Bitcoin Venture Capital Funding on Pace for $1 Billion in 2015

By  Kyle Torpey

NEW YORK (InsideBitcoins) — With the recent venture funding announcement from secretive bitcoin startup 21 Inc., the bitcoin industry is now on pace to eclipse the $1 billion mark for 2015. This would be a massive improvement over the final numbers from 2014, and each passing year has shown exceptional growth in funding for bitcoin companies since 2012. In addition to the $116 million raised by 21, Coinbase also announced a funding round of $75 million in January, which included investments from the New York Stock Exchange, BBVA, USAA Bank, and many other respected institutions in the financial industry.

21 breaks Coinbase’s record

21’s $116 million in venture capital funding is the most ever by a company in the digital currency space, and it breaks a record set by Coinbase earlier this year. There is a steep drop off in funding totals when compared the rest of the rounds that have been in announced in 2015, although KnCMiner was able to raise $15 million for their mining-centric business model. Although 21 has been able to raise a remarkable amount of money for their upcoming commercial operations, the exact nature of their business is still unknown to the general public at this point in time.

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Bank of England: Digital Currencies Could Revolutionise Payments

By Yessi Bello Perez

A combination of digital currencies and mobile technology may reshape the payments landscape, according to a new Bank of England research report.

The One Bank Research Agenda investigates issues beyond the UK central bank's traditional scope to decipher how monetary policy interacts with developments such as climate change and increasing life spans.

Mark Carney, the Bank’s Governor, summarised today's launch of the Agenda saying:

"Economies are complex, dynamic and constantly evolving systems that are underpinned by social interactions and behavioral change, shaped by fundamental forces like technology and globalization and supported – or at times disrupted – by finance."

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Comparison Site Seeks to Boost Bitcoin Remittances in Latin America

By Yessi Bello Perez

A new price comparison site hopes to boost bitcoin remittances in Latin America by placing traditional and digital currency-based services side by side.

Mondome, which has already partnered with exchanges such as Bitso, MexBT and Ripio, has been designed to let people understand bitcoin's benefits by letting them to compare it with other existing payment methods.

Pelle Braendgaard, co-founder at Mondome, said:

“Bitcoin is clearly a great technology for remittances. However, for most people there are no alternatives to the two or three remittance companies you see signs for every day on the street.”

“If bitcoin is going to change this”, he added, “we need to first of all show normal, non-technical people in immigrant populations around the world the benefits there are.”

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Bitcoin Finds a Place Among the World’s Elite

By MATT CLINCH

More famous for being a renegade alternative to a world currency, bitcoin has managed to find a more prominent role among the global elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The Alpine resort plays host to a slew of policymakers, economists, and central bankers every year. Topics usually include global growth, inequality, and climate change but the nascent industry of digital currencies has managed to eke out a place on this year’s agenda.

“From bucks to bitcoins,” is the title of the seminar due at Davos on a Friday afternoon. It explores how the mainstreaming of digital finance could disrupt financial services and transform consumer behavior. This is a far cry from last year, when the most notable mention of the cryptocurrrency was when it was openly criticized by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon on CNBC.

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Virtual Currencies Hit the World Stage: Bitcoin’s Ever-Evolving Legal Status

By  MUSHKIN LAW TEAM

Congratulations, virtual currency world—New York wants to expressly regulate you! That’s how important Bitcoin and other digital currencies have become in recent years. And as we know, what happens in New York’s financial world often has implications for the wider world. All the recent attention New York has paid to virtual currency is raising many important legal questions, with potentially profound implications. This article will offer a brief survey of just some of them.

A Cryptic History of Money

Bitcoin is the latest and best known in a long line of digital currencies. The basic premise of digital currencies is that they try to establish a medium of exchange based on immutable mathematics, thus putting the currency beyond the control or manipulation of any government. Not long after the computer was invented people started discussing the development of currency based on that series of zeroes and ones called “bits.”

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Cubits App Launch Aims to Accelerate Bitcoin Buying in Europe

By Nermin Hajdarbegovic 

Cubits has launched a web app designed to speed up and simplify bitcoin transactions.

Notably, the London-based cryptocurrency startup allows customers to buy bitcoin in minutes, making it one of the fastest digital currency platforms in Europe, according to the company.

"We want to speed up the process of getting bitcoin and making online payments fair and accessible, especially for merchants and charities that could really benefit from lower fees," said Andreas Lehrbaum, co-founder of Cubits and the co-founding chairman of Bitcoin Austria.

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Why Are So Few Black People Using Bitcoin?

By KYLE COWARD

Edwardo Jackson will gladly drop a Bitcoin primer on anyone who's curious. Beyond his outer enthusiasm for the digital currency—when he talks about Bitcoin, he speeds up as if discussing a newly-discovered oil reserve in his backyard—he loves trading it and tracking its movement in the markets.

In 2013, Jackson, a 39-year-old Las Vegas-based pro poker player and former writer for Upworthy, started spreading the gospel of the currency via his blog, Blacks in Bitcoin, where he claimed that he would “spontaneously combust” if he had no other outlet to voice his obsession with the digital barter.

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BitOasis Aims to Change how People Transact in the Middle East Using Bitcoin

By Diana Ngo

Bitcoin can offer many solutions to the Middle East, from fostering youth entrepreneurship to enabling farmers to receive loans in the digital currency, says BitOasis' Ola Doudin.

BitOasis, a Bitcoin exchange and multi-sig wallet dedicated to the Middle East, is working on bringing Bitcoin to the region. Its founder, Ola Doudin, a former Ernest & Young associate, believes the technology has the potential to address the many challenges encountered in the region and foster social development, reported PSFK.

According to Doudin, Bitcoin can offer many solutions across the Middle East and significantly boost the e-commerce industry. She explained:

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The real advantage of paying with bitcoin

By Trevor Murphy, CTO of BitStash

Bitcoin is still very much in its infancy. When most people think of bitcoin today, they remember the salacious news stories of hackers making off with millions of dollars, or the hugely volatile currency that seems to have been created from nowhere. 

It's not necessarily thought of as secure and so it's quite understandable that many are skeptical and even critical of its future potential. However, what most miss in the discussion, is just what bitcoin really is at its core, which is the first true money that human kind has ever invented — and one that is programmable, so it can be built into everything. 

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A POSSIBLE ROADMAP TO MASS ADOPTION OF BITCOIN ONLINE

By  Kyle Torpey

NEW YORK (InsideBitcoins) — It is often said that bitcoin is a store of value, but not yet a unit of account. There are many people choosing to store a portion of their savings in the cryptocurrency, but it can sometimes be difficult to spend some of that savings on real world items. For example, most people cannot walk down the street and purchase their weekly groceries via bitcoin.

Nearly every merchant that is encountered on a daily basis would be accepting bitcoin in a bitcoiner’s fantasy world, but that’s not the state of affairs at this point in time. Due to the dearth of merchant adoption — even on the Internet — early adopters need a way to bridge the gap between their bitcoin holdings and their online spending habits.

Getting paid in bitcoin

Before getting into how bitcoin acceptance could eventually proliferate throughout the online economy, it’s important to take a look at how people are getting their hands on bitcoins. As many bitcoin critics have rightly pointed out, the digital currency is cheap for merchants and expensive for consumers. For this reason, the core of bitcoin’s growth into a greater portion of society has to come from the people who have some sort of bitcoin income. It could be an online freelancer who prefers to be paid in a low-cost, irreversible cryptocurrency, or it could be a future merchant taking advantage of the low costs of a platform like OpenBazaar. Either way, it should be clear that the benefits of bitcoin as a currency and payment system are maximized when the digital currency is not simply purchased on an exchange.

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What is Bitcoin?

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin emerged in 2008 and was initially developed as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin can be understood as a value store, meaning that a Bitcoin (or part of a Bitcoin) represents some amount of value.

Another way to think of Bitcoin is as a virtual “currency” and payment system. Bitcoin is transferred from one person to another in a transaction, and the value is determined by what someone is willing to pay for it.

Bitcoin is a form of cryptocurrency – or encrypted currency — that enables anonymous, independent, and non-regulated transactions. Cryptography allows for the secure ownership of the currency, which means that Bitcoin’s users can control the creation and transfer of money. Such a degree of privacy in transactions has helped Bitcoin gain a foothold as an alternative currency.

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You Can Now Buy Ebay Giftcards With Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin

By  Ian DeMartino 

In a surprise move, eGifter, one of the two biggest online gift card providers that accepts bitcoin, added Ebay giftcards as an option for its customers.

This means that, for the first time on a major scale, people can essentially buy stuff on Ebay with Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin, albeit in an round about way.

Paypal, which is still technically a part of Ebay, recently started allowing merchants to accept bitcoins for payments and the CEO of Ebay has stated that his company will likely follow Paypal's lead on digital currencies at some point.

Back late last month, Ebay President  Devin Wenig was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as being very open to the idea of accepting Bitcoin at some point in the future:

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“BITDOLLAR”: THE UNITED STATES AND THE DIGITAL FUTURE OF MONEY

By  Evander Smart

Bitcoin is not going away, and if anything it is growing into the mainstream at a consistent pace. 

Many American corporations, some of the largest corporations in the world, have spent 2014 endorsing Bitcoin, in spite of the drop in value. 

2014 has seen nothing but price declines, but greater market acceptance in exchange. And it has even gotten the attention of the world’s largest and most influential government, the United States, to respond to it in earnest. Taxation,regulation, and condemnation have all had their moment in the sun from America’s governance. 

The U.S. seems both confused and intrigued by Bitcoin’s unique abilities. What is the right way forward when it comes to Bitcoin?

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HYPERINFLATION HITS VENEZUELAN BOLIVAR

By  Evander Smart

Another fiat currency struggles to stay afloat as the Venezuela Bolivar looks to be in the throes of hyperinflation, which has been forecast for at least the last 18 months. 

Within black-market currency exchanges, versus the US Dollar in the month of November. In a sign of desperation, the nation-state has suspended reporting of their inflation rate for the time being.

Will Venezuela Suffer Zimbabwe-levels of Hyperinflation?

As you may know, inflation is a part of any fiat currency and is the amount of the nation’s monetary supply, or an inflation of said supply. A normal rate of inflation would be around 2% annually. A citizen will be compensated for this in a cost-of-living increase for their wages annually. Many nations will claim 1-3% inflation even when that isn’t the rate when a country is printing more money than they generate in actual production because they know a low rate is desirable. 

To illustrate the inflation in Venezuela, an extra-value meal at McDonalds in Caracas costs 125 Bolivar in September of 2013. As of last month, the same meal costs 245 Bolivar, representing an almost 100% inflation within about one year’s time.

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5 Major Changes Lawmakers Made to Your Taxes

December is here, which can mean only one of three things: It's time to buy gifts; it's time to stuff our bellies full of home-cooked food; and it's time to start thinking about your taxes!

Although tax time comes around but once a year, it's really a year-round effort on your part to dot your I's and cross your T's. Having a full understanding of your wages and investments, and keeping all pertinent paperwork organized, can make a big difference come April 15. December is also your last chance to make a number of key moves before it's too late, such as adding to your 401(k) or tax-loss harvesting to potentially reduce your capital gains or a portion of your wages.

Then again, the end of the year is also the time when Congress and the IRS lay out what tax code changes have been made for the year. Since 2001, Congress has enacted about 5,000 tax code changes to the nearly 4 million words that comprise the U.S. tax system. For you novel lovers out there, this works out to more than 60 books! It's no wonder most taxpayers wind up running for cover around tax time. 

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The Future for Global Value Transfers

By John-David Perry

For the financial purist, the idea of a sustainable digital currency is as fanciful as Santa Claus. 

But don’t say that to the believers who are convinced alternative payment methods -- like Bitcoin – are practical technology that has enabled new forms of payment protocols and value systems to enter the global economy. 

Ripple Protocol is one such result of crypto-currency’s popularity. The payment system was developed by Ripple Labs and allows users to exchange fiat currency, digital currency, and other units of value across all borders.

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“FOR EVERYTHING ELSE, THERE’S BITCOIN” – AN AUSTRALIAN RESPONDS TO MASTERCARD ATTACKS ON BITCOIN

James Duchenne, Australian attorney, founding member of Texas Coinitiative, and blogger for SatoshiLegal, quite cheekily responded to the recent pleas by MasterCard to the Australian government against Bitcoin today. 

Said pleas have culminated in two important ways: the video shared below from MasterCard’s Southeast Asia president Matthew Driver, and a letter to Kathleen Dermody, head of the Australian Senate Economics committee. Duchenne wrote:

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Australian Tax Industry Calls for Voluntary Bitcoin Register

Summary: Australian taxation body The Tax Institute is calling on the government to establish a voluntary bitcoin register to de-anonymise ownership of the digital currency in Australia.

Australian taxation professionals' association The Tax Institute has proposed the establishment of a voluntary bitcoin register on which individuals and companies could register a bitcoin public address, with the aim of de-anonymising ownership of the digital currency in Australia.

The Tax Institute suggested the move in its submission to the Senate Economics References Committee inquiry into an appropriate framework for digital currencies in Australia.

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TEXAS CONGRESSMAN STEVE STOCKMAN INTRODUCES HR 5777: “TO PROTECT CRYPTOCURRENCIES”

Yesterday, Texas Congressman Steve Stockman introduced a new House Resolution (HR 5777) entitled: “To protect cryptocurrencies.” Congressman Steve Stockman is a Republican, from Texas’s 36th Congressional district, who has become one of cryptocurrency’s most ardent supporters in politics. 

Back in May, Stockman introduced HR 4602: Virtual Currency Tax Reform Act after the IRS revealed its virtual currency guidance for taxation. Texas has established itself as one of the most friendly states towards Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

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