Current Cryptocurrency Capital Influx Hints at Positive Bitcoin Price Evolution

No one wants to miss out on what cryptocurrency may be capable of achieving in the future.

  

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin may be getting most of the headlines, but cryptocurrency as a whole is on a roll. Statistics from Coinmarketcap.com reveal that 82 out of the top 100 cryptocurrencies posted gains in a recent 24-hour period. Whether all cryptocurrencies are riding bitcoin’s coattails or investors are suddenly discovering altcoins is anybody’s guess.

  

The total cryptocurrency market capitalization (price per coin times amount of coins in circulation) stands at $42.6 trillion. That marks more than a $10 billion gain in 10 days.

Ripple Leads In Growth Rate

Among the currencies with a market capitalization in excess of $1 billion, Ripple has posted the top growth rate of 33.6% in a 24-hour period, yielding a $2.831 billion market cap. Litecoin comes in second with a 22.34% growth rate and $1.132 billion market cap. Ripple’s gain has been credited to a strategic partnership initiative, teaming with Asian and Australian banks in conjunction with its stated goal of acting as a PayPal-like mechanism for large interbank transfers. Litecoin, for its part, has benefited from Coinbase’s decision to support it, allowing users to buy, sell and store Litecoin using its platform and wallet. It became the third cryptocurrency, after bitcoin and Ethereum, to gain Coinbase’s full support.

What Drives Bitcoin?

Bitcoin, far and away the largest market cap in excess of $25 billion, posted a 5.81% 24-hour jump. Bitcoin’s price reached a new all-time high once again, at $1,567. Brian Kelly, a financial analyst at CNBC, has attributed the recent surge in bitcoin’s price to the rise in institutional investors within the bitcoin market. Other factors include the bitcoin community’s consensus not to support Bitcoin Unlimited, and an overall increase in global trading. Some analysts have attributed some of the bitcoin’s growth to that of the altcoins; altcoins are usually bought and sold with bitcoin, requiring traders to buy bitcoin.

Ethereum Has Its Own Story

Ethereum, which has the second highest market cap at just over $8 billion, has jumped 12.12% in the 24-hour period. Its price rise is due to a number of factors. Google searches for Ethereum have spiked to an all-time high, nearly doubling in just one week. Some countries appear to be using ETH a hedge against national currencies. Switzerland, where the Ethereum Foundation is based, showed the strongest interest, followed by Venezuela, which is suffering triple-digit inflation.

South Korea seems to have fallen in love with the currency. Its three largest exchanges handle twice the ETH/fiat volume of Coinbase’s GDAX and Kraken combined. South Korea is also big into fantasy sports, an area where ETH’s smart contracts can be used to make the game more transparent and reduce cheating.

Don’t Forget Dash

Dash, number 5 with a $683.3 million market cap, jumped 6.77% in the 24-hour period. Featuring exceptional transaction speed, Dash continues to become more accessible to investors and consumers.

The cryptocurrency exchange Kraken recently announced the integration of Dash to its trading platform. BitCart, an Ireland-based discount gift card platform, recently allowed users up to a 20% discount for using Dash on Amazon purchases. Crypto-Woo, a payments plug-in, has integrated Dash, allowing users to pay for online purchases with Dash. CryptoBuyer, a Venezuela-based crypto exchange, has begun selling Dash, allowing consumers in the economically ravaged country to have another alternative to its imploding national currency.

Ethereum Classic, number six at $664.4 million, rose 8.97%.
NEM, at %521.7 million, jumped 9.5%.
Monero, number 8 at $371 million, rose 8.76%.

The top 14 cryptocurrencies all posted gains in the 24-hour period.  PIVX, which at $84.1 million has the 15th highest market, cap posted a 3.16% drop.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Cryptocurrency:
Top 5 Things You Should Know About Digital Cash

If you’ve had your ear to the fintech

streets over the last few years, you’ve probably heard the term Bitcoin tossed around as cash’s digital counterpart. What you may not know is how Bitcoin’s emergence in 2009 has spawned a race across the globe to be part of the emerging trend. What exactly is Bitcoin? Will it replace cash? What does it mean for your small business? Here’s a quick rundown to get you up to speed.

What is it?

Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency or a digital currency that uses encryption techniques to create units and secure the transaction. What’s unique about this invention is it decentralizes currency away from traditional banks, meaning people can complete financial transactions without any bank involvement or regulation. Bitcoin is the first form of cryptocurrency invented, and is still by far the largest within the market.

How do you use it?

To simplify it further, it’s basically a peer-to-peer sharing network. Members can initiate transactions through the network, however, no actual currency is created or transacted until both parties agree on the amount. Here’s how it works:

1.     Someone requests a transaction.
2.     The request is broadcast to the P2P network composed of computers or “nodes.”
3.     The network initiates a validation process to verify both users and the transaction amount.
4.     Once the transaction is validated, the cryptocurrency is created in the amount that was agreed upon in the validation process. If the amounts or the network credentials don’t add up, the transaction request is denied.

The cryptocurrency has no physical form and only exists within the network. Value is only assigned once the agreed terms are validated. Holders can then withdraw the value from a cryptocurrency ATM in exchange for the currency they’d like to use.

Is it legal?

The legality of cryptocurrency varies by country. Some have explicitly allowed it for trade, and others have totally banned it. For us, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) ruled that bitcoin will be treated as property for tax purposes as opposed to currency. So, it’s legal to own and use for trade internationally, however, it will be subject to capital gains tax.

Are US shoppers using it?

Sure. Knowledge about Bitcoin has increased so significantly since 2014 that there are now 554 Bitcoin ATMs in the U.S. These are stations that Bitcoin owners can use to exchange for U.S. currency.

How will this impact my business?

While Bitcoin is gaining steam in the US and across the globe, it will likely be a few years before this impacts the small business sector. Since the IRS hasn’t identified cryptocurrency as a legal tender, it likely won’t surface as a mainstream payment option for another decade or so.

However, cryptocurrency has the legs to gain popularity within contract-based subsectors. If adopted at full-scale, organizations like banks and insurance companies could be replaced. Access, validation and other major functions can be performed by the technology itself, so bank and insurance underwriting would no longer be a limitation for people who are typically denied credit. Rules, contracts, and processes can be programmed within the peer-to-peer network and therefore transformed into automated processes.

Insurance policies for flight delays will pay out immediately if an airline’s flight data reports a delayed plane. For example, musicians’ royalties can be automatically paid via the blockchain when people listen to their songs, without a record company being involved. People will no longer have to waste time claiming compensation. The amount of self-generated solar power can be calculated without checks by a utility company and credited to the user’s account

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin's price breaks records, yet again

  
Bitcoin is still on a major upswing. 

The price of the cryptocurrency broke $1,500 this week — a huge milestone for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.  The $1,500 price put the total value of the cryptocurrency market above $40 billion, MarketWatch reported. Bitcoin started off 2017 trading just above $1,000, which was its first time reaching that mark in three years. Then in February, the digital currency exceeded its $1,165 record price set in 2014. Last week, bitcoin rose above $1,400, an all-time high. And now it's above $1,500 — at $1,534 on Saturday afternoon, to be exact. It could all come crashing down again — in early 2017, bitcoin's swing above $1,000 was short-lived. Or maybe $1,500 will be the going rate for one bitcoin from now on.

Cryptocurrency Prices Explode! Bitcoin at $1600, Ethereum at $100

  

Cryptocurrency prices appear to be unstoppable today,

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Digital Gold':
Cryptocurrencies Soar as Investors
Swap Dollars for Bitcoins

Cryptocurrencies are gaining in value because many see them as a new type of digital investment that has advantages over the US dollar or even gold, Economic Historian Dr. Garrick Hileman told Radio Sputnik.

  

The price of Bitcoin was soaring to new highs

during trading last week, amid an upsurge in demand. According to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (BPI), it broke through the $1,500 barrier for the first time on Thursday; trading on Saturday has reached $1,550 so far. Since reaching $1,000 at the turn of the year, the cryptocurrency has surged in recent months and added over 20 percent of value during April alone. The steep rise in price has led some analysts to wonder whether Bitcoin, which was invented in 2009 and broke the $100 barrier in 2013, is heading for a second wave of price growth as new money enters the market.

Cryptocurrencies expert Dr. Garrick Hileman, who is an Economic Historian at Cambridge University and the LSE, as well as a founder of the macroeconomic news website Macro Digest, told Radio Sputnik that all cryptocurrencies, not just bitcoin, are gaining in popularity. "Three years ago when Bitcoin crossed $1,000, there were still a lot of other cryptocurrencies but Bitcoin represented 90 percent of the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies. Today, it's just over 50 percent so there's a broader story going on beyond Bitcoin," Hileman said.

Bitcoin's steep price increase has caught the headlines but other blockchain platforms have been gaining price at an even higher rate. For example, the blockchain Ethereum, which offers native support for automated "smart contracts," is now worth $7 billion.While cryptocurrencies are being used for more and more tasks, such as cross-border payments or online transactions, financial speculation is still the source of most demand."Most people would agree that cryptocurrency today is still considered primarily a speculative instrument, a stored value. It's a bet on people needing cryptocurrency to do things like power the 'internet of things' economy and machine to machine transactions."

"We don't know how big that segment of the economy is going to be, but a lot of people think that something like Bitcoin or Ethereum or one of these other currencies could be the payment rail for a machine-to-machine economy," Hileman explained. The idea of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies being used as a kind of digital gold, an alternative way of storing money outside of traditional banks and currencies, is also gaining in acceptance. Most recently, bitcoin and other virtual currencies received official recognition in Japan last month. "More and more people are waking up to cryptocurrency as an alternative to something like the US dollar as a traditional way to opt-out of your national currency."

  

Why Russia's Central Bank is Stacking Bullion Bricks Like There's No Tomorrow

However, investors in virtual currency should be aware that since there is no national or international regulation of bitcoin, buyers can be the victims of theft or fraud. In addition, the price is very volatile and could end up sky-high — or zero."These are incredibly volatile instruments, there's no government or central bank standing behind them to help try to regulate the exchange rate." 

"If cryptocurrency is really a new type of digital asset, if it's a new digital gold then it's really hard to know what the price ceiling is. All the gold today is worth roughly about $7 trillion, all the cryptocurrency in the world today is worth about $45 billion so it's a small fraction of gold." "Yet, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin offer a number of advantages over gold. They are a lot easier to store, in some ways they are certainly easier to send to someone else around the world, they may be even more convenient to acquire. So, if cryptocurrency is becoming a new kind of digital gold, a new commodity, then really the sky could be the limit on the price."

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Billionaire bitcoin enthusiast Tim Draper is backing a new cryptocurrency for the first time

• Draper was an early supporter of bitcoin and its underlying blockchain financial ledger technology.
• He told Reuters in an interview he will for the first time participate in a so-called "initial coin offering" of Tezos slated later this month.
• Most traditional venture capital firms are prohibited by agreements with investors from deploying cash into such high-risk assets as digital currencies.

Venture capitalist Draper wins US Marshals bitcoin auction.

Billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper soon plans to take a step that even he, a long-time bitcoin aficionado, has eschewed until now: Buying a new digital currency offered by a technology start-up.Draper, an early supporter of bitcoin and its underlying blockchain financial ledger technology, told Reuters in an interview he will for the first time participate in a so-called "initial coin offering" (ICO) of Tezos slated later this month.

Tezos, a new blockchain platform launched by a husband-and-wife team with extensive Wall Street and hedge fund backgrounds, will launch the ICO on May 22. Draper will also invest in U.S.-based Dynamic Ledger Solutions Inc., the creator of Tezos, but did not disclose details. Draper, who scored big as an early backer of Skype and Baidu, becomes the first prominent venture capitalist to openly embrace initial coin offerings. This would be a significant stamp of approval for this new financing model Blockchain start-ups. Some investors have expressed concern about the lack of regulatory oversight for ICOs.

                                         Bitcoin on the rise

Over the last year, blockchain start-ups have been raising cash by creating and selling their own currencies or tokens in unregulated offerings that bypass banks or venture capital firms as intermediaries. Interest in these deals has been stoked by the runaway performance of the original cyber currency, bitcoin, which has surged more than 67 percent in the last six weeks to hit a record high. "The best thing I can do is lead by example," said Draper, on his plan to participate in Tezos' token offering.

"Over time, I actually feel that some of these tokens are going to improve the world, and I want to make sure those tokens get promoted as well. I think Tezos is one of those tokens." Most traditional venture capital firms are prohibited by agreements with investors from deploying cash into such high-risk assets as digital currencies. But Draper said the contract terms with his investors allow investing in pretty much any vehicle. "I think most investor contracts did not anticipate something like an ICO," said Draper. "But we did anticipate that certain things are going to happen and finance is going to be transformed."

Draper said his firm has specifically carved out money for non-traditional investments. Tezos is similar to bitcoin and other blockchain platforms, but its design allows for decentralized and automated upgrades. Most software platforms provide for automated updates, but blockchains remain notable exceptions because update procedures are typically centralized. Tezos touts itself as the first blockchain platform to overcome that hurdle.

Tezos was created over a span of three years by Kathleen and Arthur Breitman. Arthur Breitman had worked at the high-frequency trading desk at Goldman Sachs and was an Options Market maker at Morgan Stanley, while Kathleen Breitman is a former management associate at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund. Unlike previous ICOs, Kathleen Breitman said, Tezos' deal would not be capped by a set number of tokens to be created. "What we're going to do is allow as many people who want to buy into the crowd sale over a two-week period," she said.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin Is Advancing Rapidly Like In Early Days Of Internet

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Jim Harper is a vice president at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. A former counsel to committees in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate, he served as Global Policy Counsel for the Bitcoin Foundation in 2014. In this opinion piece, Harper discusses the longstanding developer conflicts that have come to define bitcoin's governance, arguing that just because there haven't been any results yet, doesn't mean there won't be.

  
Two years ago today, politics invaded the world of bitcoin development.

It's been non-stop controversy ever since. But Gavin Andresen's essay series, "Time to Roll Out Bigger Blocks," didn't introduce politics to bitcoin. And the cure for what ails its highly controversial development ecosystem isn't getting rid of politics. Bitcoin actually needs more and better politics. How bitcoin politics are practiced is up to the community, which might take some lessons from principles of good government.

When Andresen 'went public' with his arguments for bigger blocks, that was the result of political failings on all sides that long predated his writing. Put simply, there are many competing visions for bitcoin's optimal uses, its future, the risks it faces and how to manage them. While minor improvements to the code continue, nobody so far has been a good enough politician to get their broader vision for bitcoin widely adopted. So, what gets people to abide by difficult group decisions, even when the decisions go against them?

Lessons from government

The US Constitution requires 'due process' in both the Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment. That means that US citizens and residents are supposed to get fairness of two types from their governments:

1. Systems designed to produce correct answers
2. The right to participate in decisions that affect them.

Elections operate along the same lines, giving everyone, including the losers, a say in who will operate the government. Bitcoin is meant, in part, to help people escape the grasps of hugely fallible governments, of course. But, you might ask, isn't bitcoin an apolitical system that resists governance? Governance and government are not the same. Every human system, including bitcoin, has governance. Bitcoin governance is whatever influences or directs the community's decision-making and the software's many encoded policies.

Bitcoin is also inherently political. Politics is essentially human relations at scale. When politics are practiced well, we don't notice it. It's politics done poorly, or running against our interests, that we speak ill of, along with the politicians who practice it. With a few noisy exceptions on the social media margins, everyone involved in bitcoin protocol and software development is a good faith actor. So, why are their efforts to move forward drawing heaps of derision and failing to advance their visions? It may be the failure to respond to the demand for due process.

Theory of open-source

Bitcoin is a category buster, so let's talk about the due process in terms of economics. In theory, markets work because a large number of buyers and sellers have perfect information, products are homogeneous, transaction costs are low or non-existent and everyone is rational. In practice, buyers and sellers are under-informed, transaction costs are often high and the decision-making of humans is driven away from correct choices by psychological, social, cognitive and emotional factors.

There's a 'perfect markets' theory for open-source software development, too, and it especially fails with respect to bitcoin. It holds that developers will perfectly perceive the needs of the community and respond to them, that miners will clearly recognize their economic interests and act in accordance with them, that bitcoin users will all oversee this process well, guiding the other sectors of the bitcoin ecosystem toward its highest and best use. It turns out that everyone isn't an expert in coding, in economics and in perceiving their own interests in an uncertain cryptocurrency future.

Miners and users don't follow the 'perfect governance' script very well themselves, but bitcoin development seems to diverge from theory the most. Developers, it turns out, are humans, who have limited time, information and capacity for cognition. Nobody could incorporate the information necessary to advance the bitcoin project consistent with all the goals held for it across the ecosystem. These fascinating 'developer-humans' exhibit human behaviors like trusting people they know and discounting information from people they don't know.

That's no basis for criticizing any developer, of course, but the leading development team, Bitcoin 'Core' sometimes seems to speak with a unified voice, and sometimes seems to vanish behind the theory that open-source development is just uncoordinated people from which coding decisions emerge.

The solution

In a system with worldwide usage and strong network effects, that makes a lot of people feel they are being denied due process. A lot of people feel they aren't getting a say in a project they feel passionate about. It's easy, despite the fact of good faith all around, to fall into thinking that the process is not designed to produce a correct outcome.

As a congressional staffer in the 1990s, I participated in a meeting where some academics suggested what the future of telecommunications regulation would look like. "Bits – everything will be bits," they said. The direction of communications technology was obvious already, and perpetuating its regulation was not my preferred goal. But, the meeting was bemusing because in Congress, knowing the right answer is 10% of the problem or less. Getting people convinced of the right answer is the other 90%. There are many right answers for bitcoin's future. Perhaps, if there were more bitcoin politics, more people could be brought on board with one or more of them.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member