A Weekly Update Delivered to your Inbox every Monday View this email in your browser This Week In Digital Currency | BTC:$329.81 (6.24%) | LTC:$3.62 (2.77%) | DOGE:$0.000228 (8.80%) | NXT:$0.019 (13.64%) | PPC:$0.75 (12.67%) | BLK:$0.031 (3.13%) | DRK:$1.70 (10.94%) | Tweet Share +1 We launched our newest column this Wednesday, Banking on Bitcoin. The column will explore the potential of Bitcoin and other digital currencies from the perspective of an anonymous Wall Street insider. Bob Fogg is an anonymous finance insider and our newest contributor at Coinprices. He works at a large buy-side firm, which provides him with an intimate view of the industry. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Bitcoin project went live this week. All undergraduates were invited to accept their $100 worth of bitcoin to use as they please. MIT educates some of the smartest young minds in the world and it is exciting to speculate on what new possibilities they may come up with now that they have been exposed to Bitcoin. The price of bitcoin slid roughly 6% this week, hitting as low as $316 on Bitfinex on Saturday. It's easy to get wrapped up in the short term price movements, but it is important to remember that the lack of liquidity on the exchanges means that short term movements will continue to be erratic. Put simply, it means that a small number of sell or buy orders can move the price up or down significantly. For instance, b itcoin trading volume is minuscule w hen compared to the trading volume of major publicly traded companies. Until more money flows into bitcoin, price discovery will be rough and volatility will remain high. Day trading bitcoin for short term profits remains a risky gamble with high rewards but the fundamentals for long term growth remain strong.



Just to put it in perspective:



Over the last month, roughly 10 million bitcoin were traded on exchanges worldwide. Over the same period, the price ranged between $275 and $415, which we will average to $345 for convenience. That means that roughly $3.5 billion USD worth of bitcoin were traded on the exchanges over the last month.



Let's compare that number to the one month volume of some well known stocks:



Bitcoin, XBT, Market Cap: $4.5B USD, 330k btc traded per day, roughly $3.5 billion USD



Chipotle, CMG, Market Cap: $20B USD, 530K shares per day, roughly $10 billion USD traded per month



Facebook, FB, Market Cap: $209B USD, 4 4M shares per day, roughly $99 billion USD traded per month



Apple, AAPL, Market Cap: $633B USD, 60M shares per day, roughly $194 billion USD traded per month



As you can see, the amount of money in bitcoin is incredibly tiny when compared to the amount of money in major equity markets. On top of that, Bitcoin is still an extremely new technology, with less than 3 million people currently using it. We are still very much in the early days of the adoption cycle and as adoption increases, the price stands to increase substantially. One major issue holding back adoption is the ability to purchase bitcoin is still significantly limited. It is much easier to sell bitcoin or use it to pay for goods/services than it is to buy bitcoin. However, that is changing everyday with many companies focused on making purchasing bitcoin easier, bitcoin ATMs are opening up worldwide, and bitcoin ETFs should soon be a reality. When the price rose past $1000 last year, it rose too fast, but now the infrastructure is just starting to catch up. The first bitcoin ATM had just rolled out this time last year, now there are 285 bitcoin ATMs worldwide. You couldn't even store bitcoin on your iPhone a year ago today, because Apple was blocking Bitcoin apps. The infrastructure has grown substantially recently, and doesn't show any signs of slowing down.



Side note: Currently 3500 bitcoin are being mined everyday, with many being sold on the market. This adds roughly 10% inflation and creates a constant downward sell pressure. The number of new bitcoin created everyday is designed to decrease over time, with it dropping by half sometime over the next two years. When the mining rewards drops by half, so will the downward price pressure. On Tuesday, Norweigan digital currency exchange, Justcoin, announced that they were shutting down , due to issues with securing a bank account. Justcoin Exchange was founded in 2013 with its office in Oslo, Norway. Justcoin was founded by Klaus Bugge Lund and Andreas Brekken. At the time of their closure, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple, and Stellar were being traded on their platform. They were the #1 exchange by volume traded for both Ripple and Stellar, #11 for Litecoin, and #14 for Bitcoin.



As the news broke we immediately reached out to the Justcoin team who assured us that all customer funds were safe and withdrawals were being processed. We have since received confirmation from multiple Justcoin users that their withdrawals did in fact go through, and we have not heard from any users who have had withdrawal issues.



We have reached out to the CTO and CoFounder of the exchange, Andreas Brekken, for a short follow up. He has yet to respond. Yesterday, at the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas, Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky spoke about his pending Bitlicense Bitcoin regulations. As the head of the New York Department of Financial Services, Lawsky has proposed a Bitlicense that could be used as a model for future federal Bitcoin regulations. Yesterday, he announced that the NYDFS was looking into a transitional framework that would allow small startups to scale into the Bitlicense gradually rather than being overwhelmed by the same compliance requirements as large established institutions. This is similar to the stance he took at a Bitlicense discussion held at Cardozo Law School last month. He remained light on the details and it should be interesting to see how the Department decides to implement such a framework.



The public comment period for the NYDFS Bitlicense Guidelines ended two weeks ago. You can read all public responses at our



According to Superintendent Lawsky, the next steps are as follows:

1) NYDFS will read and make public all comments.

2) NYDFS will release redrafted guidelines.

3) NYDFS will open up another public commentary period. You can read all public responses at our Bitlicense Hub 1) NYDFS will read and make public all comments.2) NYDFS will release redrafted guidelines.3) NYDFS will open up another public commentary period.

4) NYDFS will release final regulations with 45-60 days for companies to comply. The former head of Google Wallet, Osama Bedier, announced his newest project this week, Poynt. Poynt is a next generation point of sale device that accepts pretty much every payment method and costs only $299. It can accept current credit cards, future credit cards with the EMV pin and chip system, bluetooth payments, NFC payments, and QR code payments. This makes the device compatible with Apple Pay, Google Wallet, CurrentC, and Bitcoin. Want to make sure you didn't miss a single thing this week? You can view every top digital currency related story of the last 4 months, on our website and in our Android app. Still in the News... CoinPrices is now available on Android! We plan to update it with an even more user friendly layout shortly. We also have an iPhone app in the works, but for the time being, all smartphone users can take advantage of our completely redesigned mobile website. Let us know what you think. Check out our new layout! We just rolled out the new version of CoinPrices. Our homepage is meant to be your central hub to all things digital currency.



Our redesigned news feed tracks all of the most important digital currency news from around the web, linking directly to the primary source whenever possible. Many of our competitors use automated algorithms to populate their respective news feeds, choosing quantity over quality, but our feed is curated by our editorial team ensuring higher quality links. Our feed never has duplicate items, only links to reputable sources, and includes all major news items occurring throughout the day. The entire news feed archive will be easily searchable, coming soon.



We have upgraded our graphing capabilities, giving you more customization, and making it simple to compare digital currency performance to other asset classes. All of the coins we track can now be plotted directly against the performance of major indices, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nikkei 225, popular commodities such as Gold or Oil, and most major stocks. We are also now tracking the 24hr volatility for all coins. There are still many glitches with our new graphing implementation, and we appreciate your patience as we work through the issues. We plan to add many more features over the coming days/weeks.



We'd love to here your feedback on the changes. Let us know what you think on twitter or by email.

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