Weekend Roundup: Glenn Beck Voices Support for Blockchains, EU Tax Issues Loom, and BTC Retail Store Opens in SF

1. Glenn Beck Says Blockchain Technologies Can Help Fight Fascism

On Tuesday, Ian DeMartino reported that American TV personality Glenn Beck was next in the long line of noisy people who had hitched their political agendas to Bitcoin and its underlying technology.

Those that hate him likely aren't going to change their opinion on Bitcoin because of him one way or another, but those that love him and were on the fence about Bitcoin might have just gotten a push into the field.

2. New EU Tax Law Could Double Tax Bitcoin and Log Location Data

On Thursday, Charlie Richards reported on legislation at the EU level that could potentially affect hundreds of millions of Europeans, should they begin to use bitcoins.

A reclassification of how Value Added Tax (VAT) is to be applied in the EU will force merchants to log users' location, and make the user pay VAT twice. In particular, this could mean that from January 1 merchants could be forced to log identifying details about bitcoin users' identity in order to apply the tax correctly.

3. First Bitcoin Retail Store Opens in San Francisco

On Monday, Diana Ngo reported on a brick-and-mortar store called Nakamoto’s, which just opened inside of a coworking space in San Francisco.

Nakamoto's tech retail store follows the initial concept behind Purse.io, but in brick-and-mortar format, and aims to give more practical uses and applications for the digital currency on a local scale.

4. BitQuick Set to Raise OTC Trading Standards and 'Kill LocalBitcoins'

On Tuesday, Diana Ngo reported on a company that has very firmly got LocalBitcoins in its crosshairs.

BitQuick monitors closely the operations occurring on its exchange, and any transaction judged as abnormal, or greater than roughly US$400 in size, require a valid government issued ID. These measures will ideally dissuade LocalBitcoins users that are participating in black market activities to use BitQuick, said founder and CEO Jad Mubaslat.

5. Good News for Overstock: Utah Considers Bitcoin Payment for State Services

On Thursday, William Suberg reported on a resolution put before the Utah House of Representatives that would “legitimize Bitcoin as a legal payment method.”

Consideration of such a resolution at state level means Utah joins several US states taking an active stance towards Bitcoin’s role in the local economy. One of these is New York, which is in the final stages of preparation of its controversial BitLicense scheme. California meanwhile, as the first state of openly legalize use of Bitcoin, has seen infrastructure related to it expand dramatically.

Elsewhere

Coin Fire reports that PokerStars has almost finished integrating bitcoin payment processing. Ryan Walker, a contributor for CoinDesk and Let’sTalkBitcoins!, has a thoughtful post on his own blog in which he argues that blockchain-based identity ledger OneName (or some equivalent) could become “the single bridge between physical and digital identify.” Hacked.com reported Tuesday that many Dutch government websites sustained a DDOS attack and were offline for several hours.

Market activity

Bitcoin’s prices against the dollar found support throughout the week at US$220. Through Thursday, prices hovered pretty closely to that mark or just above it. Midday Friday (EST), prices took a quick jump toward the US$240 mark, then got an extra bump into the mid-US$240s on Saturday morning.

USD exchange trade volume mirrored this late-week rise in price, almost breaking through the US$5 million mark for the first time in February.

Transaction numbers also picked up after downward trends the last three weeks. Wednesday saw one spike, with just more than 105,000 on-blockchain transactions recorded; then, the end-of-week price jump coincided with transaction numbers topping 110,000 on Friday.

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