It’s been a tough six months for bitcoin prices. Between the Mt.Gox drama in February and the ongoing “unofficial ban” in China, there have been few periods of relative stability for prices to stabilize or gain steam. An outside observer could even be forgiven for thinking that bitcoin’s promised rising tide of monetary revolution was…
On Friday, DC-based news outlet The Hill reported that Falcon Global Capital (FGC) had filed lobbying registration paperwork. According to the filing, the firm plans for FGC founder and managing director Brett Stapper to act as the key lobbyist, focusing on issues related to “crypto-graphic based currency markets.” No other organizations are named in the…
It’s hardly a secret that Africa’s remittance fees are some of the highest in the world. In April, a report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) revealed that large money-transfer companies like Western Union were charging huge rates in some of Africa’s poorest nations, with average fees of around 12% for sending $200. The ODI…
If you’ve been involved with bitcoin for even a brief time, odds are you’ve at least heard the name Roger Ver. The venture capitalist has been involved in seed funding for some of the biggest names in the bitcoin industry — Kraken, Blockchain, Ripple and the Bitcoin Foundation, just to start — earning him the…
Until this week, the Spanish government has kept its distance from bitcoin. With the rapid growth of interest in virtual currencies in Europe, and the recent explosion of bitcoin automated vending machines in Spain itself, it’s only natural that the country’s tax authority, the Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria (AEAT), has turned its gaze to…
If there is a single technical development likely to increase bitcoin’s mainstream appeal, it’s BIP 70. The protocol, introduced in the March 0.9.0 update of Bitcoin Core, is arguably the first major toolset for making the bitcoin experience user-friendly. Among other innovations, BIP 70 allows users to display their addresses in human-readable text rather than…
Although designed as a trustless payment network rather than as a true virtual currency, Ripple has been one of the best known and highest profile alt-coins for the last several years. The system’s native currency, ripples (XRP), have traded as high as $0.06 in recent memory, giving it a surprisingly high market cap for a…
On May 18, 2010, a programmer in Jacksonville, Florida, named Laszlo Hanyecz was hungry. As a very early adopter of an experimental virtual currency called bitcoin, Hanyecz had also mined tens of thousands of the things. Surely there was someone out there in the digital void who might be willing to trade him a couple…
Canadian virtual currency exchange Vault of Satoshi (VoS) recently announced several major new services for its rapidly growing customer base. The announcement is the first of two major “Summer Update” announcements, with the second planned in the near future. VoS Director of Marketing Adam Cochran posted the announcements to several popular bitcoin forums, as well…
In late 2013, as bitcoin prices were reaching their historical peak, noted commodity investor and radio show host Peter Schiff mockingly dismissed the growth in the virtual currency as “modern-day tulip mania.” Since then, Schiff has continued to be a vocal critic of bitcoin as an investment, claiming it to be poor competition for the…