Category: Blockchain

The Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee has approved the Ursa project, a modular cryptography software library, according to an official announcement Dec. 4. According to the statement, as Hyperledger has matured, projects “have started to find a need for sophisticated cryptographic implementations.” The post describes Ursa as a shift from having each project implementing its own…

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has released guidelines for their new “FinTech” license, according to a FINMA official press release released Dec. 3 The Swiss financial regulator revealed that license pursuants, which can be blockchain-related and crypto-related firms, will be able to apply for the fintech license with the state authority starting from…

E-commerce giant Amazon announced the debut of two new services, Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain, according to a press release shared with Cointelegraph Nov. 28. QLDB is a ledger database designed to provide transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable log of transactions, which is overseen by a central trusted authority. All changes…

Ohio has become the first U.S. state to allow taxes to be paid in bitcoin. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, starting this week, companies in the state will be able to pay a variety of taxes, from tobacco sales tax to employee withholding tax to public utilities tax with…

The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) is planning to fight tax evasion schemes by using blockchain, German business news outlet WirtschaftsWoche reported Nov. 22. Following the major European tax fraud scheme CumEx-Files, the BMWi has suggested that distributed ledger technology (DLT) is capable of making the tax system more efficient in…

BitMEX research indicates frosty reception for the ICOs still yet to launch their tokens after raising over $50 million each   At least twelve Initial Coin Offering (ICO) projects that raised over $50 million in their token sales have yet to launch, new data by cryptocurrency trading platform BitMEX revealed Nov. 21. In a mailing…

Cryptocurrency mining operations in China are reportedly selling mining machines by weight, as opposed to price per unit. This selloff was reported by local Chinese crypto outlet 8BTC Wednesday, Nov. 21, with reference to the cryptocurrency mining pool F2Pool. Cryptocurrency markets experienced widespread decline throughout last week, with Bitcoin (BTC) declining to as low as…

RSK Labs, the startup working on smart contract functionality for bitcoin by way of sidechains, is operating under a new banner as part of a wider reimagining of its development ecosystem. The newly-dubbed Root Infrastructure Framework (RIF) Labs is headed by many of the same individuals that created the highly-anticipated platform in January of this year.…

In the aftermath from yesterday‘s Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork, both opposing camps in the so-called “hash war” are mining at a hefty loss, according to a tweet from the research arm of Hong Kong-based crypto derivatives platform BitMEX today, Nov. 16. On Nov. 5, BitMEX Research announced it would be launching a network monitoring…

The most contentious hard fork in bitcoin cash’s one-year history is happening Thursday. So contentious, in fact, that this one holds the potential to split the blockchain into two separate iterations of the bitcoin cash protocol – one led by developer group Bitcoin ABC and the other, Bitcoin SV, led by blockchain research company nChain. The…

Germany: Bitcoin.de Crypto Exchange Operator to Acquire 100% of Investment Bank Tremmel German holding company Bitcoin Group SE has acquired a 100 percent stake in investment bank Tremmel Wertpapierhandelsbank GmbH, “Cointelegraph auf Deutsch” reports today, Nov. 13. Bitcoin Group SE, based in Herford, Germany, operates what is reportedly the country’s only regulated crypto exchange, Bitcoin…

Mining Ethereum (ETH) using a graphics processing unit (GPU) is no longer profitable, according to an analysis from U.S.-based global trading and technology firm Susquehanna. CNBC reported Nov. 13 on Susquehanna’s findings, which point to the protracted slump in crypto markets and declining network hashrates as reasons for the profit decrease. In Susquehanna’s analysis, profit…

I have rarely laughed that hard! [UPDATED 12 NOV 2018 with GMO Data – scroll down] 7,000 Bitmain Antminers makes it “one of the largest” Bitcoin Mining facilities? That makes it at best 98 PetaHash/sec total — in a global network averaging 50 ExaHash/sec = less than 1/500th of the global network capacity.    …

Bitcoin copies overview (to grow)   An experimental market on a major crypto exchange suggests that bitcoin cash users may favor the more established version of the software, Bitcoin ABC, ahead of an expected fork this month. Due to the technical design of the cryptocurrency, currently the fourth-largest by market capitalization, bitcoin cash users must…

I wonder: who of the 99.9% not following Bitcoin news closely still understands the various splits and forks of its 1,500+ copies?   Ahead of the imminent Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork, mining giant Bitmain has rushed to deploy around 90,000 Antminer S9 machines to the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, Chinese blockchain news source…

“Gas” is the name for a special unit used in the Ethereum network. There are so many terms and technology discussions about this “DLT” platform, while it is eveolving, that this overview might help shed some light onto one of them. It measures how much “work” an action or set of actions takes to perform.…