Day: November 22, 2017

We have seen many intriguing creations in the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Stash may be one of this year’s more interesting projects, as it is a combination of a Bitcoin full node promising full financial control and an augmented chain. According to the team, this mobile financial platform and service has been in development for seven years. Now is a good time to look at what the Stash Node Pro entails exactly.

Stash Node Pro is Versatile

When it comes to deploying new Bitcoin-related hardware outside of mining equipment, people will always remain skeptical at first. Setting up a full Bitcoin node or running a proper Bitcoin wallet on one’s own system is not exactly difficult. Nor does it require expensive hardware to do so, as all you need is a Raspberry Pi 3 and a hard drive with enough space. At the same time, the Stash Node Pro is about a lot more than just this, by the look of things. According to its website, it is the first turnkey plug-and-play solution with support for Open-Transactions.

To be sure, the Stash Node Pro is still a Bitcoin full node first and foremost. It has a self-hosted copy of the blockchain and doesn’t discriminate chains based on their block sizes. This means the project is viable for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and whatever other iterations we may see in the future. That’s a smart decision by the team, as it is important to introduce solutions which support all forms of Bitcoin.

Secondly, the Stash Node Pro purports to provide “financial control”, as there is no third-party service involved. Instead, users are in full control of their money, wallet, and private key. Moreover, this project contains support for Open Transactions, which is something we haven’t seen in other products to date. This feature allows for recurring payments, invoicing, smart contracts, and even end-to-end encrypted messages. All of these features are pretty interesting and may attract a lot of enthusiasm from Bitcoin enthusiasts.

Furthermore, there is a standalone Bitcoin wallet app which can be used on Android, by the look of things. The companion app is capable of pairing with the Stash Node Pro, which gives users full access to their own copy of the Bitcoin blockchain at all times. Additionally, it introduces reusable payment addresses, which are based on BIP47. There is also an option to issue refunds, which is something that hasn’t been presented to Bitcoin users in a convenient fashion until now.

As one would expect, all of this goodness doesn’t come cheap. In fact, the Stash Node Pro is one of the most expensive Bitcoin hardware gadgets that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency mining. The price of US$987 may not necessarily be warranted at this point, even though it packs a ton of interesting features. At the same time, anyone in the world could set up a rather similar system for far less money. Those who value convenience over learning things on their own may be willing to pay full retail price for this product, though.

In the end, it all comes down to finding the right market for a project such as the Stash Node Pro. With its massive price tag, this is not something which plenty of people will put on their Christmas lists. This device is not available as of right now due to extreme demand. Anyone purchasing now will have to deal with a delay of multiple weeks before their unit is shipped out. It is evident there may be a market for a gadget like this, but advanced Bitcoin users may not see the added value in the Stash Node Pro.

Play2Live, a blockchain-based streaming platform for gamers and eSports fans, has announced the highly anticipated release of the platform’s technological demo. A trailblazer in merging revolutionary blockchain technology and streaming services, Play2Live will become the ultimate end-to-end solution for streamers, gamers and eSports fans.

There are many ongoing talks around blockchain-based streaming services and Play2Live would be one of the first platforms to demonstrate this functionality in life. “We are moving forward according to the roadmap, and this match is a good opportunity to show investors our commitment to build a strong business that will start bringing revenue soon”, says Alexey Burdyko, CEO and Founder at Play2Live.

To support the release of the demo, the company organized B03 Play2Live Match, a show match featuring CS:GO that was held on November 20th, 18:00 CET.  “As promised earlier, we have created the technological demo version of our platform along with the blockchain network. A total of 8000 eSports fans were able to enjoy the match in high quality video, make bets, chat, comment the tournament and earn rewards”, said Orhan Zeynalli, Blockchain CTO at Play2Live. “Our main goal was to collect feedback from real users and test the platform functionality, including betting, which was made possible thanks to the blockchain technology.”

Everyone wishing to take part in the live demo was able to register online and received 100.00 LUC Silver tokens which were then used to make bets for one of the playing teams PRIDE or Havu. After the show match, the participants who voted for the winning team have multiplied the number of tokens in several times. “We are proud to have successfully implemented the first working version of the platform with the use of blockchain technology and our Level Up Coins.  We would like to thank all users for showing great interest in our platform and successfully making bets despite the instabilities that appeared due to a large number of simultaneous connections. We promise to fix these problems in future and provide a much more seamless experience for all eSport fans”, said Orhan Zeynalli.

The $1500 prize pool was awarded to the winning team Havu (34th place in HLTV.ORG rating), players from Finland who won against the PolishPRIDE (36th place in HLTV.ORG rating) with a total score 2:1. According to forecasts made by gamers before the show, the betting results were made in favor of PRIDE (80 percent against 20), however the team ceded holding a pretty tight gap. The broadcasting was provided by a popular UK castor Ryan ‘Flakes’ Oliver, the official commentator of Epicenter Qualifiers, The ELEAGUE Premier Europe Qualifiers, ESL Pro League, WESG 2016 and WCA 2017 North America and UCC Studio.

More about Play2Live:

https://twitter.com/play_2_live

https://www.linkedin.com/company/18255836/

https://www.facebook.com/Play2Live-504880049864038/

The post Play2Live, the World’s First eSport and Gaming Platform Powered by Blockchain Launched a Technological Demo appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Today marks the alpha launch of the community-driven VR streaming platform, Spectiv VR! Check it out here: www.spectivvr.tv

Spectiv VR Alpha 1.0

The Spectiv VR Alpha 1.0 supports VR content viewing, uploading, and account management. Partnered content creators are currently in the process of uploading over 1000 unique VR experiences to be enjoyed on the Spectiv platform. Among these creators, Spectiv is partnered with Blend Media (www.blend.media), the largest network of professional 360-video content producers in the world. The Spectiv VR platform has already engaged over 50 different content creators who have over 3 million combined subscribers and over 20 million YouTube views. New users who own mobile-powered headsets like Google Cardboard are able to enjoy Spectiv content in fully immersive virtual reality. Viewers who don’t have such hardware will still be able to engage with scrolling 360-video experiences from their desktops/mobile devices.

The Future of Spectiv VR

Minor updates to be expected within 2017 include detailed analysis dashboards for content publishers and interactive notifications/activity feeds for viewers. Major updates to the Spectiv VR platform will include Signal Token integration, advertising within videos, and live streaming functionality. Once Signal Tokens are distributed, Spectiv VR publishers and advertisers will be able to engage with the decentralized advertising protocol. This will occur through 2D video/still image ads embedded within Spectiv VR experiences. Additionally, users on the Spectiv VR platform will be able share tips and purchase premium content with their Signal Tokens. After this, Spectiv’s primary focuses will be updating the Signal Token Protocol to accommodate for viewer/curator rewards and building out a robust VR live stream delivery system.

Signal Token Protocol

Spectiv is the creator and first adopter of the Signal Token Protocol. This protocol decentralizes the interaction between advertisers, content publishers, viewers, and curators. Using the Signal Token Protocol, advertisers can initiate Ad Campaign Smart Contracts that autonomously reward users for driving attention to advertisements. Every ad view and click that occurs is communicated to the Ad Campaign Smart Contract, triggering a token reward disbursement. This is an open-source protocol built for any media platform to implement. Spectiv will pioneer this protocol through its own media platform, Spectiv VR. This will provide a crucial real-world foundation for other platforms to learn from and build upon.

Token Purchasing Opportunities

Signal Tokens can be purchased in our Pre-ICO December 8th 2017, with early bird bonus opportunities for qualifying participants. The sale will have a maximum expected receipt of $40 million in Signal Tokens, priced at 650 Sigs/Eth. This open sale will be hosted at www.spectivvr.com

Sign up for the email list at www.spectivvr.com for whitelist access to the pre-ICO token sale which will be held prior to the open sale on December 8th. Reach out to [email protected] for early token purchasing inquiries.

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

A French asset manager has announced the launch of Europe’s first mutual fund centered around bitcoin.

The post Video Streamers Have More Options with These New Blockchain Startups appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Scaling will always remain a critical problem in the world of cryptocurrency. Even IOTA, which was designed to be infinitely scalable, has encountered issues in its early stages. The network experienced a massive DDoS attack last night as the number of public nodes wasn’t sufficient to handle the network “spam” coming in. This is a very worrisome development, although it’s one that can be solved with relative ease.

IOTA Network Needs More Nodes

It is evident that any cryptocurrency out there can suffer from scalability issues. The best solution to this problem is a solid decentralized network of peers to back everything up. In the case of IOTA, network growth has been less than stellar, and it even caused a major bottleneck Monday night. More specifically, the network suffered a spam attack which flooded the public nodes and caused transaction delays.

For a network that prides itself on being “infinitely scalable”, that was not a positive development whatsoever. It was one of the first times the IOTA network was put through its paces, and issues arose pretty much immediately. It seems this was mainly due to a limited number of public nodes on the network. Without sufficient nodes, any “flood” of data will not be processed quickly enough to keep the network going. This is why Bitcoin requires thousands of nodes in order to operate.

According to the IOTA team, these transaction delays were caused by a “spam attack”. More specifically, a spammer flooded the public IOTA nodes, although it’s not clear how this was achieved exactly. Consequently, those nodes became overloaded, causing the network to clog up. This issue was alleviated by lowering the number of transactions per second on the network, but it is not a course of action the community likes to see take place.

Without more full nodes on the IOTA network, issues like this one will continue to come up. There is a decent guide out there on how to set one up, and it is not overly difficult to do so. This problem is not unique to IOTA, mind you, as any major cryptocurrency without sufficient network nodes will run into similar problems sooner or later. Making it easier to run a full node and improving peer discovery would be two options well worth exploring by the project’s developers.

Addressing this problem in the near future will not be all that easy. For a decentralized network, spinning nodes up all over the world without relying on centralized solutions will take a lot of time and effort. A long-term solution would entail massive adoption on the part of the IoT community, and whether or not that will ever happen remains to be seen.

For the time being, it seems this issue has not affected the IOTA price all that much. It was somewhat surprising to see the price per MIOTA rise to nearly US$1 out of the blue, especially given these problems. Then again, anyone who wants this ecosystem to succeed can easily create their own full node and help alleviate a lot of these concerns in the process. Whether or not people will be incentivized to do so remains to be seen.

Cookeville, TN- Speculative Tokenized Trading Exchange, shortened to SPECTRE, is different from the other ICO’s that claim to be disrupting the financial market. The platform was created by Neuchatel Ltd whose founders, SPECTRE CEO  Karan “Kay” Khemani and COO Zisis Skoulouds, explicitly designed the platform to be disruptive and innovative. It’s two innovative features, Tokenized Balance Sheets and Dividends along with an adaptive trade platform, are their most disruptive ones. Both features aim to reduce broker fraud by removing the perpetrator of fraud-the broker-,protecting the trader through algorithms, and promoting transparency within the platform.

The main perpetrators of fraud within the financial trading market are brokers. They have complete control over the investments, and therefore capita, of the trader from the moment they invest. Brokers make money off of the losses of their traders which results in a broker-trader dynamic that encourages such practices as dishonestly reporting market prices, providing hyped strategies designed to burn accounts intro the ground, trading without permission upon the behalf of the trader, and hindering withdrawals. This unhealthy dynamic encourages a 70-90% industry loss ratio that creates distrust in the financial market.

SPECTRE seeks to disrupt this pattern by removing brokers from the equation entirely. The tokenized and decentralized liquidity pool, governed by smart contracts, takes their place. This pool is owned directly by traders. The liquidity pool, whose foundation is the Etherium block chain, is initially funded by ICO investors who receive tokens in exchange. Both the SPECTRE management team and these ICO investors receive a percentage of each trade. This creates a system upon which profit is not made purely from trader losses but rather by the sheer volume of trades made upon the platform. These profits, and the trades from which they resulted, are monitored by smart contracts to ensure all trades are fair. SPECTRE additionally uses OANDA price feeds to monitor these trades and encourage transparency.

Their adaptive trading program uses a range of algorithms to protect traders and promote transparency.  These algorithms help with such processes as emotion control, risk management, and trade opportunity recognition. These are used to keep track of traders strengths, weaknesses, and other stats. SPECTRE keeps track of these and alerts the trader if they’re about to make a costly mistake. Traders are also allowed to monitor the live value and fluctuations of the liquidity pool along with the dividend pay outs made. This, unlike traditional models where this is not possible, allows the trader to be completely certain no fraud has occurred. With SPECTRE’s transparency traders can have complete faith in the fact that their tokens are being used as intended.

SPECTRE uses two different tokens to promote trading and growth within their platform. The first is their Dividend Token, also known as a D-Token, which is the standard token used upon the platform. It pays out a 2% dividend to all token holders each time a trader initiates a trade. SPECTRE gets a 2% cut of the overall trade in the form of a technology fee each time this occurs. The second is their Utility Token. These tokens, shortened to U-Token, do not pay a financial dividend with each trade but have 1-5% higher pay trade outs in comparison to the D-Token. U-tokens also allow access to exotic trade types such as knock-in-knock-outs, barriers, ladders, and other open smart contract options. These tokens, additionally, can be bought back by SPECTRE through their buyback program. This is made possible by their utilization of 3% of fees generated on their platform to fund the program.  

These tokens, contained within the liquidity pool, are protected by a bug and security bounty program. The program is run by Mike Boutwell from CryptoAdvisors and ex Morgan Stanely executive director Adam Dossa will also be called in to run audits as needed. This program will protect SPECTRE’s liquidity pool from short and long term threats such as bots attached to trading accounts, DDOS attacks, site and liquidity pool hacks, and other attacks such as Trojan strategies.

Mike Boutwell and his team will be auditing the SPECTRE platform to eliminate any security issues that may arise after December 15th of 2017. SPECTRE will additionally allows non-team members to participate in the Bug Bounty program along with a hackathon event. Participants of the bug program will be given a demo version of the platform and will additionally be given 0.1 BTC per qualifying bug found. The hackathon will be structured similarly. Participants will be allowed to attempt to hack the liquidity pool while it is connected to Testnet. O.2-0.3 BTC will be given to any who find a flaw but a large prize of 1-10 BTC will be given to any who successfully rigs the system. This, SPECTRE hopes, will incentivize keeping the platform bug and security flaw free.

SPECTRE, with these innovations, promises to be a disruptive platform that will change the way digital trading is carried out. They have thrown the old financial trading model out and replaced it with a modern platform far more fitting for the digital age.

SPECTRE’s token sale starts on the 17th of November 2017 at 12:00 PM GMT and ends on the 10th of December 2017 at 11:59 AM GMT. The public alpha went live in September 2017 and the connection to the live Ethereum mainnet environment is scheduled for the first quarter of 2018. Access will be made available on www.spectre.ai.

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

Standard Chartered and Axis Bank have announced a new cross-border payments platform built on top of technology developed by Ripple.

Bringing Bitcoin to the masses is not as easy as most of us would like. Especially when it comes to allowing consumers to buy cryptocurrency, there is still a lot of work to be done. Thanks to a new partnership between Nautilus Hyosung and Just Cash, a lot of regular ATMs may soon receive Bitcoin support. It’s an interesting option worth exploring, as mainstream consumers still remain on the fence when it comes to Bitcoin.

Buying Bitcoin With Regular ATMs?

It sounds a bit strange to walk up to a typical bank ATM and see an option to buy Bitcoin. Although that may not happen on a meaningful scale in the near future, the new partnership between Nautilus Hyosung and Just Cash heralds some major changes regardless. It is important to note this will not necessarily be a global rollout, as it seems this feature will be limited to South Korea for the time being. Being able to transact Bitcoin using regular ATMs will certainly be convenient.

As one would expect, this will work quite similarly to traditional ATM transactions. In most countries, people can use ATMs to deposit, withdraw, and even send money to other people if needed. They are a valuable addition to regular bank clerks, although they may end up costing a lot of jobs in the process. The goal is to create a new cryptocurrency transfer ecosystem which mainly relies on QR code scanning. As most people are well aware, Bitcoin has relied on QR code-based transactions in the real world for some time now.

Although this service will mainly focus on Bitcoin for the time being, there are plans on the table to add support for altcoins as well. Right now, it remains unclear which currencies may be on that list, but the first priority is ensuring everything works well with the Bitcoin-related transfers. Considering that there are over 8,000 active ATMs to be modified in South Korea, it will likely take a while until the team gets around to integrating altcoins.

With these modified ATMs, people will be able to have funds dispensed to their wallets using a QR code. The machines will also present users with a receipt containing transaction details as well as the public and private keys associated with the transaction. This latter feature may not be the most secure solution, but it remains to be seen if this will be a mandatory or optional feature. It is a paper wallet receipt first and foremost, but it seems logical to assume that existing wallets would be supported as well.

Upgrading ATMs to support Bitcoin is a very ambitious project, to say the very least. At the same time, no one can deny this change is beneficial. Making Bitcoin more mainstream – especially as the price keeps going up every week – is a top priority. While this South Korean partnership may not necessarily yield major dividends, it sets an intriguing precedent for the rest of the world to follow. Whether or not other companies will follow this trend remains to be seen.

In the end, it is good to see some more competition in the ATM industry. Dedicated Bitcoin ATMs have been around for some time now, yet most of them have not been overly successful. People aren’t always willing to go out of their way to buy Bitcoin from an ATM. Integrating this functionality into regular bank ATMs will certainly pique people’s interest. It may not lead to increased adoption overnight, but this venture may yield some surprising results over time.

BlockShow, an international Blockchain events franchise powered by the Cointelegraph, has announced the Token Sale 2.0 launching, promising the end of the ICO 1.0 era

Freewallet, a developer of more than 20 cryptowallet apps for a variety of coins and tokens, has launched the world-first dedicated Bitcoin Gold Wallet.

Freewallet was one of the first wallet developers to announce full support for Bitcoin Gold, a new coin that emerged as a result of the community-driven fork at block 491407 on the Bitcoin blockchain. After the successful Bitcoin Gold network launch, BTG became available in the Multi Wallet, an innovative app by Freewallet that helps managing multiple coins and cross-exchanging them in one place. The Multi Wallet app is currently available both on iOS and Android.

All Freewallet users who held BTC on their balances at the moment of the fork and the subsequent chain split were credited with the equivalent numbers of BTG as well.

Seeing the growing interest of the community to the new coin, Freewallet responded to the client needs by releasing a full-scale Bitcoin Gold wallet within days upon adding Bitcoin Gold to the list of available coins in their Multi Wallet. Just like any other Freewallet app, the new wallet allows not only to safely store and conveniently transfer BTG, but also to smoothly exchange it to and from other coins right in the app, with just a couple of taps.

The BTG wallet for Android is already present on Google Play; the version for iOS has been submitted to AppStore for review. The developer hopes it should be available for Apple users as soon as the coming week.

“That’s the second Bitcoin chain split we’ve supported,” states Alvin Hagg, Freewallet co-founder. “And Freewallet managed to provide uninterrupted operations during both of them! When a new cryptocurrency is born and a new network is launched, it means there’s a great opportunity for our users to get free coins and instant profits. And Freewallet’s mission is to make sure they are happy because that’s what makes us happy, too.”

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.