Day: July 13, 2018

Moore’s law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years, and this has approximately been true up until now. Transistors are the fundamental building blocks of electronic devices; they amplify and switch electronic signals on and off. More transistors on a chip results in more processing power. However, due to quantum tunneling, there is a limit on how small transistors can get, and this will make it very difficult to make cryptocurrency mining application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips more powerful than they already are.

Quantum tunneling arises from the wave-particle duality of electrons and is specifically associated with an electron’s wave characteristics. An electron’s wave doesn’t instantly stop at a barrier. It tapers off and if a barrier is small enough, the wave of the electron gets to the other side of the barrier, albeit significantly attenuated. If there are enough electrons impacting the barrier, then some effectively teleport through the barrier.

In the case of transistors less than 5 nm or so, quantum tunneling results in an “on” state all the time, which makes them unusable. Transistors need to be switched on and off with 100% accuracy for a computer to correctly function, so quantum tunneling would compromise a computer that has transistors which are too small.

Currently, the smallest transistors on cryptocurrency mining chips are 7 nm – Japanese firm GMO has developed a 33 TH/s Bitcoin mining rig with 7 nm transistors. Scientists generally thought that 7 nm would be the smallest size for a reliable transistor due to quantum tunneling. IBM actually developed 5 nm silicon chips in 2017, but had to utilize different technology from usual to accomplish this. Even a 1 nm transistor has been developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory using molybdenum disulfide and nanotubes, but they can’t mass produce the transistors to create a chip and even if they did, quantum tunneling would probably be a problem.

Perhaps quantum tunneling can be circumvented by using completely new technology to produce transistors, but when it comes to transistors on silicon chips it would seem that they can only get so small and current technology is already close to the limit. This will inhibit the acceleration and evolution of cryptocurrency mining hardware. Of course, mining manufacturers can always pack more chips into a device resulting in a higher hash rate, but nothing increases hash rate like mass producing chips that have smaller and smaller transistors since that exponentially increases processing power.

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Augur, one of the Ethereum network’s most distinguished hosted projects, launched its main network on the 9th of July — adding greater robustness to the market prediction platform, and increasing the integrity of the REP token overall.

Following great delays and great fanfare, Augur’s decentralized prediction market has launched. One week on, an examination of the sort of wagers it’s attracted shows the ways in which the Ethereum-based project can be harnessed as well as the potential hazards. How decentralized is Augur and, if push came to shove, could the platform prove that it is truly censorship resistant? The fate of Augur may hinge on the outrageousness of the predictions its users place.

Also read: Want to Develop Bitcoin Cash Apps? Bitcoin.com Has You Covered

The Market That Was Three Years in the Making

Long before the ICO meme hit peak velocity, there was Augur. The project held its crowdsale back in 2015, raising $5 million, a figure that looks modest by today’s standards. Tokens were issued at $0.6 apiece, which is a snip given their current price of $29 – and Augur’s native REP token has reached more than twice that price at its peak. Building a decentralized prediction market powered by smart contracts is as difficult as it sounds. Even so, no one expected it to take until mid 2018 for Augur to launch.

As of last week, Augur has been live, enabling the masses to post predictions and to sell shares in the outcome of the event coming to pass. The higher the price of the share, the likelier the particular outcome is. Officially, Augur relies on the wisdom of the crowd. Unofficially, it’s a form of unlicensed gambling. The legality of Augur and its ability to circumvent censorship has become a hot topic. Should the US, where the project is based, take exception to the nature of its business model or to the iniquity of certain predictions, it could pressure the founders into winding up their operations. While there’s nothing to suggest that Augur’s in trouble, one morbid prediction could be all it takes.

Predictions for Good, Predictions for Bad

In its first week, Augur has seen some interesting predictions placed, ranging from the predictable to the meta.

As a “decentralized” project that is reliant on a web domain hosted on a centralized server, Augur is no more decentralized than Cryptokitties. Shut down the site and you would effectively shut down the platform, even if it could be ported to an alternative domain. Working within the constraints of the web in its extant form, however, Augur is decentralized in the sense that no one can stop the flow of ether and REP tokens that lubricate its market, and no one can stop its code from being cloned. As with any crypto project that has clearly defined leadership, however, a subpoena from the US government is likely all it would take to send Augur on an extended hiatus.

There is nothing to suggest the US gov has its sights set on making life hard for Joey Krug and his Augur colleagues, just as there’s nothing to suggest that the team would wind down or censor their project without a fight. But with a marketplace where it’s possible to place any sort of prediction and then to profit from it coming true, the potential for abuse doesn’t need spelling out. As crypto commenter Matt Odell noted, assassination and terror attack markets are just two of the possible applications for Augur.

In that respect, Augur elicits memories of a deep web site called The Assassination Market. Like many supposed darknet sites, it was probably a hoax, but its premise wasn’t so far removed from Augur. Operating under the slogan “We close governments”, The Assassination Market explained its methodology as follows:

1. Someone adds a name to the list along with some information.
2. People add money to the dead pool.
3. Other people predict when that person will die, but the content of the prediction stays hidden until after the fact.
4. Correct predictions get the pool.

In other words, there was a monetary incentive to kill public figures. It seems unlikely that anyone would predict a presidential assassination just to claim a few ether from Augur, but it’s an interesting possibility. Until the platform’s been stress-tested to the limits, we won’t know what it’s capable of and what abuses it can withstand. For the sake of all decentralized markets in, the future of Augur is worth watching.

Do you think Augur will be able to withstand attempts to shut it down? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Twitter and Augur.

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The Tezos Foundation is launching their first grantmaking process in August of this year, having determined three main areas as an initial target

If you’d asked any cybersecurity professional around this time last year what the greatest threat to cybersecurity was, they’d have undoubtedly said ransomware. Now worth over a billion dollars a year (and rising), with attacks like WannaCry and Petya/NotPetya wreaking havoc, every expert worth their salt was planning ways to stay ahead of the hackers.

But you know what? Things move pretty quickly in the cybercrime space. Hackers are inventive, ingenious and destructive, always coming up with new ways of pushing boundaries. Ransomware was so last year. While no one will deny it’s still a (massive) problem, other types of cybercrime are beginning to spread like the bubonic plague.

Check out the top five threats keeping cybersecurity professionals up at night right now.

5. Cryptojacking

Spiking by a massive 1,189% in Q1 of 2018, cryptojacking propelled its way past ransomware as the number one nuisance on the block. According to CSO Magazine, what makes this form of cybercrime so “interesting” is that it blurs the ethical line between everyday internet users and criminals.

In fact, some sites like The Pirate Bay are even using it to replace advertising and earn income. How? As long as you have their site open in your browser, they temporarily hijack your device and borrow your computational power to mine cryptocurrency. As soon as you close your browser, the crypto miner goes away. In other, more serious cases, it infiltrates your system and downloads just like malware.

Since cryptojacking overtakes devices and forces them to mine cryptocurrency, it burns through a lot of CPU cycles. But, unlike DDoS attacks, you won’t see disastrous downtime or funds siphoned off into a criminal’s account. You just get servers pushed to the max mining Monero.

Cryptojacking is more of an irritation than a serious disease. It’s like trying to swat a persistent fly in the outback. In fact, according to Matt Downing, Principal Analyst at Alert Logic, the most worrying thing about cryptojacking isn’t really the cryptojacking itself – it’s the fact that you got cryptojacked.

This highlights a “vulnerability in your system,” meaning that something worse could just as easily have hacked its way in.

4. Ransomware

Yes, ransomware is still high up on the list, as this vicious form of cybercrime overtakes systems and locks down computer files with strong encryption. And most businesses end up paying the ransom to get their data back (especially when it isn’t backed up).

According to Peter Tran, Head of Global Cyber Defense & Security Strategy at Worldpay, data manipulation or destruction in the form of ransomware is often the most disruptive and can take out critical infrastructures including healthcare, financial services, and supply chains.

“This is a critical threat as we move toward pervasive hyper-converged mobile, cloud and IoT-based data infrastructures. There’s much more at stake now with modern IT,” he warns.

3. Data Breaches

The very word “Equifax” sends a shiver down the spines of cybersecurity professionals, especially if the companies they work for hold sensitive data. In fact, according to research by Norton, 54 percent of US consumers report having had some personal information involved in a breach.

What’s particularly worrying about this is that the data may be sold in stolen data marketplaces on the dark web. Not only do hackers stand to make high profits from this, but they can also gather extra social information they need to hack into more accounts.

2. Micro Breaches

Oftentimes, cybercrime is aggressive and makes a lot of noise, but this is not the case with what Tran calls “low and slow attacks.” In a type of “micro breach” situation, access is gained slowly and quietly over a period of time by subverting traditional detection methods.

He says, “Lack of visibility or ‘flying blind’ puts security professionals in a constant position of disadvantage… you can’t defend against what you can’t see or detect… that leads to a lot of sleepless nights!”

1. Internet of Things (IoT) Hacking

By 2020 it is estimated there will be over 20 billion connected IoT devices worldwide. This means the amount of attack vectors significantly increases. “This increases their chances of a successful breach into much larger systems that utilize IoT as their main infrastructure,” Tran advises.

Great. So a bunch of medical devices on the blink and cars crashing into each other?

“Think about it like a hub and spokes on a bicycle wheel,” he explains, “where the hub represents a single IoT device and the spokes all lead to other access points… then multiply that by 20 billion… It’s a lot to monitor for security professionals and certainly will have security pros sleep with one eye open.”

The Takeaway

You may have noticed that phishing, cyberstalking, weaponization of AI, and other serious cybercrimes didn’t make the list. There are plenty of other forms of criminality on the web taking place which are keeping our dear friends in the IT department from getting a restful night’s sleep. But, right now, these are the top five on most security professionals’ lists.

World Cup fever is hitting its peak as the final match between Croatia and France approaches on 15 July 2018, and one symptom of that fever is excessive gambling. The Guangdong Provincial Public Security Bureau in China launched a crackdown on illegal World Cup gambling, and has seized CNY 10 million (USD 1.5 million) of cryptocurrency in addition to CNY 260 million (USD 39 million) of cash.

This was a tremendous police operation, resulting in 540 arrests, the destruction of 20 gangs, the shutdown of 70 gambling apps and websites, and the termination of 250 chat rooms on social media platforms. The gambling organizations used a combination of the darknet and cryptocurrency to maintain anonymity and avoid authorities, and were in operation for eight months and collectively had 330,000 users. They advertised that they accepted internationally recognized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum. In total, these gambling platforms facilitated CNY 10 billion (USD 1.5 billion) of bets, not all of which were for the World Cup, but the World Cup was the impetus for the investigation and crackdown.

Apparently, these gambling websites used a pyramid scheme that was conducive for the recruitment of agents and gamblers. Authorities found that most people who used these platforms were losing due to the odds, resulting in steady profits for the dealers. Chines authorities say this is detrimental to society since gamblers were losing all of their money, causing them to turn to illegal activities like theft to get more money to gamble.

World Cup gambling is a major industry at this time, with bookmakers on track to profit USD 36.4 billion this year. Most of this gambling is legal and most bets are placed with fiat. Cryptocurrency is used for some of the World Cup gambling, often legally, but cryptocurrency is ideal for illegal gambling operations due to its relatively anonymous nature when compared to centralized payment methods that usually require identification information to complete transactions.

With cryptocurrency transactions, the only information required is a cryptocurrency address which is a long string of letters and numbers, and no specific identification information is necessary. However, there are organizations which use forensics to trace cryptocurrency addresses and assign identities to them, and perhaps Chinese police used that technology in this crackdown.

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Coinbase is considering the addition of five new assets to its exchange and will negotiate with local banks and regulators to add them to different jurisdictions

Finding a platform that understands and respects the community it caters to is important for sports enthusiasts who are considering joining the fantasy sports world. However, if a platform is too regulated or too complicated, fans lose interest. Additionally, the lack of a connection between fans and the athletes they “manage” also needs to be addressed.

According to Stryking Entertainment, a company that specializes in sports fan engagement and monetization, it’s important to combine the real and virtual worlds of sports in order to create genuine interaction opportunities for fans, stars, and brands. Stryking’s platform, Football-Stars, is an innovative system where users are able to compete in football (soccer) against each other in numerous challenges, while proving their experience and skill to everybody else. In a community-driven fantasy football platform like Stryking’s, users/fans have total control – as it should be – which is also the key differentiating factor of a blockchain-based fantasy sports platform.

Christian Szymanski, the Chief Marketing Officer at Stryking Entertainment, told me that users will be able to decide every aspect of the challenge, including the entry fee and the number of participants, and whether it’s a private league or a public league. “Essentially what we are creating is a community-driven platform, where users have the control,” says Szymanski.

Of course, integrating blockchain technology and cryptocurrency allows users to be rewarded for actively contributing to the platform, whether it’s by publishing related articles, updating player stats, correcting match data, and revealing lineups—similar to how the actual sports space works prior to a game.

“One of the main reasons was that we wanted to create a community-driven platform, where users can play against each other and win a coin that can also be spent in real life,” says Dirk Weyel, CEO and founder of Stryking. “Essentially allowing football fans to have a platform where they decide exactly what they want and are rewarded in the process. Our aim is to allow the large fantasy football fan base that is spread across numerous media publishers to be able to use one coin that can be used on multiple platforms and easily transferred across borders. Using blockchain technology was the easiest way to do this.”

Investing in the Sports Space

Moreover, Stryking recently announced that it had signed the Ballon d’Or winner and former FIFA World Footballer of the Year, Luis Figo, as the brand ambassador for its Football-Stars platform. Figo’s support of Stryking, as well as his football business network, will help to encourage users to actively engage with other Football Stars in the in-game challenges and other tournaments.

Figo is involved in several entrepreneurial projects, and has invested in digital football applications, holding a firm interest in cryptocurrencies.

“When I heard about Football-Stars for the first time, I immediately loved the idea,” says Figo. “Football becomes more and more data-driven, unbeknownst to people, with detailed statistics about all aspects of the game. This is what Stryking’s platform utilizes to create a truly compelling fan experience. I am happy to support passionate individuals at Stryking and continue spreading the word about the platform that allows fans to connect, engage, and have fun with the teams and players they are backing.”

Stryking has also made appearances in the blockchain space, recently finishing first at the Bloxpo conference in Stockholm last week, and at the d10 conference in Malta. Most recently, Stryking announced that in anticipation of the beginning of the Football World Cup, it would be hosting its upcoming token sale through the Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange.

The migration of executives from the legacy financial world to crypto continues and crypto projects take banking into their own hands. 

Ripple (XRP) as announced that it wants to take over 50% of India’s finance sector by processing payments with low fees and efficient systems, according to CCN.

The announcement was made at the recent Scaling and Digital Disruption in Fintech conference by Ripple Vice President Asheesh Birla, where he suggested that he saw Ripple’s digital currency XRP becoming India’s dominant force, outgrowing Bitcoin.

XRP, which has dropped from over USD 3 at its peak to around USD 0.44 today, was due to become part of a company giveaway of XRP 2 billion to the entire population of the country, according to Birla. The project was conceived in order to familiarize all Indians with the cryptocurrency and encourage its adoption on the sub-continent. Ripple’s vice president explained his reasoning and why they abandoned the idea:

“We looked early on at India, and we looked at two billion people – a huge market. And we decided, how do you get two billion people onto Ripple? Do we give the currency away to every Indian, that’s like two billion – just give it away?”

The cost of the giveaway would have been significant, amounting to about USD 880 million at XRP’s current rate, but notably, if the coin had returned to its all-time highs the tokens would have blown out to USD 7 billion in value.

Clearly, getting coins to 2 billion people, many of whom have no access to electronic data or banking, would have been an impossible task. Earlier, Ripple had even considered larger giveaways. Birla explained that the company decided that a better distribution method would be through building a network of banks.:

“…we realized that if you get the top three banks in India onto Ripple, you get 80% of the market share… And so we realized in the next five years, one billion people will become banked in India, but they’ll be banked through their phone. So then we started targeting mobile phone providers and telcos.”

Birla says that Ripple now has 50% of Indian market “either integrated onto Ripple or in the deal, in the sort of pipeline to be signed to India”.

Securing the Indian market and working with the Japanese and South Korean banking systems could help Ripple establish a global financial network on the blockchain.

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Government of Bermuda introduces ICO regulations that require issuers to provide detailed data to conduct an ICO