Virtual currency transactions are taxable by law just like transactions in any other property. The IRS has issued guidance in IRS Notice 2014-21for use by taxpayers and their return preparers that addresses transactions in virtual currency, also known as digital currency.
Source: irs.gov
Regional news sources report South Korea’s financial authorities are working on legislation to formally allow initial coin offerings (ICOs) in an effort to appear more welcoming to the larger financial technology community.
Source: bitcoin.com
France plans to create a legal framework for raising funds via cryptocurrencies and aims to become a leading center for offerings in bitcoin-style digital currencies, its finance minister wrote on a news website.
Source: reuters.com
As you may know, SXSW is a conference and festival that celebrates the convergence of the interactive, film, and the music industry. This year SXSW took place March 9th through 18th and attracted 300,000 people to Austin, TX. And, let me tell you, a big chunk of them were blockchain enthusiasts.
Source: hackernoon.com
Liquidity and volatility are two issues that dog almost every blockchain technology startup and cryptocurrency, which is why “stablecoins” are becoming popular. Backed by gold, oil, fiat, and other, more established currencies, assets, and utilities, stablecoins offer an interesting alternative to regular cryptocurrencies.
Source: venturebeat.com
The main concern for proponents of cryptocurrency is that regulation will be introduced in a way that will stifle innovation in the sector, as Hamel tweeted before the hearing. In China, a major hub for cryptocurrency innovation and infrastructure, the government has begun to ramp up a widespread clampdown on cryptocurrency. For example, last year the government restricted trading on exchanges, pushing market leaders OKCoin and Huobi to launch cryptocurrency-only sites, OKex and Huobi Pro respectively.
Hardware wallets like those sold by Ledger are designed to protect the user’s private keys from malicious software that might try to harvest those credentials from the user’s computer. The devices enable transactions via a connection to a USB port on the user’s computer, but they don’t reveal the private key to the PC.
Source: krebsonsecurity.com
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
Source: saleemrashid.com
The U.S. executive branchissued an executive order prohibiting the use or purchase of Venezuela’s Petro cryptocurrency, claiming the currency was issued unlawfully in an effort to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, and in particular the President Nicolás Maduro’s regime.
Source: digitaltrends.com
Twitter will ban advertisements for several kinds of cryptocurrency products and projects. The policy, according to Sky News, would go into effect in two weeks and would block ads for initial coin offerings, token sales, and cryptocurrency wallets. It could also encompass a ban on ads for cryptocurrency exchanges.
Source: fortune.com
The company is updating its financial services-related ad policies to ban any advertising about cryptocurrency-related content, including initial coin offerings (ICOs), wallets, and trading advice, Google’s director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, told CNBC.
Source: cnbc.com
Amazon as a Tech company and everything store, is perhaps the only thing Millennials trust more than investing in cryptocurrencies. We’ve now reached a point where Big Tech will race to adopt them and it could change the future of banking and payments.
Source: medium.com
Last week, the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management hosted CryptoTax for a seminar on the German taxation regime. The webinar recording is available on YouTube (in German only), and the key points have been summarized here for the benefit of a global audience.
Source: medium.com
Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges on the Internet, said today that hackers and a well-executed phishing campaign are to blame for the Bitcoin sell-offs from yesterday’s afternoon.
Source: bleepingcomputer.com
Governments and Internet Service Providers in Turkey, Syria and Egypt Caught Infecting Citizens with Cryptocurrency Mining and surveillance malware.
Source: thehackernews.com
On December 19, Coinbase made a surprise announcement that it had started to trade a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Cash. Coinbase has more customers than the mainstream finance company Charles Schwab, so its decision on whether to support a cryptocurrency has a big impact on that cryptocurrency’s value. Indeed, within minutes of Coinbase’s announcement, the price of Bitcoin Cash shot up by nearly $1,000 and all further Bitcoin Cash trades were cancelled.
There is a third category of double-spends that is not documented: double-spending through full node consensus failure. The risk for this grows every day.
Source: medium.com
The affair between the sex industry and cryptocurrency isn’t new. Porn has historically been ahead of the curve tech-wise, and this holds true for Bitcoin adoption. Back in 2013, UK escort service VIP Passion started accepting Bitcoin payments.
Two years later, sex workers started posting Twitter tutorials on how to use Bitcoin to pay for advertisements on Backpage.com when major credit cards pulled their services from the platform due to rampant sex trafficking.
Over the past five months, Camp has been sketching out plans for a brand new cryptocurrency that aims to fix technical and other challenges plaguing existing projects, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. His hope, he told Fortune, is to resuscitate virtual currency’s original promise: an instant, affordable, and borderless means of payment for the masses.
Source: fortune.com