I read this news at  https://www.fxstreet.com/news/swiss-ecomin-switzerland-wants-to-be-a-crypto-nation-201801300630  and its  really gladly my heart.   
Economy minister Johann Schneider Ammann, Said "Switzerland want to be a crypto nation" as at the time when many developed and developing countries are expressing their negative options on cryptocoin and we are hearing news that many countries want to ban it. What is your take on this move or comments?

Someone just moved 40000 Bitcoins. And the best part is the fee! LOL

Just imagine the paperwork you need to go through if you are going to move 400M USD from one account to another if you are going to use the banking system.

https://blockchain.info/tx/92785a57f6e9e9eb9d37a00e6e8be7f888376f65fa2b8f868db261cbf6cca7b0

Bitfury isn't waiting for law enforcement to clean up the bitcoin space.

After years of working with government agencies leery of bitcoin's seedy past, the blockchain services firm best known for its bitcoin transaction processing business has decided to take matters into its own hands. Launched today, a number of tools collectively identified as Crystal are intended to make it easy for users to identify and investigate criminal activity on the world's largest blockchain.

But that's not to say that the end goal of Crystal is philanthropic.

Developed over a two-year period with feedback from former senior-level government officials, the platform was ultimately created to help bitcoin once and for all move past its association with black market transactions.

Beginning today, a light version of the Crystal software will be made available for free to individuals, with pricing for enterprise subscriptions to be released in March.

The core of the toolkit is a detailed risk scoring solution that helps law enforcement agents and investigators trace suspicious transactions to a final address, or a point of withdrawal. By tracking the relationships between so-called "bad actors," Crystal will generate a score of the likelihood a particular address is related to illegal activity.

The results of the data analysis are then presented in a visual graph that can be integrated with other software tools and used to prepare legal reports as part of larger investigations.

Other tools enable the autonomous tracking of bitcoin addresses over time, custom reports that can be sent based on predetermined criteria or triggered by transactions between  groups and advanced services that include previously revealed technology for "untangling" transactions that have been sent through laundering software, called mixers.

"We are analyzing the web, we are analyzing the forums, we are analyzing different kinds of sources, and combining this information and getting some kind of result if this transaction is risky or not," said Vavilov.

Bitcoin startup BTCC has been acquired by a Hong Kong-based blockchain investment fund.

While details remain scarce on the deal, BTCC said in a press release that the move will help its efforts to expand internationally following its recent closure in mainland China.

Bobby Lee, BTCC's co-founder, said:

    "Today's acquisition is an incredible milestone for BTCC. ... I'm very excited about the resources this gives BTCC to move faster and aggressively grow our businesses in 2018 and beyond.”

According to the statement, the company now aims to "lead every segment of the digital currency ecosystem," expanding into the international market after Chinese authorities forced the closure of all cryptocurrency exchanges at the end of September 2017.

While its DAX cryptocurrency exchange is no longer in operation, BTCC will focus on its three main products: a mining pool, its Mobi bitcoin wallet and a USD/BTC exchange service.

According to BTCC, which is now registered in the U.K., its exchange business traded over $25 billion in bitcoin in 2017, while its mining pool produced almost $900 million-worth of bitcoin in the same year.

We always hear about economies collapsing due to inflation. Can anyone give me one example of an economy collapsing due to deflation?

The APEX Token fund, the first tokenised crypto-focused fund of funds, allows investors access to a diverse portfolio of assets managed by a selection of cryptocurrency hedge funds.
It is primarily targeting retail investors and those already familiar with investing in cryptocurrencies, who want more diversified exposure to this asset class.
By investing in a basket of five to 15 hedge funds, each employing uncorrelated investment strategies, the group said the fund mitigates the volatility risk which comes from investing in a single asset class, while maximising returns in the rapidly growing blockchain markets.
In 2017, over 90 new cryptocurrency-oriented hedge funds launched and over 200 crypto assets came to market.
Led by Christopher Keshian and Ari Nazir, the APEX Token fund team has over twenty five years of collective experience working in crypto ventures focused on investing, technology and data, including creating the crypto hedge fund Neural Capital.
 
Investors can buy into the new fund by purchasing APEX tokens which are registered on the Ethereum blockchain, which means they are not restricted by a high minimum investment or multi-year lock-in period.
Tokens can be bought from March 2018 via the APEX Token fund website and the initial cost will be $1. The minimum investment in the fund is 0.1 ETH, with the cryptocurrency currently worth around $862.
The APEX Token fund will not collect fees from investors after the tokens are distributed. Instead, the fund will only charge an initial upfront fee to cover administrative and management costs throughout the lifecycle of the fund.
APEX tokens are tradable from the moment they are distributed to individual investors and they can be bought and sold on any exchange which chooses to list them. Tokens can also be exchanged directly through peer-to-peer transactions. Every time an APEX token is bought or sold, the transaction is recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.

As we know, for bitcoin mining lots of electricity required, so if this way we continue doing,Is it affect the environment ?
Lots of electricity means lots of coal burned.
So shall we go towards green energy ?

That is why it's so important to keep your privacy and anonymity hidden. We know cryptocurrencies have advantages in term of untraceable currencies, and the ecosystem contains a lot of anonymity. I'm sure keeping your identity private on the internet is essentials.

I would propose that in the coming weeks a few key points are going to occur:

• Additional regulation will be disclosed by both US and Europe, mainly centric around KYC requirements (will embolden the entire sector, onboarding additional capital, waiting for this event)
• Extensive price pressure on proverbial price spring will succumb and when it starts its climb up, its going to be rapid, bursting through ATH
• The fruit of the efforts over past 6 months (project progress over 3rd/4th quarter released at end of 1st qtr this year), which will show additional innovation in the space, driving more confidence
• Other big cash-liquid players will enter in the space officially, given a global competitor to Coinbase, You don't make that kind of money and not get competition. By 2nd Qtr Announce, 3rd Qtr operational

problem is that btc name have got the high fees reputation already, it will take a while till people realize that feees are much lower now,
my best guess for this fee reduction is:

A) more and more is using segwit
B) LN networking is comming, so the spammers have stop spamming as if feess get lower, the urge to not using LN will be more and they hope this way it will fall.

And the platform that makes all this possible? No one owns it. There are no venture investors backing Ethereum Inc., because there is no Ethereum Inc. As an organizational form, Ethereum is far closer to a democracy than a private corporation. No imperial chief executive calls the shots. You earn the privilege of helping to steer Ethereum’s ship of state by joining the community and doing the work. Like Bitcoin and most other blockchain platforms, Ethereum is more a swarm than a formal entity. Its borders are porous; its hierarchy is deliberately flattened.

In the past two weeks, Bitcoin prices have been steadily declining, while smaller virtual currencies such as Ripple, Stellar and Tron have risen sharply in price and capitalization.

Erik Voorhees, CEO of ShapeShift Digital Asset Management, said Bitcoin dominated the deal on the floor a year ago but now more than half are trading in other currencies.

Still, some analysts say Bitcoin will continue to benefit from investors' growing interest in alternative (Altcoin) alternatives. They point out that because it is the largest virtual currency, Bitcoin is often chosen by investors when entering the market.

Unfortunately in recent months Bitcoin has suffered a serious scalability problem as the number of operations worldwide multiplies, making the network less efficient, slower and therefore more expensive to transact. It is precisely in countries like Venezuela, where the minimum salary of a person is equivalent to 3 USD, where this problem becomes more evident, sending a transaction of 1 USD in Bitcoin can cost 30 USD in commissions, this makes any type of operation unviable.

For these reasons, after an exchange of ideas and much to our regret, we have decided to suspend Bitcoin operations as of February 1 on our web platform www.cryptobuyer.io as well as in our ATM network.

This action will be maintained until the Bitcoin network shows maturity and stability on its operations, as well as cheaper transactions fees, we do not believe in half solutions and we continue betting on the initial guidelines and definitions of Satoshi Nakamoto: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

As a counterpart we are very happy with the integration of two new digital currencies: Litecoin and Dash

The U.S. is trying to regulate cybercurrency offerings. It’s still unclear whether it has the authority to do so.

Federal judges in Brooklyn, New York, are about to rule on the question. In doing so, they could determine whether Bitcoin and other stateless currencies are securities that can be regulated like stocks or bonds. Courts across the country are likely to consult these rulings when considering other cybercurrency cases.

“If it’s not a security, then what is it?” said Peter Henning, a former SEC and Justice Department lawyer who is now a professor at Wayne State University Law School.

In what is believed to be the first criminal case focusing on an initial coin offering, Brooklyn businessman Maksim Zaslavskiy was charged in a case unsealed in November with promoting digital currencies backed by investments in real estate and diamonds that U.S. prosecutors said didn’t exist. The Securities and Exchange Commission also sued.

U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie said he’ll allow Zaslavskiy’s lawyers in both the criminal and civil cases to challenge whether ICOs can be considered a security under U.S. law. The government has until March 19 to file its argument that cybercurrency is a security.

“If the judge makes the determination that this is not a security, he’d dismiss the criminal case,” said Mildred Whalen, Zaslavskiy’s criminal-defense lawyer. “He recognizes this is a fundamental issue in both cases. It’s all completely new territory.”

Another judge in the Brooklyn federal courthouse is being asked to rule on how cryptocurrencies and ICOs should be treated under U.S. laws.

In that case, the SEC sued last month against Dominic Lacroix, whom it called a “recidivist securities law violator.” The SEC says his Canadian company marketed an ICO called PlexCoin to investors in the U.S. and abroad without registering with U.S. authorities or disclosing past misdeeds.

Lacroix, 35, and his 26-year-old partner Sabrina Paradis-Royer used Twitter, Facebook and blogs last year to raise about $15 million from thousands of investors, the SEC said. Investors in PlexCoin were told profits would be bolstered because the firm had almost 50 “market experts” working primarily in Singapore, who’d list the virtual currency on digital asset exchanges and push secondary market trading.

In reality, the SEC says, it was a scam. Only a handful of employees worked for Lacroix in Quebec, and he concealed his involvement in the company because he has a history of committing securities fraud in Canada. An asset freeze last month was a victory for the SEC’s Cyber Unit, stopping an ICO that promised investors a 13-fold profit in less than 29 days.

U.S. District Judge Carol Amon said she will first decide if the SEC has territorial jurisdiction sue before determining whether PlexCoin was a security. Lacroix is in custody in Quebec after a contempt ruling.

Jason Gottlieb, Lacroix’s U.S. lawyer, said in a letter to the judge that he would challenge the SEC’s contention that it has authority over the matter.

“It’s the Canadians who have unique jurisdiction here, and for reasons of international comity, I don’t think we should be mucking about in their process,” Gottlieb told the judge at a Jan. 9 hearing.

The SEC’s lawyers plan to file their response to Gottlieb’s argument in May. Ryan White, a spokesman for the SEC, declined to comment on Gottlieb’s claims.