin cash, an alternative bitcoin with a larger block size, or litecoin, founded in 2012 as a vehicle for faster merchant payments.

"We may start seeing more and more businesses move to bitcoin cash for on-chain transactions, due to the high cost of transacting on bitcoin, which is what Segwi2x was attempting to solve," Civic CEO and co-founder Vinny Lingham told CoinDesk.

Jake Smith, Bitcoin.com’s business developer and a long-time supporter of on-chain scaling, said he sold his bitcoin immediately after the news hit. His comments, while brief, showcase how supporters drawn to bitcoin’s possibilities as a peer-to-peer cash have been put off by the news.

"Bitcoin just signed it’s own death warrant, as far as I’m concerned," Smith added.

Likewise, OpenBazaar lead developer Chris Pacia, whose company moved to distance itself from the proposal last week, said more companies would likely turn to other options.

"[Segwit2x] didn't really make sense after the bitcoin cash fork,” he said.

Not the last

But while there is temporary relief, there is also new thinking about bitcoin's future.

The key thing that sets bitcoin apart, to many, is that it's a decentralized, digital way to move value that no one entity controls. And to some, Segwit2x’s failure simply showcase’s the strength of the technology in defending against influences that could undermine this.

Bitcoin developer Bashco pointed to the long line of attempts to increase the block size or undermine developers via such proposals, implying there will be others down the line.

"They will lick their wounds and regroup," the developer told CoinDesk.

This view speaks to the idea Segwit2x was best considered as an attempted "takeover" of bitcoin, in that developers behind it wanted to rewrite the cryptocurrency's rules without getting full agreement from the community.

A controversial move was also the decision by Segwit2x developers to remove code that constituted what has been described as “replay protection,” meaning the fork could have been executed in such a way that user funds could have been at risk if two chains emerged.

Still, some used the news to call for changes to the culture and community, especially those that keep in mind how governments or authorities could use similar methods to corrupt or harm the protocol in the years to come.

"We must continue with the research into forks and chain splits and building tools and defenses because it will almost certainly be tried again," Bitcoin Core contributor Eric Lombrozo told CoinDesk.

Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo, who had publicly feuded with high-profile members of the Segwit2x group, voiced a similar opinion that sought to appeal to unity.

"Let's take Segwit2x's failure as a learning experience – bitcoin's community is strong, and needs to broadly support any changes to bitcoin's consensus rules," he tweeted.

Others were more grandiose, hinting at the expansive narrative that has seemed to shroud what some outside the industry may see as a benign numerical change.

Pseudonymous bitcoin blogger WhalePanda tweeted:

"We won this battle … but they will keep coming to destroy bitcoin. We will not forget.”

Authors: Pete Rizzo & Alyssa Hertig Nov 8, 2017 at 23:05 UTC

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Bitcoin’s Bogeyman Cometh – Why Segwit2x Is a 51% Attack

Bitcoin's Bogeyman Cometh - Why Segwit2x Is a 51% Attack

Bitcoin's Bogeyman Cometh – Why Segwit2x Is a 51% Attack

In bitcoin's Necronomicon of possible attacks and weaknesses, one reigns supreme – the 51% attack.

If there is a fear that has played on people's minds as the end-of-days scenario for bitcoin, it is this. Attackers who hold more than 50% of hashing power could stop transactions from confirming and even reverse some transactions. They could undermine the whole project.

Bitcoin's design and its system of economic incentives has been set up specifically to combat the destructive potential of a 51% attack. And it has worked. The 51% attack has remained a hypothetical bogeyman. Until now.

By all indication, a coordinated 51% attack will begin on, or around, Nov. 16. That's when a consortium of miners representing substantially more than 50% of the network's hashing power and an allied group of blockchain startups will seek to increase the block size.

This will require a hard fork, which while controversial, is a legitimate desire. In itself, this is not an attack.

Where it goes wrong

However, the consortium's effort has evolved beyond a simple fork. It is now being developed not simply as an effort to fork the chain, but to do so in such a way as to deliberately prevent the continued existence of the status quo chain.

Specifically, the developers involved have declined to introduce replay protection.

The 2x fork will create a situation where transactions performed on one fork, can be "replayed" on the second fork. In effect, users will have funds on both blockchains, but any transaction they perform on one blockchain could lead to a loss of funds on the other blockchain.

Replay protection is a fairly easy-to-implement method to protect users from this risk. Network attacks are those actions taken with the intention of disrupting the protocol’s normal functioning. The 2x change, bereft of replay protection, causes massive disruption. This is by design.

Without replay protection in place, a minority chain becomes less likely to survive.

Question of motives

The preferred outcome for the consortium is that the status quo chain ceases to exist, that its transactions fail to confirm.

This is the literal definition of a 51% attack. If it sounds a bit bizarre to call the consortium's effort an attack, that's because it is. The consortium comprises many real supporters of bitcoin, acting in what they believe is good faith. They don't mean to be attacking bitcoin.

However, without replay protection their efforts are like an autoimmune disease, having become overzealous and perverted.

So, bitcoin is finally coming to come face-to-face with the mother of all attacks. This is a watershed moment. The very worst outcomes are bad indeed.

Transactions could grind to a halt, faith in the system could be lost, bitcoin and by extension, the entire blockchain world could prove to be far more vulnerable to attack than we hoped.

We shall overcome

However, there is also another possible, even more likely, outcome.

Bitcoin could prove resilient to the consortium's attack and emerge battered but unbroken. In so doing, bitcoin will have proven itself resilient to even its greatest foe.

It is hard to overstate how important this will be to bitcoin's perceived reliability. Bitcoin has always been haunted by the risk that its rules might come to be dictated by special interest groups or hostile, state-sponsored parties.

This risk is never going completely away, but instead of the risk being a hypothetical bogeyman, it will become a much more prosaic thing: a successfully managed risk.

The 51% attack is bitcoin's boss level. I don’t think it's an exaggeration to say that we are now at the end of the beginning. If we successfully overcome this coming challenge, bitcoin will no longer be just an experiment, it will be a fact.

But don't expect less drama — we are now entering bitcoin's adolescence.

HODL on tight, things will get hairy.

Author: Edan Yago Nov 8, 2017 at 02:30 UTC

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Could be an interesting couple of weeks

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Bitcoin Gold Hard Fork Draws Mixed Reactions

The Bitcoin Gold hard fork that caused a minor, temporary dip in bitcoin’s price a couple weeks ago has drawn both “boos” and “bravos” from the cryptocurrency community. Most observers voiced no problem with hard forks as a tool for competition and experimentation, but some see forks as compromising the perception of bitcoin’s limited supply, which they view as critical to its underlying value.

After debuting near $500 on Oct. 24, Bitcoin Gold (BTG), an altcoin that — like Bitcoin Cash — has a shared blockchain history with bitcoin, saw its price fall to $136 in two days — even amid buying pressure from margin traders who wanted to purchase it to pay back lenders. The price has stabilized since that time, standing at $140.63 on Nov. 5, according to coinmarketcap.com.

Many in the bitcoin community were quick to criticize Bitcoin Gold because of what they saw as its impractical idea to decentralize bitcoin mining, and also due to its plans to premine the cryptocurrency. Many investors, traders, developers and users do not welcome the concept of premining a cryptocurrency before its launch because it leads to a centralization of funds before the launch.

Nevertheless, several exchanges — including Bitfinex and HitBTC — have credited their users with BTG balances and added trading pairs, although they cannot enable deposits or withdrawals until after the mainnet is stable.

Forks Serve A Purpose

“There is no such thing as a “bad fork,” Bob Summerwill, chief blockchain developer at Sweetbridge, a blockchain alliance, said in a prepared statement. “You don’t have to cheer one team or the other. Experimentation and competition are good. Let the market decide, and participate where you see value.”

Summerwill said the ETH/ETC split indicated that minority chains are viable.

“The ETH/ETC split was very healthy for the community,” Summerwill said. “The Ethereum community moved on to mainstream adoption, and the Ethereum Classic community took control of its own destiny and took the code the way they wanted as well. I think that the chain splits will be healthy for the bitcoin community for the same reason.”

Splits happen periodically in all open-source communities, Summerwill said. Sometimes there are genuine differences of opinion, and network effects are not enough to keep everybody together, so a group secedes.

“This is how humans work,” he said. “It is a beautiful thing.”

Rob Viglione, co-founder of ZenCash, a privacy coin for borderless, decentralized communications and transactions, takes a similar view.

“Open-source ecosystems are designed to evolve, whether that’s through in-project improvements or forks in which the entire code base goes in an incompatible direction,” Viglione said. “Evolution is a messy process, so it doesn’t always turn out well, but sometimes that’s the only way to have big breakthroughs.

Viglione said it is not clear that swapping SHA-256 for Equihash mining is sufficiently value-added to warrant a new coin, especially since Zcash already did it last year, but it’s ultimately up to the stakeholders.

Can Forks Hurt Bitcoin?

Sol Lederer, blockchain director at Loomia, a technology company creating smart products secured through blockchain technology, holds a different view.

“These forks are very bad for bitcoin,” Lederer said. “Saturating the market with different versions of bitcoin is confusing to users, and discredits the claim that there are a limited number of bitcoins – since you can always fork it and double the supply.”

Lederer is troubled by the fact that the spinoffs spring from a minor debate on how to handle the block size limit.

“Instead of coming to agreement, the community, developers and code are fracturing into different groups,” he said. “We’re learning that while a blockchain gives you consensus on a distributed ledger, it does not give you consensus on the code base, that is what code to run. This does not bode well for bitcoin’s future, where it will face new and bigger challenges requiring further upgrades to the code base.”

Forks Will Continue

Expect more such forks in the future, says Taulant Ramabaja, chief technology officer at ULedger, a blockchain based solution for data assurance, storage and other services. He said the bitcoin ecosystem has a triangle of three veto powers: 1) the miners, 2) the exchanges and 3) the wallets (without key ownership).

“For any fork to become dominant in the future, a sufficiently large part of all three need to jump ship,” Ramabaja said. “This is highly unlikely, and therefore bitcoin favors the status quo.”

However, once Bitcoin Lightning based exchanges and wallets come online, this picture can change as the roles of exchanges and wallets will change, Ramabaja said.

Forks Have Shortcomings

Luis Cuende, co-founder and project lead at Aragon, a decentralized platform for building and managing organizations and companies, supports the goal of decentralizing bitcoin as much as possible, but he has issues with Bitcoin Gold since it doesn’t have replay protection, which makes it unsafe for bitcoin users.

Abhishek Pitti, founder and CEO of Nucleus, a provider of sensor technology that uniquely identifies users and senses pressure, motion and acceleration, believes the upcoming SegWit2x hard fork presents a serious risk to the bitcoin ecosystem due to its lack of backward compatibility or replay protection, with major developers and exchanges refusing to support it.

“On the flip side, I understand the argument presented in the form of ‘decentralization of bitcoin mining’ to people with GPUs, rather than the ASIC mining scene, which has become very centralized,” Pitti said. “Proponents of this idea believe that Bitcoin Gold can help bring mining back into the power of the common users.”

Author: Lester Coleman on 06/11/2017

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

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Bitcoin Price Achieves New All-Time High at $7,598 -Why is the Market So Optimistic

Once again, the bitcoin price has achieved a new all-time high at $7,598 on November 5, as the market continues to be optimistic about the mid-term performance of bitcoin.

Rapid Adoption in Major Regions

In Japan and South Korea, two regions in Asia that are known to have extremely conservative investors and traders, have seen an exponential increase in the demand for bitcoin from local traders. In an interview with Nathaniel Poppers of the New York Times in October, Korbit founder and CEO Tony Lyu emphasized that once people are invested in South Korea, they encourage others to join the “party.”

“Word just spreads really fast in Korea. Once people are invested, they want everyone else to join the party. There’s been this huge, almost a community movement around this,” said Lyu.

Over the past two weeks, Japan and South Korea have seen a massive portion of conventional investors in the traditional financial industry allocate their funds to bitcoin, given the increasing liquidity of bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market in general.

Specifically, in South Korea, the popularity of offline exchanges of Bithumb and Coinone, the country’s two largest cryptocurrency exchanges, started to grow, as investors without solid technical knowledge or expertise in dealing with bitcoin began to seek for direct person-to-person assistance in purchasing, trading, storing, and managing bitcoin.

As a 53-year-old bitcoin investor stated:

“Due to the emergence of physical cryptocurrency exchanges and offline customer service operations launched by CoinoneBlocks and Bithumb, many investors in South Korea are rushing to sell their stocks and equity in public companies to invest in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. Since the beginning of 2017, the demand for bitcoin has increased significantly and investors have been able to build trust over the cryptocurrency exchange market through offline exchanges.”

Japan and the US

Japan has always remained as the driving factor of the bitcoin price, especially in its new all-time highs and strong rallies. Japan is one of the very few countries that has adopted bitcoin as a currency and a payment method, using bitcoin to transact at hotels, online e-commerce platforms, retailers, and restaurants.

Today, Japan’s largest retailer in Bic Camera, budget hotel chain Capsule, major airline Peach, and the country’s largest grid operator Remixpoint accept bitcoin as a currency for all of their operations, services, and products.

Investors in the US are also optimistic in regards to the launch of a bitcoin futures exchange by CME and CBOE, the two largest options exchange both domestically and internationally. CME’s bitcoin integration is expected to offer immense liquidity for institutional and retail investors, who have been looking to allocate their “money on the sidelines” into bitcoin for many months.

The overwhelming performance of major regions such as Japan and South Korea, along with the integration of bitcoin by leading financial institutions in the US have contributed to the recent price surge of bitcoin.

In the mid-term, by early 2018, analysts expect the price of bitcoin to surpass the $10,000 mark. But, some strategists including Wall Street analyst Tom Lee of Fundstrat have warned investors to be cautious, as bitcoin price has increased from $3,300 to $7,400 in the past month alone, and such abrupt surge in the price of bitcoin could lead to a correction.

Author: Joseph Young on 05/11/2017

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
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Bitcoin Prices Still Firmly Above $7000, Without China

Bitcoin is unstoppable these days, passing one “technical” test after another, crossing the $5000-mark, the $6000-mark, and the $7000-mark in a matter of weeks. The “people’s currency” has gained 27.33% in seven days, as market volume increased.

What’s behind the digital currency’s breathtaking run?

Certainly, it isn’t the lifting of regulations which halted trade of digital currency in China, as some expected (back in September, China banned Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and shut Bitcoin exchanges, sending the digital currency’s price tumbling from $5000 to close to $3000).

Instead, there have been a number of positive developments that helped build investor confidence and hype in the “people’s” currency. One of them was the stepping up of government regulations in US and Japan to protect the cryptocurrency markets from possible manipulation, while limiting the supply of new coin offerings.

*As of Saturday, November 4, 2017, at 10.30 am

Another development was the change in Wall Street’s attitudes towards Bitcoin, with hedge funds cozying up to the digital currency; and CME introducing Bitcoin futures.

Then there was the renewed investor interest in technology in Wall Street, following a string of strong earnings reports from Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, sending NASDAQ to new highs, and re-igniting hype for technology investments.

Source: Finance.yahoo.com 11/4/17

Meanwhile money, the fuel behind the multiple asset rallies, continues to be cheap, as interest rates continue to be cheap. This means that investors do not have to sell one asset to buy another, as was the case back in the old days of “normal” interest rates.

Apparently, Bitcoin can survive and thrive without China, provided there are developments that keep the confidence and hype for the digital currency alive, and and provided that money remains cheap.

Author Panos Mourdoukoutas

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
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Cryptocurrencies May Contribute to Financial Stability

Bitcoin is trending in Turkey, and the country’s central bank officials are starting to notice. This week President Murat Cetinkaya of the Central Bank of Turkey (CBRT) said the financial institution is monitoring bitcoin closely, and spoke optimistically about digital currencies.

Central Bank of Turkey President Says Cryptocurrencies Could Contribute to Financial Stability

Turkish Central Bank President: "Cryptocurrencies May Contribute to Financial Stability"According to local news outlets in Istanbul, the president of the Turkish central bank, the CBRT, said officials from the region are researching cryptocurrencies. Murat Cetinkaya explains that the CBRT has formed a research group consisting of digital asset market participants, Turkish government officials, and regulators. The country’s banking regulator has explained current financial law does not apply to bitcoin, but has cautioned Turkish citizens against using the currency. Now in a more positive light, president Cetinkaya says cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could “contribute to financial stability.”

President Erdogan and Turkey’s Failing Economic Policy Sparked Bitcoin Interest Last Year

The bitcoin economy in Turkey is growing according to many different sources. For instance, the country has a Turkish Lira-Bitcoin exchange, BTCTurk, and other infrastructure providers such as Payza, and Bitwala. Residents living near the Istanbul Ataturk Airport can also utilize the country’s bitcoin ATM as well. Additionally, according to Google Trends statistics, Turkey’s interest in bitcoin continues to rise every month.

Bitcoin demand in Turkey started gathering steam back in 2016 when the Turkish Lira had lost considerable purchasing power that year. At the time, president Erdogan tried to convince citizens to convert their foreign currencies back into the Lira.

Turkish Economist: “There Is Serious Bitcoin Research Happening in Turkey”

Now bitcoin is seeing a lot more traction, as just last month the Miavita Beytepe apartment complex in Ankara, Turkey announced it will be selling luxury apartments for bitcoin. In addition to a few cryptocurrency exchange options, over-the-counter activity on Turkey’s Localbitcoins platform has grown exponentially. Following the statements from president Cetinkaya revealing information on the CBRT’s cryptocurrency researchers, the economist, and director of IS Investment International Markets, Shant Manukyan, confirmed the bank’s current investigation, stating:

There is serious bitcoin research happening in Turkey.

Like the many other central banks worldwide, the CBRT is admitting that policymakers are heavily examining cryptocurrencies. Cetinkaya’s statements, revealing the bank’s crypto-research group and saying the technology may be able to provide financial stability, is a good sign for bitcoin proponents located in Turkey.

Author: Jamie Redman

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Bitcoin Just Surged Past $7,000. Here’s Why

Bitcoin Just Surged Past $7,000. Here's Why

Talk about a roller coaster.

As of late Thursday, the price of Bitcoin was about $7,000, having reached the threshold for the first time just hours earlier. The upswing continued a rally that started Wednesday, when the Chicago Merchantile Exchange announced plans to offer Bitcoin futures — a move that could add even more institutional investors to Bitcoin markets and theoretically push up prices.

While Bitcoin investors cheered the rally, dubbing the CME’s decision a step toward legitimizing the cryptocurrency, it was also a reminder that digital coins still have a ways to go before reaching widespread mainstream adoption.

After breaching $6,500 for the first time a day earlier, Bitcoin prices surged as high as $7,350 in trading Thursday likely thanks to traders in Asia noticing the CME’s announcement.

“This is Asia waking up and FOMO,” said Timothy Enneking, managing director at Crypto Asset Management, referring to the fear of missing out on a potentially lucrative rally.

But the euphoria didn’t last. Over the course of the following 20 minutes or so, bitcoin prices shed $550 to hit $6,800—a 7.5% swing. While the volatility of Bitcoin has lessened since its inception, the price swings have continued to worry regulators and institutional investors—deterring widespread use.

Bitcoin's Three-Day Ride

Earlier this year for example, the Securities and Exchange Commission denied a proposal that would allow for a Bitcoin exchange traded fund, or ETF. Some Bitcoin investors had hoped an ETF tied to the cryptocurrency would do what they now expect the CME’s decision to do: Bring in more institutional investors.

In the filing denying the proposal, the SEC noted that Bitcoin had “fundamental flaws” that made it a “dangerous asset class to force into an exchange traded structure.”

Those flaws included price volatility, low liquidity, shallow trading volumes, and oversized exposure to trading in countries with weak regulatory oversight.

Bitcoin on the Rise

The price of Bitcoin reached three milestones in the last 30 days.

Granted, Bitcoin investors are hoping that the CME’s decision, which is still pending regulatory review, will increase the number of players in the market, thereby solving some of those problems by lowering volatility and increasing liquidity.

But other issues, including building a regulatory frame for Bitcoin both in the U.S. and abroad will take time. On top of that, Bitcoin is still undergoing growing pains on the technological side. Bitcoin users are now preparing for a potential “2x hard fork” called “Segwit2x” coming later this month.

Since Bitcoin is decentralized, its users must agree to update to the same software and rules to keep the cryptocurrency running. If just some users decide not the abide by those changes, it creates a new cryptocurrency. So far, the 2x hard fork, which would in theory increase the speed of transactions by increasing the size of blocks to 2 megabytes from 1 megabyte, has been divisive. The lack of consensus has spurred worries that the Bitcoin community itself could fragment.

And despite news of the CME’s decision, Thomas Lee, who is bullish on the cryptocurrency, warned Thursday owners will have to clench their teeth as bitcoin prices may still have further to fall before rebounding.

“For those tactically minded, we would be buyers of bitcoin in the $5,500 range, but such a pullback does not need to happen,” Lee, a managing partner of Fundstrat Global Advisors wrote in a Thursday note. In the long-term, Lee expects Bitcoin prices to reach $25,000 by 2022.

Authors: Lucinda Shen and Grace Donnelly November 2, 2017

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Bitcoin soared above $6,900 despite strong regulatory warning from Securities and Exchange Commission

The price of bitcoin, the red-hot digital coin up more than 550% this year, soared past $6,900 to $6,916 Wednesday evening, according to data by Markets Insider.
The rally comes ahead of a warning by the Securities and Exchange Commission on initial coin offerings, a cryptocurrency-based fundraising method.

Bitcoin blew past $6,900 Wednesday even after the Securities and Exchange Commission warned investors about celebrity endorsements for certain cryptocurrency-based fundraising efforts.

The red-hot digital currency traded at an all-time high of $6,916 per coin, according to Markets Insider data, on Wednesday. The rally followed a price spike triggered by the announcement of the potential launch of a bitcoin-linked financial product by exchange giant CME on Tuesday. The coin is up more than 550% this year.

The upward march continued Wednesday evening despite a warning by the SEC about initial coin offerings, a red-hot fundraising method.

ICOs, according to fintech analytics firm Autonomous NEXT, have raised more $2 billion this year. A number of celebrities from champion boxer Floyd Mayweather to Paris Hilton have supported ICO projects in recent months. But the SEC said Wednesday that such endorsements do not mean that such investments are sound. Here's the agency (emphasis theirs):

"Celebrities, from movie stars to professional athletes, can be found on TV, radio, and social media endorsing a wide variety of products and services – sometimes even including investment opportunities. But a celebrity endorsement does not mean that an investment is legitimate or that it is appropriate for all investors. It is never a good idea to make an investment decision just because someone famous says a product or service is a good investment."

The SEC added that some celebrity endorsers may not be educated on the investment opportunities they promote. Here's the SEC:

"Investors should note that celebrity endorsements may appear unbiased, but instead may be part of a paid promotion. Investment decisions should not be based solely on an endorsement by a promoter or other individual. Celebrities who endorse an investment often do not have sufficient expertise to ensure that the investment is appropriate and in compliance with federal securities laws."

A number of countries, including China, have deemed ICOs illegal because startups have used the method to raise quick money without disclosing substantive information to investors.

The SEC provided its first guidance on ICOs in July. The financial watchdog said ICOs can sometimes be considered securities — and as such are subject to strict laws and regulations.

Author: Frank Chaparro

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Bitcoin Price Boom Sees Students Flocking to Take Cryptocurrency Courses

The rise of bitcoin is seeing an increasing number of students signing up for cryptocurrency classes at top computer science schools such as Stanford.

According to Dan Boneh, co-director of the Stanford Computer Security Lab and professor of cryptography, he is attracting a large number of people to his cryptocurrency courses. As a cryptography researcher for almost 30 years, Boneh began teaching a bitcoin and cryptocurrency class in 2015, attracting more than 100 students. His online cryptography course has seen over one million signing up, reports CNBC.

As a result of bitcoin’s increase in value more students are turning their attention to learning more about them. To date, the digital currency has hit a new all-time high near $6,500 pushing its market value above $100 billion. It’s no surprise then that a rising interest is being experienced. Aside from the huge attraction in the valuation of cryptocurrencies, Boneh believes that they have another benefit too.

He said:

Cryptocurrencies are a wonderful way to teach cryptography. There are a whole bunch of new applications for cryptography that didn’t exist before.

Boneh’s online textbook is also being employed across the state. In Pittsburgh, at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, Vipul Goyal, faculty member in the Computer Science Department at CMU, is heading a class called Special Topics in Cryptography. Offered for the first time this year, around 20 students, mostly PhD candidates, are taking the class, focusing on digital currencies such as bitcoin and the blockchain.

Last year, the University of California at Berkeley launched a class called the Cryptocurrency Decal. In 2015, the MIT’s Media Lab created the Digital Currency Initiative.

Just as there has been an increase in the number of students taking cryptocurrency courses, so too has there been a rise in the number of bitcoin-related jobs.

According to employment marketplace Freelancer, there has been an 82 percent increase in jobs related to bitcoin. Speaking to CNBC, Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer, said earlier this week that one of the main skills that employers are looking for is a candidate’s ability to manage initial coin offerings (ICOs).

He said:

People are getting freelancers to design new types of cryptocurrencies.

The marketplace adds that employers want people to create new digital currencies and to create proposal plans for technologies utilizing blockchain.

In the third quarter of the year, Freelancer listed 480,000 new jobs. To date it has more than 12 million and 25 million active users on its site.

Author: Rebecca Campbell on 31/10/2017

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

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