China is almost a totally digital economy. If you see any documentary, this one about a guy that has build his own iPhone from parts that he bought on the market is great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA , You will realize that most of the transactions happen using their smartphone and WeCHat.

 So, to me, they just need something that works and is not so expensive. Maybe because of that, they are betting on LTC. I have sold mine LTC after SatoshLite announce that he had sold everything. I just thought it was too stupid. And if LN starts to work, I do not see any reason to LTC exist.

 But maybe, if LTC has worked to build a Point to Sale that could be used only with low-end smartphones, they would have a great advanced.

  Monero has a great project called Kasisto https://github.com/amiuhle/kasisto
  In this video you can check how fast it is https://i.imgur.com/9KRTpmD.gifv

But it is still great to know that the market in China is still alive.
 

  I hope this merit system does not just become a Karma farm. Or, worse, a karma farm of friends. But open up the opportunity for quality content to be discussed here, including voices against the mainstream. That the ponzi schemes and scams can be unmasked in long and deep topics containing evidence and facts. And that those who are always willing to help who arrive, can be rewarded with the merit it deserves.

  8BTC.com was asking on his twitter about good places to farm. I think there is a lot of small farm mining in China studying if they could move to other countries. The thing is that I believe Canada is better to mine, but it is expensive to live. China is way cheaper them Canada or Icelend. So, for Big miners, it makes sense to change, but for small ones, it makes more sense just close their business.

  They won the auction, but they have paid for the BTC. Say they have won the BTC it is exaggerated. And the thing it is not the only one. In other similar operations, the government has to auction their stack. I am wondering how long until they will see the obvious that is better just hold BTC and auction their fiat.

Hi, could you change my NEM wallet address to:

NAAVHZ-FKCBKV-XPUI65-FOPPJ3-UMPY3Q-QADRKI-HODO

Tks

"probably"

  They are aware of this. He wrote about. If Lightning becomes something used and request buy their clients, they will go back to their decision. I think they will just take a time out to understand the whole market and them go back when everything was working properly.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-programmer-at-the-center-of-a-100-billion-crypto-storm-1516708800

The Programmer at the Center of a $100 Billion Crypto Storm
How a top source of bitcoin data contributed to a sudden plunge in digital currencies

By Paul Vigna and  Jim Oberman
Jan. 23, 2018 7:00 a.m. ET
104 COMMENTS
The drop was swift: Prices for bitcoin and dozens of other digital currencies on Jan. 8 fell sharply, lopping more than $100 billion off their collective market value.

The globe-rattling move can be traced to one address: An apartment in a new residential building across the street from a local union headquarters in a gentrifying section of Long Island City, Queens.

RELATED NEWS
After Bitcoin Futures, Watch Out for Crypto Repos
Bitcoin Plunges as South Korea Crafts Cryptocurrency Crackdown (Jan. 11)
What’s Bitcoin Worth? A New Plan to Bring Discipline to Crypto Prices
Let Me Tell You Some More About Bitcoin—Hello? Hello?
It is the workplace of Brandon Chez, the 31-year-old computer programmer behind coinmarketcap.com, a website that is a top source for data on bitcoin and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies. Mr. Chez’s site, which went live in 2013, has become one of the most heavily trafficked websites in the world.

Competition is heating up. On Thursday, Interncontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, announced a partnership to launch a bitcoin data feed for Wall Street banks and traders. Independent sites including Onchainfx.com have also popped up.

Meanwhile, Mr. Chez’s site is wielding unexpected impact. On January 7, coinmarketcap.com decided to remove trading activity from South Korean exchanges from its price-quote algorithms. The reason: prices there were significantly and persistently higher than in other countries. To some, it seemed the Korean trades were artificially inflating the price of bitcoin.

Without the South Korean bids and offers embedded in the CoinMarketCap listings, prices on the site fell precipitously. The price of the cryptocurrency XRP, for example, went from about $3.40 to $2.60 in one sharp move.

"We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow"

Tom Karlo, CEO of Stripe.
https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

This is fantastic. Great news and great future for this amazing project.

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.

Bitcoin God arrived last month. Bitcoin Pizza was delivered in January. Bitcoin Private’s issuance date is... still a secret.

They’re just a few of the growing stable of so-called forks -- a type of spinoff in which developers clone Bitcoin’s software, release it with a new name, a new coin and possibly a few new features. Often, the idea is to capitalize on the public’s familiarity with Bitcoin to make some serious money, at least virtually.

Some 19 Bitcoin forks came out last year -- but up to 50 more could happen this year, according to Lex Sokolin, global director of fintech strategy at Autonomous Research. Ultimately, the number could run even higher now that Forkgen, a site enabling anyone with rudimentary programming skills to launch a clone, is in operation. In a Jan. 14 tweet, hedge fund manager Ari Paul predicted more than 10 percent of the current value of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash will reside in new offshoots.

Motives behind the efforts vary. Some backers try to improve on Bitcoin. Others seek a quick profit. Developers typically score a cache of newly minted coins in a process called post-mining. Yet prices don’t necessarily hold up for long.


“Unfortunately, most fork-based projects we see today are more of a sheer money grab,” said George Kimionis, chief executive officer of Coinomi, a wallet that lets Bitcoin owners collect their new forked coins. “Looking back a few years from now we might realize that they were just mutations fostered by investors blinded by numerical price increases -- rather than honest attempts to contribute to the blockchain ecosystem.”

He predicts forking may soon sideline a more popular alternative, initial coin offerings, in which startups raise money by selling entirely new tokens. That market has gotten crowded after raising about $3.7 billion last year, and smaller offerings have struggled.

A fork’s main advantage lies in sprouting from Bitcoin, the world’s most famous cryptocurrency. In a typical fork, all existing Bitcoin owners are eligible for the forked-off coin -- giving the new asset a potentially huge number of users. Most coins arrive with at least some name recognition, because they bake “Bitcoin” into their moniker. Take for example, Bitcoin Diamond, with a price that started off strong. It didn’t last forever.

“Bitcoin forks are kind of the new alt coin,” Rhett Creighton, who’s working on the upcoming Bitcoin Private fork, said in a phone interview. “We are going to see now a bunch of Bitcoin forks. And they are going to start replacing some of the top hundred alt coins.” Bitcoin Private promises to offer more privacy features than the original Bitcoin.

Forks can also help startups raise funds in countries such as China, where ICOs have been banned, said Susan Eustis, CEO of WinterGreen Research.

Worth Billions
Years ago, entrepreneurs drew on Bitcoin’s code to launch alternatives such as Litecoin and later Dogecoin, seeking to differentiate themselves in name and often in features. But while Dogecoin now has a $770 million market value, younger clones Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold already dwarf it. Bitcoin Cash, launched in August, is now the fourth most valuable coin, worth a total of about $28 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

“Bitcoin Cash was successful, quite a lot of momentum,” Charlie Hayter, CEO of coin researcher CryptoCompare, said in a phone interview. “Now other traders try to see if they can pull off the same thing.”

A fork can often make millions for its developers as well as the server farms running and supporting the new software. Bitcoin Gold distributed 100,000 coins, currently worth about $190 apiece, to an endowment funding its ecosystem and development. About 5,000 of those coins went to the core team that created the fork. If the coins appreciate, that’s a boon for the developers as well.

Miners -- whose computers and servers process cryptocurrency transactions -- have been helping create new coins, hoping for fat rewards. Bitbank and some Chinese miners were instrumental when Bitcoin core developer Jeff Garzik created UnitedBitcoin, which forked in December. Like many other forks, it can be mined using older gear that can’t compete with state-of-the-art machines on the Bitcoin network. So if UnitedBitcoin takes off, miners with older machines that support it will be minting money.

more = https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-23/bitcoin-may-split-50-times-in-2018-as-forking-craze-accelerates

  The Abyss utilizara o sistema DAICO. Com todos esses casos que vem ocorrendo nas ICO, vale a pena ler sobre o sistema. Ë bastante inovador já que permite aos que investiram no ICO ter um poder de decisão bem maior.

South Korea’s Cryptocurrency Crackdown Isn’t Stopping This Bitcoin Exchange’s Launch
OKCoin Korea has accepted preorder registrations for more than 150,000 people since Friday

By Steven Russolillo and  Eun-Young Jeong
Jan. 22, 2018 5:25 a.m. ET
1 COMMENTS
Cryptocurrency platform OKCoin is planning to launch a bitcoin exchange in South Korea as soon as next month, a move that comes as the country’s government is considering whether to shut down cryptocurrency exchanges altogether.

Beijing-based OKCoin, which previously ran one of the biggest bitcoin exchanges in China before the government there banned cryptocurrency exchanges on the mainland, now plans to branch out to South Korea, another Asian hot spot for crypto trading. It has launched an OKCoin Korea website and has accepted preorder registrations for more than 150,000 people since Friday. The exchange intends to make some 60 digital coins available for trading.

The intended launch comes even as the South Korean government has stepped up its efforts to crack down on speculative trading in cryptocurrencies. Many Koreans have embraced digital currencies, helping fuel their massive rise in value last year. At one point last month South Korea accounted for as much as a quarter of the global bitcoin trading, according to data firm Coinhills.



Bitcoin vs. Regulators: Who Will Win?
As bitcoin has emerged from the underground world of nerds and criminals to become a mainstream investment, the risk of hacks and scandals has also blossomed. What's a government to do? The WSJ's Steven Russolillo travels the world (sort of) to see how regulators are responding to the remarkable rise of cryptocurrencies. Video: Sharon Shi and Crystal Tai
Authorities are concerned the investor frenzy has gone too far and fueled criminal activity tied to digital currencies. A top South Korean official said earlier this month that the government was preparing a bill to ban the trading of cryptocurrencies on exchanges. That came just days after the country’s financial regulator started inspecting some of South Korea’s largest financial institutions that help facilitate digital-currency trading.

Earlier this month, the country’s National Tax Service began investigations into South Korea’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges, Bithumb and Coinone. Separately, a Seoul-based exchange called Youbit filed for bankruptcy last month after it suffered a second cyberattack and lost a large amount of its digital-currency reserves. South Korean authorities launched an investigation into the hack, with preliminary results finding signs North Korea was behind it, the Journal reported.

Han Seung-joon, marketing and public-relations director for OKCoin Korea, said the company has been working since the middle of last year to launch an exchange in Seoul. He said while OKCoin hasn’t directly contacted the South Korean government about its plans, it has been in communication with the Korea Blockchain Association, an industry group involving more than 15 local exchanges.

“We are trying to abide by the law as much as possible,” Mr. Han said. “As a new player in this market, we thought that it would be too much of a risk to voice out our opinions” to the government. But, he added, “we are preparing for the worst-case scenario” with regard to the regulatory risk.

more= https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-koreas-cryptocurrency-crackdown-isnt-stopping-this-bitcoin-exchanges-launch-1516616723?mod=e2tw

In the largely unregulated world of bitcoin and cryptocurrency, fraudsters are getting rich by deliberately spreading false information to affect the price of their holdings using social media, scam news sites, and private chat apps.


On Saturday, Jan. 14, a Twitter account purporting to be that of John McAfee, the outlandish founder of cybersecurity firm McAfee, shared a bit of investment advice. “Coin of the day,” the account tweeted, promoting GVT, a new digital coin that had started trading in the fall of 2017.

Despite his infamy (he founded one of the most successful antivirus software companies ever, fled from Belize police in 2012 after being wanted for questioning in the death of his neighbor, and ran for president in 2016), McAfee is still viewed by some as a cryptocurrency sage; he was touting bitcoin as the currency of the future long before its recent gains. And — for some — McAfee shilling for GVT was good reason to buy it, a premonition of future buying frenzies and a soaring valuation.

So they bought. And they bought without noticing the additional "L" in the Twitter username or the missing verification check that distinguished the bogus McAfee account from the real one, @OfficialMcAfee. When the tweet was first broadcast at around 3 p.m. ET, GVT was bought and sold on the market at $30. By 3:04, it was at $45, and trading volume had doubled.

more= https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/heres-how-scammers-are-using-fake-news-to-screw-with-bitcoin?utm_term=.ihGEN4G2V#.saQ7AVY51

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ico-ernst-young/more-than-10-percent-of-3-7-billion-raised-in-icos-has-been-stolen-ernst-young-idUSKBN1FB1MZ?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5a65f0ba04d30141f040eb38&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than 10 percent of funds raised through “initial coin offerings” are lost or stolen in hacker attacks, according to new research by Ernst & Young that delves into the risks of investing in cryptocurrency projects online.

Men talk in front of an electric board showing exchange rates of various cryptocurrencies at Bithumb cryptocurrencies exchange in Seoul, South Korea, January 11, 2018. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji
The professional services firm analyzed more than 372 ICOs, in which new digital currencies are distributed to buyers, and found that roughly $400 million of the total $3.7 billion funds raised to date had been stolen, according to research published on Monday.

Phishing was the most widely used hacking technique for ICOs, with hackers stealing up to $1.5 million in ICO proceeds per month, according to the report.

The research also noted that the volume of ICOs has been slowing since late 2017. Less than 25 percent of ICOs reached their target in November, compared with 90 percent in June.

The study comes amid a cryptocurrency investing craze, with young companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars online to fund their projects, with often little more than a handful of employees and a business plan outlined in a so-called “white paper”.

The challenges faced by more recent ICOs in reaching their targets are partly attributable to the lower quality of projects, as well as issues that have emerged around earlier projects, said Paul Brody, global innovation leader for blockchain technology at Ernst & Young (EY).

“The volume just exploded, people raised their fundraising goals and the quality just dropped,” Brody said in an interview.

“We were shocked by the quality of some of the white papers, we see clear coding errors and we see conflicts of interest between the companies issuing tokens and the community of token holders.”

In ICOs companies typically raise money to build new technology platforms or to fund businesses that use cryptocurrencies, also called tokens, and blockchain, the software that underpins them. Yet for many of these projects the need for blockchain and cryptocurrencies is often unjustified, according to EY.

It also noted valuations of ICO tokens are often driven by “fear of missing out”, or “FOMO”, and have no connection to market fundamentals such as project development. EY said “FOMO” has led investors to pour money into ICOs at record speeds, with the 10 shortest lasting ICOs attracting $300,000 per second on average.

The study also found several instances in which the underlying software code of a project contained hidden investment terms that had not been disclosed, or contradicted previous disclosures. For example, a whitepaper might state that there will be no further issuance of a cryptocurrency, while the code might leave that option open.

  This spreadsheet looking great. There is a lot of pieces of information on there. But it would be better if they were always updated. I see a lot of ICO from 3 months ago and none of this month. Great projects like Craft doesn't appear on there. Is there anyone with a similar spreadsheet that is more up time?

I believe that in a few months the only question would be what color he will choose. When there is some crash and governments try to close but Bitcoin still survive, it is the guarantee that we will still have this amazing tech for a long time. Resilient is a quality that not every project has.

Has anyone made the math how much he would have if he have locked his choice on his first topic?

Litecoin (LTC) – 50%
BitShares (BTS) – 10%
STEEM (STEEM) – 10%
Syscoin (SYS) – 10%
Nxt (NXT) – 10%
PIVX (PIVX) – 5%
NEM (XEM) – 5%


LTC was his most heavy choice. He would have less them 1/4 of what he has now.

  So, we need to see how Indian people will react to this. We have a great example from Korea and it would be great if we see more people reacting against the government that want just close Bitcoin without knowing the opinion of people. Politicians are scaring of losing their power, and they will lose. But for something like that happens, we need be more vocal about what we want.

Hi,

I could translate to Portuguese.
You can find my previous work here:

Jibrel
STASH
EzMarket
Nocta
Gameflip
The Abyss

If you accept my work, please, send a PM to me.

ETH Wallet: 0x1d5AAbF4470335D734dC789EEfC22B580f84e28B

BTC Wallet: 1NJ3bnjjqUvfzY11mUhmHvAoh4wQsGm9ph

Tks

https://bitcoinist.com/south-korean-exchanges-are-barring-foreign-residents-from-trading/

The South Korean government was the cause of major turmoil in the global cryptocurrency market as rumors spread that they were planning to ban cryptocurrency trading across the country. Soon after the news was released, the total cryptocurrency market valuation dropped by almost 50%, causing major financial losses for a lot of traders worldwide.

Later, government officials stated that a digital currency exchange ban is only a potential measure for enforcing regulations. Since then, the cryptocurrency market has stabilized at a valuation around $620 billion after having previously fallen to $428 billion. The new regulations are aimed to curb South Korean exchanges from allowing unverified accounts to trade digital assets. Exchanges that do not fully comply with KYC/AML procedures might also be banned by the new regulations.