Day: August 24, 2017

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The sustained solid performance of the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum helped the virtual currency market to soar past the $150 bln mark in total market capitalization.

A few days ago, we talked about how the Bitcoin Cash mining adjustments were seemingly controlled in some way. Developer Gregory Maxwell alluded to as much not too long ago. We have now received a bit more evidence to further confirm these claims, although they still remain subject to interpretation. There certainly appears to be solid evidence of a bug affecting the difficulty retarget algorithm of Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin Cash’s Mining Difficulty Adjustment Boggles the Mind

Since the day the Bitcoin Cash network was launched, people have been questioning the way its mining difficulty adjusts. It is certainly true there have been some “profitable” changes in this regard. Not too long ago we saw the difficulty drop to as low as 7% compared to the original Bitcoin blockchain despite a growing amount of network hashpower. Lower difficulty and higher hashpower should be, under normal circumstances, mutually exclusive except for a brief moment. However, this situation has remained active for some time.

As a result, there were a ton of blocks mined on the Bitcoin Cash network. That also resulted in large amounts of BCH being mined, so much even that the Bitcoin Cash blockchain is now slightly ahead of Bitcoin’s in size and block height. This is an interesting development, although it was only a matter of time until this happened due to the 8MB block size as compared to 1MB. After the mining difficulty was adjusted to 30% of that of the Bitcoin blockchain, profitability suddenly plummeted by a whopping 200%.

It is not entirely strange we would see the profitability change by such a large margin. What is rather disconcerting is how exactly this difficulty adjustment algorithm works. A few days ago, we reported on Gregory Maxwell’s comments that this technology is seemingly based on some very unusual conditions. As a result, mining pools – or even small mining operations – could take advantage of this algorithm and improve their overall profitability. Manipulating the mining difficulty of the entire network is often frowned upon, for obvious reasons.

According to new evidence emailed to us by JM, it certainly appears there is a bug in the difficulty adjustment algorithm. Whether this was added intentionally or is merely a major oversight by the development team remains to be determined right now. It certainly appears Bitcoin Cash is susceptible to price manipulation and attack by miners. The bug allows the timestamps of network blocks to be altered, which could speed up the mining process. It would certainly explain why so many miners have flocked to BCH these past two days, as they were finding blocks on the network quickly.

Based on the code, the Bitcoin Cash difficulty adjustment algorithm trusts these timestamps on blocks created by the miner. Any malicious miner could effectively exploit this trust and mine more blocks at an increased rate. In fact, one could effectively make the algorithm retarget without causing an actual network attack. This is a very disturbing development, to say the least, and one that does not bode well for the BCH network as a whole. As a result, we see an inflated mining income which can be used for short-term gains by both miners and the Bitcoin Cash developers accordingly.

Considering that Bitcoin Cash boasts the largest Bitcoin blockchain at the time of writing, it appears this “bug” was coded in on purpose. Making this altcoin stand out from Bitcoin would require trickery of some sort, including ensuring the chain is larger compared to Bitcoin’s. Unfortunately, it will not enjoy this status for long, as the current mining difficulty makes it nearly impossible to mine new BCH blocks. Eventually, the Bitcoin network will catch up without too many issues and things will go back to normal.

Venezuela’s crisis has made money worthless, but Bitcoin is their savior as mining keeps citizens afloat

Trading of First Bitcoin Capital Corp’s shares has been suspended by the SEC.

One of the most beautiful aspects of the blockchain is its capacity to help individuals regain control over their lives, wealth, and data through decentralization. A basic right individuals should have in their lives is privacy and agency over their data, information, and communications. A new project called Proemtheus aims to bring this freedom to an industry sorely in need of it, email.

The Cost of Free Services

Most readers here have a Gmail account or some other popular email service for their main correspondence. Many also have Facebook, Twitter, or other free services to communicate with others in the digital space. The greatest con ever pulled by such companies was advertising these services as free. Nothing is free, and Proemtheus understands that. These “free” centralized services sell user data regularly to turn that information into profits for the company. Much of the information sourced from these free services is sold to advertisers to show users more relevant ads. This robs users of control over their information.

Data mining is not the only issue with “free” email services. Centralized servers put both users and institutions at risk. It is much easier to attack a centralized institution than to attack a decentralized network. We have recently seen increased instances of ransomware attacks, and those are unlikely to stop any time soon. Proemtheus aims to fix these and other problems with its decentralized email project.

The First Decentralized Email System

The team behind Proemtheus feels that email is the most important asset individuals have online. It represents their identity and how they are able to communicate with the rest of the world. Proemtheus gifts its users true independence of their online data – and thus their identities – through decentralization. Users can expect direct peer to peer communication, full control over their threaded mailbox, and protection from ransomware with user data being encrypted and fragmented. Finally, users can rest easy with full control over their data and online identities.

With Proemtheus, users will have their own cloud-like data storage. In this way, rather than a platform profiting from users as is the norm, this platform could actually profit users. Should the user want to, he or she could rent out their storage or provide email services or VPNs to other users for a fee.

Proemtheus Presale

Currently, Proemtheus is holding a presale to help fund its project and generate initial investment and interest from individuals and other entities. The team asks that any individuals wishing to participate thoroughly read their whitepaper prior to investment. During the presale, the team hopes to sell 150,000 PMTP – their native token – at a price of US$1 to 1 PMTP. Early supporters can expect bonuses as rewards for referrals, purchases and pre-launch testing. They have yet to announce their ICO dates, but have opened up the presale to the entire public. That decision was made because the vast majority of the public has an email account and will benefit from taking full control over it.

Proemtheus’s site: https://proemthe.us/

Proemtheus’s presale: https://proemthe.us/join.html

Proemtheus’s whitepaper: https://proemthe.us/whitepaper.html

This is not investment or trading advice; always conduct your own independent research.

Bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency has been lately staying true its moniker — “Digital Gold” by exhibiting a huge surge in price. The cryptocurrency’s performance has kindled interest among many seasoned mainstream investors as well as newbies. Many people have started to buy Bitcoin as experts predict the price to reach new heights in the coming … Continue reading Rising Crypto-Market Makes It Important to Secure Bitcoin Wallets against Hacking Attempts

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Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has disrupted the global economic system by offering an alternative to conventional monetary and financial systems. The cryptocurrency and its underlying technology now have a variety of applications across domains, which makes it hard to ignore. However, Bitcoin’s very disruptive nature has also bred hostility between mainstream financial institutions … Continue reading Bitcoin Price Rise: There Is No Wrong Time to Buy Bitcoin

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Despite growing interest in South Africa, its central bank says digital currencies are too risky to be issued at the moment.

Researchers have been trying to get artificial intelligence (AI) to understand and generate narratives for years. A big problem in this line of research has now been seemingly solved, as researchers from Disney and the University of Massachusetts at Boston have developed neural networks that can evaluate short stories and predict how popular they could be with a large audience.

AI that can Evaluate Short Stories

Though this AI can evaluate stories, it does not try to mimic professional, experienced critics. Instead, it manages to analyze the quality of the narrative and predict its future popularity, according to Boyang “Albert” Li, a research scientist at Disney Research:

“Our neural networks had some success in predicting the popularity of stories. You can’t yet use them to pick out winners for your local writing competition, but they can be used to guide future research.”

One of the challenges researchers had to face was the lack of large databases of stories that have been evaluated by humans, which could have been used to train the neural networks. To solve the problem, researchers turned to question-and-answer website Quora, as users on the platform regularly answer questions by describing their own experiences in the form of narratives.

Researchers picked as many as 55,000 answers from Quora, and classified about 28,000 as relevant narratives, averaging 369 words per answer. Researchers then used upvotes – given by users to helpful answers – to measure a story’s “proxy for narrative quality” as well as potential popularity.

To understand the complex semantics of the various analyzed stories and their characters, two different neural networks were developed. One looked at separate parts of each story, including the question that inspired it, while the other one evaluated “how meaning of the events and story regions emerged from the entire story” in looking at the story as a whole. Both AIs made predictions of which texts would be most popular with readers.

The two neural networks outperformed the baseline text evaluation system, but the holistic AI showed an 18 percent improvement over the one that focused on separate parts.

Possible Future Uses

This is only the first step in getting AIs to create narratives themselves, as they will need to understand what makes a good text before trying to create one themselves. In the future, Disney and other leading movie studios could easily use these AIs to choose one script over another based upon how well the AI says it will perform with an audience.

Markus Gross, vice president at Disney Research, stated:

“The ability to predict narrative quality impacts on both story creation and story understanding. To evaluate quality, the AI needs some level of understanding of the text. And if AIs are to create narratives, they need to be able to judge the quality of what they are producing”.

When matured, these neural networks could even be used to generate narratives for production, meaning that one day we could watch movies written by AI that knows exactly what will get us to sit on the edge of our seats.

A new fund focused on bitcoin derivatives has been created, SEC filings reveal.