Culturecom, co-founded by Jay Chou, will accept Bitcoin

When Bitcoin is rejected by giant technology and Internet companies which are qualified with finance business in China, the game platform UCAN under Culturecom, co-founded by Jay Chou, one of the most famous superstar in Asia, believes that Bitcoins, as a transaction channel, will especially benefit SMEs. The CEO Cheng Peng said the zero transaction cost of Bitcoin is much more attractive than credit card.

The CEO also pointed out that if mobile game companies publish games through iTunes, they need pay one third of their revenue to iTunes as operating fee. If customers use Visa or Master card for payment, companies also need to pay 3% - 10% of their revenue as cross-border service fee. After the payment, game companies usually can only get 10% of the revenue for profits. Although there are other open publish channels like Google, the limited operation of Google in mainland China will affect sales. On the contrary, with zero cost and open environment, Bitcoin largely attracted game companies as a transaction channel.

Although supervision authorities in mainland China forbid financial institutions and giant IT companies from being involved in or using Bitcoin, Cheng Peng believes that this instead is an advantage for SMEs to explore Bitcoin transaction. When dealing with Bitcoin, since supervision authorities regard Bitcoin as commodity, UCAN will categorise Bitcoin to inventory in financial statements.

UCAN planned to launch Bitcoin payment for mobile game in July or August. The next step is to promote Bitcoin to offline products and Apps. Cheng Peng emphasised that his company will not speculate or arbitrage Bitcoin, but only use it for daily business transaction.

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Choir Spreads Bitcoin Love to Japan, Japanese Translations to LocalBitcoins

Finnish academic male choir KYL has been touring Japan. The tour included 5 concerts, from which 4 were fully booked. The tour also included lots of other finno-japanese cultural exchange.

The special kicker in this case was that at the same time, the Choir was spreading Bitcoin propaganda to Japan, as LocalBitcoins was sponsoring the concert. LocalBitcoins was prominently displayed in the tour t-shirts, as well in the concert promotional material.

At the same time, Japanese translation was made to LocalBitcoins, making it more usable for Japanese audience.

Localから始まる世界革命。

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Unexpected Downtime Solved, Infrastructure Upgraded

Our server had gone down yesterday. The reason might be hardware failure. We are researching the issue and trying to get the site back up.

The LocalBitcoins Team

Update: the service is now up. The reason behind the downtime was network hardware failure. Now we have moved our servers to another hosting provider.

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New Market Variables for Pricing : Coinbase, Bitpay, Kraken

The following variables were added to localbitcoins pricing engine:

- Kraken (EUR)
- Coinbase (USD)
- Bitpay (multiple currencies)

You can see the list of all possible variables in the pricing guide.

Happy trading!

If you can't invent a good price equation yourself, you can always ask a wizard. [picture unrelated]

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LocalBitcoins Trading API

Hello developers,

LocalBitcoins is proud to announce automated trading support on both online and local trades. Previously only buying Bitcoins with cash was supported through API.

In addition there is a full dashboard API available to cultivate and monitor your currently active and past trades.

The expanded API is available immediately. Please refer to the API documentation for the up-to-date details.

The API enables faster, more reliable trading. You can use the API to automate and enforce your business logic and earn more, or just to lose the hassle in filing the tax report.

Your feedback is important in the direction and focus of the development of the API. Please do continue to contact about your issues and wishes about the API as well as about your use cases either to our support form or by joining our chat.

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Attack against LocalBitcoins infrastructure 3.5.2014

LocalBitcoins received a very dangerous attack against the site infrastructure on Saturday 3.5.2014.
For now

• All user data and Bitcoins are safe;
• The site will be down for a while as the system is being rebuilt

Details

LocalBitcoins hosting provided received a request to restart the LocalBitcoins.com website server and give access to the server console (root) on Sat May 3 13:32:27. LocalBitcoins team did not initiate this request. For now, it looks like the request was made using spoofed email addresses and other weakness in the hosting provider support system.

• LocalBitcoins team was alerted about the abnormal activity when the hosting provider restarted the server.
• The attacker gained a root access to the server for ~40 minutes before the attacker was kicked out and the server shutdown.
• All data on the website server is encrypted. Manual actions are needed to make this data readable, so the attacker could not gain access to the data even when having a server console access. 

It is very unlikely that the attacker gained access to any data;  LocalBitcoins is still performing full investigation on the matter.

• Bitcoins in hot wallet and cold wallet are safe, as LocalBitcoins runs its bitcoind and wallets on a separate server.
• LocalBitcoins team has started to rebuild the website server on fresh hardware.

LocalBitcoins team will make further announcements when the investigation proceeds and the site becomes available again.  We expect to spend at least 24 hours on this. LocalBitcoins team apologizes the issues the downtime may cause to the users.

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Male Choir Singing and Bitcoin - Perfect Combination?

One would think that male choir signing and Bitcoin don't have much in common, but that is about to change. In an effort to promote Bitcoin to the vocal music enthusiasts, LocalBitcoins is supporting the KYL male choir tour to Japan.

The tour consists of four cities, including Hiroshima, Takamatsu, Saku and Tokyo.

The repertuaire includes Japanese songs, traditional finnish songs as well as international classics. Style ranges from pop to national romantic.

Tickets for the first concert, held in Helsinki, Finland can be acquired with Bitcoin. It is not yet known if tickets can be bought for Japanese concerts in BTC, but hopefully we will figure out .

LocalBitcoins.com will also be translated in to Japanese, to spread the Bitcoin adoption in Japan.

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