Google Co-Founder Billionaire Sergey Brin is an Ethereum Miner
How cool is THAT! hmmmm whats he really up too?
Sergey Brin, President of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., appeared on the panel on emerging technologies at the ongoing Blockchain Summit in Morroco.
At his last-minute surprise appearance at the summit, Brin revealed that he is mining Ethereum with his 10-year old son. He also stated that the concept of zero-knowledge proofs is “really mind-boggling”.
Zero-knowledge proof is a cryptography principle which enables to prove something without actually revealing the knowledge. This technology is utilized by cryptocurrencies such as ZCash to enable privacy features where users can conceal the transaction information while still securing the network on a public ledger.
The panel also consisted of Elizabeth Stark, co-founder and CEO of Lightning Labs, and Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT Media Lab. Elizabeth Stark spoke about the lightning network and security of centralized exchanges.
“Lightning enables people to transact at a high volume using the...
Peering Through the #FUD About #Crypto
Bitcoin has thrust cryptocurrencies into mainstream consciousness by shaking up the financial world in the past 9 years.
Since its inception in 2009, the preeminent cryptocurrency has thrown a spanner in the works of traditional banking and financial institutions and has paved the way for the creation of a plethora of industry-shaping virtual currencies and blockchain-based innovations.
With that being said, it’s been far from smooth sailing for Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. Dramatic highs and soul-shattering lows have been part and parcel of the past nine years.
The volatility of cryptocurrencies has created more than a few detractors and we’ve seen a number of headlines exclaiming the ‘death’ of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.
These obituaries have come from a wide variety of industry experts and commentators. While they’re almost always subjective, they portray a negative, fear-mongering mentality that detracts from the technological breakthroughs that have been sparked by blockchain technology.
Let’s take a look at some of the instances that have led to mainstream media outlets signaling the death of Bitcoin and examine where the industry is at midway through 2018.
It’s not difficult to find articles slamming Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies — just look at 99bitcoins.com, which has a compendium of Bitcoin obituaries that has now surpassed the 300 mark.
The earliest headline heralding the end of Bitcoin, according to the website, is an article entitled ‘Why Bitcoin can’t be a currency’ published in a blog entitled The Underground Economist in 2010. In essence, the writer pointed to Bitcoin’s constantly fluctuating value as the main reason why it shouldn’t be considered a currency.
“While Bitcoin has managed to bootstrap itself on a limited scale, it lacks any mechanism for dealing with fluctuations in demand. Increasing demand for Bitcoin will cause prices in terms of Bitcoin to drop (deflation), while decreasing demand will cause them to rise (inflation).”
Since then, the number of headlines suggesting that Bitcoin was doomed to fail has increased year on year. In 2017, there were a total of 118 Bitcoin obituaries articles.
These obituaries are any articles that predict the demise of Bitcoin, based on assumptions or quotes from a wide range of commentators. This includes mentions of fraud, ponzi schemes and money laundering and frankly anything that is negative enough to cast aspersions on the future of Bitcoin.
While the sheer number of articles that have predicted the death of Bitcoin may be humorous, a glance down the list of headlines from various publications tells a different story altogether.
Small scale blogs like the one that is credited for the first Bitcoin death article have a limited reach and aren’t likely to have a profound effect on the sentiment of a large group of people.
However, as the number of these articles increases, so too has the caliber and profile of the publications producing this content.
Mainstream mania
CNBC has covered cryptocurrencies extensively over the last few years, with content that is fairly objective in terms widespread coverage of both positive and negative sentiments towards the industry,
With that being said, CNBC has been the source of numerous interviews quoting various sources that have labelled Bitcoin a bubble and ponzi scheme, while speculating on how it would crash.
The most telling example of this was JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon comparing Bitcoin to the Dutch Tulip Mania before predicting it would blow up on CNBC. Perhaps more telling was the effect Dimon’s statements had on Bitcoin’s value, which fell after the American executive’s comments:
"It's worse than tulip bulbs. It won't end well. Someone is going to get killed. Currencies have legal support. It will blow up."
In November 2017, Bloomberg published an article that speculated on a number of different factors that could potentially derail Bitcoin as it headed to that $20,000 high in December.
The article quoted several sources that point to the number of altcoins, regulations, cyber attacks and the launch of derivatives as pitfalls to Bitcoin’s rise in price and popularity.
Bubble talk
The Guardian published an editorial in November 2017 that labelled Bitcoin’s price as a bubble, and pointed to the costs of mining, slammed the endorsements by celebrities and made strong statements about Bitcoin’s primary use as means to buy drugs and pay ransoms online.
Forbes contributor Jay Adkisson wrote an op-ed which went on to describe the way Bitcoin is currently sold as a scam. The writer boiled down Bitcoin to a core existence as a number, without an intrinsic value.
He went on to suggest that cryptocurrencies lack ‘uniqueness,’ pointing to the sheer number of cryptocurrencies in existence.
The Telegraph also published a number of articles last year, drumming up ‘bubble’ rhetoric as the 2017 wound to a close. Abhishek Parajuli took a mighty swipe in his own op-ed on the platform, citing wild volatility, poor utility as a medium exchange as well as slow transaction speeds:
“So, hype aside, Bitcoins are lottery tickets. They have no underlying utility. When the music stops, those left holding them will be burned.”
Wall Street Journal contributor James Mackintosh weighed in on the value of Bitcoin in mid-September 2017. In essence, the writer delved into the notion of Bitcoin having become digital gold as a store of value.
Going on...
The Regulatory System(S) And Cryptocurrencies
Source oneQube by Christopher Faille
Edmund Mokhtarian and Alexander Lindgren have written a fascinating discussion of “operational issues and best practices” for cryptocurrency traders. As part of this broader discussion, they have provocative things to say about the regulatory system in the U.S. and about where, if anywhere, bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies fit into it.
The regulatory system in the United States is both fragmented and functional. There is no single administrative body whose job it is to oversee the capital markets as a whole, working toward efficiency on the one hand and working against fraud on the other. Instead, there are several agencies involved in this task or these tasks, the most important of which (the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission) are distinguished from each other by the sort of investment vehicle they oversee. As the names suggest, the CFTC oversees commodities trading, the SEC securities trading.
The fragmentation is “functional” in character in that the distinction is defined by the function the two types of instrument perform. Commodities and securities have much in common. They are both traded on markets, they are both quite liquid, and they both serve both profit seekers and risk hedgers. But what distinguishes them? Seventy years ago the Supreme Court gave the following ffunction definition if a security: it is an instrument by which “a person invests his money in a common enterprise and is led to expect profits solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party.”
The Function of a Security
By design, that definition is very broad, in order to make it difficult for security fraudsters to escape responsibility by saying that they aren’t really securities fraudsters. The function of a security, whether called a stock or bond or something else, is to allow an investor to gain exposure to the gains of an enterprise (commonly a listed corporation) without making any further ‘effort’ other than the infusion of the money itself.
Stealth Project ICO Review
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Experimental Voting Effort Aims to Break Ethereum Governance Gridlock
When people think of ethereum, they generally think also of the protocol's developer Vitalik Buterin, now - off his creation - a multi-millionaire.
No doubt, Buterin is a leader of sorts for the community, even if decision-making is somewhat decentralized. And above that, ethereum's most active developers have a significant amount of say in the direction of the technology.
Recently, however, the protocol's decision-making has been called into question as a series of controversial proposals have arisen - be it the development of new forms of mining hardware or the recovery of lost funds due to various vulnerabilities.
As the community debates the various pros and cons of such proposals, Buterin has begun working with economics researcher Dr. Glen Weyl to experiment with the idea of enabling a new kind of voting for the ethereum users. In a blog post announcing the collaboration on May 21, Buterin described how ideas from Weyl's recent book, "Radical Markets," could help address these governance challenges and coordinate solutions for contentious issues.
Speaking to CoinDesk, Weyl, who received a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton University and is now a researcher at Microsoft, explained that quadratic voting aims to focus voters on issues they are passionate about and educated on. Rather than votes being distributed equally across participants, users can purchase extra votes to have a greater say in certain issues.
"The idea is it allows people to express how important things are to them, and not just which direction they feel about it," Weyl said.
The collaboration comes at a time when other ethereum researchers have banded together in an effort to come up with ways to better measure community sentiment.
And although Buterin wasn't directly involved in those meetings, in the blog post, he noted his belief that existing proposals for decentralized decision-making either put too much authority into the hands of those who own ether or, in trying to reach a larger pool of stakeholders, are vulnerable to attack by fake accounts and malicious actors trying to sway the vote.
As such, Buterin and Weyl write, the quadratic voting proposal is a more "moderate alternative" to other forms of decentralized governance.
Weyl told CoinDesk:
"[Quadratic voting] allows for decisions to be made for the greatest number of people."
Connecting communities
The duo's post on the matter seems aligned with an announcement made earlier this month by Virgil Griffith from the Ethereum Foundation, the not-for-profit that funds ethereum-related research, that it was seeking applications for projects wanting to test experiments based on Weyl's theories.
Prior to fully fledged announcements, however, Buterin and Weyl's blog post hints at ways the method could occur.
"Citizens can use a (possibly artificial) currency to buy votes at the cost of the square of the votes bought on...