New Development Stage for Bitcoin
the leading companies in the world in manufacturing and selling of precious metals, announced in March of its decision to accept bitcoin payments. A company representative confirmed a new partnership with BitPay, the largest international payment system. Bitcoin transactions can be made both through existing exchanges and on personal basis.
BitPay continues to grow as well, introducing new technologies facilitating cryptocurrency transactions. The JM Bullion partnership represents one of the first major steps towards entering a serious international market; following this announcement, several major corporations expressed interest in following in the metallurgical industry giant’s footsteps.
the pivotal moment when cryptocurrency emerged from the shadows completely and ceased to be an object of purely abstract trade. More physical devices utilizing the principle of grid computing get introduced into the world. One of the first among such devices called Ping21 was recently presented by 21inc company. A single-board mini-computer, Ping21 is the first proof-of-concept that allows buyers to pay Bitcoin in exchange for distributed ping statistics from an aggregated network of 21 servers. This enables the machine to earn digital currency in an alternative way compared to mining and 21inc believes that when compared to a company like Pingdom, this type of work, in theory, could be as profitable as mining.
Microsoft to Enhance Cryptocurrency Support
Microsoft, a transnational corporation widely known for its conservative tendencies and fondness for proprietary licenses, officially announced enhancements in bitcoin support within its software infrastructure. Namely, native bitcoin support was added to Microsoft Office package and Unicode encoding.
A new cryptocurreny called Ethereum might have a little to do with how common appetite for alternative payment systems is being whetted. This is a currency with total capitalization that’s already reached a billion dollars. Ethereum developers claim that their creation is not just another cryptocurrency but a whole new self-sustaining system out to radically rewrite the rules of global marketplace.
Ethereum development is what Microsoft is hedging its bets on, as it was recently announced that development environment of new cryptocurrency is open for programmers from all over the world. The code of this new product is open source, and it allows for creating new decentralized applications using independent block chain.
Ethereum Ascends
Ethereum, as noted above, had a promising start in March, with its price reaching up to 15 $ by mid-March. In the next two weeks Ethereum developers announced several important innovations, and that obviously had a positive effect on the marketability of the new cryptocurrency. Namely, they announced the second release of Ethereum independent blockchain that allows for full decentralization with complete independence from the source.
This announcement made Ethereum prices soar, reaching up to 0,04 BTC for 1 ETH. After growing all the way Ethereum then slowly slipped down to 0,02 BTC, an equivalent of 10 $. An unusually high trading volume was noted, and such exchanges as Bitfinex and Coincheck, notoriously reluctant to acknowledge alternative cryptocurrencies, responded by adding full Ethereum support.
Ethereum developers continue to work on enhancement and improvement of performance of their system aiming for practically instantaneous transactions which can end up a significant advantage over rather slow bitcoin. Taking into an account its impressive capitalization and constant reinvention, Ethereum might end up a serious contender to take Bitcoin’s place.