DATE AND TIME Tue, January 16, 2018 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM GMT

LOCATION Cass Business School 106 Bunhill Row London, England EC1Y 8TZ

DESCRIPTION Initial Coin Offerings ("ICOs") have quickly grown to account for more startup funding in blockchain-based companies than all of Venture Capital. Nearly $3.5 billion has been raised to date in ICOs, with the large majority of that taking place in the second half of 2017.

ICOs are similar in some ways to a crowdfunding campaign, but instead of offering a copy of a product like on Kickstarter, or shares of equity in a startup like on Crowdfunder, what is being offered are digital “tokens.” This process of selling new cryptocurrency tokens in an ICO results in funding received via cryptocurrency, most commonly in Bitcoin or Ether.

During this event two companies - Globcoin and Gimmer will be presenting and offering you the opportunity to invest in their ICO's.

Both the teams are highly experienced and have relevant industry experience.

Globcoin Crypto Platform The Platform will enable the launch of customised currency baskets for a variety of uses. Currency baskets are portfolios of selected currencies with different weightings.

The Platform will provide flexibility to investors and allows them to express a view on a country or a group of currencies, or to hedge against the weakening of others.

Used by Central Banks, very few people would have access to the network necessary to construct such an offering themselves. No retail bank or broker currently offers such a basket.

There will also be a short presentation on how to launch an ICO, if you are looking to launch your own ICO or even thinking about it, this event is useful for you.

Points to be discussed : Cost of raising funds through an ICO Size of the team Roles in the team Important platforms for marketing Community

https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

Ending Bitcoin Support
Tom Karlo on January 23, 2018

At Stripe, we’ve long been excited about the possibilities of cryptocurrencies and the experimentation and innovation that’s come with them. In 2014, we became the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments.

Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.

Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. (And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, ambitious project do so well.)

This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.

Because of this, we’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.

Therefore, starting today, we are winding down support for Bitcoin payments. Over the next three months we will work with affected Stripe users to ensure a smooth transition before we stop processing Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018.

Despite this, we remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall. There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future. We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments. OmiseGO is an ambitious and clever proposal; more broadly, Ethereum continues to spawn many high-potential projects. We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future. And, of course, there’ll be more ideas and technologies in the years ahead.

So, we will continue to pay close attention to the ecosystem and to look for opportunities to help our customers by adding support for cryptocurrencies and new distributed protocols in the future.

Peter Boockvar, the Chief Investment Officer at Bleakley Advisory Group, sees the potential for Bitcoin (BTC) to be around for a long time, but with a significant price drop coming when the Bitcoin bubble bursts, according to CNBC.

Boockvar sees a possible 70 to 90 percent price drop for Bitcoin this year, saying:

“Over the next year I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s BTC down to $1,000 to $3,000.”

When asked if the stock market would crash in the event of a significant fall in Bitcoin’s price, Boockvar said that any corresponding drop would just be psychological, because Bitcoin is “not something that really is that relevant in a 19 trillion dollar economy.”

However, he adds that people in South Korea, Japan, and the US who have been taking on credit card debt in order to invest in cryptocurrency will be hit hard.

Boockvar told CNBC that the boom in crypto markets can be attributed to easy-money policies of central banks and money printing. These moves make some cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, more attractive to investors, due to the fact that they are both finite and safe from debasement and inflation.

People have long questioned whether Bitcoin fits the mold of a traditional “bubble.” Yale economist Robert Shiller, who won a Nobel prize for his work on financial bubbles, used Bitcoin as an example of a bubble in September 2017. However, in January 2018, Shiller then said that he didn’t know what to make of Bitcoin, adding that it could be around for another 100 years.


BTC is trading at around $11,820 at press time, down about 1.52 percent over a 24 hour period.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-to-drop-as-low-as-1000-this-year-wall-street-cio-predicts

Interesting they fail to stop the cryptos and now they want to trace the assets by acquiring the control of exchanges, much clever move but it won't work.
I am too much curious that how they will going to keep an eye over all the users of the world traders on that platform, off course not all of them belongs to S. Korea, there are more than 200 countries and around thousand of banks in the world so they will need to integrate them, quite difficult.

DATE AND TIME
Mon, January 22, 2018
7:30 PM – 9:30 PM CET

LOCATION
The Blockchain Lounge
Davos-Platz
Switzerland

DESCRIPTION
Kicking off the World Economic Forum week with 10 of the leading blockchain projects and investors talking about technologies underpinning decentralisation, and what trends we can expect in the crypto space in 2018.

An evening of informal roundtable discussions, followed by drinks and networking.

Spaces are limited so registration is required. No hotel badges required for this event.

Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/crypto-kick-off-to-davos-world-economic-forum-week-tickets-42237862584?ref=eios&aff=eios

You're probably right that altcoins like litecoin will dry up since they really do not offer anything different from bitcoin. Right now they may be faster and cheaper to use but if LN succeeds they will quickly become obsolete. However we should be cautious with statements like this, we're not there yet.

I have some btc , i was very happy when the price was $20.000 but now price is very low , noone is happy.

Hello Miners In connection with the upgrade of the farm sell the S9!

-FREE SHIPPING 
-USED 6+ month
-100% WORKS  | All devices are now connected and working flawlessly (tested) |
-WARRANTY 30 DAYS
-PSU INCLUDED
-110/220
-ESCROW IS AVAILABLE

In stock 7 units.

1 Antmainer S9 14TH/s = 0.16 BTC ($1900)

Please contact me jarredalexander29@gmail.com


Happy Mining!

"Banks across India are cracking down on bitcoin trade, months after Finance Minster Arun Jaitley publicly denounced the digital currency.

Bitcoin opened on the markets at $12,899.20 (£9,307.16) before plunging by $1,000 (£721.53) just before 8am GMT.

The token bounced back somewhat at 2.05pm GMT, exchanging hands at $12,199.50 (£8,802.31) – down 4.11 percent on the past 24 hours.

Bitcoin exchanges in India are now under fire, with the State Bank of India (SB), Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Yes Bank reportedly closing or limiting activity on accounts tied to bitcoin trade."
https://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/907786/bitcoin-price-india-cryptocurrency-trading-btc-exchange

Banks are getting scared and I think people will always find a way if they want it.

Hi everyone

I have the possibility to do arbitrage but I’m not sure about some aspect that may affect it

Basically to do the arbitrage I will be buying altcoins in coinbase or kraken, transferring them to another exchange,  selling for fiat, withdrawing to a bank account, send the money to another bank account, depositing into coinbase or kraken and do the same again and again ( all this obviously in two different countries)

My questions are:

When I start withdrawing and depositing big amount of money into the bank accounts, will I be in trouble with the tax offices?

Does anyone know if have to pay taxes in both countries?

Any advice will be appreciated

Thank you

-