Day: June 15, 2018

Spain is amending its anti-corruption laws and updating its existing Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) measures by developing blockchain and AI solutions, writes Cointelegraph.

Since the OECD measures came into force in 2015, Spain has continued to struggle with high-profile corruption scandals, marking a period of 18 months in 2016/2018 with 1,379 officials prosecuted for corruption.

Again this year, the Gurtel scandal in May saw another 29 officials convicted, finally resulting in the ousting of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy. The High Court stated that Spain’s Popular Party (PP) participated in “…an authentic and efficient system of institutional corruption via mechanisms to manipulate public tenders at the national, regional and local level.”

In order to combat the recent surge of corruption, Angel Gurría, OECD secretary-general, has suggested that “integrity, transparency and the fight against corruption have to be part of the culture. They have to be taught as fundamental values”.

In February, the EU invested more than EUR 80 million into projects. As a member of the European Blockchain Partnership with other members, Spain is developing blockchain and AI applications to fight digital crime and cooperate on developing blockchain projects. Along with Spain, 21 European countries signed the declaration earlier this year to establish the partnership, including other EU nations Germany, France, and the UK.

Spain is further stepping up its fight against corruption in the cryptocurrency space with another project supported by the European Regional Development Fund. In order to add more clarity to tracking crypto transactions and clamp down on fraud, a Spanish blockchain company is working on an Ethereum-based programme which eliminates the need for intermediaries, as it transfers verified tracked funds using electronic time stamps and certified electronic delivery services.

Researchers from the University of Valladolid have developed an AI application which is an ingenious early warning system which calculates the probability of corruption in Spanish provinces. The system calculates data from various sources as to where corruption has taken place historically over a period of 12 years, between 2000 and 2012. It then predicts public corruption based on economic and political factors.

In a positive development for the country, Spain’s Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV) or National Securities Market Commission, recently stated that investment funds could interact with Bitcoin, which has given a significant boost to the Spanish market in terms of giving more credibility to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The EU promised that another EUR 300 million more is to be allocated to blockchain support by 2020.

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The post Spain Vows to Tackle Corruption and Fraud with Blockchain and AI appeared first on BitcoinNews.com.

There is excitement in the ETC world and it’s palpable if we go with statistics. Shortly after the news, ETC gained 22 percent pushing its market cap to $1.44 billion. However, contrary to expectations, ETC prices have been moving within a tight trade range with limits at $16. Should we see appreciation past that level, then we it would be a go for buyers.

Let’s have a look at these charts

From the News

The listing of Ethereum Classic was a head scratcher for many. Some were wondering what founded the rationale behind CoinBase listing a coin that ranks eighteenth in the crypto standing. But, what many forget is that ETC precedes the like of Ethereum whose figure head is the Vitalik Buterin. Besides, they still maintain a no coin burn policy. Unlike other high cap coins as EOS and Ripple which many online commentators were backing to be next of queue, ETC maintains decentralization policy and is completely open source.

We are pleased to announce our intention to add support for Ethereum Classic (ETC) on Coinbase in the coming months.https://t.co/bUG4iLUr2J

— Coinbase (@coinbase) June 12, 2018

As a matter of fact, shortly after their ETH hard fork, the development of Ethereum was split between different development group. Charles Hoskinson of Cardano oversees some bit of ETC development. No one has total control of ETC. As such,  this listing is set to benefit no one in particular but the community, early investors and hodlers. It would be a different case if XRP-despite all their offers in exchange for listing or EOS because all those moves entail direct capital gains to Ripple the company and Dan Larimer’s Block One both which are private companies controlling a considerable stake at XRP and EOS.

ETC Labs incubator program, launched by HCM #Foxconn, Digital Finance Group, & Digital Currency Group, also offers guidance and support from #IOHK and #ETCDEV

Registration is Open!https://t.co/5MKQe0IZPn
#Blockchain #Startup #ETCLabs #EthereumClassic #ClassicIsComing pic.twitter.com/AbSsPivcXP

— Ethereum Classic (@eth_classic) June 13, 2018

So, buoyed by these news, Ethereum Classic now has an incubator program where they plan on investing anywhere between $50,000 and $150,000 for three promising start-ups in exchange for nine percent equity. The program initiated by Digital Currency Group, Digital Finance Group and HCM would offer in-depth development and investment advice besides office space, networking, training amongst others once they launch their projects on the Ethereum Classic blockchain.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) Technical Analysis

Weekly Chart

Ethereum Classic Weekly Chart by Trading View

Listing news not only promises exposure but positions ETC strategically as a receptor of capital from investors. This is why we anticipate ETC to gain ground in the next couple of days if not weeks. Fortunately, there is a technical and fundamental founding for this reasoning when we take a look at the charts.

First, from it we can notice that prices are reversing from $13, a support line at the back of strong market participation. In my view, despite this happening in the midst of strong sell pressure, any close above $16 or last week’s highs would be welcoming news for buyers. On the other side of the coin, any break below $13 means bears are likely to push lower and even test $8 in the coming days.

Daily Chart

Ethereum Classic Daily Chart by Trading View

Here, it’s clear that ETC prices are oscillating within a $2 range whose upper limit is marked by June 12 highs of $16. That same level represents our intermittent buy trigger in the weekly chart and that’s why it’s worth noting in this chart. Secondly, while June 12 news was overwhelmingly positive for ETC, listing isn’t immediate.

According to CoinBase, it will take a “couple of months” before engineering and testing phases passes the grain. As such, the initial reactions was rash and characterized by irrational exuberance before recent price oscillation. Going forward, we are net bullish. However, our trade plan is valid once we see appreciation past $16. That’s when we shall place stops at $13. Before then, aggressive traders can begin accumulating anywhere inside this $3 range with tight stops at $12.

The post Ethereum Classic (ETC) Technical Analysis (June 16, 2018) appeared first on NewsBTC.

Overly, sellers did spring back to action and completely reversing June 14 gains in some coins as IOTA. However, in the midst of all sells, Stellar Lumens is resilient losing three percent. On the other hand, IOTA reversed 100 percent of their 24 hours gains with lows testing minor support at $1.10. So, even if we remain upbeat expecting buyers to spring back, any breach of support triggering means we trade with the trend as we aim at the next support level of each respective coin’s in the daily chart.

EOS Technical Analysis

EOS Daily Chart by Trading View

It’s a milestone for EOS and as expected, critics and claims of “centralization” saturate the crypto sphere but that’s normal. Fact is, already there EOSIO is live, block validation can now proceed and there is a congratulatory message for all EOS coin holders for coming through and setting the ball rolling for one great DApp revolution the world has ever seen.

EOS network is now live, this is an awesome moment. We just produced our first blocks. Go EOS!! #eosio #MainNet #eos pic.twitter.com/CHgPZ5MtM3

— EOS Authority (@EOSauthority) June 14, 2018

Yes, it is true that the community will play a role and what investors yearn going forward is more work than talk as they demonstrate to the world that indeed, the EOSIO blockchain means business and that they are keen to dislodge Ethereum from where it has been perched since 2015.

Back to price action and technicals are panning out in the foot marks following events of unprecedented price explosion. We saw that on June 14 when buyers were busy ramping up and rejecting lower lows resulting in that three bar reversal pattern and a morning star pattern right at support. Like before, we need a follow through and that means either prices edge past June 14 highs and $13 to validate our previous forecast or tumble past $9 and cancel our bullish view.

Litecoin (LTC) Technical Analysis

Litecoin Daily Chart by Trading View

After ItBit Listing, news is the SEC is now coming forward and clearing their stands on which cryptocurrencies are securities and which aren’t. According to Bob Pisani, a SEC official said in a statement through CNBC clarified that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities but did not divulge which coins were.

Bitcoin and ethereum are not securities, but some cryptocurrencies may be, SEC official says. @BobPisani has the details. https://t.co/hgL2bnSxNX pic.twitter.com/e96SeqSxRV

— CNBC (@CNBC) June 14, 2018

If this is the order of things, it may quickly turn out that LTC won’t be considered a security because it works under the same business model as BTC. Without speculating on what not or if, it’s better to wait on the official stand of the SEC.

In the last 24 hours, buyers have been experiencing upward resistance and are actually down four percent. We continue being net bullish and expect prices to appreciate past our immediate resistance at $110 in line with our previous trade plan. If not and prices sink below $90 or June 14 lows then as before, our bull projection would be voided.

Stellar Lumens (XLM) Technical Analysis

Stellar Lumens Daily Chart by Trading View

In the top 10, Stellar Lumens have proven to be a stable coin losing around three percent in the last 24 hours as prices align to our previous Stellar Lumens trade plan. As it is, everything is turning out okay and it should be provided prices continue appreciating and triggering our mid range buy triggers at 25 cents.

On the flip side and as per our emphasis, any depreciation below 20 cents will most likely welcome bears who would instead push back prices to eight cents or there about. If we take an optimistic approach, our overall bull target stands at 50 cents. That’s almost twice the current Stellar Lumens valuation.

Tron (TRX) Technical Analysis

Tron Daily Chart by Trading View

Even though Justin Sun is uncharacteristically silent on twitter today, still TRX prices are not performing dismally as other days. Like XLM and other coins, it is not really struggling to stay afloat and despite losing some of their earlier gains, TRX prices are moving inside June 14 high low.

As previous trade plan laid out, for buys to hold true then we need appreciation past 5 cents while any dip below 3.5 cents means we cancel our hawkish stand. However, because of technical alignment, buyers can begin loading on these dips with stops at 3.5 cents with short term targets at 6 cents which were February-March highs.

IOTA (IOT) Technical Analysis

IOTA Daily Chart by Trading View

After IOTA Foundation meeting with Taiwanese delegates mid May, we knew something were in the offing. Our guesses were right because IOTA’s Tangle will form the structure for Taipei’s new secure digital IDs for city residents.

#TangleID changes the role of the identifier more secure by turning it into an encrypted asset. Because it’s encrypted, no one can copy or spoof it. Only the owner can unlock it. The ID also stores personal attributes separately from the identifier. #smartcity #Taipei #IoT #IOTA pic.twitter.com/VGazJmI9Ef

— IOTA News (@iotatokennews) April 22, 2018

In this new arrangement, a startup company BiiLabs and Taipei’s IT Department shall work towards implementation of this objective. Remember, Taiwan and Taipei are blockchain advocates. In fact there is a Taipei’s  project that aims at making it the first smart city in the world.

Price wise and IOTA is clearly consolidating in lower time frames. Note that yesterday’s lows tested June 13 and 14 lows at $1.1. Now, our June 15 trade plan is clear. Our projections would only be cancelled assuming there is a confirmation of yesterday’s sell pressure past $1.10. Otherwise, we remain bullish with our buy triggers at $1.3.

The post If Bitcoin isn’t a Security According to SEC, Which Coins are? : IOTA, EOS, Stellar Lumens, Litecoin and Tron Technical Analysis (June 16, 2018) appeared first on NewsBTC.

It may come as a shock to some, but scientific pronouncements aren’t nearly as trustworthy as they seem. Consider the tale of saturated fat. Until about the middle of the 20th century, the Western world was largely unconcerned with the effects of saturated fat on health. Fatty fish, butter, and eggs were seen as components of a healthy diet. However, studies funded by the vegetable oil lobby in the US started declaring saturated fat a killer, as well as the root of most cases of heart disease. This idea persisted for another 50 years and persists in some places to this day, despite the fact that the vast majority of medical researchers now believe the whole theory was worthless. In fact, saturated fat has been proven to be good for your health.

There were two causes for this failure of science. First of all, the initial research projects were funded by a lobby group with a vested interest in portraying saturated fat as unhealthy. But secondly, there were a lot of genuine mistakes and error-strewn conclusions drawn by honest researchers. This was in part because of the lack of efforts to replicate study findings to make them more robust.

Put simply, these scientific ideas weren’t tested rigorously or openly enough. And what is exciting right now is that crypto technology is playing a part in making sure this doesn’t happen again. It’s about time, since it is becoming more and more clear that this problem is decaying the very foundations of what we thought we knew to be true.

Back to scientific basics

It has long been known that observational anomalies can happen in science and how important it is to test and retest findings. This goes to the core of the philosophy of science, as explained by two of the great scientific philosophers, Karl Popper and Ronald Fisher:

Only when certain events recur in accordance with rules or regularities, as in the case of repeatable experiments, can our observations be tested—in principle—by anyone… Only by such repetition can we convince ourselves that we are not dealing with a mere isolated ‘coincidence,’ but with events which, on account of their regularity and reproducibility, are in principle inter-subjectively testable… Non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science. [1]

We may say that a phenomenon is experimentally demonstrable when we know how to conduct an experiment which will rarely fail to give us statistically significant results. [2]

Thus, that which is not reproducible is not useful for scientific advancement. And as we saw with the saturated fat example, scientists often have a reason to generalize from a narrow observation and create flimsy new laws of science.

The answer to this problem is obvious: the more times an experiment is replicated, the more trustworthy any findings become.

Enter cryptographically-backed platforms

Advances in crypto technology enable decentralized verification of information on a massive scale in an efficient way. This is well-suited to researchers declaring their premises, data samples, and analyses available for replication and double checking. Now researchers that are collaborating with others or investigating results of other researchers can easily parse their data. More importantly, the immutable nature of ledger technology ensures that researchers do not move the goalposts to suit their results.

The more interesting aspects of this challenge are being tackled by a specific crypto paradigm that uses Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) which are like blockchains but more amenable to large and complex datasets. Companies like CyberVein are making it possible to efficiently record large datasets on a ledger easily. And with minimal fees.

To do so, CyberVein employs DAGs (which work like blockchains but don’t require all nodes to carry and confirm a full copy of the entire transaction history, as happens with the Bitcoin blockchain) as well as a different consensus model known as Proof-of-Contribution (PoC, which is more efficient than the more common Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake mechanisms). As explained by its spokesman:

On CyberVein, nodes are only required to store data shards relevant to their own transaction history and the smart contracts they are parties of. With this approach, CyberVein is able to store entire databases as smart contracts which are permissioned to their owners and participants, without congesting the rest of the ledger.

In practice, this means that users of CyberVein will be able to record experimental data directly onto their DAG database. It can then be reused in connection with other research (making citation easier, or even permitting the reuse of the data in different analyses) and also for easier peer review in which reviewers have decentralized access to the relevant data.

With these leaps forward in collective computing, new solutions are being found every day. Science has a replicability crisis at the moment, but it looks like another branch of science could be coming to the rescue.

*

[1] Karl Popper (1959) “The logic of scientific discovery”

[2] Ronald Fisher (1935) “The Design of Experiments”

Bitcoin Core version 0.16.1, which includes changes in respect of miner block size and wallets, has been officially introduced today

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao discussed how some cryptocurrency exchanges are engaging in manipulation of their volume statistics to give traders the impression they have more liquidity and are more popular than they really are.

This question was asked to Changpeng Zhao in response to a recent study that found evidence through slippage analysis that OKEx was inflating its volume statistics. Cryptocurrency trader Sylvain Ribes sold USD 50,000 of cryptocurrency on Bitfinex, Kraken, GDAX, and OKEx, and found that the order book became unstable on OKEx even from this relatively small sell. Prices declined on OKEx by over 4%, proving low liquidity and lack of support in the order book.

Zhao says that some cryptocurrency exchanges report volumes twice: if someone buys crypto, an exchange might count that as both a buy and a sell order, effectively doubling the volume of the trade, even though only half the volume was transacted. Binance would only report the transaction value as volume, according to Zhao.

A more fraudulent method of manipulating volume statistics is wash trading. This can be detected when price is moving significantly at low volumes, but stable at high volumes. Essentially, two accounts are set up to buy and sell with each other just to generate volume.

A common reason for wash trading is that some exchanges require a cryptocurrency’s team to guarantee a certain amount of volume to stay listed, so some cryptocurrency teams hire a ‘market maker’ that generates fake volume by trading with themselves. Zhao says Binance does not ask cryptocurrency teams to guarantee trading volume, to avoid wash trading.

According to Zhao, a method to detect if an exchange is being truthful about volume is by comparing the trading volume to website traffic. He says that many of the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges have similar or higher volume than Binance, but only 10% of website traffic, indicating the possibility of volume manipulation.

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The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency said they can neither confirm nor deny whether they have knowledge of Satoshi Nakamoto’s existence

Troubled exchange FSHO has failed in its bid for legitimacy as Japanese regulator toughens up on non-performers

Just two or three years ago, the headlines and events involving cryptocurrency that currently take place worldwide could not have been imagined. When PotCoin caught everyone’s attention for its appearance at the recent summit between leaders of the USA and North Korea days ago, it was certainly one such instance.

Dennis Rodman arrived in Singapore on June 11 dawning a “Make America Great Again” hat and a PotCoin.com tee. Rodman, perhaps one of the most unique ambassadors the world has seen, has played a key role in US-North Korea diplomatic relationships since his first visit to North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, in March of 2013.

Just arrived to Singapore for the Historical Summit! Looking forward to @POTUS having incredible success that the whole world will benefit by. Thank you @potcoin for supporting my mission! #Peace #Love #HistoricalSummit #Singapore #PresidentTrump #MarshallKimJongUn pic.twitter.com/XNDsyBjLv8

— Dennis Rodman (@dennisrodman) June 11, 2018

This is the second instance in which the eccentric former NBA star has been sponsored by PotCoin on his diplomatic trips, the first being in 2017. In reference to the sponsorship, PotCoin’s Shawn Perez made the following comment:

The PotCoin team as a community has been incredibly supportive of Rodman’s peace mission from the beginning. We’re thrilled to see how the political climate has improved between North Koreans and the U.S. since he became involved.

Although marijuana is legal in a number of US states, the drug remains illegal at the federal level. As such, many cannabis shops and other businesses in the field find themselves unable to receive adequate banking assistance. As such, many stores have elected to simply deal in cash. However, this has made numerous locations susceptible to robbery. PotCoin seeks to become the universal banking alternative for marijuana businesses across the US.

PotCoin’s price responded immediately to the global coverage, seeing an over 30% increase in the hours following Rodman’s arrival in North Korea, rising from US$0.075 to $0.10. Unfortunately, PotCoin has since been unable to maintain that growth, and has seen much of its gains diminish alongside the absolute slaughter of cryptocurrency markets over the past few days. PotCoin’s trip to North Korea in 2017 saw similar price action, as the coin temporarily shot up 60% before losing much of that increase over the course of the next several days.

Many experts have named Dennis Rodman the single most important tool in understanding and unifying the minds of Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. However, the relationship between the two leaders remains unclear and constantly changing. A major takeaway from the summit was Trump’s assertion that North Korea should disarm its nuclear program by 2020. Semantics aside, such a reality would be a marvelous achievement by the president and others like Rodman who work in the name of peace between the two nations.

Ethereum is not a security, former Chief Strategist to President Trump buying into Bitcoin, Coinbase Index Fund launch, and more in our latest price analysis