KuCoin cryptocurrency exchange announced a launch of new BCH trading pairs. The trading started on Jan. 17, 2018 at 22 p.m. UTC+8, reports the company’s press release. The exchange management decided to open new trading pairs for BCH as a response to their community requests.

Six pairs to start with
The KuCoin, a multi-cryptocurrency exchange based in Hong Kong, recently revealed its plans to add Bitcoin Cash Market enabling users to trade using BCH pairs. All KuCoin traders will have access to the six trading pairs: KCS/BCH, ACT/BCH, DAT/BCH, XAS/BCH, UTK/BCH, DENT/BCH.

KuCoin states that it’s the first cryptocurrency exchange to offer this. In the first week of 2018 KuСoin's traffic has tripled, currently at half a million users, as reported by Anything Crypto on Jan. 11.

Previously Bitstamp Bitcoin exchange based in Luxembourg started trading BCH/BTC, BCH/EUR and BCH/USD on Dec. 5, 2017. CoinEx exchange based in the UK announced similar plans in early December 2017.

The KuCoin exchange also revealed plans to launch the following trading pairs: BCH/RPX, BCH/QLC, BCH/DBC, BCH/BNTY, BCH/DRGN, BCH/LTC, BCH/PRL. The exact date of the start of trading is being specified.

Big promotion campaign
Along with the trading pairs launch, the KuCoin exchange announced a huge promotion for all traders with giveaways of more than $250,000 worth of tokens plus and five BTC in giveaways. Any trader has a chance to win a reward in relevant tokens. There are four kinds of competitions listed in the announcement text.

The exchange created a special telegram chat to support traders: https://t.me/Kucoin_Exchange.

About KuCoin
KuCoin was launched on Sept. 15, 2017, and it operates on a crypto-to-crypto basis, which means that no fiat currencies are supported. Its digital assets portfolio is pretty extensive and besides, the platform uses KuCoin Shares (KCS) in a similar way to Binance, says Capitancoin website in its review.  KuCoin does not offer margin trading and have not disclosed whether there is any minimum investment required. The exchange offers 24/7 customer service and it is known for posting coin pairs before they hit other major cryptocurrency exchanges.

The founding team of KuCoin Exchange has carried out research on Blockchain technology as early as in 2011 and achieved the technical architecture of KuCoin exchange platform in 2013, says the exchange’s official website.

Today, Jan. 23, markets are reacting a second time to news that South Korea will ban anonymous exchanges starting January 30, despite the fact that the information on the planned regulation has been available since late December and reported on since early January.

After the South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) today announced the date by which the country’s exchanges will be required to allow only ‘real-name’ trading, mainstream publications reported on the known move for a second time, unnecessarily increasing FUD in an already bearish market this week.   

The move, which was reportedly initiated to curb speculation, requires that bank accounts used for deposits and withdrawals to virtual currency exchanges have matching, real-name accounts at the exchanges. The regulations will also ban the issuance of new virtual accounts to crypto exchanges.

Not new news
South Korea’s plan to ban anonymous exchange operations is nothing new, today’s announcement merely setting the exact date.

Authorities had announced the ban at the end of December, but had not yet set a concrete date for when the regulations would go into effect. “Establishment of a system for ‘real name verification of deposit and withdrawal accounts’ for settlements will be completed by January 30, 2018,” the FSC documentation released today states.

In mid-January, South Korean authorities announced that crypto exchange customers had until the end of the month to convert virtual bank accounts connected to crypto exchanges to real-name ones, noting that those who do not comply will face fines.

In addition, Non-Koreans and minors will no longer be able to trade cryptocurrency on the country’s exchanges, a point that lawmakers had also previously made known.

Also this week, plans to levy a combined corporation tax and local income tax of 24.2% on exchange profits for 2017 were announced, with platforms obliged to pay by March 30 and April 30 respectively.

Bitcoin prices continue to fall in the 24 hours to press time, falling below $10,000 this afternoon, Jan. 23, and causing losses for multiple altcoin assets as a result.

Dogecoin, which started as a parody cryptocurrency, has now broken the $1 bln market cap showing how far virtual currencies have come since Bitcoin’s inception in 2009.

Four years after the Bitcoin genesis block was mined, programmer Billy Markus coded his very own cryptocurrency in 2013. With the help of Jackson Palmer, a product manager and data analyst at Adobe, Dogecoin was brought to life, meme and all.

Taking up the popular internet meme of the Shiba Inu dog, the creator envisioned the cryptocurrency to be a friendly online payment system, although its rise in popularity may not have been intended.

Nevertheless, in the space of five years, Dogecoin has grown into its own vibrant community of users. Over time, Dogecoin has become popular as a ‘tipping system’ among its users - as stated on the website:

One of the most popular uses for Dogecoin is "tipping" fellow internet-goers who create or share great content. Think of it as a more meaningful "like" or upvote, with real value that can be used all across the internet.

The cryptocurrency has no limit on the amount of coins that can be created by mining. At the time of writing, there are over 112 bln Dogecoins in circulation. While a single Dogecoin is worth no more than $0.01, a single cent, the total market capitalization is now over $1.19 bln - amounting to 72,423 Bitcoin.

Pop-culture coin
Much like Cointelegraph is known for its bold artwork, Dogecoin took up an Internet meme as its ‘mascot’ of sorts. The word ‘doge’ is a popular internet term for a dog, which started out as a simple misspelling of the word in a TV series back in 2005.

As knowyourmeme.com explains, the term doge was married with the picture of a Shiba Inu dog on Reddit back in 2010, leading it to become one of the most well-known internet memes.

Dogecoin

Its association with a cryptocurrency came about in 2014 and the rest is history - although Doge and its various memes would have provided constant internet joys with or without a virtual currency.

Charitable community
The Dogecoin community is also well known for its charitable endeavors.

In 2013, Dogecoin wallet platform Dogewallet was hacked and millions of coins were stolen. In the aftermath, the Dogecoin community started a fundraising effort known as SaveDogemas, which eventually raised the same amount of Dogecoin stolen in the hack just a month after the cyber theft.

The community has also raised funds for Olympic athletes, water projects in Kenya as well as retired NASCAR driver Josh Wise.

America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase reportedly made $1 billion in revenue in 2017, overshooting its 2017 revenue forecast of $600 mln by 66 percent, Recode reports, citing “industry sources.” According to Recode, despite the peaked interest of outside investors, the company remains private and does not allow stock to be traded on secondary markets.

The platform was swamped by an influx of new users looking to set up trading accounts as Bitcoin entered a massive bull run in November, 2017. Following the announcement of Bitcoin futures launch early that month on CME, Coinbase saw 100,000 new users sign up in just 24 hours.

Although Bitcoin’s long bull run ended in the week leading up to Christmas, its rise to an all time high of $20,000 in mid-December saw Coinbase make massive revenues through trades on its platform.

The cryptocurrency exchange makes revenue by charging fees for fiat to crypto conversions via its Buy/Sell feature and for trades on its GDAX exchange.

Investors clawing for stake in Coinbase
The success of Coinbase has not gone unnoticed by investors and venture capitalists. According to Recode’s report, shares in the company are being sought out on a number of fronts.

However, Coinbase shareholders have been told not to sell their shares to outside parties. Doing so would constitute a breach of policy, Coinbase told Recode in a statement:

"As a private company, Coinbase does not allow trading of stock on secondary markets for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there is not full and equal information available to the market. We will take appropriate action if we find people have sold Coinbase shares in violation of our agreements not to do so."

In August 2017, Coinbase raised $100 mln in a series D funding run aimed at increasing its engineering and customer service teams as well as opening a new GDAX office in New York. Investors that missed out on the latest fundraising series are trying their best to entice current shareholders to part ways with lucrative shares, Recode reported.

There has long been speculation that a special IRS amnesty program will be announced for Bitcoin and other digital currency taxpayers. It seems overdue. There’s a good deal of tax cleanup that some people need to do. But so far, we don’t have one. In the meantime, we still must file tax returns every year.

For crypto investors who need to fess up to past transgressions, there is no formal IRS program to control risks and to guarantee a particular formulaic result. A predictable tax and penalty result is what IRS amnesty programs usually provide. You can address this without a formal amnesty, of course.

For instance, amending a few returns to pick up additional income you failed to report is usually pretty safe. Of course, timing is key. If the IRS finds you first through an audit, you won't be protected. In some cases, even criminal prosecution is possible.

But what if you aren’t comfortable just preparing and filing a few tax returns or a few amended tax returns to correct your mistakes? For more serious transgressions, traditionally, if you voluntarily go to the IRS through a lawyer to correct your tax problems before the IRS discovers them, you won't be prosecuted.

Although there is not yet a special IRS amnesty for crypto, there still is one for offshore accounts. So, if you have an offshore account, the IRS amnesty can offer crypto investors a back door. With extensive data swapping deals between the IRS, foreign governments and foreign banks, almost no offshore account is secret anymore.

Even so, the IRS amnesty is still on offer. Offshore account holders can still safely fix their problems, even if they intentionally evaded reporting in the past. The cost of the IRS amnesty can be small compared to the risk of vastly larger civil penalties, and the threat of criminal prosecution. For offshore bank accounts, civil FBAR (Report of Foreign Banks and Financial Accounts) penalties alone can entirely wipe out foreign accounts.

There are two IRS programs. The OVDP or Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program is a clean wash-your-hands kind of way to correct past tax filings and come clean. It involves filing up to eight years of tax returns (or amended tax returns) and FBARs.

You pay taxes, interest and a 20 percent penalty on whatever you owe. For most people, there’s also a 27.5 percent penalty on your highest offshore account balance. In some cases, that penalty can be 50 percent, depending on the bank and timing.

In contrast, the Streamlined program involves only three years of tax returns. You file six FBARs instead of three, to match the longer FBAR statute of limitations. The Foreign Streamlined program (for US persons abroad) has no penalty. The Domestic one involves a five percent penalty pegged to the highest offshore account balance over the six FBAR years.

The Streamlined program requires a non-willfulness statement that can be risky in some cases. And Streamlined filings are subject to IRS audit. These audits can be brutal, so in choosing OVDP or streamlined, you should consider IRS audits. Thus, for crypto investors with risk, the OVDP seems a far better hook for resolving crypto tax problems.

As long as you are filing amended tax returns, other corrections unrelated to your foreign accounts can be handled too. After all, before you sign amended tax returns under penalties of perjury, you need to make sure they are accurate. If you failed to report any other income, you should include it on your amended returns.

By its terms, the OVDP applies to foreign account matters. Other corrections are technically not part of it, so the IRS could pursue these items outside the OVDP. In reality, though, the IRS appears to be processing them all together. In short, if you have other unrelated corrections to your returns, by all means, make them.

Cleaning up domestic tax problems is a feature of many OVDP cases. The IRS appears to be accustomed to the usual full disclosure including domestic tax problems too.

The domestic issues might be large, particularly given the dramatic run-up of crypto investments. However, the OVDP should still allow the IRS to collect taxes, interest, plus a 20 percent penalty on any unreported income. Remember, a key IRS tradition is that tax evaders who voluntarily step forward before they are found are usually not prosecuted.

OVDP tax return packages can fix domestic tax problems unrelated to foreign accounts. All usually seems to go fine, and there may be no real alternative. Given the costs, most taxpayers have an easier time deciding to file Streamlined rather than the more expensive OVDP.

The OVDP precludes criminal prosecution and ends in a closing agreement. In contrast, Streamlined filers can face a civil audit or conceivably even prosecution. A key for any Streamlined filer is to be non-willful and to certify that.

Negligence, inadvertence or mistake are all OK, but intent to conceal or to evade taxes is not. And the IRS has criteria for objective indicators. It is hard to say you were non-willful if you behaved secretively, did partial reporting of accounts or income, etc.

Everyone knows that tax compliance with crypto has been poor. That’s why the IRS has trained criminal IRS agents to pursue this. It’s why the IRS is using tracking software. And it’s why the IRS successfully went after Coinbase accounts via summons.

The bottom line is that crypto investors with tax problems might consider the OVDP. Using it until the IRS has a special crypto amnesty might be worth a look.

Stripe, the mobile payment processor with a $9 bln valuation, has announced that it is officially winding down its Bitcoin integration. Over the next three months, Stripe customers will be encouraged to migrate away from Bitcoin payments. After that, Bitcoin will no longer be accepted at all.

Stripe made waves in 2015 when it fully integrated Bitcoin, allowing all vendors who use the platform to accept Bitcoin payments. Many saw this as a sign of impending mainstream acceptance of Bitcoin as a payment method, but high fees and slow transaction confirmations have hobbled the network.

Disappointment
In a blog post, Stripe noted the high hopes the company had for Bitcoin when it first integrated the currency into its platform:

“Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.”

Stripe cites slow confirmation times and high fees as the reason for its abandonment of Bitcoin as a payment method:

“This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.”

Bitcoin as an asset
Stripe remains optimistic about cryptocurrency as a whole, but the company sees Bitcoin as more of an asset than a payment network:

“Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. (And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, ambitious project do so well.)”

The company’s comments echo those of others in the digital currency space, such as Max Keiser, who see Bitcoin as a sort of “Gold 2.0” rather than a medium of exchange:

“[The digital currency] Dash is emerging as the crypto payment rail while Bitcoin asserts itself as Gold 2.0. I suggest those frustrated by the Bitcoin scaling debate to embrace Dash for payments and leave Bitcoin Core alone to continue working on Gold 2.0.”

Enter the altcoins
While Keiser cites Dash as a more viable payment network than Bitcoin, Stripe cites several other currencies as contenders:

“OmiseGO is an ambitious and clever proposal; more broadly, Ethereum continues to spawn many high-potential projects. We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low.”

Notably, the company has no plans to integrate any of those supposedly “better” currencies into its platform.

Reversible
Stripe has left itself open to reconsider Bitcoin as a payment method in the future:

“We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments...Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future.”

With the slow uptake of Segregated Witness and the effective death of plans to increase Bitcoin’s blocksize, all eyes turn to the Lightning Network to make Bitcoin viable again for payments. The Lightning Network has been under development for quite awhile, and there are several competing implementations. None of them are considered to be safe or suitable for general use, however. With Stripe, Steam and others ending their acceptance of Bitcoin payments, it’s clear that if the currency is to be considered a viable network for payments, lightning better strike soon.

The Brazilian government is seeking to move popular petitions, an inefficient electoral system of the country, onto the Ethereum network, to process hundreds of millions of votes on the immutable Blockchain network.

In Brazil, popular petitions enable over 145 mln voters across the country to come to a consensus on important political decisions. But, for many decades, political experts and analysts have questioned the logistical issue of popular petitions, and political commentators have described the structural problem of the electoral system of Brazil as the basis for most of the country’s political issues.

Gabriel Barbosa, a research associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, wrote, “when people are living paycheck to paycheck, or as the common saying in Brazil goes, ‘selling their lunch to buy their dinner,’ the cost of political participation becomes high enough so that people are excluded from the political process,” emphasizing the lack of proper institutions that handle the cost of political engagement.

Move to Ethereum
As Joon Ian Wong of Quartz reported, Brazilian legislators led by Congress legislative adviser Ricardo Fernandes Paixão and university professor Everton Fraga are planning on ways to utilize the Ethereum Blockchain network to store and process electoral votes, as a part of a larger initiative to improve Brazil’s political system, which The Economist described as “sleazy.”

The key to employing a Blockchain system in processing petitions and electoral votes is to encrypt votes onto the immutable Blockchain network as transactions, to ensure that the specific piece of data remains unalterable and invulnerable to manipulation.

Essentially, processing petition signatures on the Ethereum network would require smart contracts, and the system would operate similarly as other decentralized applications that exist on the network. The electoral system of Brazil would act as a decentralized application of its own with an independent digital token, that is used to process every vote on the Blockchain.

Henrique Costa, a Universidade de Brasilia law professor, told QZ that the lack of an immutable platform to collect signatures of votes had been a real issue for the government in the past.

“In part this is due to the absence of a platform that can securely collect the signatures of one percent of voters. We’ve been through a sort of crisis regarding the legitimacy…of our laws. Although the popular initiative does exist, there is no secure way to collect people’s signatures so people can propose bills themselves.”

Within the Brazilian electoral system, any popular petition with the signatures of one percent of the country’s populations is required to be heard in Congress. But, because of the lack of an institution and a platform that handles petition votes, the group that rallies behind a particular petition also needs to find a legislator to adopt it.

Consequently, the probability of popular petitions being heard in  Congress has significantly decreased, even though many petitions have gathered signatures from the one percent of voters.

Mobile app
Currently, the Brazilian government is exploring the possibility of using a mobile app based on the Ethereum Blockchain network with which residents and citizens can submit petition votes. Since decentralized applications can operate on mobile systems, the Brazilian petition and electoral system can operate in a similar way.

Since broadcasting every single signature as a transaction of its own is highly efficient and costly, the Brazilian government will use a system called hashing to combine all of the daily votes into one transaction and broadcast it to the main Ethereum Blockchain network.

Fraga, one of the two leading advisers of the project, stated that the integration of Ethereum into the Brazilian’s inefficient and impractical electoral system would be a celebration of democracy if it passes Congress and becomes implemented. He said:

“It would be a celebration of democracy. With this project, we are doing what the constitution says, but in practice, it hasn’t [yet] happened.”

OneCoin offices were raided and its servers seized in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Jan. 17 and 18, as yet another step in a series of international raids and court cases against the highly-controversial altcoin. Although the servers were shut down, OneCoin currently remains operational.

The raid took place at the request of the prosecutor’s office in Bielefeld, Germany, and was carried out by representatives of the Bulgarian law enforcement as well as European Union crime fighting units. OneCoin’s founder, Ruja Ignatova, is Bulgarian-born but has German citizenship.

OneCoin, which promotes itself as a “centralized model [that] protects its members' safety and ensures compliance on AML [anti-money laundering],” does not fit the definition of a cryptocurrency, for it is not decentralized, does not run on open-source software, and does not have a public ledger.

The documents and servers were seized from “One Network Services” EOOD, a Bulgarian company serving as a representative and distributor of OneCoin, as well as 14 other companies. 50 witnesses were questioned during the raid, but no arrests have yet been made.

The company is registered officially in the United Arab Emirates as “OneCoin Ltd.,” but according to the Bulgarian police report, the company operates through

“Hundreds of affiliated companies on 4 continents [...] [which] are being investigated in England, Ireland, Italy, the United States, Canada, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and many other countries.”