Day: August 12, 2017

Microsoft, the $561 bln US-based technology company, has released the Confidential Consortium (Coco) Framework, an Ethereum-based protocol.

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Cointelegraph spoke to Charles Xue, a billionaire Chinese-American investor, coming to the ICO Hypethon in Russia in just a few days.

It has been a while since we last saw an update for the Breeze Wallet. As most people know by now, this project will introduce privacy for Bitcoin in the near future. It appears some significant progress has been made in that regard. TumbleBit has now been integrated into the wallet, which is a massive step in the right direction. It will be interesting to see how the Breeze Wallet affects Bitcoin usage as a whole. This is a feature a lot of people have been waiting patiently for.

Breeze Wallet Reaches New Development Milestone

Many Bitcoin users have been asking for more privacy-oriented solutions for the popular cryptocurrency. Currently, Bitcoin has no privacy and anonymity features. That is both a good and a bad thing. Some people would prefer to hide their conduct linked to transactions made with Bitcoin, despite its blockchain allowing anyone to track transactions in real time. Coming up with a solution to this problem has not been all that easy.

The Stratis team feels it is on the right track to make big progress in this regard. They announced their Breeze Wallet project quite some time ago. This wallet is designed to bring more privacy to Bitcoin users. It will be challenging to pull off, yet a lot of progress has already been made. The latest development update comes in the form of successfully integrating TumbleBit features into this wallet.

Integration of TumbleBit is an important part of the Breeze Privacy protocol. It introduces coin mixing services to a traditionally-styled Bitcoin wallet, which will yield some interesting results in the future. Achieving true privacy when using Bitcoin will not be easy, but the TumbleBit integration is a significant step in the right direction.

According to the Stratis team, the Breeze Privacy Protocol will provide a safe way to successfully anonymize cryptocurrency transactions. Although other altcoins exist which focus on this feature, Stratis thinks it can make a big impact on Bitcoin over the coming months. It is good to see more competition in the privacy and anonymity department. This also means the upcoming Breeze Wallet will be fully capable of providing enhanced privacy to Bitcoin transactions.

This service will be provided to so-called Breeze Servers, which are essentially dedicated masternodes. Every such masternode requires a balance of 250,000 STRAT to be set up and yields users with a passive income stream related to the transactions processed by their servers. All servers registered on the network use trustless registration mechanisms to prevent censorship and manipulation. This represents a very intriguing turn of events for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, assuming the project is successful.

This new wallet solution is not just designed for regular users. It can also be used by enterprises who do not want to disclose their customer information over the Bitcoin network. Whether or not any businesses will use the Breeze Wallet for this specific purpose remains to be seen. However, a lot of people are looking forward to seeing the Breeze Wallet released in the not-too-distant future. There is no alpha release date set just yet, but it is expected in the near future.

Bitcoin Cash has been evolving significantly in recent days. Most people have continued keeping a close eye on the BCH price, which is not entirely surprising. However, it seems a lot more is happening behind the scenes, showing that this ecosystem is slowly growing. Do keep in mind this altcoin has only been around for a little over a week now. Good things are happening for Bitcoin Cash, yet there is still a lot of work to be done.

Recent Bitcoin Cash Ecosystem Updates

One of the biggest Bitcoin Cash developments in recent days is how the mining profitability difference has slowly come down relative to Bitcoin. As long as the latter remains more profitable to mine, very few people will switch to BCH. Miners want to maximize their earnings for obvious reasons. Right now, BTC is 42% more profitable to mine than BCH, but that difference was a lot higher not too long ago. Reaching parity will take several more weeks, if not months.

It appears Multipool has finally mined its first Bitcoin Cash block. The pool had announced they would support Bitcoin Cash at some point, without going into specifics. It has taken Multipool some time to get things in order, but now that its first block has been found, things look rather promising. It remains to be seen whether they will continue mining BCH blocks in the future. Having more hashpower pointed toward this network can only be a good thing.

It seems one particular Bitcoin wallet has introduced a new feature which is relevant to Bitcoin Cash. Few people may have ever heard of the BitPie wallet, even though it supports multiple blockchain-based assets. In the latest update, it now allows users to instantly exchange between BTC and BCH. That is an interesting feature to note, as it could be of great interest to a lot of users in the future. BitPie was developed by the Bither team, which lends it some more credibility.

Many Bitcoin Cash supporters have also been discussing how SegWit2x will affect the network come November 2017. The fact that the updated Bitcoin Core client will disconnect SegWit2x nodes from the network in the near future has been causing a lot of speculation. It is very likely that we will see three different Bitcoin blockchains come November, unless supporters of SegWit2x support either Bitcoin in its current form or Bitcoin Cash. Though BCH provides bigger blocks, it does not incorporate the SegWit upgrade.

Bitcoin Core is forking when SegWit2X activates. There will be 3 chains, SWC, B2X and BCC. https://t.co/NXWVrrsN2u More info coming #Bcore

— Bitcoin Core (@BcoreProject) August 11, 2017

All things considered, things are looking quite good for Bitcoin Cash as a whole. Although the ecosystem is still trying to find its place in the market, things are slowly coming together as we speak. That said, there is still a lot of work to be done. For instance, the BCH network still does not have a feature similar to SegWit’s transaction malleability fix. Ensuring that no one can exploit this malleability bug should be a top priority for developers. So far, no real proposals have been introduced to make that happen.

Last but not least, Germany’s largest cryptocurrency exchange is experimenting with Bitcoin Cash trading. Bitcoin.de is a well-known platform among German cryptocurrency enthusiasts. It is currently conducting a private beta with BCH, according to Reddit. It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out in the coming weeks and months. Such a platform supporting BCH could mean big things for Bitcoin Cash as a whole. 

Smart contracts are a fascinating piece of technology. Not only can they be used to perform functions automatically, they also create new business models such as cryptocurrency ICOs. At present, though, the technology is anything but scalable or autonomous. However, Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon may have come up with a solution to this problem, with a platform known as Plasma.

Could Smart Contracts Become Scalable and Autonomous?

We have seen different use cases for smart contract technology in its current form. Cryptocurrency ICOs are a main use case for this technology, although Ethereum technology is about so much more than just that. Highlighting what else these smart contracts are capable of has proven a challenge so far. This is mainly due to the issues which arise when scaling this technology or making it autonomous.

If it were up to Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon, that situation will change very soon. They have come up with an idea to introduce scalable and autonomous smart contracts to the world. Their project is known as Plasma, and serves as a proposed framework for enforced and incentivized execution of smart contracts. The end goal is for this technology to be scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second. In a perfect world, that number of updates would someday reach the 10-digit mark.

It is due time we started to look well beyond financial applications for smart contract technology. Right now, virtually all that revolves around this particular technology has financial implications. While that is good to see, it can also hide the true potential of smart contracts. Forcing a shift to occur will require a lot of work. Making the Ethereum blockchain capable of representing a vast number of decentralized financial apps worldwide will not happen overnight by any stretch of the imagination.

At the same time, Buterin and Poon intend to focus on making Dapps more feasible — not just to process financial activity, but also as a way to come up with new economic incentives for persistent data services. If this is successful, Plasma may well provide a viable path away from centralized server farms altogether. This is a lofty and ambitious goal on the part of the developers, but one that is not entirely impossible to achieve either. There is some fierce competition in the current “war” against centralized server farms.

The whitepaper associated with these scalable autonomous smart contracts is well worth checking out. It contains a lot of technical information which developers and coders will want to thoroughly examine. These smart contracts will be composed on the main Plasma blockchain through the use of fraud proofs. State transitions associated with the contracts can then be enforced on a parent blockchain, such as the Ethereum chain, as needed. It may sound quite odd to build another blockchain, but in this case it seems a sensible approach.

Plasma will provide mechanisms to ensure continued correct execution of data. As is the case with any decentralized system, there is always room for abuse if people are inclined to follow that route. Rewarding people for good behavior is a must in situations like these. Additionally, this new project should allow for low-cost transactions and scalable computation. It will be interesting to see if such a project can succeed.

Russia’s Ministry of Health has partnered with state-owned bank Vnesheconombank (VEB) for the development of a Blockchain technology-based system.

Human DNA is the blueprint for each and every one of us. This complex entity never ceases to amaze. According to new scientific research, DNA could one day be used to hack software programs. That may sound strange and scary at the same time, and it is both. This represents a major leap forward for science and technology, albeit one with major ramifications. Like it or not, biological malware appears to be the new frontier.

Hacking Computers With Human DNA is the New Thing

According to recent scientific research, human DNA can be used to take advantage of computer systems. Being able to access a computer using another person’s DNA sample would be a major breakthrough in the first place. Controlling said computer remotely would be something else entirely. There are many such opportunities just waiting to be explored, some of which are quite scary to consider.

Biological malware is not something most people would automatically associate with hacking software. There has been some evidence of biological warfare in the past, mainly in the form of controlled disease distribution and the like. Using biological malware to take control of computer systems and servers is something new entirely. 

Scientists at the University of Washington at Seattle created what they believe to be the world’s first DNA-based exploit of a computer system. The team encoded malicious software into a short strand of DNA purchased online. (Yes, you can buy DNA samples online. These purchases are completely legitimate and everything is properly regulated.)

Once the malicious software was encoded in the DNA strain, researchers were able to gain administrator access to a computer which then attempted to process the genetic data sample. This required that the computer in question was running a DNA sequencing machine in the first place, which is not something most consumer-grade hardware is equipped with. The world is only now learning to use fingerprint readers, let alone DNA sequencing machines, in a convenient manner. That will not become easy overnight.

Even though this experiment hinges on many requirements, it goes to show cybercriminals could one day use very different tactics to access computers and servers. Using faked blood or saliva samples would give them virtually unrestricted access to information, software samples, or even forensic information stored by law enforcement agencies. That would be quite catastrophic, considering the vast majority of companies cannot even handle regular software-based hacks these days.

Right now, DNA is not a security risk. This test was only successful because the researchers were able to create a “perfect scenario” to improve their chance of success. They even had to disable most security features and introduce a vulnerability to a bioinformatics program. Despite all of these requirements, it is not unlikely criminals will one day be able to successfully bypass those safeguards. It will be interesting to see how biological warfare affects our society as a whole in the future.

Analysis from CT indicated that a price rise above $3200 would produce longevity in the increases.

Bitcoin has officially surpassed the US$62bn market cap for the first time in history. The growth of this particular cryptocurrency has been nothing short of spectacular over the past nine years. Ethereum is also showing positive signs, whereas the rest of the top 10 cryptocurrencies are at a virtual standstill. The weekend has been positive for all cryptocurrencies so far, but most people will focus on the Bitcoin price.

Another leg up for the Bitcoin Price

For those people who assumed there wouldn’t be much growth in the Bitcoin price after the US$3,500 mark, reality turns out very differently. In fact, the Bitcoin price now sits at US$3,786.57 on Coinmarketcap, which is the highest value we have seen until this day. It becomes somewhat unnecessary to talk about this being the new all-time high right now, as a new record may be set at any given moment.

With this current price growth in place, things are looking extremely good for Bitcoin. One has to keep in mind this spectacular Bitcoin price growth may come back to hurt the value in the long run, though. Not too long ago, we saw a Bitcoin dip below US$2,000 after a run up to US$2,400. It is not unlikely something similar will happen this time, although it seems most speculators have taken up a long position on Bitcoin right now. Then again, the overall market sentiment can change at any given moment.

So far, the Bitcoin price growth has elevated the world’s leading cryptocurrency to a market cap of US$62.48 billion. That is a massive amount, considering the entire cryptocurrency market cap was worth less than that just a month or three ago. This growth is unprecedented,d to say the least, and it appears better things are still on the horizon. The Bitcoin Dominance Index is also back to 47% as we speak, although very few people pay attention to this statistic these days.

Bitcoin is not the only currency making significant waves, though. Ethereum is also on the rise as of these past few days, resulting in a price point of US$311.98. With a 4.12% gain over the past 24 hours, things are looking quite good for Ethereum as we speak. Maintaining this momentum is always challenging, ever for well-established currencies these days. Ethereum has a strong 24-hour trading volume of over US$1.16bn, though. Then again, that is just over half of Bitcoin’s US$2.15bn trading volume in the same time period.

It does not appear Ethereum and Bitcoin are taking away trading volume from one another, though. Ethereum’s main markets are Bithumb, OKCoin, and Coinone, all of which have fiat currency trading markets. Bitcoin’s top markets include Bithumb, Bittrex, and Bitfinex. Bittrex is the only non-fiat trading market in this list, as their NEO/BTC market is making a lot of headlines these days. Quite an interesting development, but it is evident Korea is the main driving force to push both currencies up as we speak. It will be interesting to see how things play out over time.

Looking over the other cryptocurrencies, not much has changed over the past 24 hours. Rippe, Bitcoin Cash, NEO, and Ethereum Classic all record small losses. NEM Litecoin, IOTA, and Dash all have minor gains but nothing noteworthy to speak of. Everyone is keeping a close eye on the Bitcoin price as we speak, that much is obvious. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for all cryptocurrencies, as things have never looked better.

Bitcoin made an unplanned appearance at the most recent DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) International Tournament.

After securing $100 million in funding, CoinDesk looks at the key challenges facing the best capitalized US bitcoin and cryptocurrency startup.