Day: August 2, 2017

What to make of the most political proposal for bitcoin scaling? CoinDesk looks at the impact of the UASF movement on network development.

Analytical overview on Bitcoin Cash price and market

Cryptocurrency ICOs have been attracting many shrewd investors and dumb money over the past few months. Quite a few projects have raised significantly more money than anticipated, which shows there is a degree of desperation associated with these ICOs. EOS is one of the more ambitious projects we have seen to date. However, Vitalik Buterin feels there are some issues with the project which must be addressed first.

3. EOS Fee Structure

Similar to any other project using blockchain technology, EOS has an interesting mechanism when it comes to transaction fees.  It seems the project will be using a technique to determine how many transactions people can send based on the amount of tokens they hold at the time. This means users will need to buy a certain amount of tokens in order to spend them. This is an unnecessary exposure to volatility, according to Buterin. His argument is pretty solid.

Not everyone wants to spend hard-earned money on an unknown asset in order to use a blockchain. Even the people who want to use EOS just a handful of times will be needing to buy a lot of coins and sell them all later on, assuming the price has not collapsed. It is a less-than-stellar business model which will hurt EOS’s chances of succeeding in the long run. Early adopters will need to pay for everyone else to use the network in the future.

2. 100,000 Transactions per Second?

Scalability is an integral part of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Even the bigger currencies have been struggling with scaling, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. EOS may not fare much better, despite its bold claim of processing 100,000 transactions per second. Achieving such a degree of scalability would seem pretty much impossible right now. The project claims to be able to make it happen, although it will be incredibly difficult to do so.

EOS relies on a small number of master node-esque nodes belonging to what appears to be a consortium chain. There are no Merkle proofs or any other ways for users to audit any part of the system. Their only option would be to run a full undo and monitor everything very closely. It might work out in the end, but Vitalik Buterin feels that this is a rather undesirable outcome.  Only time will tell if this system is the downfall of EOS or not.

1. DPOS Is a Potential Issue

The concept of Delegated Proof of Stake makes a lot of sense. It is a decentralized way to achieve consensus among token holders on the EOS network. Everyone can vote on who should be eligible to run a node on the consortium network which makes up this project. However, there is no real incentive for these nodes to behave correctly, which leaves the door wide open to malicious behavior. It highlights how this project over-relies on the voting system itself.

The issue with blockchain-based voting is multifaceted. Firstly, not every token holder will vote, as we have seen multiple times in the past. This was especially true in the case of BitShares, a project also developed by the EOS team. Secondly, every voter could influence the result, making “correct’ voting a less desirable outcome. Anyone keeping coins in an exchange wallet would give that exchange their vote. That is not the desired effect by any means, although most holders will not care as long as they make a profit.

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Traditional investing is changing its face as prediction markets pick up more interest as a form of Blockchain trading and investing.

The post These Bitcoin Exchanges and Wallets Are Supporting Bitcoin Cash appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The fear of missing out is strong, but people need to start waking up because most of these teams will never be able to deliver upon their great promises.

Computer users the world over now have a new type of crypto ransomware with which to contend. GlobeImposter is a malware type spotted in the wild quite some time ago. However, compared with other types of ransomware, it has not made much of an impact until now. That may change very soon, as a new malvertising campaign has begun actively distributing this payload. 

GlobeImposter Ransomware Is a Pain in the Neck

With so many different types of Bitcoin ransomware to deal with these days, it is virtually impossible to distinguish one threat from another. Victims of the Blank Slate malspam campaign will likely not have even noticed that the group behind the project has changed the ransomware they are distributing. Until a few weeks ago, the campaign mainly distributed a BTCWare ransomware variant going by the name of Aleta. Now, it is actively distributing GlobeImposter payloads.

It is unclear why this change occurred so suddenly, although it probably had to do with the BTCWare master decryption key being released several weeks ago. Like any good entrepreneur, cybercriminals have to keep up with new trends and seize any opportunities that may come their way. GlobeImposter ransomware seems to have been a more desirable payload to distribute compared to Aleta. Regardless of the ideology behind the change, the Blank Slate malspam campaign continues to harass Internet users all over the world without any sign of slowing down.

Some may wonder why this particular malspam campaign is known as Blank Slate. That is not hard to explain, since the emails sent out to users all over the world contain neither a subject nor a body. All users see is an email from an unknown email address contains a .ZIP attachment. Inside this archive is another .ZIP file containing a JavaScript. Executing this script will trigger the GlobeImposter payload download. To help stear clear of malware, never open email attachments from an unknown sender!

The GlobeImposter payload is hosted across multiple platforms. So far, two designated download locations have been identified, although it is certainly possible additional “mirrors” will be created over time. The malicious JavaScript file is pretty straightforward.  Both download locations are obfuscated, but it may be possible to reveal their locations eventually. For now, it is unclear whether or not these servers are hosted on the darknet.

Once a user is infected with the GlobeImposter ransomware, he or she will observe files getting encrypted pretty quickly. That is the trend across all properly developed ransomware strains. The encrypted files will receive the .crypt file extension and require a decryption key to be restored to their original formats. Doing so is much more difficult than some people may think, and there is no free way to decrypt any version of GlobeImposter ransomware at the present time.

Victims are then asked to contact a specific email address and await further instructions. It is unclear how much money has to be paid to get rid of GlobeImposter. That amount may vary depending on the number of files that were encrypted. This is another example of ransomware developers moving away from using centralized command & control servers. This will be making it a lot harder to track down the culprit responsible for this malware.

Digital currency exchange Bitfinex has revealed that it will be launching a new trading platform for ethereum-based tokens.

It is important to examine the present gold prices and how they relate to cryptocurrencies.