The tide of enterprise and government-level interest in Bitcoin has been changing of late, but with an eye for the functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain rather than bitcoins themselves.

This week the government of Honduras made a deal with Factom Inc., a technology company that uses the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the provenance of digital records, to help develop a land registry database. BitPay Inc. has released a proposal of its own blockchain secured chain database system—that looks extremely similar to Factom. And just last week Nasdaq.com announced a new enterprise-level financial service for tracking securities that uses the Bitcoin blockchain.

Also in financial news, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) just released the NYXBT bitcoin price tracking index pinned to the Coinbase Exchange.

The Google+ Bitcoin Community has exceeded 15,000 members as well, be sure to join their growing ranks if you’re on Google+.

And finally, a bug fix release of Bitcoin Core is out with version 0.10.2.

Honduras will use Bitcoin blockchain technology to track land management

Last week, the government of Honduras announced a deal with Texas-based Bitcoin blockchain company Factom, Inc. that will allow the government to use Factom’s Land Registry Tool to track the ownership of land.

Factom provides a way to record entries to a list that are secured with entries in the Bitcoin blockchain, thus providing provenance for entries to the list. Entries to this list cannot be changed once entered, providing an auditable historical chain of facts, depending on the protocol decided on by the list keeper new entries can supersede past entries, but the history of the list never changes.

The entries in Factom exist outside of the Bitcoin blockchain, although Factom uses the blockchain to provide proof of publication by matching an entry to a blockchain transaction (using Merkle roots to verify entries) and proof of process by generating an auditable sequence backed up by the blockchain transactions. Finally proof of audit is achieved by keeping the Factom chain distributed so that it can be compared to the Bitcoin blockchain to validate publication and process.

The Bitcoin blockchain is slowly becoming a technology fitting the moniker “the World Wide Leger” or WWL, a play on the acronym for the World Wide Web, which is yet-another world changing Internet-utilizing technology.

By using the Bitcoin blockchain, Factom can provide proof that a transaction occurred at time of publication, matches the published fact, and since the blockchain is publicly viewable it can stand as a sort of notary for audit. The security of that notary is supported by the hash power of the entire Bitcoin network.

This has some similarities to how Nasdaq.com is using the Open Assets Protocol and colored coins with the Bitcoin blockchain to track the exchange of securities. However, in the Factom case the tracking is used to cryptographically secure lists of entries and provide proof of publication and process.

XBT Provider begins trading Bitcoin-based security on Stockholm Nasdaq

On Monday, XBT Provider AB began trading the first-ever available Bitcoin-based security available on a regulated exchange, Bitcoin Tracker One, on Nasdaq in Stockholm, according to Bitcoin Magazine.

“NASDAQ OMX Stockholm decides to officially list 1 Exchange Traded Note issued by XBT Provider AB with effect from 2015-05-18,” announced XBT Provider AB on Friday.

Bitcoin Tracker One is an exchange-traded note (ETN), which is described as designed to give investors convenient access to returns of the underlying assets, in this case USD per bitcoin, less investor fees. The average exchange rate is calculated from Bitcoin exchanges Bitfinex, Bitstamp and OKCoin for reference price. A more detailed breakdown is available on XBT Provider’s website.

According to the website, XBT Provider AB (publ) is backed and guaranteed by mining manufacturer KnCGroup. KnCGroup is best known for KnCMiner AB, producer of mining rigs, ASIC mining chips, and the KnC Cloud mining service.

Google+ Bitcoin Community hits 15,000 members

The Google+ Bitcoin Community administered by Avatar X has exceeded 15,000 members.

“Well, it is now official. THE Google+ Bitcoin Community has now reached 15,000 members,” wrote Avatar X as part of the announcement. “And it happened while keeping a high standard of post quality and friendliness. So, the only thing I can say is THANK YOU for being here to make all the work worth it.  Now, let’s go forward to 20K.”

It was only October 31st, 2014 when SiliconAngle last reported that the Google+ Bitcoin Community reached 10,000 members. Showing a trend of approximately an average 700 new members a month since that auspicious milestone.

NYSE launches Bitcoin index price tracker

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has launched a Bitcoin price index tracker under the symbol NYXBT. The market index will show the price of BTC to USD as it is valued daily at 4 p.m. GMT according to the Coinbase Inc. exchange.

“Bitcoin values are quickly becoming a data point that our customers want to follow as they consider transacting, trading or investing with this emerging asset class,” NYSE Group President Thomas Farley said in a statement. “As a global index leader and administrator of ICE LIBOR, ICE Futures U.S. Dollar Index and many other notable benchmarks, we are pleased to bring transparency to this market.”

The index is expected to be available free on the NYSE website initially, but will eventually become a subscriber only product.

BitPay releases ChainDB whitepaper and protocol description

Following in the wake of the popularity of Bitcoin blockchain using technologies, such as the Honduras government using Factom mentioned above and NASFAQ using colored coins, BitPay Inc. has proposed another blockchain secured database called ChainDB.

Introduced at MIT Bitcoin Expo 2015, ChainDB will provide alternate database blockchains that are secured by the Bitcoin blockchain. The function of ChainDB is extremely similar to Factom in that entries are chained to one another in a blockwise fashion, but also cryptographically linked to Bitcoin transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The ChainDB peer-to-peer database system is described in a whitepaper from BitPay [PDF]. Jason Dreyzehner, Senior UX Designer and Design Lead at BitPay, has asked for feedback on the proposal on the BitPay Labs developer forums.

No repository or test code appears to have been released yet.

Bitcoin Core 0.10.2 released

Yesterday, May 19, Bitcoin Core version 0.10.2 was released. This point release is primarily a bug fix.

This fixes a serious problem on Windows with data directories that have non-ASCII characters (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/6078).

Apparently foreign Unicode characters in Windows directory names could cause a crash for the previous client and this would have meant users would not be able to run the software. This would be extremely important for Windows users who do not use native English as the OS localization language.

Image credit: Screenshot “NYSE market index for NYXBT”; sthlm-9 via photopin (license)