Market Analysis Report

8-Hour Miner Meeting Ends With Litecoin SegWit Agreement

A group of miners and exchanges is supporting Litecoin’s SegWit following weeks of increasingly acrimonious debate over whether the technical upgrade would be enacted on the litecoin network. After a eight-hour meeting held on WeChat and backed also by the cryptocurrency's creator, Coinbase employee Charlie Lee, a statement was released which endorses a "Segregated Witness soft fork on Litecoin". Now, SegWit seems to be on track for activation. The post reads:

"We agree that protocol upgrade should be made under community consensus, and should not be unilateral action of developers nor miners. We advocate that Litecoin protocol upgrade decision should be made based on the needs of the users, through the roundtable meeting voting process, and activated by miner voting."

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Florida Lawmakers Want Bitcoin Covered Under Money Laundering Law

Florida lawmakers want virtual currencies like bitcoin covered under the state’s money-laundering statute, a change that supporters claim would ensure criminals cannot use Internet-based currencies to conceal financial activities, according to The Miami Herald. The proposed law was crafted by Miami-Dade cybercrime prosecutors after a judge threw out charges against a man accused of selling $1,500 in bitcoins to buy stolen credit card numbers on the Internet.

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European Commission To Establish EU Blockchain Observatory

The European Commission (EC) will tender offers for a service contract to establish a European Union (EU) Blockchain Observatory in response to a European Parliament mandate to strengthen technical expertise and regulatory capacity. The goal is to establish an EU expertise resource for forward-looking blockchain topics and develop EU use cases.

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Slush adds Zcash Mining Pool

Slush Pool, the world’s first Bitcoin mining pool, added support for Zcash. This is the first time Slush pool adds an alternative cryptocurrency to its mining pool. In its blog post entitled “5 Reasons to Mine Zcash with Slush Pool,” Slush Pool outlined five major reasons why miners should be interested in mining Zcash. The post made by Slush Pool reads:

“We have introduced support for Zcash mining today. That is quite a huge step for us, as we have focused solely on Bitcoin and merged mining so far. It took us many months to develop and thoroughly test our Zcash mining system. We have already successfully mined over 20 blocks during the private testing stage and we are hungry for more.”

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