This week (or month at least) more U.S. states are noticing Bitcoin with proposed bills in Utah and New Hampshire appearing to look into allowing government taxes and fees paid in bitcoins, with New York State also appears to be following suit.

The Bitcoin Investment Trust, a private investment firm that holds BTC in trust and sells shares, recently announced FINRA approval. Read below to see what that means and catch up at CNBC.

Electrum Wallet, one of the best lightweight bitcoin wallets out, just announced version 2.0. Finally, Coinbase announced updates to lots of services including a new and improved customer support system, same-day deposits for wire transfers, and developers get their own test sandbox.

The Bitcoin Investment Trust gets FINRA approval

BIT or the Bitcoin Investment Trust is an attempt to tie the bitcoin economy to the securities market by having a company hold bitcoins in trust, which investors can then buy shares. According to an article published by CNBC, BIT began as a private vehicle for investment in 2013 but is now working on going public.

On March 1st, 2015, Grayscale Investments LLC (the sponsor of the BIT) announced approval for BIT from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which is a self-regulatory industry corporation that regulates member brokerages and exchange organizations. Ultimately, the United States Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) is the government body that regulates the sort of investments that BIT provides, but FINRA acts as a sort of stepping-stone for the industry.

“The Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT) is a private, open-ended trust that is invested exclusively in bitcoin and derives its value solely from the price of bitcoin,” reads the BIT webpage. “It enables investors to gain exposure to the price movement of bitcoin without the challenges of buying, storing, and safekeeping bitcoins.”

The CNBC article speculates that BIT, by becoming the first publicly traded Bitcoin investment fund, could provide a way to help stabilize the apparent high volatility of the Bitcoin market. The article uses a historical comparison to the gold market and SPDR Gold ETF.

Electrum wallet 2.0

The team who develop Electrum, a lightweight open source Bitcoin wallet software client, has released version 2.0 of the wallet. It’s not the prettiest wallet, nor the easiest to use, but the wallet software sits solidly in a veteran hobbyist space and allows people who know what they’re doing to easily store and transfer bitcoins.

The latest release is available for multiple platforms including Linux, Windows, OSX, and Android.

Electrum 2.0’s changelog cites numerous updates including a new seed derivation method, new address derivation (BIP32), support for multisig wallets using parallel BIP32 and P2SH addresses, and support for BIP70 payment requests. The UI received several updates including “Receive” and “Send” tabs. The Android GUI has also received updates to its stability.

The new version also includes support for hardware wallets including Trezor (Satoshilabs) and Btchip (Ledger).

As usual, before upgrading always back up the wallet private key to a paper wallet so that nothing is lost in transition.

Bitcoin in Utah, New Hampshire, and New York?

Legislative bills have appeared in several states that may affect the future of paying taxes with bitcoins in Utah, New Hampshire, and New York. According to an article in Bitcoin Magazine, these three states are all considering research into accepting BTC for taxes and fees.

In Utah Bill H.C.R. 6, proposed in January by Utah state representative Mark K. Roberts, just passed the House and is onto the Senate. The bill would open research into allowing bitcoin as a valid form of payment, which could include taxes. And in February, New Hampshire representatives proposed HB 552 to propose bitcoin acceptance by 2017.

Last week, New York City—home of the infamous BitLicense—had City Council Member Mark Levine introduce a bill that would allow residents to pay fines owed to the city using bitcoins. New York City also made Bitcoin news in December when the Department of Finance sought solutions for paying parking tickets including with Bitcoin, ApplePay, Paypal, etc.

Regulation across the U.S. of Bitcoin is still in its infancy, especially with the still-in-draft version of New York City’s BitLicense not yet come to fruition. With three states all beginning proposals to examine Bitcoin as a legitimate form of payment shows that legislators are beginning to catch on to its value and are showing confidence or at least seeking an understanding.

Coinbase news

This week saw Coinbase, Inc., an extremely well known Bitcoin web wallet and merchant services company, announce quite a few augments to its service.

First, Coinbase announced the Coinbase Developer Sandbox, which gives developers an instanced test environment for testing API calls, software, and access to the Coinbase API and a dedicated blockchain. The sandbox runs on an alternate blockchain, testnet3, designed specifically for testing Bitcoin software. The sandbox also mimics the Coinbase API behavior exactly and provides an authentic-to-production test environment. More information is available at the Coinbase Sandbox website.

This development is very important for developers looking to use the Coinbase API because it greatly simplifies project testing and debugging without needing to use software with live coins.

Next, Coinbase announced same-day wire transfer deposits are now available for Wallet and Exchange accounts. Funds sent via wire for same-day will be available within an hour if sent before 3:30pm PT for most banks. Users must complete level 3 verification for this option to become available and only users in the U.S. approved states with a U.S. bank account can use the wire deposit feature.

Finally, the re-designed Coinbase Support Center has been announced, which provides a way for customers to look up frequent questions in a knowledgebase, report bugs, ask questions, send feedback, and message Coinbase support on live chat. The new page is clean, sleek, and contains a search bar for any questions not immediately obvious.

photo credit: Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license)