Litecoin and Dogecoin launching new charity together, and Bitcoin is now being used in the fight against Ebola. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 45:
- Litecoin and Dogecoin are teaming up on more areas than just mining. The communities behind the digital currencies are launching a new charity event deemed “Liteshibes4Christmas”. “Shibes” refers to the Shiba Inu that is featured on Dogecoin’s logo, and is also used as a nickname for Dogecoin community members. The charity event is set up to raise money for helping orphans in the Philippines.
- In the same week, another charity called “Bitcoin against Ebola” was launched by Ghana-based remittances service Beam. The obvious goal is to raise funds to fight the Ebola crisis that has severely impacted neighboring country Sierra Leone.
- Cryptocurrency exchange mcxNOW will shut down in just one more week on November 15, 2014. The closure was announced two weeks ago. It was also announced that any coins left at the exchange at this time would be destroyed. Since then, about half of the 1640 coins at the exchange have been retrieved. There are currently about 860 Bitcoins (worth roughly $300,000) remaining at the exchange, and about to be lost forever.
- The team behind the Dogetipbot has raised more than $400,000 from investors, which will be used to support and develop the popular micropayments tool that originated from the Dogecoin subreddit. Currently, it can also be used to pledge Dogecoin tips on Twitter and Twitch. The service takes advantage of low transaction fees in cryptocurrencies, as it makes micro transactions economically viable. It has processed more than 650,000 transactions so far.
- Online drug market place Silk Road was shut down by the FBI in October 2013. Bitcoins were the only form of payment accepted on Silk Road, which attracted a lot of negative attention to the cryptocurrency. Silk Road 2.0 was launched in November 2013, which had its servers seized this week, just one year later. Silk Road 2.0 had about $8 million worth of Bitcoin-based sales per month. Silk Road 3.0 appeared just several hours after the notice.
