BitcoinInsider

Alex Millar is a blogger, podcaster and YouTube publisher with a degree in engineering physics from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In this opinion piece, Millar looks at how cryptographic tokens can be viewed in a long line of historical investment instruments, and why despite the scams, there remains an argument they should be allowed to continue. Contract with wax seal Even before the emergence of money, victims of a crop failures often took short-term food loans and paid them back with interest. When money emerged, interest was usually paid in either a fraction or a multiple of 12 to simplify accounting. The practice of charging interest on loans, called "usury," has been frequently and widely condemned, regulated or outlawed by authorities beginning with the Buddhist Jatakas texts from 600-400 BC. Critics claim usury exploits the needy, is a form of unearned income, and contributes to inequality. Basic economics shows that capping the price of anythi...

Blockchain startup Factom has raised $4.2m in new funding to build a series of unnamed new products for its blockchain data network. The Austin, Texas-based company that lets users verify data using its Factom blockchain, fresh off winning a $200,000 grant from the US Department of Homeland Securities, now plans to scale with a series of hires to be announced over the coming months. Factom co-founder and CEO Peter Kirby said the Series A round, led by venture capitalist Tim Draper, will also be used to further develop its core technology and suite of products. Kirby told CoinDesk: "We really believe that when you move all the data in the world into the blockchain you can create a lot of transparency and value." Factom had previously raised over $3m, and already has three enterprise products: a data protection tool, an identity solution and distributed data storage service similar to a more traditional database. In total, Factom's protocol is being used to secure 67.4 mill...

Bitcoin startup Blockstream has a new CEO. The company said today that its first CEO, Austin Hill, is formally stepping aside, with current president Adam Back being appointed to the role. As part of Hill's exit from the firm, he has also stepped down from the board. Blockstream said that Hill was leaving the company to "pursue other opportunities". Back, a noted cryptographer who is one of the startup's founders, said in a statement: "I am honored to take on the CEO position at this important phase in the company's growth and am excited about leading Blockstream to its full potential. We have a world­class team dedicated to building the foundation that will underpin the transformation of finance for years to come." It's been a busy year for Blockstream, which announced $55m in new funding in February. To date, the startup has raised more than $70m in venture capital in order to support its efforts to develop bitcoin-focused initiatives such as sidec...

Wall Street mega-bank JPMorgan has co-developed a private, permissioned version of the ethereum network. The project, presented during a meeting of the Hyperledger technical steering committee last month, was recently demonstrated during the Sibos convention in Geneva. But while the bank avoided the headline-grabbing announcements of its peers like Bank of America and UBS last week, this doesn't mean it is shying away from discussing its work. Called Quorum, the platform was developed in partnership with ethereum startup EthLab, and it is one of the first projects to come out of a working group within the bank known as the Blockchain Center of Excellence. Amber Baldet, program lead for the division, explained that JPMorgan is now looking to open source its blockchain technology work in order to get more developers involved. Baldet told CoinDesk: "One of our goals in working with an open-source platform and contributing our work back is to encourage collaboration and innovation...

Have you ever wanted to send a completely anonymous payment to someone, then realised your method wasn't so anonymous after all? Security is a huge issue in this time and age, and while things are being done every day to make payment sending faster and more secure, Umbra has done a great job of creating an anonymous cryptocurrency that offers features similar to Skype and Bitcoin; it's completely hassle-free, and it's about as private as you can get. Let's take a look at it, shall we? An umbra is the darkest part of a lunar eclipse, and it's almost as dark as the Umbra is in terms of security- Umbra's a privacy centered coin that originated as a fork of bitcoin. With similar intentions to Monero, although slightly more privacy-centered, it was not intended to directly compete with bitcoin in terms of standard sending and recieving; it's simply not what the coin was primarily made for, and you have to realize that about the coin. While designed for priv...

Swiss banking giant UBS has unveiled a project designed to replicate the entire lifecycle of an international trade transaction on Hyperledger's Fabric blockchain. Built in collaboration with IBM, the trade finance project is still in its earliest stages, but it's arguably already more ambitious than many blockchain prototypes that focus on just a single aspect of the process. Designed to "holistically" combine payment transactions, the prototype merges trade finance transactions, foreign exchange payments and more, into one single, elaborate smart contract. According to UBS's head of product and market development for transaction banking, Beat Bannwart, the effort also involved the full range of UBS professionals who are subject matter experts in these areas. Bannwart told CoinDesk: "We looked at it from a transaction banking point of view, so we involved people from trade, from supply chain finance. But the aim was actually to combine all these different st...

A lesser-known startup has successfully tested an important piece of bitcoin's scaling puzzle. Widely considered to be the best way to boost bitcoin's transaction capacity, the Lightning Network proposes a way to execute the majority of bitcoin transactions without involving the blockchain or compromising the network's decentralized architecture. But, as a relatively new proposal, it's still very much a work in progress. That's one reason why recent tests completed by a French company called Acinq have generated so much excitement. Inspired by a white paper released by bitcoin mining firm Bitfury in July, the Acinq team launched 2,500 Amazon Web Service nodes this month as a way to test a proposed routing system for Lightning-style payments earlier this month. Conducted on 18th September, the test put the routing theory proposed in the white paper into practice. As it showed Lightning nodes could effectively route payments, Bitfury CEO Valery Vavilov argued that the...