That's amazing news for the people in the UK to be able to be able to perform 7200 times faster cross-border transactions through SpecialFX. This would be a great alternative to SWIFT which would generally take longer to send transactions abroad or remittances. I hope the 69 firms who signed up to Epiphytes sandbox allows them to experiment well and good before hand cheap and faster transactions combined with p2p Bitcoin. If they make sure of a similar offchain scaling channel like the Lightning network it would ensure no delay in transactions and at lower costs.

We are not protected from geopolitical risk. If China bans Bitcoin < Political decision > then you will see a massive drop in the price. If the USA implement strict regulations, you will see a drop in the price. So we are not immune to the influence of these poor decisions being made by these governments.

We do protect fiat currency holders when their currency depreciates, due to poor political governance, but Bitcoin has it's own problems too. 

But are they actually using Bitcoin ?

"Epiphyte will work with the FCA to provide cost efficient and secure transactions, using a peer-to-peer protocol like Bitcoin."

When all your hardware is centralized in one location (regardless of where that location is) when it is compromised, destroyed, or stolen such hardware will be rendered useless and will add zero value to the system.

Spread out the mining operation.

I am thinking about adding another widespread myth about the Blockchain wallet, namely, that it is the safest wallet between the web-wallets such as Coinbase and Xapo (as far as it can be called that), but I'm still sitting on the fence, so to speak, and haven't yet made up my mind whether this myth is worth adding to the list...

What do guys/gals think?

Lol, i always found this they mentioned that blockchain is official wallet, well if there such an official wallet it must Bitcoin Core which is created by Satoshi Nakamoto honestly i've never heard satoshi declare that Bitcoin Core is official wallet.

About #1 i believe every country in this world using bitcoin either as a payment method or investment tool, however used bitcoin for transaction is illegal here but police won't arrest you if you hold or trade them like stock.

-A decentralized virtual token that just so happens to have its mining operation basically centralized by a handful of Chinese miners.

bitcoins tech is distributed. even with the "china hash power" debate, people need to realise the tech and security behind the label of "chinese miner"

remember an asic miner is basically just a SHA calculator. it has no hard drive and does not hold the blockchain. it is the host pool that holds the blockchain, organises the transaction data and creates a hash. which is then sent out to the asics to simply to calculate a second hash(PoW) and send that second hash back to the host pool.

the two parts. pool vs asic do not need to be in the same physical location. nothing stops an asic farm hopping from a pool managed in china or iceland or georgia. its a split second activity to pool hop.

the asics can communicate with many different servers. if one goes offline another is instantly available and pool hopping is actually routine. so its not an issue.

in short. there are a few nodes sitting in different countries (with the actual bitcoin blockchain data). so if someone wanted to corrupt a node in china. asic miners will hop to the one in iceland, georgia, america or other country that has not been corrupted.

also it doesnt matter what skin colour a person managing a host pool. some chinese pools may have a website wrote in chinese but the tech support staff maintaining the nodes(plural) are working in an office in san fransisco or iceland and the nodes they maintain are in many countries.

i really hate all the distraction/racist posts about china and trying to falsely combine several different pools who each have several different servers in several countries, to some how be considered (wrongly) as one entity. simply because "its china".

this wrongful/misunderstood distraction is actually moving peoples awareness away from where the weaknesses actually are. which ofcourse is the nodes.
if the nodes are in majority running the same code, then diversity/independence is a threat no matter what country or no matter how many nodes there are..
EG if 95 of 100 nodes or 4750 of 5000 nodes has a bug.  it has no difference, they are all affected equally
you can have a million nodes, but if 950,000 are running the exact same software.. its no better then just having 20 nodes with 19 running the same software

saying there is a 51% threat due to geography, rather than understanding the technology/infrastructure is a big massive piece of FUD compared to 95% of nodes running one piece of the exact same software.

software needs to be diverse too.
there is nothing wrong with a 100% agreement of certain rules. but having just one base of code making that decision, isnt actually an agreement. its control

Yes and there is an argument that it would be cheaper and more efficient for the banks to use their current systems or use a database. Also why would the banks use a blockchain? That would mean that they would have to share their data to all the other banks. Do the banks really trust each other that much? What secures this private blockchain, is it also proof or work? I cannot imagine a real blockchain without proof of work.

Byzantine fault tolerance

Digital Asset also confirmed it would be utilizing a consensus system that offered an alternative to proof-of-work mining. The process, pioneered in bitcoin, uses a decentralized network of computers to secure the bitcoin blockchain and process transactions.

Digital Asset said Hyperledger includes a "prototype implementation" of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus module, which would serve as an alternative to the mining process.

"We are collaborating with many of the other members of the project on the consensus module to ensure there is a scalable, secure, Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol that can provide settlement finality for wholesale financial institutions," the release said.

Each node publishes a public key. Any message coming through the node is signed by the node to verify its format. Once enough responses that are identical are reached, then you can agree that is a valid transaction.

Current Bitcoin devs can't rapidly solve the growing pains of Bitcoin. If some well financed company like Chase bank or Wells Fargo decided to throw money at "Blockchain Technology" it sure as hell wouldn't take a couple of years to solve the block size issue.

OMG, you guys are so Stupid, it is beyond belief.

Substitute Bitcoin in this text with foreign currency and will get semantically identical text. There are major currencies like dollar, euro, yuan, Swiss franc, but there are a lot more currencies that most people here don't even know the names of. For example, can you tell me the name of the national currency of Peru without looking into Wikipedia? But I could just as well claim that the Peruvian currency is not money anywhere beyond Peru since it is not considered a "standard medium of exchange" anywhere outside of this country. And so what?

And who is actually not fully grasping what money is?