Crypto Brief
Bitcoin just tanked below $10,000 after SEC says crypto exchanges must register with agency
Bitcoin fell Wednesday, dropping below the key $10,000 level after the Securities and Exchange Commission said it will require digital asset exchanges to register with the agency. The statement referred to digital assets that are considered securities.
The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization dropped nearly 10 percent on Coinbase in a sudden move after the SEC statement stoked fears that tightening regulation could restrict future trading. Bitcoin fell to near $9,500 but had recovered slightly to $9,969 as of 5:08 p.m. ET.
The statement from the regulatory agency comes after weeks of subpoenas from the SEC in its attempt to establish better control over the many trading platforms and exchanges.
"The SEC continues to draw a line in the sand between securities and non-securities but without going so far as to name names," said Spencer Bogart, partner at Blockchain Capital.
However, he expects the crackdown will focus more on so-called "alt-coins" than bitcoin, potentially helping the price of the largest cryptocurrency by market cap. "Of all crypto assets, bitcoin seems least likely to be deemed a security — by a long shot," Bogart said. Full article here.
Bitcoin's Famed Tokyo Whale Sold $400 Million and He's Not Done Yet
He’s not your typical Bitcoin whale, but Nobuaki Kobayashi has become a force to be reckoned with in the cryptocurrency world.
The Tokyo attorney and bankruptcy trustee for the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange disclosed on Wednesday that he sold about $400 million worth of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash since late September. Kobayashi is sitting on another $1.9 billion of the tokens and will consider offloading those too as he raises cash to distribute to Mt. Gox’s creditors.
Once the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection four years ago after disclosing that it lost 850,000 Bitcoins, then worth about $500 million. The company, which later said it recovered about 200,000 Bitcoins, blamed hackers for the loss.
While Kobayashi didn’t provide details on his strategy for offloading the coins, he said he tried to get “as high a price as possible.” Disclosures in his report on the Mt. Gox website suggest his Bitcoin sales since September fetched the equivalent of $10,105 on average. The cryptocurrency was trading at $10,554 as of 10:17 a.m. London time on Wednesday. Full article here.
Bitcoin Drops Below $10,000 As Traders Suspect Binance Hack
Bitcoin prices fell to less than $10,000 today, plunging through that key, psychological level as markets responded to concerns that digital currency exchange Binance may have been hacked.
The world's largest cryptocurrency by market value declined to as little as $9,468.45, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (BPI).
At this price, Bitcoin was trading at its lowest since February 26, when the digital currency reached as little as $9,393.41, additional BPI figures show.
[Ed. note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]
Binance Troubles
Bitcoin's sharp decline came as rumors circulated that Binance may have been compromised.
Earlier this morning, the exchange announced that it had halted withdrawals as it looked in to "unauthorized market sells."
At the time, Binance stated that there was no evidence that the platform had been compromised. Full article here.
Getting rich by mining bitcoins is as simple as turning on your computer, right? Wrong
The main feature of cryptocurrencies is that they operate on a decentralised peer-to-peer network, with no central authority or government backing.
The underlying technology that makes cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin possible is what is known as the "blockchain".
The blockchain is essentially a public ledger of all the transactions ever made in the currency.
It keeps a record of which user owns what coins.
When a transaction is made it is added to the end of the blockchain and confirmed using a series of complex computations by the computers of other users who are on that currency's network.
Those users are then rewarded with new bitcoins for letting their computers do the work.
The most recent transactions made on the network are bundled up into a transaction "block", which is finalised roughly every 10 minutes.
Once a computer solves the block's complex equations and finds a valid hash key it is added to the blockchain, verifying bitcoin transactions between users, while at the same time rewarding the miner with new bitcoins.
It can take a while for miners to reap rewards, as only the first user to solve the block by finding one of a number of valid hash keys is rewarded with bitcoins. Full article here.
‘Obsessed With Price’: Famous Bitcoin Developer Wants To Save It With 5 Female ‘Monk Hackers’
Revered UK Bitcoin developer Amir Taaki wants to recruit five “preferably female” developers to live a “quasi-monastic” lifestyle in order to give Bitcoin a “vision,” Wired reports March 6.
In an interview with Wired, Taaki, who is known among the Bitcoin technical community as a central figure in preserving the largest cryptocurrency’s original values, said he even has plans to use the “monk hackers” to effect Bitcoin- and Blockchain-powered political change - beginning in Catalonia.
“It will be like a startup accelerator, only a politicised one. Not driven by profit, but by social change,” Wired quotes him as saying during a speech in the politically troubled Spanish province.
From September 2015, Taaki spent several months fighting Isis terrorists in a Kurdish-controlled autonomous part of Northern Syria before engaging with social reconstruction while introducing inhabitants to Bitcoin.
Now, he says, reviving the spirit of Bitcoin is one step on the road to the “complete collapse of the world state system.”
“Bitcoin doesn't have any vision behind it, any vision of where it's going,” Taaki told Wired. Full article here.
Blockchain is meaningless
itcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have entered the mainstream discourse, but they’ve also been joined by a concept that is widely circulated, but poorly understood: “the blockchain” or just “blockchain.” The idea of a blockchain, the cryptographically enhanced digital ledger that underpins Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies, is now being used to describe everything from a system for inter-bank transactions to a new supply chain database for Walmart. The term has become so widespread that it’s quickly losing meaning.
“What is a ‘blockchain’? The word is a buzzword that is increasingly ill-defined,” David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts, said in an email.
There are countless blockchain explainers in text, audio, and video around the web. Almost all of them are wrong because they start from a false premise. There is no universal definition of a blockchain, and there is widespread disagreement over which qualities are essential in order to call something a blockchain. Full article here.