Crypto bull sees bitcoin at $11 500

The bitcoin bulls are charging. A day after hedge fund manager Mike Novogratz said the cryptocurrency will end the year at US$10 000, Fundstrat’s Thomas Lee doubled his price target to $11 500 by the middle of 2018 — a 40% gain from current levels.

Lee, who heads research at Fundstrat, said a 10% pullback earlier this month triggered by the controversial cancellation of an upgrade to bitcoin’s underlying software has set the stage for the coming surge.

The November slump “cleaned up weak hands”, Lee wrote Wednesday in a note to clients that almost doubled his last forecast. The strategist had warned earlier in the month that bitcoin’s rally to $7 000 from $3 500 raised the likelihood for a short-term pullback. “We no longer feel caution is warranted,” he said.

Bitcoin rose 1.2% to $8 230.12 as of 11.05am in New York, about $100 short of its all-time high set on Tuesday after Novogratz’s comments. The most popular cryptocurrency has surged more than seven-fold since December, surpassing $8 000 for the first time this week.

The ride to records hasn’t been straight up for the virtual asset, with three separate slumps of more than 25% all giving way to subsequent rallies this year.

“We recommend steady buying of bitcoin at these levels,” Lee said in the Wednesday report. Fundstrat also boosted its price target for the Bitcoin Investment Trust, an over-the-counter security that offers investors exposure to bitcoin. Lee predicts it will trade at $1 300 by mid-2018, up from his prior target of $800.

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Warning Signs About Another Giant Bitcoin Exchange

Phil Potter is the chief strategy officer of Bitfinex, an unregulated virtual currency exchange. Its size and impact worry even advocates of virtual currencies.CreditChristopher Goodney/Bloomberg

Warning Signs About Another Giant Bitcoin Exchange

SAN FRANCISCO — As the price of Bitcoin has soared, the virtual currency has edged toward the mainstream.

Square, the fast-growing payments company run by the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has begun selling Bitcoins to ordinary consumers, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange will soon allow banks to trade on the value of Bitcoin.

But if you want to see where the price of Bitcoin is actually determined in round-the-clock bidding, you have to go to a number of unregulated exchanges that often fly in the face of American and European laws.

These days, no exchange is bigger than Bitfinex, an opaque operation that provides no information on its website about where it is or who operates the company.

Bitfinex, which is officially incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, has been fined by regulators in the United States and cut off by American banks, and it has lost millions of dollars of customer money in two separate hackings, leading critics to question whether it even has the money it claims to hold.

In the latest blow, on Tuesday, an alternative virtual currency that is owned and operated by the same people as Bitfinex, known as Tether, announced that it had been hacked and lost around $30 million worth of digital tokens.

None of that has been enough to stop customers from pumping billions of dollars worth of virtual currency trades through Bitfinex in recent weeks — on some days, the exchange claimed to be doing more trades, by dollar value, than some stock exchanges in the United States.

Even many people who believe in virtual currencies worry that the mixture of loose controls and booming trading at the world’s largest exchange is likely to cause trouble for all the investors piling into virtual currencies, even those who don’t go near Bitfinex.

22BITFINEX-2-jumbo
On some days, Bitfinex claims to carry more transactions, in dollar volume, than major stock exchanges.Credit

“I’m worried about the systemic risk that this centralized company poses, and I’m worried that if they go down, they will take down the space with them,” said Emin Gün Sirer, a computer science professor at Cornell University, who has a track record of successfully predicting problems in the growing virtual currency industry.

The chief executive of Bitfinex and Tether, Jan Ludovicus van der Velde, said in an email on Tuesday that “the financial position of the company has never been stronger.”

Concerns over virtual currency exchanges are nothing new. The first and largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed in 2014 after losing $500 million of customer money to hackers.

This year, law enforcement took down another large Bitcoin exchange, BTC-E, which was accused of being a way station for many of the Bitcoin flowing through online black markets and ransomware attacks.

Regulators in the United States and a few other countries have tried to tame the business, and the largest exchanges in the United States and Japan are now under official oversight.

Those regulated exchanges, though, are dwarfed by unregulated ones like Bitfinex and several that have popped up in South Korea, where regulators have been slow to act.

The liquid nature of the Bitcoin markets, flowing around national borders and laws, is a product of the virtual currency’s unusual structure. Bitcoin is stored and moved through a decentralized network of computers that are not under the control of any single company or government.

Author: Nathaniel Popper Nov. 21, 2017

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Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash – Can Both Survive

Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash - Can Both Survive

Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash: Can Both Survive?

Industry leaders comment on which will dominate the market: Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash.

You could be forgiven for thinking Bitcoin Cash was dead; the currency had slumped to about $600 before a sudden revival last week caused the price to soar to $2,600 while simultaneously knocking Bitcoin down a few notches.

As a brief recap, Bitcoin recorded a new all-time high of about $7,800 on Wednesday, November 8 followed by a downward trend, which saw Bitcoin fall by nearly 30 percent to under $5,630 by Sunday, November 12. The root of this was that the Bitcoin community couldn’t reach a consensus to proceed with the proposed SegWit2x hard fork. However, it didn’t take long for Bitcoin to return to its previous values and seek new highs.

The discussions of a hard fork finds its root in the one megabyte block size limit that the original developer of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, set to make the digital currency more secure. Given the limit of only 21 million Bitcoins, Satoshi most likely didn’t envisage that Bitcoin will be as huge and valuable as it is today. That’s certainly understandable since nothing like it had ever existed.

However, now that the digital currency has become more popular than Satoshi probably envisaged, the currency is dealing with the modesty of its original design. Bitcoin’s lack of capacity has led to the growing amount of time it takes to process Bitcoin transactions. Those who would like to have their transactions confirmed in a timely manner have to pay relatively more transaction fee as an incentive for transaction validators (miners) to prioritize their transactions.

According to a website that tracks Bitcoin fees, the current “fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 770 satoshis/byte.” For reference, a comment on BitcoinTalk pointed out that the recommended fee (same as the fastest and cheapest fee) as of January 2017 was 120 satoshis. That’s over 500 percent increase in the recommended transaction fee since the beginning of the year.

This is contrary to the promise of speed and affordability that has been publicized as one of the advantages that Bitcoin offers over the traditional ways of conducting financial transactions.

The aim of the shelved SegWit2x hard fork was to solve these challenges by increasing the amount of transaction data that each block can handle to two megabytes. Once this fork was cancelled, some investors grew weary and pulled out of Bitcoin and moved into Bitcoin Cash, a digital currency that resulted from a Bitcoin hard fork in August.

Bitcoin Cash recorded an all-time high of over $2,500 when Bitcoin was falling on November 12. Considering that the scaling limitations inherent in the Bitcoin system still lie unfixed, coupled with the social buzz around Bitcoin Cash, investors are likely to be worried about what the future holds for Bitcoin. Here are some thoughts from industry experts.

The Lack of Consensus Makes Bitcoin Vulnerable To Big Money Manipulation

According to DNX Community CEO Conradie Graeme, the failure to push the SegWit2x hard fork through is a setback for Bitcoin.

“Everyone is focused on scalability issues, but I believe there’s a bigger vulnerability issue about Bitcoin Think about it, as it stands, if you can afford to pay more in transaction fee, you can have your transactions confirmed quickly and there is no limit to the amount of Bitcoin you can buy or sell. And in reality, it’s only the big money investors/traders who can afford to pay more in transaction fees. So in theory, big money can pump and dump Bitcoin using the unfair advantage of being able to get their transactions confirmed quickly by paying more. They can dump before anyone else to take profits. This could mean that Bitcoin will remain highly volatile and high volatility could hinder it from ever becoming huge in the digital payment space.”

Bitcoin’s Value Will Decline

Maksim Balashevich, CEO and Founder of Santiment, believes that Bitcoin will drop in value.

There is always time to accumulate and then also time to reduce the risks. #bitcoin is risky now more than rewardy #cryptocurrency pic.twitter.com/FC2PnhX3bZ

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) November 7, 2017

Santiment believes Bitcoin’s value will drop, being redistributed among other ‘cash payments protocols’ such as Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Dash, Monero and Ripple. He adds:

“The Bitcoin Core [developers] (and Blockstream) should feel the real pressure and pain for what they’ve been denying for too long time. Once this pain is obvious and on all discussion boards, we might find the way for relief.”

There’s Room for Coexistence

Eric Jackson, CEO and Co-Founder, CapLinked, on the other hand, believes that Bitcoin’s widespread institutional support and adoption means that it will likely be here to stay, adding that its recent price rebound confirms that. That doesn’t mean Bitcoin Cash has no chance. Here are his words:

“I also believe that it is possible for Bitcoin Cash to coexist with Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s appreciation over the past half-decade has turned it into a store of value more comparable to gold than a currency. The very notion that Wall Street is developing derivatives of Bitcoin also suggests that it is on its way to becoming the world’s first digital commodity. Bitcoin has smaller block sizes and higher transaction fees compared to [Bitcoin Cash], making [Bitcoin Cash] mechanically better suited as a payment option than Bitcoin. Thus, assuming the rise of [Bitcoin Cash] is in part due to the need for a more flexible digital payment mechanism, I think there is room in the world for both.”

Clem Chambers, CEO of global stocks and shares website ADVFN also shares the view that several digital currencies can coexist:

“There is room in the market for both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, and for that matter many other coins including eccentric issues like Bitcoin Gold. In classic coinage, there are many denominations for the very same reason that there will be many different cryptocoin denominations. There are also many different currencies on top of denominations and for that matter an infinite set of designs. Cryptocurrency will follow a similar path.”

At press time, Bitcoin is trading at an all time high of just under $8300.

Author: Craig Adeyanju 11/21/2017 – 04:39

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Roger Ver Declares Bitcoin Cash to Be True Bitcoin, Market Forces Bring More Attention

Earlier this year, divergent groups within the original Bitcoin community could not agree on a particular protocol to be implemented in scaling the platform. Those who sought bigger blocks therefore hard forked away from Bitcoin and created Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Battle for supremacy

Since the creation of Bitcoin Cash in August 2017, there has been a tug on both sides of the divide and many key players and stakeholders have publicly taken sides based on reasons that are peculiar to them.

After the hard fork, Bitcoin Cash followed a general downward trend following its initial surge post-creation, while Bitcoin continued to smash the roof and set new record-highs repeatedly. Recently, Bitcoin retraced significantly over a short period of time – about $2,300 in just a few days. The difference between this dip and previous corrections was the corresponding surge in value of Bitcoin Cash which many people see as a direct rival to Bitcoin.

This Bitcoin Cash surge has caused formerly-neutral trading platforms like eToro to add Bitcoin Cash to their platform, with members paying a closer attention to developments around the cryptocurrency.

Which is the real Bitcoin?

Roger Ver is known as ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ due to the fervour with which he preached the Bitcoin gospel in its early days, but now appears as the main face behind Bitcoin Cash. He insists that his version of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Cash, is the future of Bitcoin.

Ver tells Cointelegraph:

“Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin and will have the bigger market cap, trade volume and user base in the future.”

Currently, Bitcoin Cash has a market cap that is just about one-fifth that of Bitcoin, a daily trading volume of over half and a circulating supply that is slightly higher when compared to Bitcoin. Following the recent price fluctuations, the crypto community is beginning to pay closer attention to Bitcoin Cash.

Challenges are essential for growth

The CEO of Netcoins, Michael Vogel, sees Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as the world's largest and most ambitious open source project. The closest parallel, according to Vogel, is the open source nature of Linux, which is notorious for the sparring that happens between the backers of different versions of the software. Vogel believes that the rivalry between different camps of the Bitcoin community is just a temporary roadblock that will lead to a more robust and resilient technology.

Vogel says:

“I do not think the challenges and in-fighting between various crypto camps are a bad thing. In another way we're effectively witnessing democracy in action. These are, in part, simply growing pains of a new technology, but by blasting through these roadblocks Bitcoin also becomes more robust and resilient. This is why, in my opinion, Bitcoin continued to rally to all-time highs after the Bitcoin Cash fork during the summer; Bitcoin users have realized that "Bitcoin is still Bitcoin" any time a new fork occurs.”

Deliberate market influence

Dana L. Coe, Director at BitLox, sees the current situation as a deliberate action of market makers who are taking advantage of the tender stage of the crypto ecosystem. Coe tells Cointelegraph that the activity between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash is pure market volatility driven by rumors and speculation, which essentially drives all markets. However, he notes that in this case one can easily observe the market makers as they are quite obvious. This is especially so, as we have seen Bitcoin recover fully from the fall in price and subsequently break the $8,000 mark.

Coe says:

“The cryptosphere has come a long way, but let us not forget that compared to the economy as a whole, it is still small. Therefore, when actors from the larger national economies take an interest, crypto prices are most certainly to be subject to outsized influences. In the end, Bitcoin will stand or fall on the faith of it’s users and it’s users alone.”

Still more to come

Apparently, there is genuine attention being paid to the two most expensive cryptocurrencies at the moment. Most proponents have taken to social media to show support or criticize either Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash, depending on which one they support.

Immediately after the hard fork, exchanges such as Bittrex, Kraken, ViaBitcoin and Bter all listed Bitcoin Cash on their platforms, after which its adoption seemed to have reached a plateau. But with more trading platforms listing Bitcoin Cash in the wake of its biggest push since creation, it is only normal to expect more developments around the community as time goes on.

Author: Iyke Aru

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First Long-Term LedgerX Bitcoin Option Pegs Price at $10,000

LedgerX just initiated its first long-term bitcoin futures option.

Called a Long-Term Equity Anticipation Security (LEAPS), the trade was matched by the platform this morning and is set to expire on December 28, 2018.

Under the terms of the deal, the buyer has the right to buy bitcoin at a price of $10,000 at that date, or almost a 30 percent premium on today's price.

Yet, because the buyer only makes money if the price is more than $10,000 (called the strike price), the investment can be seen as a reflection of the level of confidence that the price will reach that level by the agreed upon date.

Such long term futures options have long been seen in the industry as a much needed sign of maturity, and could in part help pave the way for even more institutional money to enter the space.

In an exclusive interview with CoinDesk, LedgerX CEO Paul Chou sought to position the milestone as just the first of many more before the cryptocurrency market can truly be considered mature.

Chou said:

"There will be, I expect, a lot more trades down the line. This is the first one, but it at least gives you the first guess from different institutional traders as to what bitcoin's dynamics will look like from now until 2018."

The trade option was listed by LedgerX late Friday night, and to Chou's surprise, two institutional investors agreed to the terms of the deal just one day later.

Under the terms, the buyer agreed to a price of $2,250.25 for the trade, meaning the seller collects that money if the price is less that $10,000 by the end of next year, and the buyer gets to purchase bitcoin at the strike price if it is higher.

Unlike a futures swap however, the buyer is not obliged to purchase the asset.

"If the price goes to zero, you don't have to pay $10,000 for it," Chou said. "But if a year from now it's at $20,000, then you can exercise your options."

Based on LedgerX's own calculations (made using the Nobel-prize winning Black-Sholes financial markets model), the startup believes there is a 25 percent chance that bitcoin will reach that level in the allotted time.

Soft launch

While this is the first LEAPS financial instrument matched by New York-based LedgerX, they've been conducting increasingly high trade volumes since their soft launch a month ago.

As reported by CoinDesk, LedgerX traded $1 million in bitcoin derivatives its first week of trading, ending Oct. 20.

Since then, the first cryptocurrency firm to be granted a derivatives clearing organization (DCO) license by the CFTC has posted a $1 million day, a $1.6 million day and on November 15, a record $2.6 million day.

Since LedgerX listed the LEAPS option at 5:30 Friday evening, Chou says they saw an additional $500,000 traded before midnight. "That's for a holiday week too," he said. "So we were shocked." He estimates the company has conducted approximately $16 million in notional bitcoin transactions to date.

While the startups numbers seem to indicated active early interest, legacy institutions such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Group) and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) have both recently revealed their own similar plans.

Though Chou hopes to maintain his first-mover advantage, he said there's no hard date to launch into full operation. Rather, his team wants to make sure the platform scales well beyond the 1 million messages it sends per day before this milestone. He says he'd be "surprised if that takes "more than a month," concluding:

"But it might be sooner."

Author: Michael del Castillo Nov 18, 2017 at 21:59 UTC

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3 Reasons the Bitcoin Price Hit $8,000 Today

The bitcoin price touched the $8,000 mark on Friday morning (or Thursday night, depending on your time zone), enabling the flagship cryptocurrency to check another milestone off its to-do list before it reaches five-figure territory.

Bitcoin Price Touches $8,000

Just days prior, the bitcoin price had been trading below $6,000, but a mid-week rally raised bitcoin back to its pre-dip level and ultimately vaulted it to a new all-time high of $8,040 on cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex.

BTC Price Chart | Source: BitcoinWisdom

At present, the bitcoin price is trading at a global average of $7,741, which translates into a $129.2 billion market cap.

3 Factors Behind Bitcoin’s Rally

While a multitude of factors contribute to the movement of the bitcoin price, three stand out as primary drivers of the present rally:

1. Wall Street’s Anticipated Entry Into the Markets

Ever since regulated U.S. derivatives exchange operator CME announced it would add bitcoin futures contracts to its product offering, analysts have been counting down the days until Wall Street makes its first major entry into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Anecdotal evidence indicates that prominent institutional investors are eying the markets with interest — enough interest that Coinbase is launching a cryptocurrency custodial service specifically targeted at institutional investors with more than $10 million in crypto assets.

Related to this is the fact that Wall Street investors are increasingly bullish on publicly-traded companies that enter the bitcoin or blockchain space. Payment processor Square, for instance, received a significant bump to its share price after it rolled out a bitcoin pilot program to a limited number of users of its Square Cash app.

square-cash-bitcoin-price-nov17

2. Successful Lightning-Based Atomic Swap

Though less likely to make its way into the mainstream press, another factor influencing bitcoin’s rally is the successful completion of the first off-chain atomic swap. Accomplished using lightning network technology, developers at Lightning Labs traded testnet bitcoin for testnet litecoin trustlessly and without leaving a record of the transaction in either blockchain. Once the lightning network reaches mainnet implementation, this feature will enable the creation of decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges.

3. SegWit2x

Finally, some analysts believe that the bitcoin price received a small bump due to the fact that a minority percentage of miners continued to signal for SegWit2x even though the fork’s most prominent advocates had called for its cancellation. Spencer Bogart, head of research at Blockchain Capital, had told Bloomberg Quint that he believed “some capital is rotating out of other crypto-assets and into bitcoin to make sure they receive coins on both sides of the fork” in the event that it did execute as planned. However, the fork did not occur — or at least has not yet — and fork-compatible nodes remain stuck at block 494782.

Author: Josiah Wilmoth on 17/11/2017

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Bitcoin Breaks Through $8,000 Following Massive Head Fake

Bitcoin just surmounted the $8,000 level, topping out at $8,020 on Bitfinex before retreating to $7,900 at press time. By now, reading about Bitcoin’s breach of its previous high might be getting repetitious, so strong has the currency’s bull run been. This time is an exception, though, because Bitcoin just pulled the mother of all head fakes.

Looking back

About a week ago, the SegWit2x hard fork was cancelled and the price immediately spiked from $7,200 to $7,800. But within the hour, the price had dropped and continued to fall further. Just a few days later, Bitcoin had sunk to a local low of $5,500, while rival Bitcoin Cash shot up from $600 to $2,600. At the time, a large number of Bitcoin miners had moved to Bitcoin Cash and the number of unconfirmed transactions soared to over 135,000. Fees increased commensurately.

Things didn’t look good. Bitcoin had just officially eschewed the only near-term solution to the scalability crisis. SegWit, which was adopted back in August, will take time to gain traction as wallet providers must include the feature and users must voluntarily begin using it. Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s long-term scaling plan, is still in testing and not ready for primetime yet. With the cancellation of 2MB blocks, it became obvious that there would be no quick fix to the currency’s scaling problem.

Waves of good news

However, Bitcoin Cash began rapidly dropping from its nearly vertical price ascent, miners came back to Bitcoin, and the transaction backlog subsided. Bitcoin’s price began to rise, and as good news arrived, the price moves became even larger.

What good news? Well, the British hedge fund Man Group, with over $100 bln in funds under management, announced they will begin trading Bitcoin once CME’s futures market is launched. Immediately following this, Payments app Square announced its full integration of Bitcoin into the payments platform. The company stated:

“We’re always listening to our customers and we’ve found that they are interested in using the Cash App to buy Bitcoin. We're exploring how Square can make this experience faster and easier, and have rolled out this feature to a small number of Cash App customers. We believe cryptocurrency can greatly impact the ability of individuals to participate in the global financial system and we're excited to learn more here.”

Square’s market capitalization swelled from $15 bln to $16 bln following the announcement, so Wall Street is apparently just as pleased as the Bitcoin community.

Coinbase Custody

Adding to the good news, Coinbase today announced Coinbase Custody, a Bitcoin storage service intended for hedge funds that might want to invest in the digital currency. Coinbase’s announcement states:

“Over 100 hedge funds have been created in the past year exclusively to trade digital currency. An even greater number of traditional institutional investors are starting to look at trading digital assets (including family offices, sovereign wealth funds, traditional hedge funds, and more). By some estimates there is $10B of institutional money waiting on the sidelines to invest in digital currency today. When we speak with these institutions, they tell us that the number one thing preventing them from getting started is the existence of a digital asset custodian that they can trust to store client funds securely.”

The announcement continues, describing the benefits of the service:

We are designing Coinbase Custody to meet the needs of institutional clients. In particular, we feel that institutional clients require:

Strict financial controls (multiple signers, audit trails, limits, etc)

Dedicated account representatives and phone support

SLAs on funds transfers

A regulated digital currency custodian

Multi-user accounts with separate permissions

Support for a wide range of digital assets and currencies

Insurance (in some cases)

And high levels of cyber and physical security

The new service is expected to launch in 2018.

Expect sharp moves

Bitcoin’s technical analysts, who look at chart patterns to try and predict price moves, suggest that the currency is about to experience a significant price move. Because of its rapid climb, analysis would seem to indicate that the price should experience a pullback here to regroup and consolidate before pushing higher. However, around $8,000 is the top of the trading channel that Bitcoin has been in for months, and if the price can resoundingly break through this barrier, it could go parabolic.

In a sense, Bitcoin’s value is even higher than it would appear, at least for those who owned Bitcoin before the August 1 fork and who held the resulting Bitcoin Cash they received. User csasker on the /r/BitcoinMarkets subreddit wrote:

BTG + BCH + BTC now over 9000! :D:DDD

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Morgan Stanley chief says bitcoin ‘doesn’t quite deserve the attention it’s getting’

Morgan Stanley chief says bitcoin 'doesn't quite deserve the attention it's getting'

Morgan Stanley Chairman and CEO James Gorman said bitcoin is getting more attention than it might deserve
He said the cryptocurrency is the "definition" of a speculative investment, and anyone thinking it might be stable is "deluding themselves"
But Gorman acknowledged that bitcoin's growing acceptance and usability meant it was not going away overnight

Bitcoin is getting more attention than it deserves, but the phenomenon is not going away overnight, according to Morgan Stanley Chairman and CEO James Gorman.

Speaking with CNBC on Thursday, Gorman said bitcoin isn't even close to a safe investment, and would-be cryptocurrency owners shouldn't expect otherwise.

"Something that goes up 700 percent in a year — it's by definition speculative," he said. "So anybody who thinks they're buying something that it's a stable investment is deluding themselves."

"It might go up another 700 percent, but it could easily not," Gorman added.

Gorman's stance on bitcoin appeared slightly less negative than some of his peers on Wall Street. For example, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon predicted if "you're stupid enough to buy [bitcoin], you'll pay the price for it one day." Meanwhile, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called the cryptocurrency "an index of money laundering."

The criticism from financial luminaries has done little to deter bitcoin's ascent. On Thursday morning, the cryptocurrency traded at $7,141.03, according to Coindesk data. It had begun the year at only about $1,000 per token.

Gorman added that bitcoin is "punching above its weight" and the cryptocurrency "doesn't quite deserve the attention it's getting."

Previously, the Morgan Stanley CEO described cryptocurrencies as "more than just a fad."

He explained to CNBC that bitcoin's growing acceptance and usability meant it was "not going away overnight."

But there are issues and uncertainties surrounding the cryptocurrency.

"Is it a needed new form of stored value? I'm not so sure," he said, adding it was also unclear if the regulators and central banks would watch bitcoin's growth from afar or become involved.

Still, the bank chief grappled with digital money's reputation for facilitating criminality: "Does it support people who want to use currencies on anonymous basis for wrong purposes? Absolutely," Gorman said.

Proponents of bitcoin predict the cryptocurrency will continue breaking records amid its growing acceptance among users to carry out financial transactions. One analyst even predicted bitcoin could top Apple's market cap in five years.

Author Saheli Roy Choudhury
Reporter, CNBC.com

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Won’t Let Bitcoin Go to Zero – CME Chief Quells Fears Ahead of December Bitcoin Futures Launch

Won't Let Bitcoin Go to Zero - CME Chief Quells Fears Ahead of December Bitcoin Futures Launch

Won’t Let Bitcoin Go to Zero – CME Chief Quells Fears Ahead of December Bitcoin Futures Launch

Bitcoin futures contracts are scheduled to launch in one month on the world’s largest derivatives exchange, and market analysts have nothing to fear.

That’s according to Terry Duffy, chairman and CEO of the Chicago-based CME Group, which will soon become the first licensed U.S. derivatives exchange to list bitcoin futures contracts. Speaking with CNBC, Duffy revealed that CME plans to launch bitcoin futures trading during the second week of December.

Previously, the exchange operator had provided a vaguer timeline, stating that it hoped to list them during the fourth quarter, pending regulatory approval, so many analysts doubted they would actually launch before the end of the year. But their impending launch makes some industry insider nervous.

“For the first time, I am extremely scared,” Barron’s quotes Thomas Peterffy, head of derivatives trading firm Interactive Brokers Group, as saying. He says that he fears bitcoin’s volatility will make smaller firms more likely to fail to cover their margins, which could be as low as 2% on futures products. If bitcoin products are not isolated from the rest of the market, he says that that the failure of these small firms could reverberate throughout the exchange and render it less protected against risk.

However, Duffy downplayed these concerns and assured skeptics that CME will implement restrictions designed to contain the inherent volatility of the bitcoin markets.

“I’m not going to let it go to zero,” he said, adding that if the exchange has rules in place to handle liquidation-only events. He further explained that CME has “velocity logic functionality” tools — colloquially known as market “bumpers” — that enable the exchange operator to press pause on trading during periods of intense, precipitous volatility. These bumpers might pause bitcoin trading for as long as an hour, and the market will also have intraday limits to prevent the price from fluctuating too wildly within a single day of trading.

“I should not be trying to predict the price of products. I’m here to manage the risks of products,” he concluded.

Author: Josiah Wilmoth on 14/11/2017

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Bitcoin Cash Hard Forks In Bid to Ease Mining Difficulties

Bitcoin cash appears to be successfully navigating a planned hard fork.

At press time, the majority of the network nodes (roughly 82 percent) have transitioned to new software (version 0.16.0 or later) that includes rules aimed at making the protocol's reward distribution more attractive to the miners that secure its blockchain.

Executed at roughly 21:00 UTC, the new version of the bitcoin cash blockchain has since amassed six blocks, while none have yet been mined on the older network. The results suggest that, while still possible, the fork will pass without the creation of a competing cryptocurrency.

As reported by CoinDesk, today's hard fork looks to switch the protocol to a different mining algorithm that will favorably adjust how hard it is for miners to create new blocks roughly every 600 seconds.

The idea is that by doing so, bitcoin cash will avoid the sudden changes in difficulty that have encouraged large numbers of miners to switch frequently between the bitcoin and bitcoin cash blockchains, migrating to whatever version is offering the most in terms of rewards.

Kept intact will be the rules that caused the creation of the cryptocurrency, which hard forked off of the main bitcoin blockchain in August by way of code that increased its block size to 8 MB, up from 1 MB on bitcoin.

Smooth upgrade

But it's the necessity of the mining change that has many thinking the upgrade will be smooth.

In remarks, Haipo Yang and Jiang Zhuoer, two major mining pool operators, said they didn't expect the change to be contentious. Other users, speaking in WeChat channels dedicated to the cryptocurrency, voiced similar statements of support for the measure.

This is due in part to the mining algorithm, which they acknowledged as having produced wild fluctuations in hash rate in the past. Developers have largely agreed.

According to the blog post outlining the hard fork and the updated software, the current rule is "problematic because it prevents consistently fast confirmations for users, and radically shifts the coin issuance schedule."

In this way, Juan Garavaglia, a developer working to coordinate the fork sought to label it as successful, indicating his optimism that the majority of the bitcoin cash network will update.

"For [the] fork… economically relevant and miners [nodes] are the critical ones," he said.

Already, startups including Yours and Ledger have migrated software.

Cash and carry

Should the software upgrade ultimately hold, it could bode well for bitcoin cash.

The protocol's supporters are arguably more encouraged about the network's future with the suspension of the Segwit2x hard fork, scheduled to occur on bitcoin last week. A controversial scaling proposal drafted by a group of miners and bitcoin businesses, Segwit2x looked to increase the bitcoin block size from 1 MB to 2 MB by way of a hard fork.

Still, with the measure failed, its supporters appear to be migrating to alternatives. This weekend saw bitcoin cash rise to a value of nearly $2,000, an all-time high, though analysts differed on whether this amounts to lasting (or even real) support for the network.

At the same time, money talks, and already at least one smaller miner indicated they're following the situation, possibly hinting at the psychological factors at play in the market.

Yimo Cheng, a China-based tax accountant who mines bitcoin out of his home, said he hasn't yet started mining bitcoin cash for concerns about its ownership being concentrated among Chinese buyers.

And while he believes bitcoin is "more international," he ultimately said he would continue to monitor how the dynamic between the two blockchains developers.

He resolved:

"I will obverse it for a while."

Bailey Reutzel contributed reporting.

Author: Pete Rizzo Nov 13, 2017 at 22:30 UTC

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden