Ethereum's "Istanbul" system-wide upgrade, or hard fork, arrived two days earlier than expected – causing miner confusion and a split of the Ropsten testnet.
During an appearance on CNBC's Squawk Box Morgan Creek Digital's co founder Anthony Pompliano was asked how will Bitcoin retain its property as a store of value when national currencies all become digital.
The functionality of cryptocurrency wallets has been rather limited to straightforward asset storage, with a few branching out to asset transfers as well. However, a revolution is coming and it could transform how they operate completely. Developers are beginning to integrate exchange functionalities into hardware cryptocurrency wallets, essentially making it possible for inter-currency trading to be done.
After months of speculation, cryptocurrency trading platform Bakkt launched its bitcoin futures contract offering this week.
The contracts essentially enable investors to place speculative bets on the price of bitcoin in the future, and while these aren’t the first such products to be launched, the distinction here is that the contracts offered by Bakkt will be physically delivered — allowing traders be paid in bitcoin upon the maturity of the contracts, as opposed to in cash equivalents.
The bitcoin mining industry has continued to log new milestones, with miners riding this year’s cryptocurrency price rally, growing mining difficulty and the imminent reward halving in 2020.
An industry report from China-based ASIC miner manufacturer Innosilicon has revealed that there are currently 4.3 million bitcoin mining machines on the network, with a demand for another 1.5 million yet to be filled. Once this market gap is filled, the report estimates that the total Bitcoin hash rate could increase by 75 exahashes by the end of the year.
On Wednesday, reports surfaced that the Bitcoin hash rate dropped about 30 to 40 percent, following a price flash crash in bitcoin’s price from $10,000 to $8,300.
Given the gravity of the fall in both metrics, speculations arose that the fall in price could be directly tied to the drop in the hash rate. Well, as it turned out, the hash rate is fine. The issue was a deviance in the block times that was being mined, nothing else.
“It was just regular random fluctuations in block times. The longer time period over which you estimate hash rate, the more accurate your estimate is likely to be … and vice versa,” Jameson Lopp, the cypherpunk CTO of Casa, explained on Twitter.
Bitmain, the largest manufacturer of bitcoin mining equipment in the world, is continuing to take advantage of the surge in the mining space. This week, the company launched the World Digital Mining Map (WDMM), a service which will essentially connect miners and mining farms together.
With the WDMM, individual miners who need a cost-effective way to host their hardware can access a directory of mining farms close to them, complete with details of their efficiencies, their mining capacities and a host of other relevant specs.
Appreciation for cryptocurrencies in Europe and the Americas is relatively high compared to attitudes in Africa. On that continent, knowledge about cryptocurrencies is sparse at best, but this can’t stop those Africans who are interested in cryptocurrencies from embracing them.
In an interview with Owenize Odia, the country manager for Luno Nigeria, Bitcoin Magazine unearthed details about the current push for cryptocurrency adoption in Africa and how effective it has been so far.
News broke this week that France could see up to 25,000 points of sale within the country accept bitcoin as a means of payment next year.
The initiative will see retail software provider Global P.O.S. leverage its wallet application EasyWallet and payment processor Easy2Pay to enable the payment option. Cosmetics giant Sephora, sports gear company Decathlon and others are expected to be part of the program, which will be launching in 2020.
Kenny Rowe was part of the early days of MakerDAO. He focuses his ideas on DAOs and various concepts around them. We pick Kenny's brain and discuss the intricacies of DAOs and their efforts. Kenny is part of the DAO side of MakerDAO, as well as a general Ethereum ecosystem participant. With an extensive history in blockchain-based social organization, Kenny brings a unique perspective to POV Crypto.
A new bill from Uzbekistan's Ministry of Energy would triple the price of power for crypto miners, raising fears it could stifle the local mining industry.
Coinbase is proud to join leading crypto businesses in announcing the creation of theCrypto Rating Council, a member-operated organization formed to assist market participants that trade or support crypto assets to comply with U.S. federal securities laws. Founding members of the Council are Anchorage, Bittrex, Circle, Coinbase, DRW Cumberland, Genesis, Grayscale Investments and Kraken.
The proper legal characterization of a crypto token — as a currency, a commodity, a security, or something else — can have a meaningful impact on how crypto businesses operate. Whether a token is a security under U.S. federal securities laws, in particular, will significantly impact registration, licensing, and operating obligations for financial services firms that offer crypto services like exchange, investment management, or trading.
Although the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has issued helpful guidance, whether any given crypto asset is a security ultimately requires a fact-intensive analysis by knowledgeable technical and securities law experts. This analysis is difficult and expensive to operationalize consistently, may involve judgment calls, and can lead to disagreement among legal experts (and even government officials).
This challenge prompted Coinbase to bring together several industry leaders and securities law experts to create a scalable, points-based rating system centered around a set of several dozen, yes / no factual questions. These questions are derived directly from SEC guidance and case law and are designed to address important characteristics that inform whether an asset is or is not a security. We also worked hard to focus our framework on objective, repeatable, fact-driven questions that can be answered consistently by technical experts across different assets and over time. The result of the analysis is a score which makes it easy for members to synthesize the analysis across many tokens and make their own, independent business decisions about whether or how to support an asset.
The Council Members The following companies, spanning digital asset trading platforms, digital custodians, trading firms and more, are founding members of the Crypto Rating Council:
Any asset rating published by the Council is the result of a factual analysis performed by outside legal experts in conjunction with technical experts at member firms. These legal experts then use the Council’s framework to establish a rating for each asset under review. Member firms, typically acting through in-house lawyers, then deliberate and vote whether to adopt the rating. All scores published by the Council are the result of this analytical and deliberative process. We expect and look forward to welcoming more organizations to the Council over time.
About Asset Ratings The Council’s analytical framework results in a score between 1 and 5. A score of 1 means the Council’s independent analysis suggests the asset has few or no characteristics consistent with a traditional regulated security. A score of 5 means the Council’s analysis suggests that an asset has many characteristics strongly consistent with treatment as a security. The Council will publish its score for most assets that members support or use in the ordinary course of their respective businesses. We expect that some ratings will change over time and we will accept and consider feedback from asset issuers when they want to share additional information or clarifications that may impact an asset’s rating.
The Council’s ratings are performed independently. They are not endorsed by the SEC, CFTC, or any government agency, developer team, or other third party, and they are not legal advice. Although we may seek input from development teams, developers have no influence over the performance of the analysis and most of the Council’s ratings have been established without direct developer input. More details about the scores and methodology can be found here.
In the coming months, we expect to add more members, review more assets, and publish more and revised asset scores. As we continue to grow, we may develop similar tools for non-U.S. jurisdictions.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and Adam B. Levine are back with part two of our recent live show recorded at BTC2019 in front of a studio audience. This time, we've got nearly an hour of audience Q&A. Enjoy the show!
This episode was sponsored by edge.app
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On Today's Episode, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and Adam B. Levine are back with part two of our recent live show recorded at BTC2019 in front of a live studio audience. This time, we've got nearly an hour of audience Q&A.
Enjoy the show!
Stephanie Murphy: 'œDo you think Bitcoin will be able to shift from block rewards to transaction fees to maintain security as the block reward approaches zero?'
Andreas M. Antonopoulos: 'œThis is one of the fundamental misunderstandings and dynamics of mining for most people, which is the idea that something suddenly happens sometime at an undescribed future, either at the next halving or in 2141. The truth is on a daily basis, every single miner in the industry looks at six or seven different factors: the efficiency of their mining equipment, the price of electricity in their local fiat, the cost of their operation system, the current price of Bitcoin in fiat, the reward that's available as a block subsidy, the average amount of fees they can get, and the relative proportion of hashing power. They decide based on all of these factors. Do I leave this specific machine on at its current efficiency, or do I turn it off, or do I point it to another coin? That happens every single day. Every single day that decision continues, it's rebalancing all of these dynamic factors. So the shift between block subsidy and fees happened every single day since January 3rd 2009 and it continues to happen today.
Sometimes, the capacity of the blockchain, the number of transactions that are in there, the value of the fees mean that it really attracts miners because there's a lot of fees to take. Other times, the fees decrease, the number of transactions decreases, so they're now more reliant on block subsidy and then it swings back and forth and back and forth. It's gonna oscillate in that way all the way to 2141.
Stephanie Murphy: 'œWhat does everybody's view on Rootstock (RSK)?'
Andreas M. Antonopoulos: I don't think Rootstock is putting smart contracts on Bitcoin. Rootstock is allowing you to use Bitcoin to pay for smart contracts on the Rootstock Drivechain, which you could theoretically do by shifting money into Ethereum. In fact, recently I saw someone who had built a gateway that allowed you to make a Lightning payment that terminated in an Ethereum contract. So there's many ways to bridge different blockchains together. Quite honestly, I don't think we should be doing smart contracts on Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't do smart contracts, and it doesn't do smart contracts because it does security. That's not a trade off I think is worth doing. It's much better to leave that to a chain that has a much more experimental culture and can take bigger risks.As to whether we can do smart contracts, that's not a binary question; it's a question of value. So can we do smart contracts that can keep $1,000,000 secure? Yes. $10,000,000? Maybe. $100,000,000? No, the DAO proved that. How about now? DAI is doing more, so maybe yes. So it's basically a moving front. As the the maturity of the smart contract ecosystem expands, we can do bigger and bigger stakes (no pun intended) within the smart contract ecosystem. Every now and then there's gonna be a fairly catastrophic failure that's gonna cause a regression in the amounts of money that's put in them. But essentially it's growing. We're proving this every day, and it's the same thing with Bitcoin. The way you measure security in a smart contract or you measure security in a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is how secure is Bitcoin? X billion dollars. That's the stake that is sitting on it right now, unhacked so far.
Stephanie Murphy: 'œIf Bitcoin or crypto is going to give power back to the people, how can we help people from sanctioned countries like Iran, North Korea get access to this freedom?'
Andreas M. Antonopoulos: 'œ[...] one of the ways we fix issues of privacy is by using the asymmetry inherent in all societies, which is generally the number of people being watched is much larger than the watchers. The panopticon works both ways. If you surveil people, they can surveil you back. Blockchains give you a really important thing, which is immutability. So for example the next set of leaks of Panama papers, what you do is you embed them in the blockchain so they cannot be erased from history. You can do the same thing with other surveillance technologies. If you want to create a situation where society moves towards protecting privacy and making it stronger, what you do is you strip the powerful people in society of their privacy and suddenly they care.'
Credits
Thanks for listening to this episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! Content for todays show was provided by Jonathan Mohan, Stephanie Murphy, Andreas Antonopoulos and Adam B. Levine.
Music for this episode was provided by Jared Rubens and General Fuzz, with light editing by Adam B. Levine.
Transcribed highlights for this episode were provided by ProfessorMeow
Any questions or comments? Email adam@ltbshow.com - See you next time.
On this episode of The Tatiana Show, Tatiana and Josh have a conversation with Brent Lyman, Senior Advisor at www.coinme.com. Coinme is America's first licensed bitcoin kiosk company. Brent tells us of the founding of Coinme in 2014 in Seattle, Washington and what started as 100 kiosks has now grown to over 3000 today.
We discuss how they worked with regulators to update the money transmitter laws to create a virtual currency license. We then delve into their partnership with Coinstar and how that may influence mainstream usability of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Brent gives us some insight into future plans for the company to expand into all 50 states as well as internationally. Brent also reveals his thoughts on working with money transfer companies and potential mergers of bitcoin networks with financial institutions.
About the Guests:
With close to two decades of investment experience, Brent joined Coinme's Private Client team as an Advisor to educate clients and help them take full advantage of digital currencies. Prior to working with Coinme, Brent experienced pain points during his personal investment ventures within the digital currency ecosystem, and these experiences fuel his passion for breaking down barriers and making digital currencies approachable and easy to understand for consumers. Brent's history includes experience as an SVP for a 16 billion-dollar company for over a decade. He received his Bachelors of Science in Business Administration from Kansas State University, and when he's not working Brent enjoys spending time with his wife and their two dogs, attending Mariners or Sounders games, and exploring the city of Seattle.
*You have been listening to the Tatiana Show. This show may contain adult content, language, and humor and is intended for mature audiences. If that's not you, please stop listening. Nothing you hear on The Tatiana Show is intended as financial advice, legal advice, or really, anything other than entertainment. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you're hearing to us on an affiliate network, the ideas and views expressed on this show, are not necessarily of the those of the network you are listening on, or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on the show.
During the 2019 Baltic Honeybadger conference, Bitrefill CEO Sergej Kotliar gave an exclusive video interview for Bitcoin Magazine. His company, which started out as a retailer of phone credit recharge vouchers, is now the Bitcoin community’s go-to place for various gift cards. It is also one of a growing number of bitcoin enterprises that facilitate a lifestyle where anyone can live on their BTC.
“The motivation was to find the most useful thing that you could do for most people, in order to help them buy stuff with their coins,” said an enthusiastic Kotliar in his first line of the interview.
However, that statement merely refers to the nascent phase of Bitrefill, when BTC could only purchase phone credit refills. As the CEO recalls, the business really took off after the variety of gift cards it offered started to increase.
A notable example that Kotliar shared is that of Steam cards, which became very popular in December 2017 after the issuing company Valve stopped accepting bitcoin as a means of payment for its games. The fact that Bitrefill provided a quick and reliable alternative for bitcoiners has been praised by community members and marked the beginning of an upward trend for the company.
We as a company value privacy and wouldn’t want a world where everything is surveilled all the time.
— Sergej Kotliar
Bitrefill offers its gift cards, vouchers and services without requiring any kind of registration, just the way in which a casual shopper would walk into a store and purchase items with a greater degree of discretion from third parties. If you don’t want Google or Microsoft to have access to your payment details, then you can simply buy gift cards for the Play Store or Skype with your BTC. Likewise, you can book hotels, max out on video game currencies, renew subscriptions and pay for flights in a confidential and elegant way.
Kotliar’s vision for Bitrefill involves privacy as a fundamental human right and a circular economy where Satoshi’s deflationary currency gets traded back and forth for goods and services.
Lightning is the most promising technology to do small value transactions, so we went all-in as soon as it became possible.
— Sergej Kotliar
Gift card purchases on Bitrefill can be made for amounts as low as $1, so it makes sense for the company to look for ways to expand the accessibility of its offerings. To that end, Bitrefill now runs two of the biggest Lightning nodes (Bitrefill.com and Bitrefill Thor), with a cumulated capacity of 45.3 BTC (about 5.4 percent of the entire network’s capacity) and hundreds of open channels.
In January 2019, Bitrefill also added a Lightning-specific service which allows users to run their own LN channel on a proprietary node. The solution, which they appropriately named Thor, has been upgraded in April 2019 to include “Turbo” speeds and is a great way to send and receive payments on Bitcoin’s second layer without operating the required hardware. Anyone on the go can simply open a channel. According to Kotliar, the service will receive more refinements to facilitate the onboarding process and make it more accessible to a greater number of users.
In the long term, Bitrefill seeks to develop the circular economy and add even more products and services that can be bought with bitcoin, while also expanding on the Lightning infrastructure.
Despite providing a valuable service, many people took exception to Shape Shift enforcing Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering requirements, but it looks like that will be reversed in the near future.
The question being asked by some industry observers now is; are the repo agreements and Bitcoin price action related?
At Wyohackathon 2019 Caitlin Long and Tyler Lindholm join the show to discuss the progress in Wyoming, making it the friendliest state to Blockchain in the country.Stay tuned for next year it'll be a doozie.Sponsored by SaltLending.com and Epic.Tech
This week on Proof of Love, we talk break-ups' the good, the bad, and the funny. Feel like you're at brunch with Tatiana, Stephanie, and Lauren this week as they reminisce on their worst break-up stories and share what they've learned from the ghosts of boyfriends pasts.
Thank you to our wonderful sponsor Vaultoro. Visit Vaultoro.gold/Tatiana to start investing today.
Do you have a burning question, or a show idea for us? Please email us at tatiana@proofoflovecast.com!
Remember, this is a new show, so if you like it, please be sure to tell 3 friends! Leave a good review on Itunes, and be sure to follow us on our socials!
*You have been listening to Proof of Love. This show may contain adult content, language, and humor and is intended for mature audiences. If that's not you, please stop listening. Nothing you hear on Proof of Love is intended as financial advice, legal advice, therapy or really, anything other than entertainment. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you're hearing to us on an affiliate network, the ideas and views expressed on this show, are not necessarily of the those of the network you are listening on, or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on the show.
'œA libertarian society will have all sorts of problems. It won't be perfect, it won't be a utopia, it might have problems that a statist society doesn't have. But, I think on net it will tend to be better.''" Erik Voorhees
Location: Denver
Date: Wednesday, 18th September
Project: ShapeShift
Role: Founder & CEO
Since its birth over 10 years ago, Bitcoin has resonated with Libertarians. Through its very design, Bitcoin aligns closely with the Libertarian belief that governments should have no interference in people's lives or money.
Helped by popular Bitcoin books such as Saifedean Ammous' The Bitcoin Standard, more and more newcomers to Bitcoin are becoming aware of Libertarianism as well as Austrian Economics. However, these can be confusing concepts to grasp, especially for those growing up always accepting and/or believing that there must be a state.
So, what is Libertarianism? Should we strive for smaller decentralised societies with little or no government intervention or regulation? And could Bitcoin play a key role in reducing the size of governments around the world?
In this interview, I speak with Erik Voorhees the Founder and CEO at ShapeShift. Erik explains the theory behind a Libertarian state, reducing the size of governments, minarchism vs anarchism, and internal Libertarian conflict points.
IOV Labs, the company behind the Bitcoin-powered Rootstock (RSK) network, has acquired Latin American social network site Taringa for an undisclosed amount. Taringa is a 30 million strong network with over 1,000 active online communities.
The acquisition is expected to provide IOVLabs with access to invaluable data and information needed to test and distribute its decentralized infrastructure at scale.
Tokenizing User Feedback
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldivar, the chief executive of IOV Labs and RSK, wants to use this customer data to gain feedback as his team rolls out tools and protocols in the future. Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, he said,
We believe that integrating blockchain technologies and economies into existing social networks, with millions of users, can be an important gateway for their participation in the emerging internet of value. Through the acquisition of Taringa!, we intend on receiving immediate feedback on our features, to improve them together with the community as we go along, and to extend the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.
— Diego Gutiérrez Zaldivar
In order to collect this sort of feedback and utilize it, Zaldivar explained that IOV Labs will begin by using the Rootstock Infrastructure Framework (RIF) and RSK services to tokenize interactions on the social network.
“We are already building our first tool to allow Taringa users to get rewarded by being active participants in their communities,” Taringa CEO Matías Botbol explained in a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine. “Once this is in place, we envision adding more features, including peer-to-peer token exchanges, a marketplace for other DApps to start offering products and services to our users, and more.”
RSK is a Bitcoin sidechain project that is connected to the Bitcoin blockchain via a two-way peg. The chain uses “smart bitcoin” (RBTC) to run its internal ecosystem, thus allowing users to lock their bitcoin and get a token representing that value on the sidechain. With these RBTC tokens, users can go on to interact with DApps and other smart contracts on the RSK blockchain.
Social networks are driven by the most popular and snappy content, where avid users strive to become “influencers.” These popular influencers are traditionally compensated outside of the network, usually based on the number of interactions that their branded content accumulates over time.
The question of how to reward these content creators in a more direct, equitable or tokenized way has been an ongoing concern for Taringa. In July 2019, it launched a pilot program called “Taringa Pioneers,” a system that sought to reward popular content creators on the network with cryptocurrency.
Decentralized Storage and Payments
According to Zaldivar, IOV Labs will be integrating the RSK wallet into Taringa. This will allow them to experiment with several incentive models for compensating content creators in the community using bitcoin and RBTC.
The blockchain firm also has plans to move Taringa’s infrastructure to RIF-based decentralized protocols. Its naming service protocol, RIF Directory, which functions as a secure, DNS-like system, would house Taringa user registration and reputational profile protocols. Meanwhile, RIF Data will handle secure storage and distribution of content.
“We see Taringa! as the first step towards massive adoption of both RSK and RIF platforms, and a great step forward for our long term vision of empowering individuals through decentralization,“ Zaldivar said. “We can’t wait to share more news about the first products very soon, as we continue building the internet of value.”
In July 2019, RSK took a step further in bringing decentralized storage to Bitcoin by joining forces with Swarm to develop a multi-chain distributed storage network.
“Our vision is to create an open marketplace for decentralized infrastructure and services, so this is the first step toward integrating other protocols into the RIF OS,” Zaldivar told Bitcoin Magazine.
Bitcoin Magazine catches up with Aleksandar Svetski, CEO of the Bitcoin company Amber. Svetski argues why now more than ever, “Bitcoin not blockchain” is the best direction in which the cryptocurrency industry should grow. This is one part of his thesis expressed in the interview for why he thinks of himself as a contrarian and as Bitcoin itself as the ultimate contrarian’s bet.
DISCLAIMER: The following content is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial or other advice. Nothing contained in this presentation constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement or offer by BTC Media, The Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network or any third party service provider to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments.
Bitmain is creating the eHarmony of bitcoin mining. Okay, maybe that’s a bit embellished, but the mining firm is creating a tool that connects large-scale mining operations with individual suitors shopping for mining hardware hosting services.
The new service, dubbed the World Digital Mining Map (WDMM), will create a directory of cryptocurrency mining farms and list the efficiencies of their energy sources, capacity of their facilities and other specifications. This data will help individual miners find a suitable mining farm to host their hardware. Essentially, the service creates an open marketplace for individual miners to find a cost-efficient method to operate their rigs.
The WDMM “will help mining farm owners fill available capacity they have, while hardware owners will have more options for places to host their rigs,” a representative from Bitmain told Bitcoin Magazine.
“The WDMM will help to make cryptocurrency mining more sustainable in the long-run by connecting mining farms and hardware owners in a whole new way. It is part of our commitment to provide miners with on-going support throughout their hardware’s lifetime and to support the sector’s overall growth,” Matthew Wang, Bitmain’s director of mining farms, said in a press release.
A Bitmain representative told Bitcoin Magazine that the WDMM “aims to connect the mining ecosystem in the most meaningful way for each party. Bitmain’s role here will be to offer services to support the relationships in the mentioned areas. The funding and investments required for each mining farm’s infrastructure will be done by the owners.”
The company representative added that, while there is no added cost to be listed on the WDMM, “hardware owners will need to pay mining farms a fee that they both agree on. If further Antminers are needed, Bitmain can support with the sales process.”
First Look at World Digital Mining Summit
Bitmain is planning on launching the new tool at the World Digital Mining Summit in Frankfurt, Germany, in October 2019. Miners at the summit will have first priority for the service, and each applicant will need to include pertinent information on their facility’s hardware capacity, power resources and other metrics.
“In return, participants will be given personalised services from Bitmain which includes assistance with mining farm design, connections to foreign customers to host, and support with operations, purchasing and construction,” the press release reads.
September 27, 2019: This article has been updated with further information from Bitmain.
Despite operating its own largely unsuccessful, state-backed cryptocurrency, the petro, the central bank of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is also considering adding bitcoin to its balance sheets, giving state institutions the ability to settle payments in cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrency mining has been especially popular in Venezuela for several years, due to factors such as the low cost of electricity and lack of access to financial institutions caused by international U.S. sanctions. Although the Venezuelan government launched the first state-backed cryptocurrency in 2018, the usage of world-renowned crypto assets like bitcoin has been steadily rising.
On September 26, 2019, Bloomberg reported a new development in the Venezuelan crypto scene: the largest, state-backed oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) has made a formal request that the Venezuelan central bank deal in bitcoin and ethereum. According to Bloomberg, PDVSA is having trouble making and receiving payments through conventional channels, due to banks’ refusal to deal with Venezuelan businesses. However, PDVSA has in its possession a large, unspecified reserve of these two popular crypto assets. It believes that the Central Bank of Venezuela can use these reserves to pay off the company’s debts and receive payments without needing to go through traditional exchanges.
Circumventing Sanctions
The report claims that the Central Bank of Venezuela is seriously looking at its ability to make deals with this sort of asset. The Venezuelan government began officially experimenting with using BTC to circumvent various international sanctions in July 2019, so this development seems in line with previous behavior. Of particular interest, however, is the added note that the Venezuelan government is considering the feasibility of counting crypto assets toward the nation’s international reserves.
The Venezuelan government’s international reserves currently sit at the lowest point in three decades: $7.3 billion. Venezuela had previously entrusted a further $1.2 billion worth of gold to the Bank of England, which the bank has unilaterally refused to give back to them. Citing diplomatic ties to the United States and a disposition from both the U.S. and the U.K. to support Juan Guaido’s complete nonstarter of a self-proclaimed “interim presidency,” it does not seem clear if the bank will ever return such a substantial portion of the entire treasury back to Venezuela. Depending on how successful the central bank’s attempts to deal in bitcoin are, plans like this could help the hemorrhaging national economy regain some stability.
Bitcoin Magazine catches up with Aleksandar Svetski, CEO of the Bitcoin company, Amber. Aleksandar argues why now more than ever, Bitcoin not Blockchain is the best direction for the crypto industry to grow. He also considers himself and contrarian and explains how Bitcoin is the ultimate contrarian bet.
DISCLAIMER: The following content is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained in this presentation constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by BTC Media, The Let's Talk Bitcoin Network, or any third party service provider to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments.
Continuing the series on the various ways one can learn about the technical aspects of Bitcoin, in this article we will focus on the Bitcoin Core PR review club.
John Newbery announced the creation of the Bitcoin Core PR review club on Twitter in April 2019. Pull requests (PRs) are proposed changes to the codebase or documentation that can be submitted by anyone before being discussed by the maintainers and contributors of the project and eventually being either merged or closed.
The aim of the review club is to onboard new contributors to Bitcoin Core by providing a stepping stone to reviewing and testing pull requests. As Newbery said in his tweet, “There are hundreds of open PRs, it’s not obvious which ones are suitable for new contributors” and that “maintainers seem to speak a strange and confusing language.”
The major bottleneck for Bitcoin Core currently is “good testing and good reviewing and a deep understanding of the system to be able to do that good reviewing.”
How to Find the Bitcoin PR Review Club
The club is hosted on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel #bitcoin-core-pr-reviews. IRC is a protocol that is as old as the web. It is the communication channel of choice for online Bitcoin technical meetings and conversations. Think of it like Slack or Mattermost but without the GIFs, emojis, threads and the ability to receive messages when offline. Indeed the company Slack emerged from attempting to address the shortcomings of IRC. Of course, unlike Slack, IRC doesn’t require proprietary software and paid plans to access chat histories. IRC is also faster and less memory- and bandwidth-hungry. There are many IRC clients to choose from, some are free, some are paid.
Every week, those interested in learning more about the Bitcoin Core PR review process or the details of specific pull requests can join the IRC channel at 17:00 UTC on Wednesdays. The meeting is open to all and lasts for one hour. A different pull request is chosen each week. Participants can suggest a specific pull request to be covered in advance of the meeting. There is pre-reading available prior to the meeting and it’s a good idea to go through this in advance to get the most out of the discussion. Logs of all prior meetings are also available.
Most of the meetings have been led by Newbery so far but there have been guest hosts, including some of the authors of the PR being discussed that week. It is certainly a format that can be replicated informally and impromptu whenever there is a group of people wishing to discuss and learn about a particular PR.
The complexity of the PR varies greatly from week to week. Some, like #15443 and #15204 — focused on testing and the graphical user interface, respectively — are relatively easy to follow for new contributors. Others, such as #15481, relating to Matt Corallo’s proposed “Great Consensus Cleanup” soft fork, require a deeper understanding of the Bitcoin codebase and its history to understand the context.
Why Participate in the Bitcoin PR Review Club?
For those who would like to contribute to Bitcoin Core in the future, the PR review club is a no-brainer. But even if you don’t aspire to do that, attending and participating is a great opportunity to both learn more about the Bitcoin Core codebase and to pick up tips and tricks on how to review other people’s code from Newbery and other Bitcoin Core contributors. To this end, Jon Atack, another Bitcoin Core contributor, is in the process of drafting a document collecting together the advice and pointers gathered during the PR review club.
In addition to reading the PR and the prepared notes, one can clone the repo, check out and build the PR branch, and run the tests in advance of the meeting. This will allow you to comment directly on the PR, as authors of PRs typically need confirmation that the PR successfully builds and its tests pass on different operating systems. Build instructions and guidance for running tests are available within the Bitcoin Core repository.
If you want to go even further, there are various tools that are useful when reviewing the code changes of the PR. They include Ctags which, as founder of the MIT Bitcoin Project Jeremy Rubin explains, allow you to use a special set of keyboard shortcuts to jump to where an object is defined in the code from within your favorite text editor. You can also use git grep to search for a string in your working directory or tree in Git.
In addition, GNU Debugger (GDB) on Linux or LLDB on Mac OS are useful debugging tools which let you “do brain surgery on your program,” as Rubin puts it. You can go through the code line by line, inspect the memory and understand the impact of each line. In addition, you can modify the values of variables to help you understand what causes a program to crash. Developer Fabian Jahr is drafting a document with guidance on using these tools which at the time of writing is optimized for Mac OS.
A Major Bitcoin Bottleneck
Although the level of review on Bitcoin Core code compares well to other Bitcoin implementations and certainly to other altcoins, it is not as rigorous as befits a project supporting an ecosystem measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. If, as we expect, the ecosystem continues to grow, supporting potentially trillions of dollars of value in the future, this need for greater numbers of people capable of quality review will only become more acute.
In the PR review club on September 4, 2019, Newbery advised, “Reviewing is the most effective way you can contribute as a new contributor (and also will teach you much more about the code than opening PRs).”
Review is the main bottleneck preventing faster progress on long-term goals such as making the Bitcoin Core codebase more modular, separating out the node, wallet and GUI components, and providing additional functionality for second layer protocols like the Lightning Network. Some of the most important and critical PRs have languished for months due to lack of review.
Linus’ Law
In his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond dubbed the regularly-cited law that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” as “Linus’ Law,” after the creator of the Linux kernel Linus Torvalds. The recent announcement of the vulnerability in three of the most mature Lightning implementations — c-lightning, eclair and lnd — reminds us of the prospect of bugs in protocols resulting in users losing funds.
Perhaps one day, with the help of the Bitcoin Core PR review club, it will be your eyeballs that prevent a bug from being merged into Bitcoin Core.
Thanks to Jon Atack for contributing to and reviewing this article.
Fold, a company dedicated to adding accessibility and mainstream adoption of the Lightning Network, has announced that it is launching a new app following a wave of successful fundraising and new partnerships. Fold’s new app allows users to spend fiat via a credit debit card and earn bitcoin back on purchases with select retailers.
Will Reeves, the company’s CEO, announced the launch through a Medium post, which promised that the first to sign up will receive 100,000 free satoshis.
In July 2019, the gift-card-to-bitcoin exchange announced that it had become Lightning compatible. Later that month, it launched a “sats-back” program that rewarded users for shopping at certain retailers with bitcoin (via mainnet or the Lightning Network) with up to 20 percent back on certain purchases. This latest announcement adds fiat purchases to the sats-back program.
Adoption and Privacy Protection
The news follows a $2.5 million fundraise from investors like Craft Ventures, CoinShares and Slow Ventures. Fold plans to use the fresh capital to expand the operations of their kickback program, which currently includes retailers like Amazon, Uber, Starbucks and Hotels.com. The payout in satoshis, even if purchases are made in USD through the app, is intended to encourage even mainstream users to become more active in the Lightning Network.
The company has also taken a variety of measures to prioritize user anonymity, such as actively encouraging the use of independent wallets and a focus on purchasing prepaid cards. In addition to a mobile app launch, a press release claims that a desktop version of the Fold app will be arriving in October 2019.
Lolli, another crypto-based cashback platform, has a similar business model with some critical differences. Lolli has allowed users to earn satoshis back by using fiat purchases since its inception but does not have an infrastructure for allowing users to actually make the initial purchases with bitcoin. Still, by awarding users with BTC following their fiat purchases, Lolli is primed to expand the acceptance of bitcoin hodling among its users.
Seoul-based cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb has launched an upgraded version of its global website. According to a company announcement, the South Korean exchange says it’s now out of beta as it launches a revamped exchange interface, which is accessible on both mobile and web platforms.
The release contains Bithumb’s commitment to ensuring a fair and transparent trading ecosystem; one where customers can provide feedback and recommendations for their service needs and where they can rest assured that they’ll be acted upon.
According to Bithumb, the new platform contains a bevy of aesthetic improvements, including a more user-friendly interface and updates to graphics.
It also features functionality optimizations, such as enhanced transaction speed, peer-to-peer trading improvements and easier wallet management. There are also new fiat-to-crypto on-ramps that allow users to purchase digital assets with their credit cards on their desktop or through the mobile app. Prior to this, fiat deposits were only available to Korean residents while others had to deposit cryptocurrencies to trade on Bithumb.
“The new site includes tweaks on all areas for improved user experience. Users will notice a change with the site layout that prioritizes the most important information,” Bithumb stated, adding that improved ticker boxes, better color contrasts and enhanced site navigation will help take out clutter and increase accessibility.
The exchange will also now accommodate Japanese language support, bringing its tally of supported languages to four (in addition to English, Chinese and Korean).
Bithumb Revamping and Looking to the Future
The launch is coming on the heels of several expansion efforts from Bithumb as it looks to put the repeated security breaches it has suffered behind it. The data of 30,000 Bithumb customers was compromised in a July 2017 hack. A year later, around $30 million worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from Bithumb’s hot wallet. The exchange lost about $20 million and $13 million worth of cryptocurrency in March 2019 and April 2019, respectively. It eventually did its bit to recover the funds, collaborating with popular exchanges such as Huobi, Changelly, ChangeNow and CoinSwitch to freeze them.
Since then, Bithumb has embarked on a continuous expansion path. It acquired Singaporean exchange Bitholic in August 2019, with the latter then changing its name to Bithumb Singapore.
Calm down, y’all. The Bitcoin hash rate isn’t plummeting, despite the headlines you may have read. In fact, it has already recovered — though that’s not even a completely accurate representation.
On September 25, 2019, social media swirled with news that Bitcoin’s hash rate dropped a precipitous 30-40 percent. This was followed by bitcoin’s worst daily price decline since July 2019, falling from its $10,000 support to $8,300 at the time of writing. With both metrics falling on the same day, this led to speculation that one may have caused the other.
Except, the hash rate didn’t actually fall. As explained by Casa CTO Jameson Lopp, the drop was triggered by a variance in block times. Typically, a new block is mined on average every 10 minutes, though depending on a variety of factors, this time could be shorter or longer by a little or a lot.
The need for journalists to be the first to report "news" puts them in direct conflict against patiently verifying their observations. pic.twitter.com/ewVmuObEAp
In this case, block times were longer than usual, so this led hash rate estimates to erroneously signal that the hash rate was dropping. As Lopp put it on Twitter, “It was just regular random fluctuations in block times. The longer time period over which you estimate hash rate, the more accurate your estimate is likely to be… and vice versa.”
In other words, people jumped the gun. Instead of waiting a while to verify that the drop was actually a decrease in hash rate and not some deviance in block time, they relied on metrics that are just estimates of network conditions.
Christopher Bendiksen, head of research at Coinshares, clarified this “common misconception” that live-feed hash rate estimates are 100 percent accurate in a blog post.
“So let’s start with something you might not know: the Bitcoin hashrate is actually not a known measure,” he wrote. “It is technically not even knowable (kinda like the number of air atoms in a balloon isn’t knowable). All one can do is estimate the hashrate based on the frequency of past blocks and the mining difficulty. And while those estimates can be really good they have to be done right.”
Echoing Lopp, Bendiksen espoused that the best way to get an accurate look at Bitcoin’s hash rate is to view its 7- to 14-day moving average, the same logic that dictates Bitcoin’s roughly two week (every 2,016 blocks) difficulty adjustment.
“Knowing the difficulty, one can know what time it should take a certain amount of hash power, on average, to find a certain amount of blocks. This estimate gets more accurate the longer the interval one measures it over,” Bendiksen wrote. “And therein lies the essence of the problem. If the measurement interval is too short, the estimate becomes vulnerable to the inherent variance in block times.”
If you look at any hash rate graph, you’ll see what he’s talking about. Not only do estimates vary graph-to-graph, but wild swings, up and down, are a common occurrence. “This doesn’t mean that the hash rate is rapidly growing or falling; it is simply a relic of the inherent variance in PoW mining,” Bendiksen explained in a tweet.
So don’t fret or FUD. Bitcoin isn’t entering a mining death spiral. And beyond mere speculation, there’s not a real argument to support this “drop” triggering the current sell-off because, in reality, the network’s hash rate hasn’t changed by any significant measure.
hey guys I reached into my urn full of hundreds of red and blue marbles. I pulled out two red marbles and one blue. that means the distribution of red to blue in the urn is exactly 2:1.
Bitcoin’s long-held support at $9,750 gave way on September 24, 2019 in a swift and violent 15 percent move to the downside.
At the moment, the market is testing a previously untested weekly level at $9,200 and is currently finding support.
If the daily candle manages to close below this support level, we can expect to see a test of the $7,700s as this represents the next macro support level below our current range.
If the bulls want to see a reversal, now is the time. We really want to see a daily close above $9,200 and, ideally, a weekly close above $9,200. If the weekly candle can close above $9,750 that would be a very, very bullish statement for the market.
Trading and investing in digital assets like bitcoin is highly speculative and comes with many risks. This price analysis is for informational purposes and should not be considered investment advice. Statements and financial information on Bitcoin Magazine and BTC Inc sites do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BTC Inc. They should not be construed as an endorsement or recommendation to buy, sell or hold. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
