Hiromi Yamaoka believes cryptocurrencies are 'too far off' from making a serious impact

Financial technology is fast revolutionising the banking industry but digital currencies will not replace physical money any time soon, a senior Bank of Japan (BOJ) official said on Wednesday.

“It’s too far off,” Hiromi Yamaoka, head of the BOJ’s payment and settlement systems department, said on the sidelines of a forum on financial innovation hosted by Thomson Reuters.

“It would change the banking system too drastically.”

Japan has become a front runner in the financial technology (fintech) industry, with the government this year having recognised bitcoin as legal tender and approved several companies as operators of cryptocurrency exchanges.

The BOJ last year set up a section in charge of fintech to offer guidance to banks seeking new business opportunities, and joined up with the European Central Bank to study distributed ledger technology (DLT) like blockchain.

But the BOJ and ECB said in September they had judged that blockchain – which is best known as the system underpinning bitcoin - was not mature enough to power the world’s biggest payment systems.

“From a practical perspective, I think this is still ‘under construction’,” Mr Yamaoka told the forum, referring to blockchain and DLT technology.

He said the hype surrounding initial coin offerings was “quite tremendous”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/digital-currency-bitcoin-wont-replace-paper-money-bank-of-japan-finance-banking-technology-a8069491.html

Major remittance markets such as the Philippines have seen significant success in legalizing bitcoin as a payment method over the past year. In December, the Philippine central bank legalized bitcoin as a legal currency, enabling expat workers and local employees to use bitcoin to process remittance payments.

Consequently, Coins.ph, the largest bitcoin brokerage and remittance startup in the Philippines, gained 2 million active users, establishing itself as the most used mobile app in the Philippines. With a $15 million investment from Google’s venture capital arm, Coins.ph expanded to Thailand and Malaysia and launching Coins. Coins.ph, adding hundreds of thousands of new users.

Square, one of the largest payments apps in the world, has three million active users. Coins.ph, a local Philippine remittance app, has a similar user base as Square, a $16 billion financial company.

If India regulates bitcoin and legalizes the currency, its remittance industry will be quick to adopt bitcoin, growing the mainstream adoption of the digital currency in the region.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/what-happens-when-india-regulates-bitcoin-as-largest-remittance-market/

Bitcoin has witnessed decent two-way business in the last 24 hours.

A drop below $8,000 during the Asian day was quickly undone and the world's largest cryptocurrency by market value once again approached record highs, hitting $8,333 this morning.

At press time, bitcoin is changing hands at $8,228, according to CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index.

As per CoinMarketCap, the bitcoin-U.S. dollar (BTC/USD) exchange rate has appreciated by 1.13 percent in the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, the total trading volume in the last 24 hours was $5 billion, the highest since Nov. 16.

The price action analysis indicates the failed breakdown below $8,000 may be costly for the bears.

4-hour chart


The chart above shows:

1. Failed breakdown: BTC witnessed a solid rebound from the upward sloping 50-MA and is back in the rising channel.
2. The relative strength index (RSI) holds above 50.00 (bullish territory).

1-hour chart


...The descending trend line seen on the chart above has been breached as well, suggesting there is scope for a rally.

https://www.coindesk.com/holding-strong-failed-breakdown-a-boon-for-the-bitcoin-bulls/

Tether, the company behind USDT(dollar-pegged) asset that are used in most cryptocurrency exchanges, manage to bury the issue just like that. $30 Million USDT token is not a small issue. Remember when NEO investors got tricked in depositing their assets into a phishing site. The news spread everywhere like there's a flock of mass manipulators spreading FUD everywhere.

There's someone behind this manipulations and people are taking it easy. Our hard earn money isn't just something they could steal and walk it like nothing just happened. We work day and night to earn those money. Imagine if these manipulators manage to pull all their funds before spreading another FUD again? Making everyone broke except for themselves. I just can't believe people are going easy on this. This is a serious matter, your money, your friends money someone, how long will we wait until something worst happens than this? I'm sorry this issue is already worst.

https://neonewstoday.com/development/paper-wallet-generator-under-investigation-for-possible-phishing/

According to reports from a few news outlets, social media platforms and online forums a new bitcoin mining rig called the “Dragonmint” is joining the bitcoin mining environment in 2018. The machine’s creators claim the device is 30 percent more efficient than current ASIC models on the market.


A New Mining Company and ASIC Device Planned for 2018 Claims to be 30% More Efficient Than Current Market Competitors

In 2017 there’s been a lot of talk about new mining technology and powerful chips below the 16nm standard, but really no show. The 16nm semiconductor fabrication utilized within the Bitmain Antminer S9 and the Avalon Miner 741, are still currently two of the best performing machines on the market. The Japanese company GMO Internet plans to produce 7nm semiconductor chips for bitcoin mining soon.

Now the Dragonmint 16T miner produced by the firm Halong Mining is calling itself “the world’s most efficient Bitcoin miner,” even though it has yet to be sold on the open market. According to a report written by the journalist, Aaron van Wirdum, the Dragonmint miner boasts “newly designed chips” and is “30 percent more energy efficient” than the Antminer S9. The Dragonmint #DevelopmentTeam  claims the model’s hash power produces around 16 THS.


In that report, the project is said to run by the pseudonymous bitcoin developer, Btcdrak, who says he wants to bring more “competition” to the mining rig manufacturing environment. On the company’s website, the new chip technology claims to be based on DM8575 ASIC chips which achieve 85 GHS per chip, alongside 0.075 J/GHS of power efficiency. The company details the miner is the “first step in a long strategy” which began in 2016. Over 100 experts helped with the project, explains Halong Mining, including software developers and chip designers.

“The project is motivated by, and driven to help facilitate greater decentralisation in Bitcoin mining at all levels, and make sha256 great again.”

Blockstream CEO Tweets About Halong Mining but Satoshi Labs Executives Want No Associations.

There’s not much about the company online except yesterday’s burst of social media shares, articles, and forum posts. When the announcement first came out, people assumed the project might be sketchy as it looks like a photoshopped version of the S9. Unfortunately, the bitcoin community is plagued by these types of phony miner companies who use pictures of miners produced by other businesses. However, on the same day the Blockstream CEO, Adam Back vouched for the company’s miner using his Twitter feed.

“Jan Čapek is CEO of Slush pool, the first and longest-running bitcoin mining pool — They took the video demoing a Dragonmint miner. Marek “Slush” Palatinus, and Pavol Rusnak seen above,” Adam Back tells his Twitter followers.

However, the IT Architect of Satoshi Labs, Marek Palatinus, didn’t appreciate being associated with Halong Mining in Back’s tweet. “Me, Trezor or Slush Pool or any other people mentioned in the tweet are NOT anyhow related to Halong Mining,” emphasizes Palatinus to the Blockstream CEO. Palatinus then asks Back to remove the tweet, and Trezor CTO Pavol Rusnak also tells him to delete the tweets tags.

“Please remove me from your tweet, I was not present during the filming,” Rusnak exclaims.

"Adam Back then apologizes for his tweets by saying, “Jan Čapek demoed a unit — That is it — Halong Mining is a separate company and unrelated to Slush or Trezor companies — Sorry for the confusion if people inferred more by tagging.”

Shipping in March 2018

Besides the announcement and Adam Back suddenly vouching for a new mining company the price of the Dragonmint 16T is $1,595 USD but you have to purchase a batch of five or more. The company also sells a 1600W power supply unit (PSU) and state that both the PSU and Dragonmint’s will not ship until March 2018.

A 36-year-old man, whose identity remains unknown, was robbed of more than 100,000 euros of Bitcoins, while he had connected to the public Wi-Fi network of a restaurant, located in Vienna, in Austria.

According to CBSNews, however, the Austrian police would seek to determine whether the victim's account had not been hacked before he used the Wi-Fi network provided by the restaurant.

This theft opens the question of securing cryptocurrency portfolios. While the number of people holding a Bitcoin wallet seems to increase each month, it is necessary for them to follow some good security practices.

The victim would probably have had to create a second wallet dedicated to her daily purchases - she should have avoided using a public Wi-Fi network to access a wallet containing several Bitcoins.

Trading platforms targeted

It was in February 2014 that we had witnessed the most important Bitcoin theft. The Mt. Gox trading platform collapsed following the exploitation of a security breach by hackers - nearly 750,000 bitcoins were stolen.

Marc KapelèsThe trial of his former CEO, the French Mark Karpelès, is currently taking place in Japan. The man is accused of data manipulation and embezzlement. However, it could soon recover nearly $ 1 billion, thanks to the strong appreciation of the Bitcoin price.

In mid-2017, the main South Korean cryptocurrency trading platform, Bithumb, was the target of a hacker attack, which managed to steal the equivalent of 930,000 euros.

But that's not much of what happened to stealing an individual from Pennsylvania. The man recently confessed to stealing the equivalent of $ 40 million in Bitcoin, thanks to the creation of malicious software.

Crypto-currencies whose price continues to grow

All these risks do not seem to slow down the rise in crypto-currencies.

The price of Ether, the currency used on the Ethereum network, has increased by 2600% in just a few months: the currency was worth less than $ 8 at the beginning of 2017, and recently exceeded for the first time the threshold of $ 400.

Bitcoin has grown more than 700% since the beginning of the year, from less than $ 1,000 to more than $ 8,000 today.

The price of Bitcoin reached a new record high at $ 8,339 on Tuesday, just after a drop to nearly $ 7800 caused by the announcement of theft of nearly $ 31 million Tethers (USDT).

Billionaire and ex-fund manager Mike Novogratz has restated his belief that bitcoin will end the year at $10,000, adding that ethereum could close at $500.

Speaking with Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas yesterday, Novogratz said that "I think we'll hit a new high soon ... we'll end the year at $10,000 in bitcoin."

Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market value, will also reach a new high soon of "close to $500."

He said:

"There are a lot of positive things happening in the ethereum ecosystem."

Novogratz further played down the recent Tether hack, in which over $30 million-worth of tokens were stolen, noting that "these are all very young experiments."

Notably, the billionaire told Bloomberg that he has invested in initial coin offerings or ICOs, including one launched by the WAX digital asset exchange.

With plans to start a $500 million fund for cryptocurrencies, token sales and related startups, called the Galaxy Digital Asset fund, Novogratz indicated that he goes to great lengths to ensure the safety of his cryptocurrency holdings.

Novogratz first predicted the $10,000 bitcoin price last month, stating that he believes the value will be reachedin six to 10 months.

https://www.coindesk.com/mike-novogratz-doubles-down-on-10000-bitcoin-prediction/