I can remember a few years ago that the UK pound was almost at the level of being valued at $2. Two dollars to the pound. Amazing. I brought a lot of American stuff that year. Yesterday, I bought something and it was $1.30 to the pound. Shoot. The dinner for $100 that a few years ago would have cost me £50 was now £72. Ouch!  I’ve seen this a lot over the years in my travels. Australia used to be cheap. It’s now expensive. Europe used to be expensive and then became cheap, but it’s getting more expensive again since we voted to Brexit.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/the-case-for-bitcoin-or-something-like-it/

Originally conceived in October 2013 by founder and project leader David Vorick, the decentralized cloud storage program Sia received some backing from a crowdfund in early 2014. The network was launched for private beta testing around twelve months ago, for developers and those who weren't afraid to use the command line interface.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/decentralized-cloud-storage-sia-launches-version-1-0-with-full-functionality

Cybersecurity expert, libertarian presidential candidate, and founder of McAfee antivirus, John McAfee is taking over as CEO at publicly-traded MGT Capital Investments, Inc., (NYSE MKT: MGT).

Fresh at the helm, McAfee is already charting a new course for the company, focusing on how to secure cryptocurrencies. The company previously invested in and developed a wide array of intellectual property.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/john-mcafee-leads-cybersecurity-company-signing-up-roger-ver-and-erik-vorhees

Sean Ryan and Perry Woodin are ideas men, and founders of Node40, an incentivized node service and Dash masternode hosting provider launched in 2015. “In the world of distributed Peer-to-Peer (P2P) decentralized blockchain applications, stability is of paramount importance. Without stable nodes, the network can experience issues,” states the company site.

The founders say that the most challenging aspect of running the business has been holding their focus and not branching out.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/p2p-node-support-company-node40-faces-challenges-in-blockchain-space/

Since its launch on April 5th, the first truly decentralized marketplace, OpenBazaar, has been growing steadily, both in popularity and in features.

Due to the peer-to-peer nature of the platform, it is difficult to quantify how popular it is, but there are various secondary indicators. The most apparent is how many users are following the @OpenBazaar account inside the program.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/openbazaar-growing-fast-with-major-upgrades-on-the-horizon

Based in Fort Lauderdale Florida, Citrix is a software corporation founded on a core principle, “to make the world’s apps and data secure and easy to access.” Over 400,000 organizations and over 100 million users across the globe use Citrix solutions, generating the company $3.28 billion in revenue during 2015.

The American multinational recently commissioned Censuswide to quizz 250 IT and security specialists in UK companies with 250 or more employees, “to glean further insights as to their strategies to defend against cyber and ransomware attacks."

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/large-uk-businesses-holding-bitcoin-to-pay-ransoms/

We live in an age where online content often has no attribution attached, from songs to cat gifs and HD movies. Sharing content has become so ubiquitous and easy that ownership information can be quickly lost and hard to track. It then becomes effortless to replace that information, compounding the problem further.

To tackle this problem, Denis Nazarov and his co-developers have created not just another service but a protocol, a unified format that allows emerging decentralized applications to use the same set of shared file types and data formats.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/mediachain-adds-integrity-layer-to-online-content

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has ordered Bitfinex to pay $75,000 for offering illegal off-exchange financed retail commodity transactions, and failing to register as a futures commission merchant.

Formed under the laws of the British Virgin Islands, with their official headquarters in Hong Kong, Bitfinex operates one of Bitcoin’s most popular platforms for exchanging and trading bitcoins, litecoins, and ether.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitfinex-pays-75000-to-settle-with-cftc-for-offering-illegal-bitcoin-transactions-and-failing-to-register/

Access to bitcoin in Australia became far easier today, as a Melbourne-based startup, Bitcoin Australia, teamed up with one of the largest retail networks in Australia, Blueshyft.

Anyone with some cash, a phone number, and an email address, can now purchase bitcoins over the counter at more than 1,200 retail locations. The process takes less than 30 minutes, using iPad-based terminals at newsagency shops nationwide.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/blueshyft-and-bitcoin-australia-partner-to-sell-bitcoin-over-the-counter-at-1200-newsagency-shops

Smart contracts are poised to revolutionize the ways that humans, machines, and organizations create and enforce contractual relationships. Everything from property ownership to financial instruments to family arrangements can now be implemented as a piece of code on a publicly verifiable shared ledger known as a blockchain.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/a-visit-to-the-oracle/

21 Inc. is a privately-held bitcoin hardware company that launched in May 2015, having raised over $121 million in venture capital, more than any other company in the bitcoin space to date. The company's stated goal is “putting a bitcoin miner in every device and in every hand.”

The team has also been busy creating a tutorial library on their website recently, teaching not only how to use their hardware and software products, but how to use them to earn an income.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoins-best-funded-startup-starts-marketplace-for-user-collected-data/

Bermuda is a picturesque British overseas territory with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of about 5.2 billion dollars and a population of less than 65,000 people. Nonetheless, it's an important offshore financial hub, with a zero-percent corporate income tax rate.

The island territory has the fourth highest per capita income in the world, according to the CIA factbook, which is about 70% higher than that of the US.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/bermuda-monetary-authority-meets-with-agentic-group-to-establish-a-bitcoin-incubator-and-blockchain-startup-facility/

Living in the Bitcoin land, you never know what you might come across next. It could be as benign as someone issuing a currency backed by pre-1965 silver US dimes, as geeky as someone creating a blockchain to mine for prime numbers, or it could be as convoluted as BitShares with the many iterations it had over the years (as someone put it - "BitSharesX - An Alt Coin That Is Impossible To Understand"). Over the last few months, I've been seeing a lot of spam about Tau-Chain, along with its many extravagant claims, and figured it might be interesting to try to understand it.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/tau-chain-a-programmers-perspective/

Russian media recently revealed plans to create a national cryptocurrency to be used alongside the ruble. The Federal Financial Monitoring Service's (Rosfinmonitoring), released the plan to TV stations and newspapers across the country.

Deputy Director of Rosfinmonitoring, Pavel Livadny, hopes that the new currency will be more convenient for Russians, and reduce the costs related to financial transactions. At the same time, there are plans to ban all other cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/amidst-bitcoin-boom-russia-plans-its-own-cryptocurrency-banning-all-others/

OKWave is a popular Japanese question and answer social website, and no stranger to bitcoin, having integrated a bitcoin tipping feature to their Arigato platform last year. The company announced an alliance with San Francisco-based venture and bitcoin company Breadwallet LLC today, giving their website added functionality and a high-quality integrated solution for user bitcoin wallets.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/okwave-and-breadwallet-team-up-to-leverage-bitcoin-use-in-japan/

During the inaugural ID2020 summit, held at the UN headquarters in New York on Friday, representatives from over 50 technology businesses discussed the world's Identity problems, including representatives from at least half dozen blockchain-centered companies.

The purpose of the annual event is to make sure that every human being has access to identity services, even if they have no state-issued identification. “One fifth of the world's population is without legal identity” the ID2020 website states. "Without legal identification people are invisible to society and vulnerable to trafficking, prostitution, and child abuse."

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/id2020-held-at-the-united-nations-features-lots-and-lots-of-blockchain/

A self-described “ethical hacker,” who goes by the handle Phineas Phisher, is responsible for some of the highest-profile hacks on questionable organizations in internet history. Two of his previous targets were shady malware makers, assisting governments to spy on their own people. With the help of websites like Wikileaks, Phisher's hacks have illuminated dark corners of government around the world.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/modern-day-robin-hood-bank-robber-donated-25-bitcoins-to-help-fight-isis

I believe it is vital to understand and think about basic concepts like rights and obligations in order to successfully understand Bitcoin, Ethereum and eventually replace the traditional financial instruments and systems that are all based on these models.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/rights-and-obligations-in-and-out-of-blockchains/

The Besa Mafia hitman marketplace was the latest and most elaborate example of a hitman service on the deep web, the part of the World Wide Web that can’t be found with standard search engines.

The very real Silk Road offered a similar deep web marketplace, but focused on illegal drugs, drawing the line at hitmen and weapons.

As the Silk Road and its' successors target different markets, it appears that Besa Mafia was picking up the extra business, providing all kinds of violence for bitcoins, including beatings, arson, acid attacks, and even murder.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/besa-mafia-deep-web-hitman-service-turns-out-to-be-an-elaborate-bitcoin-scam/

Everyone in the crypto world has been talking about the “Civil War,” and not the one involving Captain America and Iron Man. No, the civil war they are referring to is the Bitcoin civil war, a rancorous year-long battle for control centered on scalability.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/decentralized-transparent-blockchain-based-governance/