Digital currency Bitcoin hits new high before losing S$200 in value in one day

[opmi]

Hi any VB bought Bitcoin before??? I am interested to know more..and maybe TIKAM some...

Thanks.

I have and I still hold/trade a small quantity for speculation. It's a very high risk "asset" and it's so volatile that you can trade without leverage, unlike FX.

Check out www.itbit.com. I believe it is one of the most liquid exchange in this region. Trading costs for bitcoins are typically lower than other traditional instruments.

Thanks.

I find the info at URL below quite useful.

http://www.coindesk.com/information/how-...-bitcoins/

[Life is a game]

I walked past bugis mrt station from downtown line and noticed a 10 dollar hair salon accepting e coin as payment. Quite interesting.

[iewnuj]

Coindesk.com is a good starting point.

For live SGD prices you can use:
http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currency/SGD.html

If you wish to monitor USD prices there's a lot more. Here are 2 of the charts I use:
https://hypron.net/bitcoinwisdom/
https://tradeblock.com/markets/

[opmi]

See the video..

VICE Tours a Bitcoin Mine in China
Joon Ian Wong (@joonian) | Published on February 6, 2015 at 19:05 GMT VIDEO

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A detailed exploration of a bitcoin mine in Dalian, a major city in the north-east of mainland China, has been published by VICE's technology title Motherboard.

The facility is called the No. 1 Bitcoin Mine. It contains 3,000 miners and costs $80,000 a month for 1,250 kW of electricity to keep them running, according to the film. It's located in the Changcheng area, in the waterfront Lushunkou district.

The mine appears to be cooled by huge industrial fans mounted on the walls of the building. According to Motherboard, a "persistent, deafening buzz" emanates from the fans in the hot summer months, where temperatures hit 27 degrees celsius.

Jin Xin said he is one of four shareholders who own and operate the mine. The group, described as "secretive" by Motherboard, operates five other sites. This one mines 20 to 25 bitcoins a day, although it was producing 100 coins a day at its peak.

The mine manager likens bitcoin's current state of development to its eventual role as the "the currency of the future"; to China's own transition from a cash-based economy to a debit and credit-card based one.

The Motherboard video was first released on Snapchat where it was available for 24 hours.

http://www.coindesk.com/video-vice-tours...ine-china/

[Retired@52]

See Link: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/alleged-bitcoi...nance.html

[Retired@52]

I don't know there is a "digital currency", till i saw the news report. I assume it is not a hoax...

Interesting to know more on the digital currency...

Digital currency Bitcoin hits new high before losing S$200 in value in one day

NEW YORK — Bitcoin, the digital currency, lost more than US$160 (S$200) in value yesterday, just hours after hitting a record high.

The currency hit a new high of US$266 before falling to US$105 and then bouncing back to US$130. The fall is unlikely to put off speculators. Two months ago, a Bitcoin was worth US$20.

http://www.todayonline.com/business/digi...ue-one-day

[Retired@52]

See Link: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/alleged-bitcoi...nance.html

[CityFarmer]

To be fair, the recent case in Hong Kong, is likely a ponzi scheme, using the name of Bitcoin. The same as scams using the name of gold...

Report: Hong Kong Bitcoin exchange disappears with £254 million

MyCoin offered clients to invest in a contract that would provide a HK$1 million return (£84,823) on a HK$400,000 (£33,929) investment, and even, as the South China Morning Post says, offered additional prizes of Mercedes-Benz cars or cash if investors recruited others.

However, there are now fears that MyCoin operated a pyramid or “ponzi scheme,” which later paid investments out to early clients to create — illegally — the illusion that the company was seeing huge returns. One client said she was “told by those at higher tiers [of the scheme] that we can get our money back if we find new clients.” Tech In Asia is already labelling MyCoin a “pyramid scheme” and a “scam.”
...
http://www.businessinsider.sg/mycoin-pon...Nqz3vmUc70

[specuvestor]

It is still up 50X from 3 years ago. I consider that as expensive vs currency reserve USD.

(Bloomberg) -- An investment in bitcoin promising a 150
percent yield. That’s what was being offered to more than 2,000
people last August in the grand ballroom of the Sheraton Macao
Hotel, where they gathered to hear investor Jim Rogers, eat free
meals and be entertained by singers, dancers and glittering
beauty queens.
It was too good to be true. Hong Kong police arrested six
people in connection with an alleged scheme to defraud investors
of at least HK$169 million ($21.8 million). All are still
awaiting formal charges. Police said more than 90 people have
complained after discovering they can’t contact the company that
took their cash, Hong Kong-based Rich Might Investment Ltd. and
its trading platform MyCoin.hk. Multiple attempts over five
weeks to reach any company representatives by e-mail and phone
were unsuccessful. Its storefront in Kowloon closed in January.
MyCoin attracted an estimated 3,000 people from Hong Kong
and across the China border in Shenzhen, and similar MyCoin
conventions or promotional dinners held elsewhere in China,
Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan may have drawn
hundreds more, according to interviews with eight investors and
posts by more than 100 mainland Chinese on a WeChat group,
similar to WhatsApp. Most of MyCoin’s investors live in China
and haven’t contacted police, they said.
“People around the world are trying to get money out of
the Chinese,” said Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the
School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Beijing Institute of
Technology. “Mainland Chinese are very vulnerable to these
kinds of schemes.”

Huge Outflows

About $324 billion flowed out of China last year, in
contrast with 2013’s net inflows of $56 billion, as Chinese
sought in part to flee a declining yuan and make investments
abroad, according to estimates by Wang Tao, chief China
economist at UBS Group AG in Hong Kong. Money from China has
driven up housing prices in Sydney, Vancouver and elsewhere.
In Portugal, Chinese rushing to buy real estate have been
burned by middlemen, some charging a quarter of the sale price
as commission. Also this year, Chinese investors complained they
lost a total $1.2 billion when a Geneva-based foreign-exchange
investment firm said it was taken over by hackers that lured
money from 20,000 people, China’s state broadcaster CCTV
reported in February.

Circumventing Controls

More than 80 percent of the world’s bitcoin transactions
are now carried out in Chinese yuan, up from less than 10
percent at the beginning of 2013, according to a report from
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Bitcoin is more widely accepted outside
China than by Chinese merchants after the People’s Bank of China
imposed restrictions last year. One possible explanation:
bitcoin transactions may enable citizens to circumvent China’s
$50,000-a-year limit on moving money out of the country.
Investors in MyCoin paid a minimum HK$400,000 and were
promised HK$1 million a year later, as long as the bitcoins’
value remained the same or appreciated, according to documents
given to Bloomberg News by investors.
According to Hong Kong’s Companies Registry, William Dennis
Atwood, whose address was listed as in Marina del Rey,
California, was the sole director of Rich Might Investment and
resigned Nov. 10, transferring 7,000 shares of Rich Might to a
company called Fascinating Horizon Overseas Ltd. the same day.
No value for the shares was given.
Fascinating Horizon’s address is listed in the Registry as
in the British Virgin Islands. That address is a branch of a
Hong Kong-based corporate-services company, SBC International,
which helps individuals set up companies. An e-mail response
from SBC said it couldn’t provide any information about the case
or how to reach Atwood or other representatives of Rich Might,
MyCoin or Fascinating Horizon due to client confidentiality.

Massage Parlor

Additional attempts to contact Atwood were unsuccessful.
U.S. phone directories don’t show Atwood as being listed at his
California address or elsewhere in the Los Angeles area. The
rental office of the apartment building said in a reply e-mail
that nobody by that name lived there and declined to provide
further information.
Wong Lok Yan was appointed as director of Rich Might
Investment upon Atwood’s departure and resigned Jan. 28,
Registry documents show. Wong’s address listed in the Companies
Registry is a massage parlor in the Wan Chai district. A woman
who opened the door said there was no one by that name. Hong
Kong police would neither confirm nor deny they were looking for
Atwood or Wong, nor say whether they were among those arrested.
The six people arrested in Hong Kong in connection with the
case, who were not identified, have been released on police bail
without yet being charged in court, according to a police
spokeswoman, who didn’t give her name due to policy. They must
report back to police in April, she said.

Around China

MyCoin’s Chinese buyers live in Guangzhou, Xian, Shanxi and
Hebei, as well as Shenzhen, the investors said. Shenzhen police
didn’t respond to calls, an e-mail and a fax seeking
information. A few Chinese investors said on WeChat that they
had called their local police, while no collective action has
been taken.
“The Chinese investors don’t know what they could do to
get their money back,” Beijing Institute of Technology’s Hu
said. “They may think the police are not going to help, and
they don’t want to pay lawyers because the case is uncertain.”
Wendy Lin, a 55-year-old Shenzhen housewife, said she first
heard about MyCoin from a friend. They traveled several times to
Hong Kong, to a Chinese restaurant in Kowloon, for promotional
campaigns for the virtual currency and also attended the confab
in Macau, a one-hour ferry ride from Hong Kong. They filed a
police complaint in Hong Kong.

‘Total Chaos’

“My family is in total chaos now,” said Lin, who said she
invested about 900,000 yuan ($144,400) along with her daughter
and younger sister. “They invited famous people to their
events. How would I have thought the whole thing was a scam?”
Rogers confirmed that he accepted the MyCoin speaking
engagement through an agent and said he had no knowledge of the
alleged scam when he accepted. He has never invested in bitcoin
or MyCoin, he said.
“I was there to speak about investing in the world,” said
Rogers, contacted by phone in Singapore. “I explained whenever
anybody asked that I did not know much about bitcoin or MyCoin,
but I was there to learn.” The MyCoin venture, started in early 2014, promoted itself
through professionals such as insurance brokers, real estate
agents and paralegals, said Nancy Lau, a representative of a
group of 30 of the MyCoin investors in Hong Kong who have banded
together to push to get their money back.
“MyCoin has a very complicated structure,” she said. “We
aren’t sure who exactly the masterminds are. The sales
representatives said they were victims, too.”

Free Trips

People typically put in HK$400,000 for 90 bitcoins and were
to have accumulated 0.64 bitcoins per day for 12 months, Lau
said. Their gains were promised to multiply if they introduced
more people.
Investors were given free trips to MyCoin roadshows, said
Jeff Peng, 30, who does importing and exporting in Taiwan.
MyCoin provided him accommodation in Thailand, Macau and the
Philippines last year with the expectation that he would help
recruiting efforts, he said. Mercedes-Benz cars were given to
good performers at the events, and lucky draws awarded prizes
such as Samsung tablets, said Peng. He invested almost NT$3
million ($95,100) and hasn’t made a police complaint because he
doesn’t believe it would get his money back.
“I did suspect at some point last year that it could have
been a scam, but I didn’t realize it could be over in less than
a year,” he said. “Now I don’t even know whether they hold any
bitcoins for real.”

Growing Suspicious

Lin said she first grew suspicious of MyCoin in November
when the firm said it was planning a backdoor listing in Hong
Kong. Also known as a reverse takeover, it’s when a closely held
company gains listing status by taking control of a publicly
listed entity.
“I was like, ‘Oh no, this must be bad,’” Lin said, noting
that she had heard of fraudsters using this tactic to convince
investors to leave their money parked as equity in the future
listing and declining to return it.
Starting in December, a few weeks after Atwood’s
resignation, MyCoin started changing bitcoin’s valuations rather
than follow the market value, according to Lau. Prices quoted by
MyCoin dropped to HK$20 in January, when the market price was
HK$1,700, she said. MyCoin investors were prohibited from
redeeming their bitcoins, even when they accepted the lower
price, she said.
The value of the virtual currency plunged 58 percent last
year after reaching a record $1,100 in 2013. It’s currently
valued at $281. Investors such as Lin just want to get their money back.
“They paid for almost everything, and they said they are
registered in Hong Kong,” said Lin. “So I trusted them.”

[CityFarmer]

Latest update of Bitcoin ...


Bitcoin is officially a commodity, says US regulator

NEW YORK (sEPT 18); Virtual money is officially a commodity, just like crude oil or wheat.

So says the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which on Thursday announced it had filed and settled charges against a Bitcoin exchange for facilitating the trading of option contracts on its platform.  "In this order, the CFTC for the first time finds that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are properly defined as commodities," according to the press release.
...
http://www.theedgemarkets.com/sg/article...-regulator