Add Wellington Management Co. to the list of mainstream investors getting serious about digital coins.

The Boston-based firm with $1 trillion under management is considering including cryptocurrencies in some portfolios, it said in a February report from a team that includes equity research analyst Matthew Lipton and trading technologies principal Lee Saba. The company’s systems were upgraded to enable trading in Bitcoin derivatives, and Wellington has started taking positions in companies related to cryptocurrencies.

“Various Wellington teams are already positioning portfolios to take advantage of mining and blockchain implementations by, for example, investing in select chipmakers making components” for tracking and creating digital coins, the report said, without naming specific stocks.

Shares in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which manufactures chips for Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., have climbed 34 percent since the beginning of 2017 and surged to a record in January. Nvidia more than doubled in the period. Demand for the high-powered chips used in crypto mining comes at a welcome time for TSMC amid waning smartphone sales in China.

Wellington is keen to stress that, for now, it’s not snapping up direct exposures in Bitcoin and related currencies, dubbing its official stance as “cautious.” As the firm’s analysts dig deeper into digital tokens, they plan to say more on the outlook in due course.

600 powerful servers specifically designed to mine bitcoin. Plus 600 graphics cards, 100 processors, 100 power supplies, 100 motherboards and 100 sets of computer memory.

According to The Associated Press and Visir, those are the items a coordinated group of Icelandic thieves have stolen. And though 11 people have reportedly been arrested and at least two are still in custody, none of the stolen computers have yet been found by police.

The thefts, which occured between late December and early January, were reportedly captured on surveillance cameras by Advania, the server company hit by two of the three thefts. (The graphics cards, processors and so on were allegedly stolen from a home.) Advania had been offering its customers access to bitcoin-mining rigs, and it sounds like those were the type that were stolen. The Associated Press reports that the stolen computers are worth nearly $2 million.

"This is a grand theft on a scale unseen before," Police Commissioner Olafur Helgi Kjartansson said, according to the AP. "Everything points to this being a highly organized crime." 

The AP reports that police are tracking energy consumption across Iceland in case the thieves turn on their new computers and place a strain on the grid, since that could potentially lead them back to the stolen computers' location

I guess too. support are in 10500$ level and it is trying to break 11.5k$ resistance if it does and touches the 12k$ level probably the reversal patter may confirmed and bullish season will replace the bearish market that we experiencing right now.

Do you thing we can have a major financial crisis where stocks lose most of their value and that also happen to cryptos?

China first started banning bitcoin in 2013.

By the end of 2016, all volume in Chinese exchanges was gone.

Sometime in 2017 all Chinese exchanges ceased operations, as btc rallied to the moon.

That we still hear about Chinese FUD today is laughable.

The Marshall Islands is set to create the first ever legal tender issued as a cryptocurrency, the Sovereign (SOV).

The decision comes straight from the sprawling chain of over 1,1000 volcanic islands’ parliament, who have declared that Sovereign (SOV) will be exchanged and distributed as a digital coin.

The Marshall Islands — a sovereign nation located halfway between Hawaii and Australia — currently use the United States dollar (USD), despite being a sovereign nation. However, the country will still continue to use the USD as the SOV will initially be created as a supplementary currency.

At a speaking event on Tuesday, Facebook pioneer and bitcoin billionaire Tyler Winklevoss took that point to its logical conclusion. By his reckoning, Litecoin isn’t the silver to bitcoin’s gold, or the Vegeta to bitcoin’s Goku, as coin creator and Dragon Ball Z fan Charlie Lee is fond of tweeting about. Rather, he said Litecoin is basically one big beta test for potential bitcoin features rather than an end in and of itself.

The technical term that Winklevoss used is “testnet,” which is any alternative bitcoin blockchain designed strictly for testing purposes. A testnet has its own coins, but this cryptocurrency is not supposed to accrue any actual value. Developers can experiment with the testnet without posing any actual risk to the all-important main bitcoin blockchain.

Of course, there’s a big difference between a testnet that has no value and Litecoin, which has a market capitalization of $11.8 billion.

Do you happen to know which exchanges have the lowest withdrawal fee? I think I'm going to switch to another one.

Since SegWit adoption we have managed to decrease our BTC withdrawal fees by 25%, to 0.0006 BTC.

While a lot of people are commending and happy about this move, I might have to take the negative side on this. I see it as misplaced priority and a complete deviation of what bitcoin is all about. When the traditional banking system is being introduced, regulated based on actions that bitwala will have to take before being issued the license to operate, then that is centralisation as against decentralization. One thing is certain in this arrangement, you won't have control of your private key and the moment that is present in this arrangement, every other thing is defeated because control is gone.

While, this is seen as a further step in the penetration of crypto into the mainstream, it further establish the fact that bitcoin cannot replace banks because no matter how much freedom it offers to detest the use of banks, it won't happen because they will always find a way to feature in the future.

MintChip – Unlike most cryptocurrencies, MintChip is actually the creation of a government institution, specifically the Royal Canadian Mint. MintChip is a smart card that holds electronic value and can transfer it securely from one chip to another. Like Bitcoin, MintChip does not need personal identification; unlike Bitcoin, it is backed by a physical currency, the Canadian dollar.

Do you think that banks, governments and investment companies such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and other will try to replace the decentralised coins and try to lure their clients to invest into their own private blockchains? What can be done to prevent that?

Effective immediately, withdrawal fees on Bitcoin (XBT) are reduced to 0.0005, and withdrawal fees on Bitcoin Cash (BCH) are reduced to 0.0001.

#Binance is happy to announce a 50% reduction in $BTC withdrawal fees. Effective immediately, BTC withdrawal fees are only 0.0005 BTC!

Switzerland knows what it is doing. Several hundred years without war and good economy well that is a nice background.
If they acknowledge Bitcoin it will be huge. A big breakthrough will happen.

There is a concerning trend over the last year to pay bounties in project tokens instead of BTC/ETH. This leads to market dumps almost always after the ICO due to bounty sell-offs.

In reality, it makes no difference for the team to pay in ETH instead of the token, and here is why: The amount raised in the ICO is usually in ETH. By sending 2% (or whatever the bounty was) from this project fund to bounty hunters, it makes little difference to the team, they still have 98% of their fund left. Furthermore, no market dumping can occur, and we no longer have to listen to the whining on telegram when the price drops below ICO like it always does.

Over the past five months, Camp has been sketching out plans for a brand new cryptocurrency that aims to fix technical and other challenges plaguing existing projects, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. His hope, he told Fortune, is to resuscitate virtual currency’s original promise: an instant, affordable, and borderless means of payment for the masses.

Almost a year ago in May, Camp bought his first Bitcoin along with 10 Ether, Ethereum’s native token, on Coinbase, a popular online exchange in the U.S. But as he looked to invest further in the ballooning field of digital tokens and alternative cryptocurrencies, he was let down.

“The more research I did, the more I was not really wanting to buy a large amount of any one of them,” Camp told Fortune. “I realized it might be better to release a new project from a different philosophical standpoint with cooperation from a lot of universities, scientists, and research institutes—like the Internet,” he said, in terms of its path to development.

Camp has christened his rival project “Eco,” a name he settled on because it is short, easy to pronounce in many languages, and evokes concepts like “ecosystem,” “economics,” and “ecommerce.”

...Another factor is distribution. Camp doesn’t want a small group of speculators to hoard Eco tokens. The more people who get their hands on it, the better, in his view.

In fact, Camp is giving away free money to prime the pump. Out of a total of 1 trillion tokens to be generated over several years, the project plans to disseminate half the supply to the first 1 billion users. Camp plans to set aside a fifth of the tokens for verified nodes (in this case, university partners and researchers), a tenth for the Eco Foundation, to pay operational expenses and fund research grants, another tenth for advisors and active contributors, and a final tenth for “strategic partners worldwide.”