Current Bitcoin Price: $3568 (as of 8:30 AM PST)

Over the last 24 hours, the market has climbed another few percent on yesterday’s 5-10% gains. Bitcoin in particular is up 3%, while XRP and Ethereum are up 10% and 4% respectively.

EOS is up an incredible 15% today, along with IOTA, up 11%, and Waves, up 20%. Much like yesterday, it’s hard to see any red in the charts — apart from in the percentage changes of stablecoins, which tend to lose a few points when they’re cashed out.

Top Bitcoin & Crypto News Stories for 18th December 2018

France rejects crypto-friendly tax

Earlier this year, there had been talk of a French tax bill that would limit the tax on cryptocurrency profits to 30% or less. It sounded like an ambitious plan at the time, but what have the government decided?

As you might imagine, the French government has rejected the pro-crypto tax bill. Instead, French tax residents will have to pay taxes amounting to 60% of their cryptocurrency profits over $30 thousand, plus more for the $30 thousand itself.

Send Ethereum to an email address

Perhaps one of the biggest barriers to mainstream cryptocurrency adoption is the difficulty of using some coins, especially for non-technical folk. If you can send money to an email address using just PayPal, how come you can’t do the same with crypto?

You can now, thanks to the ARKANE platform. A GIF image on Reddit showed a user sending Ethereum directly to a registered email address, with the funds arriving in the associated wallet.

Substratum founder day trading with ICO funds

Substratum is a cryptocurrency project that gained a lot of attention for its ICO last year, which raised over $13 million. However, the project has been under fire for its questionable management practices.

The Substratum founder has supposedly admitted to having day traded cryptocurrencies with the project’s ICO funds, which should of course be used for funding the project.