Romania's Oldest Bitcoin Exchange Is Shutting Down Next Week
Romania’s BTCxChange announced it was closing its platform earlier this week.
In a notice dated , the nation’s oldest cryptocurrency exchange told its customers to withdraw all of their remaining funds from the platform, which had already suspended most of its operations – including the ability to trade between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies like the Romanian leu – earlier this year.
The notice said:
“We inform you that starting from 1st of May 2018, our platform will be closed. Operations stopped back on 1st of February but you still could stock your bitcoins on our platform.”
Earlier this year, the exchange’s chief executive, Max Nicula, said the startup’s bank accounts had been shut down, and it would no longer able able to process fiat trades, .
This marks the third time the exchange has said that it would close. In September 2016, the company announced it would possibly be sold, and prepared for a closure at the time. At the time, the startup’s owner, Horea Vuscan, said he wanted to retire, and placed the exchange up for sale, .
Before then, the exchange asked its users to withdraw all their funds after its team lost access to their servers in , less than a year after it first opened.
The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a . CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.
2017 has been a record breaking, awe inspiring rollercoaster ride for cryptocurrency valuations with over 2000% valuation increases. With all the hype and global attention on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, Initial Coin Offerings have attempted to tokenize just about everything in 2017. However, in this culture of tokenization, what everybody has failed to observe is that, with price spikes in crypto valuations comes energy spikes in transactions processing.
As of September 30, 2017, 1 bitcoin transaction could power 7.5 homes in the US for a day.
As of December 31, 2017, 1 bitcoin transaction could power 10.5 homes in the US for a day.
This trend should cause severe alarm and provide us all with reason for concern. Furthermore, with a tidal wave of ICOs forthcoming this year all intending to take advantage of the hype and frenzy that is frothing within the crypto community, the consumption of electricity to process all these transactions is only expected to rise exponentially.
A proof-of-work (POW) system (or protocol, or function) is an economic measure to deter denial of service attacks and other service abuses such as spam on a network by requiring some work from the service requester, usually meaning processing time by a computer.
On the contrary, Proof of Stake (PoS) concept states that a person can mine or validate block transactions according to how many coins he or she holds. This means that the more bitcoin or altcoin owned by a miner, the more mining power he or she has.
While we all look forward to proof of stake to evolve, nevertheless, the most sought after, pioneer proven currency remains bitcoin, which continues to operate on a proof of work methodology. This is why the network is voraciously consuming electricity for the foreseeable future.
This situation is extremely reminiscent of the heated debate experienced between our dependence on fossil fuel consumption versus our shift to renewable energy consumption as a civilization. This debate has been ongoing for over two decades now, and our dependence on fossil fuels is anticipated to continue for the foreseeable future similar to our dependence on proof of work.
In lieu of this culminating impending crisis, one company has taken measures to solve this head on. Limited, a UK based Waste to Energy treatment plant, launched its pre-sale in the fall of 2017. successfully raised USD 30.5MM from US private equity funds in a conventional round of funding, achieving their soft cap requirement. Now with the funding for the plant secured, 4NEW has allocated all its electricity output into its coin, namely . The plant has a capacity of generating 300 million kilowatts per annum. With a total coin supply of 300 million, each Coin will be backed by 1 kilowatt of electricity.
This electricity will be applied towards the mining of bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. So while blockchain network protocols take time to evolve into a more energy efficient network, we can have a sustainable mechanism via which cryptocurrencies can transact in an environmentally responsible fashion with zero impact to the climate as is the case with dependence on fossil fuel generated electricity.
Furthermore, for the first time, we have a utility company solely dedicated to providing energy to blockchain networks; With the people holding the power to allocate this energy in their desired location via a voting structure only available to the coin holders. Needless to say, has successfully tokenized electricity, the most sought after commodity for our civilization with applications not just within the crypto community but also mainstream utilization.
bitcoin Is a Hedge Against ‘Irresponsible’ Federal Reserve: Asset Manager Get Exclusive Analysis and Investing Ideas of Future Assets on Hacked.com. Join the community today and get up to $400 in discount by using the […]
Yahoo Japan Expands Towards Crypto Industry Planning for an Exchange in May 2019 Photo: Thomas Hawk / Flickr Japan, one of the most highly developed countries and one of the world’s largest markets, will see […]
