2018 September

The new financial ecosystem and its relationship with traditional banking is like a multi-circled Venn diagram: there are overlaps with some of the disruptor ‘neo-banks’ offering debit cards, for example, but no loans. There are many more examples of ‘we offer this, but not that’ in the emerging world of finance and personal banking. This

Real world cryptocurrency use stories are encouraging for its supporters. This one concerns a café in Bern, the Swiss capital, that is offering a ‘first of its kind’ service: customers can order items using bitcoin and the Lightning Network (LN). All customers have to do is ‘Scan, pay and pick up inside.’ EnergyKitchen is offering

Are you fond of a good mystery that needs to be solved? We’ve got one for you today from the world of cryptocurrency. On 16th September Reddit published the fact that a Bitcoin wallet valued at $720 million has just been ‘reawoken’. It has been asleep for four years, but during the last 10 days

You can always depend on John McAfee for an attention-grabbing headline: the man is a master of saying what he knows everyone would like to hear. This week he’s back on form after a few quiet weeks: perhaps he was on holiday, or just waiting for the best moment to release his latest prediction, and

Tim Draper, the venture capital investor, speaking at the DealStreetAsia PE-VC Summit 2018 held in Singapore, said in his talk that he believes the total cryptocurrency market capitalisation will hit $80 trillion in the next 15 years. Currently, the total market cap is $202 billion, which shows you the extent to which Draper believes it

More good news on the ethereum front: Vlad Zamfir, one of ethereum’s creators, has announced that it is one step closer to sharding its blockchain. Sharding is a way of alleviating the strain of a growing network by breaking the blockchain up into smaller units, called shards. Scaling is an issue that the ethereum blockchain

So far, 2018 has been a wild ride for crypto leading to uncertainty, concern and an overall bad mood regarding things as diverse as questions about regulation, ethereum scaling problems and the SEC delaying decision-making about ETFs. But, as Christina Comben writes at The Merkle, “If there’s anything we know about this crazy space, it’s

If you own ETH you may be viewing its daily price while covering your eyes with you hands, just like watching Nightmare on Elm Street the first time round. It is a case of falling, falling, falling and some wonder if it will go lower than $150. Today is no different. ETH is getting battered

There is a growing anxiety amongst miners working to secure the ethereum blockchain. The problems for them stems from the new ASICS, which is the specialised mining hardware built to maximize the software’s rewards and on the ethereum forum, there are a number of miners threatening to take their equipment to other crytpocurrencies. One forum

OK, there is a catch – you have to watch porn films! Pornhub has become the first company to pay users for watching adult content. And, in a recent milestone moment, the firm paid out $10,000 to one user for the one million films that person had watched over the years. The Merkle reported this extraordinary