Bitcoin clears milestone $3000USD, and other cryptocurrency news...

Hi Steemians and welcome to my snapshot of worldnews in cryptocurrency.

Well Bitcoin has passed the $3000USD milestone new high and all things crypto are looking very rosy as a result. The new record comes at a time when alternative digital assets are seeing robust inflows, with Ethereum's ether token setting a new all-time high of more than $350USD as well. I think that Ether may be one to watch as many people are entering the ether-market, it must be noted that the smart money seems to be in LiteCoin, Ether, Zcash and Dash.

There has been yet another attack on crypto-currency in the US where they are proposing to update the anti-money laundering laws by targeting crypto-currency users travelling to the US. In the future, travellers will have to report their crypto holdings as well as report any devices containing crypto-currencies. This piece of news puts a whole new spin on the American laptop ban doesn't it? I wonder how many travellers this will effect?

Meanwhile in Russia, Vladimir Putin met with Vitalic Buterin at the St Petersberg Economic Forum last week and supported Buterin's plans to build contacts with local partners to implement blockchain technology in Russia. Putin said at the Forum, that crypto-currency is a brand new business model that will have an impact much like the internet had on business and discussed blockchain technology as a means to boost growth after Russia's worst recession in 2 decades. Russia's central bank, like the Western Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which comprises of JP Morgan, Intel and Microsoft, has deployed an Ethereum based blockchain pilot project. The future is in the blockchain friends and the quicker people realise this, the better. The really great thing is that even being around since 2009, hardly anybody knows about blockchain technology and there are many opportunities to be had! Just saying...

In the Middle East, in UAE, Emirates Islamic Bank part of the wider Emirates NBD Group, is formally integrating blockchain into it's paper checks, this news is hot on the heels of the announcement of Sharia approved gold backed crypto, 1Gram, in Qatar. Which I believe is a real game changer, so watch this spot folks, the question has to be asked, how will this currency stack up to fiat-back currencies?! The mind boggles!

In India, a consortium of India's leading banks including DCB Bank and State Bank of India, have approved Microsoft Azure as being the exclusive cloud blockchain provider and will use Microsoft's Azure blockchain to host the nodes that will relay transactions on their distributed ledger systems.