Day: September 2, 2017

While some cryptocurrency projects focus on very specific and focused areas and industries, others cast wider nets. Our sponsors at EROSCOIN are hoping to create a new blockchain that is different from all other cryptocurrencies in order to bring this technology to almost every industry imaginable. Since the company is focusing on a blockchain payment solution, virtually all other industries may also benefit from its network.

What is Eros Coin?

Ultimately, EROSCOIN is a project that is aiming to bring about wider blockchain and cryptocurrency adoption through innovating in the current blockchain ecosystem. The team wants to make regular use of cryptocurrency a daily experience for everyone, rather than just for the select few as is the case today. While Bitcoin and Ethereum have seen somewhat successful adoption, Eros Coin’s team believes they can help cryptocurrency achieve even greater adoption. They will do this by adding extra layers of security to blockchains to ensure that peer-to-peer transactions are safe and also help merchants and businesses acclimate themselves in the blockchain world.

They also want to address the main problems of the payment industry today. EROSCOIN will deliver smooth, seamless, and secure payment while supporting peer-to-peer, business-to-business, and user-to-business transactions. They will build online payment gateways and provide web and mobile wallets for storing funds. Making international payments easier and more secure is also a main goal of the team. Hopefully, they will also make splitting currencies easier as well.

The plan is to create a new payment method that is decentralized so that there is no central authority creating massive overhead or any needless oversight into the network. However, the Eros Foundation will provide transparency for financial management, code management, and business decisions. It will also operate within the bounds of legal regulation and its own code of ethics. It will be a fully open-source project and solution.

Eros Coin ICO and Whitepaper

EROSCOIN will be holding an ICO in just a few weeks to fund the development and implementation of the Eros Foundation and its network. A whitepaper outlines how the team plans to spend the funds raised. The largest portion will go toward development costs for the Foundation and the network itself. Marketing, legal, and administration are other expenses that the team hopes its ICO will be able to help cover.

Interested parties will need to invest Bitcoin in the ICO and will receive Eros Coins (ERO) at a rate of US$0.15 per 1 ERO initially. There will be a total of 2.4 billion ERO tokens.

The whitepaper is also helpful for understanding how exactly this project aims to accomplish its goals. Should anyone be interested in the project, it is imperative that one reads the whitepaper thoroughly to grasp EROSCOIN and the Eros Foundation.

Check out the Eros Coin website here: https://eroscoin.org/

Here is their whitepaper: https://eroscoin.org/whitepaper.pdf

This is a sponsored post and not investment or trading advice; always conduct your own independent research.

What people need to fear are the bubbles in equity markets and real estate, not cryptocurrencies.

Most people with an interest in finance know about India’s demonetization plans. A few months ago, the government decided to make certain bills invalid overnight and replace them with higher-denomination ones. Considering India mostly uses cash to store wealth instead of banks, that move caused a lot of civil unrest and ultimately caused more issues than solutions. The latest RBI report shows how this entire plan is a “complete failure.” Rest assured this will not be the last demonetization effort in India or any other country, though. It also shows why Bitcoin is a far better solution, in this regard.

India’s Demonetization Attempt is a Failure

The plan by the Indian government to cause a massive wave of demonetization would not end well. Recalling 500 and 1,000 rupee notes late last year after an overnight decision was bound to cause a lot of problems. The result was quite worrisome: people spend hours, if not days, waiting in line at ATMs to withdraw their money. Unfortunately, a large portion of bank ATMs never received the new bills or could not keep up with the demand. Civil unrest was the only logical outcome and the Reserve bank of India has faced a lot of scrutiny ever since.

Granted, the RBI effectively tried to resolve some of these issues as quickly as possible. These efforts have been mostly in vain, despite 98.96% of recalled notes returned to the bank over the past few months. At the same time, the bank effectively invalidated 86% of the circulating currency overnight, which was a very debatable decision. In fact, it is still one of the most unusual decisions a central bank has made to date and not necessarily a moniker RBI wants to be associated with.

The reason for this large-scale demonetization effort was to erode black money and reduce the amount of cash used across India. Considering how mobile and contactless payments are on the rise in the country, that was a seemingly solid idea. The poor execution of this plan, however, has caused so much friction between consumers and the government it is doubtful the damage can ever be repaired. Although the government claims their efforts had the desired effect, the average person may not necessarily agree.

One thing that stands out is how the RBI successfully gained some undeclared bills, but they also lost a lot of money to print these new notes. The net result of this entire venture is clearly in the red, which cannot have been the objective from day one. That is unless their intention was to launder some of their own black money, according to the Opposition in India. There may be more morally dubious reasons for this decision.

Congress VP Rahul Gandhi is not happy about this demonetization effort. He claims it represents a “colossal failure, which cost innocent lives and ruined the local economy.” Those are some serious accusations, although it is understandable why there are uttered. In the end, customers were forced to deposit money into their bank account, giving the RBI more economic power than ever before. By not allowing users to withdraw their funds accordingly, the RBI effectively controlled all of India’s economy for a few months. There are rumors regarding tax evaders making deals with bank officials to exchange old currency, according to the Hindustan Times.

These demonetization efforts like these are power grabs by financial institutions. It also highlights why Bitcoin is the only currency that should matter to everyone, as it cannot be controlled by banks. Traditional financial tools – including banks – are used for tax evasion, fraud, and who knows what else. When things get too messy, the average consumer will pay the price. The RBI set a very dangerous precedent.

Reports from anonymous sources in China indicate the country’s top financial regulator may be close to cracking down on initial coin offerings.

The Era of Decentralization

The digital age has completely changed the way we interact and live. This is especially true for the early 2000s. Borders were transcended by digital avenues. Tim Berners-Lee – the World Wide Web inventor – finally saw his dream of  “a place where we all meet and read” come true. E-commerce and social networking exploded. Any Utopian visions of cyberspace soon died though, with the centralization of many services that took away that true sense of freedom early internet users experienced.
However in today’s world, new technologies such as blockchain technologies are powering a movement away from the centralization of services. Social media, blogs and any peer-to-peer services can technically be now built and run without depending on any single and central organization. Collaborative platforms such as review sites are the obvious next step.

Challenges Review Sites Face

A review site is a website where individuals leave public audits of their experiences with products and services. While consumers’ reviews have been proven to be highly influential to users, they are as well commonly subject to concerns and criticisms.

1. Conflict of interest: Review sites are generally financed by advertising. This business model consequently stirs up a, sometimes legitimate, mistrust from consumers who might suspect the owners of moderating the reviews or favoring their clients’ items in listings, reviews and/or ratings in an effort to get more money from their advertisement sponsors.
2. Dependence on Tech giants:  Building a trustworthy reputation on the internet takes time and effort. Over the last 10 years, internet tech giants have captured data and taken over the relationship with customers, essentially having a monopoly on consumer data and trust. They now have got the upper hand on even the major brands. So what happens if you are not the best – i.e. most profitable – choice of one these giants’ secret algorithms? What is your ability as an individual or company to transfer, to recover your hard-earned reputation to start selling your product on a new platform? The truth is not much. Reputation has been privatized. This means that most businesses are at the mercy of tech giants.
3. Fake and inconsistent reviews: It is a challenge to fight fake reviews, whether they are extra-positive, auto-promotion reviews generated by business themselves, hit peices from competitors, ranting ex-employees, or grumpy clients. Most sites do not actively manage nor restrict postings. First, they usually do not have the human resources to assess and verify the information in the reviews. That would require a truly staggering number of employees. However even if they did, we do not want them to restrict postings. This keeps the integrity of platforms in tact. Unmoderated and real reviews by users are more valuable than any that may be restricted or doctored. This is why it takes a lot of effort to develop a platform that encourages good behavior, promotes genuine and legitimate reviews but prevents, spots, and punishes bad actors.
4. Polarization of reviews: Most reviews are either extremely positive or negative with little middleground. Why? Most likely, because users that are satisfied overall stay silent. The effort of writing a review is usually triggered and “paid for” by delight or excessive disappointment and anger.

Improving the Way We interact with Reviews

Our Sponsors at REVAIN are reinventing the review model and aims at tackling the previously mentioned challenges. They do it by leveraging blockchain technology, best known for driving Bitcoin and more generally the engine of services decentralization. The blockchain may lay the foundations to design a new form of smart, collaborative, and robust review platform.

Transparency

The blockchain-powered review platform provides users, merchant and third parties with a clear view on the mechanisms and rules that govern the reviews. It also offers to all actors an equal visibility of activities.

Immutable Reviews

The platform offers a trusted single-source of information that cannot be altered by any party without anyone noticing. It is an obvious quality to establish trust between all stakeholders but may as well come with risks.

To offset these risks, REVAIN needs to provide more context, to help users to put reviews into perspective, and to balance them. Here is how they address those issues:

• The enforcement of “good behaviors” through governance mechanisms incentivizes for their honest reviews and holds businesses accountable to provide appropriate and useful responses to the potential criticisms.
• An emphasis on the degree to which each review is constructive and useful, independent from the fact that it is positive or negative. Studies have shown this value to be directly indexed on the tone / level of emotion of its writer, which can be evaluated by Artificial Intelligence. This obviously does not substitute for human judgement but helps in filtering, checking the content, and ultimately help all users to make a sound judgment.

Governance and Economics of the platform

The blockchain enables new form of economic organization and governance.  Through issuing and exchanging of digital tokens, it enables a direct value flow from those who produce value to those who consume this value, without the need of a ruling central authority or clearing house. Writers are rewarded for genuine and constructive reviews. Businesses pay to expose these reviews and bad actors are punished when they break platform policies. It is about designing and fostering a relationship where users and businesses trust each other.

Conclusion

Decentralization of reputation management could be extremely valuable to the public and companies. REVAIN plans on reinvigorating review services at both the user and business level. With a solid footing thanks to their recent ICO, it will be interesting to see how the project develops.

This sponsored post does not necessarily reflect the opinions of any The Merkle employees. This is not investment or trading advice, always conduct your own independt research.

The cryptocurrency asset class saw a broad sell-off on Saturday after bitcoin passed a notable milestone in its price history.

An investor who purchased $100 of Bitcoin in September 2016 when Bitcoin was selling for $572 would be sitting on $850 with today’s $5,000 price point.

Whenever cybercriminals offer free tools to the rest of the world, one always needs to be suspicious. The new Cobian Remote Access Trojan, for example, is provided free of charge on underground hacking forums. However, it comes with a backdoor that aims to provide the original developer with access to all of the victim’s data. This is a very sneaky way of letting others do the dirty work. The Cobian RAT has been in circulation since February of 2017, although it is unclear how much information has been collected so far.

The Cobian RAT is a Poisoned Apple

Never look a gift horse in the mouth, but it does not hurt to conduct your own research anyway. This is especially true when someone tries to provide you with free software to conduct nefarious activities and does not ask for anything in return. Nothing is truly free. If the advertised tool is indeed as harmful as the developer claims, there is no real reason for him to share it with the rest of the world without asking money for it. The Cobian RAT is seemingly capable of letting others build their own malware types with relative ease. Unfortunately, it also leaves something behind in all of those creations.

This “free malware builder’ allows other users to create their own version of the Cobian RAT with some custom settings. It is similar to how most ransomware-as-a-service toolkits operate. Once a criminal uses this free builder to develop their own malware, they can effectively distribute it to victims all over the world. The main objective is to steal and compromise data on target devices. Unfortunately for the people creating their own RAT, their newly created malware also connects to a Pastebin URL under control of the original developer.

Through this Pastebin URL, the developer can issue new commands to all RATs built on top of his original platform. So far, it seems over 4,000 systems have been infected with Cobian RAT types that are not the original code. Researchers seemingly indicate two people have access to this Pastebin URL at this point. These individuals are the original Cobian developer and the person distributing the customized RAT. It exposes all of the collected data from victim computers to these two individuals as well. They let other criminals to their dirty work for them.

Luckily, it appears the Cobian RAT is not without flaws either. There are several bugs, including some of the features which just do not work whatsoever. That is pretty unusual for a malware focusing on logging information first and foremost. Any computer user who types above the average speed will be somewhat safe from harm. The used keylogger is incapable of capturing all of the keystrokes accordingly, which is not a positive sign for anyone looking to use this code. It may also explain why Cobian is offered for free.

Additionally, it appears there has not been too much interest in Cobian so far. Researchers have not noticed any of these versions in the wild other than a few individual infections related to this keylogger. When the malware was delivered successfully, it was distributed through a compromised website. Compromising websites and update servers has also become a popular way to distribute ransomware lately.

For all of its shortcomings, Cobina is still a threat to be reckoned with. It is not all that different from what its competitors provide to the masses, even though it has a few bugs and a backdoor. All of the standard features one would expect to find are present in Cobian. Now that the backdoor has been exposed, however, it is believed very few criminals will show any interest in Cobian moving forward. After all, no one wants to risk exposing data to other criminals.

A look at the applications using Blockstack’s platform give insight into what kind of future the startup is looking to cultivate.

Sponsored article.

With nearly half of the world untouched by the Internet, the potential to transform a crisis into an opportunity is what the AirFox ICO is all about.

Hedge fund participation has coincided with a substantial increase in Bitcoin price.

Cryptocurrency markets are often quite boring over the weekend. In most cases, we will see markets trading sideways for two days with no real volume to speak of. This weekend is already shaping up to be quite different, to say the least. Although a major Bitcoin price dip was not necessarily what most people were hoping for, it is what we have to deal with right now. This also affects all of the other major cryptocurrencies, with the exception of Litecoin and Ethereum Classic.

Bitcoin Price Goes Deep red as Markets Push Back

It has to be said, the recent Bitcoin price growth would effectively result in a push back of some sorts. With a gain of around $500 in about a week, reaching $5,000 per Bitcoin would have been a very realistic target. Sadly, the markets have decided otherwise and the Bitcoin price is going through a very sharp correction right now. With the price dropping back to around $4,600 and not stabilizing just yet, it is unclear what the remainder of the weekend will bring, to say the least.

Unfortunately, this Bitcoin price correction was somewhat to be expected. We have seen a similar correction around two to three months ago after a major bull run. History is certainly repeating itself in this regard as we speak. Moreover, one cannot legitimately expect a $5,000 price point without some people purposefully triggering sell orders. There are also some speculators who opened a short position at this particular price point for obvious reasons.

The trading volume for Bitcoin is not going down, though, which is a positive sign for the time being. With nearly $3bn in 24-hour volume, it is evident the Bitcoin price is triggering a frenzy of activity right now. Although the charts indicate most of these traders are sales right now, there will always be people looking to buy the dips. After all, one solid advice in the Bitcoin world is to buy the bleeping dip whenever possible, although one has to keep in mind corrections like these will be part of the process. Looking at the bigger picture, the Bitcoin price is doing just fine, though.

Right now, Bitfinex is leading the charts based on trading volume, followed by Poloniex and GDAX. It also appears Bitfinex is pushing the price down a bit more compared to other exchanges, as there is a near $70 gap between Bitfinex and GDAX, for example. It is not the most attractive arbitrage opportunity right now, though, but it certainly has a lot of merit. People looking to explore this gap can gain a lot of money pretty quickly, assuming they can move their bitcoins across fast enough.

What is somewhat surprising is how the Asian exchanges are sliding down the rankings as we speak. In most cases, we would see a Korean, Chinese, or Japanese exchange in the top three by trading volume. That isn’t the case right now, although bitFlyer comes in at number 5. The rest of the Asian exchanges are somewhere between 7th and 11th, which is a bit surprising. Then again, given the weekend trends we often see in the cryptocurrency world, these rankings often look very different compared to during the weekdays.

It does not appear the Bitcoin price will get a major nudge from the Asian exchanges this weekend. That doesn’t mean the BTC value won’t go up in the coming hours, as there are plenty of other exchanges which can push the price up if there is enough volume. Where that volume will come from and how much it can affect the Bitcoin price, remains to be determined, though. For now, the bearish sentiment across the Bitcoin market will make it pretty difficult to climb back toward $4,900 anytime soon.

As is to be expected, the Bitcoin price drop is affecting most other top alternative cryptocurrencies as well. There are two big exceptions in this regard, as Litecoin has somehow successfully most of its value despite this market volatility. Ethereum Classic is also clearly pumping in Asia right now and its value is not dropping by any means. This pump will effectively come to an end sooner or later, though, albeit this Bitcoin price drop may allow it to go on for a while longer. An interesting weekend leis ahead, that much is evident.