From The News Desk The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Boston-based Bitcoin platform Circle has added $50 million in new funding — valuing the company at $200 million.The company's latest investment was led by Goldman Sachs and Chinese investor IDG Capital Partners.Previous investors Accel Partners*, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst Partners, and Digital Currency Group also took part in the round.The involvement of the Wall Street entrenched Goldman and IDG -- an investment titan in China that backed Baidu and Tencent -- reflects the growing mainstream acceptance of Bitcoin in America and abroad.I'm not sure which firm will have a bigger impact, but both could play significant roles in advancing the viability of Bitcoin and the growth of Circle moving forward.With Goldman Sachs' investment, Circle — and by proxy Bitcoin — gets a huge uplift in visibility outside of the smaller venture capital community.While General Catalyst and Accel carry weight in the world of entrepreneurs and fast-growth startups, the approval of a multinational investment bank like Goldman, even with all its baggage, is a signal of Bitcoin's arrival in the consciousness of the financial world at-large.

It's also impressive to get backing from IDG, in another sign that Circle's international aspirations separate it from other purveyors of Bitcoin, as Michael Carney pointed out last year.As great as it is to have support from a Wall Street giant such as Goldman Sachs, the prospects of unleashing what is fast becoming one of the most legit Bitcoin services platforms on the massive, tech-hungry emerging market that is China is a potential game changer for both Circle and Bitcoin as a mainstream cryptocurrency.Bringing aboard Goldman Sachs and IDG also coincides with a shift in the services that Circle, which has been primarily known as an entry way into Bitcoin acquisition and transfer, will offer going forward.Circle users will now be able to store and transfer dollars through the service, a product offering similar to those of Venmo and Stripe, with the obvious exception that the fiat currency (cash dollars) can also be easily transferred to Bitcoin.As part of the company's willingness to be transparent about many of its operations and security, it was revealed that dollars stored on Circle will be held by a regulated banking entity, in this case the FDIC-insured Silicon Valley Bank.

Another benefit of IDG's investment is that it will can help make inroads in China as Circle rolls out more offerings that are part of its current vision, like bringing similar money transfer services to other fiat currencies including the yuan, euros, yen, etc. Becoming the brand name of trusted Bitcoin services is one thing, which Circle has taken a major step towards today with the backing of Goldman Sachs.ethereum kopen paypalBecoming the world's Bitcoin brand and Internet money exchange is a far more lofty ambition, and one that Circle seems to be ambitiously trying to achieve.litecoin address hash*Disclosure: Circle investor Accel Partners is also an investor in Pandobitcoin calculator source code

Robocar technology has received perhaps the most honest compliment mankind can bestow: Hackers tried to steal it.Even more extraordinary was the willingness of the targeted company, China’s Baidu, to acknowledge the attempted heist."It's very difficult to know who employs them to do that, but we know someone tried to hire someone in the underground market to steal from us," said Ma Jie, the cybersecurity chief of the Beijing-based company, in an interview with Bloomberg.tokyo bitcoin hackersHe wouldn’t or couldn’t give further details.litecoin mining ati gpuBut there are plenty of suspects with the money needed for black-hat operations, including world-bestriding companies flush with cash.daily bitcoin voucherNot one has been found guilty in a court of law, but accusations have begun flying: Last month, Waymo, the spinoff of Google’s robocar project, accused a former employee of stealing megabytes’ worth of its data and for a rival operation at Uber.ethereum chain state

Uber denies any wrongdoing.Baidu followed in the footsteps of Google by turning a specialty in search into a subspecialty in autonomous cars.Like most robocar outfits, it is testing the technology in California and forming partnerships with auto makers and tech firms.bitcoin foundation italyAmong Baidu’s recent deals are its investment seven months ago in Velodyne, the lidar company; its collaboration with BMW; and its partnership with Nvidia, developer of a system-on-a-chip for robocars.bitcoin ke dollarBaidu has demonstrated partially robotic cars, and it’s talking up a ride-hailing robotaxi service as early as next year and a rollout of truly self-driving cars in 2021.In this, too, it is very much in line with the industry, which is offering an ambitious, although increasingly divergent, timeline for the new technology.Earlier this month, at a conference in Germany, Volvo, Audi, Ford and BMW estimated they’d have cars that could drive themselves with human supervision by 2021.

Nvidia said that it would be able to do that this year, and be able to field a totally self-driving car by 2025.Bosch was more pessimistic, saying that full autonomy might take several years longer to achieve.With all these companies competing for skills that take years to develop, the price of engineering talent has soared.And it’s no wonder that the temptation to steal those engineers’ work has also increased.The mutual love affair between China and bitcoin shows no signs of losing steam.Today two related venture capital firms invested $5 million in BTC China, the digital currency’s biggest trading platform, and the value of bitcoins surged to an all-time high, due in part to Chinese demand.But how long before Beijing turns an uneasy eye toward a currency that is explicitly designed to evade government control?BTC China is the biggest player in what has quickly become the biggest bitcoin market in the world: The currency itself has experienced volatile spikes and free-falls in the last few years.

It suffered a 20% decline in October after the online black market Silk Road, where all trading was done in bitcoins, was taken down by US authorities.Since then, though, bitcoin has made huge gains.17, before news of the investment in BTC China, the price of a single bitcoin climbed from $490 to $569—a 16% increase—and had reached a new high of $608 this afternoon (Nov.Here’s its price and trading volume for the last 24 hours on Mt Gox, one of the biggest bitcoin exchanges: China now makes up more than 50% of the world’s daily bitcoin turnover, according to the data site Bitcoinity, and the eye-catching graphic at the top of this post shows that China is now a major locus of bitcoin nodes—the high-powered computers that serve as hubs for the decentralized network on which bitcoins are tracked and exchanged.As Quartz has reported, China and bitcoin are an ideal match for a host of reasons.In particular, bitcoin appeals to Chinese investors who cannot freely trade the renminbi because of government regulations, and the hype has been fanned by positive state-run media reports about the currency—even after the collapse of a trading platform called Global Bond Limited, which turned out to be a swindle, as the New York Times reported today.

There also aren’t many places yet to spend bitcoins in China, although online search firm Baidu accepts them, along with a Shanghai real estate developer.The Chinese government is in the progress of rolling out financial reforms that could eventually allow Chinese investors to freely trade renminbi and make offshore investments.Bitcoin, however, threatens to short-circuit these gradual changes.Chinese bitcoin holders could conceivably use bitcoin to speculate on foreign currency and put their investments offshore.But some argue that the Chinese government has more to gain from bitcoin’s rise than it has to lose.Jonathan Stacke, a writer for the digital currency research site The Genesis Block, wrote in May that bitcoin could conceivably chip away at the US dollar’s status as a reserve currency.That’s a long-held goal of the Chinese government, which gave bitcoin its de facto blessing with glowing reports on the state-run broadcaster CCTV and the Communist Party-controlled People’s Daily newspaper.