after a week the price of eth slowly rise again...
shall it continue to rise ?

Two New Coinshares Crypto-Investment Funds: The ‘Active’ and ‘Large Cap’
Coinshares Group Plans to Launch New Crypto-Investment Funds
Coinshares is well-known for it’s Bitcoin Tracker One ETN listed on Nasdaq OMX.
Coinshares Group is a well-known company that offers two globally traded ETNs based on the decentralized cryptocurrencies bitcoin (Bitcoin Tracker One and BTC Tracker Euro) and ethereum (Ether Tracker One and ETH Tracker Euro). The firm focuses its energy on providing investment vehicles tied to the emerging market of crypto-assets. The ETN provider is approved by the Swedish FSA (Finansinspektionen), and average retail investors can purchase the ETNs which are listed and sold on Nasdaq Nordic in Stockholm. Coinshares is now launching the ‘Active’ Fund and ‘Large Cap’ Fund which offer two types of digital asset fund investment.

The ‘Active’ Fund will follow an alpha-generating ongoing strategy with multiple crypto assets. The ‘Large Cap’ fund will be more a more passive and significant larger basket fund. The Chairman of Coinshares Group, Daniel Masters, believes the firm has a great experience with crypto-investment products and says the company looks forward to offering the new funds.

“As a group, we have developed a deep expertise in bringing new, fit-for-purpose crypto-investment products to market; products which offer traditional investors proper, familiar channels to access the crypto-asset ecosystem,” explains Coinshares chairman.

We are particularly excited for these two new funds as they represent the latest evolution of our expertise and are built on key learnings from the last three years of managing crypto-asset investments.

Investor Education, a New London Office, and Working With Regulators
Coinshares Group Plans to Launch New Crypto-Investment FundsAdditionally, Coinshares has been offering investor education called, “a framework for analyzing crypto assets,” and is also opening a new London-based office. The firm says it plans to expand in global jurisdictions where regulatory policy is shifting with these emerging new technologies. Ryan Radloff, the CEO, and founder of Coinshares says the company still has a lot of work to do regarding dealing with regulators investigating digital assets. Moreover, the company has created a “representative relationship” with Sapia Partners LLP, part of the Lawson Conner Group.     

“As one of the European leaders in crypto-finance, we have a responsibility to lead by example; and as a group, we believe that the crypto-finance community should seek more regulation, not run away from it; this London office is a proper step in upholding that belief,” Radloff details during the announcement.   

There is still a lot of work to be done on regulation in crypto-finance and we look forward to working with regulators throughout the process.

Coinshare’s existing ETNs have had a very successful year much like the rest of the cryptocurrency economy. The product Bitcoin Tracker One (COINXBT:SS) is up 881.22 percent over the past year. The first Ethereum tracking ETN on Nasdaq Stockholm launched this past October hold an excess of $350Mn USD in just a few short months.

source: https://news.bitcoin.com/coinshares-group-plans-to-launch-new-crypto-investment-funds/

The $5 Billion ICO
Bigger than Filecoin. Bigger than Tezos. Bigger than Telegram, EOS, and all the rest. In fact, the value of the petro token sale, if it hits its cap, will almost equal the total revenue generated in 2017 from initial coin offerings. With the price of one PTR provisionally fixed at $60, to correspond with a barrel of oil, Venezuela’s tokens are more expensive than even the $50 Bitconnect X is seeking in its current ICO. In fairness to the South American nation, its cryptocurrency is not a Ponzi scheme. Its creators promise:

Petro will give investors the opportunity to enter the crypto asset market with an instrument of intrinsic value that is safer, more stable and susceptible to a fundamental analysis because it is linked to a widely known industry, and therefore, suitable to be used in large transactions and even as a store of value.

Venezuela Releases Its Petro Whitepaper Ahead of a $5 Billion ICOIn many respects, the petro whitepaper is unremarkable. 22 pages, neatly formatted and capably written, save for the odd typo, mark it out as a cut above the average cryptocurrency whitepaper. There’s a lot of talk of blockchain in there, but mercifully no mention of “disruptive technology” or a “new paradigm”. If it were the work of just another startup launching just another cryptocurrency, it would scarcely attract a second glance.

But as the first government-issued cryptocurrency, albeit from a country with pariah status in American eyes, Venezuela’s effort was bound to provoke scrutiny and fascination. While there are no major curveballs in the document, there’s something inescapably strange about reading a national government’s whitepaper which references Coinmarketcap and where talk of pre-sales and token emissions is bandied about. There’s no roadmap, but every other whitepaper staple is present and accounted for.

Highlights from the Petro Whitepaper
The petro whitepaper is worth reading in full, if only to take in the magnitude and bizarreness of it all. Here are a few highlights:

– There is a section which charts the % gains and daily volatility of bitcoin, ripple, and ethereum in 2017.

– 100 million PTR will be created and, like bitcoin, each petro will be divisible into 100 million parts. (Given that the token is designed to hold relative stability against the price of a barrel of oil, 100 million decimal places seems like overkill.)

– Just as bitcoin’s smallest unit is a satoshi, the petro’s is called a mene (0.00000001).

– A footnote explains that “mene” is the word for petroleum in wayúu, the second most spoken language in Venezuela. Interestingly, it’s also a form of the Spanish verb “minar” – to mine.

Venezuela Releases Its Petro Whitepaper Ahead of a $5 Billion ICO

– 38.4% of the tokens will be made available in a pre-sale starting February 20 and 44% will be made available in a public sale starting one month later. The remaining 17.6% will be retained by the Venezuelan Superintendency of Currency and Related Activities.

– Various levels of discount will be available in the pre- and public sales.

– No new tokens will be issued after the public sale, though the government may introduce a Proof of Stake model.

– “The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela guarantees that it will accept Petro’s [sic] as a form of payment of national taxes, fees, contributions and public services, taking as a reference the price of the barrel of the Venezuelan basket of the previous day with a percentage discount.”

– As an ERC20 token, it is likely that the petro will be tradable on DEXes such as Etherdelta and may also be listed by major non-U.S. exchanges.

– Should the token sale reach its hard cap, $4.944 billion will be raised. If contributions are all in ethereum, that would account for almost 5% of ETH’s total circulating supply.

– If all of the ether collected were to go to a single contract address, it would hold more than twice as much ETH as the next largest wallet, owned by Poloniex. It would also give Venezuela the power to crash the ethereum market by dumping millions of ETH.

Venezuela Releases Its Petro Whitepaper Ahead of a $5 Billion ICO
President Maduro announces details of the petro at a government meeting
The Anti-Tether
Scrutiny Intensifies as Tether Exceeds Supply of 1 Billion USDTIf tether aspires to be the U.S dollar in all but name, the petro is its antithesis. As the white paper notes: “Due to the imposition of the US dollar as the international backing currency and the subsequent replacement of the gold standard with the fiduciary model, the world economy has suffered from uncertainty and instability caused by the foundation in a currency without a gold backing, which has been particularly harmful to emerging economies.”

President Maduro and his team certainly aren’t short of confidence, writing:

Petro is a much more ambitious project than other digital convertible currencies such as the digix (gold-backed) or the tether (backed in dollars), because it opens the opportunity for using other assets to backup the currency. Due to the condition of crypto asset with state sanction (non-control) on its own platform, the instrument has a massive adoption potential, with an approximate of 31 million people in Venezuela alone, that is, ten times the size of the global market for cryptocurrencies.

One final point of interest to emerge from the petro whitepaper: there is no mention of KYC procedures or of investors from countries such as the U.S. being barred from participating. Should it transpire that Americans are permitted to participate, and they duly go on to funnel millions or even billions of dollars from the U.S. to Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro will doubtless be delighted. Quite what the SEC will make of it all is another matter entirely.                                                                                        source: https://news.bitcoin.com/venezuela-releases-petro-whitepaper-ahead-5-billion-ico/

Real-Name System Enforced
South Korea Ends Anonymous Cryptocurrency Trading TodaySouth Korea begins converting existing virtual cryptocurrency accounts to real-name accounts today as mandated by the government.

The implementation of this new account system effectively ends “the use of anonymous bank accounts in transactions to prevent virtual coins from being used for money laundering and other illegal activities,” Yonhap reported.

Six major banks in the country are participating in this new system so far: Shinhan Bank, Nonghyup Bank, Industrial Bank of Korea, Kookmin Bank, Hana Bank, and Gwangju Bank. The news outlet elaborated:

Opening cryptocurrency accounts has been banned for weeks while the banks have installed the system, which ensures only real-name bank accounts and matching accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges for deposits and withdrawals.

“Foreigners and underage investors are banned from opening cryptocurrency accounts in South Korea,” the publication noted, adding that “The new system also requires cryptocurrency exchanges to share users’ transaction data with banks.” Traders with existing virtual accounts will be fined if they keep depositing money into their existing accounts.

Business As Usual for Banks
South Korea Ends Anonymous Cryptocurrency Trading Today
Shinhan crypto flyer (Photo\Kim Hyung Min)
“The market forecasted that there will be a lot of requests for opening new accounts following the introduction of the real-name system,” Maekyung wrote. However, on the first day of introducing the real-name system, the news outlet noted that banks are seeing little changes from the previous year, adding that some customers may have opened accounts online.

An IBK official told the publication that “there is no big difference” in the number of customers opening accounts at the bank.

A Chosun reporter visited several banks and found no unusual traffic. At a Shinhan Bank branch, there was a “customer guide” with definitions of crypto-related terms. It also includes an anti-money laundering guideline.

Real Name Verification
South Korea Ends Anonymous Cryptocurrency Trading TodayKorea Business explains that “Real name verification is possible only if there is an account of the person’s name at the bank that the virtual currency trading company uses.”

To open a new bank account for trading cryptocurrencies, customers “must submit documents to the bank…such as payroll, utility bills, credit card payments,” the news outlet detailed.

Bithumb has been trading with Nonghyup Bank and Shinhan Bank, Upbit with Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK), Coinone with Nonghyup Bank, and Korbit with Shinhan Bank. “Looking at the number of virtual accounts that are subject to the real-name system conversion, IBK has 570,000, Nonghyup Bank 1 million, and Shinhan Bank 140,000,” Hankyung reported.

Smaller Exchanges Could Suffer
Small and medium-sized cryptocurrency exchanges are expected to suffer from the conversion into the real-name system, local media report, citing that banks are reluctant to issue new accounts for them and they can no longer use existing corporate accounts.

The Korean Blockchain Association revealed that 10 companies out of its 25 crypto exchange members use corporate accounts in place of virtual accounts. They include Coinnest, Gopax, Coinlink, and Eyalabs, Maekyung reported. The publication quoted the association explaining, “Exchanges that have not been granted virtual accounts have fallen into the blind spot of regulation.”

source: https://news.bitcoin.com/south-korea-ends-anonymous-cryptocurrency-trading/

The US Wants South Korean Crypto Data
US Financial Regulator Requests Crypto Trading Data From South KoreaThe New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) has asked South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) and Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to share the data obtained from their inspections of six major Korean banks, local media report. The NYDFS supervises banks, insurers, and financial institutions in the US. It is also responsible for issuing New York’s infamous Bitlicense since 2014.

US Financial Regulator Requests Crypto Trading Data From South KoreaThe South Korean FSS and FIU inspected Woori Bank, KB Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Bank, Nonghyup Bank, Korea Development Bank (KDB), and Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) between January 8 and 11, as news.Bitcoin.com previously reported. However, the authorities extended the inspection period to January 16. The purpose of the inspections was to ensure that banks fulfil their anti-money laundering (AML) obligations related to services they provide to cryptocurrency exchanges.

In addition to requesting results of the probes into the six banks, the NYDFS also “asked to see the banks’ internal regulations on cryptocurrency dealings,” Chosun reported and quoted a Korean government official saying:

There’s a lot of concern from foreign governments about the regulations being imposed on cryptocurrency trading…With the Korean government conducting on-site inspections and establishing guidelines, financial regulators in New York seem to be gathering information for research purposes.

Crypto Countermeasures & AML
The Korean government has been actively devising cryptocurrency countermeasures. Following the inspections of the six banks, the FIU created a set of anti-money laundering guidelines for banks to follow when dealing with cryptocurrencies. Concurrently, the regulators also published their countermeasures for cryptocurrency regulations which they promised back on December 28. Earlier this month, the government also mandated that crypto exchanges share their user data with banks under the new real-name account system.

US Financial Regulator Requests Crypto Trading Data From South Korea
Kim Yong-bum and Sigal Mandelker.
A Korean financial official was quoted by the Korea Times saying, “It seems like the whole world is wondering about our virtual currency countermeasures.”

According to Maekyung, on January 25, US Treasury Secretary Sigal Mandelker discussed how to strengthen anti-money laundering measures related to cryptocurrencies as well as international cooperation measures with Vice Chairman of the Korean Financial Service Commission (FSC), Kim Yong-bum. Mandelker said at a US Senate Banking Committee hearing on the Anti-Money Laundering Act:

We will actively crack down on any virtual currency exchange that does not have a money laundering safety net.

source: https://news.bitcoin.com/us-financial-regulator-requests-crypto-trading-data-south-korea/

Samsung Bitcoin Chips
Samsung Enters the Bitcoin Mining ASIC Manufacturing BusinessSamsung Electronics (KRX: 005930), the flagship company of the Korea-based multinational conglomerate Samsung Group, has entered the bitcoin mining business according to reports from the country. It has earlier signed a contract with a Chinese bitcoin mining hardware maker to supply it with chips, and already started mass production in January.

According to the reports Samsung Electronics completed the process for the development of semiconductor ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) for bitcoin mining last year. A Samsung Electronics spokesperson told Korea’s The Bell that, “We are in the middle of a foundry business that is being supplied to a virtual money mining company in China”.

The market for ASIC miners has been booming along with the massive 2017 price rally, and hardware manufacturers such as Bitmain used their strong profits to sway the semiconductor foundries to produce chips for them over traditional clients. It was recently revealed that the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, TSMC, expects that the bitcoin mining sector will continue to grow this year, possibly offsetting for weak iPhone X sales for Apple’s primary chip supplier.

GPU Mining
Samsung Enters the Bitcoin Mining ASIC Manufacturing BusinessSamsung is set to profit not just from the bitcoin ASIC mining boom, but also from the huge parallel demand for GPU-based cryptocurrency mining. The company has started the mass production of a new type of DRAM for graphics cards, which is said to be more suitable for cryptocurrency mining. The 10-nanometer 16Gb GDDR6 DRAM is twice as fast as conventional GDDR5 DRAM and improves power efficiency by more than 35%, resulting in greater profitability for GPU for cryptocurrency mining.

This shows that chip manufacturers like Samsung are well aware of the prevalent use of their GPUs for cryptocurrency mining by end users, and might be even focusing it with new designs. Only recently it was revealed that GPU manufacturer Nvidia has taken measures to try and ensure its products get into the hands of gamers, not miners.

source: https://news.bitcoin.com/samsung-enters-bitcoin-mining-asic-manufacturing-business/

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Forwards Bitcoin
“Which is why Bitcoin is an excellent idea,” continues a crypto community favorite philosopher, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 57, in a recent post to his Opacity blog, It May Fail but We Now Know How to Do It. “It fulfills the needs of the complex system, not because it is a cryptocurrency, but precisely because it has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it has now a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right.”

Mr. Taleb is best known for his work in probability, risk, decision theory, and his books include 2010’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and 2012’s Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, both highly cited by ecosystem enthusiasts. His present meditation on bitcoin came by way of a foreword to an upcoming release.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb vs David Birch on The Bitcoin Standard
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In his defense of bitcoin, he rifles through “experts” on the economy, familiar names who’ve either outright failed or who merely kept the dying patient alive for a little while longer, arriving at the cautionary value of how “we need to be careful on who to endow with centralized macro decisions.” The echo chamber of central banking has sought only its own ends rather than improving upon currency, half of all transactions. It’s probably safe to write the industrialized world hasn’t experienced innovation for at least a century. Imagine if any other technology, tool, commodity was allowed such stillbirth.

Mr. Taleb notes Hayek as inspiration for the innovation of bitcoin, at least in spirit. The distribution of knowledge means, almost paradoxically, “it looks like we do not even need that thing called knowledge for things to work well. Nor do we need individual rationality. All we need is structure,” and that structure is decentralization. Even stalwart stores of value throughout history, such as gold, have lost their heroic reason for existence: they’re now wholly play things of governments, from Hong Kong to New Jersey, while “Bitcoin is a currency without a government,” Mr. Taleb reminds readers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb vs David Birch on The Bitcoin Standard

As such, he explains, it “has a huge advantage over gold in transactions: clearance does not require a specific custodian. No government can control what code you have in your head,” Mr. Taleb insists. He does acknowledge bitcoin’s present drawbacks in terms of network congestion and transaction fees, however, but brings us back to Hayekian ground, as bitcoin “is the first organic currency.”

David GW Birch Might’ve Very Well Missed the Point of Bitcoin
While Mr. Taleb is refreshingly pithy and grounded in bitcoin’s ultimate ends, other intellectuals of note in the financial world aren’t so convinced. Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money that We Understand to Money that Understands Us (London Publishing Partnership, 2017), is a breezy enough read by a familiar English financial columnist and pundit, David GW Birch. Mr. Birch, The Telegraph notes, is “one of the world’s leading experts on digital money,” and a director of Consult Hyperion, an IT management consultancy.

Despite its title, the book has precious little to say about bitcoin, devoting almost as much space to ether, zcash, and ripple as possible alternatives to what Mr. Birch declares a near sure thing: bitcoin won’t survive. Indeed, cryptographic currencies won’t either, at least not in the manner Mr. Taleb has praised, according to Mr. Birch.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb vs David Birch on The Bitcoin Standard
David GW Birch
Of its 18 chapters, it takes until the 13th before a discussion of cryptocurrency is hashed out. And really the segment is to probably justify the title, as scattered paragraphs tangent to practical concerns and comparisons to M-Pesa. Lost wallets and lack of recovery. Low relative adoption rates. Finally, he even doubts bitcoin is a currency. He writes almost rhetorically, “might it be the future of money? I think not,” Mr. Birch answers.

“Bitcoin is not the future of money, and the future of money is not Bitcoin,” he emphasizes. He does walk a tightrope of coming close to Mr. Taleb’s understanding, suggesting many people are fed up with status quo currency arrangements. But then Mr. Birch cheers much more centralized cryptocurrency alternatives such as ripple before advocating a kind of digital fiat hybrid where central bankers somehow stabilize and tame crypto in preference to his favored centralized structure. And then he’s off to the drug of professional financial journalists, “blockchain” this and “blockchain” that.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb vs David Birch on The Bitcoin Standard

Mr. Birch has it exactly backward: bitcoin is practical in a liberation sense. It’ll find its way toward use cases, and is nearly every day. While Mr. Birch’s predictions might just come to pass, the allure of bitcoin as an idea is now out there: people are free to transact without minders. Ending on Mr. Taleb for contrast suffices to push home the point:

“But its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.”  source: https://news.bitcoin.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb-vs-david-birch-on-the-bitcoin-standard/

The Battle for Privacy Heats Up
Privacy is all relative, but of late there’s been relatively little privacy to be enjoyed by bitcoin users. Blockchain monitoring software is becoming more sophisticated and more common, with U.S. law enforcement agencies using it to profile and hunt down deep web users. Chip Mixer is a relatively new bitcoin tumbler that’s designed to restore some of that privacy. Available on both the clearnet and darknet, the service uses a variety of techniques to obfuscate blockchain movements.

Unlike other mixers, Chip Mixer adds in its own chips which are then shuffled around in a manner akin to gambling at an online casino, before the initial deposit is withdrawn into a new address. Services such as Chip Mixer are useful not only to darknet vendors and customers, but to bitcoin users in general seeking to regain some privacy. In a week in which a prominent bitcoiner got the community talking simply by transferring their 40k BTC to a new address, it’s evident that there are instances where transaction obfuscation is desirable.

Deep Web Roundup: Dream Adds Monero and Bitcoin Tumbler “Chip Mixer” Launches

The Age of Blockchain Monitoring Has Arrived
“Criminals think that they are safe online because they’re anonymous, but they are in for a rude awakening,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday, launching a crackdown on Fentanyl distribution. “We have already infiltrated their networks, and we are determined to bring them to justice.”

The sort of tools used by three-letter agencies such as ICE are presented as a means of combatting the trafficking of harmful narcotics, but this is invariably the thin end of the wedge. Companies such as Bitfury gleefully boast of creating tools that are “for use by law enforcement organizations and financial institutions.” Their latest, Crystal, “tracks the relationships of an entity with identified bad actors (such as dark market traders)”. These sorts of companies would have no qualms about their software being used to profile users based on nothing more than their country of origin, libertarian beliefs, or cypherpunk ideology.

Deep Web Roundup: Dream Adds Monero and Bitcoin Tumbler “Chip Mixer” Launches

Dream Marketplace Adds Monero
There is an alternative means of regaining anonymity when transacting online which doesn’t call for passing through time-consuming tumblers: use a privacy coin. Dream, one of the longest standing DNMs, has always been a bitcoin-only marketplace, with bitcoin cash finally added a month ago. Now, much to the relief of r/Darknetmarkets, monero has made its way to Dream. To date, law enforcement – together with other busybodies intent on surveilling deep web users – have failed to deanonymize monero. Given the level of rhetoric surrounding new blockchain forensic tools, 2018 is shaping up to be an interesting year for privacy advocates and those who would seek to deny them that right.                                                              source: https://news.bitcoin.com/deep-web-roundup-dream-adds-monero-bitcoin-tumbler-chip-mixer-launches/