At this moment in time, billions of people from all around the world mind their daily business without owning an ID, and being registered in any database. While this practice, most common in third world countries, allows people to stay off the grid, it can also cause numerous problems. Some of these include the inability to open bank accounts, travel to other countries, or even being treated in a hospital.

It is worth pointing out that fixing the issue via governmental implication isn't that easy, especially in certain regions where bureaucracy and high taxes make it almost impossible for a citizen to get their ID card.

At this moment in time, one of the biggest misconceptions regarding bitcoin refers to the fact that it represents a digital currency meant to fund illegal activities. While there are numerous research studies carried out by analysts from all around the world, which have proven that only an insignificant percentage of bitcoin transactions are carried out for shady purposes, this trend of belief continues.

According to recent reports, Intelligence Agencies in India have just issued an official report stating that virtual currencies such as Bitcoin can be used for the funding of illegal activities, by people who also move their funds through hawala transactions. Once the report has been received by the competent authorities, the Indian Government alongside with the Reserve Bank of India, also known as RBI, have responded and said that they will investigate the issue and do their best in order to ensure that the bitcoin payment method is not used for illegal purposes.

So far, Japan’s policy on bitcoin has been quite lenient, apart from a couple of taxes imposed on people purchasing bitcoin with the help of digital currency exchanges. However, recent reports indicate that Japan’s government has just decided to finally end the 8% consumption tax, imposed on these types of bitcoin transactions, thus coming as a relief to the digital currency community in the Asian country.

While initially announced in a Japanese publication, the change will come after an agreement set by the Financial Agency and the Japanese Financial Ministry, after long talks, which should come to fruition by the end of the year, or in early spring. Reports indicate that a tax panel will also join the discussions, and will hopefully be in favour of the plan to end these taxes.

While bitcoin is present throughout the world, the Asian sphere has always been in advantage, thanks to regions such as China, where bitcoin mining, trading and use has become a routine for some people. However, another country may soon rank up and start playing an important role in the future of digital currency.

With this in mind, various economic analysts believe that India may be the main source of bitcoin’s next rally. During the last couple of days, the price has seen a clear increase, especially after UnoCoin launched in India. While China still is the dominant force behind the success that bitcoin has had in Asia, India’s influence may just help the digital currency hit new heights, especially if adopted by the country’s, highly unbanked population. Reports indicate that more than half of India’s population is unbanked, thus placing the region a couple of hundred years ago, in terms of the quality and presence of financial services. This represents one of the main reasons why bitcoin and other digital currencies have such a high potential in the region, if promoted accordingly.

At this moment in time, there are several countries throughout the world, which tend to be extremely strict when it comes down to the freedom of using the Internet. Such examples include China, Syria, and even Turkey from time to time.

By imposing censorship, the governments of these countries wish to discourage access to information, and online meet-ups needed to discuss possible protests, ideologies and more. According to recent reports, it seems like the government of Turkey has recently blocked and restricted several websites including Google Drive, GitHub, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and more.

This decision was made to stop the spreading of leaked emails, about Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, alongside with his son in law, who happens to be a government minister.

At this moment in time, bitcoin’s underlying support, the blockchain system is doing its job very well. Yet, as the digital currencies continue to advance, and be adopted by more and more people, studies have shown that the blockchain network may face a couple of limitations that would need to be fixed as soon as possible.

With this in mind, one of the main issues of the blockchain network, which has been highly debated in the past, is scalability. As bitcoin was initially designed to support lightweight clients, the network can only verify a set number of transactions during a predefined period of time. If more and more people would begin using bitcoin, the block size alongside with the scalability issues could lead to slower transactions, which could take hours or even days to complete, thus making bitcoin and its network obsolete.

A new investment record has recently been set, after the Bangalore-based Bitcoin firm known by the name of Unocoin, has managed to raise a total of $1.5 million in their first pre Series-A investment round, which is a record for all digital currency-related investment rounds in India and its surroundings until now.

There are however, some controversies regarding this project. As the founder wants to find a way to scale bitcoin to the masses and facilitate adoption throughout India, many believe that this isn’t an achievable goal, considering the fact that over 50% of India’s population is currently unbanked.

During the last couple of months, as blockchain technology gained significantly more popularity, governments have also started discussing about blockchain-related regulation. According to recent reports, it seems like the United Kingdom may be the world’s first country to present its regulatory framework for the blockchain network.

It seems like the Fintech Accelerator deployed by the Bank of England is one of the main reasons why this regulation will be put into place, considering the fact that blockchain networks now represent the basis for new innovative financial products and services.

Contrary to popular belief, banks and governments aren’t the only institutions interested in understanding more about blockchain technology, and potentially implementing it. In fact, Microsoft has recently unveiled the newest version of their consortium blockchain software product, at the Annual Ethereum Developer Conference over in Shanghai.

For those that do not know, back in June, Microsoft announced a project meant to allow businesses from all around the world to freely build consortiums and take better advantage of the currently available blockchain technology. Known by the name of Project Bletchley, it represents an open and modular blockchain fabric, which allows users to freely construct and scale member-only, permissioned blockchain consortiums. Microsoft believes that since the blockchain network is basically a distributed ledger technology, this allows its power to be directly proportional to the number of companies and individuals using it to build new networks.

Since people first started trading bitcoin a couple of years ago, its price has always depended on a couple of aspects, such as trading volume, popularity, rate of adoption, press news, developments and so on.

According to recent reports, Gemini, one of the world’s biggest bitcoin exchanges has recently announced that it will launch a daily auction feature, meant to determine the trading price of the digital currency. To put things better into perspective, as it often is quite hard to settle on a price each day, the Gemini exchange now wants to allow users to set the price themselves, and hence find the true price of bitcoin every day.