Bitcoin is currently trading in the $8500 region. The price drop from the near $20,000 high of mid-December 2017 has been blamed on the sale of over 35,000 Bitcoins and Bitcoin Cash by the trustee handling the Mt. Gox bankruptcy, Nobuaki Kobayashi.
These recovered coins were sold to compensate those users who lost bitcoins to Mt. Gox’s hack and subsequent Gox failure. A further 160,000 Bitcoins and a similar amount of Bitcoin cash remain to be sold.
Coinbase announced a cryptocurrency index fund. Investing in the fund will give exposure to all coins listed on the GDAX exchange, proportional to their market cap. This includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin cash, and Litecoin. Only American citizens who are accredited investors are eligible at this time.
Japan’s financial services regulator, the FSA, has plans to suspend or penalize several low quality Japanese crypto exchanges. The plans come in response to the January breach of CoinCheck, in which nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of NEM was stolen.
Halong Mining announced a defensive patent for overt AsicBoost. This process increases mining efficiency by about 15%. Halong Mining, the creators of the new DragonMint 16 terahash miner, will share the patent with any other ASIC manufacturer who agrees to the Blockchain Defensive Patent License.
This agreement prevents patent-protecting any crypto-related technologies and thus granting a legally-enforced monopoly as happened with Bitmain, another mining hardware company, in the past.
That’s what happened this week in Bitcoin. See you next week.
