Some of biggest bitcoin miners in China have reportedly been looking to set up operations in other Asian countries; there has been conflicting reports out of China is the last week as to what the country is doing when it comes to mining operations; the PBOC has not made official comments yet and the mining overall doesn’t look to slow down as other countries can fill the role of China. Source.
Starting August 1 at about 8:20 AM EST, the bitcoin blockchain split, and there is a new set of tokens - bitcoin cash (BCC) - on the new blockchain; bitcoin's price dropped about 10% from $2,944 to $2,632 in about forty minutes, according to bitcoin trading platform OKCoin. Source (Chinese)
Over the weekend, the price of bitcoin dropped by as much as 20%; the price has since rebounded slightly with a current price as of writing of $1,041; the recent volatility is due to disagreements between developers, exchanges and entrepreneurs about the size limit of a block; some want to increase the current block limit of 1 MB; two groups have been debating including Bitcoin Unlimited, who is advocating for no limit on block sizes, and Bitcoin Core, who is advocating to keep the block size as is; Bitcoin Unlimited has recently threatened to implement a hard fork. Source
Bitcoin's price has been gaining in recent days; CNBC reports on its new high of $3,586.23 on Friday; over the weekend it continued to gain, surpassing $4,000; with the new highs the cryptocurrency’s value has gained over 24% in the past week and tripled in value for the year; its split into bitcoin and bitcoin cash has been a lead catalyst for its recent price gains; an additional upgrade called “segregated witness” is also being supported. Source
A consensus over the upcoming bitcoin split was not reached and the plan was cancelled; the hope was for a new version that could handle double the number of transactions; upon hearing the news bitcoin’s value shot up to over $7,800; the current version can only handle about five transactions per second and to compete with names like PayPal and Visa that will need to change at some point in the future. Source.
Jeff Garzik helped contribute to the underlying code of bitcoin and is now coming to market with Metronome; "We've really been beating this up on the economic-model side, the engineering side, the legal and tax side," said Garzik, who serves as CEO of Bloq, to American Banker; Metronome does not have it’s own blockchain and has the ability to jump from one blockchain to another; the new cryptocurrency could be appealing to banks because of the flexibility and they are looking to launch in December. Source.
This week, we cover these ideas:
That absurd Paul Krugman article about Bitcoin. Also Jim Cramer has things to say about financial regulation.
If all the prices are down, which they are, does that mean that everything is bad and wrong?
How timing is a personal financial planning problem, not a market value problem
The price of bitcoin is the highest in Zimbabwe which reached $13,500 at the time of the article being published; this is due to the conflicts happening in the country; for people in Zimbabwe bitcoin is seen as a safer option; the US dollar and South African rand also trade for approximately twice their price in the country. Source
Bitcoin Software Addition 'SegWit' Could Make Digital Currency Faster The Bitcoin community is ready to roll out an enhancement to the digital currency's code base; SegWit (which stands for "Segregated Witness") separates the encrypting of the transaction information from the currency miner's validation signature; currency miners need extensive computing resources and time to prove that a transaction is true and valid, therefore this step has traditionally slowed down the recording of transactions; done with testing, the new SegWit feature could be released as soon as November 15th; it is considered officially adopted once 95% of the Bitcoin software community deploys the code; this could take as little as a month or two, or significantly longer.
Bitcoin rose 5 percent yesterday to $10,300, which is a five-month high, after comments from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell...