Your Crypto News on Steemit December 12, 2017

Parity wants to save frozen Ethers with Hard Fork
Deutsche Cannabis AG plans an ICO
CBOE: Bitcoin Futures are now traded on Chicago Stock Exchange
40 Percent of all Bitcoins are owned by only 1,000 People (Whales)
Deutsche Bank calls Bitcoin a Top Risk Factor for 2018
UBS is planning a Blockchain Project
Bitcoin Course Challenge Week 10

The London company Parity Technologies yesterday made several suggestions on how to make the frozen Ethers worth 230 million US dollars available again. The Ethereum community should now decide with their feedback on the future of the cryptocurrency Ether.

The British crypto-wallet provider Parity addressed itself yesterday in a blog post to those affected by the bug in the multi-signature wallets. Ethers in the current value of more than $ 230 million are affected. These can not be used for more than four weeks. In fact, a bug fix should close a security hole that allowed cybercriminals to steal $ 32 million of Ether from the Multi-Sig Wallet in July. The bugfix, however, led to new problems, which apparently nobody at Parity foresaw.

Yesterday, four different protocol changes were introduced, with different consequences for the owners of the affected wallets. The rescue operation was only possible with the help of a hard fork, as they emphasized. One should not indulge in any illusions that there is no other way. However, Parity can not or will not decide by itself which protocol changes are made in detail. We are now waiting for feedback from the community.

Final bugfix or source for new bugs?

The proposed solutions have already been criticized by Ethereum developer Nick Johnston, according to news portal coindesk. The planned modification of an invariant (specified value) in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM for short) could possibly lead to new and unexpected errors. That's exactly what you really want to prevent. In the blog post, Parity, on the other hand, promises auspiciously of functional improvements that will free the frozen Ether credits while avoiding similar problems in the future.

Blockchain expert Eric Holst (KI Decentralized) said at the Crypto Monday in the Düsseldorf launch site that you always have to wait for a certain amount of time for new cryptocurrencies to see whether the programming is completely free of errors. Dear first not invest, because some bugs may not show up at first glance. The audience responded yesterday, but Ethereum and its internal crypto-currency ethers have been in productive use for several years. Therefore, it seems doubtful to them that Parity can restore the users' confidence after this rollercoaster ride at short notice. Incidentally, this also reflects the critical comments that can be read in many places.

The Deutsche Cannabis AG would like to use according to Reuters and German media reports an Initial Coin Offering for financing. For this purpose, the company would like to issue its own token, the CaliCoin, which should be available from March.

Initial Coin Offerings are currently one of the hottest finance issues and have long since taken the step out of the fintech corner. On the contrary, the offering of new cryptocurrencies is also ideally suited to financing own projects, apart from blockchain or financial market projects. This finding now seems to have come to Deutsche Cannabis AG, which recently announced its own ICO.

Accordingly, the company plans from March 2018, the so-called CaliCoin issue. The name CaliCoin derives from the name of the US state of California, which, in the view of the Deutsche Cannabis AG, represents the most suitable use of the cannabis in Germany. The construction of the token was commissioned by an external service provider to complete the CaliCoin in the course of January 2018. As of now, nothing is known about the exact technological design of the token. As various media, including FAZ and Wall Street Online report, the total ICO volume is between 5 and 10 million euros.

Deutsche Cannabis AG is a financial investor investing in American cannabis manufacturers. The ICO is intended to finance the company's projects. Any investment goals will arise primarily along the cannabis supply chain, from cultivation to distribution. About the possibility of a token sales should open up sources of money, which are not attainable in the classical way.

Disclaimer:
The information presented in this post is not a recommendation for purchase or sale. It is only an opinion of me the author. They serve merely to describe the project and are not to be understood as an investment analysis.

It's a nobilitation: Bitcoins are traded on the Chicago Options Exchange as futures. Trading started today - and immediately caused a stir: The website of the stock exchange is lame, and the price rose faster than the platform allows.

The history of the first futures on Bitcoin is a neck-and-neck race from two institutions in the US city of Chicago: The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), one of the oldest exchanges in the world covering much of the futures contracts in global finance and the CBOE, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, one of the world's largest options exchanges, has been working in parallel to launch futures on Bitcoin.

The race has now made the CBOE. The stock market yesterday started trading in Bitcoin futures. "CBOE Bitcoin futures are traded on CFE with the ticker symbol 'XBT'," the press release says, "XBT futures are cash settled contracts based on Bitcoin's price in dollars, as determined by Gemini's auction becomes."

The Future is currently offered in three different schedules: F8 expires on January 17, 2018, G8 on February 14, and H8 on March 14. The prices are currently 17,600, 19,140 and 19,100 dollars, the trading volume is by far the highest in F8. Within just 2 hours, more than 800 contracts were traded.

The introduction of Bitcoin futures gave the options exchange unusually high levels of attention - and more traffic than the site's servers have to endure. So CBOE had to warn via Twitter, that the page loads today because of the high number of calls slower than usual. But the trade is not affected.

Also, yesterday morning has twice grabbed an automatic stop trading for a few minutes. Whenever prices fall or rise too fast, the stock market stops trading for a few minutes. This serves to limit volatility. As the Bitcoin Futures quote has already risen from $ 15,000 to $ 18,000 today, this stop has already been triggered twice.

For whom are the futures interesting now? "The original futures contracts traded in Chicago ran on grain or wheat. Farmers could use them to realize sales prices even before they sown their grain, "CBOE writes on the company blog. "Bitcoin futures allow market participants to realize sales prices for future bitcoins."

Futures are, of course, handy for miners to pre-sell their future earnings to protect themselves against price swings, as well as payment service providers who need to continually switch Bitcoins against other currencies. You can protect yourself at least partly against price declines. But also for traders and investors such futures are a good option to protect themselves on all sides.

What's next?

It will be exciting again soon, when the leading US futures exchange CME moves in to offer their own Bitcoin futures. According to inside information also the New Yorker technology stock exchange Nasdaq is to plan shortly something similar. With these futures contracts, investors can bet on rising and falling Bitcoin prices without having to understand or own them. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this will further boost the course of the Bitcoin or that it will soon lead to a further course correction.

In addition, there is still an elephant in the room: the Bitcoin ETF. A listed fund offered opportunities for crypto trading that went beyond futures trading. In the past, there have been several attempts to launch such an investment fund, even though the project has not yet been buried. If futures trading turns into a success story, it can be assumed that the calls for a Bitcoin ETF should not be quieter.

1,000 people, so-called "whales", should own 40 percent of Bitcoins and thus have great power over the courses. For other cryptocurrencies this proportion is even greater.

Because 40 percent of the available Bitcoins should be in the hands of only about 1,000 people, these so-called whales have a major impact on the development of the Bitcoin course. The estimate quotes the business news agency Bloomberg from the investment company AQR Capital Management.

It is probably based on the data of the publicly available Bitcoin blockchain. From these, however, only shows how many wallets own as many Bitcoin. In this case, a person can have several wallets and in rare cases, several people have access to a wallet. According to the report, most of the major Bitcoin owners know each other and could theoretically agree to move the course to their liking.

"They can call each other, and they probably did," says industry observer Kyle Samani, managing partner at investment firm Multicoin, in an interview with Bloomberg. Because Bitcoin - like the other cryptocurrencies - is not regulated, the exchange of at least some information between the investors is legal.

According to Ross & Shulga lawyer Gary Ross, it's not forbidden for a group to come together to buy large quantities of Bitcoin to drive up the price - and then get back out of profit in a short time. However, if they had additionally scattered rumors, that could be illegal.

Bitcoins: price shakes because of big investors

Either way, the weighty Bitcoin owners can cause price shaking just because of the size of their shares. For smaller investors, this makes trading in the cryptocurrency more difficult to assess. At the current high prices, the big investors could sell off a large portion of their holdings in order to cash out. This could cause an intermediate rash in the Bitcoin downside.

It looks even worse for small investors with other cryptocurrencies. While about 100 top Bitcoin addresses control around 17.3 percent of available Bitcoins, Ethereum already accounts for 40 percent. For coins like Gnosis, Qtum or Storj, the 100 largest owners even have more than 90 percent of the available shares of the cryptocurrency.

The market research department of Deutsche Bank describes Bitcoin as one of the top risk factors for the coming year. According to the analysts, Bitcoin's share price plunge would affect new entrants in their speculation with cryptocurrencies as well as when trading Bitcoin futures. The role of Blockchain, however, is rated positively.

Deutsche Bank Global Markets Research periodically brings together the key risks of the global financial market. New York-based chief economist, Deutsche Bank's Torsten Slok, named Bitcoin one of the top 30 risks to market development in 2018. These risks not only impact on the VIX volatility index, which is considered by professionals to be a major sentiment barometer. It is not about short-term fluctuations that could be triggered by the risk factors. Rather, these are sources that have an impact on the growth of the market, Slok Bloomberg announced in other US media last Thursday.

Bitcoin is ranked 18th in the list. At the top of the list in the second quarter of 2018 is possible inflation in the US, followed by a feared change of strategy by the European Central Bank. Incidentally, the Federal Republic of Germany also has a decisive influence on the global financial market. So one feared in this country a surprising inflation or unpredictable considerable wage increases.

At the same time, however, the blockchain is seen as a technology behind Bitcoin in a far better light. In a presentation on cryptocurrencies and the blockchain, Global Chief Investment Officer and Global Head of Wealth Discretionary Christian Nolting and Global Head of CIO Office Markus Müller will reflect on the impact of new disruptive technology on the way global business can be done in the future.

In doing so, they agree that the opportunities and opportunities afforded by the blockchain range far and far outweigh any risks posed by cryptocurrency. It is seen the potential that the technology can be applied most profitably within the next few years.

Shortly after the release of the Bitcoin futures, the Swiss bank UBS announces a new blockchain based platform. In doing so, she wants to make communication with other companies easier and more efficient.

Banks that will use Ethereum smart contracts in the future include Barclays, Credit Suisse, KBC, SIX, Thomson Reuters and UBS, as announced in their press release yesterday.

The use of smart contracts should make it easier for all participating companies to align the reference data of their Legal Entity Identifier with the industry consensus.

The reconciliation should be anonymous and more efficient. The project was launched in London, including the imminent launch of MiFID II and MiFIR early next year. The two abbreviations stand for bills that protect consumers and strengthen the financial markets.

In this regard, the new laws require institutions to each have a Legal Entity Identifier. One can imagine the same Legal Entity Identifier as a digital stamp, which receives basic information such as address, name and date of foundation of the respective company. This reference data also includes the industry classification and identifiers and data of the European Securities and Markets Authority. These data bundles can then be automatically matched and controlled using smart contracts.

The benefits are obvious Christophe Tummers, Head of Data at UBS.

He also said:

UBS works with smart contracts

The data synchronization follows the procedure typical for blockchains. The relevant data is encrypted and hashed, making it anonymous. The power of disposal over the data remains with the respective institute. Finally, the hashes migrate to the blockchain.

The smart contracts then match the data with the prevailing consensus. The respective users always have the opportunity to gain insight into their own data.

At the moment the project is still in the test phase - only non-sensitive data is being compared. By the end of January 2018, however, the project should be ready to start.

While banks and regulators are still divided on cryptocurrencies, the potential of the underlying blockchain technology is increasingly being recognized and used. The ability to store sensitive data anonymously and decentrally opens up many horizons. In addition to the widespread solutions in the financial sector, the use cases are in principle wide open. There are similar proposals, for example in the healthcare sector or in the legal sector.

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