Day: August 6, 2017

According to bitcoin analyst and researcher Tuur Demeester, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley — the $89 billion U.S.-based bank — is seeking to raise over US$950 million in an initial coin offering (ICO), merely a few days after prominent boxer Floyd Mayweather raised over US$30 million in an ICO he sponsored.

ICO Second Wind?

John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, stated:

“I have been watching and investing in the cryptocurrency market over the last several years… We think Omega One is going to be transformative because it benefits the entire ecosystem – making crypto assets cheaper and easier to access.”

However, similar to the vast majority of ICO projects within the bubble-like ICO market, this project has yet to produce viable products and software. Still, Mack has endorsed Omega One’s ICO despite the fact that it does not even have a functioning prototype or codebase to show.

Alex Gordon-Brander of Omega One described the project platform as a “bridge between traditional capital markets and the crypto markets” which will provide “balance sheet intermediation and a trusted counterparty.” In essence, Omega One will operate as an efficient and trusted platform for institutional and large-scale investors seeking to invest in the cryptocurrency market. It uses a non-custodial smart contract wallet system and aggregation of liquidity across many cryptocurrency exchanges to ease the buying process for institutional investors.

The vision and platform of Omega One are interesting and unique. Such a liquidation and investment platform for institutional investors still does not exist within the cryptocurrency market. However, some of the most successful ICOs in the market including Bancor and EOS received harsh criticisms from experts for raising hundreds of millions of dollars without having built or developed a functioning code base.

Bitcoin analyst Beutyon noted, “Bancor is 40 lines of code. The men who invested $144,000,000 in it, didn’t hire a developer to audit the software. Astonishingly stupid.” Augur co-founder Joey Krug stated, “Dear god, the free market just gave $150 million to something we found out didn’t work in practice in the Augur beta.”

It is too early in the development and testing phases of Bancor to evaluate the platform’s potential and functionality. The valuation of Bancor was flawed as the Bancor network is currently worth around US$84 million. That is $66 million less than the value of all Bancor tokens issued in its ICO.

It is important to consider what happened to Bancor in considering the lack of a viable product or codebase from Omega One, given the amount the new ICO plans to raise. According to a close and reliable source of Demeester, Mack is aiming to raise US$950 million in the ICO, nearly half of the investment raised by all ICOs in the past combined.

Conceptually, both Bancor and Omega One are viable and unique ideas that could work and attract millions of users into their platforms. The truth is, Bancor did not need to raise US$150 million in order to launch its platform by late 2018, and Omega One does not need nearly US$1 billion to build a code base and maintain its development team.

At the moment, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) along with the Chinese central bank, South Korean government and Japanese financial regulators are planning to issue strict guidelines on ICOs and regulate the ICO market.

The police have reportedly seized a total of €400,000, including nearly €100,000 in cash that was discovered hidden behind a spare tire in a garage during the arrest.

Ukraine is set to have 150 Bitcoin ATMs in 2017 with 20-30 of the total in Kiev.

When Ether reaches a price of $2,000, we are looking at a market capitalization of around $188 bln.

People interested in mining cryptocurrency with computer graphics cards may want to pay attention to AMD — not just because its cards are usually cheaper and more competitive compared with NVIDIA, but also due to its new model set to be released soon. Though unconfirmed, rumor has it that its new RX Vega 64 drivers will increase every card’s hashing power. If true, that would be a major development.

Massive Performance Boost With New AMD Drivers?

It is always interesting to see how software updates can impact the way computer hardware behaves. Graphics cards, for instance, can be made a lot more efficient through software tweaks. In most cases, the gains are negligible, but every now and then a major upgrade comes through that proves to be a game changer. It appears the updated RX Vega 64 drivers will improve hashpower by a significant margin. In fact, the cards could reach a hashrate of 70-100 MH/s if true, which would make them by far the most powerful cryptocurrency mining cards in existence.

This news first surfaced on the VideoCardz website, which purportedly has it “on good authority.” This sort of news always needs to be taken with a few tablespoons of salt, as it is a “he said she said” kind of rumor. Then again, these indications are often somewhat right, which could spell an interesting future for cryptocurrency mining. Gamers and video editing professionals who rely on AMD GPUs will not be too pleased with this updated driver, as they will battle over card availability with mining enthusiasts.

The AMD Vega Frontier card has a mining performance of roughly 30MH/s. That is incredibly competitive, as the Geforce GTX 1080 TI is only a hair faster and has a steeper price depending on where one lives. However, the new driver update would somehow more than double the mining capacity and still leave room for improvement. If this card is capable of hitting over 70 MH/second for Ethereum mining purposes, things will get very interesting in the near future.

When rumors like these arise, the obvious question is how this boost is achieved. Boosting the hashing power from 30MH to 33MH is a 10% increase, which is not impossible. Doubling or even tripling its capacity without hardware upgrades is seemingly impossible to achieve, unless AMD has been holding the card back for quite some time now. The AMD Vega frontier card packs a ton of performance in other departments already, which could explain a thing or two.

It is possible AMD made this decision — perhaps subconsciously — to limit the card’s cryptocurrency mining performance. Just because a graphics card may be a beast for gaming does not necessarily mean it will be effective for cryptocurrency mining as well. It is possible this driver update simply unlocks its full mining potential, although that is mere speculation right now. Until the driver is released and someone posts its hashrate, we will have to wait and see whether there is any truth to this “news.”

The bigger question is how this change would affect the GPU market altogether. We have already been seeing GPU shortage issues over the past few months due to cryptocurrency miners buying up all the available stock. Ever since that time, the price of mineable cryptocurrency has been declining steadily. This performance boost would be good for AMD as they would sell more cards, but not necessarily good for Ethereum. More people mining would push up the difficulty and increase the number of coins miners would have to sell in order to break even. This could send the ETH price crashing to US$150 or lower, depending on how big of an impact the driver makes.

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Share trading hasn’t changed much in centuries, but DIMCOIN promises to change the way things are done.

Although many Bitcoiners feel tax compliance is not required, the reality is somewhat different. Many countries effectively tax Bitcoin capital gains and incomes. Accounting can quickly become a big hassle when dealing with cryptocurrency, though. NODE40 launched a new tool to make tax compliance  a lot easier for Bitcoin enthusiasts. Efforts such as these will … Continue reading US Bitcoin Users can now File Taxes Through the NODE40 Balance Tool

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Very few people have ever heard about the concept of artificial skin transplants. That will change in the near future, though. Artificial skin transplants may be the one thing we need to treat type 2 diabetes. The skin grafts based on CRISPR gene editing can yield some very powerful results. Their first tests involving mice are positive, but ensuring the technology works for humans in the same way is something else entirely.

Diabetes Can be Treated With Artificial Skin Transplants

A lot of people may not like the sound of artificial skin transplants. It sounds a lot scarier than it really is. However, there is nothing to fear about them. In fact, we have been using artificial skin implants for several decades now, although they were never deployed as a way to treat diabetes up until now. Burn patients often recover thanks to these implants. Artificial skin implants have proven to be an invaluable tool in the world of healthcare so far and it seems their number of use cases may be expanded upon.

Scientists have successfully used these implants to treat diabetes in mice. That is a major development in medicine. The researchers edited stem cells from newborn mice to control the release of the hormone stimulating insulin production. Once the cells were turned into skin grafts, they were given to mice suffering from diabetes.

The mice were not born with diabetes. Instead, researchers fed them high-fat diets to create obesity. A bit of a cruel method, but it is not uncommon to see this sort of thing in the medical sector. Obesity is still one of the main risk factors to cause type 2 diabetes. Especially people with a high insulin resistance develop this condition. This type of development was induced in these mice through some modifications to create viable test criteria.

Once the mice received the artificial skin implants, their insulin resistance levels started to reverse. Additionally, they gained around half the weight as those not given the grafts. This suggests that one can treat diabetes with these implants, although it will not do much for anyone suffering from type 1 diabetes. The people who do suffer from that condition may soon have access to a cheap and efficient solution created from stem cells. The goal is to turn these stem cells into human skin over time.

There may be other clinical developments involving artificial skin implants we have yet to discover. Ever since doctors started treating burn patients with this technique, the quest to find other use cases has been in full effect. Given the recent breakthroughs in this field, one can grow artificial skin in a lab. However, given the lack of human test subjects, finding other use cases has been pretty difficult. This is where the mice come into the picture, even though the results involving human subjects may differ greatly.

This is not a cure for diabetes, but it is an approach to help people maintain their glucose levels. For now, it only works if you have type 2 diabetes caused by obesity, but it is still an important breakthrough regardless. The bigger question is what other types of diseases may be treated through artificial skin implants.

The recent SEC ruling that Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) must comply with securities registration laws had resulted in apprehensions that ICOs may dry up in the US. However, Filecoin has raised $52 mln in a pre-ICO sale, which is claimed to be SEC compliant.

Everything is looking calm and quiet in the world of cryptocurrency. That is a more than welcome change after so many weeks of price volatility and uncertainty. The Bitcoin price holds its own around the US$3,175 mark for the time being, whereas other currencies also note some gains or small losses. Antshares, or NEO as it is known these days, is clearly the winner of the weekend with a 25.8% gain, though.

Bitcoin Price Holds Firm, Altcoins Benefit Too

In the normal world of cryptocurrency as we know it, a Bitcoin price gain often leads to altcoins bleeding value. That has been the case for many years now, but it looks like the trend is reversing every so often. More specifically, the recent Bitcoin price gains to US$3,175 and beyond have not caused any major damage for altcoins yet. Bitcoin Cash is the one exception, but that project will face its own struggles for quite some time to come, regardless of how the Bitcoin price evolves. It is still the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap but losing ground quickly these days.

What is rather remarkable is how Ethereum is gaining in value as well. The past few months have not been easy for this alternative currency. Network issues, ICO hacks, and some other factors have driven the price down quite a bit. Things are finally looking up again for Ethereum, though, thanks to a 7.25% gain in the past 24 hours. Ethereum also has slightly more trading volume than Bitcoin, which could hint at more price gains to come in the [near] future.

Prices for Litecoin, NEM, Ethereum Classic, and Dash have all remained virtually unchanged, barring some small losses and gains. Status quo in the cryptocurrency world is a very rare sight to behold and it looks like this is certainly one of the few times we can actually witness it. Rest assured this situation may look very different in a few hours from now, but at the time of writing, it is almost a peaceful picture to behold.  One has to appreciate the finer things in life as well.

That being said, there is one currency, which catapulted itself into the top 10 all of a sudden. We discussed the concept of Antshares – now known as NEO – not too long ago. The project aims to become the Ethereum of China, which is a pretty bold statement. Then again, it is good to see projects with no lack of ambition these days. There have been far too many clones and copycat coins over these past few years, that much is evident. NEO is now the tenth-largest currency by market cap, thanks to a 25.84% gain over the past 24 hours.

There are no boring days in the world of cryptocurrency, even when most top altcoins remain stable. The big news of this weekend is how Bitcoin finally broke the previous all-time high and is seemingly able to hold its own without much effort. It’s nice to see a Bitcoin price in US$3,175 and higher, as it has been coming for some time now. With a market cap of nearly US$53bn, Bitcoin is looking a lot stronger than it has ever done before. Maintaining this position for an extended period of time will still be a challenge, even for the king of cryptocurrencies.

Next week will be an interesting period to keep an eye on cryptocurrency pricing charts. No major news is expected, but rest assured market manipulators and speculators will try to shake things up once again. It is unclear what this might mean for the Bitcoin price over the next few days, though. Most of the volume pushing the price up came from Asia. That volume can dry up pretty quickly as well as send prices crashing down again. These price charts will look very different a week from now, that much is almost a certainty.