Shortly before Passover, young Jesus arrived in Jerusalem. There, in the courtyards of the Temple, he saw merchants offering their wares next to money changers and his heart filled with rage. He turned their tables and scattered the market in an act that would shape Christian morals about money. In the face of the holy poor ideal of the New Testament, the Catholic theocracy has always worked to strengthen its political-economic position.

Bitcoin dropped below $7,000 a few minutes before press time, in a move that warrants caution as a possible bull trap. The leading cryptocurrency closed yesterday (as per UTC) above the trendline sloping downwards from the March 5 high and May 5 high, seemingly confirming a long-term bearish-to-bullish trend change. However, the follow-through has been disappointing. As of writing, BTC is changing hands at $6,965 on Bitfinex – down 3.5 percent on a 24-hour basis.

The crypto industry is booming, and it’s unlikely to slow down for a long time. For anyone outside of the community, understanding the basics can be a challenge as cryptoinsiders tend to explain things very technically. Here, I have tried to break down crypto concepts. So if you’d like to understand crypto basics, read on...

Who’s using Bitcoin to buy and sell goods and services? A lot fewer people than you probably would have guessed. After peaking at $411 million in September, the amount of money the largest 17 crypto merchant-processing services received in the best-known cryptocurrency has been on a steady decline, hitting a recent low of $60 million in May, according to research that startup Chainalysis Inc. conducted for Bloomberg News.

Bitcoin’s capacity is limited. Meanwhile, smart contracts can be resource intensive. So even though Bitcoin has always supported basic smart contract functionality, the two have never been a natural match. But a recent topic of research spearheaded by Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra could help fix this. Recently presented as key part of his presentation at Scaling Bitcoin Stanford, “Scriptless Scripts” have the potential to completely move certain smart contracts off of Bitcoin’s blockchain — while still leveraging all of Bitcoin’s security.

A newly published Coinbase patent seeks to protect a way of making bitcoin purchases more secure for customers. In the filing, published August 14, the U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange outlined how it could develop a payment portal which would allow users to pay using bitcoin directly from their digital wallet.

Even though members of the US House of Representatives have several times talked down on cryptocurrencies, events in the past couple of months have revealed that some congressmen are secretly investing in crypto assets. Thanks to an ethics memo issued by the House Ethics Committee in June. The mandate required that lawmakers, officers, and employees disclose all cryptocurrency investments over $1,000 in a financial disclosure report to be submitted within 45 days after the purchase of such digital assets.

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On any given day, as much as two-thirds of the transaction activity registered on the Bitcoin network has nothing to do with buying goods and services or trading the virtual currency.

The fallout from the alleged scheme extends as far as Texas and has embroiled a former lawmaker.

Pantera Capital officials continue to maintain an upbeat outlook for cryptocurrency amidst the current market downturn. In an ICO and digital asset funds conference call Tuesday, CEO and chief investment officer Dan Morehead said blockchains are the next step in the evolution of equity, while cryptocurrency is a superior form of currency. He called bitcoin the biggest disruption of this generation.

List of bitcoin startups, cryptocurrency providers, blockchain companies in UK, bitcoin companies London with portfolio & blockchain services.

The number of people who bought virtual currencies more than doubled last winter. For people who got in late, the bust has been disastrous.

Ever since its inception Bitcoin has never really been private. Although Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper suggests privacy was a design goal of the protocol, government agencies, analytics companies and other interested parties — let’s call them “spies” — have ways to analyze the public blockchain and peer-to-peer network, to cluster Bitcoin addresses and tie them to IP addresses or other identifying information.

The debate about the value of bitcoin has been going on since the inception of cryptocurrencies. Some think that bitcoin is the future of currency and will replace fiat currencies as a whole because of the convenience that it provides. On the other end, there are people who believe that bitcoin will never be able to reach the status of an official currency in any way and will die out soon as we proceed with time. In the middle lie the expert who believe bitcoin is definitely valuable and will persist as we move forward.

A University of Texas team found evidence that a cryptocurrency boom may have been largely due to manipulation.

The Bitcoin community has changed greatly over the years; from technophiles that could explain a Merkle tree in their sleep, to speculators driven by the desire for a quick profit & blockchain startups seeking billion dollar valuations led by people who don’t even know what a Merkle tree is.

Hundreds of coins created through initial coin offerings (ICO) have become worthless. 

Why I quit my day job to become a Bitcoin miner.

BlackRock has set up a working group to investigate ways the world’s largest asset manager can take advantage of the fast-growing cryptocurrency market despite its chief executive lambasting the bitcoin sector. The $6.3tn investment powerhouse has created a team from different parts of the business to investigate cryptocurrencies and their underlying infrastructure, blockchain, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Coinbase launched the investigation in the wake of a sudden surge in the price of Bitcoin Cash hours before the company announced the addition of the asset, which is an offshoot of original cryptocurrency Bitcoin, to its exchange for the first time. The move made Bitcoin Cash accessible to millions of customers who previously had no way to purchase it, pushing up its value as has happened historically when Coinbase...

Bitcoin has recovered somewhat in the past few days, but its value is still almost $200 billion less than when it hit its record high in December 2017. The flagship cryptocurrency is trading just above $8,400 on Wednesday, according to CoinDesk, but that's still some 58 percent off the $19,783.21 record from December. Market capitalization or value is down by almost $200 billion since then.

Iran’s national currency has crashed to its record low against the U.S. Dollar as the country prepares to face economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. The Iranian Rial, which was just beginning to gain momentum after years of depreciation, set a new low on Monday, trading on an average at 100,000 Rials on the black market. Many Iranians are now agitated that their economy will collapse.

Morgan Stanley appointed Andrew Peel as head of digital asset markets. The update comes from his LinkedIn profile, where the new position is listed. He leaves Credit Suisse, after twelve years with the bank, where his latest job was vice president of sales and trading innovation, although he spent the majority of his stay in the Delta One desk. Peel will be traveling between London and Zurich for his new role, which isn’t that surprising given how a lot of financial services companies are limiting their exposure to the UK in the wake of Brexit.

Starbucks and Microsoft are working on a new cryptocurrency platform called Bakkt.

Cryptocurrencies have taken the world by storm. Between January 2017 and December 2017, the price of Bitcoin rose by over 2,000%—from $953 to $20,089. Right now, the market cap of Bitcoin alone is over $120 billion. However, the most exciting part of blockchain technology isn’t Bitcoin rather, the way it can be applied to change the world we live in.

Leading Japanese mining company GMO Internet has stopped mining Bitcoin Cash (BCH) once again, reports indicate. According to company documents recently made public, the top bitcoin mining firm stopped mining bitcoin cash in July and previously in April. The documents published by Trace Mayer of the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast show that GMO mined 0 BCH last month, down from 62 coins in June and a high of 287 in February.

As part of an in-depth look into the mining giant ahead of its controversial planned initial public offering (IPO), BitMEX considered the potential for the company to recapture its former success while leveling thinly-veiled criticism at its management. “Bitmain can be a legendary crypto company, generating strong shareholder returns for decades to come, but in order to achieve this (and it’s a lot harder than it sounds) the Bitmain management team may need to improve their management of company resources,” the analysis summarizes.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, shares the enthusiasm recently expressed by McAfee – just like the creator of the eponymous antivirus, he believes Bitcoin is better both than gold and the U.S. dollar. Explaining about why exactly Bitcoin is better than gold, he said: ”There is a certain finite amount of bitcoin that can ever exist. Gold gets mined and mined and mined. Maybe there’s a finite amount of gold in the world, but Bitcoin is even more mathematical and regulated and nobody can change mathematics.” Fiat money, as he thinks, can just be printed as some influential bankers want, while with Bitcoin such things are impossible.

While Japan respects digital currencies as legal currency and the IRS considers them property, South Korea has taken a different approach. Lee Joo-yeol, South Korean central bank governor, recently proclaimed that Bitcoin and virtual currencies would be treated as commodities. Regulation will take time to fully formulate and is not expected any time soon, according to the governor.

On-line Plc jumped as much as 394 percent on Friday after announcing plans to change its name to On-line Blockchain Plc, following an initial climb of 19 percent on Thursday when it first announced the news.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have exploded in value—making them an ever-more attractive target for scammers and hackers. Here's how to protect investment.

When Mt. Gox, the world's largest bitcoin trading exchange, collapsed in early 2014, more than 24,000 customers around the world lost access to hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of cryptocurrency and cash.

Some creative Tesla owners came up with a way to make a few bucks from their parked EVs: Cryptocurrency mining. This raises questions that shouldn’t just be aimed at bitcoin mining, or even electric vehicles. For those unfamiliar, cryptocurrencies only work because there is a network of distributed computing that processes the transactions. To reward those offering the computing power, cryptocurrencies give fractions of new bitcoins to those who did...

The operator of the largest U.S.-based bitcoin exchange has more users than brokerage Charles Schwab. "With all the talk about bitcoin, a good deal of people are also starting to open accounts where they can buy and sell crypto-currencies," Bespoke Investment Group said in a Friday blog post.