Libra is facing too much resistance and it looks to me that it is never going to realize. First, it was the American law makers who had issues with the project. And now even the partners such as Paypal are no longer interested in it and are looking for an honorable exit. It seems that many of these companies jumped in to the Libra bandwagon too soon, without thinking much about the consequences.

I really doubt whether Mark Zuckerberg has properly studied about the concept of cryptocurrencies. He wanted to take advantage of the hype surrounding Bitcoin and use it to remove the stagnation in the FB revenue growth. Also my guess is that he wanted to compete against Bitcoin, as his rivals (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss) are well known supporters of BTC.

BitPay, a leading cryptocurrency payments platform with presence all over the world says that its merchants will soon start to receive Ripple’s XRP as payment for goods and services. The support of XRP brings the total number of cryptocurrency support by BitPay to four. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash are already used by customers to pay at thousands of merchant shops across the world.

The more immediate issue for me is that the philosophical basis for fiat currencies has never been more fragile. No politician in the U.S. is talking about the need to shrink what are becoming very large budget deficits, with the possibility that they can only be financed directly by central banks. This is known as Modern Monetary Theory, or the printing of as much cash as a government needs to fund it's spending

PayPal is on the verge of quitting Facebook’s Libra project after having pulled out of a key meeting in Washington on Thursday.

All 28 backers of Facebook’s plan for a new global digital currency were due to gather to discuss how Libra would tackle increasing opposition from regulators, but people familiar with the event said PayPal had not been present — the only one not to show.

A decision by the payments group to quit Libra would be a big blow for the project, which is being steered by David Marcus, a Facebook executive who was previously PayPal’s president.

One person close to PayPal said the company was concerned that Facebook has not done enough to address the backlash against the project, especially over money-laundering concerns.

“It doesn’t seem that there was a lot of pre-work done with regulators,” the person said. “[Payments] companies don’t want that [regulatory scrutiny] to bleed into their businesses.”

Now, bitcoin trading and investment giants Anchorage, Bittrex, Circle, Coinbase, DRW Cumberland, Genesis, Grayscale, and Kraken have banded together to create the Crypto Rating Council in order to better decide which digital assets can and cannot be traded on their platforms.

The group have created what they call a "scalable, points-based rating system" to help define whether a cryptocurrency is or is not a security.

The system will use a set of several dozen questions, "derived directly from SEC guidance and case law."

"We also worked hard to focus our framework on objective, repeatable, fact-driven questions that can be answered consistently by technical experts across different assets and over time," Coinbase wrote in a blog post announcing the council.

The system will give bitcoin and similar digital tokens a score between one and five, with a score of one meaning the council’s independent analysis suggests the asset has few or no characteristics consistent with a traditional regulated security.

What miners? Bitcoin miners? I wish them good luck with their SHA256 asics. 

You can participate in Maddof schemes for a number of times until you get burnt. This is the equivalent of "im buying the dip because altcoins are low, and altcoins always come back". Eventually, altcoins will not be comming back, and the tide will finally shift towards natural state of things (total BTC domination), then altcoin bagholders will have their last cry on reddit about how they became scammed by this and that token.

Ethereum briefly passed Bitcoin in one key area last week: total daily USD-denominated transaction fees. In fact, Ethereum miners collected more in fees than Bitcoin miners on this past Saturday and Sunday too, according to Coin Metrics.

...Due to the limitations placed on capacity, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum see higher transaction fees when the networks become congested. This is exactly what has happend with Ethereum over the past month, as total daily USD-denominated transaction fees hit levels not seen in over a year.

So, what has caused the recent spike in Ethereum transaction fees? It appears the blame can be placed on a Ponzi scheme-esque game called FairWin, which also has a critical vulnerability in its associated contract on the Ethereum blockchain. According to on-chain crypto market analytics firm Glassnode, FairWin has recently been consuming up to half of the gas spent on the Ethereum network at any given time.

The spike in FairWin's popularity, according to Etherscan, correlates almost perfectly with the increase in total fees seen on the Ethereum network this month, according to Coin Metrics.

Oh my god. Now I have seen it all.

I agree that millions of people use DOGE and it remains as one of the most popular cryptocurrencies (but not one of the largest, in terms of market capitalization). And you agree that DOGE has seen no development for many years now. Those who created this coin (Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus) are not involved in it anymore and they have moved on with other projects.

One of your arguments is true. It's value is not increasing (for obvious reasons) and therefore people find no reason to hoard it. The fee is very low, and therefore it is being used for payments in a lot of online stores. But in order to remain as a currency, it should have some value associated with it. And ideally a coin that is created just for a joke should not be having any.

According to data from CoinDance, Bitcoin trading in Hong Kong reached an all-time high this week when measured in Hong Kong dollars. During the last week, more than $12,294,796 HKD (about $1,567,525 USD) worth of Bitcoin was exchanged in Hong Kong, surpassing the record of $11,666,176 HKD set in late January 2018.

If we express these figures in BTC, the numbers are similarly (yet not equally) impressive. A total of 173 bitcoins were exchanged throughout the week, which is a high not seen since April 2017, when traders moved 196 BTC in one week. That figure, however, pales in comparison to the 1086 BTC that were moved at the end of 2015, long before the rally that led Bitcoin to capture the world' s attention

You must be lucky for having that experience that your bank doesn't question any of your transaction of money with their service because in my country, the banks are so strict about the source of our income. They will ask a lot of questions and they will ask for proof also and verify it to really know if we are telling the truth.

Recessions usually end up with fiat losing value and when fiat loses value then bitcoin gains value.

The threat of a recession has sent global equities lower. Notably, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted more than 450 points in day two of a sell-off.

Meanwhile, gold has risen from $1,460 to $1,500 per ounce in the last 48 hours and is now looking to extend gains. The yellow metal, a classic safe haven asset, is clearly benefiting from the recession concerns and the resulting risk aversion.

Bitcoin, however, has been largely trapped in a $8,200–$8,500 range since Tuesday. In fact, the top cryptocurrency’s bounce from recent lows near $7,700 has run out of steam near the 200-day moving average (MA) resistance at $8,483 over the last 48 hours.

The lack of demand for bitcoin as a safe haven asset amid the economic worries appears to contradict the argument often put forward by many observers that the cryptocurrency is digital gold.

The people who were hyped about Bakkt was not the institutional investors, but rather the current hoarders/speculators in the Bitcoin scene. These people had unrealistic expectations about the Billions of dollars that might be invested into Bitcoin futures on the day of the launch and that was simply not realistic at all.

Institutional investors look for stable investments with high returns and a manageable risk to protect investment money that might be used for pension funds. They are not risk takers with high risk investments and they prefer cash settled investments and not something that are settled with actual assets. 

The bitcoin price is down currently because there is a correction going on in the market. Maybe in a month or two the bitcoin price will start moving upwards.

How is Japan at -0.47%?