Day: August 23, 2017

Blockchain’s awakening in 2017 has come about thanks to a drive to create value in new ways. BMCHAIN, a Blockchain-powered platform which launched its pre-ICO this week, is aiming to take the target audience for this value creation one step further by monetizing the skills of users themselves.

The potential worth Blockchain conceals is becoming increasingly mainstream knowledge – entrepreneurs, investors, users and even regulatory authorities are fast cottoning on to the potential and spawning an industry already worth at least $1 billion.

How they choose to gain control of this value varies, but so far this year, efforts have focused on pure revenue in the form of cash, gained through issuing tokens via an ICO or token sale.

Tokens Do Not Equal Success

Already, however, the notion of selling a token for profit to sustain a business is wearing thin with the market.

It is now reputation, not profit potential of an offering, which exerts an influence on whether a Blockchain business can survive years rather than months.

A key example lies in recent ICO sales, with identity startup Civic garnering praise for placing strict controls on issuance and ownership of its CVC token.

Other schemes meanwhile suffered from so-calling ‘whaling’ – a small number of rich investors buying up the majority of the market and creating a profit-driven ecosystem.

Other than strictly controlling an ICO, what alternatives are there to leverage the international community to produce a Blockchain product or service that will endure? This is the issue now facing and preoccupying the next generation of startups.

Perhaps the first of these was Steemit, which monetized the crowd to create a distributed social network, rewarding users for quality content with tokens.

BMCHAIN To Reward Users For Benefits They Bring

Since its launch in 2016, however, technology has moved on. Russian-based syndicate Biznes Molodost is busy preparing a brand-new platform, BMCHAIN, which aims to involve and create Blockchain value from anyone, simply by monetizing their natural capabilities.

“Golos and Steemit began what we intend to take much further,” BMCHAIN cofounder Roman Moiseyev explains.

“Users will be able to monetize not only written content like articles but also any kind of work, assistance and experience-sharing.”

Such a wide scope for promising to create tangible value for users is tricky to get right, and an entire mini ecosystem will appear in order to turn the vision into results.

This ecosystem is already in a strong position thanks to Biznes Molodost’s community of entrepreneurs, of which there are around 200,000 in Russia and its neighbors.

The plan all hinges on the concept of reputation. Calculated using a scientific formula, BMCHAIN will use its bespoke BMT token to evaluate a user’s monetary value. The token’s pre-ICO is already active, having launched August 20.

“Our project will be a one-off in its capacity to evaluate exchanges, and this evaluation will function as an estimate of reputation,” Moiseyev continues.

“Each participant’s digital reputation translates into a specific number of tokens awarded by the system. Trustworthy partners are thus easily located using Blockchain – a verifiable reputation is available, and clients transact solely using BMT.”

Longer-term, BMCHAIN will serve as an umbrella operation for Biznes Molodost extension tools, among which will be a prepackaged ICO service called Token API.

“Token API as a solution will allow entrepreneurs with no prior understanding of Blockchain to see their ICO through from start to finish – including issuing the token itself and engaging interest from exchanges,” says Moiseyev.

Security: Blockchain Immutability ‘Most Important’

With Blockchain wholly in fashion, BMCHAIN will likely find as much success as Steemit did upon its market entry.

As with Steemit, however, which succumbed to a hack shortly afterwards, the risks associated with such a large-scale concept are obvious.

“Data being tamper-proof is the most important aspect of the Blockchain tech we employ on our platform. It means we can understand risks associated with user interactions right there and then, leveraging automatic arbitration to do so at a fraction of the time and cost of before,” Moiseyev says.

“This is in addition to processing thousands of Blockchain transactions every second at next to zero cost, without worrying about authenticity issues.”

With plans in the offing to enter the international payments market in a manner reminiscent of Ripple, security is without doubt a major concern for BMCHAIN going forward.

“500,000 entrepreneurs are in line to test the system in its first year,” Moiseyev concludes. “In terms of funding, we achieved 1506 ETH during a pre-token presentation ($466,000 at the time, August 16) and another 245 ETH on the first day of the pre-ICO, August 20 ($70,000).”

Bitwala has released its stance on the upcoming SegWit2x hard fork in response to customer demand.

London, August 23, 2017 – LAToken, the first tokenized assets platform, has successfully raised $8,5 million during the first day of its public token sale, which means the 1st Round of our ICO is 85% completed. LAToken is a blockchain platform that tokenizes and makes tradeable assets ranging from equity and debt to real estate … Continue reading LAToken Raised $8,5 Million Within the First Day of Public Token Sale

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In the world of cryptocurrency wallet technology, multisignature solutions have been slowly becoming the new norm. A multisignature wallet requires multiple users to sign off on a given transaction. This is mainly beneficial to companies and projects working with a single wallet. However, this technology can also be used for escrow-related services. This is greatly interesting to darknet market operators, who have been looking to integrate multisignature escrow wallet solutions.

The Purse of Multisig Escrow Wallets

Escrow services continue to play an ever-growing role in the world of cryptocurrency. This is especially true for marketplaces. Ensuring the buyer has the necessary funds and locking those funds in escrow until the shipment arrives at its destination is a way to prevent scams. We have seen many marketplaces and service providers employ this technology over the past few years, as it protects all parties involved.

To improve upon the concept of escrow technology, some marketplaces – especially those on the darknet – have been flocking to multisignature escrow solutions. These still involve the use of a middleman holding onto customer funds. However, with a multisignature implementation of escrow services, there is not a reliance on a single entity controlling the funds. Rather, multiple parties have to sign off on every transaction before the money is released to the seller. It is not a trustless solution by any means, but it certainly provides some benefits.

One of the first darknet marketplaces to introduce multisignature escrow was AlphaBay. Once the world’s most popular darknet marketplace, AlphaBay was removed from the equation by law enforcement officials a few weeks ago. Additionally, law enforcement officials took control of all of the funds controlled by the platform, including its escrow money. It is unclear if they successfully “cracked” the mutisignature requirements for this wallet, though. After all, they only arrested the alleged operator of the platform, who theoretically only holds one of the multisig keys.

Introducing multisignature escrow addresses is a great way to provide additional safety to both buyer and seller. It reduces the chances of a platform operator successfully screwing over either party because they are friends with the other. Most multisignature escrow wallets require at least two different signatures to move funds, although there is no real limit as to how many signatures are required to sign off on transactions, other than for practical reasons.

One thing to take into account is how using multisignature escrow solutions do not necessarily prevent loss of funds by any means. If the service provider deploying the wallet were to go out of business, there is no guarantee users could successfully recover their money. In most cases, the buyer, seller, and service provider all hold one key each. If the operator went out of business, the buyer or seller would need the other party to agree to provide their key to move money out. That assumes the wallet itself has a private key which can be exported to a different solution if needed.

It is quite surprising to see so few service providers implementing multisig escrow right now. One would expect this technology to be far more prevalent these days. BitGo is the market leader when it comes to mutisig wallet solutions for Bitcoin; thus it would make sense to see services focusing on multisig escrow solutions with the help of BitGo. Only time will tell if we will see more of these implementations in the future. It would certainly make a lot of sense for any company to use this technology moving forward. Safeguarding customer funds should be a top priority for every company.

Cove Identity is excited to announce it’s upcoming ICO, scheduled for end September. The ICO will consist of a pre-sale with discounted tokens to incentivise early investment and a full ICO which will take place a few weeks after the pre-sale. More details including the whitepaper, token structure and pricing will follow shortly. You can sign up at the website to be the first to know when the whitepaper is released. Today, we are releasing a shorter abstract of the whitepaper to give investors more details about the project. You can download the PDF on our ICO information page.

How Cove Identity Works

With Cove, a user can create a secure wallet on their phone to store digitally-verified copies, as good as the original, of their most important documents. They can verify their documents with other users and organisations on the blockchain, eventually allowing them to effortlessly and securely validate their identity online and offline. Hundreds of people have already downloaded the first version of the app from the Android and iPhone app stores.

Cove helps users take end-to-end control of their digital identity and documents:

1. Easily create secure digital backups of your most important documents. Cove automatically scans and tidies documents and uses text recognition to suggest tags, effortlessly organising the documents.
2. The Cove Secure Wallet uses the end to-end-encryption to ensure the user’s files are as secure as they can be.
3. The Cove Network offers multiple ways for users to verify the existence of their secured documents and the contents within them. A verification score will be accumulated with every successful verification making it increasingly likely for 3rd parties to accept these documents as valid.
4. With all their important documents verified and securely stored in their secure wallet, users can easily validate their identity with 3rd parties that are both on the Cove partner network and off it through multiple validation options. Blockchain helps in both the verification and validation processes.

Why invest in the Cove ICO

Cove has all the elements in place to lead a strong ICO and develop a great product that gives true value to the user:

• Cove already has a cohesive and effective 15 member team in place
• The product already exists and is gaining strong early traction
• We will run a professional, fair and transparent ICO
• The opportunity is huge with great potential returns for investors

Kunal Nandwani, CEO of Cove said: “Our team has been working hard over the past year to develop a great product with a great use case for blockchain that exists right now. We’ll be following the same high standards with our ICO and are excited to share our product with our investors and the rest of the world”.

For more information on the upcoming ICO, read our abstract and sign up to know when we release our full whitepaper and more details about the ICO. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us at [email protected]

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of any Merkle employees. This is not investment or trading advice; always do your own independent research.

On August 22 the creator of the Yours network, Ryan X Charles, announced his blockchain based media platform is switching over from litecoin to bitcoin cash. The team just recently switched from the legacy bitcoin chain to litecoin because of the protocol’s inability to process micro-transactions.

Also read: Bitcoin Software Wars: The Battle Between Nodes, Hashpower, and Developers

The Yours Network Switches from Litecoin to Bitcoin Cash for Cheaper Micropayments

This week Ryan X Charles surprised the cryptocurrency community with a new announcement. The creator of the Yours network explained his development team decided the other day they would be going “full on-chain” with the bitcoin cash protocol. Yours is a social media application that gives micro-payment incentives for content such as articles with pictures, stories, audio, and video.

When Charles revealed the soft launch of Yours two months ago, he said he had difficulty with micro-transactions because of bitcoin’s fees. After the soft launch, the development team decided to utilize litecoin with the platform to lessen network fees and created a better experience for users. Charles changed his mind again and says he’s excited to switch to bitcoin cash because it will allow all the “product experiments we’ve been dreaming of.”

“We’re going to be the biggest company on bitcoin cash in three weeks,” explains Charles.

‘Reducing Code Complexity by Going On-Chain’

Following the announcement, news.Bitcoin.com reached out to Charles and asked him why they switched from litecoin to bitcoin cash. “Litecoin has fees of about five cents and no plan to scale on-chain,” Charles explains. “Litecoin will eventually face the same problem as bitcoin.

We spent over a year developing a trustless payment channel network similar to the Lightning Network except it’s not dependent on Segwit. We’ve realized that we can dramatically reduce our code complexity by going on-chain with bitcoin cash.

We then asked the Yours developer if the platform’s users will see a bitcoin cash implementation in three weeks. “You will see it a lot sooner than three weeks,” Charles details. In addition to keeping the platform on-chain, the developer explains that the Yours protocol can reduce its code size by at least 10x. “We were able to archive our micro-payments system – we don’t currently need it on BCC. We can broadcast our transactions on-chain with low fees, even just one cent,” Charles tells news.Bitcoin.com.

The Yours Creator Wishes Bitcoin the Best of Luck

As for bitcoin and the protocol’s upcoming Segwit implementation the Yours developer says he hopes it all works out.

“We wish them the best of luck. Unfortunately, bitcoin fees are too expensive for us, even with payment channels, because the cost of onboarding and offboarding users is too high,” Charles adds.

What do you think about the Yours network implementing bitcoin cash instead of litecoin? Let us know in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock and Yours.

 Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.

The post Reward-based Social Media Platform Yours Switches from Litecoin to Bitcoin Cash appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Fans of the NEO cryptocurrency may have noticed that last week’s uptrend has broken suddenly. In fact, it appears there is a lot of selling pressure across the exchanges supporting NEO. It seems some discussions on Reddit may be influencing the NEO price right now. At least one user has claimed that the NEON wallet changed the address to which they were sending money right before completing the transaction. The majority of the community feels that the allegation is utterly bogus.

What is Going on With the NEO Price?

The past few weeks have been nothing short of amazing for anyone holding the NEO currency. After successfully rebranding from AntShares, NEO has proven that the coin certainly has a lot of value to the right people. A few days ago, one NEO was valued at just over US$50, but that price has since come down quite a bit. In fact, the price per coin has fallen to US$35.84 and continues to decline across supporting trading platforms. There must be an ulterior reason as to why this is happening right now, yet no one seems to know what is going on exactly.

If a discussion on Reddit is to be believed – and it is probably not entirely accurate – there is something wrong with the NEON wallet. For those who are unaware, NEON is a wallet solution for the NEO currency. We all know cryptocurrency wallets can pose major security risks when it comes to safekeeping funds and sending money to the right addresses. This latter aspect is quite important, as it would not be the first time cryptocurrency wallet users have seen a recipient wallet address change out of the blue when transacting. This particular discussion seemed to indicate something similar was happening to multiple users of the NEON service.

The poster in question claimed that a Bittrex deposit had suddenly been redirected to an unknown address. When the user (allegedly) reported this strange occurrence to the NEO team, he was promptly banned on Slack for spreading “FUD”. We do not yet know the full story of what was said by both parties in this case, but bans are usually only handed out when users are either spreading outright lies or trying to aggravate other users when they feel they do not receive the help to which they are entitled. Either incident could have occurred here, but we cannot tell for sure.

So far, the NEO community does not seem to believe this story one bit. One of the NEON developers in the Slack channel noted that the user had claimed the wallet had a secret bug which was patched later on. The same user also claimed that multiple bugs had been discovered in the NEO blockchain which would allow for this alleged bug to occur. Details regarding said bug were never provided, which does not make the job easier for developers by any means. Without evidence and with just a story that could have easily been made up, the ban on Slack appears to have been more than warranted. Again, we do not know the entire story, but the developer’s words would seem to be a more credible recollection of what was said.

It is certainly possible this particular user has seen his or her funds transferred to the wrong NEO address. Whether or not that is the fault of the wallet or due to the user’s computer having been compromised is unknown. In similar cases, a computer is compromised whereas the wallet works just fine. Cryptocurrency users need to learn to take better care of the tools they use to store wallet balances. Regardless of whether that is a computer or mobile phone, all devices are prone to malware attacks which often go by unnoticed until it is too late.

For the time being, it is unclear if these allegations have effectively driven the NEO price down. It is certainly possible users are concerned about the missing funds and how they could potentially be dumped across exchanges. Then again, there are no other credible records of anyone having similar issues with the NEON wallet right now. The most likely explanation is that there is no wallet bug, whereas the user’s computer was infected by malware or a keylogger which allowed a hacker to alter the transaction’s recipient address. This happens a lot more than most people realize, but it is not the fault of wallet developers.

Russia is a country that never ceases to amaze people. More specifically, the region is quite intriguing when it comes to cryptocurrency and digital assets. It now appears Burger King Russia has issued their own token on Waves Platform. This token is known as Whoppercoin, although its use cases remain to be determined for the … Continue reading Burger King Russia Launches Whoppercoin Token on the Waves Platform

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The average price of bitcoin across global exchanges in trending up, having already climbed almost $130 during today’s trading.

The post WikiHow Users Can Now Secure Their Online Identities with Civic appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

We have seen quite a few cryptocurrencies go through a pump-and-dump cycle the past few days. Bitcoin Cash was the first, followed by Monero – which seems to maintain its price-  and now Ripple’s XRP asset is skyrocketing in value as well. All three currencies have one thing in common: their majority of trading volume during the day of the value increase came from Korea’s Bithumb exchange.Owners of the XRP asset will be quite pleased with how things are going, although it remains to be seen if this value will remain locked in place.

What is Going on With the XRP Price These Days?

A lot of people were quite surprised when the XRP price hit $0.33 earlier this year. In fact, that happened in May of 2017, which almost feels as if it was years ago. We have seen so many changes in the world of cryptocurrency over the past few weeks and XRP is certainly a part of those changes. After its initial bull run in May, things took a turn for the worst as far as XRP was concerned. The price continuously declined for weeks on end and eventually settled around the $0.14 mark.

Considering there are over 38 billion XRP in circulation right now, that value is still relatively high. With the recent XPR price increase pushing the value to $0.28, the market cap has grown to a total of $10.77bn. Considering how Ripple’s market cap jumped from under a billion to this number throughout 2017, it’s not hard to see why the digital asset has been so successful. In fact, its success is quite similar to some of the main cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Unfortunately, it is hard to predict how things will evolve for the XRP price moving forward. After all, this current price action has all of the signs of a clear pump-and-dump scheme. Some users may not like to hear that, but it is evident there are forces at work which will certainly influence the XRP price over the coming hours and potentially even days. With Korea’s Bithumb exchange bringing in over $1bn in trading volume and the other Korean exchanges generating over $650m in combined volume, it is evident this momentum wouldn’t take place were it not for South Korea.

We have seen similar momentum where Bitcoin Cash was concerned a few days ago. For some unknown reason, the BCH price went up quite a bit before eventually crashing down again. Right now, the BCH price is unsuccessful in its attempt to stabilize, and the current mining difficulty increase makes it unprofitable to mine Bitcoin Cash. The coming days and weeks will not be easy for Bitcoin Cash, even though its network hashrate has grown a bit. On the other hand, the network blocks are pretty far apart once again, resulting in about one block being found every hour today. Not a positive sign by any means.

Focusing back on the XRP price for a minute, it is evident the trading volume across Korean exchanges can dry up at any given moment. If that is the case, nearly 75% of all current XRP volume will be wiped off in a heartbeat. That will evidently result in a major XRP price decrease, although no one can tell where things would end up at. It is not unlikely we will see an entire XRP price retrace over the coming days, depending on how long the volume across Korean exchanges remains this high. In most cases, that will not last all that long.

There is no denying Ripple and its XRP asset have their place in the financial sector. This is not your average cryptocurrency either by any means. XRP is a digital asset that is not designed to rival Bitcoin, Ethereum or any other major cryptocurrency right now. Instead, it is designed to change the financial sector as a whole in its own way. Various financial institutions are already paying attention to what the company is doing with its technology, that much is evident. However, the value of XRP remains to be determined by the market, rather than speculators and daytraders.

Popular how-to website wikiHow is partnering with blockchain startup Civic to boost the security of its login process.

IBM has launched an educational initiative, partnering with 1,000 universities in an effort to fill the many industry positions currently vacant.