6 Major Firms Use Ethereum / Coinbase Halts Trading / Japan Salaries In Bitcoin / Trump & Blockchain
Story - Ethereum Moons on UBS News
Let’s begin with the Ethereum chart:
https://www.coinigy.com/main/markets/BITF/ETH/USD
3 all time highs in the last 3 days.
The whole Cryptoverse is now capped at half a trillion dollars. Still tiny tiny compared to the old financial system.
So what shot Ethereum’s market cap over $63m?
Well here’s one piece of news that came out:
Most of you have probably heard of UBS they are a global financial services company based in Switzerland.
They provide things like wealth management, asset management, investment banking, private banking, corporate banking etc.
From the 3rd of January 2018, companies will be subjected to a new regulatory reporting standard called MiFID 2.
I find it interesting that this applies to investment intermediaries, meaning it would not apply to peer to peer systems like a decentralised exchange.
If you only read the headline it sounds like amazing news, however that enthusiasm gets dampened by the first paragraph.
It specifically says they are going to run a permission blockchain on Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
Meaning they are going to build their own separate Ethereum based blockchain to run this on.
Meaning they are not going to be buying Ether from the market to pay transaction fees.
They may find it beneficial to make use of the public Ethereum network but that remains to be seen.
They kind of have to take this approach because the public Ethereum network isn’t going to scale in time for them to make use of it.
I mean it says they are doing this in order to get in line with 2018 EU regulations so they don’t have time to wait for Ethereum to scale.
Story - Coinbase Halts Trading for ETH and LTC
https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-halts-litecoin-ether-trades-prices-spike/
At the peak GDAX processed $1.8b of LiteCoin trades in a 24 hour period.
I guess that was a bit too much for the Coinbase IT infrastructure to handle so they halted trading.
I know Coinbase keeps cropping up in the news because of the poor performance of its platform and I can imagine how frustrating it is, however we have to get some perspective here.
I don’t think these issues are caused by Coinbase slacking.
I think they are doing their level best to upgrade their infrastructure, but every time they do that, the demand for their services increases by another order of magnitude.
Eventually Coinbase hits certain limits on how far it can grow.
It takes time to hire new people, train them and get them setup in customer support centers.
It takes time to setup additional servers and integrate them into their cluster.
Every time they add something they need to make sure they don’t break anything they already have, or worse still open up a security hole because they are rushing their upgrades.
Brian Armstrong even says as much in this Medium post from a few days ago in which he cautions everyone about possible outages during times of significant volume:
And it’s not just them either, last night I made a failed attempt to do a trade via Changelly because the site either wouldn’t load, or when it did load the interface wasn’t working properly.
I put that down to them being overwhelmed with traffic as well.
This always leaves me to wonder how many trades are missing from the market.
Like how many orders haven’t even been placed because of these technical barriers? Interesting though ay?
Story - Japanese Internet Giant GMO Offers to Pay 4700+ Employees in Bitcoin
https://news.bitcoin.com/japanese-internet-giant-gmo-pay-employees-bitcoin/
They can’t take their whole salary in Bitcoin, the minimum if around $88 and the maximum is $881.
Their salary will simply get reduced by the amount of Bitcoin they opt for.
The Bitcoin part of their salary will then be deposited into their GMO Coins account.
GMO Coins is the cryptocurrency exchange that the company owns.
This scheme will start being offered to employees of GMO Internet and then gradually rolled out to the other 42 subsidiary companies that they own.
This is a big piece of the cryptocurrency puzzle, allowing people to be paid in crypto so they can skip the whole process of taking their salary and then buying Bitcoin with it.
Story - Trump Signs Defense Bill Authorizing Blockchain Study
https://www.coindesk.com/trump-signs-defense-bill-authorizing-blockchain-study/
President Trump has signed off on a $700b military spending bill that includes a mandate for a blockchain cybersecurity study. How much of that is for the blockchain study though? Hmmmm….
[orange]
But here is my favourite bit…
[yellow]
Ding ding ding, and there’s the opening to put obstacles in the way of blockchain adoption.
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What good is 100K Bitcoin if Coinbase is going to crash every other day???
I am with you on Coinbase. They are in the process of scaling and I am sure they knew this was coming. I bet they just didn't think it was going to be this soon. As soon as futures were announced they increased customer service by 600+%. Both BTC an all Ethereum based networks have been swapped in the last few weeks. Everyone is making huge moves to scale for next year.
As far as Coinbase shutting down and having trouble scaling to meet needs of transaction traffic I think Cryptos are too hot to handle hahaaa and I expect most of these exchanges are going to have trouble with incoming traffic from here on out AND I LOVE IT. Keep up the great posts Monk. JD
BTC: savings account, LTC: current account
@marketingmonk you left me wondering, is all of this ethereum hipe based on a false premise ? Even if that is, I'd say ethereum has enough value to sustain it's increase.
Ethereum is still affordable and is one of the most widely known & trusted block chain. New comers to crypto will hedge their initial investment in bitcoin with some in ether. All we need now is for a major ecommerce platform, say Amazon, to accept ether as payment and it will explode!
I dont think Amazon can adopt crypto until they can be sure the network they select can handle the volume of transactions.
You haven't seen anything yet! Expect exponential growth! 2018 will be the year when the masses will join in and altcoins are going to skyrocket!
The problem that I see with the mania is that everybody can't just buy bitcoins and become rich. That should tell you something.
I see you @nokodemion. You're right about that, however nobody said that everybody will become rich. The crypto market cap right now is 0,5 trillion USD. All bank currency in circulation all over the world is approximately 1,5 - 2 quadrillion USD. In other words, it's too early at the moment and the whole crypto - thing is something entirely new. There's plenty of ground for growth. Of course, that won't last forever and therefore you have a good point there. Just keep in mind that it hasn't even started yet.
Amen to that.
exactly
Man I hope you're right! Ride the wave!
I am damn right! ;)
Good article. I think ETH acceptance will continue to increase and so will its value. Even though this is a huge, highly supported currency, my major concern for this currency is the growing number of alternatives.
More alternatives should just bring higher liquidity to the whole market, positive thing in the long run?
we are reaching the acceptance time for the cryptocurrency.
This is the most important time for a new product in marketing
Coinbase really pulled some bullshit. The stunt they pulled was reminiscent of a shady 80s brokerage firm. What good are they if they shut down trading every time there's some movement on the currency?
Some of steemit post so much attractive... which make it special.
Special about bit coin steem block chain etc