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There are so many benefits to using a cryptocurrency, that it would seem foolish to neglect such an invention. For example, it allows you to send money anywhere in the world in an instant, with basically no fees involved. Everyone can be included in the financial system, it will change the way we interact with money, it can prevent fraud, and much more.
The Venezuelan government is cracking down on remittance payments with a new banking mandate, one that could put the country’s Bitcoin users on an even tighter leash.
In a letter “addressed to all banking institutions,” the government has ordered all domestic banks to disclose the IP addresses, financial details, transaction amounts and locations of all citizens who access their banking services from outside the country.
Per the measure, Venezuelans are expected to “notify [their] banking institution of [travel] instances prior to [departing], explicitly indicating their destination place(s)” and how long they’ll be out of country, the letter reads.
If a citizen fails to comply with the above stipulations, banks may “enact a special condition that restricts the ability of the client to make online transactions,” effectively locking them out of their bank accounts if they are caught accessing services outside of the county. The bank is then required to “report the policy holder’s name; identification of the resource/asset; date and place of provenance; date of imposed restriction and the IP address from which access was attempted” to the National Entity of Financial Intelligence.
“Lack of compliance with the above stated,” the letter concludes, “will result in the imposing of sanctions in accordance with the terms outlined by the legislative decree.”
The measure, self-described as a means to “preserve the interests of the users and of the general public,” is the government’s attempt to strongarm the community of Venezuelans who migrate to neighboring countries, such as Argentina, to send money home. Their own country’s economy ravaged by hyperinflation, these expats seek work abroad in hopes of earning a living wage to support themselves and their loved ones.
It’s these citizens funneling money back into the country that the government wants to police with its new order.
“A lot of people are sending money to their relatives in Venezuela and they want a cut of that,” Venezuelan Eduardo Gómez, head of support at Purse.io, told Bitcoin Magazine. This strategy, he continued to explain, is much like the Cuban government’s own monopoly over cross-border transaction clearing.
“If you look at what Cuba is doing … the biggest revenue source for Cuba is remittances; it’s all the Cubans living in Florida, in Miami, sending money home to their families. If you want to send money to Cuba, you have to go through the government to sell dollars for Cuban pesos.”
Venezuelan officials are reaching for the same control. In sanctioning state-approved trading houses, which as Gómez suggests are in the government’s back pocket, politicians are hoping to reroute all remittances through these institutions to take a cut of payments. The bank order is the means by which the government intends to coerce citizens to use these services.
And their IP addresses are the leverage. As the order indicates, if a client is caught accessing online banking services abroad, or she fails to report the required information to her bank, then that client could lose banking privileges.
Gómez told us that the government has already come down on citizens using middleman services who offer cheaper money transfer services in neighboring countries, citing his siblings’ use of such services in Uruguay.
This new measure will look to sweep up those they’ve missed, including users of well-known OTC Bitcoin exchange LocalBitcoins.
“Bitcoin is a threat to [the government] because people are using LocalBitcoins to trade money around,” Gómez said.
While Gómez admitted that there’s less volume on Latin America’s LocalBitcoins hubs compared to international exchange volumes, he did say that “volume is increasing,” as it has become a popular remittance option to circumvent government-sanctioned trading houses.
Expats will even use the service as an alternative to foreign currency transfer intermediaries. Many Venezuelans living and working in Argentina, for example, will convert their Argentinian pesos into bitcoin. Using LocalBitcoins, they’ll search for a Venezuelan trader who uses the same bank as them, something that can be tricky depending on rates, bitcoin-to-bolivar liquidity and transaction size. Once a user finds the right match, they’ll give the buyer their bank account number — or, in some situations, that of a relative — and settle the transaction.
Under the government’s new requirements, Venezuelans who deposit directly into their own bank accounts could be in trouble, Gómez said, as they could have their banking services shuttered on account of illegal use — with similar consequences for those buyers transferring the funds. If the measure takes its desired effect, Gómez believes that it could have damaging ramifications on Bitcoin’s use and LocalBitcoins’s presence among Venezuelans.
“What this means for Bitcoin in the short term is that it could take some liquidity from LocalBitcoins because I have heard some rumors that a lot of Latin American traders for LocalBitcoins are Venezuelans living abroad. A lot of these guys left the country years ago, so what may happen is that a lot of those traders won’t be able to log into their bank accounts.”
Theoretically, this is easy to overcome. Instead of transferring funds into your own account, for instance, you could have them sent to a relative, instead. Gómez forecasts this as a likely outcome — one that, if it causes an uptick in LocalBitcoins’s popularity, could lead the government to shut down domestic access to the platform entirely.
“In the long term, the government may restrict LocalBitcoins via something like DNS blocking or IP blocking to restrict access to LocalBitcoins in Venezuela. If they see that a lot of people are using LocalBitcoins to circumvent this IP restriction, then they may see it as a threat.”
Still, this action would be a long time coming if it’s ever executed, Gómez predicts, for the same reason why LocalBitcoins is the only cryptocurrency exchange still active in the country: officials use it.
“A lot of people inside the government use LocalBitcoins to sell their bitcoins that they earn via mining because all of the government officials mine,” he said.
Even as the Venezuelan police raid local mining operations, government officials themselves mine with immunity, having bootstrapped their own rigs since the market’s 2017 bull run. Seeing as it’s so popular among officials, Gómez thinks the government will leave the exchange alone — for now, at least.
In our talk, Gómez indicated that the government’s banking order will no doubt create headaches for Venezuelan Bitcoin users. But by and large, the order is about effecting greater control over all aspects of the economy. Wrangling in Bitcoin users, specifically those sending money across borders, is just one degree of this control.
“Ultimately, the government wants a cut of the pie for remittances,” Gómez said.
LocalBitcoins is certainly cutting into the government’s transaction processing profit, but it’s not only used for money transfers. Gómez also told Bitcoin Magazine that Venezuelans use the service to check the bolivar’s rate against the U.S. dollar, which has become a de facto trading standard for many in-country services.
Venezuelans used to reference DolarToday, a popular service for transparent bolivar-dollar rates. But ever since rumors began to spread that the Venezuelan government covertly purchased the domain to control the rates, “LocalBitcoins is becoming the market reference for the dollar,” Gómez said. Users will refer to the bitcoin-bolivar rate against the bitcoin-dollar rate to arrive at a reliable bolivar-dollar rate.
The government’s economic war, as Gómez indicated, is total — one that looks to tighten the noose around any service or tender that works around officially sanctioned services. Given LocalBitcoins is proving to be a multifaceted tool for those Venezuelans who use it, it’s reasonable to assume that, if its popularity continues to surge, the government may take action.
If it does, this could completely throttle the last access points Venezuelans have to cryptocurrency platforms and services. Gómez said that even though LocalBitcoins is the only operable exchange left in the country, “there’s [still] a lack of liquidity.”
In the event of this closing, Venezuelans will have yet another hurdle to jump when attempting to use crypto; this would neutralize one of the only economic safe havens citizens have left as the bolivar continues to hemorrhage value.
“Venezuelan salaries are so low that there’s not even a way for people to buy crypto. To put things into perspective, the average salary in Venezuela for one month of work is $1. Can you imagine that? Working a full month and only earning $1 at the end of it,” Gómez concluded in our talk.
This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.
Origin Protocol, one of the early initial token offerings listed on CoinList, has announced the launch of its new decentralized messaging service. Origin’s latest offering could challenge encrypted giant Telegram, which, while not decentralized, is widely used within the cryptocurrency community.
Origin Messaging was designed to meet the need for a decentralized messaging system, not only for Origin, but for the entire ecosystem. The team believes this is a core service to their marketplace. In their words:
“Messaging is [a] critical component necessary to facilitate meaningful transactions [between users].”
Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, Origin Co-founder Josh Fraser said the company is built on the belief that “buyers and sellers” should be able to “transact without rent-seeking middlemen.”
He continued, “When you cut out the middleman, you also remove their fees, and both the buyer and the seller are able to get a better price. We’re passionate about promoting free and transparent commerce and giving our community a stake in the network.”
The team has expressed confidence that a decentralized, encrypted, real-time service will best suit users. The Origin Messaging service was designed by leading research and development engineer Yu Pan, who is a co-founder of PayPal and a top engineer at YouTube.
Origin engineer Micah Alcorn outlined the features in Origin’s blog post. These include an open-source framework and secure, end-to-end encryption. According to him, user privacy is paramount, and no one — including Origin and the National Security Agency (NSA) — should have the ability to eavesdrop on user conversations.
The platform is also fully decentralized, built on top of OrbitDB, which is a serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database that uses IPFS as its data storage and IPFS pubsub to automatically synchronize databases with peers. Furthermore, it is entirely free because though it leverages Ethereum’s infrastructure and signing capabilities, no messages are published to the Ethereum blockchain, which means there are no associated gas fees.
He also lists speed, auditability, ease of use and anonymity as useful features of the new platform. Interestingly, the Origin dApp is ERC-725 compatible, which means users can create non-fungible assets that are used to verify the authenticity of the message recipient’s identity.
According to Origin, “ERC-725 gives you a smart contract that you alone control. This smart contract represents your identity on the blockchain. You can attach as much identifying information to your identity smart contract as you want. You can also get attestations from other trusted third-parties like Origin that verify specific aspects of your identity and add those to your identity smart contract. You can see an example of this in action in the Origin dApp where Origin will verify information like your email address, phone number and Facebook account. After Origin verifies that you control those accounts, we will sign an attestation on your behalf that you can attach to your identity smart contract.”
Of course, users also have the option to include no identifying information at all and choose to be known as nothing but an Ethereum address.
Origin is not the first cryptocurrency project to pitch a decentralized messaging service. Obsidian, a fork of Stratis, for example, has launched its own decentralized messaging platform. Popular messaging app Telegram also had plans to decentralize its services by launching an ICO, though it took a step back from this plan in May of 2018 by canceling the public portion of its fundraising.
This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.
In order to make payments on the lightning network — Bitcoin’s second layer solution for instant and cheap transactions — users must first fund lightning channels. This process, however, creates a slight disconnect between lightning users and on-chain users. Lightning users can pay lightning users, and on-chain users can pay on-chain users, but they can’t pay one another directly.
To solve this, “Submarine Swaps” allow users to make trustless transactions between lightning addresses and on-chain addresses in either direction. The technology could be a game changer for both Bitcoin lightning and mainnet users, as it would remove the transaction barriers between them.
“[I] think this makes it a lot more attractive to [run] a lightning-only service,” Submarine Swap’s developer Alex Bosworth told Bitcoin Magazine, as on-chain users wouldn’t beexcluded. “You don't have to [...] worry about including the on-chain people,” he said. “You can outsource that to somebody else, and you don’t have to trust them.”
Using the same cryptographic tricks as those used in the lightning network, Submarine Swaps use a trustless middleman to link a Lightning channel transaction with an on-chain one. This middleman, likely a program called a swap provider, is tasked with settling both the on-chain and off-chain transactions with both users, bridging the gap between Bitcoin’s network and the lightning network.
If one lightning network user wants to send funds to an on-chain user, for example, the middleman will transfer these funds to its own lightning wallet, if (and only if) he sends a transaction with comparable funds on the Bitcoin blockchain to the desired on-chain address. The process works the same in the inverse if an on-chain address wants to send funds to a lightning address.
“There's lots of different ways it can be used,” Bosworth said. “So let's say an exchange wants to send to a lightning invoice but it doesn’t have lightning funds, or it doesn't have a lightning wallet; in that case, it could ask somebody who does have that to assist them, and then they could do so in a way where its locked to their on-chain unit.”
He continued to explain that the feature could ultimately be integrated into wallets, enabling an on-chain client “that doesn’t even know about lightning” to transact with its users.
Bosworth also pointed out that the swap providers could be the one and the same person. “It’s flexible in that respect. So you can have it be either a [third party] or it could even be yourself.”
When asked if the swapping mechanism would want for liquidity, Bosworth said that he believes transaction rewards will incentivize enough users to front their bitcoin for transactions. “[Users] are incentivized by the swap rate to provide liquidity, I think that will attract more liquidity. This is a low risk operation, so I can either have my coins just sit there doing nothing or I can have them available for swaps and generate some revenue,” he stated.
The Submarine Swaps concept was originally conceptualized by Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun — though Bosworth came up with the same idea independently. The technology can be applied in various use cases, as Bosworth envisions.
The technology is still in its infancy, as Bosworth explained, and it’s also contingent on the development of existing lightning network applications.
“I’ve started doing tests on mainnet, and you can try testing it out on Submarine Swaps so you can see a swap in action, but there’s lots of stuff to work out and the LND still needs work; they’re working on a major new release, so things are moving along but I wouldn’t say it's like super safe because not everything is 100 percent yet.”
This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.
🚧🛑🚧🛑🚧🛑🚧🛑🚧🛑🚧🛑🚧🛑🚧 Bitcoin Cash: Forked at Block 478558, 1 August 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BCH Bytether: Cross for...