Newsletter #66

28 February - 7 March 2015

This week we saw two big launches in the ecosystem: Mercury, a trustless decentralized exchange and Abra, a peer-to-peer Bitcoin remittance app.

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Latest News

Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT) is poised to become the world’s first publicly traded bitcoin fund beating the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust (WBT). FINRA, the financial industry regulatory body, has approved the company’s listing on the OTCQX, the most heavily regulated of over-the-counter exchanges and will trade under a ticker symbol of “GBTC.”

CoinFire gives an in-depth study of GAW Miners and their business dealings which have attracted the attention of several US regulators for potentially fraudulent activities.

Market

Tim Swanson chips into the discussion on the fair value of a bitcoin.

Richard Brown explores the idea of a central bank issued cryptocurrency.

Ecosystem

Mercury, a trustless decentralized exchange, released an Alpha version of their software that allows for trades to happen entirely on the blockchain, with no risk of the exchange getting hacked or exchange operators running off with your money. Private keys are only stored on your computer.

Abra (A Better Remittance App) is a new iPhone and Android software cash wallet and money transfer application. It is designed after the Hawala model and works on a network of Abra Tellers. Abra Tellers function like mobile airtime agents but sell and buy digital currency.

William Mougayar spent the last month combing and classifying through the crypto-technology market and has published a large database of 425 companies, spread across 64 sub-categories.

CoinDaddy has released what it calls its WHOIS for assets as part of a larger series of releases meant to support digital asset trading. CoinDaddy currently supports Counterparty and Dogeparty.

Mining

A paper published by researchers from the New York University provides insight into why many bitcoin miners fail.

Images which allegedly depict the site of two of the alleged largest bitcoin mining farms in world have been shared via the Chinese blogging site Weibo. The photos showcase what is home to the alleged miners of Antpool and BW.com, which as of today represents 19.2% and 7.9% of the hashrate respectively.

Legal

Comptroller of the Currency Thomas J. Curry is right to argue that the letter of the law may have to change in the face of technological advancement in order to carry out the spirit of the law.

A bill introduced to the California legislature aims to bring virtual currency businesses more clearly under the state’s Money Transmission Act.