Monthly Archives: February 2018

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Chinese Entrepreneur Warns Against Mining and ICO Bans

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Chinese Entrepreneur Warns Against Mining and ICO Bans

Chinese Entrepreneur Warns Against Mining and ICO Bans

Angel investor and Founder of Chinese app Meitu, Cai Wensheng, has published criticisms of the central government’s expanding regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrencies via Wechat. Mr. Wensheng warns that heavy-handed regulatory policies may squander the opportunity for China to maintain a significant presence in the burgeoning global cryptocurrency sector, in addition to arguing that many of the challenges faced by cryptocurrencies are indicative of the typical “development process” experienced by emerging monetary forms.

Cai Wensheng, the founder of Meitu, has expressed criticisms of the Chinese government’s prohibitive regulatory policies regarding cryptocurrency mining and initial coin offerings (ICOs).

According to The Meitu founder, the majority of the world’s bitcoin mines are located in China, with Mr. Wensheng estimating that “80%” of the world’s bitcoins are produced by hardware housed in China. As such, Mr. Wensheng believes that a regulatory crackdown targeting bitcoin mining risks squandering the opportunity to maintain its dominance in the bitcoin markets, describing such a potential export industry.

Mr. Wensheng argues that China should use bitcoin mining surplus power for productive purposes, stating that “China’s surplus power [can be used] to produce surplus power to produce bitcoin, [which can be] sold to the South Koreans, Japanese, and Americans” – making China “a bitcoin foreign exchange earner.” However, Mr. Wensheng also warns that if bitcoin miners are “forced overseas [to] Iceland, Chinese people will need to spend a lot on foreign exchanges to buy back bitcoin.”

Challenges Faced by New Monetary Forms

The Meitu Founder argues that many of the challenges and criticisms faced by bitcoin have been experienced by other emerging monetary forms throughout history, stating that “every coin is a kind of faith.” Mr. Wenshen asserts that many of the world’s national currencies have gone through numerous periods of considerable volatility throughout history, claiming that political instability led to dramatic price fluctuations for many sovereign currencies prior to 1973.

“This is the case with the Golden Circle Certificates of the Republic of China, Mr. Wenshen stated, adding that instability is an inherent component of the requisite “development process” experienced by emerging monetary forms.

Mr. Wensheng also predicted that cryptocurrencies will reshape the securities industry.

 

Entrepreneur Warns Against Heavy-Handed ICO Regulations

Mr. Wensheng has argued that initial coin offerings do away with many of the barriers preventing ordinary investors from being able to access exposure to emerging companies, adding that venture capital and investment firms typically access tokens at the same price as their retail counterparts in the ICO markets.

Mr. Wensheng also compared the ICO markets to the dotcom bubble of the nineteen-nineties, stating that of the “hundreds of companies” that listed Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) “in 1999” very “few companies are left,” however, “One Amazon is enough” – implying that heavy-handed restrictions on ICOs may result in China failing to facilitate the growth of potential major companies that could emerge through the disruptive ICO sector.

 

Author: Samual Haig

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Entrepreneur

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

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Bitcoin WARNING – EU Commission says crypto is NOT currency ahead of imminent crackdown

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Bitcoin WARNING - EU Commission says crypto is NOT currency ahead of imminent crackdown

Bitcoin WARNING – EU Commission says crypto is NOT currency ahead of imminent crackdown

BITCOIN and other cryptocurrencies do not have a "guaranteed value" and should come with a "clear and frequent" warning to investors in order to safeguard them from possible risks to their investments, EU financial services commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have attracted a growing number of investors since their value began skyrocketing shortly before Christmas 2017.

Mr Dombrovkis warned that speculation could pose risks to investors, suggesting the European Union stands ready to regulate cryptocurrencies in months to come.

He said: "Cryptocurrencies – which are not currencies in a traditional sense and whose value is not guaranteed – have become subject to considerable speculation: this exposes consumers and investors to substantial risk, including risks to lose their investment.

"This is why our conclusion is that warnings about those risks to consumers and investors are important and must be clear, frequent and across all jurisdictions."

Speaking to the press following a roundtable discussing the challenges and opportunities of crypto trading, Mr Dombrovkis said: "We do not exclude the possibility to move ahead by regulating crypto-currencies at the EU level if we see, for example, risks emerging but no clear international response emerging.”

But despite calls for caution from investors, the EU Commissioner suggested Brussels recognised the technological importance of the structure driving the trade of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies – the blockchain.

He said: "We concluded that blockchain technology holds strong promise for financial markets and to remain competitive Europe must embrace this innovation."

Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology has been repeatedly championed as the foundation for a new kind of global finance. However after nearly a decade of hype, real working examples of its value have been few and far between.

Last month a massive trade deal between the US and China renewed hopes that the technology was finally peaking above the parapet of the cryptocurrency community and gaining mainstream traction.

The deal used a blockchain-based digital platform to complete terms between the US and China for the sale of 60,000 tonnes of US soya beans.

The blockchain is broadly understood as an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.

 

 

Author : AURORA BOSOTTI UPDATED: 22:16, Mon, Feb 26, 2018

 

Published by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

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This 11-year-old just wrote a book on bitcoin that hopefully a kid can understand

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This 11-year-old just wrote a book on bitcoin that hopefully a kid can understand

This 11-year-old just wrote a book on bitcoin that hopefully a kid can understand

  • Andrew Courey, a middle school student in Massachusetts, recently published a 57-page book on bitcoin.

  • He did the research when he wasn't in school, playing sports or working on mobile apps.

Like most sixth graders, Andrew Courey is usually playing sports and toying with his iPhone when he's not in school. But unlike most other 11-year olds, he's also an expert on bitcoin.

Courey is the author of "Early Bird Gets The Bitcoin: The Ultimate Guide To Everything About Bitcoin," which he self-published for the Amazon Kindle in January. The e-book sells for $2.99, and the paper copy, just released, costs $9.99.

The son of a tech investor, Courey loves math, enjoys tinkering with mobile apps and frequently comes up with business ideas. At one of his recent basketball games, upset with a foul call, he walked over to his dad on the sidelines and suggested creating the "Glassdoor for referees" — a website for grading officials.

Last year, he was looking for investment opportunities as part of an ambitious plan to earn $20 million by the age of 14, which would enable him to drop out of school, according to an agreement with his parents. Courey came across bitcoin and began reading stories and watching YouTube videos about miners and early investors who had made a lot of money from the digital currency.

Given the run-up in prices last year, when bitcoin surged almost 17-fold, Courey wasn't sold on the currency as an investment. But knowing that his son was looking for sources of "passive income," Jeff Courey, Andrew's dad, convinced him to write and sell a book that could put all his research to good use and simplify the many complex ideas around bitcoin and blockchain.

"Anyone can learn about cryptocurrencies if they're willing to spend 70 to 80 hours researching every source until they find a couple sources that make sense," said Andrew, who lives with his parents and younger sister in Wellesley, Massachusetts. "The whole book, in the simplest terms, is very easy to read and simple to understand."

The book is 57 pages and includes chapters on the history of bitcoin, bitcoin wallets, the cryptocurrency ethereum and initial coin offerings, or ICOs. The title has two meanings, with early bird serving as a reference both to kids, for whom the book is written, and the idea that the people who got into bitcoin early made fortunes.

A wallet is like a mailbox

One of Courey's main objectives with the book was to find real-world analogies to bitcoin and blockchain so that complete novices (kids) can grasp these foreign and very complicated concepts. For example, he compares the distributed ledger technology blockchain to a Google Docs file "shared with everyone that can only be edited by buying or selling bitcoin."

In describing a bitcoin wallet, where currency is stored, Courey writes that there's a public key that's available to anyone and a private key that only the owner can access. Here's the analogy: "Imagine there is a mailbox — the mailman can drive the mail to any mailbox, but only the person with the key can access the mail."

Courey concludes each chapter with a "fun fact" related to the topic. At the end of the chapter on bitcoin mining, he writes that the current power consumption required for mining "is estimated to be more than that of 159 countries."
 

Author Ari Levy CNBC

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

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Coinbase Informs 13K Affected Customers Of Imminent Data Handover To IRS

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Coinbase Informs 13K Affected Customers Of Imminent Data Handover To IRS

Coinbase Informs 13K Affected Customers Of Imminent Data Handover To IRS

 

US-based cryptocurrency exchange and wallet service Coinbase sent an official notice Friday, Feb. 23 to approximately 13,000 of its customers whose information it is legally required to turn over to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

 

The IRS had initially asked Coinbase in July 2017 to hand over even more detailed information on every one of its then over 500,000 users in an attempt catch those cheating on their taxes. However, another court order in Nov. 2017 reduced this number to around 14,000 “high-transacting” users, which the platform now reports as 13,000, in what Coinbase calls a “partial, but still significant, victory for Coinbase and its customers.”

 

On Friday, Coinbase told the around 13,000 affected customers that the company would be providing their taxpayer ID, name, birth date, address, and historical transaction records from 2013-2015 to the IRS within 21 days.

 

Coinbase’s letter to these customers encourages them “to seek legal advice from an attorney promptly” if they have any questions. Their website also states that concerns may also be addressed on Coinbase’s Taxes FAQ.

 

The ongoing legal battle between Coinbase and the US government dates back to November, 2016, when the IRS filed a “John Doe summons” in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

 

On Feb. 13, personal finance service Credit Karma released data showing that only 0.04 percent of their customers had reported cryptocurrencies on their federal tax returns so far this tax season.

 

 

 

Author Molly Jane Zuckerman

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

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Tesla Billionaire Elon Musk Reveals How Much Bitcoin He Owns

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Tesla Billionaire Elon Musk Reveals How Much Bitcoin He Owns

Billionaire Elon Musk is a huge fan of cutting-edge technology and is usually ahead of the curve when it comes to finance, but he's not a bitcoin bull. The co-founder of Tesla Inc. revealed on Twitter that he owns only a tiny fraction of one bitcoin token.

"I literally own zero cryptocurrency, apart from .25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago," Musk confessed. Using today's bitcoin price of about $10,000 a coin, that translates to $2,500.

The serial entrepreneur – whose net worth tops $20 billion – made the revelation in response to a question about a Twitter scam where random users posed as celebrities (like Musk) in a bid to steal people's cryptocurrencies.

Musk's indifference to bitcoin probably wasn't a shock to his fans, since he recently told his 19.8 million Twitter followers that "a friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is." (See also: Elon Musk: Education, Success Story and Net Worth.)

In November 2017, Musk denied rumors that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of bitcoin. The brouhaha erupted after a former SpaceX intern claimed in a blog post that the serial entrepreneur was "probably" Nakamoto.
 

Is Elon Musk Satoshi Nakamoto?

In a blog post on Medium, Sahil Gupta, who had interned at Musk's space company SpaceX in 2015, said "Satoshi is probably Elon."

Gupta reasoned: "Elon is a self-taught polymath. He’s repeatedly innovated across fields by reading books on a subject and applying the knowledge. It’s how he built rockets, invented the Hyperloop (which he released to the world as a paper), and could have invented Bitcoin."

The true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has never been confirmed, but there has a steady stream of rampant speculation about who he really is ever since bitcoin quietly launched in 2009. (See also: Has Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Been Found?)

Meanwhile, Elon Musk isn't the only billionaire who's skeptical of bitcoin and the crypto phenomenon. Bitcoin cynics are put off by the virtual currency's erratic price movements, lack of regulation, and absence of a valuation guarantee because it's not backed by a central bank.

Billionaire Charlie Munger, the second-in-command at Berkshire Hathaway, slammed bitcoin as a "noxious poison" and called the media hype surrounding digital currencies "totally asinine."

Similarly, Munger's boss, mega-billionaire Warren Buffett, predicted that cryptocurrencies will almost certainly "come to a bad ending." (See more: Bitcoin Is 'Poison,' Says Berkshire Billionaire Charlie Munger.)

And in its latest letter to clients, the Paul Singer-led Elliott Management, which oversees $34 billion in assets, excoriated cryptocurrencies as a bubble, a scam and a fraud. “This is not just a bubble," Elliott wrote. "It is not just a fraud. It is perhaps the outer limit, the ultimate expression, of the ability of humans to seize upon ether and hope to ride it to the stars."

 

 

Author Samantha Chang | Updated February 23, 2018 — 6:50 PM EST

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

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Bitcoin Fees Are Down Big – Why It’s Happening and What It Means

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Bitcoin Fees Are Down Big – Why It's Happening and What It Means

$26 down to $3.

The average cost of sending a bitcoin transaction is cheaper than it's been in a year and a half, showing the price isn't the cryptocurrency's only unpredictable metric these days.

But with all the debate about growing fees, this might come as a surprise. After all, it wasn't so long ago that fees were so high a group of prominent investors and miners created a whole new version of bitcoin mostly to keep fees lower.

Backing up a bit, much of the conflict centered on the fact that while called "fees," these expenses are best considered as transaction costs that are necessary to the network, as necessary as paying for someone to deliver a protocol service, be it SMS, VoIP or email, or even a pizza.

This is because bitcoin is a software that requires all of the many thousands of computers that run it to stay in sync. To do so easily, there's a limit on how much data the network can process at intervals, and users need to pay more to get their transactions in at times of congestion.

So, as bitcoin grew more popular in the last year, fees skyrocketed to over $25, according to a graph from data website Bitinfocharts.

Bitcoin users, those who truly rely on the protocol for essentials, have been affected by this, as were those who believed bitcoin could be competitive with legacy payment systems.

But, bitcoin fees have fizzled out, declining since the end of December.

So, why did fees take a nosedive? The simple answer is users are making fewer transactions right now. In December, there were roughly 400,000 transactions per day, while today bitcoin is seeing only 200,000, according to data from Blockchain.info.

"I think its really simple," BitGo engineer Mike Belshe told CoinDesk. "There is substantially less transaction demand."

The question, he added, is why has there been a decrease in transactions?

SegWit and beyond

If Twitter and Reddit are any indication, sentiment on the matter tends to be influenced by personal politics, in this case, where users stand in bitcoin's long-standing block size debate, which, at its core, was about network economics.

Popular Twitter figure "Armin van Bitcoin" cheered that the low fees mean the "scaling debates are now a thing of the past," pinning the development partly on growing adoption of Segregated Witness, a scaling feature at the center of bitcoin's long-raging fee debate.

And there is truth to the claims. SegWit reduces transaction fees and adds more space to the blockchain, but it still isn't widely adopted, so it's hard to say how much it actually helped. There hasn't been much of a recent increase in SegWit use either. For the past several months, only about 10-14 percent of transactions, according to SegWit tracking site SegWit Party.

Plus, SegWit doesn't reduce the number of transactions, it makes each one cheaper.

Another possibility, according to Belshe, is that fee prices "finally forced" some large transaction processors to implement a technology called "batching," rolling many transactions into one, to leave more space on the blockchain.

Indeed, exchanges like Coinbase have said they were working on implementing the feature in the past. And Thursday, cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift announced it now batches transactions, making a point that it makes up 2 percent of all the transfers that occur on the bitcoin blockchain.

However, it's a theory that's difficult to get hard data on, unless an exchange were to formally announce that they were using this technique. "This is hard to confirm with 100 percent certainty," Belshe said.

Still, he argued that even if just one large exchange started batching transactions, it could have a huge impact on the overall transaction load.

These sorts of technical theories add to the idea that developers and those building services on top of bitcoin can make optimizations in order to free up space on the blockchain, without compromising on some of its core features.

"This is why Bitcoin Core worked so hard to get 'layer-two solutions' working, and why they focus so much on optimization of the size of transaction through various things like Schnorr and Bulletproofs," XO Media CEO John Carvalho said.

"They are doing everything to minimize the footprint of every type of transaction attached to bitcoin because they are all stored forever," he added.
 

Ditching bitcoin

Others, especially those critical of how bitcoin developers favor a smaller blockchain and limited transaction space, argue the lower fees are a consequence of people that are sick and tired of the high fees leaving bitcoin.

"Bitcoin isn't useful for anything that involves low fees so people are migrating to alternatives. this has the consequence of lowering the fees on bitcoin," said Ryan X. Charles, founder of Yours, a media startup building on bitcoin cash.

Charles notably moved his startup off of the bitcoin blockchain last year, migrating to alternatives before building on bitcoin cash.

It's possible that some users are doing the same. Payment processor Stripe stopped accepting bitcoin in January payments due to the high fees, and BitPay, a startup that offers payment services over bitcoin has differentiated into supporting multiple protocols for its merchants.

Yet, if they are pushing users elsewhere, it's not clear where they're going. Bitcoin cash, the cryptocurrency created as a cheaper alternative to bitcoin, still has about 10 percent the number of transactions bitcoin currently does.

"Apparently [high fees] don't incentivize folks to switch to bcash," BitGo engineer Jameson Lopp said.

Bitcoin developer Meni Rosenfeld doesn't think so either. In fact, he disagrees with both of the above theories.

"The main reason for the drop in [bitcoin transaction] fees is not SegWit adoption, and it's not people moving to [bitcoin cash]. It's simply that the craze for buying cryptocurrencies in general has calmed down," he tweeted.

Indeed, there's been a downtick in outside interest in bitcoin. A lower price has less new investors searching for bitcoin on Google and coming in to buy and trade the cryptocurrency.

This view seems supported by the fact that the second most valuable blockchain by market cap, ethereum, has also seen a dramatic drop in fees in recent months. The same goes for litecoin, clocking in at number five, and XRP, at third place.

Charles also argued it's possible crypto's waning hype cycle has contributed to lower fees.

"I wouldn't be surprised if ethereum is also lower due to the decline in market value. There may simply be less demand for sending transactions across all blockchains. We went through a hype cycle," he told CoinDesk.

And it's always possible the low fees were caused by a mix of the factors described above.
 

Fees forever

What do lower fees mean for users? In short, it shows that under the current setup, fees might fluctuate over time.

The hope is that – eventually – fees will always be "low," with the word low having somewhat of a relative definition. After all, a low-cost airline flight may be better than an expensive bus ride.

In this way, supporters hope that bitcoin will one day offer the best of both worlds, supporting high demand and "low" fees that reflect the quality of service, while also supporting miners, computer operators who devote real-world costs to securing transactions.

"The fee market is necessary as a counterweight to market price. [Theoretically,] demand for blockspace is infinite, so there must be levers to manage it," Carvalho said.

In the meantime, fees could continue to decline, creating a new standard of "low" that might be friendlier to today's internet users. Carvalho and Rosenfeld, for instance, think the much-touted Lightning Network will help get bitcoin to that point, as it moves more transactions off of the main bitcoin blockchain.

If Lightning really takes off, then low fees may become another problem, as they might not be enough to defray mining costs when the network finally produces all 21 million bitcoin.

For this reason, developer Greg Slepak had an almost ominous-sounding view of the future, arguing that users should "take the opportunity" of today's lows fees, adding:

"It might not come again."

 

Author Alyssa Hertig Updated Feb 23, 2018 at 02:11 UTC

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

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Bitcoin – British MPs launch inquiry into digital currencies

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Bitcoin – British MPs launch inquiry into digital currencies

MPs have launched an inquiry into cryptocurrencies and the technology behind them.

The Treasury Committee said it wants to understand the risks and benefits of digital money following an explosion of interest – and investment – in them.

The MPs will cover the role of digital currencies in the UK, including the impact on consumers and businesses.

Although currencies such as Bitcoin have drawn criticism, the technology behind them has been praised.

Nicky Morgan, chair of the of the committee, said the MPs would look into how consumers and Britain's financial infrastructure might be better protected, without stifling innovation.

Last year's rapid rise, and subsequent fall, in the value of Bitcoin focussed attention on cryptocurrencies. They were variously dismissed as fraudulent, a "Ponzi" investment scam, and a vehicle for criminals and tax evaders.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney said Bitcoin had failed as a currency, but that the underlying technology which records and verifies the chain of transactions might prove useful.

Warren Buffett, the venerated investor, said the speculative cryptocurrency craze "will come to a bad end".

Divorcing couples may clash over Bitcoin

Ms Morgan said: "People are becoming increasingly aware of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, but they may not be aware that they are currently unregulated in the UK, and that there is no protection for individual investors.

"The Treasury Committee will look at the potential risks that digital currencies could generate for consumers, businesses, and governments, including those relating to volatility, money laundering, and cyber-crime.

"We will also examine the potential benefits of cryptocurrencies and the technology underpinning them, how they can create innovative opportunities, and to what extent they could disrupt the economy and replace traditional means of payment."

But she also wants to strike a balance between protection and regulation, and not hindering the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrencies. "As part of the inquiry, we will explore how this can be achieved," she said.

The committee, which has yet to set a date for its first evidence session, will take evidence on key questions, including:

  • Are digital currencies ultimately capable of replacing traditional means of payment?

  • To what extent could digital currencies disrupt the economy and the workings of the public sector?

  • What risks and benefits could digital currencies generate for consumers, businesses and governments?

  • Could regulation benefit digital currency start-ups by improving consumer trust?

  • How are governments and regulators in other countries approaching digital currencies and what lessons can the UK learn from overseas?

Source   BBC

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrpreneur

 

Bitcoin - British MPs launch inquiry into digital currencies

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

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Crypto Mining Craze Creates Global GPU Shortage

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Crypto Mining Craze Creates Global GPU Shortage

Crypto Mining Craze Creates Global GPU Shortage

The cryptocurrency bull run of 2017 attracted multitudes of investors looking to get rich quick but it also created a mining boom that has resulted in a worldwide shortage of computer components.

 

Miners Plunder Singapore, Hong Kong For Cheap Rigs

Scores of miners from around the world come to the electronics bazaars in Asia to buy cryptocurrency rigs. Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po and Singapore’s Sim Lim Square to name just a couple are jammed with people of all ages ordering specialized rigs.

This new demand for mining rigs has revitalized these electronic markets that were dying only a few years ago when shoppers turned online for computers, cameras, and gadgets of all kinds.

“It’s 30-50 percent cheaper to buy equipment related to crypto-mining in Hong Kong than in Europe,” Russian bitcoin miner Dima Popov said. This is because Hong Kong has no sales tax and is in close proximity to Chinese components manufacturers.

Miners are demanding more powerful rigs that can include up to 500 graphics cards each which has created a worldwide shortage of the cards allowing manufacturers and retailers to gauge buyers on the price.

 

Scarce GPU Cards Selling At Double Price

The market for high-end graphics cards used to work like anything else. You went to the electronics shop, found the card you wanted and paid just about the Manufacturer’s retail price. Today due to the escalating demand from mining you’ll most likely find the shelves that once held them bare but if you do actually what your looking for expect to pay a premium.

These high-end graphics cards are the most efficient way to mine cryptocurrency and as hobbyist miners and big players alike scramble to snatch up as many as they can prices go through the roof. Last summer popular GPU’s like the AMD Radeon RX 580 sold for about $250 at retail, today the price is more likely to be over $500 and that is if you can find them.

Checking the price of the 5 most popular graphics cards from last year and comparing it with the updated version shows a general price increase of between 70 and 100%. This leaves many wannabe miners trolling online for the best deals on new or even second-hand cards. Buying older cards though means slower computing ability which reduces the profitability of a rig.

Rigs using, for example, a high-end Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 ti card costing around $1,300 (MSRP) can earn as much as $10 dollars a day at current crypto values. This means that the card may pay for itself in about 4 months.

String the math out and it’s easy to see how a fair sized rig can make a very nice profit over a year or more. Retailers reported a dip in demand for the cards during the crypto market correction but now that Bitcoin and it’s like are on the rise sellers and manufacturers are looking for demand to reach and surpass 2017.

Author JMCMAHON • FEB 21, 2018 • 05:02

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Crptocurrency Entrepreneur

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

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Trader Takes a Risk With Bitcoin, Becomes Cryptocurrency Billionaire

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Trader Takes a Risk With Bitcoin, Becomes Cryptocurrency Billionaire

Trader Takes a Risk With Bitcoin, Becomes Cryptocurrency Billionaire
A mysterious investor who had recently purchased astonishing $400 million in bitcoin has just become a cryptocurrency billionaire.
Earlier this year, Bitcoin investors pressed the panic button when the cryptocurrency saw as much as 50 percent of the market lost amidst fears of growing regulations within the community.
Taking advantage of the collapse Bitcoin experienced over the first two months of 2018, the unnamed trader with the Bitcoin address 3Cbq7aT1tY8kMxWLbitaG7yT6bPbKChq64 purchased almost $400 million of the currency, apparently making a smart move, with the market now regaining momentum once again.

"Not sure who that big buyer was," founding partner of Tetras Capital Alex Sunnarborg told MarketWatch. "But many have bought this dip and have added since the rebound and additional regulatory clarity in the US and Asia".

Bill on "Cryptoruble" Introduced in Russia's Lower House of Parliament
The trader reportedly purchased about 41,000 bitcoins between February 9 and 12, increasing his balance from 55,000 coins to over 96,000. During that period Bitcoin's price was trading between about $8,600 and $9,000.
Cryptocurrencies nosedived at the beginning of 2018, weeks after bitcoin reached an all-time high of around $19,500. According to Fundstrat Global Advisors LLC's Tom Lee, Bitcoin may be well off its mid-December peak of $19,511, but it will be touching new highs again by July.    

Source Sputnik News

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur

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Doge Is Helping Ethereum Solve Its Biggest Issue

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Doge Is Helping Ethereum Solve Its Biggest Issue

Doge Is Helping Ethereum Solve Its Biggest Issue

A cryptocurrency modeled after a dog meme is proving yet again it's not just a joke.

Created on a whim in 2013, dogecoin isn't simply still around, it's playing a crucial role in the ongoing testing of at least one "serious" technology. In fact, on February 5, it notably factored into an experiment that successfully showcased one of ethereum's more enterprising projects.

On that date, the much-anticipated technology truebit successfully sent dogecoin to ethereum's Rinkeby testnet, where it became a distinct asset on that blockchain. A historic first, the transaction marked the completion of a years-long project developers see as a stepping stone toward the interoperability of crypto assets more broadly.

Nicknamed the "dogethereum bridge," the test also marks the first real release for truebit, which aims to solve one of ethereum's biggest problems: scalability.

In short, the smart contract platform can't support many users right now. Indeed, because of all the data ethereum needs to store in its globally distributed database, it requires more than three times as much data as bitcoin, and that's making it more difficult for users to run.

Though truebit is lesser-known than scaling solutions like raiden and sharding, the technology is perhaps more ambitious because it's designed to scale any type of ethereum computation, rather than just transactions. This is key, since ethereum bills itself as more than "just" a financial cryptocurrency.

In the long run, truebit wants to scale video, machine learning or just about any computation you can think of, and dogethereum is the first use case, so far.
 

Truebit co-founder Jason Teutsch:

"We built a first version of that, which we're calling 'truebit lite.' It demonstrates that all the core pieces of truebit work. It's a big milestone for us."

$1 million on the line

Backing up, the history of dogethereum is an interesting one.

In the heyday of dogecoin (back when its thriving community could pool together $30,000 in donations to fund a bobsled team), Ethereum Foundation UX designer Alex Van de Sande got together with other developers and set a bounty to incentivize someone to come up with a way to move coins from dogecoin to ethereum and back.

The group locked up the funds in a DAO, a kind of application that runs on ethereum, enabling money to be spent only once specific rules are met. In this instance, the funds were set to only be released if five of the DAO leaders vote to do so by signing approval with their ethereum private keys.

Since the price of ethereum ballooned over the years, the smart contract holds ether worth about $1.2 million today. But no one's received the bounty so far, primarily because running dogethereum in an efficient way has proven to be a much more difficult problem to solve than expected, as Van de Sande pointed out in a string of tweets describing the project's origins.

The heart of the issue is it's too computationally expensive to validate a coin going from one chain to another – and back again – costing millions of dollars in ether. In order to solve this problem, it needs to be less expensive to run computations on the ethereum blockchain.

"This [bounty] kicked off a two- or three-year discussion about how best to implement it," said truebit developer Sina Habibian, adding:

"Dogethereum is representative of a larger problem of how to run big computations."

And dogethereum is how truebit was born – the seemingly silly bridge sparking Ethereum Foundation developer and truebit co-author Christian Reitwiessner's interest in designing a scalability layer on top of ethereum.
 

The big test

Truebit developers might be getting close to snatching the dogethereum bounty, though, since some successful tests on the Rinkeby copy of the ethereum blockchain have been executed.

The only other step is doing it live.

Truebit built a dogecoin light client, a smaller version of the blockchain that slashes most of the historical data, embedding it in the doge relay so it can securely move coins from chain to chain.

Yet, Truebit's developers stressed the challenging aspect of what they've accomplished, arguing that the dogethereum bridge is different than decentralized exchange via atomic swaps, an idea that's been gaining ground of late. Rather, it's more like sidechains, a long-stalled bitcoin technology.

"We want to actually pull coins off of the dogecoin blockchain and put them onto ethereum in the form of ERC-20 tokens," Teutsch explained. "And be able to move them back."

"You don't need a counterparty. You're doing this completely on your own," Habibian added.

To accomplish this, there has to be some way of locking coins on dogecoin so that they cannot be spent until they are sent back from ethereum. But that's not the most difficult part. What remains computationally expensive is proving that the owner of the dogecoin owns the ether coins on the other side.

They then executed a transaction on the Rinkeby testnet, sending the dogecoin to ethereum – and back again – using truebit under the hood, so the normally expensive proof is executed off-chain, in a much cheaper way.
 

No estimates

Despite the public debut for the scaling project, though, the team behind truebit still has their work cut out for them.

In this first version of the technology, the incentives are "greatly simplified," Habibian said.

In the technology they have ready today, some of the participants are behaving "altruistically." That is, the system's verifiers are performing expensive computations just to be nice.

And while that probably wouldn't work in practice, truebit's goal is to one day create a marketplace where participants are paid for doing computational work on their computers and contributing correct results.

"People will come out of their own self-interest to run these computations and make money in return," Habibian said.

So, when will all that be ready exactly? Habibian wouldn't give an estimate for how long it will take to launch for real on ethereum.

"It's always hard to make estimates like that because one of the rules of software engineering is, 'However long you think something's going to take, it'll take three times as long,'" he said.

Still, he revealed truebit plans to release new software programs iterating on this milestone in the coming months now that the startup has teamed up with decentralization startup Aragon and ethereum-based video service LivePeer.

That's how they think the technology will spread at first, beyond dogethereum, marking a big step for truebit – and potentially ethereum too.

As Habibian told CoinDesk

"When it's done and it's fully built, you'll be able to run any computation on ethereum."

 

Author Alyssa Hertig Updated Feb 19, 2018 at 03:41 UTC

 

Posted by Daviid Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member