Last month, San Francisco-based bitcoin startup Shift Payments announced plans to release a new debit-card system that would enable users to pay with traditional bank accounts, as well as bitcoin and Ripple wallets. Backed by tech-industry kingmakers Y Combinator, the card promised to serve as a next-generation bridge between digital currencies and traditional banking by […]
Could bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies be used to aid terrorist groups? That’s the question officials from the U.S. Special Operations Command asked members of the bitcoin industry this week in a meeting Tampa, Florida. While not an entirely secret event, the Virtual Currency Workshop was a closed-door conference seeking to determine the potential for anti-American […]
Only a week after exiting beta testing for its new bitcoin-to-dollar exchange platform, China’s OKCoin has skyrocketed past Western exchanges in terms of volume. As CoinDesk reports, the USD/BTC trading pair on the site had a volume of 16,342 BTC yesterday, handily beating Bitfinex’s 15,552 BTC volume, as well as Bitstamp’s 14,463 and BTC-e’s 6,556. […]
Perhaps in advance of their looming PayPal partnership, the engineers at Atlanta-based bitcoin payment processor BitPay have been hard at work updating Copay and Bitcore — their open-source, multisig wallet platform and bitcoin core implementation, respectively — to become as “featureful as possible.” The new updates, announced today, bring a range of new options and […]
Ripple Labs announced today that their bitcoin-friendly alt-coin system will soon be offered to the customers of two small U.S. banks. The Ripple system is part of a new low-cost, real-time international payments service offered by CBW Bank of Topeka, Kansas, and Cross River Bank of Teaneck, New Jersey. The integration is the first time […]
One of the biggest concerns about PayPal’s rapidly approaching integration with bitcoin-based payments has been liquidity. The eBay-owned payment processing giant handled around $180 billion in transactions last year, roughly 30 times bitcoin’s total market cap. If PayPal aims to bring bitcoin payments to the masses, even a relative giant in the space, like Coinbase, […]
In an interview with CBC News, Square CEO Jack Dorsey dropped an interesting hint about his company’s future relationship with bitcoin. Speaking about concerns that Square might face stiff competition from the forthcoming Apple Pay mobile point-of-sale system, Dorsey said: “We’re building a register so that sellers can accept a credit card, so they can […]
The Jersey-based Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Fund (GABI) announced yesterday that it was in the early stages of deploying the fund’s assets into bitcoin. The company spent the whole of August and much of early September acquiring customers for its initial offer period, and appears to have closed that initial round in the last few […]
International environmental nonprofit Greenpeace announced today that has partnered with BitPay to begin accepting bitcoin donations. The organization is in a unique position to benefit from bitcoin’s international and decentralized nature, as the it is wholly funded by direct individual donations rather than corporate sponsorship or government support. As a result, Greenpeace donations are typically […]
The first bitcoin-related company to submit to an audit under the standards of the International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE) has passed with flying colors. Netagio, a small bitcoin and gold exchange based in the U.K., recently announced the results of an ISAE 3000 review conducted by international auditing firm BDO. Netagio claims this to […]