Day: August 2, 2017

The peculiarity of the African continent qualifies it as a viable hub for Blockchain solutions.

Adam Back says the Bitcoin community should deploy a “moratorium” on SegWit2x to avoid a second fork.

sponsored

Trustless Blockchain networks make sense for gambling; however, they have their limitations, but BitDice is working to overcome those, especially in terms of fairness.

New and exciting cryptocurrency projects are rolling out nearly every week. However, not all of these projects are equally valuable or well thought out. This makes the ones that are worth it that much more appealing. One project that is very interesting and gaining momentum right now is called QuikNode. Let’s explore what QuikNode is and what it can offer.

What Is QuikNode?

QuikNode touts itself as the quickest and easiest way to run your own Ethereum node. While many cryptocurrency enthusiasts know the importance of nodes and running nodes, new investors brought to the space by ICOs may not necessarily be aware. Nodes are an essential part of the Ethereum ecosystem. They validate transactions, propagate blocks, and help regulate consensus voting. QuikNode strengthens the Ethereum virtual machine and provides considerable benefit to users.

QuikNode for Investors

Almost every investor is looking to get in on the next big ICO as quickly as possible. While some of them do not take the time to do their due diligence, those who do their research should have their interests piqued by QuikNode. It will act as an express lane to the Ethereum blockchain for these investors. Users of QuikNode can expect to pass queuing for public nodes by utilizing their fast and password protected nodes.

QuikNode for Ðapp Developers

Many developers mostly want to focus on their projects or apps. However, they usually also have to worry about the environments in which their apps will live. This can be a huge headache, as there are only so many hours in the day. QuikNode wants Ðapp developers to leave the worrying about infrastructure to them, and guarantee fast performance. It can do this by doing the web3 reads from its own hosted nodes. Ðapp developers can finally put their focus solely on their apps rather than worrying about infrastructure.

QuikNode for Enthusiasts

There is something beautiful about cryptocurrency in that many users are just people who love the idea and aren’t just here to get rich. These are the users who try to run full nodes from increasingly small computers, the people who make gumball vending machines that run on ETH, and the nerds who just want to support the ecosystem. QuikNode is one very good way that these enthusiasts can do so. It also has a referral program for those eager to find others to help support the Ethereum ecosystem as well. Supporting the network while earning a little ETH on the side? Cool!

QuikNode for New ICOs

ICOs are incredibly popular ways to raise funds for projects. While they can be easy to set up, setting them up correctly takes skill. QuikNode can help projects by taking care of the infrastructure. Its system helps ensure the best possible user experience on the network with automatic scaling solutions and will soon offer a load-balanced platform to its users as well. Project managers can now focus on building the best products or services and not have to worry about whether or not their investors can even participate in their ICO.

Check out QuikNode here: https://quiknode.io/

A major US options exchange is seeking to list cryptocurrency derivatives, and has inked a notable partnership to move it toward this goal.

Renwick Haddow has stolen $40 mln of investor cash through fraudulent schemes including a fake Bitcoin exchange.

Things are still looking remarkably positive for Bitcoin Cash, the recently created altcoin which forked off the Bitcoin blockchain. For a project many assumed would fail and lose value pretty quickly, things have taken an interesting turn. In fact, the Bitcoin Cash price is skyrocketing right now and even managed to surpass the US$750 mark. It is evident the game is afoot, although no one knows for sure what will happen in the coming hours or days.

Bitcoin Cash Price is off the Charts

No one expected such a significant growth for Bitcoin Cash on its first two days. Even though there is no real reason to think this altcoin is worthless, the fact it is gaining on Bitcoin so quickly is rather unprecedented. In fact, one BCH token is worth US$756 at the time of writing, which is an obscene value, all things considered. That same token was worth less than US$100 this morning after a lot of people sold off their coins for bottom prices.

A valuable lesson can be learned here, though: never sell your new coins too early or you may regret it. People who purchased BCH at 0.03 Bitcoin this morning currently sit on a 1,300% profit for doing absolutely nothing. That is by far the easiest way to get rich these days, as there is no other “investment” which comes even close to such returns. Then again, Bitcoin Cash could have easily been a dud for all we know and things would have looked very different if that was the case.

That being said, we are now part of an era where two “competing” types of Bitcoin are trying to one-up one another. Although some people will gladly argue Bitcoin Cash can never compete with Bitcoin – it is still not accepted as an official payment method anywhere as far as we know – the charts tell a very different story. One BCH is valued at 0.277 Bitcoin, even though it is currently traded around 0.41 Bitcoin on the Bittrex exchange. All other exchanges are well behind Bittrex in this regard, but that particular platform doesn’t allow BCH deposits for the time being.

The Bitcoin Cash price increased by a staggering 121.35% over the past 24 hours. That is simply amazing to witness, regardless of your feelings toward the project. Seeing a part of the community split from the main Bitcoin chain and still create a valuable token in the process is rather intriguing. More importantly, the Bitcoin Cash price is not affecting the value of Bitcoin all that much. Value has effectively been created out of thin air, by the look of things. Rest assured this upward momentum can’t carry on forever as far as  BCH is concerned, though.

As is to be expected, Bittrex is the market leader in terms of trading volume. However, with the exchange not allowing deposits to take place – nor does Yobit  – that price is heavily inflated. It may also be a sign of things to come for the Bitcoin Cash price, though. If it were to stabilize around the 0.4 Bitcoin mark, Bitcoin Cash would effectively have a US$1,000 value per token. Such a development seems highly unlikely right now, but one never knows what the future may have in store.

If Bitcoin Cash can keep this momentum up – which seems highly unlikely – it may overtake Ethereum’s market cap in the coming days. Right now, the surging Bitcoin Cash price results in a market cap of US$12.312 billion. Bitcoin’s market cap is still sitting at US$44.859bn, as it is not affected in a significant way. Only time will tell how this situation will evolve, but all Bitcoin Cash holders will be incredibly pleased with these developments.

If you liked this article, follow us on Twitter @themerklenews and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and technology news.

In June 2017, Bancor, a startup building decentralized exchange for digital tokens, raised $153m. Weeks later, enterprise blockchain solution startup Block.one raised $183m through its EOS tokens. Followed by Tezos, one more name on a growing list of startups that recently raised astronomical funds from the public through ICO. Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is soon … Continue reading IndSoft Systems launches Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Solution as Service for Startups and Upcoming Entrepreneurs to Raise Capital

The post IndSoft Systems launches Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Solution as Service for Startups and Upcoming Entrepreneurs to Raise Capital appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Back in June, we ran a story on how Facebook had created chat bots capable of negotiating and, inadvertently, also taught them how to lie. The bots lied by learning from real human conversations and subsequently faking interest in one item to add perceived value. Now, these Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have been shut down for creating a language of their own in order to communicate more efficiently.

The Bots That Gave up on English

In a negotiating experiment, Facebook’s AI bots were shown two books, one hat, and three balls. Each agent was assigned a different value that represented how much it cared about a specific item, and the goal was to maximize profit by negotiating with the other bots.

Now, according to Fast Co. Design, Facebook’s negotiating AI apparently decided that the English language was not efficient enough for its negotiations and decided to create its own language to get rid of its inconsistencies.

The resulting language looks like the gibberish one would expect out of AI built by amateurs, but upon further inspection, it was decided that despite being seemingly unintelligible to humans, it made perfect sense to AI agents. Indeed, it allowed them to communicate with one another without researchers knowing what was going on.

An exchange between two AI agents, Bob and Alice, went like this: Bob stated, “I can i i everything else”, and Alice came back at him with, “balls have zero to me to me to me to me…” The conversation continued from there with variations of these two sentences.

According to researchers, repeating phrases like “i” and “to me” reflect how AI operates. The two bots were working out how many of each item each one should take. Bob’s words “i i everything else” showed that he was offering Alice more items. Apparently, English use was not rewarding for AIs in this scenario, and they utilized a more efficient solution given the way in which they operate.

Per Facebook AI researcher Dhruv Batra:

“Agents will drift off from understandable language and invent code-words for themselves. Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”

Facebook Will Stick to English-Speaking AI

Researchers noted that as there are no humans capable of understanding this type of language, they’ve had to shut these agents down and stick to those that use English so they can stay in charge of what is going on.

After all, the goal of teaching bots to chat and negotiate is getting them to talk to humans, not to one another. If we are looking for the best restaurant in town, gibberish is not going to help us out.

In a similar case, Google’s AI managed to improve its translation service by learning language pairs it hadn’t been taught, seemingly by using its own internal language. For example, if an agent had been taught English to French, and French to Italian, it could translate English to Italian.