Day: August 8, 2017

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The digital currency called “digital silver” posted a trading volume of more than $1 bln on July 5, 2017, allowing it to briefly surpass Bitcoin’s volume.

Cryptocurrency ICO investors are being targeted again. Multiple MyEtherWallet phishing attempts have cost people a lot of money. There is now a new TokenSwap phishing attempt which tries to achieve a similar goal. ICOs remain prone to scamming attempts, which does not bode well for the industry as a whole.

Beware the New Cryptocurrency ICO Chat Scam

Anyone running a cryptocurrency ICO often relies on two communication tools to stay in touch with the community. One is Telegram, where people can ask a lot of questions and receive brief answers. The other is Slack, where more serious investors inquire about the technical side of things. Unfortunately, these Slack platforms have lately been attracting significant numbers of scammers and criminals. Anyone partaking in cryptocurrency ICO slack rooms knows all too well that things are getting a bit out of hand.

Slack chat rooms have been plagued by multiple Ethereum-related phishing attempts of late. The first wave of scamming attempts came in the form of fake wallets purportedly from the ICO team explaining how users needed to log into MyEhterWallet. Considering the popularity of this online Ethereum wallet solution, the criminals were largely successful in stealing money from users. They also did not just obtain ETH, as a lot of victims saw their ICO tokens get stolen as well. This phishing scam has targeted small and large ICOs alike.

Additionally, other cryptocurrency ICO investors have been tricked into depositing ether to the wrong address. These addresses were provided through either Telegram or Slack, or even the official website after being hacked briefly. The latter issue became apparent during the InsureX ICO not too long ago, yet the company issued tokens to all affected users regardless. This goes to show both investors and projects have taken the brunt of the financial damage associated with these scamming tactics.  Unfortunately, it appears the phishing attacks aren’t over just yet.

A new phishing scam has surfaced on Slack instructing users to visit a fake TokenSwap website. The message mentions recent Ethereum network attacks by black hat hackers and scalability issues forcing the developers to implement major protocol changes. They claim that EIP101 and EIP190 have been activated on the network, which means that all ERC20 tokens require an upgrade to the ERC21 standard. The scammers propose that this be done using a fake TokenSwap website provided in the message.

There is no such thing as a forced protocol upgrade, nor is it necessary to convert ERC20 tokens to ERC21. In fact, at present there is no ERC21 token standard at all. Whoever is responsible for this phishing attempt is trying to use fancy terms to make his or her offer appear legitimate, but their efforts will eventually be in vain. Anyone who knows better is aware that this is a clear phishing attempt, and it is most definitely not an actual message originating from the official ICO team.

Phishing attempts will continue to haunt cryptocurrency ICOs for quite some time. A lot of these projects have attracted dumb money and clueless investors. People with no knowledge of the cryptocurrency ICO ecosystem will often fall victim to these scams and suffer the consequences of doing so. It is unclear whether anyone has fallen for this TokenSwap phishing scam so far, but it is likely there will be some people losing out on good money.

Some VC firms may see a short-term money making project in cryptocurrencies while many VC firms and angel investors truly believe in the technologies offered by Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.

Since early 2016, bitcoin has been gaining mainstream acceptance and adoption by consumers, financial service providers, institutional investors, and large-scale conglomerates. Despite this, many analysts and media companies continue to emphasize that the cryptocurrency will likely not have an easy road ahead. As it turns out, there are equal or greater risks inherent in traditional banking that the mainstream media often chooses not to report.

Bitcoin is Better than Fiat

In an attempt to defame bitcoin, many media outlets have peddled horrific stories about the network including its usage on dark web marketplaces, hacking incidents involving centralized bitcoin exchanges, and the recent hard fork of Bitcoin Cash. They want you to think that bitcoin is unsafe because of its security challenges and price volatility. What they fail to mention is that fiat currencies have their own sets of security risks and volatility, worse even than Bitcoin.

The hacking incidents associated with centralized bitcoin exchanges including Bitfinex and Bithumb pale in comparison to the amount of damage resulting from poor security measures of current banking systems. On that note, a recent report suggests that the client data of 25 percent of U.K.-based banks have been sold and distributed on the dark web.

The Sun, a publication based in London, shared this infograph:

In an interview, Emma Mills, Chief Operating Officer of cybersecurity firm C6, emphasized that the financial and personal information of over 11 million consumers and bank users are currently being traded on the dark web. That is over 25 percent of bank users and consumers in the U.K.

Mills detailed service providers in the IT industry that allow bank users to verify whether their financial data has been compromised by hackers or traded on the dark web. However, once exposed to the dark web, there is little ability to protect victims’ financial data.

“It’s a really good indicator, but it’s a bit after the horse has bolted. You wouldn’t leave your purse on a park bench or a bus without being fearful that you would lose money. People don’t seem to have that mindset. It’s actually more important to protect themselves online and be careful about what they post,” Mills explained.

In bitcoin, there are two types of platforms: custodial and noncustodial. Custodial bitcoin platforms include centralized bitcoin exchanges and trading platforms that control the private keys of users. In custodial platforms, users do not have direct control over their funds, and as such are under risk of account closure or fund theft. On non-custodial platforms, users have absolute control over their funds. Thus, even if non-custodial wallet platforms such as Blockchain, Breadwallet and Trezor were to be hacked, user funds are safe as private keys would not be exposed to the hackers.

Bitcoin has set a positive precedent for the entire technology and finance industries. Within bitcoin, non-custodial platforms are on the rise, but the same is not true within the conventional finance industry. The vast majority of service providers rely on centralized platforms that can impose serious security threats for users.

One of Thailand’s largest commercial banks is looking to digitize some of its financial contracts through a new blockchain solution.

BOSTON August TBD, 2017 — LAToken (https://www.latoken.com/), creator of the peer-to-peer Liquid Asset Token (LAT) marketplace and wallet, and Rivetz International today announced a partnership to bring TEE hardware-based cybersecurity to the LAT platform. The newly announced Rivetz token, RvT, provides a new decentralized model to protect and assure the transactions, identity, and messages created … Continue reading Rivetz International Partners with LAToken to Boost Marketplace Security on Mobile Devices

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The post How the Blockchain Could Become an Image Dataset Repository for AR/VR appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The number of unconfirmed transactions is quickly mounting once again. Some are asserting this to be a spam attack by BCH supporters, although there is no proof to back that up. Luckily, it seems that network fees have not been affected in a significant manner so far.

Bitcoin Mempool Fills Up Quickly

It seems that in the case of Bitcoin, the mempool will hardly ever be empty. That is a positive sign showing that people are broadcasting transactions on the network. Once SegWit locks in, an increasing number of transactions will become less and less of a problem. Until then, we may have another mempool issue on our hands if the number of unconfirmed transactions continues to increase at the current rate.

At the time of writing, there were over 13,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions. That number is not all that large, considering the network had to deal with nearly 200,000 such transactions just a few months ago. However, it is rather odd that there were very few unconfirmed transfers 24 hours ago and things have been slowly picking up. It is possible that the mounting Bitcoin price may have something to do with this.

As one might expect, people have been moving their coins to and from exchanges when the price has moved in either direction. Although these transactions normally do not create noticeable backlogs, in this case they will be intermixed with other unconfirmed transactions. According to Reddit, we are witnessing another “spam attack” on the network due to someone — or perhaps multiple entities — sending dust transactions back and forth to clog up network blocks. If that is indeed the case, it would not be the first time it has happened.

It is hard to blame this issue on people who may not even have anything to do with it. Considering the mempool has been filling up a lot slower than it could have if this were a proper spam attack, it is hard to figure out what is really going on. That being said, the mounting number of unconfirmed transfers has been accelerating. We started writing this article at 13,000 and are now up to 14,000 a few paragraphs later.

There are a lot of transactions with fees of less than 5 satoshi per byte. This has drawn some parallels to the previous spam attacks Bitcoin users have been having to deal with in recent months. It is possible someone else is behind this new attack as well. Once the “attack vector” is known publicly, it only takes one or two individuals with malicious intent to recreate the scenario and flood the network.

It seems that network blocks clear out approximately 10% of the waiting transactions right now, indicating that this is only a minor issue at best. If the problem persists, however, it may portend another major spam attack against the Bitcoin network. Doing so would not make much economic sense, but it never has in the past either. 

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An ICO industry spokesperson is querying the lack of “concern” in the market over the SEC’s recent comments.

An internet advisor to Russian Vladimir Putin is trying to raise as much as $100 million in an initial coin offering.

The Social (SCL) pre-ICO ended just a couple of days ago, on the 7th of August. Their presale sold more than 12 times the set minimum they were aiming for over the entire ICO period.

Social is a cryptocurrency that will be used within Nexus, a secure and private decentralized social network with integrated marketplace, crowd funding and ad platform. Nexus is already available on the iOS App Store, Google Play Store and the web, making it one of the only companies to run an ICO with an already existing product available for use.

Nexus looks to have a very bright future as the team has put together a very exciting roadmap for the next 24 months. They hope to integrate new features such as a secure ERC20 compatible multi-wallet, instant access debit card, Tor API, built in VPN, end-to-end message encryption, and moving all data and multimedia to decentralized storage.

Social coins will be used within the Nexus marketplace to buy and sell goods and services from other users. Ad spaces on the platform will be self-serve and semi-automatic, and are also purchased with Social. Crowd funding campaigns can be set up by any user on Nexus to request donations for a number of different categories such as emergencies, business ventures, charities, etc. The team is also planning on an integrated instant access debit card so that any SCL in your account wallet can be spent as fiat anywhere that accepts Visa.

Probably the most interesting part of their ICO is the coin distribution. Most ICOs hold a majority of coins/tokens for their own keeping, along with giving 10% or more away for bounties or payment. The Nexus team will be holding zero coins to ensure that a large majority of the tokens in circulation have been acquired by real funds to provide a solid market capital foundation. A total of 95% of coins will be available for purchase during the entire ICO period. This will highly reduce the probability of a day one exchange dump, which happens to most new tokens that hit the market.

The presale/pre-ICO for Socials (SCL) raised an enormous 3,519.63 Ether. The main ICO is set to start on the 17th of August at 01:00 GMT and will run for exactly one month, or until the hard cap of 50,000,000 SCL is hit.

ICO Info

Website: https://ico.nexus.social/

White Paper: https://ico.nexus.social/pdfs/legals/Nexus-White-Paper.pdf

Product Links

Web: https://nexus.social/

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/nexus/id1088134410

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=social.nexus.nexus

The post Finding Blockchain-Based Security Solutions for the 3D Printing Economy appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Interest in mining cryptocurrency has skyrocketed lately. This has caused a major wave of sales of PC graphics cards, which has actually driven up the price of many mid-range cards. Mining with a GPU may even turn a profit if one has access to cheap electricity. However, this process is known to damage graphics cards and affect their longevity. People considering mining should keep these factors in mind, particularly if they plan on reselling their cards later on.

Mining Is Tough on GPUs

It makes a lot of sense to mine cryptocurrency with a graphics card. They are easy to come by, are not overly expensive in most cases, and can result in excellent hashpower after making some initial adjustments. In fact, the AMD Vega Frontier edition may soon mine Ethereum at 70MH/second, assuming the rumors are true. Setting up a GPU mining rig requires doing some tweaking, and getting multiple cards to mine using the same motherboard can be tricky at times.

Once a rig is up and running, most people simply leave their hardware hashing away. If needed, it will switch mining pools on its own. Most miners will hardly pay attention to the hardware itself, choosing to monitor things from a distance. That does not mean your hardware does not need checking up on, however, as it remains under a lot of stress while mining cryptocurrencies. This level of stress is often underestimated.

When you start mining cryptocurrency, your GPUs are constantly under a full load at all times, and their fans typically spin at the highest RPM. That might sound less stressful than spinning up and cooling down again, but that is not necessarily the case. Keeping GPU fans running at a constant speed at all times will serve to wear them out comparatively quickly. Even though fans are designed to spin quite a bit, their longevity is severely affected by the rate at which they are forced to run. However, not using fans while mining cryptocurrency is most definitely a bad idea.

Thermal cycling is also something to think about when mining cryptocurrency using GPUs. Although one would expect mining to entail relatively low thermal cycling, that is not the case by any means. That said, some tweaking of each card’s power limit setting may make this a trivial issue more often than not. Reapplying thermal paste on a GPU every so often does wonders to keep the card cool and avoid major damage. Note that the process should not have to be repeated too often; it can be done less than once per month.

Pushing a graphics card to its full load on a constant basis can always result in card failure. In most cases, the card would have to run at full speed for over a year for this to happen, although your mileage may vary based on the model, maker, and general condition of the card. Electronics are always prone to manufacturing issues, which often only appear after the device has been put through the proverbial wringer. That being said, there are plenty of miners who have seen their cards fail over time and even catch fire as well.

Contrary to games and other computational tasks, cryptocurrency mining runs a GPU at full capacity almost constantly. Even stress tests only keep this up for so long before they risk damaging cards. Cryptocurrency mining of any sort will stress a card to its limit for as long as it is running. Granted, most models can handle that with ease, but it will always impact the card in one way or another. Those effects may not become apparent immediately. One of my own cards worked fine for months after a year of mining altcoins and then started artifacting suddenly.

Whether or not the upcoming line of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs dedicated to cryptocurrency mining will suffer from these issues remains to be seen. There has to be a reason why these cards are better suited for the job compared to regular GPUs. So far, very few specifics have been unveiled to the public regarding these GPUs. They will be more efficient, of course, but they may also improve in other ways like handling loads better and degrading slower. As a rule, people who take good care of their GPUs will rarely encounter issues.