It’s almost the New Year and 2016 is just a few days away. A good time to look back at where Bitcoin has been and where it’s still going. To that end, read below to see predictions on the Bitcoin market from Business Insider and Bitcoin luminary (and exchange owner) Erik Voorhees.

News has also come to light that Factom’s revolutionary project with the government of Honduras to provide blockchain-backed land registry services has stalled. This is most likely due to internal politicking and bureaucracy.

Uphold has announced support for “voxels,” which are a cryptocurrency token from VR content creation and marketplace Voxelus.

Bitcoin market value has seen a slight dip since last week to $425 today from $445, which appears to have taken place over Christmas Day. While the $20 dip happened during that period, the market price has stayed relatively stable since.

This and more in today’s Bitcoin Weekly. Happy New Years, Bitcoin community. May 2016 be as fruitful and innovative as 2015.

Factom project with the government of Honduras over land registration stalled

The Land Registry Project by Factom, Inc. with the government of Honduras has hit a snag, according to Duncan Riley of SiliconANGLE. The information comes from Factom Chief Executive Officer Peter Kirby, who stated that Honduran politics has led to the prototype project going unused.

The company announced this project with the Honduran government back in May, but the Factom has been playing it close to the vest with any information on the ongoing project since then.

“We’ll all have to wait another year to deploy a blockchain-backed land title system that is both tamper-proof and transparent,” Kirby said. “I’ve had humbling conversations with many smart people in the world of international land title, including a CEO of major title insurance company, international policy experts, and companies that have built and sold land title software for decades. They all agree that this is a very common occurrence. The project is political in nature, and government systems move slower than we all would like.”

Uphold announces support for trading VR currency “voxels”

Uphold, Inc. (formerly Bitreserve) has announced support for voxels (VOX), the official cryptocurrency of Voxelus, a virtual reality content creation platform and marketplace. Voxels will be available for trade on Uphold for various other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoins or dollars, in advance of the April 2016 planned launch of Voxelus.

To provide popularity for the cryptocurrency, Voxelus recently held a crowdsale of voxels in partnership with Uphold and Erik Voorhees’ registrationless altcoin exchange ShapeShift AG (which also has plans to support voxels).

Voxels are a cryptocurrency based on a Litecoin fork with 210 million pre-mined coins and two-minute confirmation time. As the “coin of the realm” of Voxelus, content creators will be able to exchange the cryptocurrency like any other corporate token with the side-benefit that the currency can be exchanged on two large cryptocurrency markets from launch.

Erik Voorhees’s ShapeShift cryptocurrency exchange requires no log in.

Erik Voorhees predictions for the Bitcoin industry in 2016

Erik Voorhees, CEO of registrationless exchange ShapeShift.io, recently spoke to Paul Buitink and Tim Pastoor on reinvent.money. During the interview, Voorhees mentioned three positive trends that he sees driving the Bitcoin and blockchain industry into the new year: more venture capital and startups, the Lightning Network, and Augur (a prediction market).

The broad strokes of the talk are reported by CoinGeko, but here’s a short summary of the points.

On venture capital and the Bitcoin and blockchain industry, Voorhees sees VC investments in 2015, which exceeded $1 billion fed to Bitcoin businesses, as being the foundation for application development into 2016. He mentions this “takes a while to turn into actual products that consumers can see and enjoy. And over the next year, I think a lot of those products are going to be going to market.”

The Lightning Network is a payment channel built atop the Bitcoin infrastructure designed to enable micropayments without burdening the Bitcoin blockchain. As it stands, Bitcoin may be a good mechanism for providing microtransactions; however, it turns out that the Bitcoin blockchain may not be the most ideal technology for a lot of low-value transactions (due to size and time restraints), especially if miners’ fees overwhelm tiny transaction values. The Lightning Network seeks to resolve this problem but still allow for actual “micro” in microtransactions.

“I’m very excited about the Lightning Network; it certainly has lots of potential. If that gets done well and people can really do microtransactions essentially at no cost and at any number, that’ll just blow out a whole bunch of interesting use cases that the world should probably get prepared for,” said Voorhees on the subject.

Finally, Augur is an interesting take on networks of distributed confidence that leverages the wisdom of crowds along with a consensus algorithm to provide for high-confidence predictions based on particular future events. The system is designed to allow certain levels of accuracy in any topic, from politics to commerce, just by asking a question and offering a reward.

Voorhees’ finds Augur particularly exciting because it’s “another one of those projects that has huge potential, and if they execute it well, that is really going to change the way the world works” and that world-changing capability is “being able to price information in a distributed manner.”

In essence, Augur would work to pool expertise (via forecast and prediction) in a manner that would reward people with a reasonable amount of information on a topic, and they would get paid for properly predicting future events. In short, Voorhees appears to be saying that Augur represents a commodification of information in a way never seen before.

Highlights from Business Insider’s 2016 Bitcoin predictions

Business Insider posted a monster infographic positing over 33 signs that Bitcoin’s growth will not slow down in 2016 and continue to grow beyond. To that end, here’s a set of highlights from that article and infographic:

• The total amount of VC investment in Bitcoin since 2012 is $927 million. Over half of this investment has occurred in 2015 alone;
• World-class merchants now accept Bitcoins for payment, including Microsoft, Dell, Expedia, Dish, Overstock, TigerDirect and Intuit;
• Transaction fees with Bitcoins are extremely low: 0.0001 BTC per 1000 bytes; and
• Daily transactions occurring with Bitcoins amount to about $289 million per day. This is comparable to Paypal ($397 million), Square ($362 million) or Western Union ($216 million).

Beyond previous years, large merchants have come on board (including Microsoft, Dell, etc.), but the brick-and-mortar merchant adoption has slowed a great deal. Clearly larger merchants are testing the waters to see what a Bitcoin audience might be interested in. Business Insider also cites the extremely low per-transaction fee for Bitcoin trades, which works in the favor of merchants who already pay outrageous fees for traditional credit (such as Visa, MasterCard, etc.).

An interesting highlight is the citation of $289 million per day in Bitcoin transactions and how that exceeds that of Western Union, but falls short of Square, Inc. and PayPal, Inc.

The second half of 2015 saw a giant growth in the fintech industry showing interest in the Bitcoin blockchain (and proprietary blockchains in general), which will most likely lead to continued innovation in 2016.

The Traction Goods Tx Notebook includes a Bitcoin blockchain-stamped TX as a QR code unique to each handmade batch.

Blockchain-stamped handmade notebooks for sale from Traction Goods

Stuff maker and designer Traction Goods just released a new line of handmade notebooks. While handmade notebooks are not very special in and of themselves, these ones are stamped with Bitcoin blockchain transactions per batch — thus the name “Traction Goods Tx – Handmade notebook.”

“A unique feature to this notebook is that each handmade batch contains an associated blockchain (Bitcoin) transaction ID, serving as a timestamp and reference to the notebook,” cites the sales page.

The TX is stamped on the inside cover of the notebooks with a QR code and a short message embedded in the ID decodable when displaying the TX as HEX. The method of this embedding is outlined on Ken Shirriff’s blog describing the history of these “hidden” TX messages. And a tool exists at http://www.cryptograffiti.info/ to insert messages for those who don’t have the immediate technical knowhow.

The product is currently on sale for $14.00 (down from $18.00).

Traction Goods is also known for a Satoshi Nakamoto T-shirt, among other products.

15 millionth Bitcoin mined and 100 million transactions confirmed!

https://twitter.com/cloud_mining_/status/680142970838859776

Last week, just before Christmas, the Bitcoin network hit 100 million transactions (viewable on Blockchain.info’s chart) and the 15 millionth Bitcoin was mined. As milestones go, this shows that the Bitcoin network continues to grow as this is also its seventh year of operation since launching in 2009.

Bitcoin milestone: The world just got its 15 millionth bitcoin today! Just 6 million more to go ???! Happy #bitcoin Christmas! ???

— Bobby Lee (@bobbyclee) December 24, 2015

The block essentially credited with the 15 millionth Bitcoin is TX 89563900d303c0bfdb1923558ddb7a2c55f96c915de7153467c4f4e55454b2a6 (although there’s some technical reasons why it may not be, but that doesn’t matter when celebrating).

Featured image credit: Dawson/Bloomberg News