I believe that ETH may have a much larger volume of use than Bitcoin. But ETH will never be the best story of value. And for that reason I find it improbable to pass the price of Bitcoin. Few people still commonly use crypto. The main function is still speculation and story of value.

I think this is a lot harder to answer. Some people are considering US law is the world's standard. The reality is that Bitcoin is global, so in each country something like this could be seen in a different way. I believe we will soon have new legislation in each country on this subject.

Today I do not see how that could be illegal. Since people will not have as much power of decision.

 $ 8658 but the price right now is $6215

This is unexpected. We are again well below the price and far from what could be considered a bubble by following the parameters. I imagine that we will have a great rise at some point to stay close to the values that are expected.

I work in real stores. Next to my stores there are several others. Each one uses its own payment structure with credit cards and cash registers. In this case, if bitcoin was to be accepted, would it be interesting for all stores to open a single payment channel? Would it be the most economical solution? Or in stores is it always more interesting to have a single channel?

People still use torrent to download movies in China. They still download programs for their cellphones, music. What will become increasingly difficult will occur the same as occurs in countries such as Japan and Korea. But with time and the clear demonstration that the future is in the crypts, it is quite unlikely to imagine that this banishment will be forever.

How big is the market to buy cryptocurrency using credit card? I have always found it very difficult, unsafe and expensive to use credit card for this market. I do not know if something like that will interfere much with price. You can't buy stocks, bonds, mutual funds with credit card either .

It is a joke that at no time desires to be taken seriously. But, eventually as everything related to cryptomoedas, it can be taken seriously and offer good gains for those who decided to invest. Only it appears in one of the worst moments of this new economy. So if it is resilient, it is likely that it will cost a lot more than anyone can imagine. Memes are more viral than solid and academic projects.

The best investment strategy at the moment is to watch the price and the news 24 hours a day. And react to them thinking in the short term. Unfortunately fundamentalists need to have a frozen heart to resist so much pressure and FUD.

No one knows the price that people will be willing to pay tomorrow. But today, anyone who buys is probably imagining the price they can sell in two or more weeks. And that price will be at least double from today. The great and dreadful crash of Tether occurred and the market still exists. The only way is up.

Former director at Institute of Financial Sciences, China's Ministry of Finance: It's impossible to truly ban bitcoin. We must pay close attention to the blockchain technology.
http://finance.ifeng.com/a/20180127/15951366_0.shtml

 China Internet Finance Association issued a reminder on the prevention of foreign ICO and "virtual currency" transactions and urged investors to recognize the risks of offshore ICO and "virtual currency" trading platforms.

At the Davos World Economic Forum held in the same period, bitcoin and blockchain have also become the hot topics discussed by economists and politicians from all over the world.

On the same day, Jia Kang, former director of the Institute of Fiscal Science at the Ministry of Finance and Dean of Huaxia New Supply Economics Institute, told the Fenghuang Wang Financial News at the 2017 China Financial Annual Forum that China has adopted a relatively harsh attitude toward Bitcoin. The exchange is now being Prohibited. He said that in a sense only the gesture of the Chinese government, but Bitcoin and International Unicom transactions still exist, it is impossible to truly ban Bitcoin because it can be traded as long as it can access the Internet.

As for Bitcoin's underlying technology "blockchain," he said it must be taken seriously that the blockchain is an irreversible historical trend. Some far-sighted organizations should quickly use the blockchain to innovate and develop according to their own situation.

Jia Kang also talked about the sale of the same rights, he believes that the same rights to rent and lease should first be in the "two days of fire and ice" property market fire to implement. It is also more urgent for renters to get equal access to public services such as their children on the same level as those who own homes. It is also more urgent to implement a compliance-oriented approach on this side of the fire. After the sale of the same rights, the school district room will not break the sky high price.

Tether, the issuer of the dollar-pegged cryptocurrency USDT, said its relationship with audit firm Friedman LLP has ended.

The statement, provided Saturday evening by a company spokesperson to CoinDesk, confirms the suspicions of online sleuths and is likely to raise new questions about the company's finances.

Friedman had been working on an audit of Tether, which has close ties to the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. Critics of the two companies, most prominently the blogger who goes by the handle Bitfinex'd, have claimed that Tether had been printing tokens out of thin air to drive up the price of bitcoin on the exchange.

It is not clear from the spokesperson's emailed statement who broke up with whom. The statement reads:

"We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved.  Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success."

The company remains "committed to the process," the spokesperson added.

Eagle-eyed cryptocurrency enthusiasts on Twitter had raised doubts about the status of the relationship last week, noting that Friedman had dropped Bitfinex's name from the list of clients on the audit firm's website. Friedman did not return calls and emails from CoinDesk over the course of the week.

In a preliminary report released in September, Friedman said Tether had $442.9 million of cash on reserve, matching the outstanding issuance of USDT – but that assessment was not a full audit and contained numerous caveats.

https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship-auditor-dissolved/

 Caramba, que postura lamentável. TODAS as exchanges são atacadas, de maneiras inacreditaveis, todos os dias. As recém criadas, as veteranas, as que são apenas planos. Só conferir no tópico da Foxbit, eu mesmo só entro lá quando preciso reclamar. Esse é um ambiente onde a desconfiança reina, já que num espirro o dinheiro pode sumir.

E isso ocorre todos os dias. pirate40, MtGox, os irmão italianos, Mercado Bitcoin, 500btc... Essa semana mesmo o dinheiro de muitos desapareceu numa exchange Japonesa.

Todas as qualidade da criptoeconomia são facilitadores para que uma pessoa gerenciando a carteira de outros possa em um unico dia desaparecer. Pior, num descuido, uma outra pessoa possa desaparecer com os recursos que estão sob sua custódia. É uma situação que coloca qualquer um num nível de tensão fora do comum. MESMO quando não há motivos para tanto.

 Agora, quando por qualquer razão esse motivo aparece, nunca se pode esperar uma reação como essa. Se existe a segurança que tudo está sendo feito da maneira correta o recomendável, ao menos meu Pai sempre me ensinou assim, é: Engole seco e ajude o cliente a ter a melhor experiência que ele poderia desejar já que nesse momento você não perderá apenas um cliente. Receberá um inimigo que sempre falará mal da sua empresa ou o transformará no melhor promotor do seu negócio.

 Sinceramente tudo leva a crer que os problemas são bem maiores que os relatados. Mas espero que sejam revertidos e que os amigos aqui do forum que acreditaram na proposta não saiam prejudicados.

 And you should consider that most of the coins go up and down really quick. So you would probably end up with less than you start in a few months. Anyone that try something like that will end up beting on shitcoins that could go almost to zero. Every day there is a coin or token with some problem. Today was NEM day.

Will they launch a centralized currency to buy all the others? If they do some regulation but still allow direct investment in Bitcoin, it would be revolutionary and would put Bitcoin worth more than $ 100,000.

https://www.coindesk.com/starbucks-chairman-hot-blockchain-cold-bitcoin/?utm_content=buffer8dc16&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Starbucks Chairman Howard Shultz said the coffee chain plans to incorporate blockchain technology and digital currencies into its long-term payment technology strategy, and hopes to "expand digital customer relationships."

Shultz does not, however, believe that bitcoin will play a role in this strategy, remarking that he didn't believe the original cryptocurrency would "be a currency today or in the future."

He clarified that Starbucks is not developing a digital currency or announcing an investment in blockchain or cryptocurrencies, but would like to use its stature to lend credibility to these technologies.

Shultz made the remarks in the company's quarterly investor call, which were subsequently reported by diginomica.

According to the report, he said:

"I believe that we are heading into a new age, in which blockchain technology is going to provide a significant level of a digital currency that is going to have a consumer application."

Starbucks, he added, is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the changes.

"We think we have something to offer the companies that are chasing this, because we are in a position to create the trusted legitimate place in which this could be accepted and possibly take advantage of the mobile payment digital platform that we have created."

The platform Shultz referred to is Starbucks' mobile payment app, launched in 2015, which enables customers to pay and order in-app, while accruing rewards.

Mobile payments constitute nearly one third of Starbucks' U.S. transactions, and as a result, Shultz said Starbucks is considering implementing cashless stores in the U.S.

Starbucks has a history of embracing leading-edge payment solutions. It adopted Square as the exclusive processor of all of its debit and credit card transactions in the autumn of 2012, though the relationship later dissolved.

Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck has confirmed that it has suffered what appears to be the biggest hack in the history of the technology.

In a press conference at 23:30 JST (14:30 UST), the exchange's president Wakata Koichi Yoshihiro and chief operating officer Yusuke Otsuka estimated its loss at 58 billion yen (approx. $533 million). According to Bloomberg, which attended the conference, 500 million NEM tokens were taken from Coincheck's digital wallets.

Tweets by Nikkei appeared to indicate that the precise amount stolen may not be fully known until further checks have been carried out into the intrusion.

But though the exact dollar figure for the incident is hard to pin down (given the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies and the company's lack of information), data suggests the figure is now at least over $400 million, factoring for a decline in the value of XEM, the NEM protocol's token, following the incident.

At press time, the price of XEM was $0.85, down from a high of $1.01 today, according to data from Coinmarketcap.

Notably, the dollar amount stolen from Coincheck is likely greater than the amount stolen from Mt. Gox in 2014 (pegged at $340 million), though the impact on the cryptocurrency market will be much smaller given the immense increases in market capitalization since.

Rumors had been circulating about the theft since early this morning when Coincheck abruptly froze most of its services.

The firm announced on its website around 13:00 JST (04:00 UTC) that it had restricted deposits, trading and withdrawal of XEM, the token running on the NEM blockchain.

A wider suspension on withdrawals of all cryptocurrencies as well as Japanese yen was announced around 30 minutes later. In the following hour, trading of all cryptocurrencies was also restricted, except bitcoin. According to the latest update, other deposit methods including credit cards have also been stopped.

Coincheck is looking into compensating its customers, its executives also announced.

It was also revealed that Coincheck was not registered with Japan's Financial Services Agency, but now plans to do so. Coincheck's president said he "deeply regretted" the issue.

https://www.coindesk.com/coincheck-confirms-crypto-hack-loss-larger-than-mt-gox/?utm_content=buffer6920e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Why a $39 Million ICO Chose Stellar Over Ethereum
 19
 
Brady Dale
 
 
 Jan 25, 2018 at 14:00 UTC
FEATURE
"We look at ethereum like AOL or Myspace."

That's how Mobius Network co-founder and CEO David Gobaud explains why his startup ran its initial coin offering (ICO) on the Stellar network instead of ethereum, the most popular blockchain for token sales.

The comment underscores the growing interest in some corners of the crypto community for faster and cheaper payment rails as ethereum, like bitcoin, struggles to scale.

Mobius announced Thursday that it has raised $39 million in the ICO — one of the larger recent token sales and the largest by far on the Stellar platform. The company accepted only Stellar's native currency, lumens (XLM), in exchange for its own token, known as mobi.

According to Mobius, the sale hit its $39 million hard cap after only two hours, selling 35 percent of the total 888 million mobi tokens.

Participants in the round included China's Angel Chain Capital, Nirvana Capital and WaltonChain, an internet of things (IoT) startup that is building devices to enable manufacturers and retailers to track supply chains, according to the firm's website.

In addition to this backing, Gobaud emphasized that Mobius deployed its decentralized app (dapp) store alongside its ICO, saying it was important for the company to come out with live code early, to prove the project was real.

But what's perhaps most striking about the sale was the choice of blockchain.

While latency or cost might not be a dealbreaker for some blockchain projects, they are for Mobius' use case. Its thesis is that traditional tech companies will soon want to integrate with cryptocurrencies and, eventually, a decentralized web.

Mobius' white paper compares the company's work to that of Stripe, the Silicon Valley darling that took integration of credit card payments down to a few lines of code (and incubated Stellar in its early days). Mobius aims to do the same thing for cryptocurrency payments and, down the line, for publishing data to trade on decentralized marketplaces.

So the company needed an IoT-friendly network that could handle large amounts of transactions and data quickly, with low or no fees.

The goal is to "make it easy to connect every device, developer and data stream to the blockchain ecosystem," Gobaud said.

Yet while the vast majority of ICO-funded projects have been run on top of ethereum, using the ERC-20 standard, that blockchain has suffered from transaction backlogs and pendulum-like swings in fees.

Hence, after beginning its project on ethereum, Mobius switched to Stellar, the protocol created by Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb. Like Ripple before it, Stellar was designed specifically for frictionless payments.

Trade-offs
Ethereum's scaling challenges have become acute in recent months. The issue moved Kik to announce that it would move its kin token off ethereum in December 2017.

While the ethereum developers recognize and are working on the problem, the Mobius team couldn't wait for a scaling solution, Gobaud said.

"We were building our dapp store on ethereum and then we connected with Jed," he said adding:

"We realized there was no way that ethereum could handle our technology. It was too slow, too expensive and too insecure. ... We see all these other projects with these immense problems"

Gobaud highlighted the problems with safely deploying smart contracts. "They are Turing complete programs, but they are really hard to write," he said, pointing to the first and second multi-million-dollar ether losses on Parity. Solidity was not a language built with security in mind, Gobaud argued.

In Stellar, "we think we've uncovered this underutilized, really unknown technology," Gobaud said.

For example, Stellar supports multi-signature wallets at the protocol level, making custodianship much easier for developers.

But Stellar has its downsides, Gobaud acknowledged. It's not Turing complete, for example, but Mobius is happy to make that trade-off in exchange for vastly faster and cheaper transactions.

What's next?
The white paper discusses a lot of use cases for the mobi token and its protocol, but the easiest one to explain is payments.

For anyone who believes that cryptocurrency will become more and more appealing to online businesses, the company that makes transacting in crypto easy the fastest stands to recoup benefits with a long tail.

If Mobius can make accepting crypto payments a matter of adding a few lines of code, that would be compelling if online companies begin accepting cryptocurrency more widely.

Talking to Gobaud, though, payments seems more like a way to sell the traditional internet on blockchain integration.

He's most excited about the market that will come when firms start posting their data to decentralized marketplaces, selling it via secure, live auctions he calls the "NASDAQ for data."

Gobaud said:

"More advanced or technical users are really excited about the data marketplace because they are aware that getting data into blockchain ecosystem is really complicated."

Data generated on blockchain protocols is easy to verify because they are closed environments. But data from the real world can't be verified on a blockchain without help.

That's why Mobius is building a proof-of-stake oracle system, so that data streams with data from the real world can build up reputations as reliable sources over time. With the system, to put its data up for sale on the market, a company would have to prove it holds a certain amount of tokens.

If that marketplace catches on, the cost of staking should be more than paid for by revenue from selling data over time. This could be anything from data about road conditions from a smart vehicle or local weather from a sensor on top of a commercial building.

To reach the point where the decentralized web has a rich enough ecosystem to support these marketplaces, the team is also working to solve other small problems faced by developers on the way there. For example, it built a universal login protocol, where a website can verify that a device holds a token to let its user log on to a service.

Some sites might want to take this a step further and use tokens to integrate the level of access someone has to a site. So, on a platform like Reddit, a user might only need one token, while a moderator might need a few tokens to log in with more advanced permissions.

In the meantime, developers are already building dapps for Mobius' store, but it's small scale offerings so far, little video games or prediction games. That's work at the experimental level, but Gobaud said he's encouraged by the fact that people already want to work with it. The websites on Geocities were crude, too, but they were a stepping stone to the web we know today.

He concluded:

"It's like the early days of the internet."

https://www.coindesk.com/why-a-39-million-ico-chose-stellar-over-ethereum/?utm_content=buffer02353&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

https://blog.bitmex.com/the-lightning-network/


Abstract: In this piece, we explain the motivation behind the creation of the Lightning Network and why its scaling characteristics are superior to what we have today, potentially resulting in a transformational improvement. We describe some of the basic technical building blocks that make Lightning possible. We then examine some of its limitations, including the downsides of inferior security compared to transacting on-chain and why this makes Lightning potentially unsuitable for larger-value payments.

---

Conclusion

In our view, the Lightning Network does appear to potentially offer significant and transformational improvements with respect to scalability. Therefore transaction speeds and transaction fee rates should dramatically improve, without impacting the underlying security of the core protocol. Crucially, however, the inferior security properties related to Lightning payments, may make the Lightning Network unsuitable for larger payments (or at least it may be irresponsible to use it for larger payments). Speculation and investment flows, which require these larger payments, currently appear to be the major driving force in the cryptocurrency space, with the volume of small retail payments being relatively small in comparison. Because of that, Lightning may not be as big of a game changer as some imagine, at least in the medium term. While enthusiasts appear likely to adopt this technology quickly, widespread adoption may take considerable time.

---

 Great text about Lightning Network write by the Bitmex Research Team.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-cryptocurrencies-soccer/english-soccer-club-arsenal-signs-up-to-promote-cryptocurrency-idUSKBN1FD2KK


English soccer team Arsenal is entering the cryptocurrency world by signing a deal to promote new digital tokens being sold by an American gaming software company.

Soccer Football - Premier League - Arsenal vs Liverpool - Emirates Stadium, London, Britain - December 22, 2017 General view of a corner flag before the match Action Images via Reuters/John Sibley
California-based CashBet said on Wednesday that the Premier League club had agreed to become its “exclusive and official Blockchain Partner” ahead of the upcoming “initial coin offering” (ICO) of its new cryptocurrency, “CashBet Coin”.

The partnership makes Arsenal “the first major team in world football to officially partner with a cryptocurrency”, CashBet said in a statement.

Arsenal’s Chief Commercial Officer, Vinai Venkatesham, said the North London club was “looking forward to working with CashBet Coin as they launch their new cryptocurrency”.

According to its website, CashBet sells software that helps gaming companies accept bets using cryptocurrencies.

CashBet Coin will be advertised at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, and CashBet can use Arsenal’s brand to promote the new tokens.

The explosive rise in prices for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin last year has drawn in millions of buyers across the globe. Hundreds of new coins have been offered for sale to the public.

Regulators have called the investment mania a dangerous bubble, and said ICOs are “highly speculative” with investors putting their entire capital at risk.

Backers of cryptocurrencies say the technology underpinning virtual coins has the potential to transform the way we handle money.

 Achei muito rápido pelo preço que paguei. Óbvio que está longe do ideal e tal. Mas custou acho que dois dolares e 14 minutos para enviar da FoxBit pra Binance.



Os dois primeiros horarios são email da Fox. Um informando sobre o encaminhamento, segundo sobre o envio e o terceiro é da Binance informando que chegou. Parabéns aos envolvidos.

Ps. Pq no email que a Fox envia, não enviam junto a tx?