Your Crypto News on Steemit December 17, 2017

• eBay Is Seriously Considering Bitcoin As A Means Of Payment!
• USA: Government Wants To Sell Seized Bitcoins!
• Binance The New Crypto Exchange Number One?
• What To Do If The Bitcoin Transaction Is Stuck?
• Internet Neutrality And Bitcoin - Juggling With Digital Political Explosives!

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According to a senior manager, the eBay trading platform is seriously considering accepting Bitcoin as a payment method. With this year's Christmas business it will be nothing more. Like Yahoo! Finance reports that it could take a while before it launches.

On the subject of bitcoin, there is actually nothing on eBay that does not exist. In addition to countless books, BTC plastic cards, T-shirts, collecting coins, USB sticks and various hardware such as mining power supplies u. v. m. missing is really only the most important: namely the payment by Bitcoin itself.

Things may change in the near future, as Scott Cutler, senior vice president of corporate headquarters in San Francisco, told Yahoo! Finance that eBay is seriously considering using Bitcoin as a means of payment. At the same time cutler curbs too high expectations. It is not quite that far yet.

As the news magazine reports, the stock of the competitor Overstock.com (OSTK) since the beginning of 2014 by 250%. When Overstock launched Bitcoin as the first major US trading venue on January 9, 2014, 800 orders totaling $ 126,000 were settled within 22 hours and paid for with the BTC. That was an increase of 4.33%. After the initial hype generated by the media, payment by cryptocurrency declined again. In May 2014, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne announced that the proportion was less than one percentage point. Far more optimistic Jack Dorsey expressed in October. The head of the mobile payment service Square, who also leads Twitter, told Yahoo !, that there is nothing more powerful in payment solutions than digital currencies.

eBay & Bitcoin - a win-win situation?

The eBay trading platform has always been under enormous competitive pressure from Amazon & Co. Therefore, an expansion of the offered means of payment would be a realistic opportunity to generate higher revenues. Of course, it remains to be seen how high the sales increase will be in the long term. For the Bitcoin the introduction by eBay would be a real sensation. From now on, she would transport him straight from the nerd-corner where he used to be, into the middle of the mainstream.

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The US government is currently planning to sell seized cryptocurrencies. These are means of payment confiscated by the authorities in a fraud case involving fake prescriptions for opioids and currently worth about $ 10 million.

A Utah agency is currently working to get rid of the confiscated 513.1 bitcoin. In addition, the authorities still have 512, 9 Bitcoin cash available, which also wants to make the government to make money.

Astime.com reports, the authorities justify their decision as follows:

According to the court order, the crypto currencies are to be sold in US dollars on crypto exchanges - so you want to counteract this with a possible loss of value. The money they then want to transfer to an official account.

District Judge Dale Kimball has approved the sale of seized cryptocurrencies on December 12. He thereby met the demand of the prosecutor, who had demanded an immediate sale.

The case involves a man from Utah who has operated a multi-million drug ring with opioids in a suburb of Salt Lake City.

The Bitcoins come from the black market

Aaron Shamo and his partner are said to have sold fake recipes in the Deep Web. Not least of all, they benefited from the opioid epidemic that prompted President Donald Trump to impose the national emergency. When the authorities confiscated the cryptocurrencies, they had an approximate value of $ 500,000.

Already in 2015, the US government sold cryptocurrencies in several auctions, which were confiscated during the confiscation of the Silk Road black market. As we reported, officials were also arrested who wanted to enrich themselves.

So while far-reaching legislative changes are planned that are likely to affect cryptocurrencies as well, the US government is trying to enrich itself with cryptocurrencies. Maybe to get around the hurdles that come with changing the law. Let's hope that the confiscated Bitcoin does not flow into terrorism or into the drug market.

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After reading the post "Let's bring STEEM and SBD to BINANCE!!" by @razvanelulmarin, I thought to write this article about Binance to give you a little bit more insight about this great crypto exchange.

If you are in the area of cryptocurrencies you probably already noticed it. In addition to the existing crypto exchanges such as Bittrex and Poloniex, a Chinese platform has established itself, which has been able to gain a larger market share in a short time and continues to grow steadily. This is partly due to the partially new concept of the Binance Token (BNB) and the relatively high number of new currencies that can be traded on Binance. It is estimated that 70-80 different cryptocurrencies are tradable on Binance. Below I will introduce Binance and the specifics of the stock market.

Interestingly, Binance has funded its own development through an ICO. In July 2017, the company successfully sold 100,000,000 Binance Token (BNB) for approximately $ 15 million. This equals 50% of all existing tokens (200,000,000). This raises the question of what a crypto exchange needs its own token. BNB is a (clearly the cheapest) option to pay transaction costs and fees on the exchange and is subject to a buyback strategy: 20% of all platform profits are used to buy back BNB tokens until 50% of all tokens have been repurchased and geburned. Thus, in the long run only 100,000,000 tokens will be in circulation and another 100,000,000 uselessly locked away. The ICO model has direct benefits for the company and investors. Binance receives capital to drive the development of the platform and investors have the opportunity to buy on the platform at a more favorable terms through acquired BNB. Binance users have the choice whether they want to pay fees in BNB or "classic". If you use BNB, the fees are reduced by 50% - so it is negligent not to use BNB to pay his fees. This creates another reason why users buy, consume and buy BNB tokens again.

In the first quarter, Binance bought and committed 986,000 BNB (about $ 1.5 million). Thus, the company has already generated a profit of $ 7.5 million in the very first quarter. Given that Binance is growing steadily and incorporating new currency pairs, it is clear that quarterly earnings will increase significantly - and therefore the level of the buyback will rise sharply. Here, a resourceful investor could well speculate on an increase in the token price.

Another interesting feature of the Binance platform is that ICOs are executed directly through their platform. As some "older" members of the crypto community may still know, exchanges like Poloniex or Bittrex used to offer ICOs directly through their platform. In fact, I can not spontaneously remember a single coin that has executed its ICO on one of these exchanges and still exists today - possibly Xaurum (XAU), but only after their rebirth ICO number 2, where you could swap old XAU tokens. With Tron (TRX) Binance has, inter alia, an ICO handled, the token currently has more than 1 billion USD market capitalization. So here's another reason to use the platform - it's possibly the only way to access specific ICOs. The first official ICO campaign of the Binance Launchpad, GIFTO, was sold out after 2 minutes. By the way, you could also participate in the ICO with BNB here.

In addition, Binance offers various incentive systems for users: On the one hand airdrops are distributed to users of the platform, on the other hand, users are rewarded with high turnover with tokens. In the framework of the Community Coin of the Month, the respective communities can support the listing of a coin via Twitter, after which the winner is added to Binance as a new trading pair. In addition to the generally very high number of new trading pairs, there is thus the possibility for each reasonably relevant cryptocurrency to be added free of charge to Binance.

In summary, Binance is a state-of-the-art crypto exchange that, unlike the established exchanges, places value on innovative services and constantly integrates new tokens on the platform. Here, the location in Asia is certainly a clear advantage. Exchanges such as Kraken, Bittrex or Poloniex must focus significantly more on regulatory issues and therefore do not have the freedom to continue integrating ICOs into their platform. Therefore, it can only be beneficial to use Binance - you get access to new tokens, airdrops, ICOs.

As you can see in the graph above, Binance also has a referral program. If you decide to sign up for Binance, I would be very happy if my Referral ID were used (ID 13328676).

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The rising popularity of Bitcoin not only boosts the price of the crypto market, but also makes it difficult to carry out a Bitcoin transaction. As more and more money transfers are made to Bitcoin, individual transactions take longer and / or cost more money. What can you do about it?

As the number of Bitcoin transactions increases, it takes longer for a single transaction to be processed and noted in the blockchain. In the meantime, given the limited block size, it is almost impossible to directly hit the next block with a single transaction, and blocks 2 and 3 are becoming increasingly difficult to reach. This circumstance attracts corresponding waiting times.

At least partially, this time can be mitigated by paying an additional transaction fee (Replace-by-Fee), which goes beyond the standardized surcharge. Since miners first process the transactions that are most appealing to them, a transaction for which an extra charge is paid has a greater chance of being processed in an early block. Transactions for which no or very little transaction fee is paid can therefore take several hours, or even days at worst.

There are, however, different circumstances to consider when giving a transaction fee. The type and amount of the fee depends on the scope and relevance of the transaction. In addition, the ability to pay a fee for rapid development is different from the wallet provider used and differs from Wallet to Wallet. If the booking of a payment must necessarily be made in the next block, a correspondingly high transaction fee is required. Some wallets support dynamic fees and automatically determine the amount of fee needed for a calculated execution period.

If a transaction that has already been made does not reach its destination in the desired time frame, there is also the option of accelerating it and shortening the waiting time, provided that this is supported by the majority of miners. This process is called Opt-In Replace-by-Fee. This will make the transaction a second time - with a higher fee than the first one. Since the new transaction is processed by the miners before the old one, the transaction paid at no extra charge will automatically expire because it is rejected by the Bitcoin network as double-spending.

In any case, it should be noted that a transaction increases in price the sooner it has to be carried out. If time is not too urgent, consideration should be given to refraining from insisting on timely payment. In addition, given the current performance of Bitcoin, one should generally think about not doing too many of its transactions in Bitcoin - in retrospect, they may turn out to be much more expensive than initially anticipated.

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Net neutrality good bye: In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week has decided to weaken the existing legislation on data neutrality on the Internet. Specifically, this means that data flow will be available in the future. In the future, providers and Internet service providers should be able to charge customers for faster data flow and reduce content. Thus, the authority intervenes in one of the democratic primal principles of Worldwideweb: the free availability of data. Critics see it bleak omens - even for cryptocurrencies.

It is a digital political explosive: net neutrality, a pillar of the free Internet, is on the edge. For a long time, hardly any concept was so controversial between internet idealists and competitive pragmatists as the bulky bureaucratic word. But what is behind it?

In essence, the concept of net neutrality refers to the equal treatment of all data on the Internet - whether video streaming, cloud data or telephone calls, regardless of sender, recipient or other conditions. This was intended to secure long-term non-discriminatory competition on the Internet.

However, network operators in particular have always rejected the concept and demand more control over data transmission. They want to transmit and argue data of varying quality on their networks, thus preventing data congestion. This should be possible since this week.

The end of the free internet?

Because last Thursday, the US FCC made a big step towards the network operators, softening the neutrality of the network and thereby harvested much criticism.

The telecoms regulator has narrowly passed the amendment to the existing regulations. This means that network operators may in future prefer offers based on customer tariffs and restrict others.

Critics see red: they fear the monopolization of data access in the face of the enormous purchasing power of corporations. These could prioritize their data on payment through the veins of the network and thus displace independent offers. Thinking in the future, this could not only lead to preferential payment for wealthy customers. Triggering the free flow of data is often seen as a threat to political censorship, market influence and interference in press freedom.

What is Europe doing?

After the decision on Thursday, many eyes will be on Europe. Does the old world follow suit, and does the net neutrality principle also compete with American corporations?

At present, a regulation applies in Germany and in all EU member states, which only allow a few exceptions to net neutrality. The "zero rating" of the streaming services, for example, allows loading without loss and data volume. However, the principle itself is repeatedly invoked by political decision-makers, as well as in the election programs of the German parties currently in the grip of the upper hand.

In addition, EU Commission Vice-President Andris Ansip, who is responsible for the digital market, appeased "We will continue to protect net neutrality in Europe". A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Economic Affairs also referred to the continuing European legal framework.

Nevertheless, critics now fear that exceptions, such as the zero rating, could in future also be extended in Europe. Because that one will get the American changes "indirectly felt", lies about in the increased market power of the US corporations said Klaus Müller, CEO of the Consumer Federation Association, to the ARD. If you want to be competitive in the future, you have to follow suit. At least the fear of critical voices.

Consequences for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies?

Criticizing the FCC shimmy not least of all from the booming scene around cryptocurrencies and their child prodigy Bitcoin. This is due to the fact that especially transaction exchanges in times of astronomical prices and unprecedented media attention are dependent on high data volumes, fast data flow and delay-free processing.

Without existing legal frameworks that guarantee net neutrality, network operators and Internet service providers could in future have the option of throttling the data flow precisely where high user activity restricts network quality elsewhere - and this is especially the case with crypto exchanges.

CEO of the US startup Substratum Network, Justin Tabb, told the International Business Times his concern about an end to net neutrality. He warns:

In spite of this pessimistic perspective, it has to be said: Whether these scenarios, which are gloomy for the cryptoscape, are currently pure speculation. Interference and control as well as legal reactions in the wake of dissolution of net neutrality are hypothetical until now. Because still the US Congress can vote against the change of the FCC. This is not unlikely in view of the public echo and outcry not only in the US, but worldwide.

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I wish you all a lovely Sunday and a great start in the new week!!!
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@danyelk