Bitcoin's true believers vow to ride out cryptocurrency rollercoaster

The crowds have thinned somewhat at Bitcoin Center, leaving just the true believers in the volatile cryptocurrency.

"Two months ago we couldn't breathe here" due to the throngs, recalled Nick Spanos, founder of the trading and educational hub in lower Manhattan.

"People outside couldn't get inside."

The centre, which was set up in December 2013, calls itself a one-of-a-kind epicenter for all things bitcoin. It is primarily frequented by technology and financial types, mostly male and mostly younger, although it aspires to go well beyond that core audience.

"The Bitcoin Center is open seven days a week to shed light on the world of bitcoin to whoever walks in our doors!," proclaims its website.

"Our staff can provide an overview of bitcoin on the spot or register guests for our comprehensive bitcoin courses." On a recent weekday evening, about 100 people gathered in the space, a parlor in a Ukrainian restaurant, to trade bitcoins on smartphone applications, nibble on complimentary snacks and take in the latest insights from Spanos.

Bitcoin dealer in Finland plays cat and mouse with banks closing accounts

One of the Nordic region’s biggest Bitcoin dealers, Prasos Oy, has one lifeline left.
The company exchanges cryptocurrencies into euros, and relies on banks to help it with those transactions. But banks are increasingly saying no to Prasos and firms like it, for fear of getting into trouble with anti-money laundering rules. Prasos says it’s now waiting and hoping regulators will set clear guidelines that allow it to continue doing business.

Four banks in Finland, where Prasos is based, have already blocked its transactions, Chief Executive Officer Henry Brade said. The company can still access one bank account and now uses that for all its client money flows.
There’s no law telling banks in the Nordic nation how to treat cryptocurrency dealers. But there are anti-money laundering rules that stipulate lenders must know their customers and the origins of the funds they handle.

One of the selling points of cryptocurrencies has long been the anonymity they offer, which is a red flag for banks.

After Facebook ad ban, Twitter moves to prevent crypto scams on platform

Twitter is taking measures to prevent cryptocurrency-related accounts from running scams on its platform, the company said on Wednesday.
“We’re aware of this form of manipulation and are proactively implementing a number of signals to prevent these types of accounts from engaging with others in a deceptive manner,” Twitter said in a statement.
The measures come amid a boom in the price of bitcoin, the world's best known cryptocurrency. Bitcoin rose some 1,400 percent last year, but has fallen nearly 30 percent in 2018.
Last month, a Twitter account posing as Elon Musk targeted fans of the Silicon Valley billionaire, claiming to give away cryptocurrency. On Wednesday, the account appeared to be suspended.

China may stamp out crypto trading by blocking access to overseas websites

China plans to stamp out all remaining cryptocurrency trading in the country by blocking access to overseas-based websites and removing related applications from app stores.

The moves were outlined in a report Sunday by Financial News, a publication under the People's Bank of China, which said the aim was to snuff out the "dying cinders" of cryptocurrency trading and initial coin offerings "which are glowing once more".

Faced with Chinese citizens who continue to trade cryptocurrency on platforms operated beyond the country's reach, or take part in initial coin offerings, authorities will "ratchet up oversight in a sustained manner", the report said.

Here's why billionaire Warren Buffett will never invest in cryptocurrencies

Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett said on Wednesday he will never invest in cryptocurrencies.
“I can say almost with certainty that cryptocurrencies will come to a bad end,” Buffett told CNBC in an interview.

Buffett’s comments come a day after JPMorgan & Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said he regrets calling bitcoin a fraud, referring to comments he made at a banking conference in September.

Bitcoin has taken the investing world by storm, surging to a high of more than $19,000 and created a divide on Wall Street about whether it is a legitimate financial instrument.
Bitcoin was down around 3 per cent at $13,981.53..
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Bitcoin losing lustre as underworld switches over to other currencies

Bitcoin is losing its lustre with some of its earliest and most avid fans -- criminals -- giving rise to a new breed of virtual currency.

Privacy coins such as monero, designed to avoid tracking, have climbed faster over the past two months as law enforcers adopt software tools to monitor people using bitcoin. A slew of analytic firms such as Chainalysis are getting better at flagging digital hoards linked to crime or money laundering, alerting exchanges and preventing conversion into traditional cash.

The European Union’s law-enforcement agency, Europol, raised alarms three months ago, writing in a report that “other cryptocurrencies such as monero, ethereum and Zcash are gaining popularity within the digital underground.” Online extortionists, who use ransomware to lock victims’ computers until they fork over a payment, have begun demanding those currencies instead. On Dec. 18 hackers attacked up to 190,000 WordPress sites per hour to get them to produce monero, according to security company Wordfence.

For ransomware attacks, monero is now “one of the favorites, if not the favorite,” Matt Suiche, founder of Dubai-based security firm Comae Technologies, said in a phone interview.

Monero quadrupled in value to $349 in the final two months of 2017, according to coinmarketcap.com, placing it among a number of upstart coins that that rose faster than bitcoin, the world’s most valuable digital currency. Bitcoin roughly doubled in the same period, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
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Drop in Apple shares due to weak iPhone X demand drags Wall Street lower

Wall Street's main indexes came under pressure on Tuesday following a 2.8 per cent drop in Apple's shares on a report of weak iPhone X demand.

Apple will slash its sales forecast for its flagship phone in the current quarter to 30 million units, down from what it said was an initial plan of 50 million units, Taiwan's Economic Daily reported, citing unidentified sources.

That, along with some bearish brokerage calls on iPhone X demand, put its shares on track for their worst single-day percentage fall since Aug. 10.

Shares of companies that supply parts to Apple, including Broadcom, Skyworks Solutions, Finisar and Lumentum Holdings, fell between 1.8 per cent and 3.5 per cent.

The S&P technology index fell 0.9 per cent, the only loser among the 11 major S&P 500 sectors.

Most markets around the world, including parts of Europe and Asia, were shut on Tuesday. Trading volumes are also expected to be light in the holiday week.

"It's going to be slow trading for most of the week. A market that's going to stay within a trading range, we could have a plus or a negative day, but nothing exciting," said Peter Cardillo, the chief market economist at First Standard Financial in New York.

At 9:34 a.m. ET (1434 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 8.32 points, or 0.03 per cent, at 24,745.74 and the S&P 500 was down 2.4 points, or 0.09 per cent, at 2,680.94.

The Nasdaq Composite was down 29.11 points, or 0.42 per cent, at 6,930.86.

Sucampo Pharma surged 6 per cent after Mallinckrodt said it would acquire the drugmaker for $1.2 billion, to gain access to its constipation drug Amitiza. Mallinckrodt shares rose 4.3 per cent.
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News digest: Exports rise 30%, Adani to build highways, and more

Exports jump 30%, trade deficit high at $13.8 bn

The GST Council's efforts to resolve exporters' woes on refunds seem to have started yielding results. Exports grew 30.55 per cent in November, a month after it contracted 1.1 per cent, also due to the low base effect and rising petroleum prices. In fact, petroleum products, along with engineering goods, gems and jewellery, and chemicals, drove nearly 80 per cent of the rise in merchandise exports. Read more


Govt okays sops for leather sector, waives fee for small digital payments

The Cabinet on Friday cleared a Rs 2,600-crore proposal to boost job creation in the leather industry, lowered the merchant discount rate (MDR) on transactions up to Rs 2,000 through debit cards, BHIM UPI or Aadhaar-enabled payment systems to promote digital transactions, and approved a series of Bills, including one amending the Specific Relief Act to smoothen enforcement of contracts. Read more

Growth slowdown bottoming out, says RBI governor

While expectations on price rise remain stable for the moment, “considerable caution and vigilance is warranted on the inflation front” but the slowing in growth could be over, said Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Urjit Patel. Read more

Adani group to foray into highway construction sector

The Adani group, which has a presence in the power, coal and maritime sectors, would soon foray into the highway construction sector. Read more
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Bitcoin recovers more than $1,000 after losing almost a third of value

Bitcoin surged on Monday, recovering more than $1,000 after losing almost a third of its value in less than four days as traders bought back into the volatile cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin tumbled in the second half of last week, falling as low as $5,555 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange on Sunday, a slide of almost 30 percent from a record high just shy of $7,900 on Wednesday..

It rebounded on Monday, trading up more than 14 percent on the day at $6,718, though that was still more than $1,000 less than last week's record high.

Market-watchers said the fall had been driven by a decision on Wednesday to abandon a planned software upgrade that could have split the cryptocurrency in a so-called "fork" - a move that had initially had a positive impact on the digital coin, sending it to a record high of $7,888 on the view that this marked a resolution of a long-term dispute.

But some were disappointed that "Segwit2x" fork had been abandoned. It would have increased the capacity of the "blocks" transactions are processed in, thereby reducing competition to get payments processed and lowering transaction fees.

Consequently, analysts said, some of those who see low fees as important to the future of bitcoin were selling it for a clone called Bitcoin Cash that spun off from the original in August. Its block sizes are larger, and therefore transaction fees are lower.
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After hitting all-time high, Bitcoin slides by over $1,000 in 48 hours

Bitcoin dropped below $7,000 on Friday to trade more than 5 percent down on the day, having fallen by well over $1,000 since hitting an all-time high on Wednesday.

Bitcoin dropped to $6,800 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange by 1200 GMT, before recovering a little to $6,870 just over 20 minutes later.

On Wednesday around 1800 GMT, it had touched $7,888 after a software upgrade planned for next week that could have split the cryptocurrency in two was suspended.

As bitcoin fell, Bitcoin Cash - a clone of the original that was generated from another split on Aug.1 - surged, trading up as much as 35 percent on the day at around $850, according to industry website Coinmarketcap.

Despite losing almost 7 percent this week, bitcoin is still up more than 600 percent so far this year.
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Bitcoin hits new all-time high of $6,450

Bitcoin climbed to a new all-time high of $6,450 on Wednesday, boosted by bets the cryptocurrency could enter the financial mainstream after the world's largest derivatives exchange operator said on Tuesday it would launch bitcoin futures.

CME Group Inc said it would provide a regulated trading venue for the cryptocurrency market and would launch the new derivatives in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Bitcoin has had a bumper year with a more than sixfold increase in price, and has more than doubled in price since mid-September alone.

It was up 0.3 per cent on Wednesday on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange.
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Russia to ban exchanges selling crypto-currencies, calls them "dubious"

Russia will block access to websites of exchanges that offer crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin, Russian Central Bank First Deputy Governor Sergei Shvetsov said on Tuesday.

He called them "dubious".
Russian financial authorities initially treated any sort of money issued by non-state approved institutions as illegal, saying they could be used to launder money.

Later the authorities accepted the globally booming market of crypto-currencies but want to either control the turnover or to limit access to the market

"We cannot stand apart. We cannot give direct and easy access to such dubious instruments for retail (investors)," Shvetsov said, referring to households.

Speaking at a conference on financial market derivatives, Shvetsov said the central bank sees rising interest in crypto-currencies because of high returns from buying into such instruments.

He warned, however, that crypto-currencies gradually transform into high-yielding assets from being a mean of payment.
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By concealing identities, cryptocurrencies fuel cybercrime

When hackers hold their victims’ data for ransom, as happened in the WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware attacks that spread across the globe in mid-2017, a key to the criminals’ success is getting away with the money. That often means they use cryptocurrencies like bitcoin to collect payment, hoping to remain hidden behind a digital mask.

The WannaCry hackers went a step farther, though. They converted their bitcoins into Monero, another e-currency designed to offer even stronger privacy.

At the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, we have explored the ways cryptocurrency systems protect users’ anonymity. Anonymity in cryptocurrencies is fueling crime by enabling criminals to evade identification by law enforcement. We believe that this problem will get worse as cryptocurrencies evolve stronger privacy protections and become more flexibly programmable. We also believe there’s no simple solution.

Masking criminal identities

All cryptocurrency systems work in roughly the same way. Groups of computers receive transaction information directly from users who want to send each other money. The computers order and permanently record these transactions in a public ledger so that anyone can read them. The public ledger also makes it possible to keep track of how much currency individual users own. Developers tweak the code in different cryptocurrency systems to add additional features, like fast transaction processing or improved anonymity.
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JPMorgan's Dimon says bitcoin 'is a fraud' and will blow up

Bitcoin "is a fraud" and will blow up, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co, said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a bank investor conference in New York, Dimon said, "The currency isn't going to work. You can't have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart."

Dimon said that if any JPMorgan traders were trading the crypto-currency, "I would fire them in a second, for two reasons: It is against our rules and they are stupid, and both are dangerous."

Dimon's comments come as the bitcoin, a virtual currency not backed by any government, has more than quadrupled in value since December to more than $4,100.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that enables individuals to transfer value to each other and pay for goods and services bypassing banks and the mainstream financial system.

While banks have largely steered clear of bitcoin since it emerged following the financial crisis, the virtual currency has a range of people who support it, including technololgy enthusiasts, liberterians skeptical of government monetary policy and speculators attracted by its price swings.
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Bitcoin's central appeal could also be its biggest weakness

Bitcoin reached a huge new peak in value in June 2017, when one unit of the virtual currency was worth US$2,851 (£2,208), up from around US$600 just a year earlier. More than 10m people worldwide are now thought to own bitcoin and more than 100,000 merchants accept it for goods (not counting all those using it to sell drugs and other illegal items on the black market).

Part of bitcoin’s appeal for many of its users is the lack of centralised control or regulation by any government or bank. Instead it relies on a technology known as blockchain to underpin and secure transactions. But research my colleagues and I have conducted suggests that the lack of any social trust in the way blockchain operates poses a challenge for bitcoin’s further spread.

Blockchain is a public database that records digital transactions. These are validated by computers working within a worldwide network that solve complex coded problems. Whereas traditional bank transactions are authorised by financial institutions and controlled by governments through taxation and contracts between parties with known identities, blockchain is decentralised, unregulated and anonymous.

In our studies of blockchain’s users we found that these features appeal to bitcoin users because of increasing distrust of financial institutions and governments. The technology empowers people to regain control over their money, with no restrictions over where and when they can send it.

But our findings also indicate that two core aspects of blockchain’s design – the fact that transactions are anonymous and irreversible – pose significant challenges to the social trust among its users. Anonymity has an obvious appeal for people looking to avoid government control. And irreversible transactions were built into blockchain’s original design as a positive feature to address banks’ privilege of reversing transactions, even when the contract states that they were final.
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Cyberattack hits Ukraine then spreads internationally

Computer systems from Ukraine to the United States were struck on Tuesday in an international cyberattack that was similar to a recent assault that crippled tens of thousands of machines worldwide.

In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, A.T.M.s stopped working. About 80 miles away, workers were forced to manually monitor radiation at the old Chernobyl nuclear plant when their computers failed. And tech managers at companies around the world — from Maersk, the Danish shipping conglomerate, to Merck, the drug giant in the United States — were scrambling to respond. Even an Australian factory for the chocolate giant Cadbury was affected.

It was unclear who was behind this cyberattack, and the extent of its impact was still hard to gauge Tuesday. It started as an attack on Ukrainian government and business computer systems — an assault that appeared to have been intended to hit the day before a holiday marking the adoption in 1996 of Ukraine’s first Constitution after its break from the Soviet Union. The attack spread from there, causing collateral damage around the world.

The outbreak was the latest and perhaps the most sophisticated in a series of attacks making use of dozens of hacking tools that were stolen from the National Security Agency and leaked online in April by a group called the Shadow Brokers.

Like the WannaCry attacks in May, the latest global hacking took control of computers and demanded digital ransom from their owners to regain access. The new attack used the same National Security Agency hacking tool, Eternal Blue, that was used in the WannaCry episode, as well as two other methods to promote its spread, according to researchers at the computer security company Symantec.

The National Security Agency has not acknowledged its tools were used in WannaCry or other attacks. But computer security specialists are demanding that the agency help the rest of the world defend against the weapons it created.
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