Cannabis companies are turning to the world’s most popular digital currency in an effort to get rid of all that cash.

The inability to access traditional financial institutions is one of the marijuana industry’s biggest impediments. Legal cannabis was a $6 billion industry last year and is expected to grow to $50 billion by 2026, according to Cowen & Co. But because pot is illegal under federal law, big banks and credit-card companies steer clear. That’s forced most merchants to accept cash only, a logistical headache and constant security threat. 

Enter bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that consists of digital coins “mined” by computers solving increasingly complex math problems. At least two financial-technology startups, POSaBIT and SinglePoint Inc., use the cryptocurrency as an intermediate step that lets pot connoisseurs use their bank-issued credit cards to buy weed.

If you haven’t heard yet, Bitmain just released their plans for an upcoming Hard Fork should BIP148 start on August 1. If this makes you scared and want to sell all your Bitcoins, don’t fret, I’m here to help you understand what this proposes, how it’ll affect you and what you can do.

So far, we’ve only been talking about two of the three branches of the Bitcoin governance: Miners and Developers. When the two disagree, the ideal solution would be to have the Users adjudicate. Unfortunately, safe, liquid adjudication is only available after a hard fork when the price between the tokens can float.
But what if we can give both Miners and Developers control over separate, smaller domains? What if each could run separate chains and each could change and use them according to their needs and desires? Further, what if these separate chains were actually extensions of Bitcoin itself?
Wouldn’t Users naturally utilize the one that they preferred? Wouldn’t the best idea win instead of the best political player?
If this sounds familiar, it should. This is what the whole sidechains project is all about.

In June 2016, a hacker targeted a virtual currency known as ether. This is the story of the bold attempt to rewrite that history.

One out of every four drug users in the UK purchased from a darknet market in 2017. This placed the UK behind Finland and Norway in the list of locations with the highest percentage​ of DNM users in the survey. Finland and Norway came in at 41 percent and 27.1 percent, respectively​.

Australia’s opposition leader Bill Shorten has suggested that governmental action to deny use of encryption to terrorists should extend to Bitcoin.

The infamous bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, which declared bankruptcy in 2014 while owing creditors 45 billion yen ($414 million), has a stash of bitcoins held by its trustee that—at least for the moment—are valuable enough to pay off its creditors and then some, thanks to the cryptocurrency’s record-setting price surge this year. Bitcoin set a historic high two days ago (June 11), trading at over $3,000 a coin. The Mt. Gox trustee holds 202,185 bitcoins (pdf), which are now worth about $560 million, at the bitcoin price of nearly $2,800 today.

The financial regulatory arm of the state of Illinois has clarified its rules for digital currency companies operating in the state.

Announced yesterday by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR), the completed regulatory guidance clarified that digital currency is not captured under the definition of money used in the state’s Transmitters of Money Act (TOMA). The final announcement was published after nearly six months after the agency's initial request for comments.

Crypto Fund AG has announced the creation of a “Cryptocurrency Fund” which will invest in a variety of digital currencies such as bitcoin, ether and ripple, among others. The fund plans to launch in Q4 2017.

The start of the year, however, was not gloomy for all hedge fund managers. The funds that did outperform were those focusing on technology and currencies.

FX funds that had the foresight to gain exposure to digital currencies such as bitcoin managed to outperform their peers as well as the S&P 500 Index. The HFRI Macro: Currency Index, for example, gained 8.2 percent year-to-date.

This should not come as a surprise given the impressive rallies of digital currencies such as bitcoin and ether, which both reached numerous new all-time highs in the spring months of 2017 and generated a 190 percent and 4,900 percent return respectively since the start of the year.

He explained:

“Currencies like the dollar have provided reasonable stability. Bitcoin has not. And it’s not clear to me that the whole mining paradigm can provide that type of stability… We’ve seen tremendous instability with bitcoin, so I wouldn’t put my money into it. I certainly do think there could be alternatives to national currencies emerging in the future. Algorithmic ones are a possibility, I just don’t think we’ve arrived at the right algorithm yet.”

There is the question how to name those competing chains. I would suggest to keep the ticker BTC for the UASF Bitcoin and use the UASF in brackets as post fix to make it more explicit (e.g. BTC -Bitcoin (UASF). For the Bitmain coin I would suggest either BMC or BUC (Bitcoin Unlimited Coin). Be assured the selection for the ticker BUC has nothing to do with the many bugs the Bitcoin Unlimited devs have produced in the past. ;-)
Ready now to add the UASF prefix to the Bitsquare twitter handle. Thanks Bitmain for making the situation more easy.

We have started working on supporting alt coins (that is, other crypto currencies besides bitcoin or different versions of bitcoin). So if required and if technically feasible, we will be able to support both versions of bitcoin in future.

The litecoin cryptocurrency adopted an upgrade called Segregated Witness just over a month ago and, so far, the integration is reported to be issue-free.