With Trouble At Home, Kraken Looks Overseas After a rocky start to doing business outside of the Eurozone, where Kraken is the largest exchange for bitcoin buyers and sellers, CEO Jesse Powell announced Tuesday that the San Francisco-based company has reached an agreement to team up with payment service company PayCash to offer customers additional USD and GBP trading facilities for bitcoin purchases and sales orders. Kraken was met with a weak reception by financial services firms in North America earlier this year after attempting unsuccessfully to ingratiate itself into what is a deeply cut-throat and hugely compliance-heavy market niche. Since August, multiple investment bankers have complained to CoinSpeaker that Kraken’s senior management team is difficult to do business with since the executives at the exchange comprises only people with technology backgrounds. “Not one of them has even a vaguely competent grasp of the financial services industry – you end up talking to yourself in the end,” maintains a banker for a multinational public-listed US investment bank who asked that neither he nor his employer be named. Kraken plans to tend to its European trading operations, which it is expanding into the UK, as well as to open an office this month in Japan A Look At Sidechains, Etherium & Zerocash Sidechains, Ethereum and Zerocash are three new technologies under development amidst the $5-billion, 300 quadrillion hash annual blockchain processing system. Sidechains The technology allows users to transfer virtual currencies between blockchains by using a two-way peg system that eliminates the need for creating new digital currencies. Sidechains simply “peg” to the bitcoin blockchain, leveraging the depth of the liquidity of bitcoin’s market and the extent of processing power available as a result of bitcoin mining activities. Thus, there might be thousands of sidechains “pegged” to Bitcoin with different aims and characteristics. Ethereum Ethereum is a blockchain platform with a built-in Turing-Complete (TC) programming language for decentralized applications and smart contracts, which includes multiple signatures and escrow transactions. The project is intended to merge and enhance the conepts of altcoins, on-chain meta-protocols and scripting. TC programming language is designed to power not only programmable money, but voting systems, identity registries, financial derivatives, reputation systems, decentralized autonomous operations as well. They recently raised 30,000 BTC ($14 million) by trading “ether”, their own currency. The project is set to be launched in winter. Unlike the blockchain, ethereum blocks store a copy of the most recent record and individual transaction history. The difficulty and the block number are also included in the block. Zerocash Zerocash is the blockchain protocol based on the decentralized anonymous payment (DAP) scheme that keeps all the users totally anonymous. It doesn’t store any data on the amount transferred, addresses or payment’s origin. InPay Crowdfunds IPO Poland-based InPay recently made its shares available for purchase in the first crowd-funded IPO of the virtual currency landscape after getting the go-ahead from domestic financial regulatory authorities. The sale of stock was launched on the crowdfunding site Beesfund. InPay is selling a stake of 5% in what will comprise 5000 shares at 40 zloty ($1.20) per share. The company intends to raise about 200,000 zloty ($60,000). More than 100 investors have already acquired subscribed to the offer, which the company expects to wrap up by mid-November. Former SEC chief Levitt Goes Digital Two bitcoin companies, BitPay and Vaurum, announced today that Arthur Levitt, former Chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), will serve as advisor to both enterprises. BitPay is the world’s largest bitcoin payment processor, while Vaurum is an institutional bitcoin exchange. Levitt, the longest serving Chairman of the SEC, will work closely with both companies to monitor business practices as well as help develop new ways to market and refine this new form of currency. “Bitcoin is a fascinating new product in the rapidly changing world of financial service,” said Levitt in a statement to the press. “I hope to help BitPay and Vaurum blend their new business models with core monetary methods and transparency practices in order to ensure their long term success.” BitPay Launches Open Source Gimmick As Rumors Fly BitPay, the payment gateway that services merchants who want to accept bitcoin as a payment mechanism without holding physical BTC, announced this week it was working on an open-source program designed to facilitate peer-to-peer interaction – comercial and social – in the virtual currency landscape. The program is called Foxtrot. The announcement comes on the back of growing speculation in corners of the market – especially among exchange chiefs – over the true health of the company’s purported cash-flow problems. While BitPay has raised $32 million from notable investors including Richard Branson and Roger Ver, some of those working on virtual currency exchange floors who see the actual transaction volumes being carried out by merchant payers maintain that BitPay’s tiny fees combined with a lackluster uptake of users paying for everyday items such as food, clothes and books in bitcoin has meant for dwindling cashflow just as the company’s core holdings, most of which are in bitcoin, have begun to taper off in value. “A Bitpay fallout is likely if the situation goes on as is – the European operations are a mess,” one employee of a North America based exchange told CoinSpeaker. The employee asked not to be identified by name for fear of harming his personal reputation in the industry. The employee referenced a professional bitcoin market maker for exchanges who confirmed the rumor, but he also asked not to be named or quoted. Early stage investor Roger Ver denied the claim and insisted that the company was doing “better than good” when asked about the comments last month in a private interview with CoinSpeaker’s editorial managers. How to Store Bitcoins by Anton Kolkovskiy on Thursday, March 20th, 2014 7:32am EDT 0 Comments We know how Bitcoins are generated and how a bitcoin transaction works, but how are bitcoins stored? We store cash in a physical wallet, and bitcoin works in a similar way, except it’s normally digital. Paper wallets can be used to store bitcoins offline in non-digital format. Using securely generated paper wallets significantly decreases the chances of your bitcoins being stolen by hackers or computer viruses. Photo: Zach Copley/Flickr This guide is meant more for those with a lot of bitcoins, as in huge stashes worth a fortune (mostly early adopters), but can also be useful to starters with small stashes (even though they risk less and are far less likely to be targeted). Bitcoin is modern equivalent of cash and, every day, another merchant starts accepting them as payment. We know how they are generated and how a bitcoin transaction works, but how are bitcoins stored? We store fiat cash in a physical wallet, and bitcoin works in a similar way, except it’s normally digital. Bitcoin Paper Wallets A paper wallet is a way to store Bitcoins that involves printing the Bitcoin addresses and private keys directly on a piece of paper. When done properly, paper wallets are one of the safest ways possible to store Bitcoins. Paper Wallet Advantages • Protection from malware and keyloggers. • Maintain 100% ownership of your private keys. You own the coins not a 3rd party service. • No dependence on the security of any website. • Keeping a piece of paper safe is easier than keeping your computer secure. Paper Wallet Disadvantages • The paper contains everything needed to spend the coins and must be kept physically secure. here’s a vicious, global economic war raging and its outcome will be determinative for the destiny of humanity, and necessarily, also for Bitcoin. That sounds melodramatic, but it’s true. You don’t have to take my word for it. Warren Buffett, multi-billionaire and fourth richest man in the world, recently stated: “Through the tax code, there has been class warfare waged, and my class has won. It’s been a rout.” The economic warfare is positively vicious. “Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. “ And 80% live on less than $10 per day. Indeed, in the aggregate, the 67 wealthiest people in the world, of whom Warren Buffett is number three, are as wealthy as the world’s poorest 3.5 billion. This is the stark, socioeconomic context of Warren Buffett’s braying that: “…there has been class warfare waged, and my class has won.” Of course, Warren Buffett’s “class” is the multi-billionaire class and the number of multi-billionaires on the Forbes’ billionaire list has increased dramatically in recent years. There are now 1,645 of them worldwide with an individual, average worth of $4.7 billion. In just one year there were 219 more multibillionaires, and their aggregate wealth increased from $5.4 trillion last year to $6.4 trillion this year. The US supplies 492 of them, more than any other country. Those worth less than $1.3 billion did not even make this year’s list. Last year’s list included just one Rockefeller and two Rothschilds. Such mega-wealthy families as the Bushes, the Windsors, and the rest of the European royal houses, who together control unknown and probably unknowable trillions of dollars of assets, are conspicuously absent from the list. What does Warren Buffett mean when he says that class warfare has been waged through the tax code and that his multi-billionaire class has won? Permit me to explain. At a macro-level, so-called “money” is created by central banks, right out of thin air. They manufacture money by the train car load. They just print it up in vast quantities and lend it out at interest. For example, the dominant central bank on the planet (at present) is the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank which issues the Federal Reserve Note, popularly known as the American dollar. On all of the Federal Reserve Notes, whatever the denomination, are printed the words: “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” In other words, the so-called US dollar is essentially a debt instrument, issued at interest by the US Federal Reserve and created out of thin air by the unknown trillions. If you are using it, you are paying off debts. If you are paying US dollars to someone it means you are in their debt. If you owed them nothing you would not have to pay them. The US dollar is a piece of paper, or stream of electrons in a digital database, issued at interest, and has no intrinsic value. It is essentially a ledger entry, or a marker or chit. A gold mine has intrinsic value. Productive agricultural land has intrinsic value. And so forth. By comparison, the US Federal Reserve Note is just a little scrap of paper, or an ephemeral stream of electrons in a digital database. Nothing more. So how does that relate to Warren Buffett’s statement about class warfare being waged through the tax code? Why not start at the very beginning, with the Federal Code of the United States government, which goes so far as to stipulate that, by law: Federal reserve banks, including the capital stock and surplus therein and the income derived therefrom shall be exempt from Federal, State, and local taxation, except taxes upon real estate. (USC Title 12 – Banks and Banking, Chapter 4 – Taxation , Subchapter I – Federal Reserve Banks, § 531 – Exemption from taxation) There it is in black and white, codified in the law. The wealthiest private bank in the history of humanity, which is actually a private banking cartel, creates trillions of dollars of so-called “money” right out of thin air and then loans out said “money” by the multi-trillions of dollars and pays no tax on that money, or on the surplus from it, or on the astronomical income it derives from it (the interest). Remember the Golden Rule – “Those who have the gold make the rules.” The vast regulatory and taxing bureaucracy engendered by this astronomical lending enterprise forces almost everyone downstream of the loan origination to submit to some form of taxation in order to repay the trillions of dollars lent out at interest. The taxing and regulatory machinery is intricate and labyrinthine, though the Federal Reserve Bank itself (which is a consortium of immensely powerful and wealthy private banks) is exempt by law from the very burden that is imposed by law on everyone else who is not a member of the super-wealthy, mega-banking clique. So who gets that money? Where do those trillions of dollars go? Money, Money, Who’s Got The Money? US congressman Alan Grayson wanted to know the answer, so he posed the question to the US Federal Reserve Bank’s Inspector General, Elizabeth Coleman, in a Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations congressional hearing, on 5 May 2009. More than four million people have watched a Youtube video of the exchange between Congressman Grayson and Inspector General Coleman for a reason. To wit: in response to the Congressman’s direct queries about the disposition of two trillion dollars in the Federal Reserve’s portfolio and literally nine trillion dollars of off-balance sheet transactions by the Federal Reserve, Inspector General Coleman pleaded ignorance. She said she did not know anything about it. Hey, two trillion dollars, nine trillion dollars, before you know it, you’re talking real money, and the Inspector General claimed to know nothing about it, though it’s her job to know. In a separate hearing, Grayson also quizzed former US Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, about who received more than half a trillion dollars of loans from the Federal Reserve and could elicit no more from Bernanke than that the money was loaned to the European Central Bank, which then loaned it out to other banking institutions. In other words, at the highest levels of the US banking establishment literally trillions of dollars are in play and the Inspector General of the US Federal Reserve says she knows nothing about it. Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, was little better in his direct testimony before a US congressional hearing. It’s no surprise then, that the Atlantic writes that “the finance industry has effectively captured (the USA) government…in a quiet coup,” and then advises that the only way out of the increasingly severe financial crisis in which the US finds itself is to: “…break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.” How To Break The Financial Oligarchy That Is Blocking Essential Reform This is where Bitcoin enters the picture. The way to break the obstructionist financial oligarchy is not to beat the oligarchs at their own game, which is well to nigh impossible, seeing as they have written the laws and regulations to favor themselves, first, foremost and always; rather the way to break the financial oligarchy is to design an altogether different game, with different and open rules in which everyone in the whole world can play, and do an end run around the financial oligarchy. In their own way, this is what Bitcoin, and a growing coterie of similar cryptocurrencies and altcoins are doing. A parallel, potentially all inclusive, global, decentralized financial network is rapidly growing, here, there and everywhere, all over the world. Of course, like an obstreperous child trying to grab a fistful of Jello, the old line financial oligarchy is trying to clamp down on Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency and altcoin movement. But as in the case of the brat grabbing a fistful of Jello, Bitcoin squirts right through their greedy, larcenous fingers. And now that the idea and practice of cryptocurrency has escaped to the wild and gone native, even if Bitcoin were to be brought to heel, there is nothing to stop another cryptocurrency or altcoin, or scores or hundreds of them, from arising to take its place. Two Sides In The Economic War There are, thus, two sides in this economic war, and extremely little, if any wiggle room between them. We truly have come to a fork in the road, and the planetary financial system must cast its lot either with: 1. The filthy rich, autocratic .001% who fancy themselves the overlords of humanity and the Earth, and the massive, global web of regulatory and taxing bureaucracies that facilitate and enable their stranglehold of national and international finance; 2. Or with the great masses of unimaginably suffering humanity. That is to say, is Bitcoin for the liberation of the human race from the plunder, exploitation, repression and oppression of the filthy rich, autocratic .001%? Or at the end of the day is Bitcoin just a more clever, techie, geeky way to ensnare people even more firmly into the suffocating grip of the bureaucratic regulatory and tax traps laid by the filthy rich banking cartels, and to establish global, Infaq, Sedekah,Zakat Online Infaq Online, Sedekah OnlineZakat Online via bitcoin Bitcoin Address wallet =16Qp2UZYXdj28YDyTfVaxPrFZnQcMyseGG
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 08:22:59 +0000