ETHBITS Gets Green Light for New Copy Trading Cryptocurrency Exchange

  

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Cryptocurrency explainer:
Everything you need to know

Everything you need to know CryptoCurrency Bitcoin Stack

If you’ve ever had a company or friend offer to pay you with Bitcoins or another type of digital money, you’ve encountered cryptocurrency, also called crypto-money or cryptoassets. Cryptocurrency is a digital currency that is created through the use of encryption software. This approach is a solution to security and control issues that prevented a purely digital currency from being successfully developed in the past. If you hear someone talking about one of these currencies, it’s almost certainly in a cryptocurrency format. This type of digitally created and secured money is currently in a period of very cool experimentation, so let’s take a look at how it work, why it’s popular, and where cryptocurrency is heading in the future.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Weekly Round-Up and
Cryptocurrency Markets Update

Last week saw Bitfury striking xxxxxx

a deal with the Ukranian government to put the latter’s data on a Blockchain platform. The deal will ensure blockchain recordings for areas like public health and services, state registers, energy and social security. In a twist, High Tech Private Equity Fund SICAV plc is reported to have acquired nChain, a Blockchain company associated with Wright Craig, the man who once claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. The company plans to make available their intellectual property assets to the blockchain community via royalty-free licensing and open sourcing.

An initial Coin Offer intended for mining activities to support the signaling of Bitcoin Unlimited has been halted as a result of not reaching its goal. The ICO was allegedly linked to Chinese Angel Investor in Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic, Chandler Guo. On the Bitcoin Network scaling front, the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool, F2Pool has declared its support for Segwit. Wang Chun, Owner of F2Pool revealed on Friday that 56 percent of his network members are in support of Segwit.

Eventually, the advent toward mainstream adoption of blockchain gets after Mark Carney, Bank of England’s Governor, claimed blockchain technology can save banks tens of billions of dollars a year. The governor was speaking International Fintech Conference last week in London, where he further revealed that the next generation of Britain’s interbank wire system will be blockchain-compatible.

Market Updates (as of Monday)

Bitcoin’s current price recovery

is outstanding despite the fact that the scaling debate is still raging on. Some experts believe it is being driven by mainstream adoption in Japan. As at 22:00 GMT, Bitcoin has appreciated by 0.22 percentage point and its market value was $1180.73 maintaining the number one position on CoinMarketCap. Ethereum is still holding on to the 2nd spot and has kept the velocity from the current altcoin rally although it lost 0.82 percent today. Its market price was $48.49.

After a stratospheric rise that resulted in Ripple ousting Dash from number three, it has slow down to some degree. The cross-border transfer crypto with KYC was selling at $0.033308 with a 1.33 percent downward adjustment. The battle for number four is so titanic. For three days now, Litecoin and Dash has been dislodging each other to take over momentarily. However, at the time of filing this report, Dash was reigning with a 0.21 percent depreciation, posting an exchange rate of $75.23. Litecoin also took a fall of 1.02% and was being sold for $10.71. It must be stated that the decision to implement Segwit has boosted its price and market cap.

Even though Monero was recently indicted in a finding that found out that some of its transactions are traceable, it doesn’t seem to be affected much and is still at the 6th position. It scored a negative 1.76 percentage point and the exchanges listed it for $20.38. Moreso Ethereum didn’t have a good time either. At number seven, it could be bought for $2.65 and dip 0.42 percent. With a market price of $0.024212 and 0.48 percent upward gain, NEM kept its 8th position intact. The consistency for the Smart Contract platform is impressive.

Angur with the selling rate of $11.52 and a 2.55 percent upward adjustment maintained number 9 as well as the biggest gain on top 10. In a surprising move, PIVX has pushed Maidsafecoin to the 11th position and it is now counted among the top 10 Cryptos on CoinMarketCap. This anon digital currency in a few months has established itself among the elites. It bagged a 0.93 percent growth and its price was $2.01.

Gainers And Losers

On the top 20,

Factom rose by a significant 14.37 percent. It is one of the Cryptos below top 10 that must be watched keenly. Sadly Bitconnect which was at top 10 briefly on Wednesday fell negative 26.63 percent to be the biggest loser.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

  

The iEx.ec project

is all about connecting Blockchain technology and cloud computing business. It aims to create a decentralized cloud and set up a marketplace for computing resources. Its founders conducted numerous scientific research over the years at prominent research institutions, such as the French INRIA and CNRS. The team has a step-by-step plan for the four years ahead. iEx.ec will rely on a set of its own technological solutions. However, the team has not done a lot of dissemination work till recently. Its track record on Github is quite modest. So the question remains open, whether the iEx.ec technological base is as good as they claim it to be.

Konstantin Lomashuk, CEO of Satoshi.Fund:

“The market of cloud computing is huge and we will see more and more new companies aiming at it. It’s really good for the decentralized ecosystem.”

iEx.ec

iEx.ec stands for “I Execute”. Headquartered in Lyon, France, the project was created in October 2016. It is a spin-off company from INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science. iEx.ec aims at starting off as a fully distributed Blockchain-based cloud platform. It is designed for distributed Blockchain-based applications (DApps) with plans to evolving into a market network for decentralized computing products and services. In total, their five editions of the project planned within four years from the launch date. The last outlined edition will represent a fully distributed platform for Blockchain computing.

Potential market

The iEx.ec market network will be designed for various participants of the distributed computing ecosystem. It will enable them to do business with each other to better monetize their products and services. Each new version of the network will be updated to host new types of participants:

• DApps providers (version 1)
• application and server providers (version 2)
• data providers (version 3)
• mining farms, miners, GPU apps providers (version 4)
• emerging classes of applications (version 5)
• at this stage, iEx.ec also plans to partner with telecom companies, attracting the latter, among other, with the possibility to halve their infrastructure costs, distributing small data centers along their network point-of-presence

The market network is to provide its users with

• full traceability and trust
• a wide range of customers and, consequently, new markets
• an innovative Blockchain-based environment, tailored for its users’ features and needs

Competitors

The project’s closest challenger is the Golem Network. It is a decentralized economy of computing power, where one can rent it out or develop and sell software. As pointed out in iEx.ec whitepaper, the key difference between the two is that Golem, with its supercomputer, focuses mainly on High-Performance Computing (HPC) users, while iEx.ec, with its decentralized cloud, will first attract DApps and expect Cloud and HPC users to join later when the Network will evolve becoming more competitive. The economy of DApps is on the rise now, and iEx.ec seems to fit perfectly in it.

Main features

• Desktop Grid Software XtremWeb-HEP, to enable use of any computing resources to execute compute- or data-intensive applications
• Blockchain, to coordinate the access of computing resources to distributed apps
• Claim of Proof-of-Contribution consensus protocol, to certify off chain contributions directly on the Blockchain
• Matchmaking smart contracts, to pair a resource request with a resource offer according to their description
• Simplified version of a multicriteria scheduler [MulticritSched], to enable customers to define their own preferences based on specific criteria
• Market management framework, including API to register bids, a set of template contracts, a web user interface and JavaScript code
• Result checking algorithm, including escrow mechanisms and a reputation system, to choose business partners from the market based on their provable reputation and on the established budget
• Native RLC token, to pay for Application, Server and Data providers on the market network

Team

The core team members, including Gilles Fedak, Haiwu He, Oleg Lodygensky, and Mircea Moca, have an impressive research and development background in big data, grid and cloud computing. Gilles Fedak alone co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers. The core features underlying the iEx.ec are their own developments. They were produced in the scope of their work at INRIA and CNRS. The team is also linked with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Blockchain part is done by two experts from La Javaness, a French digital innovation accelerator. There are also a data management expert, the Energy Positive Server developer, two PR specialists and a new media expert based in the company’s China office. In the future, the team considers collaborating with several well-known European and Chinese universities in research. It also intends to obtain complementary funding through national and European research agencies.

ICO Details

• Launch: 19 April, 2017 at 13:00 UTC
• End: as soon as the max cap of 60.000.000 RLC is reached (otherwise – in 30 days)
• Max RLC total supply: 87,000,000 RLC
• Max RLC sold by crowdsale: 60,000,000 RLC
• RLC minimum objective: 10,000,000 RLC
• Both BTC and ETH are accepted
• 1 BTC = 5000 RLC
• USD/ETH – to be defined at the start of ICO, according to the ETHBTC rate
• 20% bonus – April 19 to April 29
• 10% bonus – April 29 to May 9
• Crowdsale terms and funding URL: http://crowdsale.iex.ec

Token distribution

• Maximum of 60,000,000 RLC – crowdsale
• 12,000,000 RLC to 15,000,000 RLC – founders, team and early investors
• 1,700,000 RLC to 6,000,000 RLC – a fund for developers, to be distributed in the form of bounty grants, marketing actions, and research grants
• 1,700,000 RLC to 6,000,000 RLC – special contingency reserve (not sold on markets)

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Meet Bitcoin Plus –
The Next Great Cryptocurrency

  

Let’s face it,

Bitcoin is currently dominating the market, but altcoins cannot be just brushed off, they are maturing as well and are ready to provide a keen and tough competition. There is one coin, however, which, as claimed by its founders, cannot even be called an “altcoin.” Meet Bitcoin Plus – the next great cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin, but “reincarnated”

The history of Bitcoin Plus goes back to early 2014 when the coin was launched through an ICO held on the Poloniex Exchange. However, it turned out that the ICO was carried to fund not the cryptocurrency but holidays of the original developer who escaped with collected funds somewhere in the south direction. Later on, Bitcoin Plus went into rehab as a few truly dedicated community members formed a team, hired a coder to fix the wallet and introduced the sustainability plan.

Yule Mills, one of the team leaders at Bitcoin Plus, explains to Cointelegraph:

“The original developers created a great coin but it appeared they had ulterior motives, therefore they soon abandoned the coin. I was the original investor and have loved it since I first found out about it in May 2014. I think it is Bitcoin but reincarnated with many improvements and rarities, hence the added Plus in the name of the coin.”

How it will drive the market wild

The cryptocurrency has evolved greatly, especially during the last year. Originally, XBC was purely a Proof-of-Stake coin, however, a bunch of recent updates included the ability to secure the network using Proof-of-Work, therefore Bitcoin Plus is what is now known as a hybrid POS/POW. This means that if the network ever faces a serious issue, things can be moved along manually by switching on Proof-of-Work for a short period.

Bitcoin Plus has one mln coins to respond to 21 mln Bitcoins, it is characterized by a much faster block processing time and can handle eight times more transactions than Bitcoin. Mills points out that the best feature of Bitcoin Plus is the 20 percent annual staking until all one mln coins have been staked. In his opinion, this feature alone is currently driving the market wild.

Mills comments:

“Bitcoin Plus went from $.08 in January 2016 to a high of $131 just last month. That's serious.”

Bitcoin Plus, scalability issues minus

There is an opinion that what is good for Bitcoin has a positive impact on other cryptocurrencies. But what about the problems currently faced by Bitcoin, are they any relevant in the rest of the cryptocurrency space? Scalability has always been an issue for Bitcoin but recently the network has been running out of capacity, transaction fees have been getting higher, while the speed of processing was significantly decreasing. The SegWit vs. BU debate has been going on and on for months and it doesn’t look like we are going to see a conclusion any time soon. How do these block games affect Bitcoin Plus?

Well, XBC has a much shorter average block processing time – 60 seconds compared to that of Bitcoin, therefore the Bitcoin Plus network is able to handle 10 times more transactions every 10 minutes. Besides, the block size limit of Bitcoin Plus is much larger standing at 1.5 MB. The average transaction size of Bitcoin Plus is very similar to its predecessor, therefore every block is able to fit as many as 3,030 transactions or 50.5 transactions per second. The Bitcoin Plus team assures that it will take a long time before users have to start worrying about any scalability issues.

Mills says to Cointelegraph:

“Regarding scaling issues, the original Bitcoin can handle, as fact, less than seven transactions per second compared to Bitcoin Plus which can handle 50+ transactions per second. We are keeping a close eye on SegWit vs. Unlimited and, truthfully, I don't think either idea is a good one. The thing about Bitcoin Plus that works is we have a team that agrees on things. If Bitcoin Plus needs to scale we will scale to Visa level if needed.”

Engaging community into development of the coin

The current team of Bitcoin Plus consists of several community members who run the website, BitcoinTalk Forum Thread, Block Explorers, 24/7 nodes and ensure the sustainability of the coin. The team is open, accessible and their intentions are transparent. It also seems that they are trying to engage the community in the development of the coin, offering ideas for updating of the network for voting and extensively reporting on the completion of upvoted ideas. Isn’t it what the cryptocurrency space is all about? Absolute freedom, flexibility and the ability to reach consensus? With all this packaged in Bitcoin Plus, it is expected that the project will attain great success.

Mills concludes:

“Bitcoin would be an altcoin if it wasn't so successful. I don't consider Bitcoin Plus an altcoin. It's a force to be reckoned with, and you are going to see Bitcoin Plus on a mass scale soon.”

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Following a previous announcement by F2Pool

that they are now to signal for segregated witnesses (segwit), ViaBTC has publicly reiterated they do not support segwit for a number of reasons.  The bitcoin mining pool says:

SegWit, which is a soft fork solution for malleability, cannot solve the capacity problem… Even if SegWit after activation can slightly scale up block size with new transaction formats, it’s still far behind the demand for the development of Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin has been running at full capacity for months with numerous proposals put forward and rejected by miners. The latest ones are segwit, currently at around 32% hashrate share, and Bitcoin Unlimited which stands just under 40%. Segwit’s main aim is to send transactions off-chain and onto second layers, such as the Lightning Network or sidechains. ViaBTC says such transactions “are NOT equal to Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer on-chain transactions” before adding that “LN will also lead to big payment “centers”, and this is against Bitcoin’s initial design as a peer-to-peer payment system.”

The main criticism against segwit is its use of a 1:4 ratio, which many suspect is a political decision that will bind bitcoin’s trajectory for decades to come regardless of technical factors. ViaBTC says: “SegWit lifts the block size limit to 4MB with 1MB base and 3MB witness block. However, from the current transaction data, the average effective block size will be less than 2MB even if all transactions upgrade to SegWit. This is a tremendous waste. If we want to double the capacity of Bitcoin, we’ll need to make sure the internet bandwidth to run full nodes can support at least 8MB blocks, instead of 2MB. This will make it even tougher to increase block size in the future.” Moreover, the decision to upgrade to segwit is irreversible, according to ViaBTC. So if something goes wrong, bitcoin might be stuck because:

“On technical terms, SegWit uses a transaction format that can be spent by those who don’t upgrade their nodes, with segregation of transaction data and signature data. This means SegWit is irrevocable once it’s activated, or all unspent transactions in SegWit formats will face the risk of being stolen.” Some 70% of miners have now made a decision on whether to support segwit or Bitcoin Unlimited, a proposal which simply increases the blocksize as set by nodes and miners. It’s not clear what the other 30% are waiting for, but it will be interesting to see what they do decide once they get around to exercising their duty.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member