Skip to main content TRENDING: SPONSORED: Bitcoin value hits record high The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 faxThe contents of this site are ©2017 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.Just two days after Gyft founder and Civic CEO Vinny Lingham’s warning about a Bitcoin hard fork devastating bitcoin’s value, 21 different Bitcoin exchanges have clarified their position on Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) trading.The exchange coalition stated in a hard fork contingency plan that they will trade any BU cryptocurrency as an altcoin alongside bitcoin, thwarting any plan for BU to replace Bitcoin.In software engineering, a fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software.The term often implies not merely a development branch, but also a split in the developer community.The development of Bitcoin Unlimited required forking Bitcoin's code.

Once the fork is released, there will be two separate blockchains, even though they contain identical transaction histories.The BU developers hope that BU will quickly acquire all of the miners that are currently mining the existing, 'Bitcoin Core' blockchain.If it were to do so, the latter would then be unable to secure its network, and therefore the original Bitcoin would quickly cease to be of value.If instead, only some of the current miners left to start mining BU's blockchain, two coins could exist side by side.This is what happened in June when Ethereum forked, resulting in two competing cryptocurrencies.This is also the fate that Lingham said Bitcoin must avoid at all cost.- Statement on Potential Bitcoin Hardfork EventThe first of three announcements on Friday was sent to the media as well as posted on the Bitfinex website.It contained signatures of some of the biggest exchanges by trading volume, including Bitfinex, Bitstamp, BTC China, Bitsquare, Bittrex, Coinfloor, itBit, Kraken, ShapeShift, Zaif, and nine others.The announcement states that the exchanges are collectively faced with addressing the very real possibility that a Bitcoin network split may occur in the future, and that bitcoin miners have a right to choose an alternative implementation of Bitcoin.

“We do this not out of judgement or philosophical reasons but rather for practical and operational considerations,” the group declared.“As exchanges, we have a responsibility to maintain orderly markets that trade continuously 24/7/365,” the announcement reads.bitcoin wallet lite“We cannot suspend operations and wait for a winner to emerge [...] Due to operational requirements alone we are compelled to label an incompatible fork as a new asset.”However, when a fork of this nature happens, there is a danger of coins from one blockchain being spent on the other coins' blockchain, known as a “replay attack.” The exchanges have agreed to not list BTU until this threat has been addressed.- Statement on Potential Bitcoin Hardfork EventA second announcement on Friday came from Poloniex, which has yet to decide if they will be listing BTU coins.bitcoin di bali

The exchange reiterated many of the same points raise in the first announcement.“We will support Bitcoin Core continuously as BTC,” the exchange states, adding the same stipulation about replay attacks.bitcoin ticker gbp“Poloniex agrees that any contentious hard fork must include replay attack protection.bitcoin nasil yapilirWithout this, exchanges cannot continuously and properly operate.”A few hours later, the co-founder and CTO of international Bitcoin exchange BitMex, Samuel Reed, issued the final statement of the day.bitcoin bay toronto“As proposed in the multi-exchange hard-fork contingency plan, there is significant doubt that a BU hard fork could be done safely without additional development work,” states Reed.ethereum pepe

“In the case of a fork, we support the plan as proposed by Bitfinex, Bitstamp, BTCC et al.”Reed further added that “it will not be possible for any exchange, including BitMEX, to support both chains separately.” The exchange will not even consider listing the coin until the replay attack protection is in place and BU is not “at risk of a blockchain reorganization if the Core chain becomes longer.”The news rattled traders, sending Bitcoin’s price dropping sharply throughout the day, from a high of $1160 to a low of $1052.However, the solidarity of so many exchanges on the issue has calmed a lot of the Bitcoin community, while enraging others.Jihan Wu, the co-founder of Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin ASIC chip manufacturer and mining pool operator in the world, is a known BU supporter.Wu recently switched over 75 percent of his mining pool's power to support BU.Since the exchange’s contingency plan was announced, Wu has referred to the exchanges as “not world class level.” Meanwhile, BitGo engineer and Bitcoin Core developer Jameson Lopp tweeted, “It appears that BU devs have no intention of adding replay protection - their plan is to kill the Core chain instead.”

Although Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $3,000 (£2,370) in the last 24 hours, it also dropped $300 (£237) in the same period, showing the virtual currency's instability.Indeed, just hours later, it rose again to $2,900 (£2,290), which led some analysts to breathe a sigh of relief.Although the value of Bitcoin did bounce back to its previous levels, one industry commentator warned that it could signify the downfall of virtual currencies as a whole, showing the market may not be as robust as many think."It is just standard technical divergences – we made a higher high on less volume and waning momentum," BTC VIX, a representative of the Whale Club, told CoinDesk."[This could] signal a weakening trend.".” Meanwhile, the BTC-E exchange said it was the subject of a DDoS attack and that's a pretty major issue as that particular exchange accounts for around 6% of US dollar-denominated bitcoin trade.However, values are still an average of 150% above 2016 levels.Just a month ago, bitcoin hit $2,000 (£1580) for the first time in its history.

26/05/217: Coinbase sent offline due to "unprecedented" Bitcoin trading Bitcoin exchange service Coinbase suffered outages throughout the week due to a sudden surge in usage of the cryptocurrency, which is currently floating at a record high.Coinbase, which operates the world's largest market for the buying and selling of Bitcoins, was knocked offline after the company reported "unprecedented traffic and trading volume".The exchange, which operates in 32 countries, said it was working to resolve the issues, which have affected its website, as well as its mobile applications./QgVT05Gzh6 — Coinbase (@coinbase) May 25, 2017 Bitcoin has seen massive growth over the past month, rising past the $2,000 mark earlier this week, and hitting a record high of $2,800 just before the outage.Its value then slumped to around $2,300 before recovering slightly.Yet the currency has fluctuated wildly since the outage, and has yet to fully recover from the dip.Right now the currency is valued at $2,620 per bitcoin.

"The market cap of digital currencies has increased 50% to $91 billion in the past week," explained Coinbase, in a statement to IT Pro."As a result, Coinbase has seen a dramatic increase in traffic and trading volume.""The Coinbase engineering and support teams have been working round the clock to keep up with this unprecedented volume," the statement added." has suffered a few outages including degraded performance and deposit / withdrawal delays for some users.We are actively working on resolving these issues and restoring our site to normal performance."Despite the rise in popularity of the cryptocurrency, it has faced problems with scaling, as its own network has become so large that it is struggling to handle payments as quickly as the service promises.This latest outage suggests that those exchanges that support the currency are also finding it difficult to keep up with the pace.The majority of the firm's services are back online, but it appears the site is still struggling with credit and debit card transactions, according to its own site report.

Coinbase was first founded as a startup in 2015 and generated a record $75 million in funding, the largest of any bitcoin-focused companies.Since then it has become the world's most funded exchange network.22/05/2017: The value of bitcoin reached an all-time high at the weekend, smashing past the $2,000 mark, rising almost 50% in last three weeks.That's according to a number of bitcoin exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken, which also report that the total market cap of the world's most popular cryptocurrency now stands at $32.92 billion.Currently a single bitcoin is valued at $2,168, according to this graph by CoinDesk.Bitcoin first broke the $1,000 mark back in January 2013, but since then its value has fluctuated wildly, even dropping back down to $935 at the end of March this year.Following a steady rise during April, the currency has sky rocketed in May, rising 12% in the past week alone.Although this is great news for the health of bitcoin, rival cryptocurrencies are beginning to chip away at its market dominance, which now only represents 47% of all cryptocurrency.

This is largely due to scaling difficulties, as Bitcoin has now become so large that its network is struggling to handle transactions as quickly as the service promises.Other cryptocurrencies, such as ripple and ethereum, have gained similar traction over the past few months, adding to a collective cryptocurrency market value that exceeds $70 billion.Cryptocurrencies have some way to go before they are a viable alternative to traditional currencies - gold for example has a value of around $8.2 trillion.However, the fact that cryptocurrencies aren't valued on tangible assets or revenue, we essentially have no idea how much the currency is worth, making a price surge particularly impressive.07/04/2017: Bitcoin developer claims some users are abusing the system Bitcoin Core developer and Blockstream CTO Greg Maxwell has alleged that some miners are abusing a weakness in the virtual currency's proof-of-work algorithm that allows them to mine bitcoin 20% faster than others.Maxwell explained that someone has discovered a covert version of ASICBOOST, a technology developed by developers Timo Hanke and Sergio Demian Lerner that legitimately can be used to mine the currency.

Those abusing the weakness are reportedly using a mining chip to break through the barrier and Maxwell said this is unfair to other Bitcoin miners.SegWit, the covert technology in question, has been developed by Chinese company Bitmain, although developers at that organisation are denying their tool is anything like AsicBoost."There is no relationship between SegWit and ASICBOOST,"Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu told Coindesk."Bitmain has tested ASICBOOST on the Testnet but has never used ASICBOOST on the mainnet as implied in Gregory Maxwell’s proposal," the company added in a statement."We ask conclusive proof from whoever claims this to be false because such baseless claims are toxic for the Bitcoin space."However, Maxwell explained the Bitcoin Core team has developed Segregated Witness, a scaling solution that would stop miners being able to use the method.06/03/2017: Bitcoin is now more valuable than gold The Bitcoin digital currency has exceeded the value of gold for the first time in history, hitting a high of $1,278.21 while the price of an ounce of gold was worth $1,236.10 at the time of writing.

The value of Bitcoin has been steadily increasing over the last three months, rising 30%, while the value of gold has decreased, suggesting people are starting to accept the digital currency as a serious way to pay for goods.Bitcoin's value has risen as a result of increased demand in China, despite a crackdown by the government, which claimed the currency is being used to take money out of the country.It also become more popular in India and Venezuela following the move to get rid of old notes according to Forbes.Added to that, Bitcoin is becoming a more popular way to trade money and some retailers, including Dell, have started accepting it as payment for goods and services.However, just because the value of Bitcoin has increased so substantially, that doesn't make it a better bet than gold.The digital currency has a reputation for being unstable, with the value plummeting in 2014 following the collapse of Mt.Gox.It also experienced a 20% drop in value in January this year.There's also been a lot of controversy about whether it's a safe option for making payments.