PYMNTS.com Bitcoin Price and Volatility index.
Bitcoin Tracker | Week 51
Bitcoin is sitting around the same as it was before Thanksgiving at 367.21 from 357.64, according to the PYMNTS.com Bitcoin Price index.
PYMNTS.com caught up with Purse CEO and co-founder, Andrew Lee.
This week’s bitcoin trivia: Bitcoin is now the ninth biggest payment network worldwide after the biggest ecommerce weekend of the year.
As always, if you have any news you’d like to share, please send it our way at contactus@pymnts.com.
On the Plus Side …
The bitcoin network accounted for a total of $296 million in spending on Black Friday and Cyber Monday making it the ninth largest payment network. Top 10 not too bad! However even if the entire spend was in the United States that would only be .30% of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. A Republican from Texas filed a bill for a five-year moratorium on digital currency regulation…whatever could he want to do during that time?
- December 4, 2014 – $296 million was spent across the bitcoin network on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- December 4, 2014 – igot, a bitcoin exchange has opened for business in over 40 countries.
- December 4, 2014 – An Indonesian school is using bitcoin, dogecoin and the blockchain to teach 10 year old schoolchildren about environmental sustainability.
- December 4, 2014 – A new bill, HR 5777, that was submitted to Congress by US Representative Steve Stockman of Texas, calls for a five-year moratorium on digital currency regulation in the US.
- December 4, 2014 – The U.S. Marshals Service received over two dozen bids for the 50,000 bitcoins that were seized from the (alleged) owner of the Silk Road. The winners of the bitcoins which are valued at $18.6 million, will be notified on Friday. The Winklevoss twins didn’t bid this year.
- December 3, 2014 – The CEO of hyperWALLET, a global payments companies that serves the needs of clients that must make a large number of payments, told PYMNTS.com that the best part about bitcoin is the opportunity to allow a payer and payee to not use the same intermediary while still transacting with each other.
- December 3, 2014 – Liberty Teller, a bitcoin ATM operator, rebranded as LibertyX and brought its bitcoin ATM network to 2,500 locations across the US.
- December 3, 2014 – A bitcoin multimillionaire and peace advocate, Roger Ver, believes that the use of bitcoin helps to undermine violence around the world. He believes that by using bitcoin, users can prevent governments from funding their wars.
- December 3, 2014 – The largest bitcoin payment processor, BitPay, announced an integration with Xsolla which helps game developers monetize and improve conversions.
- December 3, 2014 – San Francisco based ChangeTip, a bitcoin-enabled social media tipping platform secured $3.5 million in seed funding.
- December 2, 2014 – NCR Silver are reportedly asking for bitcoin acceptance but haven’t shown as much of an interest in Apple Pay.
- December 1, 2014 – The South Korean bitcoin exchange, Korbit, has agreed to accept bitcoin for a major video-on-demand service in Asia.
- November 20, 2014 – The first end-to-end cash remittance service using bitcoin between Hong Kong and the Philippines. The service, offered by Bitspark, is designed for the over 140,000 Filipino service workers in Hong Kong.
On the Dark Side …
MasterCard is not pleased with the Australian authorities and the lack of regulation of bitcoin down under. Bitcoin mining difficult has decreased for the first time in two years, meaning there haven’t been as much of a demand in mining and HSBC broke up with a hedge fund that is behind a bitcoin fund, due to the risk of money laundering.
- December 4, 2014 – The way that the IRS has set up taxation of crypto currencies may create an accounting nightmare for almost all involved. These rules may encourage employers who were thinking of paying employees in virtual currency to fly under the taxing radar.
- December 3, 2014 – MasterCard wrote to Australian regulators asking them to force bitcoin transactions to go through “regulated and transparent administrators” in the same fasion that traditional payment providers have to use the country’s payment system. In their request, MasterCard emphasized that crypto currencies don’t provide the minimum standards: safety, stability and reliability.
- December 3, 2014 – Bitcoin mining difficulty has decreased for the first time in two years. The difficulty determines how hard it is to has a new block and varies based on the amount of computing power used by miners on the network.
- December 2, 2014 – Recent polling of internet users in North America revealed that the lack of information and knowledge about digital currency is the main barrier to consumer usage.
- December 2, 2014 – Citi’s global head of FX strategy, Steven Englander, believes that the US Marshalls Service may have to auction the seized bitcoins at a steep discount.
- December 1, 2014 – According to VentureBeat, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies might have had a huge potential but it is still too difficult for the public to really grasp the concept.
- December 1, 2014 – The Bitcoin Foundation issued a warning that two websites are pretending to represent the Bitcoin Foundation in an attempt to have people give the fraudsters their bitcoin addresses.
- December 1, 2014 – HSBC severed ties with hedge fund Global Advisors (GA) because HSBC was worried about the money laundering risk of being associated with a bitcoin investment fund.
