At a recent SF Bitcoin Developers meetup, Bitcoin Core contributor and Blockstream CTO Greg Maxwell provided a technical presentation on the upcoming 0.15 release of Bitcoin Core. During the Q&A portion of his talk, Blocktime co-host Michael Tidwell asked Maxwell for his thoughts on SegWit2x and specifically what he thinks would happen in a situation where the hard fork portion of the proposal gains majority support from the network hashrate.

China plans to ban trading of bitcoin and other virtual currencies on domestic exchanges, dealing another blow to the $150 billion cryptocurrency market after the country outlawed initial coin offerings last week.

The ban will only apply to trading of cryptocurrencies on exchanges, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the information is private. Authorities don’t have plans to stop over-the-counter transactions, the people said. China’s central bank said it couldn’t immediately comment.

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s largest bitcoin exchanges are awaiting clarification from the government following more media reports that Beijing is planning to ban trading of virtual currencies on domestic exchanges, but markets were largely subdued on Monday.

Researchers at Finland’s central bank have dubbed bitcoin’s economic system “revolutionary.”

Their involvement is on one hand just another form of celebrity endorsement. But there’s an important difference: The celebrities, whether they know it or not, risk tripping over federal securities laws and, according to legal experts, putting themselves in possible legal jeopardy with the SEC.

The alleged hackers already got their dark web site and email suspended over suspicions that they’re not really who they claim to be.

The team behind the open-source, bitcoin-powered marketplace OpenBazaar has published the beta version of its forthcoming 2.0 release.

The launch, announced over the weekend, delivers a number of additions that developers outlined back in February. Among those is an integration with The Onion Router (Tor) network, enabling anonymous access to the marketplace network, as well as upgrades intended to boost overall up-times and access to storefronts.

What if I told you that there’s a way you can save more than 80% on transaction fees by compressing your Bitcoin transactions? You’d probably think I was crazy or was proposing a radical change to the Bitcoin system. But I’m not.
Since the earliest version of Bitcoin, it has been possible to combine multiple Bitcoin payments into a single transaction, significantly reducing overhead. In this article, we’ll describe why payment batching works, how much it can save you, how to use it, and how much block chain space would be saved if it was used more frequently.

The wait for more advanced bitcoin smart contracts might soon be over.

Spurred by last month’s SegWit activation, bitcoin developers are reviving a plan that would see the world’s most popular blockchain retooled with functionality long synonymous with ethereum and its more expressive code executions.

In his first interview since his arrest, alleged BTC-e operator Alexander Vinnik has said he is innocent of charges brought against him by the U.S. government.

Computer scientists from the Swiss university ETH Zürich have found a way to make off-blockchain payment networks even more scalable.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said his department will regulate the use of cryptocurrencies in the country by the end of 2017.

China’s ban on initial coin offerings should not stop firms from researching blockchain technology, a senior Chinese official said
Sun Guofeng, director general of the Chinese central bank’s research institute said the move to ban the practice of creating and selling digital tokens was a necessity
It was to stop illegal fundraising and pyramid schemes, Sun said

Decentralization is a key characteristic of cryptocurrencies because it removes dependence on trusting third parties in order to transact between individuals. However, exchanges between different cryptocurrencies typically still require trust in a centralized exchange or counterparty. Cross-chain atomic trades (for which we have coined the acronym “XCATs”) remove the need for a single point of trust for trades between different cryptocurrencies.