Issue #90
15 - 21 August 2015
Bitcoin is on a constitutional crisis. Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn has released Bitcoin XT, a fork of Bitcoin Core that introduced several new features, chief among them an increase of the block size to 8MB. Also, there was a huge dip in price mid-week. TradeBlock has a good post explaining the Bitfinex flash crash that caused this.
Bobby
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BITCOIN PRICE (BITSTAMP)
Latest News
Bitcoin is divided. The crux of the issue comes down to a single technical detail: the size of bitcoin’s blocks.
Mike Hearn shares his vision behind the release of Bitcoin XT.
On the evening of Aug 18, bitcoin markets realized a rapid and substantial sell-off across major exchanges. Prices began declining around 11:30pm UTC and stabilized only 30-45 minutes later. Over the same period, Bitfinex, the world’s largest USD exchange by volume, diverged from the broader market, printing trades as low as $162, or a 35% decline within a 20-minute window.
Mark Karpeles, the former CEO of the now defunct bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, has been re-arrested on charges of embezzlement.
Core maintainers and highly influential CEOs alike, like Peter Smith of Blockchain and Steven Pair of BitPay, have entered the online fray, fueling passion-laden discussions across Reddit, Twitter, Medium, and GitHub.
Market
A new exchange traded fund (ETF) tracking the value of bitcoin is reportedly planned for launch on Korea Exchange.
Bitcoin services provider Cubits.gr and Greek exchange BTCGreece have teamed up to help Greek citizens move cash out of the country to suppliers and business..
IBTimes asked Fidor Bank chief executive Matthias Kröner about bitcoin, regulators and governments.
Ecosystem
Blockstream recently announced the alpha release of their Sidechain Elements project, and one of the more interesting experiments in the release is Confidential Transactions. This is a proposal to improve privacy in bitcoin, which is not as anonymous as some users would like to think.
CoinTelegraph spoke with Gliss from CoinMarketCap about what it takes to be included in everyone’s favorite Cryptocurrency Index, Ethercoin trading and what were the most controversial altcoins to date.
Augur, the decentralized prediction market and one of the hottest Ethereum apps, has begun their token crowd sale on August 17, raising over US$600 thousand equivalent in BTC and ETH in the first day
Coinbase's Brian Armstrong sees the serious pain points in the current financial system as a key starting point for Bitcoin.
Leon Li, founder and CEO of bitcoin exchange Huobi explores the current state of bitcoin in China.
Legal
During a presentation on digital currencies entitled “Old Money, New Money,” Andy Haldane, Chief Economist and the Executive Director of Monetary Analysis and Statistics of the Bank of England and his team stated that “Digital currencies are ‘harder money’ than a gold standard” because “sustained adoption [of bitcoin] would see ongoing deflation.”
Nigeria's Central Bank has called out for bitcoin regulation in an attempt to curb money laundering and avoid international sanctions, reports claim.
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