Hackers Steal $70 Million in Bitcoin

In a theft on the cryptocurrency-mining service NiceHash, hackers made off with nearly $70 million worth of Bitcoin.

NiceHash announced the security breach on its Facebook page Wednesday afternoon, saying it is investigating the incident and stopping operations for 24 hours. NiceHash also recommended that users change their online passwords as a precaution, though they added “the full scope of what happened is not yet known.

NiceHash said it is working to determine the exact amount of Bitcoin that was stolen. However, the Wall Street Journal reported that Andrej P. Škraba, head of marketing at NiceHash, confirmed to the outlet that approximately 4,700 bitcoin, worth about $70 million, was missing from NiceHash’s bitcoin wallet. Škraba also told the Journal that “it was a professional attack,” but would not give any more information, noting that developments would be released at a later date.

NiceHash said its payment system was also compromised following the incident.

“We are fully committed to restoring the NiceHash service with the highest security measures at the earliest opportunity,” the cryptocurrency-mining service said in its post.

Apple to buy Shazam for $400m'

Apple is close to buying the music recognition app Shazam for about $400m (£300m), media reports say.
Shazam, a UK company founded in 1999, allows people to use their smartphone or computer to identify and buy music through a snippet of sound.



Shazam, which says it has more than 100 million monthly users, makes most of its revenue from commissions paid on referrals to Apple's iTunes Store.
Neither Apple nor Shazam have commented on the reports on the TechCrunch site.
If the deal is confirmed, Shazam will become the latest in a string of UK technology firms to be bought up by larger businesses.

Shazam - a billion dollar London success
The influential Music Business Worldwide site points out that the reported price is significantly lower than the $1bn valuation placed on Shazam during its last funding round in 2015.

By acquiring Shazam, Apple would basically cut out the middleman and save money on commissions.
It would also hurt the competition, since Shazam would no longer be referring people to rivals Spotify and Google Play Music.

The deal would also help the Apple Music service gain ground on Spotify, by making it easier for users to find songs and add them to playlists.
At present, Spotify has 60 million users worldwide, while Apple Music has just 27 million.

Bitcoin Market Cap to Surpass Trillions in Long-Term

In an interview with CNBC, Cameron Winklevoss explained that the properties of bitcoin allow it to operate as a premier store of value that is in orders of magnitude better than gold in many aspects, including transportability, divisibility, and monetary supply.

“We’ve always felt that bitcoin, given its properties, is gold 2.0 — it disrupts gold. Gold is scarce, bitcoin is actually fixed. Bitcoin is way more portable and way more divisible,” said Winklevoss.

He added that if bitcoin can continue to disrupt the $6 trillion gold market in the long-term, it will be able to hit a trillion dollars in a relatively short period of time, given that the market valuation of bitcoin already remains close to $300 billion.

“Long term, directionally, it is a multi trillion-dollar asset — I don’t know how long it takes to get there,” emphasized Winklevoss.

Bitcoin is rapidly transforming the global finance industry as a decentralized store of value. If the bitcoin market is able to sustain its growth rate over the next few years, it will penetrate into the gold and offshore banking industries. The combined market cap of gold and offshore banking industry amount to nearly $40 trillion.

Winklevoss noted that other currencies and cryptocurrencies are not the competition of bitcoin. Rather, other safe haven assets and store of values such as gold are the real competition of the cryptocurrency. He explained:

“Bitcoin is not competing with those other currencies. It is competing with gold. Bitcoin is the oldest, it has the first mover advantage and there’s tremendous liquidity,”

A study conducted by Asset Protection Planners in April of 2015 estimated the amount of cash and assets stashed in offshore bank accounts at over $32 trillion.

At the time, tax lawyer and Liechtenstein wealth adviser Philip Marcovici, stated that the motive of both individual and institutional investors storing money in offshore banking accounts is not to avoid taxes, but to obtain privacy and financial confidentiality.

“For most people, it is not only the objective of not paying taxes. It’s the objective of obtaining the right to privacy and seeking financial confidentiality,” said Marcovici.

Structurally and conceptually, bitcoin is a significantly better system to store money for individuals and institutional investors than offshore bank accounts, primarily because governments can still crackdown on offshore bank accounts. In 2016, the US government fined Swiss banks $1.3 billion, involving more than 43,000 offshore bank accounts holding $48 billion.

As a decentralized and peer-to-peer store of value, governments cannot possibly crackdown on bitcoin holders and accounts. Hence, it provides investors with privacy and financial confidentiality, which offshore bank accounts were meant to provide.

If bitcoin can account for even 10 percent of the global offshore banking industry, bitcoin’s market cap can surpass $3.2 trillion. Based on the fixed supply of 21 million, a $3.2 trillion market cap values bitcoin at $152.380.

How to buy Bitcoin

A lot of people are talking about cryptocurrencies these days, probably because they've gone so much higher this year.

The most important thing to remind ourselves is that anything to do with bitcoin or ethereum right now is pure speculation. Prices are rising because there is a finite supply and people are betting that other people are going to buy at higher prices later. There are zero fundamentals involved because these digital assets produce no cash flows, like a stock or a bond.

Whether or not cryptocurrencies represent the future of commerce or are just in a giant bubble, people are curious about how they can experiment.

I do not recommend that people risk their money in cryptocurrencies, but I have been experimenting personally, just to learn and see for myself what it's all about. This video is for people who are curious and it's not an endorsement of any particular coin or service.

Okay, with that disclaimer, I'll tell you a little bit about how I've been doing my research.

I chose to use Coinbase.com to buy my first bitcoin this July. It's a brokerage and handles storage for people who want to buy and sell digital assets.

To get started, I created a login and an account. I was then prompted to link a bank account, which took 48 hours to establish. I was able to execute my first purchase, locking in my price immediately, although it took almost a week before the money was transferred in from my bank and the coin purchase showed up on the screen.

The first thing you'll see when you log in is a dashboard. It defaults to showing you Bitcoin's recent price activity, although you can toggle over to see prices of Ethereum and Litecoin, the other two digital assets Coinbase currently allows you to buy and sell.

Below, you'll see the holdings in your account.

The buy/sell page is where you place an order. It looks like an online stock brokerage page, and that's probably not an accident. You have the option of buying fractional amounts of cryptocurrency. You don't have to buy one whole coin at a time. I believe that this has sped adoption among young speculators first starting out with lower dollar figures.

You can also see that there is an option to place a fixed dollar amount at a specified interval. For example, you can have the same dollar amount move into your account daily, weekly, biweekly or monthly, making an automatic purchase regardless of price. It's sort of like dollar cost averaging.

The most popular news source for all things crypto is called Coindesk. Coindesk has set itself up to be something like the Wall Street Journal for digital assets. The news coverage goes on throughout the day, written by analysts and journalists who cover the space.

It is, of course, highly biased toward being bullish on crypto in general so it's important to take everything you read with a grain of salt.

Let me remind everyone that so far, Bitcoin has had a parabolic rise and has turned into something of a mania, and there is no reason to think that this could go on uninterrupted. In fact, one of the most enduring features of the crypto-space is the periodic crash, which comes without any warning, even though all of the crashes have led to higher prices so far.

Storage and custody is another tricky issue, with hacks of these exchanges having occurred on a regular basis. For that reason, many players have been taking their digital coins off of the exchanges and storing them on a chip that is not connected to the internet.

Timing a mania or a bubble is very difficult, so my attitude is to expect that every dollar I experiment with could be lost.

The world of cryptocurrencies is both exciting and fraught with danger, volatility and the chance of theft. It's very early right now and anyone experimenting should do so with eyes wide open and a high risk tolerance.

Ethereum: Moving forward from bitcoin

Ethereum might not be as intuitive as the web as we know it today, but still, anyone with a computer or a smartphone can try the platform out as long as they own 'ether' – unique pieces of code that allow updates to the blockchain's ledger.

The thought of using ethereum might sound intimidating, but it could be rewarding.
If the 'unstoppable world computer' develops according to plan, it could provide alternatives to the Facebooks and Googles that many people use every day.

What is Ethereum?


Before you can understand ethereum, it helps to first understand the internet.
Today, our personal data, passwords and financial information are all largely stored on other people's computers – in clouds and servers owned by companies like Amazon, Facebook or Google. Even this CoinDesk article is stored on a server controlled by a company that charges to hold this data should it be called upon.

This setup has a number of conveniences, as these companies deploy teams of specialists to help store and secure this data, and remove the costs that come with hosting and uptime.
But with this convenience, there is also vulnerability. As we've learned, a hacker or a government can gain unwelcome access to your files without your knowledge, by influencing or attacking a third-party service – meaning they can steal, leak or change important information.

Brian Behlendorf, the creator of the Apache Web Server, has gone so far as to label this centralized design the "original sin" of the Internet. Some like Behlendorf argue the Internet was always meant to be decentralized, and a splintered movement has sprung up around using new tools, including blockchain technology, to help achieve this goal.

Ethereum is one of the newest technologies to join this movement.
While bitcoin aims to disrupt PayPal and online banking, ethereum has the goal of using a blockchain to replace internet third parties — those that store data, transfer mortgages and keep track of complex financial instruments.

In short, ethereum wants to be a 'World Computer' that would decentralize – and some would argue, democratize – the existing client-server model.

With ethereum, servers and clouds are replaced by thousands of so-called "nodes" run by volunteers from across the globe (thus forming a "world computer").

The vision is that ethereum would enable this same functionality to people anywhere around the world, enabling them to compete to offer services on top of this infrastructure.

Scrolling through a typical app store, for example, you’ll see a variety of colorful squares representing everything from banking to fitness to messaging apps. These apps rely on the company (or another third-party service) to store your credit card information, purchasing history and other personal data – somewhere, generally in servers controlled by third-parties.

Your choice of apps is of course also governed by third parties, as Apple and Google maintain and curate (or in some cases, censor) the specific apps you’re able to download. Take the example of an online document service like Evernote or Google Docs.

Ethereum, if all goes according to plan, would return control of the data in these types of services to its owner and the creative rights to its author.

The idea is that one entity will no longer have control over your notes and that no one could suddenly ban the app itself, temporarily taking all of your notebooks offline. Only the user can make changes, not any other entity.

In theory, it combines the control that people had over their information in the past with the easy-to-access information that we’re used to in the digital age. Each time you save edits or add or delete notes, every node on the network makes the change.