Intel cuts funds for OpenStack at Rackspace San Antonio Business Journal OpenStack is an open sourced software that enables individuals and businesses to create individualized cloud computing environments and can be managed just like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Intel confirmed that it is no longer participating ... |
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Intel cuts funds for OpenStack at Rackspace - San Antonio Business Journal
Bitcoin Price Key Highlights
Bitcoin price appears to be forming a head and shoulders uptrend reversal pattern on its 1-hour time frame, possibly hinting at further losses.
Technical Indicators Signals
The 100 SMA is crossing below the longer-term 200 SMA to signal that the path of least resistance is to the downside. In other words, a triangle breakdown might be more likely to happen than a move higher. Note that the potential head and shoulders spans $1160 to $1240 so the resulting selloff could be of the same size, assuming that bitcoin price breaks below the neckline.
On the other hand, a break past the triangle resistance could lead to a move up to the recent highs at $1240 or higher. Stochastic is pointing up to show that buyers are in control of bitcoin price action while RSI is also heading north so bitcoin price might follow suit. However, both oscillators are also nearing overbought levels to show that selling pressure could return soon.
Market Events
Geopolitical risks still remain as tensions in the Asian region are picking up due to North Koreas missile tests. US President Trump has said that he will not back away from military action if North Korea doesnt rein in its activity, further increasing the risk of retaliation.
Meanwhile, liquidity could still stay low as most European markets are closed for Easter Monday. This means that headlines could still lead to big market moves as traders appear to flock to bitcoin in times of uncertainty, particularly in other financial markets.
As for the US, only the Empire State manufacturing index and NAHB housing market index are up for release next. As always, stay on the lookout for headlines that could inspire risk-off flows, which usually benefit bitcoin price.
Charts from SimpleFX
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Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis for 04/17/2017 - Reversal Pattern Forming? - newsBTC
Posted April 17, 2017 12:01:09
Some of the most powerful players in the world of bitcoin say recent moves by Chinese regulators targeting use of the virtual currency will not stall its long-term rise.
Through sheer weight of numbers, Chinese investors have seized virtual control of the highly valuable crypto-currency in recent years, with huge computer 'mining' farms in remote areas playing a crucial role.
At the start of this year, more than 90 per cent of daily trade for bitcoin was being made in Chinese yuan.
But that has fallen, as China's Central Bank, the PBOC, started taking a series of regulatory measures to reign in the use of bitcoin.
"The PBOC can potentially have very strong control over the price of bitcoin, at least in the short term, because it can effectively cut the money flow involved in bitcoin trading," said Jihan Wu, one of the most prominent figures in the global bitcoin community.
Mr Wu operates Bitmain a Beijing-based company that is the leading manufacturer of the specialist computers used to generate new bitcoins on the network.
His company also administers Antpool, one of the biggest bitcoin mining collectives, along with several computer 'mines' in China's remote western areas where electricity is cheaper.
"Potentially [the PBOC] could shut down all the Chinese bitcoin exchanges", he said.
"But I don't think the Chinese Government will do very aggressive regulation over bitcoin.
"I just think they want to control the risk for those investors who don't have enough knowledge about bitcoin."
In February, Chinese regulators forced two major Chinese bitcoin exchanges to temporarily halt withdrawals while they upgraded anti money-laundering measures.
While that wiped almost a third off bitcoin's value, it has rebounded to hit new highs peaking in March at $US1,290, before taking a hit when a US-based plan for a publicly listed bitcoin electronic trading fund was knocked back by regulators.
Since then, the currency has continued its upward rise, due to an explosion of direct buying and selling between Chinese investors off the exchanges, known as 'over the counter' trade.
"In the longer term, I don't think the regulations are a bad thing", said Zhao Dong, another Beijing-based investor who heads up a company called Galaxy Dragonfly Investments.
Mr Zhao previously invested in bitcoin mines, and has ridden the highs and lows of the currency's volatility, at one point losing close to $4 million.
But he still spends all day trading the currency on behalf of clients both in China and overseas.
"In future, if there's a global online currency that's adopted widely enough, then no government will be able to control it", he said.
"For bitcoin, the possibility of this is huge, and even if it's not bitcoin, a similar currency would also surely develop.
"This is why I devote myself to this career."
Topics: currency, computers-and-technology, world-politics, china
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Beijing's moves to reign in bitcoin aren't deterring China's new crypto-currency kings - ABC Online
An EU-regulated fund, High Tech Private Equity Fund SICAV plc, managed by Accuro Fund Solutions, has acquired nChain, a technology group associated with Craig Wright, a scientist who previously claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
SICAV claims the new acquisition is the biggest to date involving bitcoins underlying blockchain technology. SICAV put no value on the deal and did not mention Wright in its press release.
Reuters identified nChain, previously known as EITC Holdings, as Wrights vehicle for filing hundreds of blockchain and bitcoin-related patents.
Records from the U.K. confirmed that the target company, under both the nChain and EITC names, has filed more than 80 blockchain- and bitcoin-related patents.
A source close to the deal told Reuters $300 million was invested in nChain, but did not clarify over what time period.
Wright told Reuters the goal is to build bitcoin into a global system with no ruler, no king.
All I do is to help grow the use of bitcoin, and I want to see it in daily use by at least a billion people on-chain. We have the funds, the people and the technology to do this, Wright told Reuters.
Reuters previously reported Wright was working with Calvin Ayre, a Canadian online gambling tycoon, to create a patent portfolio.
nChain told Reuters via email that neither Wright nor Ayre had a stake in the companybefore or after the sale. nChain said it previously acquired Wrights assets and intellectual property, and that he now holds the post of chief scientist.
Reuters also previously learned that Wright was deeply involved in the early development of bitcoin, and had told Australian tax officials he owned more than 1 million bitcoins.
Thursdays announcement marked the first time nChain publicly acknowledged it is filing patents.
nChain is a distributed, decentralized ledger that chronologically records transactions in an immutable way.
The nChain group of companies has grown to a team of more than60 scientific research, engineering and other professionals based mainly in Vancouver, Canada and London, U.K. The acquisition will support nChains research activities and advance blockchain adoption globally.
While learning about the suite of nChains capabilities through the transaction, it became clear to me that we are in a new era of the digital age following the creation of the personal computer and the Internet, Arthur Davis, whohas been appointed as a director of nChain Holdings Limited, stated in the press release. This changes everything leading us into what we at nChain call the Internet of Transactions.
Davis said nChain has designed a blockchain infrastructure to transform the way businesses operate. He said the technology will be disruptive on a scale most people have not yet fully appreciated.
nChain sees the full extent of this disruption being achieved by maximizing transactional velocity on the bitcoin blockchain, he said.
nChains research demonstrates itsvision through:
Removing the bitcoin blockchains artificial block size limit (temporarily set at 1MB) to support greater scalability and usage;
Enabling on-chain scaling without undermining the benefits of decentralization;
Advancing native scripting to build smart contracts; and
Supporting open source protocols.
nChain is developing protocols and applications to support blockchain growth globally. There is a software development kit to allow programmers to create applications on the bitcoin blockchain, solutions to scale the bitcoin blockchain, innovations to improve security, on-chain smart contracts scripting, and a decentralized trading platform using autonomous agents.
nChain supports the formation of a neutral standards organization that will coordinate the bitcoin protocol. This will deliver a stronger software design. Ensuring the bitcoin blockchains long-term advance makes it essential to harmonize a miners objective of profitability and the importance of the governance principles led by the software development community.
The patent program at nChain involves some of the most complex technologies we have ever seen, and stands at the forefront of blockchain innovation worldwide, said Cerian Jones, a partner at Urquhart-Dykes & Lord LLP and nChains lead patent attorney.
Also read: Bitcoin creator Craig Wright lines up 70 blockchain patents
nChain plans to make some intellectual property assets available to the blockchain community through royalty-free licensing and open sourcing.
This acquisition is directly aligned with our investment objective of identifying and supporting world-leading disruptive technology innovators, said Michel Van Zanten, who oversaw the transaction for the investors. We were attracted to nChains core infrastructure capabilities and technical understanding of how a globally scalable enterprise-class architecture can be built to transform the way in which the world operates.
Nuovo Capital served as nChains financial advisor for the transaction. Baker McKenzie, a law firm, advised nChain on IP, tax and corporate aspects of the transaction.
Featured image from BBC.
Excerpt from:
Private Investors Acquire Company Behind 'Bitcoin Creator' Craig Wright - CryptoCoinsNews
If youve ever had a company or friend offer to pay you with Bitcoins or another type of digital money, youve encountered cryptocurrency, also called crypto-money or cryptoassets.
Cryptocurrency is a digital currency that is created through the use of encryption software. This approach is a solution to security and control issues that prevented a purely digital currency from being successfully developed in the past. If you hear someone talking about one of these currencies, its almost certainly in a cryptocurrency format. This type of digitally created and secured money is currently in a period of very cool experimentation, so lets take a look at how it work, why its popular, and where cryptocurrency is heading in the future.
How does a currency exist in a totally digital format? What is it based on? While the process varies a little between different cryptocurrencies, they all follow the same general system.
First, cryptocurrency chooses a base unit and how much that particular unit is worth when compared to other currencies (often, the U.S. dollar is used as a baseline). Some cryptocurrencies are more imaginative than others at this point. They try to represent debt registries, contracts, or the act of currency exchange itself. It can get a little weird, but ultimately the unitin some way relates to the value of other currency, as is true of all currencies in the world.
Units of cryptocurrency are then created, typically when a transaction occurs. The units are carefully formed and preserved through algorithmic encryption, then linked together in vast chains of data, where the currency can be tracked and exchanged.
However, at this point, cryptocurrency is still too vulnerable and too easy to fake. The currency units need to be timestamped and processed to make them more concrete and harder to copy. A third party developer can do this, but most cryptocurrencies prefer to crowdsource the process to those with the right hardware and software to mine the currency.
Mining uses algorithms to go through each transaction, encrypt the cryptocurrency, and add it to a digital ledger, essentially verifying it and cementing its position online. This process may also be referred to as consensus protocols orconsensus platforms, depending on the currency. This process is meant to make the currency impossible to duplicate, though whether its successful is up for some debate.
Some cryptocurrencies are highly centralized, with someone usually the organization that created the process/software making decisions about how much currency is created and how it is used. Other types are very decentralized, controlled only by how and where people are willing to use them.
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Cryptocurrency explainer: Everything you need to know - Digital Trends
Computer geeks packing away hard drives was never going to be quite as dramatic as sharp-suited bankers carrying boxes of their possessions and pieces of office art down Wall Street, but the collapse of the Bitcoin currency exchange Mt Gox in 2014 was widely seen as the alternative digital currencys Lehman Brothers moment.
The Tokyo-based exchange, which was handling 70pc of all Bitcoin transactions a year earlier, suspended trading and was eventually liquidated, with approximately $450mdisappearing. Earlier this month, Japan introduced legislation to protect users from being ever stung by a collapse again, while also making Bitcoin exchanges comply with anti-money laundering regulations and officially authorising it as a normal payment method.
In the UK, cryptocurrencies, as payment methods such as Bitcoin are known, still have a confusing legal status. But Japans move could act as a framework and catalyst for widespread adoption.
Dr Cathy Mulligan, co-director of Imperial College Londons Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering, who believes that insufficient regulation could be holding back startups and the growth of financial technology, rather than creating opportunities through lack of regulatory constraints, says: We have the situation in the UK where many startups are chasing the regulator to say, How are we going to be regulated? rather than the other way round.
Bitcoin in the UK is really treated as private money. If you tried to exchange Bitcoin for sterling you dont get charged VAT on the value of the Bitcoin but it is charged on, for example, the commission instead.
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Regulating Bitcoin: how new frameworks could be a catalyst for cryptocurrencies - Telegraph.co.uk
Cryptocurrencies represent awesome payment systems that enable anyone to send and receive money to and from anyone in the world; convert it to fiat currencies easily and use it to buy whatever one might choose whether online or offline. However, one of the drawbacks of crytpcorurrencies is that it can be somehow hard to buy them, especially in selected countries where it is difficult to open a bank account.
Throughout this article, I will show you three ways to make money online in the form of cryptocurrencies using just your laptop/PC and an internet connection:
Steemit.com is a blockchain based social network, that incentivizes its users for posting and curating (upvoting) content. On Steemit, you can makemoney online, in the form of crypto, for posting new content and/or curating (up-voting) the content of others. The social network has three forms of currencies/tokens:
When you publish a post on steemit, you will receive rewards for it after 24 hours depending on the number of upvotes it received by other users, who create content. Your earnings will be divided into 3 portions
a. 50% will be in the form of STEEM Power
b. 25% will be in the form of STEEM
c. 25% will be in the form of SBD
STEEM and SBD can be instantly transferred to an exchange and sold for Bitcoin, while you can only convert STEEM Power to STEEM, to be able to sell it, through a complex process known as Power Down.
Even though I remember that I used to mine around 1 whole bitcoin every 36 hours in 2010,using just my PC, it is now impossible to mine bitcoin and most major altcoins using a PC, as the networks of all these coins have grown massively and their networks difficulties have skyrocketed too. However, there are a handful of altcoins that you can still mine using a PC with reasonable specifications.
Minergate provides a descent service that enables you to mine a number of altcoins using your PC or laptop including monero, bytecoin, ethereum, ethereum classic and others. The software also has a great option; Smart mining, which automatically picks up for you the best coins to mine according to market prices and network difficulties.
With a few clicks, you can download, install and start mining cryptocurrencies using your laptop. The higher the specifications of your PC (processor, RAM) and GPU, the bigger the amount you can make via Minergates mining software. Roughly speaking, a dual core i5, 8 GB RAM PC with a 1 GB Nividia Geoforce GPU can mine what is worth around 10 cents per day.
Gridcoin Research (GRC) is a cryptocurrency network that is created to facilitate multi-party computing and reward volunteers who donate their computing power to BOINC projects with GRC. You can make between 8-30 cents per day via donating your PCs processing power to the gridcoin network.
Follow the BOINC client and gridcoin installation guides on gridcoins official website and in less than 20 minutes, you will be earning gridcoin for donating your computers processing power.
About Dr Tamer Sameeh
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3 Simple Ways for Earning Cryptocurrency Using Just Your PC - Live Bitcoin News
Monday, April 17, 2017 6:22 AM UTC
Privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Zcash has been approved on the Apple App Store via Jaxxs iOS platform.
According to the official announcement, Jaxx, a multi-token blockchain wallet, was the first wallet to integrate Zcash and is excited to now have the cryptocurrency available on its iOS platform. Also, Apple follows a rigorous approval process, particularly for allowing cryptocurrencies onto the App Store. The iPhone makers approval of Zcash signifies that it is a fast-growing and well-respected technology.
Jaxx is a very simple, easy-to-use wallet and the team behind it has been a pleasure to work with. Im delighted that thanks to them, hundreds of millions of iPhone users can, for the first time send and receive Zcash from their phones, Zooko Wilcox, CEO of the company behind Zcash development, Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, said.
Jaxx also revealed that it is in talks with Zcash on the possibility of supporting ZEC shielded addresses. Currently, Jaxx supports transparent addresses which behave similarly to Bitcoin, publishing transaction data publicly to the blockchain. It explained that while the use of shielded addresses by others provide greater privacy for transparent addresses compared to Bitcoin, official support for shielded addresses in Jaxx will significantly enhance capabilities for users.
The privacy aspect of their [Zcash] technology meshes really well with Jaxxs philosophies. Weve been working on a Zcash-integrated iOS version for a long time and were over the moon that Zcash has been approved on the App Store, Anthony Diiorio, CEO of Jaxx, said. Zcash is a very well run project and its been an absolute pleasure to work with Zooko and team. We look forward to continuous collaboration between our two projects, especially for when we implement Zcashs shielded addresses.
In addition to Jaxx, Zcash also announced its integration on a second wallet, SmartWallet, a Brazilian money application.
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Zcash cryptocurrency gets Apple App Store approval via Jaxxs iOS platform - EconoTimes
Microsoft Korea, the local unit of US software giant Microsoft Corp. said Monday that it has added an artificial intelligence function to its cloud-computing service, Office 365.
The company said Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel will be backed up by various cloud-powered AI capabilities through data centers in South Korea by employing machine learning capabilities.
"The company will make efforts to improve work productivity to put together AI and cloud computing by utilizing knowledge learned from developing office products," Yoo Hyun-kyeong, a Microsoft Korea official, told reporters.
The company said it has also strengthened the security function in Office 365 to better detect outside threats as part of efforts to improve security.
Microsoft offers both the Azure public cloud services and its Office 365 hosted applications from 38 Azure regions across the world, with 13 of them located in Asia.
Cloud computer services have become one of the core infrastructures for Internet of Things technology, big data and other new Internet technologies. Major players, including Amazon and IBM, have become front-runners in the South Korean market for cloud computing services. (Yonhap)
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Microsoft adds AI to cloud-computing service - The Korea Herald
Cloud computing is expected to quadruple within the next few years. Its predicted that only 8percent of all workloads will continue to be processed by traditional data centers, while 92 percent will be processed by cloud data centers.
Recent estimates by Cisco predict that there will be a number of changes by the year 2020. Those changes include an increase to 14.1 zettabytes in cloud traffic. Big data and the Internet of Things are big contributors to this growth, with the amount of data generated by IoT predicted to reach 600 ZB per year. Thats significantly more than traffic from data centers to end users, at 2.2 ZB, or data center traffic, at 15.3 ZB.
From 2015 to 2020, the number of workloads in private cloud data centers is predicted to decrease by 19percent, while those in public cloud data centers will increase by that amount. That shift is attributed to an increase in hybrid cloud strategies such as cloud bursting, in which the public cloud accommodates sudden spikes in traffic, but daily operations rely on a private cloud.
Platform as a Service (PaaS), which includes databases and developmental tools, is expected to remain stable, within one percentage point. The demand for Software as a Service (SaaS) is expected to rise by 9percent, from 65percent to 74percent of total cloud workloads. However, demand for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is expected to decrease by 9percent from 26percent to 17percent. One reason for that is that many companies are improving their own internet infrastructures, both to meet the increasing demands for high speed connections, and to increase their storage capacity for sensitive data. Big projects like Google Fiber in U.S. or NBN in Australia will certainly be a huge boost, and set a new standard for what we expect out of tomorrows connections.
The benefits of IaaS are undeniable. Saving the expenses of purchasing and maintaining hardware and networking equipment is just one of them. Paying only for the capacity that an organization requires at any given time is another prime consideration. Superior disaster recovery capability is also among its virtues. Systems including email, web servers and critical applications, can still be accessed via the Internet from virtually anywhere.
Despite the benefits, analysts are attributing the decline in IaaS to the shift toward public cloud providers. One of the attractions of IaaS was that it allowed businesses to both expand and test new systems and procedures with very little disruption. As trust in critical applications supplied by SaaS providers has been built over time, many may begin offering IaaS support as well. That support will take the form of advancements in storage, memory, and networking as well as processing power.
Trust in the public cloud is increasing not just for businesses, but for individual consumers as well. Current trends suggest that by 2020, the average consumer user will use an estimated 1.7 GB of cloud storage space per month, compared to the average 513 MB they used in 2015. Much of that can be attributed to a 5percent increase in video streaming workloads and a 20percent increase in social networking workloads. Overall, the percentage of consumers using personal cloud storage is predicted to increase from 47percent to 59percent, which represents approximately a billion more users.
Smart businesses are finding ways to ensure that they attract, capture, and keep, a share of those new cloud consumers. One of the best ways is by having an infrastructure in place capable of seamlessly accommodating large numbers of new customers. IaaS makes that possible. PaaS adds another layer by providing an independent operating system, database, application server, and programming language. With SaaS, the entire application is delivered over the web through a browser, providing consumers with 24/7 availability from any location.
Smart service providers are working towards incorporating features from all three types of services and offering more hybrid options. The one thing that wont change is that businesses will continue to require instant, stable, and consistent communication with their customers on multiple platforms. They will also require secure storage for all the data created from those communications.
Just as consumers want the choice of communicating via email, text, or phone, businesses want to be able to choose and combine the most useful tools from IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS to create customized systems. It will be interesting to see how many of the top five service providers of 2015 will appear in the top five of 2020.
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Cloud Computing Is on the Rise as Big Data and IoT Merge - Tech.Co