Monday, February 9, 2015

Hong Kong warns over digital currencies amid alleged bitcoin fraud

Hong Kong warns over digital currencies amid alleged bitcoin fraud

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Hong Kong's central bank has warned people against investing in virtual currencies amid local media reports that a bitcoin exchange may have run off with US$387 million in client funds - making it potentially the biggest bitcoin scandal after last year's bankruptcy at Tokyo-based Mt.Gox. 
PHOTO: AFP

[HONG KONG] Hong Kong's central bank has warned people against investing in virtual currencies amid local media reports that a bitcoin exchange may have run off with US$387 million in client funds - making it potentially the biggest bitcoin scandal after last year's bankruptcy at Tokyo-based Mt.Gox.
The South China Morning Post reported on Monday that clients of Hong Kong-based MyCoin had approached a local lawmaker alleging the company absconded with their money. An assistant for Legislative Council member Leung Yiu-chung told Reuters that Leung had received more than 15 complaints from MyCoin clients regarding the alleged fraud, and these would be passed on to the police on Wednesday.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) said in a statement late on Monday that the case "may involve fraud or pyramid schemes," adding: "Given the highly speculative nature of Bitcoin, we have all along urged the public to exercise extra caution when considering making transactions or investments with Bitcoin." Calls to MyCoin in Hong Kong could not be connected. Calls to the company's China customer service line were not answered.
Bitcoins are created through a 'mining' process where a computer's resources are used to perform millions of calculations.




Advocates say the virtual currency is revolutionary as it's not controlled by a central bank and has potential as an alternative means of online payment. But the rise of bitcoin, which is unregulated in many countries including Hong Kong, has stoked concerns it can be used as a vehicle to launder money and finance extremist groups.
Mt.Gox, once the world's largest bitcoin exchange, filed for bankruptcy a year ago after it claimed to have lost around US$500 million worth of customer bitcoins in a hacking attack.
On its website, MyCoin claims to be a "leading global Bitcoin trading platform and application service provider," with a China-based research and development team.
MyCoin promised clients a HK$1 million (US$128,976) return over a 4-month period based on a HK$400,000 investment that would produce 90 bitcoins on maturity, the South China Morning Post reported, adding MyCoin claimed to have 3,000 customers each investing an average of HK$1 million.
The price of a bitcoin has slumped from a late-2013 high of above US$1,000 to around US$220, according to CoinDesk's price index.
REUTERS













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Price gap between condos, houses swells to record level

Price gap between condos, houses swells to record level

CondoConsturction4
Tasmin McMahon, The Globe and Mail
9:41 AM, E.T. | February 9, 2015
Real Estate
Tags: Condos, Housing Prices
For many first-time homebuyers, condominiums have been the easiest way to get a foothold into the housing market, a pit stop on the way to a dream home.
But a flood of new high-rise condos and fierce bidding wars for urban detached houses has caused a widening gulf between the price of condos and houses, which last year reached a record high.
In December the average price gap between a condo and a single-family house in the resale market of Canada’s four major cities, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal, hit $320,000, according to data from Brookfield RPS prepared for The Globe and Mail. It has more than doubled in the past decade as the average resale price of a house in urban centres grew 90 percent, while the price of a condo grew by just 48 per cent.
The discrepancy is starkest in Vancouver, where the average resale house price has shot up 120 percent since 2005 to $1.1-million, while condo prices have risen by 50 per cent. The gap is smaller, but growing, in markets like Toronto and Calgary.
The causes are predictable. The supply of new listings for urban houses, has followed “an almost uninterrupted downward trend” for several years, said Shaun Hildebrand, senior vice-president of condo research firm Urbanation. That has been driven partly by a lack of newly built homes in urban centres and also by the fact that existing homeowners have been hesitant to sell in case there’s nothing to buy.
On the other hand are the rising number of new condo developments, driven in large part by a push among policy makers to boost density and curb urban sprawl.
But the price gap has profound implications, both for new buyers trying to find their way into the housing market without breaking the bank and for cities struggling to find the right mix of affordable housing.
Increasingly, the price gap between houses and condos reflects the fact that the two appeal to entirely different buyers, with investor-owned condos mainly serving the rental market as young families bid up the prices of detached homes. Even Calgary, which traditionally has had plenty of room to sprawl, has seen the shift toward condo buildings featuring bachelor units and no parking.
The glut of new rental housing has convinced many potential condo buyers to rent instead, driving down the demand for condos.
“There isn’t that same sense of urgency as there once was to get into marketplace because the costs are actually comparatively lower to rent than to buy,” said Mr. Hildebrand.
Meanwhile, the trend toward basement rental suites has made it easier for homebuyers to afford the massive mortgages on their houses, while also competing directly with condos on the rental market.
Despite a trend toward high-density city living, for many Canadians the ideal home is still the detached house, which is why the prospect of losing out on a dream house has become a far more emotional than missing out on a great condo, said Cory Raven, managing broker at Re/Max in Vancouver. The chances that a similar unit in the same building will eventually hit the market are pretty good, while the chance of finding the same renovated house nearby great parks and schools is slim to none.
Some industry officials say the slowdown in condo prices has been good for the market because it has driven out speculative investors looking to buy preconstruction units and then flip them a year later for a huge profit. Today’s condo investors are more often looking to make their money long-term on rental income rather than price appreciation.
“We’re okay with prices in the condo market not climbing as fast as low-rise because it adds some stability into the marketplace,” said Paul Golini Jr., executive vice-president of Empire Communities, which builds both low-rise and high-rise developments in Southern Ontario. “If the price of condos were increasing exponentially, then the land would be increasing exponentially. It’s easy to get caught in that vicious circle of price increases.”
Yet in the rush to encourage urban intensification, cities like Toronto are now struggling to find the right mix of affordable housing to serve an influx of new residents from other provinces or countries.
“One could reasonably make the case that some of the [policy] incentives in place have taken us too far in terms of the shrinking diversity of housing choices,” said Toronto-Dominion Bank deputy chief economist Derek Burleton.
He worries policy makers are focusing too much on development around existing transit corridors, rather than building a more comprehensive transit system that could help unlock new land on which to build a better mix of housing.
By encouraging more high-rise projects, cities haven’t necessarily succeeded in stopping suburban sprawl. In some cases, they have only pushed it farther away.
The fastest-growing communities in Canada, according to the latest Statistics Canada census, are far-flung suburbs like Milton and Stouville, Ont. as well as Squamish, B.C., which sit nearly an hour outside their respective urban cores of Toronto and Vancouver. They have been growing at a far faster rate than the cities they serve as young families move further afield in search of affordable detached homes.
“There’s a little catchphrase that we came up with in the industry: Drive until you qualify,” Mr. Golini said. “You’re driving further away from the city core until you hit the number that allows you to qualify for that price.”
But some say the tide is slowly turning. Builders are increasingly turning away from purely high-rise condo developments and toward mid-rise and townhouse developments in a bid to create more affordable family-friendly housing in the urban core. Changes to Ontario’s building code last month legalizing six-storey wood-frame buildings, which are cheaper than steel and concrete, should also help add mix of new, more affordable low-rise housing.
In some cases condo dwellers are choosing to move up within the condo market rather than fighting bidding wars for houses in the city. The demand for bigger condos is helping drive up the price of units in older buildings in Toronto, which have traditionally traded at a discount to new builds, Mr. Hildebrand said.
At Yonge and Eglinton, in the heart of Toronto’s uptown, Menkes Developments Ltd. is building its first condo project directed to young families. In the Eglinton, which is slated to open in 2018, at least 10 per cent of the units will be family-friendly three-bedrooms and the building will also have a dedicated playroom for kids.
Some buyers are now looking at condos as a long-term family home rather than a stop on the way to a detached house, said developer Alan Menkes. But the shift is happening slowly.
“We’re going to try to do more family condominiums, but the market is going to determine what we can build,” he said. “We don’t want to build things that the market doesn’t want.”
Even for the younger generation of homebuyers trend toward settling down in a condo has been painstakingly slow, meaning the gap between condo and houses is destined to only get bigger in the coming years.
"There is generation that finds it completely normal to live in a condo and not have any aspiration to buy a home,” Re/Max’s Raven says. “But they still have parents who they’’ve got to go to dinner with on Sunday and those parents are telling them: ‘you have to buy a house, you have to buy a house.’”

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What To Do With Bitcoin : A Few Tips




What To Do With Bitcoin : A Few Tips


by  on February 4, 2015 in Altcoins



We have been asked a lot of questions by non crypto users about Bitcoin and what you can do with it. Some people we spoke to referred to it as “useless fictitious monopoly money”. When we asked how some of these people came to that conclusion or where they got the evidence to back up their claims they are usually silent.
In the rare occasions where we did get a response it is usually along the lines of citing biased sources, like bank officials ( yes trusting a bank is the really smart) or other self proclaimed “experts” in the financial sector ( who fail to grasp the elementary workings of Bitcoin).
Most of this so-called evidence they put forth is can be boiled down to this: “You can’t buy anything with Bitcoin because Bitcoin isn’t a currency…. it is a ponzi”. In a previous article we explained why bitcoin isn’t a ponzi scheme but is in fact real money, just like dollars, euros or pounds. So blowing out one of these general misconceptions quite easily, let us look at the rest of their flawed conclusions; “you can’t buy anything with Bitcoin because its not real money/currency”.
The fact is that you can buy a lot of things with Bitcoin. This can be done directly: where you buy goods/products/services with Bitcoin. Another option to buy things with Bitcoin is indirectly. This means you need to jump through a little more hoops.

Buying Directly with Bitcoin.

As this subtitle suggests, we will discuss places where you can buy goods/products/services with Bitcoin directly from a shop. There are a wide variety of shops that already support these kinds of transactions. Most of these shops see Bitcoin as a viable payment alternative. A good friend of us described Bitcoin as “the new gold of the the 21st century”. However we will be saving that for later.
We can’t list every single shop in this article because every day the businesses that accepting Bitcoin as an alternative payment method are growing steadily. Nevertheless we will give some examples of shops that accepts Bitcoin for their services/products. if you aren’t mentioned in here, feel free to drop us a line.
The first group are the “small businesses”. Like stated in other articles we’ve written, Bitcoin can be a stabilizing factor for small businesses because it creates an income diversification.You have restaurants along the Bitcoin boulevards or Bitcoin cities in Europe for example. You can pay your bill with either euros or with Bitcoin. Even if you have a  business lunch/dinner, you can ask to pay in Bitcoin but still get your receipt in euros.  
If we move to the recreation sector there are a couple of businesses that are accepting Bitcoin. For example: there are cycling shops that offer their services and products in exchange for Bitcoin. The great guys over at Cyclenation in the Netherlands are one of those businesses that do that.  If we move over to Belgium there is a gaming shop called GameSwap that accepts Bitcoin for their games and products.
If you like collecting knives or are a hunter looking for some knives, you can useknives4bitcoin. here you can buy all kinds of knives for Bitcoin at reasonable prices. We probably get some grief about this because: “ these are weapons” and “this shows that Bitcoin is evil and illegal blah”. Well let me point out that you can buy knives from basically everywhere. From supermarkets to local shops to even a farmers market; all of them can be used to cut up vegetables, gut fish or.., you know, stab some annoying internet trolls. That last one is just hypothetical though.
You can even order special tea from the Tealet website. We will do an article about them, and they are cutting out the big corporate businesses out of the loop so more profit can flow directly to the tea growers and farmers. Basically it is a farmers market for tea, which is a very nice initiative especially in these economic hard times.
The second group can be labelled as “big businesses” that are incorporating Bitcoin in their business model. For example Overstock and others. However one might also lob media in this ever expanding group. The Chicago Sun-Times for example and others are already accepting Bitcoin payments. You can also book your holiday using Bitcoin in some countries because certain hotels, vacation homes and even camping places are accepting Bitcoin.
To conclude this section, we can state that there are a lot of businesses that are accepting Bitcoin as a viable alternative payment method.

Indirect payment options with Bitcoin.

What we mean by “indirect payment options with Bitcoin” is that you can’t buy directly at a website or shop with Bitcoin. In order to buy things with Bitcoin you need to execute one or more steps.
First there are the gift cards, which you can buy with Bitcoin or fiat money. Some of these sites, like Gyft, offer great opportunities for buying gift cards. You can get gift cards for Amazon.com, Home Depot, BestBuy, Starbucks, Whole Foods Market, etc. Of course most of those things are for our American readers.
In Europe we have Pock.io that provides, more or less, the same service. You can buy gift cards for Steam ( uk account) or for Amazon ( uk site) or even get a Marks & Spencer gift card. For those who have never been to the UK or haven’t entered a Marks and Spencer shop, though they are quite numerous, it is a kind of grocery/supermarket shop where you can buy food, drink and other great things to eat.
Of course if you want to buy something on Amazon.de or Amazon.it you are not going to find gift cards on Pock.io. You can either search in the community for people to buy you a gift card and you pay them with Bitcoin, though there are risks involved, or you can choose to useall4btc.com.
All4btc is an easy to use site where you can buy at amazon or other sites. How does that work you ask? Well just copy the link, for example that new vacuum cleaner you always wanted, make sure that everything is filled out correctly (address, country, amount in fiat and shipping costs if any). After you pay with Bitcoin, your item will be shipped to you. It works for nearly every site, like amazon or ebay, but  if you want  to use it for other sites, you should contact them first to make sure.

Conclusion.

If there are a lot of people recognising and using a certain form of payment system, be it coins or shells in real life, nearly every economic professor labels that as a currency. With the ever growing digitalisation of our lives in the 21st century, we can say that digital currencies are just that; currencies. One of my professors named Bitcoin more aptly a “digital world currency”, since it is used all over the world and is present in nearly every country.
So yes, people can use Bitcoin for the exact same things as normal currency. You can buy and sell things using Bitcoin and even do illegal activities with Bitcoin as one can with fiat. the big difference with Bitcoin and fiat is that it is open and fully traceable, even though it is pseudo anonymous. This means that people skimming or fraudulent practices can be traced back to addresses and the culprits can be brought to justice. It will be a lot of work but there are already start-ups that are working on search engines for the blockchain. Maybe that is why certain people are afraid of Bitcoin and what it represents.
Whatever the case may be, people can do the exact same thing with Bitcoin as they can with fiat currency. Can you buy food with Bitcoin? Yes. Can you buy other local products with Bitcoin? Yes. Can you buy illegal items( drugs, guns, fund terrorists,etc) with Bitcoin? Yes but you can also do that with other fiat currencies and even with gold or diamonds. However it isn’t wise to use Bitcoin for illegal transactions since Bitcoins can be tracked through the Blockchain.
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Curbing threats to payment systems a priority: Fed's Rosengren

Curbing threats to payment systems a priority: Fed's Rosengren

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Attacks on electronic payment systems are a serious financial stability concern that requires public investment, and that the US Federal Reserve and other central banks should move to thwart, a top Fed official said on Friday. 
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG

[WASHINGTON] Attacks on electronic payment systems are a serious financial stability concern that requires public investment, and that the US Federal Reserve and other central banks should move to thwart, a top Fed official said on Friday.
Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren did not comment on monetary policy or the economy in a speech to the Basel committee on banking supervision.
Instead, he warned that central banks must be more proactive to protect the "many potential points of failure" in the complex landscape of payments.
Americans and US retailers can choose from an array of options, from credit and debit cards to newer services like PayPal and Google Wallet, to make and receive payment for goods and services.



Whether to steal or disrupt, hackers can take advantage of vulnerabilities in accounts of the customer, the merchant, the third-party provider, or the bank.
An attack "that renders consumers and businesses unable to transact business could be extremely disruptive and could possibly cripple an economy," Mr Rosengren said in prepared remarks.
"The adoption of a national defense grade security level, rather than a commercial grade security level, would mean a much more resilient, albeit expensive, payment system," he said.
Massive security breaches involving retailers such as Target Corp and Home Depot last year have raised awareness of the need to make payments safer. Earlier this week, the Fed launched a bid to work with banks and others in finance to improve the speed and safety of payments systems.
Mr Rosengren, who typically does not comment on cyber security but whose Fed bank ran a test on sharing cyber-threat information, called the overall effort a "national priority."
Payments breaches, he said, "contribute to the erosion of confidence in payment mechanisms and ultimately increase overall transaction costs."
REUTERS










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Federal Reserve wants confidence on inflation, unfazed on dollar

Federal Reserve wants confidence on inflation, unfazed on dollar

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Inflation is too low and the Federal Reserve is looking for evidence that inflation will return to a 2 per cent target, an influential Fed official said on Monday, adding that the strong dollar should not derail US economic momentum. 
PHOTO: REUTERS

[NEW YORK] Inflation is too low and the Federal Reserve is looking for evidence that inflation will return to a 2 per cent target, an influential Fed official said on Monday, adding that the strong dollar should not derail US economic momentum. "Inflation is too low. I want to have some reason for confidence that it is coming back to 2 per cent," Fed Governor Jerome Powell said on Bloomberg TV.
The stronger dollar "will weigh a little bit on our exports and it will certainly in the short-term hold inflation down through import prices, so it might be a slight headwind but I don't see it stopping the momentum" in the economy, he added.
REUTERS






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