Day: July 24, 2018

Stars of the crypto and venture capital worlds made their way to Washington recently for a day of congressional hearings on cryptocurrency

At the beginning of 2018, I wrote an article outlining a New Year’s resolution that I thought could help boost cryptocurrency adoption and awareness in 2018, as long as enough people were doing it. Last week was the twenty-fourth installment of my challenge. While we should be a bit further along in the challenge, the couple of weeks I randomly couldn’t write about it have begun to add up. This week’s challenge was much like the other recent weeks. Let’s dive in.

A friend of mine and I recently caught up over some whiskey at a new establishment near Union Station in Chicago. He and I often try to explore interesting and worthwhile topics over a few drinks – how to make money in various market conditions, land worth buying, large social issues, the future of our world, and so forth. He’s also sold on the idea of cryptocurrency, but also has some reservations about when and how mass use/adoption will come about.

He had heard of the Lightning Network (LN) and the Bitcoin scaling debate before, but he wanted to understand LN a bit deeper and asked me to help explain. He was deeply impressed by the idea of smart contracts acting as payment channels between two people, and liked how the only time that on-chain fees are paid is when entering and exiting the contract. We talked about how this would be a good idea for our whiskey talks, as we usually alternate who pays. He was impressed with the off-chain scaling solution. However, being a whiskey talk, we wanted to see how we could break it.

Breaking it wouldn’t be feasible, from a fraud standpoint. The use of multi-signs and reverted transactions without both signatures would see to that. Perhaps the only way to game the system that way would be to receive a good or service before signing, then not sign – though the economic incentive to do that is low, since the other party (or parties) would likely just close the payment channel after that. Even then, escrow could be coded into the payment channel’s logic.

The issue that we both identified is one that critics of LN as the major scaling solution point to: it probably creates Lightning Hubs that are pretty similar to banks, such that I have a hard time making a distinction. Yes, these Lightning hubs wouldn’t be lending money they don’t have to cover transactions like banks do with loans, but the centralization of wealth and transactions is somewhat concerning to me, and it was to my friend as well. In a space where we are looking to keep everything as decentralized as possible, I don’t like sacrificing that for cheaper transactions. That said, LN is a very impressive piece of technology, and I hope it is helpful in keeping high-volume, low-amount transactions from spamming the network. I just worry that if additional scaling solutions to SegWit and LN are not developed, LN might centralize us a bit. I guess you could say this conversation helped us learn about the concerns that LN’s critics have.

Writing this post reminds me that I actually intended to send him some Litecoin to play around with, as I don’t think he has much of it.

Are you participating in the Year of Cryptocurrency Challenge? How is it going for you? Send us your thoughts via Twitter or in the comments below!

The Delaware Department of Justice has taken an apparent interest in the Poloniex exchange, asking a group of individuals to contact them if they experience account issues

Hunting crypto scammers and shillers is now a sport. Armchair sleuths have taken it upon themselves to chase down perceived bad actors, and to publicly out them for their crimes. Crypto influencers who conceal promoted tweets and conflicts of interest are liable to be outed and shamed.

Also read: ICOs Have Become a Parody of Themselves

Shillexed is the New Bitfinexed

In the originality stakes, @Shillexed isn’t going to win any awards. The account is basically a clone of @Bitfinexed, whose chief preoccupation is bemoaning Tether’s lack of transparency. Shillexed has even recycled the Bitfinexed logo, only it’s operating under a different mission: to uncover crypto influencers who fail to disclose payment for the projects they tout.

The phrase “crypto influencer”, while much derided, is the best term there is to describe Twitter traders with over 20,000 followers and the ability to move illiquid markets. The guys behind these accounts (for they are invariably male) don’t get paid for the charting, TA, and memes they supply their followers. Few people would begrudge them the occasional promoted tweet, but it’s the failure to disclose this fact that’s controversial. There’s a big difference between someone shilling a project because they think it has strong fundamentals and doing so because they’re getting paid.

Krypto Leaks is on a Mission

While Shillexed is chasing down conflicted Twitter influencers, a new Telegram group, Krypto Leaks, is hellbent on exposing “scammers, abusive VCs and pool founders”. So far it claims to have exposed dubious advisors, impropriety among ICO pools, and the usual scammers PM’ing Telegram users purporting to be channel admins. Crypto scams are constantly evolving, although you wouldn’t think so to look at the replies to a typical crypto tweet, where the ETH bots are sure to be out in force.

On Telegram the scams tend to be a modicum more sophisticated. One reverse scam that was witnessed this week involves someone messaging a bona fide crypto influencer, claiming to have screenshots of someone using their name to defraud victims. If the genuine influencer clicks on the screenshot which purports to show evidence of the fraud, they will unwittingly download malware designed to steal their private keys. In a space where it is safe to trust no one and wise to assume that everyone has a hidden agenda, accounts such as Shillexed and Krypto Leaks have an uphill battle.

Given the worry that crypto vigilante groups could themselves be elaborate scams (remember Blockbroker, an ICO set up to unearth exit scams that exit scammed?), it’s wise to be cautious of all cryptocurrency accounts, whatever flag they choose to drape themselves in. If nothing else, Shillexed has got crypto influencers treading carefully and being mindful of what they promise ICOs in their DMs. One exposé is all it takes to ruin a reputation that took years to build.

Do you think crypto vigilantes are a force for good, or are they just being sanctimonious? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, and Twitter.

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Technically, Ripple (XRP) is bearish and that’s despite news of Wirex support or coin listings in different exchanges around the world which is of course supportive of price. Following yesterday’s high volume XRP bull candlestick reversing from support, chances are we might see a follow through today but that won’t be enough to warrant XRP buys until after Ripple bulls break above 50 cents.

From the News

Ripple’s RTXP is not only reliable but it one of the most versatile protocol out there. The user case of XRP is particularly important for financial institutions. We have seen it coming through for different banks and even if they sometimes won’t find a place for xRapid or XRP in that case, RTXP tags with it efficiency and cost reduction. It’s in this vein that Wirex is trying to capitalize on user demand by availing a XRP wallet for their customers.

..You asked, we delivered
Wirex #XRP Wallets are here!
Everything you need to know: https://t.co/J6bo72Xbzi #WelcomeToTheWirexFamily #Trifecta @Ripple @askutch @bgarlinghouse @JoelKatz @chrislarsensf pic.twitter.com/uwVdehCQRR

— Wirex (@wirexapp) July 23, 2018

Wirex is a UK-based fiat and cryptocurrency card provider that wants to make fiat-crypto payment as seamless as possible. Under this objective, going forward, their 1.3 million customers spread across 130 different geographies will now convert XRP to fiat, receive XRP from external wallets and make point payment in XRP or fiat. That’s on top of trading XRP with Bitcoin, Litecoin and other tokens availed by the company.

As expected, such news created a buzz and it got better because in their announcement, the Wirex co-founder said XRP is not only stable and cheap but this high liquid coin is free from Bitcoin’s influence.

The XRP-BTC decoupling part shall and will continue to be a point of interest for all level of investors in days to come. After all, Brad Garlinghouse, the co-founder of Ripple said that decoupling will come to effect once we see strong user adoption.

XRP Technical Analysis

Weekly Chart

XRP Weekly Chart by Trading View

This is the fifth week of XRP horizontal consolidation. The bad thing about this consolidation is that its trade range is tight and confined within 10 cents with clear resistances at 55 cents and support at 45 cents.

Being a strong bear trend, our interest shall shift to 45 cents, our main support line and 2018 lows. As mentioned in our previous XRP technical trade plans, trading with the trend is advisable and this is even compounded by the close proximity between current XRP spot rates and 45 cents.

In any case and as spelled before, strong close below June 2018 lows might usher in the next wave of XRP sellers with bear targets at 15 cents.

Daily Chart

XRP Daily Chart by Trading View

Here, XRP is clearly finding support and even if we are bearish, yesterday’s injection of buy pressure is positive.

This rejection of lower lows might pad and form the basis of further gains today and in that case, we shall refocus our attention on XRP and see if bulls would muster enough momentum to breach 55 cents triggering our longs as laid out in our previous XRP trade plan.

Disclaimer: Views and opinions expressed are those of the author and aren’t investment advice. Trading of any form involves risk and so do your due diligence before making a trading decision.

The post XRP Technical Analysis: XRP Price is “Bitcoin Proof” Says Wirex CEO appeared first on NewsBTC.

On a positive note, altcoins are on a recovery path and syncing with last week’s bulls. Not only are we seeing respectable gains in Litecoin, EOS and IOTA-which by the way is reversing from 90 cents, but the fact that LTC bulls are now retesting $90 is encouraging from a bull perspective. Hopefully, coin specific news would continue trickling in boosting prices in the process.

Let’s look at these charts:

EOS Technical Analysis

EOS Daily Chart by Trading View

You have to check this yourself but according to CoinFairValue, EOS’s fair value is $676! That right there means there is some serious EOS undervaluation and going by that analysis, investors should investing heads first. To elaborate, the site claims that their fair value evaluation of each coin is based on “growth expectation of the coin usage” and well, if we comb through the community, the only use of EOS thus far is mainly for RAM purchases. On the negative side, a dApp developer said EOS was being used to Sybil attack the Ethereum network.

CoinFairValue assertions are for sure controversial and regardless, the EOS market is reacting and moving higher. After yesterday’s bull candlestick, we might see additional gains to day and perhaps a break above July 20 high low as bulls aim to edge past $9, our bull trigger. Considering the proximity to $9, my EOS Trade recommendation to risk-off traders is to buy at current spot rates with stops just below this four day consolidation at $7.5. Usual targets would be at June highs at $15.

Litecoin (LTC) Technical Analysis

Litecoin Daily Chart by Trading View

Encouragingly, Litecoin bulls are now back and following yesterday’s jump and retest of $90. Odds are we might see our buy triggers being retested today. Because of that, my trade suggestion is simple: Buy Litecoin on every dip in lower time frames. As laid out in previous trade plans, our first targets would be $110, our immediate resistance and previous support line.

Stellar Lumens (XLM) Technical Analysis

Stellar Lumens Daily Chart by Trading View

Of all the coins being “explored” by CoinBase, Stellar stands out and that’s thanks to Jed McCaleb, the founder of Stellar platform. In case Lumens, the native currency of the Stellar foundation, get listed then we might see its value quadruple to $1 in the coming days because of the psychology behind the 13 million CoinBase users.Not only will it be the cheapest coin on offer, but the number of available coins means everyone can purchase any amount as long as their account can allow.

Aside from these expectations, we remain XLM bulls and our plan is to ramp up longs on every dip in line with our Stellar Lumens analysis. Conservatives can way for bull pressure resumption above 30 cents while risk-off traders can begin buy at current spot prices with stops at 25 cents. In the meantime, those who bought XLM at 22 cents can lock in some profits and move their first take profits to 40 cents.

Tron (TRX) Technical Analysis

Tron Daily Chart by Trading View

Justin Sun, the co-Founder of Tron says BitTorrent is the “genesis of decentralized movement” and with more than 100 million active users, his description holds true. That might be the reason and the fuel behind Tron’s acquisition with online commentators placing the cost at $140 million. By running BitTorrent on the Tron’s blockchain, the company will hope to accelerate their objectives and create an “internet of options, not rules”.

Sun’s statements are all over the place and exactly how they shall leverage BitTorrent as they recover back to the top 10 is not clear. What we do know though is that TRX buys are finding support and so far, it is up three percent and moving closer towards our immediate resistance at 4 cents. Syncing with our Tron trade plan, strong breaks above 4 cents would means a trend shift allowing TRX bulls to buy on dips with stops at July 24 lows.

IOTA (IOT) Technical Analysis

IOTA Daily Chart by Trading View

A combination of scalability, free transactions and fast transaction settlements is what gives Tangle and IOTA an edge. By all accounts, IOTA is on the fore front advocating for IoT and M2M data ecosystems. As they do they are invariably laying the foundation of what they call“Industry 4.0 Smart Manufacturing”. In this close loop, data is Gold. In this Smart Manufacturing era, Tangle stores every bit of data with machine coordinating independently as they update themselves automatically.

IOTA Foundation's vision of Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing https://t.co/RPOVijutHn

— IOTA (@iotatoken) July 22, 2018

Our IOTA trade plan holds true and clearly, there is a triple bottom right at 90 cents. Despite this recovery-IOTA is up two percent, my suggestion is to retain an IOTA neutral to bullish skew with first IOTA loading once we see buyers printing above $1.2 or July 18 highs. Ideally, we would want to see strong break outs above July highs and resistance at $1.3 going full throttle.

Disclaimer: Views and opinions expressed are those of the author and aren’t investment advice. Trading of any form involves risk and so do your due diligence before making a trading decision.

The post Litecoin, IOTA, Stellar Lumens, Tron, EOS Technical Analysis: Litecoin is Over-valued and EOS Fair Value is $676 Claims CoinFairValue appeared first on NewsBTC.

Singapore Airlines has officially launched its blockchain-based loyalty program for frequent customers.

Since its conception, the internet has been championed as a place where information and data should not be censored. While in practice this has not always been the case, especially with governmental rulings and policies to prevent access to and use of the internet, internet advocates have largely become hostile to the idea of censoring or “removing” parts of the internet. More often than not, attempts to “kill” a story or remove a piece of information from the internet are met with backlash and hostility. Enter the Streisand Effect.

What Is the Streisand Effect?

Put simply, the Streisand Effect is the phenomenon whereby the act of attempting to suppress or remove information from the internet draws attention to the target of the attempt. While this is not a new occurrence by any means (humans have always been attracted to forbidden knowledge), the internet has perfected it.

It was named after the American entertainer Barbra Streisand who, in an attempt to suppress photos of her Malibu home, only called more attention to the photos – which were replicated and stored across various networks, making any hope of actually taking down these photos virtually impossible.

Needless to say, most Public Relations people worth their salt in this day and age are well aware of the Streisand effect and its gravitational pull. When posed with a situation where undesired information has gotten into the hands of the public, the advice should be to lean into it or just ignore it.

How the Internet Creates the Perfect Setting for Streisand Effects

The internet is a beautiful (and terrifying) place, whose earliest adopters helped instill an ethos of freedom of information. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are well known for their outspoken privacy and digital rights advocacy, and the EFF was one of the most influential groups in the early days – going as far as to publish seminal Declarations of Cyberspace’s Independence.

The internet, by its very nature, should obviously have visceral reactions to suppression attempts. However, what makes the internet a more worthy adversary to such attempts than its predecessors (like the printed press) is that the internet can store, replicate, and publish “forbidden” content at a breakneck pace. Mass participation in these mirroring events makes legal recourse a wild goose chase. The combination of a foundational ethos and the ability to back that ethos up makes the internet the perfect spawning ground for the Streisand Effect.

However, the internet also generally champions privacy. So, while many people want the free flow of information on the internet to remain free, there is generally an admiration for good information security and data security. Put plainly, usually only the nefarious actors on the internet will be the ones attempting to steal data for publishing with malicious intent (doxing), and these actors are often met with the same detestation that those attempting to suppress information are.

Conclusion

The Streisand Effect is a common part of our world today, though it appears that as PR firms and individuals learn more about its devastating effects, they become better at triaging situations to avoid it. To understand just how powerful this effect is, realize that the Wikipedia page on the Streisand Effect shows the pictures in question, and that even 15 years later, I am writing about it.

Actor Johnny Depp, of Edward Scissorhands and Pirates of the Caribbean fame, has been linked with a new film said to be a biopic of the late cryptocurrency billionaire Matthew Mellon.

Although it hasn’t been confirmed, sources reportedly told the Mail Online that Depp is understood to be interested in the role and that “there is a screenplay being shopped”.

Mellon was a descendant of Judge Thomas Mellon, founder of the Mellon Bank, which became the largest bank outside of Wall Street in the late 19th century. It has now become part of the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation. Having been named Finance Chairman by State Chairman Ed Cox in May 2011, Mellon saw a USD 2 million investment in Ripple (XRP) become a USD 1 billion fortune in 2015. It was said to be his first real business success.

He mixed with high fliers and socialites in Manhattan and London until his death in Mexico this April where he died before he was due to check into in a rehabilitation center. He suffered a fatal heart attack after taking ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drink made out of vine and roots and used as a traditional spiritual medicine in ceremonies among indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin region. He suffered from addiction in the months before his death with a USD 100,000 monthly prescription habit.

He married into another banking dynasty in his British wife Tamara whom he met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. and quickly became part of London’s high society with friends such as Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley. His first wife founded the successful shoe company, Jimmy Choo.

He went on to date “Kick” Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F Kennedy Jr, after his second marriage to Nicole Hanley, which also ended in divorce in 2015. It was at the end of this marriage he went through his cryptocurrency phase.

“Matthew was very interested in the idea of the blockchain and what Bitcoin could be very early on… He didn’t understand the underlying 0s and 1s of the technology but understood that the technology could make things cheaper, faster, more efficient,” said David Marshack, who was an adviser to Coin.co.

“He risked everything on it and toward the end of last year, it exploded and made him an awful lot of money… It made a bunch of people second-guess their early criticisms.”

The family of the banking heir are reportedly divided about Mellon’s life appearing on the big screen and an undisclosed source has said that some “are horrified by the idea… The last thing they want is the Mellon legacy portrayed on-screen”.

The role would certainly offer Depp plenty of material if the film came to fruition. One friend of Mellon’s commented, “This may be fulfilling a dream of Matthew’s. He would have loved this idea… He used to say, how cool would it be to have a movie about my crazy life?”

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This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

In a blog post before Google’s Cloud Next ’18 conference today, the company has announced a partnership that will permit it to offer the financial services industry a cloud-based platform on which they can develop and run blockchain-based applications.

Google’s Cloud Platform

To make it happen, Google has teamed up with Digital Asset — a provider of distributed ledger technology (DLT) software — and BlockApps — a platform on which enterprises can develop blockchain apps. These partnerships will permit users to explore ways to use blockchain/DLT frameworks on Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP).

The plan is for GCP to run both the open-source integrations for Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum, the two leading enterprise blockchain platforms, according to the company.

Further, GCP also joined the private beta of Digital Asset’s developer program, which provides a group of technology partners, software vendors, and financial services companies access to its software development kit for its Digital Asset Modeling Language, a smart contract coding language.

“This will reduce the technical barriers to DLT application development by delivering our advanced distributed ledger platform and modeling language to Google Cloud,” Digital Asset CEO Blythe Masters said in a statement.

Blockchain-Based Services

Smart contracts are a blockchain-based business automation tool, think scripts, that run on the blockchain against pre-determined business rules.

Real world applications mean a smart contract can determine when the conditions of a real-estate purchase have been met, and in turn release funds from a bank. A smart contract can also be used in supply chain management to track and verify the receipt of goods.

Over the past two years, blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) offerings have rapidly grown to include some of the tech industry’s biggest players, like Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s certainly not a surprise Google and these other tech giants are so interested: the market for blockchain products and services is expected to grow from $706 million last year to more than $60 billion in 2024, according to analytics firm WinterGreen Research.

As of late, Google has been at the forefront of emerging technologies like BaaS, often backing startups in related fields and making acquisitions to recruit talent. So far, Google’s parent company Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV has invested in wallet service Blockchain Luxembourg, financial transactions network Ripple, cryptocurrency asset management platform LedgerX, and international payments provider Veem.

“You’re going to see an unbelievable amount of R&D expenditures go into this,” Jeff Richards, a managing partner at venture firm GGV Capital, said. “Everybody learned from the internet and mobile that you can’t afford to wait.”

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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American digital asset manager Bitwise has applied for an SEC-regulated cryptocurrency ETF that would track 10 different assets

Tezos, a controversial blockchain project that launched its beta network a year after its ICO, has announced that it will be audited by the ‘Big Four’ company PwC