#Goldman #Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is the #latest banking executive to raise concerns over #bitcoin, as the #currency shot down #below its previous high of $ 7,000 today. Blankfein said “maybe bitcoin is kind of a #bubble” in an interview with CNBC, stating that he was “not comfortable” with the currency. Blankfein’s comments are in line […]
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EXCLUSIVE—#SegWit2x, a controversial change to the #bitcoin #blockchain, will no longer happen, bitcoin holders and #cryptocurrency enthusiasts found out yesterday. Aside from the initial shock, bitcoiners seem to be #fine to wave goodbye to SegWit2x. Some even seem to be celebrating, at least according to Twitter: ?ALERT? Our wish has come true! #NO2X !!! The […]
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#Blockchain pros at a Ripple conference in Toronto said the #technology had moved ahead once it was detached from #bitcoin.
Financial Technology
Bank payment specialists starting to use #Ripple #blockchain make clear to their own executives and regulators that this has nothing to do with #bitcoin.
Financial Technology
The Acting Comptroller of the Currency of the #United #States, Keith Noreika, has stated that he is considering imposing a nationwide licensing program for #cryptocurrency #exchanges, similar to the licensing program recently enacted in Japan. This hypothetical licensing program could put into place a nation-wide, unified regulatory framework for cryptocurrency exchange platforms. Last week, Japan’s […]
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Even after shutting down dozens of #bitcoin exchanges and banning bitcoin executives from leaving its borders, the“mouthpiece” for the People’s Bank of #China, Financial News, published an article declaring that Beijing should “accelerate the process of launching a digital currency after it curbed the risks of [en]cryptocurrencies.” Furthermore, last week, China’s Ministry of Information and #Technology […]
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The price of #bitcoin continues to teeter today, with the #cryptocurrency having lost a third of its value in the last week. Bitcoin’s sharp drop comes after rising uncertainty in the Chinese market, with two major Chinese currency #exchanges, #China BTC and ViaBTC, having announced that they will halt trading by the end of this […]
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The price of #bitcoin is down following a report that China may ban all #cryptocurrency exchanges within its borders. On Friday, Chinese financial news outlet Caixin reported that the Chinese government is considering banning all exchanges between bitcoin, ether, and other #cryptocurrencies, and the Chinese yuan. Immediately following this report, the price of bitcoin dropped […]
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Earlier this year I made a set of #payments #predictions for #2017, which is living up to expectations as a year with new developments and change occurring on all fronts. In this blog, I give an #update on how the payments landscape is shaping up and rotating towards a new world of digital payments.
Prediction: Contactless card transactions in the UK will rise to between 6BN – 9BN transactions in 2017, (compared to my forecasts a year ago of 3BN transactions for the UK for 2016).
Contactless transactions are growing at a huge rate, far faster than most realize, showing a profound change in the way we pay across the globe. They are also spilling over into mobile contactless payments (e.g. Apple Pay) which grew 336 percent in the UK in the first half of 2017 compared to the same period in 2016 according to Worldpay.
Prediction: Voice payments solutions will start making a hit with the public—perhaps through Siri on iPhones, Alexa on Amazon and at POS.
Voice payments and voice commerce are an emerging trend that is here to stay.
Prediction: Alternative payment mechanisms (APMs) such as PayPal, iDEAL in the Netherlands and Klarna (Europe and US) will continue to grow strongly (20 percent – 30 percent) for e-commerce, driven both by convenience and by high fraud rates in card-not-present transactions.
APMs are already more popular than cards in some countries for e-commerce, and this continuing trend shows cards dominance is under threat globally.
Prediction: The UK will continue to lead the world in instant payments. Plans will be developed for a new real-time payments infrastructure that leaps ahead of current implementations in terms of ambition and capability.
Prediction: Faster Payments will process 1.65BN transactions, 15 percent higher than 2016 (1.4BN transactions).
Instant or real-time payment infrastructures are appearing all around the world. Adoption is gradually gaining pace and we can expect years of ongoing renewal, such as in the UK, as they embed and evolve with the demands of the digital economy.
Prediction: #Bitcoin transactions for 2017 will be 150M transactions (up from 83M in 2016), miners’ revenue $ 850M ($ 562M in 2016), the average hash rate will be 5.7gh/s (1.5gh/s average in 2016), $ 120BN will be transacted in Bitcoin ($ 56BN in 2016) and the average number of unique addresses used daily will average 600K (406K addresses daily in 2016).
This is a blizzard of statistics, but they show that the Bitcoin network continues to grow in terms of transactions and users (addresses), that significant sums are transacted over it, and that while miners are multiplying—in fact, tripling—the computing power (# rate) in the Bitcoin network, they are receiving significant rewards for doing so.
The number of Bitcoin transactions is still very low for a payments network, and are constrained by the current network capacity limit (which is supposedly being resolved), indicating that the Bitcoin network is more a store of digital asset value than a payments network. However, while miners’ revenue is dependent for now mainly on block rewards, over time this will diminish increasing their need to compete for transaction fees, and if Bitcoin is to endure, the number of transactions will need to grow significantly.
I suspect that this is part of Satoshi Nakatomo’s game plan for Bitcoin, and if it materializes, Bitcoin will become a mainstream force over the next 10 years as a store of value and as a payments network.
Prediction: Ripple will be the one DLT player in payments that grows, with its #technology moving on from use by #banks for pilots, bilateral exchange and internal payment flows, to use as a new cross-border payments network with growing transaction volumes between networked banks.
Ripple goes from strength-to-strength. While there are some examples of banks experimenting with other DLT, such as R3 in Singapore, no other DLT player comes close to the penetration of Ripple in payments, particularly cross-border payments.
The post 2017 payments predictions: A mid-year update appeared first on Accenture Banking Blog.
#Bitcoin’s #price has been up and down today, swinging wildly from its more than $ 4,400 high to about $ 3,900, before it rose #again. The #cryptocurrency is back #over $ 4,000 at the time of this reporting, at around 11:30 am ET, hovering at about $ 4,025, after previously dropping more than $ 500 in value down to about […]
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