Hedge funds in the US and Japan have devised a daring wager on the future price of bitcoin as the Tokyo courts continue to wade through the aftermath of the Mt Gox exchange collapse and one of the biggest digital heists in history.

According to people with direct knowledge of the situation, at least four hedge funds have begun buying or offering to buy claims from the many thousands of former trading account holders who lost bitcoins and cash when Mt Gox — then the world’s biggest bitcoin exchange — declared bankruptcy in February 2014.

None of the 24,000 or so claimants is expected to get back more than a quarter of the lost bitcoins and cash in their accounts. But the payout will eventually come entirely in the form of bitcoins, so the potential advantage is huge.

Nobody knows how long it will take for claims to be settled but there is the potential for it to be at least another year while five other Mt Gox-related legal disputes are resolved.

Hedge funds are offering claimholders a shortcut that lets them sell their claim now and receive 15 per cent of the yen value of each claim in cash. The hedge funds, meanwhile, are gambling on a bitcoin windfall at some point in the future.

When the claims were lodged in 2014, the Mt Gox trustees calculated their value using an exchange rate of just under $450 per bitcoin. After gains throughout 2016 the market price of one bitcoin in January surpassed $1,000 for the first time since the Mt Gox collapse, and on Monday was trading just above $1,012.

Is starting a bitcoin Faucet worth the input effort and investment? Is the profit earned by running the faucet provides decent income? Has anyone invested in such venture? How was your experience?

it is just part of promotion , the site says transaction fees free at least for two weeks as campaign to attract people to trade there. so i guess after that the fee will be there as usual , no way they can make it last forever.

also if you take a look to alexa stats http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitflyer.jp , the whole traffic come from japan only , hmmm is there something wrong?

Yup. Zero fees. And if that 400,000 figure is true then 399,000 of them will be foreigners looking for action. Japan really doesn't seem to have taken to Bitcoin in any way whatsoever.

The race to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded fund for retail investors became a three-way competition.

According to Paul Vigna at The Wall Street Journal, Grayscale Investments, a firm run by technology entrepreneur Barry Silbert, filed with the SEC to list its Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC) on the New York Stock Exchange.

Grayscale joins two other groups seeking approval for their bitcoin ETFs. Winklevoss Capital, the firm operated by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, is awaiting an SEC decision on its filing, which is expected by March. SolidX is also seeking SEC approval for its bitcoin ETF, which also would be listed on the NYSE.

As the newspaper reports:

    The move by Grayscale Investments, a unit of Mr. Silbert’s Digital Currency Group, could expand the audience for the fledgling virtual currency if the fund is approved by the SEC. It also could prove an early test for how an SEC run by a Donald Trump appointee will greet innovations that may raise investor protection or other market-structure issues.

    …The benefits of being first on a major exchange could be big, assuming that bitcoin does manage to establish itself as a viable asset class. The SPDR Gold Shares ETF launched in Nov. 18, 2004, and has $31 billion in assets. The iShares Gold Trust ETF launched on Jan. 21, 2005, and has $7.7 billion in assets. Gold, a commodity not backed by any particular government, appeals to investors for some of the same reasons that bitcoin does.

Although this does sound like a great thing for bitcoin, will it not also have the undesired result of further centralizing bitcoin to the Asiatic countries? Not trying to FUD, was simply my first thought after reading this.

Launched in May of 2016, iPayYou is an online platform and digital wallet that promotes the viability of Bitcoin as a method of payment. It immediately saw early success through a unique feature known as Pay-by-Twitter — the first online platform site for peer-to-peer payments over Twitter (TWTR).

Now in a bold bet sure to deliver a caffeine jolt to the retail sector, iPayYou this past December introduced Bitcoin Direct to Starbucks (SBUX), a new way for coffee aficionados to pay for those espressos and other drinks through the use of Bitcoin.

This feature allows users to seamlessly transfer bitcoins from their existing iPayYou Bitcoin wallet to their Starbucks mobile app. They select how much (in USD) they wish to transfer before prompting Bitcoin Direct to Starbucks to automatically withdraw that amount from their iPayYou account. Once deposited into that person’s Starbucks account, purchases can be made via the mobile app at any Starbucks location.

I can assure you that exchange operators are perfectly aware who is the big whale and who is behind the flow of coins.

Will it help you when you will know who owns the coins? What will you do if you know that 'Jon Snow' is selling 882 BTC?

You can still see the see sell/buy orders just without names behind it.

People on the litecoin subreddit are going hard on it, telling people to mine on their phones and anything they can to push segwit, how is it being decided in the litecoin community?

Financial analysts claim there is less than 30% chance that SEC will give ETF a go.

The recent string of new requirements by the PBOC has made life a bit more difficult for Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges. Some services even started delaying bitcoin withdrawals by several days, as they are working on implementing new anti-money laundering requirements. HaoBTC was one of the few exchanges seemingly unaffected by the announcement, even though they made some significant changes as well.

Just last week, the company announced they would introduce new deposit fees for their exchange business. A 5% fee would be charged for all deposits, which is quite steep, to say the least. It appears this was only a sign of what had yet to come as Chinese sources claim HaoBTC will shut down their exchange service very soon. All of their other bitcoin services, including the mining pool and online wallet will continue to operate without delays or issues.

Why does Bitcoin need to scale? There are plenty of alt-coins for quick/micro payments. Leave BTC alone!

My own theory about what happens in China is below - it shows why I believe there will be further announcements and significant ones - but actually this poll is not about this theory - just about next important announcement what ever it is about.

It looks very likely that the Chinese authorities will do everything to stop money outflows. Their first announcement about this a few months ago was about stopping bitcoins from moving outside of the country - this was not believed here - because it seemed impossible to enforce. Later in January we have had announcement about PBOC examining the exchanges, and then requiring them to stop leveraged trading, introduce trading fees stop artificially inflating volumes and in general enforcing more strictly any other relevant law. My interpretation of this move is that it was mostly about gathering information - the fake volumes were muddying the image. Then this week they announced that there will be new AML rules (or check or whatever) and most exchanges temporarily stopped withdrawals before the new AML rules are established.

This is pure speculation - but what I believe will be next is that PBOC will announce something like 'registered wallets' and all BTC transfers from a registered wallet will be allowed only into another registered wallet (moving BTC from unregistered wallet into a registered one will also be possible). The registered wallets will be hosted to enforce this - but it is quite easy for the authorities to watch for infractions on the blockchain - so I think many companies will be allowed to host registered wallets. The exchanges of course will only allow withdrawals to registered wallets. This way the goal announced many months ago of stopping BTC from moving abroad will be reached. In practice BTCs in the registered wallets will be something very different from 'real' BTCs - but formally it will only be about enforcing the capital controls.
The next thing will be controlling the miners. All mining businesses will be vulnerable - but it will be much harder to enforce the rules on people mining on their private machines, I guess the measures here will depend on how tightly they need to control it, how big outflows it generates.

I'm finding myself holding some extra ETH to use as payments, since Bitcoin is becoming too expensive/delayed

One thing is sure, they have had enough time to work things out. If it still doesn't get approved, then something is fundamentally wrong. Not that it would change much for me if it doesn't get approved, but I think it will disappoint quite some people as this (once approved) may turn out to be an entry point for high level investors that are waiting on the side lines right now.

This made me laugh reading it.


I hope and wish Needham and Company really know what they are talking about and getting into. They should visit this forum more and see what is really happening with Bitcoin. We had spammers attacking the network causing more than 50,000 unconfirmed transactions twice this week and more the past few weeks. We have scalability problems and more problems on how to solve it. We have an experimental payment system with Bitcoin but the people outside of it treats it like digital gold. So amusing.