According to a survey from Telehealth vendor American Well, 66% of consumers are willing to try telehealth, but only 8% have actually done it and 17% of those interested in virtual care were unsure whether the service was covered by their insurance.
Another study (from health system Intermountain Healthcare) found that only 20% of people had heard of telehealth, which American Well called “a tremendous opportunity”.
Additionally, two thirds of Americans are using devices that help them monitor their personal health and 50% use health apps.
Berenberg
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Telehealth is clearly increasing in popularity – the number of physicians reporting telemedicine as a skill rose 20% per year over the past three years according to a study from professional medical network Doximity – with younger generations the most likely to make use of the new virtual care services (surprise).
According to a 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), virtually conducted doctor-patient visits increased by 261% yearly between 2015 and 2017.
However, the article also highlights the well-known gap between people saying they are willing to try something new and people actually then trying it – as well as the continued efforts required in consumer education.
The two key groups telemedicine providers have to convince are mothers (since they still handle the majority of their childrens’ doctor visits) and seniors (a tricky one, given the inherent reluctance to use the tech, but a lucrative and growing market which could probably be accessed by targeting the younger relatives who look after their care rather than the seniors themselves).
The Stellar Development Foundation and messaging service Keybase announced Monday a 2 billion XLM airdrop, the largest in Stellar’s five-year history, worth roughly $120 million. Over the next 20 months, Keybase users can expect monthly airdrops of 100 million XLM.
Keybase currently has 300,000 active users across its various services, according to the company. “All you have to do is have an authenticated Keybase account, and your XLM will appear in your wallet – automatically, every month, for as long as the airdrop continues,” according to a draft blog post shared with CoinDesk.
The popularity of the decentralized blockchain-enabled web browser Brave continues to grow as it has outranked other browsers in Google Play rankings in Japan.
Brave beats rival browsers
According to a Reddit post on Sept. 8, this is the first time that the privacy-focused Brave browser has overtaken its rival browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Chrome in Japan. The most recent ranking data from Google Play shows that Brave sits comfortably at number 10 on the list, while its closest competitor Firefox lags behind, occupying 14th place.
A Google Play ranking is determined by how well apps perform against several key metrics such as crash rates, app-not-responding rates, excessive WiFi, location or processing in the background.
IBM has doubled the number of its employees on the technical steering committee (TSC) of Hyperledger, stoking concerns about the tech giant’s influence on the enterprise blockchain consortium.
Six out of the 11 2019-2020 TSC members announced last week are IBM employees. Five work at Big Blue itself and one, Mark Wagner, is a senior principal engineer at Red Hat, an IBM subsidiary. By comparison, the previous year’s TSC had only two IBM representatives and the same number of total seats (Wagner served on the committee, but IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat did not close until July 2019).
The new committee will begin governing after the new TSC chair is elected next week.
Investment management firm VanEck has issued just 4 bitcoins (BTC) via its new trust focused on institutional investors. VanEck: one week, one Bitcoin basket
Data from the company, spotted by economist and cryptocurrency commentator Alex Krüger on Sept. 10, showed that since its launch at the start of the month, VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust 144A Shares total net assets are only $41,400.
The product, which caused a buzz after VanEck described it as being akin to an exchange-traded fund (ETF), caters strictly to so-called qualified institutional buyers, or QIBs.
“VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust 144A Shares… looks and feels like a traditional ETF,” its official description reads.
Fresh data from the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA) has revealed that as of April 2019, the value of yen-denominated Bitcoin (BTC) holdings has outstripped those in XRP on domestic exchanges.
As Cointelegraph Japan reported on Sept. 10, the surge in the value of exchanges’ Bitcoin holdings coincides with the beginning of Bitcoin’s 2019 bullish uptrend, which saw the top cryptocurrency hit close to $14,000 by late June.
More XRP is being accumulated, but value declining
The zone around 0.165$-0.164$ starts to be a support zone and even we tried to break it several times, it looks like that the sellers have difficulties to go lower. We have the see what will be the results in the coming hours as we are just sitting on it but a UP bounce from that zone is possible.
Major cryptocurrency exchange Binance’s United States-based branch Binance.US will launch in the coming weeks, preceded by Know Your Customer (KYC) registration a few days earlier.
According to a Medium post published by Binance.US on Sept. 6, while the launch of the trading platform itself is expected in the following weeks, KYC onboarding will start a few days earlier. The aim of this is to ensure that users will have time to verify their accounts and deposit their funds.
Bitcoin is an innovative amalgamation of pre-existing technologies and the creation of new ones that has lead to an entirely new form of money. However, for many, the support for the world’s first digital currency is based primarily on ideological preferences.
In this article, you will discover why a significant amount of Bitcoiners also love Austrian Economics.
What is Austrian Economics? Austrian Economics is a school of thought that originated in Vienna, Austria. Though influenced by works from earlier times, the work considered to be the foundation of this economic school of thought is Carl Menger’s 1871 book ‘Principles of Economics.’ In 1949, another notable name within the Austrian school, Ludwig Mises, published the book ‘Nationalokonomie,’ which provides an overview of the principles governing the economists who identify under this label.
At the time of its publication, Mises’s book was received unfavorably by other leading economists who had already made a turn towards Keynesian economics, following the devastating effects of the world wars. Austrian Economics was losing the ideological war, with Keynesian Economics significantly influencing global economics especially after the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created. The IMF played a major role in the global post-war monetary system, establishing gold and the dollar as the standard and greatly influencing the U.S.’s position in global politics.
Matthew Trudeau, chief strategy officer of ErisX, offered a thoughtful response last month to a CoinDesk article about high-frequency trading in crypto. In short, CoinDesk reported that features linked to high-frequency trading in conventional markets were making an entry on crypto exchanges and that this might be bad news for retail investors.
While I agree with Trudeau that, in general, “automated market making and arbitrage strategies create greater efficiency in the market,” I disagree with his assertion that applying the conventional markets’ microstructure blueprint will improve liquidity in crypto.
I will explain below that, pushed to their limit, the benefits of speed brought about by electronification actually impair market liquidity as they morph into latency arbitrage. It is inevitable that crypto markets become much faster, but there is a significant risk that some exchanges overshoot and end up hurting their customer base, re-learning the lessons of the conventional latency wars a little too late. Those who do will lose market share to electronic OTC liquidity providers and alternative microstructures, which I will present in this introductory post.
Finney, the world’s purportedly first blockchain-enabled smartphone, will soon be available for purchase in Bangladesh. According to a report by local newspaper The Daily Star on Sept. 9, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory
Commission approved the phone for import in August and it will be available on the Bangladeshi market in October.
Mobile Phones in Bangladesh Finney’s launch in Bangladesh comes amid a trend of growing smartphone ownership in the country. According to a 2018 report from global research firm GSMA Intelligence, by 2025, 75% of the population (138 million) will have smartphones, while 41% (73 million) will be mobile internet subscribers.
Per GSMA, the increasingly urbanized population has been buying more smartphones as cheaper devices come to market, and in this regard, Finney’s price is more comparable with high-end phones available in Bangladesh. Finney debuted last year with a cost of $999, while the Samsung Galaxy S10 is available on local phone market MobileDokan for 74,900 taka ($894).
Last Friday Bitcoin (BTC) price marched within just a few dollars reach of $11,000 and it seemed that the weekend would be a bullish one. The top digital asset was on the verge of leaping over the descending trendline of the massive wedge. A mysterious $1 billion Bitcoin transfer spotted by Whale Alert had some speculating that a whale or an institutional investor was moving funds into Bakkt’s custody service.
Shortly after topping out at $10,938, Bitcoin sharply reversed course and traders were left to speculate whether Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s Bitcoin comments put a damper of the bullish price action. Or perhaps the advent of Bakkt’s (physically delivered) Bitcoin futures contracts was repeating the CBOE/CME Bitcoin futures product that launched to much hype right at the peak of the 2017 monster rally.
Let’s take a look at the current price action and see if we can determine what Bitcoin is up to.
“On 9th September, Zilliqa and @Infinito_Ltd look forward to hosting a joint AMA .”
STEEM Trading Update by my friend @cryptopassion
Here is the chart of yersterday :
Here is the current chart :
So as expected and predicted yesterday, we didn’t go test the 0.18$ before that the drop came back. We should go now in the direction of the lows on the STEEM. It is possible that we move in range between 0.18$ and 0.155$ before a break out in one direction. Let’s hope it won’t be a new drop and so a new low…
Beyond Investing is launching the US Vegan Climate Exchange Traded Fund (VGN ETF) on the New York Stock Exchange on September 10th.
The ETF is targeted at vegans looking for climate-conscious investments and is constructed by taking “the Solactive US Large Cap index (a proxy for the S&P 500 Index) and [excluding] any stocks whose activities are incompatible with a vegan and climate-conscious approach to investing,replacing damaging stocks with midcap alternatives that meet its ethical criteria.”
Analysis and Comments
Flows toESG and sustainability-focused fundshave spiked this year, as investors continue to focus on the investment opportunities that address issues such as climate change, (plastics) pollution, or gender pay disparities.
Therefore, you should expect to see continued growth in the number of investment instruments focused on these issues, particularly as worries around uncompetitive “stranded assets” intensify.
Telegram’s blockchain project, TON, has entered the last preparation stage before going live. The code for running a blockchain node was released on the test network portal late Friday. Now developers and community members interested in the messaging app provider’s blockchain can start kicking the tires of a full node, a validator node and the blockchain explorer.
The release had been previously scheduled for Sept. 1, according to the sources familiar with the project’s progress, but was delayed a few days for unclear reasons.
French hardware wallets manufacturer Ledger announced that its cryptocurrency management software Ledger Live now supports Ethereum (ETH) ERC-20 tokens.
In a blog post published on Sept. 5, Ledger announced the version 1.14.0 of its Ledger Live software that now supports over 1,250 Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens. The update has already been released for both mobile and desktop versions of the software.
Saturday, Sept. 7 — Bitcoin (BTC) is trading sideways after falling short of the resistance at $11,000 yesterday, while Ether (ETH) is making a slight recovery from its dip earlier this week
Bitcoin has been trading in a range around $10,400 today. Yesterday it appeared that the coin would finally cross the $11,000 mark, a price the cryptocurrency has not seen since Aug. 13, but it fell short and corrected down to $10,313. At press time the coin is trading at $10,521, up 1% on the day.
Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey stated that there are no plans for a platform-specific “Twitcoin” cryptocurrency, noting that he will instead focus on promoting Bitcoin (BTC).
Open standards are better According to Australian news outlet The Sydney Morning Herald’s article published on Sept. 5, Dorsey is confident that Bitcoin is still the most likely candidate to beсome the internet’s native currency. Twitter CEO noted: “I think open internet standards serve every person better than ones controlled or started by companies.”
It seems like everyone and their dog is a cryptojacker these days. Just a couple days ago, the US Department of Justice charged Paige Thompson, the ex-Amazon employee who hacked into hundreds of millions of customer accounts from credit card company Capital, with the crime.
Thompson was exploiting the computing services of cloud servers to mine crypto, making a tidy profit.
And “cybergendarmes,” the French police’s crack cybersecurity team, just rumbled a hacking group that used a network of 850,000 computers to mine the cryptocurrency Monero, reports the BBC.
It comes as no surprise, then, to hear that cybersecurity researchers from McAfee Labs just found that crypto-jacking campaigns have risen 29 percent, according to a report released this week.
“On 9th September, Zilliqa and @Infinito_Ltd look forward to hosting a joint AMA .”
STEEM Trading Update by my friend @cryptopassion
Here is the chart of yersterday :
Here is the current chart :
The STEEM is doing a similar pattern than the BTC but I’m not sure that we will be able to go test the 0.18$. We drop litte bit too much compared to BTC (as it is often the case) and so that resistance level is still quiet far. If the BTC starts again to correct, I expect that we won’t test at all the 0.18$ resistance and that the drop will come back on the STEEM also.
According to a recent report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global meat consumption must be reduced to curb global warming and alleviate strains on stretched land and water resources.
As human use directly affects more than 70% of the global ice-free land surface, plant-based foods and sustainable animal-sourced foods could free up several million square kilometres of land by 2050 and cut harmful emissions.
Last year’s report called for rapid changes across society to keep the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, while this year’s report states that “[t]he window for making these changes is closing fast. If there is further delay in reducing emissions, we will miss the opportunity to successfully manage the climate change transition in the land sector.”
Analysis and Comments
According to the report, agriculture, forestry and other land use activities accounted for 23% of total net man-made GHG emissions during 2007-2016 (excluding pre- and post-production activity in the food system).
While the IPCC stops short from actually telling people to go meat-free, it does advocate the benefits of a more plant-based alternative diet, which may be seen as a positive for players in this space (although this is not exactly news).
The Guardian published a highly critical response to the IPCC’s land and climate report (saying that it “irresponsibly understates the true carbon cost of our meat and dairy habits”), which includes a number of very interesting figures – well worth a read!
Lithuanian blockchain startup DappRadar, a platform for discovering and analyzing blockchain-based decentralized applications (DApps), announced it raised $2.33 million in seed funding. $2.33 million to expand services
On Sept. 5, DappRadar announced the closing of a $2.33 million seeding round, which was led by Naspers, a South African-based global internet and media group. Blockchain.com Ventures, a venture capital fund and subsidiary of Blockchain.com, and Angel Invest Berlin were also among the participants.
Ethereum’s testnet activation of the Istanbul hard fork has been pushed back to early October, according to the community manager of the Ethereum Foundation, Hudson Jameson.
According to CoinDesk on Sept. 6, Jameson said on a developers’ call that the testnet launch of the hard fork is now scheduled to take place in the beginning of October.
He added:
“For anyone listening in who doesn’t know how this works, we pick a block number that we estimate to be around the 2nd of October. […] However, that might be one or two days behind or forward from that date based on how fast blocks are produced between now and then.”
Since the cryptocurrency boom and initial coin offering craze of 2017, many countries in Asia have taken steps to clarify their regulations surrounding cryptocurrencies and security tokens.
In this article, we focus on the three countries that have the clearest regulations in place regarding digital assets, though there is still more work to be done.
Click on this link to see updated regulations in Thailand, Hong-Kong and Singapore
Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Jerome Powell said that the United States Federal Reserve is monitoring digital currencies carefully, but not working on its own at the moment. Speaking at a forum in Zurich, Switzerland, on Sept. 6, Powell addressed the issue of cryptocurrencies, arguing that central banks would likely will not release their own digital currency in the near future.
Powell added that cryptocurrencies raise a range of concerns including cyber security issues: “If you think about one currency that was for the United States, it would really need to be cyber secure because it’s one thing to be able to counterfeit paper currency, it’s another thing to hack into a cyber currency and create, with a computer, however much of it you want.”
“Xensor will be listed in IDAX exchange on September 6th, 2019”
STEEM Trading Update by my friend @cryptopassion
Here is the chart of yersterday :
Here is the current chart :
Till now and also due to the BTC correction, the UP that we had yesterday is becoming a simple PUMP and DUMP. We almost lost all the UP of yesterday so yeah, just consider it as a false signal. I traced for you the low on the STEEM around 0.155$. It is really possible that we go touch it quiet soon. Let’s see if we will have a bounce on that level.
A top official at China’s central bank has confirmed that the country’s forthcoming digital currency will bear similarities to Facebook’s Libra token.
The English-language website of the Hong Kong Economic Journal reported the news on Sept. 6, citing prior coverage by Shanghai Securities News, which is owned by the official Chinese state-run Xinhua News Agency. “We need to plan ahead for a rainy day”
Mu Changchun — deputy director of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC)’s payments department — has said that China’s digital currency will be supported across major e-payments platforms such as Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba-backed Alipay. The tokens will be guaranteed by the central bank and thus as secure as PBoC-issued paper notes and can be used without an internet connection, to ensure that transactions can continue even in the event that communications networks are down.
Crypto exchange Binance is launching a dollar-backed stablecoin in the U.S.
Moreover, the new Binance USD (BUSD) has received the blessing of the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). The exchange announced Thursday that NYDFS had approved the new offering, which Binance is launching in partnership with the Paxos Trust Company.
The Binance stablecoin will be backed by U.S. dollars on a 1:1 ratio, according to a press release. The offering joins the Paxos Standard and the Gemini Dollar as an NYDFS-approved stablecoin.
At launch, verified Paxos customers will be able to directly purchase BUSD tokens through the company’s wallet using either U.S. dollars or PAX, its own stablecoin. Binance users will likewise be able to trade BUSD for bitcoin, binance coin or XRP.
Since the cryptocurrency boom and initial coin offering craze of 2017, many countries in Asia have taken steps to clarify their regulations surrounding cryptocurrencies and security tokens.
In this article, we focus on the three countries that have the clearest regulations in place regarding digital assets, though there is still more work to be done.
Click on this link to see updated regulations in Thailand, Hong-Kong and Singapore
Mark Mobius, major investor and founding partner of Mobius Capital Partners, is still bearish on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology… with some caveats.
Speaking on CNBC’s The Squawk Box this morning concerning emerging markets and safe-haven asset classes, Mobius said cryptocurrencies, like fiat, are backed by faith and only hold utility as far as others are willing to use them.
“The bottom line is there is a whole generation of people who have faith in the internet, they have faith in these cryptocurrencies…the degree to which a cryptocurrency can enable you to buy something and you believe that to be the case, then that’s fine.”
Mobius said a gold-backed cryptocurrency run on the blockchain would be of interest, however. “If there is a cryptocurrency that is really backed by gold and there is a meaningful agreement and some kind of modern thing connection, then this could be quite interesting,” he said.
A $1 billion Bitcoin (BTC) transaction has become conspicuous not because of its size but because its sender spent far too much on fees. Someone could have sent 94K BTC for $35
Social media users were guessing at the origin and destination of the funds on Sept. 6, which involved 94,504 BTC ($1.018 billion).
According to Twitter-based monitoring resource Whale Alert, the transaction did not involve known wallets or those belonging to a specific cryptocurrency-related organization, such as an exchange. One theory suggested the funds may be tied to institutional trading platform Bakkt, which begins accepting client deposits today. “Institutions
building inventory for their market-making needs going forward,” commented Max Keiser on the giant transaction. He added: “This = effective ‘put’ on the BTC price at $9,000 (as I’ve been reporting for several yrs now). Ie, institutions are net-buyers of any BTC that shows up at $9k. Risk/reward now for buyers is excellent.”
“Xensor will be listed in IDAX exchange on September 6th, 2019”
STEEM Trading Update by my friend @cryptopassion
Here is the chart of yersterday :
Here is the current chart :
Yesterday I was saying you that we need an increase of volume and volatility to break the support line at 0.18$. It happened only some hours after my article. The only negative point is that we are doing a pull back on this support line at 0.18$ but we already broke back the support. It is not a drama as this kind of pullback is not always precise but we must see in the coming hours a bounce from the levels at 0.18$ and see a UP continuation to validate this nice movement. If it is not the case, I’m afraid that this UP would have just been a pump and dump…
Nearly 200 CEOs in the US, including companies such as Apple, Bayer, BP, Deere, JPM and Abbott (all members of the “Business Roundtable”) released a new Purpose of a Corporation statement this week.
The new statement shifted from being focused exclusively on creating shareholder value to a much broader remit including all stakeholders such as employees, communities, suppliers and customers. The full statement can be found here.
The Business Roundtable is made up of America’s most influential corporate leaders and has periodically issued Principles of Corporate Governance since 1978, with each version since 1997 having historically endorsed the principle of shareholder primacy.
Analysis and Comments
One of the questions we get on ESG is whether this time it is different or whether companies are just paying lip-service to investor demands for more ESG focused strategy.
The above development is evidence that there is a structural shift within the corporate world. This is significant. America’s largest companies are effectively saying shareholders are nolonger a priority and that a much broader set of goals will be put in place treating other stakeholders on the same level. It’s no longer just about profit. Will be interesting to hear Trump’s thoughts….
Out of 189 members of the Business Roundtable, only Alcoa, Blackstone, GE, Kaiser Permanente, NextEra, Parker Hannifin and State Farm failed to sign up.
A top United Nations (UN) official said cryptocurrencies are making international efforts to combat terrorist financing, money laundering and cyber-crime “exceptionally difficult.”
Neil Walsh, chief of the Cybercrime and Anti-Money Laundering arm of the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, said that the anonymizing and pseudo-anonymizing attributes of cryptocurrencies provide a “new layer of secrecy that favors the criminals,” when speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Linda Mottram.
Specifically, Walsh raised concerns about the role cryptocurrencies play in the clandestine child trafficking industry.
“In the past, when we looked at some of the really big high-threat areas like kids getting abused online, it had to be paid for and now, with the use of cryptocurrencies, it’s exceptionally difficult for investigators to track that and try and manage that risk down,” Walsh said.
Bitcoin’s five-day winning run, the longest in a month, has neutralized the short-term bearish view. A UTC close above the lower high of $10,956 created on Aug. 20 is needed for a bullish revival.
Volumes picked up on Tuesday, adding credence to Monday’s triangle breakout on the daily chart. So, a rise to $10,956 may be on the cards.
The probability of a move above $10,956 would weaken if the prices drop below key the crucial support at $10,286 on the hourly chart. Acceptance below that level could yield a deeper drop into four figures.
The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) is charging full speed ahead with its digital currency plans, hoping to beat Facebook’s Libra to market.
A dedicated team from the central bank’s Digital Currency Research Lab is now developing the system in a closed-door environment, away from the PBoC’s downtown Beijing headquarters, a person close to the bank told CoinDesk.
The team has been working in this separate location since early summer so they could fully concentrate on the project, this person said.
The work has been expedited as Facebook unveiled in June its vision for Libra, a global cryptocurrency to facilitate payments, the source added.
Square and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said Bitcoin (BTC) will continue to be adopted more widely, but it is still too early to consider it a currency.
Make Bitcoin more usable and accessible as a currency
On Sept. 4, the outspoken Bitcoin advocate told the Australian Financial Review that he is convinced the No.
1 cryptocurrency will continue to be adopted more widely. However, Dorsey added:
“It’s not functional as a currency. The peaks and troughs are like an investment asset and are equivalent to gold. What we need to do is make it more usable and accessible as a currency, but it’s not there yet.”
Rainforest Foundation US is a New York-based, non-profit NGO working in Central and South America, which is now hoping to support anti-deforestation efforts with crypto and blockchain tech.
Deforestation and fires in the Brazilian Amazon
On Sept. 4, the Rainforest Foundation reached out to the crypto and blockchain community to ask for their support to fight against deforestation and forest fires in Brazil. The post on the foundation’s website states:
“Since Bolsonaro took office in January, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is up 75% and forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon have doubled compared to the past year. As guardians of our rainforests, its animals and its people, we are working with The Giving Block to form a coalition of crypto sponsors, donors and media partners who will help stop this devastation.”
The Rainforest Foundation says that it is accepting cryptocurrency donations in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and other cryptocurrencies.
The STEEM has still difficulties to progress, even during the UP of the BTC. We are slowly progressing towards the resistance line at 0.18$. If we don’t have an increase of volume and volatility, we have no chanc at all to break this resistance line and we have a high risk of rejection during the test of this line. Let’s see if we will start to see more volume on the STEEM because currently is really low and without any volatility.
