Appatic

This edition of BWNS is brought to you thanks to www.CryptoSteel.com . The coldest Bitcoin Hardware Wallet there is. But also the most hardened way to back up and preserve any kind of password safe and secure. Which is offline and pressed into a case of steel.

Bitcoin Average Exchange Price For The Week.

The BAEP in the third week of 2017, while still filled with volatility. Was not as bad  of a ride compared to week 2. Ride started on Monday 16 above $820 USD and then rose with a high of $834 and stayed without much movement at all after that. Tuesday 17 started pretty much as Monday ended with a low of $834 and then saw a huge rise up to $892 and ended up the day in a high of $909. Wednesday 18 showed up with a high of $912, only to then plunge back down to a low of $864 and finish with a small recovery to $880. Thursday 19 went on with a small increment to $895 and went off with a high of $908. Friday 20 arrived with a small decrease to $903 that still would serve as the high, continued with a dip to a low $891 and parted off with $902. Saturday 21 embraced the weekend with a small decrease to $899 that would serve as bottom of the weekend and then got it mood back up with a uptrend to $922, that then escalated to a high of $928. Sunday 22 continued in a good mood with $929, followed with a high of $940, but ran off steam and plunged down to a low of $900. Ending the week with a recovery to $922.

Most of the reactions of the price per Bitcoin still had strong links to the fallout of the PBOC oversight on Chinese Exchanges. As most of them eliminated margin trading and started the discussion of ending zero fees trading.  On top of that, Donald Trump inauguration took place, marking the beginning of the USA presidency of Donald j. Trump.

 

News

-

The North American Bitcoin Conference took place for its fourth year in Miami.

TNABC 2017 was still quite filled with a lot of Blockchain related stuff that was not at all about The Bitcoin Blockchain. That said, one of the relevant Bitcoin related news to come out from it was that Abra, will be launching worldwide in February with support for 50 fiat currencies.  Using Bitcoin as the backend. On what Abra is and why it is being seen as a big deal? Well, maybe because it is presumably many things at once in a single app. It is being heralded as paypal, circle and western union in one app. Whether it lives up to the hype of that description or it just becomes a competitor for startups like coin.ph, paxful, localbitcoin apart from coinbase and circle is yet to be seen. Some of the other highlights were presentations from MGT, Rootstock and Bitwage. All which can be watched right from this post.

 

 

 

 

 

The Third Annual Miami Bitcoin Hackaton results were finally known

Judged by  Bitstop ATM co-founder Doug Carillo; Bitcoin Uncensored co-host Joshua Unseth; Satoshi Labs CEO Alena Vranova; Breadwallet CMO Aaron Lasher; and local developer and tech educator Nelson Milian. These were the first, second and third place winners:

1.- BitTag – Geochaching game app of Tag with Bitcoin rewards.

2.- Coinbar – Querying of Bitcoin Data using the gimmicky Touch Bar in the new Apple MacBook Pro’s.

3.- Setbounty – A Chrome Browser App that allows to set Bitcoin Bounties for features and bug fixes in Github hosted projects.

For more on the hackaton. Click in.

Via Ariel Deschapell at CoinDesk

 

Japan Rises To 2nd Biggest Bitcoin Trading Country

Or so it seems. Or if it has, it is by a hair. If this is accurate that means both China and Japan are now ahead of USA when it comes to Bitcoin trading.  Making Asia the dominant force in this area of the Bitcoin Ecosystem along with Mining Pools, Mining Facilities and Mining Hardware development. This development should not come to as much of a surprise. Given that as it was reported in a previous BWNS edition. Japan now has two solid Bitcoin Exchanges and Bitcoin Payment Processing adoption on the rise along with those.

 

Via William Suberg at Bitcoinist.

 

Barry Silbert files to list the Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for a $500M USD Initial Public Offering (IPO)

This was done by Grayscale Investment LLC, that is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group according to the SEC filling documentation records. BIT is what has been known as GBTC, that so far trades at a crazy premium on OTCQX. In resume, this means that the SEC will now have two Bitcoin ETF to considerate. One from the Winklevoss Twins known as (COIN) and Silbert’s (BIT) .

 

Via Lester Coleman at Cryptocoinnews

 

Coinbase Battle with USA’s IRS could cost up to $1M USD.

This according to a declaration given by CEO Brian Armstrong.

Still the right thing to do even if they are only really doing it as a PR move. If Coinbase were seen as just quickly giving up to the IRS, that alone would hurt its business for more than $1M USD. 

 

via Stan Higgins at CoinDesk

 

Daimler AG bought PayCash Europe, An Online Payments Company who also provides Bitcoin Payment Processing

As part of its Digitalization Strategy, Daimler AG bought PayCash Europe to use it as the backend for Mercedes Pay. Which seems to be an in-car ewallet service for their Mercedes Benz cars. Yet, buying PayCash could also then be used as the backend for other apps that Daimler AG is invested in like Car2Go and MyTaxi.

All of this is only really a good thing and good news for Bitcoin, if PayCash Europe not only keeps supporting BPP as usual. But also enables it as an option in Mercedes Pay, Car2Go and MyTaxi. Otherwise, this news will end up as either inconsequential or disappointing. Time will tell.

 

Via William Suberg at Bitcoinist

 

SatoshiPay Raised 640,000 EUR in funding.

Blue Star Capital was the venture capital firm that invested in the Bitcoin Micro-payment startup.

This makes only part of the funding being raised by SatoshiPay as they are targeting for a full 1 Million Euros in total funding.

 

Via Stan Higgins at CoinDesk

 

Bitpay’s Bitcoin Transactions reach an all time high.

It is now known that Bitpay Bitcoin Transaction movement surpassed the 200,000 transactions per month. And that means Bitpay transactional volume doubled in 2016.  Making for very good news. This means healthy growth when it comes to Bitcoin Payment Processing  as these numbers are only coming from Bitpay. And there are now 7 different Bitcoin Payment Processor providers around the world.

 

Via Andrew Quenston at Cryptocoinnews

 

 

Coinbase Co-Founder Fred Ehrsam is leaving.

Saying that he may be doing something in the Cryptocurrency space later. Which sounds conveniently vague. Kind of feels like he is not just leaving Coinbase, but also the Bitcoin Space.

Ehrsam also declared optimistically that he leaving is not bad and neither it will be when more people leave Coinbase. Something that already has been happening. Fred says it is just like what happened with Paypal. Where ex-employes went to do great ventures and got named a Paypal Mafia. Literally stating that ex-coinbase employees could later on be seen as the Coinbase Mafia. Implying all of the early Coinbase employees are bound to future great successes.

 

Yeah, that not arrogant and cocky at all. Not at all..

via Pete Rizzo at CoinDesk

 

Blockstream released a White Paper explaining the Strong Federations System. A Foundational piece to improve upon their Sidechain implementation project known as Liquid

The White Paper titled “Strong Federations: An Interoperable Blockchain Solution to Centralized Third Party Risks” details how to improve privacy, costs, speed of value transfers and settlement among exchanges and brokerages.

Material in question is too technical to summarize effectively without recreating the linked news report and the source article. Please click in to read more about it.

via Antonio Madeira at Bitcoinist

Source: Blockstream Blog

 

OkCoin and Huboi stop offering Margin Trading

As discussed on the price weekly recap. The effects of the PBOC oversight of Chinese Bitcoin Exchanges continued this week. With Leverage being the first thing to go away. Margin trading had to be second thing to go.

 

via Gautham at NewsBTC

 

UK Bitcoin Exchange Coinfloor starts offering Zero Fee Trading

Something that previously was only offered on Chinese Bitcoin Exchanges is now making its way up to this London based exchange.

 

Via Pete Rizzo at CoinDesk

 

Japanese IT Giant GMO entered the Bitcoin Exchange And Wallet Space

Previously already cornered the Bitcoin Payment Processing market in Japan. GMO has now decided to enter more Bitcoin markets and will offer a Wallet and Exchange offering, that they promise will be first level even to experienced traders. Not that hard to believe considering they are very experienced in the area of securities and online security. GMO also happens to be one of the biggest IT companies in Japan and its is now also known they are an investor in the currently regarded best Japanese Bitcoin Exchange Bitflyer. The very same one who did a mainstream worth video Ad campaign. One they were quite confident enough to pay to occupy the homepage of Yahoo Japan. Site which is still one of the Top 10 most visited sites in Japan.  Needless say, it is safe assume that Bitcoin is now Big in Japan.

 

via Luke Parker at BraveNewCoin

 

Coinbase gets granted New York State Bitlicense

Making them the third Bitcoin startup after Ripple and Circle to get one.

I wonder if they celebrated this or the celebration was just letting it be known they have one. Eh.

 

Via Michael del Castillo at CoinDesk

 

The Facebook Bitcoin Group reached 20,000 registered members

It took quite longer than anticipated versus The Google+ Bitcoin Community which is now at over 31,000 members. And the reasons were:

1.- Unlike other Facebook Bitcoin Groups around. TFBBG is tightly maintained. With over 2,500 members being removed via moderation over time. This because they were spammers or dummy accounts.

2.- Facebook introduced account auto-moderation in 2016. And it quickly removed well over 2,500 accounts from the membership during 2016 alone. Apart from that. Facebook also removed accounts that were not even into the community. The way I can tell is that their profile don't exist anymore, but they still appear as requesting to join.

I guesstimate that between facebook and moderation over 2000 more accounts were never even allowed in from the request list over 2016 up to now. That makes for a cut  of over 7000 account from the possible membership number tally.

So, that's that. But this is how there is also no spam or scams over there. Even when achieving that on a Facebook Group is x5 harder than in G+.

Link: The Facebook Bitcoin Group

        

Articles

-

Is Bitcoin making a dent into the Gambling Industry?

Kyle Torpey think so based on his findings and makes the case for that being the case. With the possibility that the future of Bitcoin and Gambling brightest point is yet to come.

Thanks to my experience managing two of the Top Bitcoin discussion sites. I can tell from that experience that Bitcoin Casino Affiliates post submissions and spam attempts do have increased significantly in the last 6 months.  I also have seen big gambling sites ads lately specify they do accept Bitcoin. So, I do believe that the outlook of Bitcoin in Gambling is a good bet. 

 

Via Kyle Torpey at Coinjournal

 

Bitcoin Uncensored Coverage of TNABC 2017

Bitcoin Uncensored really surprised everyone that cared to notice with the way they covered The North American Bitcoin Conference 2017. With them basically having their own Mini Conference within TNABC 2017. All with much of it happening on the bathroom facilities of the conference venue. No, you didn’t just read that wrong.  Chris DeRose and Junseth along with some great hosting help of Tone Vays and Riccardo “Fluffypony Spagni did panels by setting up a table and recording equipment inside the in-use and active Men bathrooms facility provided by TNABC 2017.  They of course went beyond Bitcoin Coverage and while all panels are worth a watch. The following ones are the ones I personally think deserve a share.

 

Since explaining the how, why and what of Bitcoin Uncensored would be in part spoiling the fun. Here are the videos from the panels without providing any further explanations.

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, just one note. If you can only watch one panel. Watch this last one above with Tone Vays as host. It was something else, trust me.

 

Novelties & Humor

-

Have you ever wondered about just how seriously is Bitcoin being studied Academically and how many articles could you find about Bitcoin over the years if you went looking for them around the web?

Brett Scott sure did. He made a long list in a spreadsheet that anyone can take look at.

So, have a look. You know you are now curious.

 

Link: Bitcoin Academic Research

 

Bitcoin Hodlers: All about Popcorn and Chill

 

via Kevin Su

 

This edition of BWNS was brought to you thanks to www.CryptoSteel.com . The coldest Bitcoin Hardware Wallet there is. But also the most hardened way to back up and preserve any kind of password safe and secure. Which is offline and pressed into a case of steel.

That’s all for this week!