Legendary Swiss ski resort St. Moritz has announced on Thursday that they will begin accepting Bitcoin payments for lift passes. The 2017/18 season that has just begun will be the first in which the payment method is trialled.
According to Swiss public television, SRF, and the newspaper Südostschweiz, Engadin St Moritz is the first Swiss lift company to recognise payments with cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin resumed its tumble on Thursday after South Korea said it was eyeing options including a potential shutdown of at least some cryptocurrency exchanges to stamp out a frenzy of speculation.
The price of bitcoin on Thursday afternoon in Seoul fell about 8.5 per cent to Won19.93m ($18.534) on Bithumb, one of the world’s busiest virtual currency exchanges, as traders reacted to the measures. Bitcoin, the world’s biggest and best-known cryptocurrency, has fallen about 28 per cent from its record high reached last week.
On the morning of December 27, 2017, bitcoin was worth slightly more than $15,400. But Morgan Stanley analyst James Faucette said the real price of bitcoin might be $0.
Business Insider reported that Morgan Stanley executive director James Faucette has reportedly sent a memo to his group’s clients that suggested the true value of Bitcoin was $0.00. Faucette’s team of analysts argue that not only is Bitcoin hard to equate to real world money, less online retailers are accepting the cryptocurrency as payment. “If nobody accepts the technology for payment then the value would be 0,” Faucette said in his analysis.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to clear the way for music-streaming service Spotify to go public using the unusual method of a direct listing. The successful music-streaming service Spotify will release its stocks to the public in 2018 through a direct offering instead of the traditional IPO.
Before Spotify can directly list its shares, the New York Stock Exchange must win approval from the SEC to change its rules. “The NYSE has applied for such a change and the SEC has indicated to Spotify it’s likely to approve,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Cryptocurrency bitcoin tumbled below $14,000 briefly on the Bitstamp exchange on Friday, down roughly 30 per cent from its record top near $20,000 set at the start of the week.
The cryptocurrency which became sensational all over media reached as high as $19,666 on Sunday but dropped after the launch of giant CME Group’s bitcoin futures. The cryptocurrency was about $1,000 in the year’s beginning.
The Long Island Ice Tea Corporation is exactly what it sounds like: a company that sells people bottled iced tea and lemonade. But today the company announced a significant change of strategy that would start with changing its name to "Long Blockchain Corporation."
Coinbase, one of the largest online exchanges for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, is investigating possible insider trading after the price of a Bitcoin offshoot called Bitcoin Cash climbed hours before Coinbase announced support.
Due to its stature in the industry, a cryptocurrency trading on Coinbase-as opposed to smaller exchanges-is seen as a stamp of legitimacy. When Coinbase announced unceremoniously on Tuesday that it would allow trading for Bitcoin Cash, a controversial clone of Bitcoin with some small differences, the digital currency’s value skyrocketed from just under $3,000 per coin to above $6,000.
Virtual currency investment firm Crypto Finance has closed a €13 million capital raise to fund an application for the license with Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), but did not specify a timeline. Established in June this year, the company provides asset management, brokerage and storage facilities to the crypto-investing community.
It is one of a wave of startups looking to create an alternative financial system in Switzerland as the country’s traditional banks continue to shy away from the booming cryptocurrency market.
