Japan Bank Consortium launches its Ripple-powered payment app

Japan has finally given the green light to the Japan Bank Consortium to launch its Ripple-powered payments app for Android and iOS.

The news comes straight from Ripple themselves. “ The Japan Bank Consortium launched MoneyTap today, a Ripple-powered payments app to offer real time settlement for domestic payments in Japan,” the company wrote on Twitter .

But before you scream out “mass adoption” in triumph, it is worth pointing out that the app won’t process cryptocurrency-based payments. Instead, it will merely utilize Ripple’s distributed ledger technology ( DLT ) to facilitate payments between banks and institutions.

For the record, Money Tap is developed by SBI Ripple Asia – a joint effort between Japanese financial giant SBI and Ripple.

The payment app was first announced in early September. A few weeks later, SBI confirmed the Japanese Ministry of Finance has approved Money Tap for launch. Indeed, Japan recently introduced a legal requirement that all businesses handling electronic payments be registered with local finance bureaus.

Japanese netizens can head to the official Money Tap site to learn more about the app. To download the app, they can head to Google’s Play Store here or to Apple’s App Store here .

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Major cryptocurrency exchange delists Bitcoin Gold following $18M hack

The threat of attack is very real for upstart cryptocurrency projects. Bitcoin Gold, a popular hard fork of Bitcoin, is set to be delisted from cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex.

The reason for the removal is that the currency has suffered a series of debilitating heists that netted thieves over $20 million in stolen funds.

Back in May, Bitcoin Gold was hijacked with rented computing power . After hackers took control of more than 51 percent of the overall hash power, more than 388,000 BTG (approx. $18 million at the time) was stolen from cryptocurrency exchanges like Bittrex. Hackers were able to use “double-spending,” a method of repeatedly tricking an exchange into transferring more coins than it should.

It is uncertain just how much was taken  directly from Bittrex, but Bitcoin Gold maintains that compensation of over 12,000 BTG ($255,000) was requested.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that by September 14, Bitcoin Gold will be completely removed from Bittrex.

In response, the Bitcoin Gold development team uploaded a lengthy statement , which told its side of the story:

This is proof that security incidents really do have a lasting effect on cryptocurrency projects. The dev team does defend itself by claiming the 51 percent attack that led the double-spending was not its fault. Instead, it blamed the Proof-of-Work consensus style on which Bitcoin Gold operates.

Obviously, Bittrex does not feel the same way, but whether or not this will have an impact on the long-term survivability of Bitcoin Gold, isn’t yet clear. What is clear, though, is that market sentiment has turned.

Last year, when $3.3 million worth of Bitcoin Gold was stolen after users were tricked into downloading a fake wallet , it was ranked the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

Today, it’s ranked 29th.

A brief history of Bitcoin (and the people that made it happen)

The recent fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin are just the latest in a series of spectacular peaks and troughs since it was created in 2009. (Though its price has been falling recently, it remains five times higher than last April, before the latest major peak began.)

Commentators are often dismissive of Bitcoin buyers, writing them off as naive victims of a fraudulent bubble. But if we look more carefully, we can trace the history of Bitcoin through five key narratives. Each has drawn in a different group of buyers and in doing so contributed to its long-term growth in value.

The idealists

Bitcoin arose from a tiny group of cryptographers who were trying to solve the “double spend” problem facing digital money: “cash” held as a digital file could easily be copied and then used multiple times. The problem is easily solved by financial institutions, who use a secure central ledger to record how much everyone has in their accounts, but the cryptographers wanted a solution that was more akin to physical cash: private, untraceable, and independent of third parties like the banks.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s solution was the Bitcoin blockchain, a cryptographically secured public ledger that records transactions anonymously and is kept as multiple copies on many different users’ computers. The first narrative of Bitcoin’s value was built into Nakamoto’s original “ white paper .” This claimed that Bitcoin would be superior to existing forms of electronic money such as credit cards, providing benefits like eliminating chargebacks to merchants and reducing transaction fees.

The libertarians

But from an early stage, Nakamoto also marketed Bitcoin to a libertarian audience. He did so by stressing the absence of any central authority and particularly Bitcoin’s independence from both states and existing financial institutions.

Nakamoto criticised central banks for debasing money by issuing increasing amounts of it and designed Bitcoin to have a hard limit on the amount that could be issued. And he stressed the anonymity of Bitcoin transactions: safe, more or less, from the prying eyes of the state. Libertarians became enthusiastic advocates and buyers of Bitcoin, more as an act of rebellion than for financial reasons. They have remained highly influential in the Bitcoin community.

The savvy young

These, however, were small constituencies, and Bitcoin really started to take off in July 2010 when a short article on Slashdorg (“news for nerds”) spread the word to many young and technically savvy buyers. This community was influenced by the “Californian ideology” – belief in the capacity of technology and entrepreneurs to transform the world.

Many bought small quantities at a low price and were somewhat bemused to find themselves sitting on significant investments when the price multiplied. They became used to huge fluctuations in the price and frequently advocated “ hodling ” Bitcoin (a mis-spelling of “hold,” first used in a now iconic message posted by an inebriated user determined to resist constant “sell” messages from day traders).

The hodlers insisted, half seriously, that Bitcoin was going “to the moon!” (used 178,000 times on the bitcointalk forums), and talked of buying “lambos” (lamborghinis) with their gains. This countercultural levity generated a sense of community and a commitment to holding Bitcoin that helps to sustain its value.

The investors

The last two groups that have contributed to Bitcoin’s history are more conventional. What I consider the fourth group of investors consists of speculators who have been attracted by the volatility and peaks in Bitcoin prices.

On the one hand, we have the day traders, who hope to exploit the volatility of Bitcoin’s price by buying and selling quickly to take advantage of short-term price movements. Like speculators in any other asset, they have no real interest in the larger picture or of questions of inherent value, but only in the price today. Their only narratives are “buy” and “sell,” often employed in an attempt to influence the market.

On the other hand, we have those who are drawn in by news of price bubbles. Ironically, bubble narratives in the press, often designed to deter investors, can have the opposite effect. These investors join what Keynes called a “beauty contest” – they only care what other people might be prepared to pay for a Bitcoin in the short to medium term future.

The portfolio balancers

The final and newest group of Bitcoin buyers are the portfolio balancers: more sophisticated investors who buy Bitcoin to hedge against wider risks in the financial system. According to modern portfolio theory, investors can reduce the riskiness of their portfolios overall by buying some Bitcoin because its peaks and troughs don’t line up with those of other assets, providing some insurance against stock market crashes. This is an emerging group, but one that could significantly raise Bitcoin’s acceptability among mainstream investors.

Bitcoin’s value, then, has been built on an evolving series of narratives which have drawn in successive waves of buyers. While mainstream commentators are often dismissive of Bitcoin as lacking inherent value, all asset market values depend on narrative processes like these.

Bitcoin may well collapse again, but so may any other financial asset. Investing in Bitcoin is neither more nor less risky than investing in the latest technology company launched on the stock market without ever having made a profit.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Dave Elder-Vass . Read the original article .