FinCEN is an agency of the Treasury Department responsible for preventing financial crimes, and they have taken a few steps toward creative effective regulations for cryptocurrency transactions. FinCEN is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, an office of the Treasury Department, primarily concerned with money laundering and other forms of financial fraud domestically and internationally. It is because of FinCEN’s far=reaching authority that major cryptocurrency exchanges who do business with US citizens will generally require identity and bank account verification, and will impose limits on transaction amounts. In 2013, FinCEN issued guidance that anyone engaged in the transmission or exchange of cryptocurrencies may fall under their jurisdiction to regulate Money Service Businesses (MSBs), meaning you may potentially have to register as a Money Transmitter on the Federal and state level if you frequently engage in cryptocurrency transactions. Continue reading...
The truest definition of a Bank Draft is a check written with the certification of a customer’s bank. Bank Drafts are checks also known as Bank Checks and Cashier’s Checks. They have already been cleared at the writing institution and they provide an extra endorsement that the payment is good. Regular personal checks do not need to be co-signed or verified before they are used as payment, whether or not there is enough money in an account to cover it. Continue reading...
An account number is a serialized identifier which is ascribed to a particular account holder or account at a financial institution, retailer, or other entity. Account numbers may include letters or numbers and may be of various length, but they usually exceed 5 characters. An account number is a way for a company or organization to uniquely identify the accounts associated with each individual customer. Continue reading...
Homeowners insurance covers a variety of risks to a homeowner, including damage to the property and the belongings within it, as well as liability coverage in the event that someone else is injured on the property. It does not include coverage for flood or earthquake damage, so people living in areas where that might be a problem will need to find a separate policy for those coverages. Homeowners insurance is highly advisable for any homeowner, and most mortgage lenders will require it. Continue reading...
Blockchain, if applied on a broad basis, could lower costs substantially for both financial institutions and consumers, while also preventing fraud. This could upend the financial markets as we know it, in a good way. With blockchain, virtually any type of asset can be stored digitally and securely, meaning that money, equities, bonds, contracts, deeds, etc.. can be moved from peer to peer with little to zero fear of fraud, and no vulnerable (or costly) intermediary like a bank or a government. Continue reading...
The overarching theme of blockchains is that they can provide security and asset verification in a decentralized system, which is perhaps the best-known method for preventing fraud. Blockchains are a technological revolution that provides an opportunity to establish strong systems for digital identity. Here are some of the applications and uses for it: A user can authenticate a unique physical item by pairing them with a corresponding digital token. In that sense, these tokens serve to connect the physical and digital worlds. With a token assigned to each physical good, that can revolutionize supply chain management, managing intellectual property to prevent counterfeiting and fraud detection. Continue reading...
Blockchain technology is already being used and developed for many important and impressive applications, and much more is yet to be discovered. Blockchains use distributed work to obtain consensus for changes to a distributed ledger. Because of their nature, blockchains are incredibly powerful tools that can be used in many realms and applications. They offer security in that they are almost unhackable; any attempted unauthorized changes to the system are immediately obvious to the entire system because it is built on agreement and consensus among its many nodes. Because this structure gives each addition to the ledger, and the record in the ledger, a high degree of integrity and security, future applications of blockchains are being researched in various fields around the world. Continue reading...
A Merkle Tree is a technique widely used to create the blocks in blockchains. When records of numerous transactions are blended together into a block and sent to a blockchain to be deciphered and validated, Merkle Trees are generally the design with which they are put together. Ralph Merkle first designed this hashing method in 1979 but didn’t see it popularized for some time. They are sometimes called hash trees. In case you are unaware, the difference between hashes and encryptions is that hashes are not intended to be decryptable unless someone has the original content. Hashes are basically symbols of a certain length generated using the “seed” of the actual content that was fed into the hash function. If the same content is entered as the seed, it will produce the same hash, but any differences will yield a completely different result. Continue reading...
A distributed ledger is a records system in which the same information is held redundantly across many nodes in a network, and is essential to blockchain technology. Centralized databases used to be the primary way that important records of transaction histories and so forth were held. Databases validate the identity of those requesting access to the records by asking for and retaining personally identifying information. If that office building were to lose power, was hacked, or was destroyed, it is possible for all of the information to be lost or given over to hands of bad actors. Even with cloud storage backups, the security and financial risk to any one of these storage depositories remain a problem. Continue reading...
In your “bitcoin wallet,” of course... Once you have acquired bitcoin, you will want to make sure that you store it in a secure fashion that suits your taste and needs. You have several options for this, since technically all you’re storing is a few lines of code, and this can be done on a computer, in a cloud, on a removable storage device, or on some sort of physical medium such as paper or even a physical manufactured bitcoin. Continue reading...
The pseudonymous inventor(s) of bitcoin and blockchain technology, Satoshi Nakamoto, likely walks among us today. Satoshi Nakamoto was the pen-name of the author(s) who anonymously gave the world the design and code for bitcoin and blockchain technology. Penning a white-paper entitled “Bitcoin: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” the author(s) described the need for a decentralized digital currency and proposed blockchain technology as the way to validate digital transactions with a distributed ledger. Continue reading...
A letter of credit is a provided by a bank or financial institution on behalf of a borrower or buyer, to ensure the seller that payments will be made on time and in full. In the event that the buyer is unable to make payment on the purchase, the bank will have to step-in to cover the full or remaining amount of the purchase. Letters of credit are often used in international transactions to guarantee that payment will be received. Continue reading...
Similar to other cryptocurrencies, litecoin can be purchased through major cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet apps. Many reputable exchanges exist for buying and trading cryptocurrencies, and several of these will allow you to purchase litecoin with credit cards, wire transfers, and bank deposits. There may be issues with buying enough litecoins to suit your fancy if you aren’t willing to verify your identity, or if the exchange simply won’t allow you to exchange for a large balance of litecoin in single transactions. One option that may open more doors is to purchase bitcoin first, and then exchange those for litecoin. Many people search for good ways to buy litecoin or Bitcoin with Paypal, but it is probably more trouble than it’s worth. Paypal has a somewhat over-active reversible charge system, which favors some buyers or sellers over others by default and can be used by bad actors to reverse the payment owed to someone transacting business in cryptocurrencies. Continue reading...
Blockchains create an indisputable digital record that is decentralized, i.e, cannot be changed by a single actor. Using blockchain is generally for digital security. Here are few reasons to use a blockchain: Tokenization A user can authenticate a unique physical item by pairing them with a corresponding digital token. In that sense, these tokens serve to connect the physical and digital worlds. With a token assigned to each physical good, that can revolutionize supply chain management, managing intellectual property to prevent against counterfeiting, and fraud detection. Continue reading...
Blockchain technology does not always have to be implemented in a public peer-to-peer system. Blockchains rely on a network of computers, representing nodes, that collaborate and distribute the information required for the blockchain to function. The nodes in some blockchains can be established by any computer willing to run the client software for the network. Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies are intended to function this way: as a public, open-source, permission-less, and trust less network. The nodes are used indiscriminately by the rest of the network as long as the node is performing the functions required of nodes, and this is called a proof-of-work system. When Satoshi Nakamoto coded the first blockchain, his intention was to keep the network functioning with only one tier: “one CPU, one vote.” That vision has encountered obstacles in the form of ASIC mining and other unforeseen circumstances that have empowered some nodes and groups of users over others. Continue reading...
Blockchains use distributed ledgers, which are decentralized and do not rely on centralized databases. Databases are the traditional way to store information and to keep it secure. When companies store information about their customers, or about the business itself, it is usually kept in a database connected to servers that handle requests for the information. The design for such a system tends to look like a wagon wheel: a central hub with numerous spokes connecting it to the outer wheel. Layers of security are heaped onto centralized servers and permit access to various levels of information is given to specific users. Continue reading...
Before you dismiss that email in your inbox with the subject line "Equifax Breach Settlement (Credit Monitoring Instructions and Activation Code)," it's important to pause and reconsider. This email is not a scam; it's a legitimate offer from Equifax as part of the final settlement for the data breach they experienced in 2017, which affected millions of individuals. In this article, we will explain how eligible claimants can benefit from four years of free credit monitoring from Experian IdentityWorks℠ and provide key information to ensure you don't fall victim to potential scams. Continue reading...
Do you like security, speed, and low to zero transaction costs when conducting financial transactions? Bitcoin aims to offer all three. Security, speed, and low transaction costs are among bitcoin’s objectives. In a peer-to-peer network, there are no middle-men charging fees for clearing transactions, operating a call center, or maintaining the security of a database. Some types of fraud are much less likely than in traditional systems since the existence of a balance and the validity of transactions are constantly checked and updated by thousands of distributed, independent nodes in the network that do not close based on traditional banking hours. Transactions clear almost immediately instead of waiting on a large market or a Federal bank to balance its books. Continue reading...
The cryptocurrency community has opened up creative options for making money in the form of lending platforms. A few forms of lending exist for cryptocurrencies at the time of this writing. One way to do it is to make your funds available in a lending market facilitated by an exchange, such as Poloniex, where you can name your interest rate and allow other traders to use your funds for trading on margin. Continue reading...
The Ethereum platform allows developers to use it as a coding environment and distribution network for applications built on the blockchain. The ability to create distributed applications on a blockchain is a novel idea that has gained a lot of momentum since Ethereum’s release. Developers can write and distribute their applications over the blockchain network, at little to no cost, while removing the necessity of running a website or a large server database because the blockchain satisfies these needs. The code for the application becomes part of the blockchain ledger, and users who wish to use some functionality of the decentralized application, or Ðapp as they are called, will submit requests to the Ethereum blockchain, pay the transaction fees for the distributed network to process the requests, and the network will call on the code of the Ðapp stored in the blockchain and process it using the computing power of the distributed network sometimes called the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Continue reading...