Modern electronic payment systems rely on trusted, central third parties to process payments securely. Recent developments have seen the creation of digital currencies like Bitcoin, which combine new currencies with decentralised payment systems. Although the monetary aspects of digital currencies have attracted considerable attention, the distributed ledger underlying their payment systems is a significant innovation. As with money held as bank deposits, most financial assets today exist as purely digital records. This opens up the possibility for distributed ledgers to transform the financial system more generally.

In the world of Bitcoin, Mike Hearn is a big deal. He developed the code that made it possible to use Bitcoin on smartphones. A couple of years back, he quit a cushy engineering job at Google to focus on Bitcoin full time because he was convinced of its potential to change the world. But now he’s quitting the digital currency and declaring Bitcoin a failed experiment.

“The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards,” he writes on Medium. “I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins.”

www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/mike-hearn-senior-bitcoin-developer-says-currency-failed-experiment


If your money is trapped in Bitcoin know that you are declared shafted and that is it!

Five more banks have joined a global consortium working on ways blockchain technology can be used in financial markets, the firm leading the project said on Thursday, as it brought in experts from the worlds of banking and technology.

BNP Paribas, Wells Fargo, ING, MacQuarie and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce will join 25 other banks including JPMorgan and Citi in the initiative, led by New York-based financial tech firm R3.

Most of the world's biggest banks, with the exception of Chinese lenders, have now signed up to the initiative. It represents the first time banks have collaborated on how the technology that underpins bitcoin, a controversial, web-based "cryptocurrency", can be used in finance.