August 5, 2018 – Page 4

Bitcoin Magazine’s Week in Review: Challenging the Way It’s Always Been Done – Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Magazine’s Week in Review: Challenging the Way It’s Always Been Done
Bitcoin Magazine
Bitcoin Magazine talks with security experts Hartej Sawhney, co-founder of Hosho, Dmytro Budorin, CEO of Hacken, and believes that security can slip by the eye of software engineers because they “don’t have a quality assurance (QA) mindset.” Dmytro …

and more »

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Magazine's Week in Review: Challenging the Way It's Always Been Done
Bitcoin Magazine
Bitcoin Magazine talks with security experts Hartej Sawhney, co-founder of Hosho, Dmytro Budorin, CEO of Hacken, and believes that security can slip by the eye of software engineers because they “don't have a quality assurance (QA) mindset.” Dmytro ...

and more »

Bitcoin Magazine’s Week in Review: Challenging the Way It’s Always Been Done

Week in Review

This past week, we talked to three security experts about how to design smarter and more secure smart contracts. Google is dipping its toe in the blockchain waters by introducing integrations for applications built with Ethereum and Hyperledger. The financial sector got some more love with the Digital Chamber of Commerce’s white paper to help cryptocurrency and ICO markets grow responsibly. Finally, 17 tons of almonds moved from Australia to Germany with real-time tracking and verification on the blockchain.

Featured stories by Jimmy Aki, Colin Harper, Marianne Lehnis and Nick Marinoff

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Audits and Quality Assurance: Patching the Holes in Smart Contract Security

In the most infamous smart contract hack in the industry to date, The DAO, a decentralized venture fund, lost 3.6 million ether in June of 2016, and the fallout of the attack saw Ethereum hard fork to recoup losses.

Bitcoin Magazine talks with security experts Hartej Sawhney, co-founder of Hosho, Dmytro Budorin, CEO of Hacken, and believes that security can slip by the eye of software engineers because they “don’t have a quality assurance (QA) mindset.” Dmytro Budorin, CEO of cybersecurity community Hacken, and Amy Wan, CEO and co-founder of Sagewise, about how comapnies can ensure the security and quality of their smart contracts, as well as the role of the community in holding those companies accountable.

Behlendorf: Google Can Benefit From “High-Velocity Development on Fabric”

Google is following a similar path taken by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and cloud-hosting services offered by Oracle, Huawei and IBM to offer ready-made templates for their ‘blockchain as a service’ offerings.the latest tech giant to offer blockchain technology to its customers.

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Hyperledger’s executive director Brian Behlendorf spoke about Google’s decision and how Hyperledger’s Fabric open-source nature, maturity and flexibility fits in with Google’s strategies.

“Eating Their Lunch:” Blockchain Upstarts Challenge Investment Banks

Blockchains carry the promise of making international money transfers cheaper and faster for all parties involved. Once the technology has proven its speed and scaling abilities, investment banks and international settlements will undoubtedly become increasingly comfortable as transaction partners.

Thomas Levene, founder of Best Blockchain Solutions Consultancy, discusses how major investment banks could make $10 billion in efficiency savings by utilizing blockchain technology and how new, upstart blockchain companies are challenging the status quo.

Chamber of Digital Commerce Sets Out ICO and Token Guidelines

The Chamber of Digital Commerce’s Token Alliance is producing a new group of guidelines built to help the cryptocurrency and initial coin offering (ICO) markets grow responsibly. Founder Perianne Boring tells Bitcoin Magazine how regulations could introduce legitimacy and protections into a landscape still obscured in popular opinion by skepticism and doubts that are made murkier still by persistent manipulation and fraud.

Released as a whitepaper, the report is entitled “Understanding Digital Tokens: Market Overviews & Guidelines for Policymakers & Practitioners.” The paper specifically pertain to “utility tokens,” which provide users with future access to products or services. In these instances, ICOs will raise money for new blockchain products by offering investors future use of the items being developed (usually at a discounted rate).

An Australian Blockchain Experiment: Tracking Global Almond Shipments

Following a successful 2016 trial of blockchain technology in an interbank open account transaction, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has partnered with five international and Australian companies to ship 17 tonnes of almonds from Melbourne, Australia, to Hamburg, Germany, using a new distributed ledger platform built on the Ethereum blockchain.

The shipment made its way to Western Europe in a pioneering experiment that combined a private blockchain, smart contracts and a geotracking Internet of Things (IoT) framework to facilitate end-to-end movement of the almonds. Using the joint solution, the entire process was seamlessly tracked and verified remotely from the point of origin to delivery in real time.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

Ready, Set, Go: New Solutions Seek to Leverage and Extend Blockchains for Enterprise

The wide array of proof-of-concept blockchain projects is not addressing the need to evolve the entire blockchain, which would enable not only mainstream adoption but enterprise usage as well. New distributed app frameworks are being developed to solve this problem. Blockchain Is Mostly Early Stage Among the top cryptocurrencies and industry-leading blockchain companies, most blockchain […]

Blockchain Is Mostly Early Stage

Among the top cryptocurrencies and industry-leading blockchain companies, most blockchain implementations are early stage. Consequently, many blockchain projects amount to simple proof of concepts, with few high-impact prototypes or even MVPs to speak of. Due to the large number of test cases currently out there, the evolution of blockchain technology remains slow, with widespread difficulty around enterprise IT integration and a serious dearth of developer-friendly, easy-to-use software tools.

It is perhaps proof of this that both blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies (even with more than 1,500 in existence) remain non-mainstream, given how difficult even tech enterprises of every size find integrating and implementing blockchain use cases into their existing technology stacks. This is generally the fault of the developers themselves, who much of the time lack the ability to deliver the enterprise-grade capabilities needed to run real business-based distributed applications, whether deployed to public or private users. In sum, because of how many blockchain projects are out there, experiential and knowledge gaps between business IT and dApp developers, and the general difficulty in building and supporting the technical infrastructure needed to maintain enterprise-grade dApp implementations, it is difficult for both businesses and developers to support multiple blockchain solutions across industries.

Things Can Get Easier

Leaps in speed and volume of new technical use case deployments across industries depend on protocols and/or platforms that eliminate or severely reduce development and deployment barriers. With blockchain, the problem is scale: single blockchains cannot do it, so techniques like sharding and sidechaining have been developed to allow derivative blockchains to outsource root blockchain functions, which has been transformative in terms of improving the speed of blockchain functionality and building out dApps to deploy new use cases. Yet without a consistently large stream of people to continue building them across industries, the evolution of blockchain will remain slow. Conversely, platforms and protocols that open up such development from a language-agnostic perspective can facilitate that evolution.

The Market and the How

Enterprise-grade solutions to blockchain evolution can be powerful in making blockchain solutions accessible to everyone. Mass market deployment is one way: by targeting B2B solutions with consumer effects, blockchain evolution and mainstream adoption can take less time and be more effective.

Thankfully, developers are already hard at work to make this happen. Blocko, a Korean enterprise blockchain solution provider, has been working since 2014 to make dApp infrastructure available to every enterprise. Blocko leverages its proprietary CoinStack to outsource traditionally server-intensive blockchain functions to its platform, where developers can then go to directly create dApps alongside legacy systems with no additional integration costs.

Stateside, similar solutions are taking shape. One such upstart, AERGO, is a blockchain company creating a revolutionary blockchain-based ecosystem. AERGO’s work is premised on a deep knowledge of the obstacles facing public and private enterprise blockchain adoption and usage: unreliability, difficulty associated with software development and IT integration, interoperability constraints, and scalability problems.

To combat these challenges, AERGO is combining Blocko’s Coinstack blockchain with its advanced programming framework to leverage serverless computing to extend public and private blockchains with support from modern cloud architectures. The company’s goal is to enable any company and/or developer to create new kinds of apps, services, and decentralized business models. To achieve this, it has created a technical and operational framework supporting an ecosystem of dApp developers, curated cloud delivery partners, and enterprise companies.

Eventually, AERGO intends to be a distributed modern ecosystem built around a high-performance, secure and easy-to-use blockchain by facilitating consumer and enterprise hybrid blockchain solutions.

“While history does not repeat itself, it does rhyme. New waves of technologies often come and go, such as TCP/IP, which became the backbone of the modern internet. We are now witnessing the beginning of the next iteration of the internet, which will be built on decentralized architectures and ecosystems that are not exclusively controlled by a handful of large tech companies. Within this, AERGO will develop a broad system of app developers, technologists, and infrastructure providers with the aim of making the AERGO platform useful to developers and businesses,” said AERGO COO Phil Zamani.

dApp development platforms are proliferating, and Blocko and AERGO aren’t the only ones. Yet for any of these technologies to succeed, they will need to combine a nuanced understanding of development and adoption barriers, as well as of business problems that intersect with these challenges, with robust multi-industry partnerships with companies willing to plunge their employees into flat, distributed development ecosystems. Yet as with platforms like GitHub and GitLab, there may unexpectedly be not only enterprises, but whole swaths of developers from a number of disciplines as well.

Google Trends Indicate Worst is Over for Bitcoin – Bitcoinist

Bitcoinist

Google Trends Indicate Worst is Over for Bitcoin
Bitcoinist
Stock “Market Maven,” CEO, and author Clem Chambers believes Google Trends statistics for the search term “Bitcoin” are telling us that the worst is over for Bitcoin investors. But, that’s no good if you are waiting for the new low before you buy.

and more »

Bitcoinist

Google Trends Indicate Worst is Over for Bitcoin
Bitcoinist
Stock “Market Maven,” CEO, and author Clem Chambers believes Google Trends statistics for the search term “Bitcoin” are telling us that the worst is over for Bitcoin investors. But, that's no good if you are waiting for the new low before you buy.

and more »

Half a Million Dutch Households Own Crypto but Central Bank Still Wary

A Dutch Central Bank spokesperson still maintains that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are too volatile for savings and their value can only be expressed in fiat terms. In a recent CB publication on fintech, bank divisional director Petra Hielkema expressed these sentiments, also adding that there are still risks associated with buying cryptocurrencies in her …

The post Half a Million Dutch Households Own Crypto but Central Bank Still Wary appeared first on BitcoinNews.com.

A Dutch Central Bank spokesperson still maintains that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are too volatile for savings and their value can only be expressed in fiat terms.

In a recent CB publication on fintech, bank divisional director Petra Hielkema expressed these sentiments, also adding that there are still risks associated with buying cryptocurrencies in her view. Despite these concerns, the Dutch Central Bank has no plans to impose a cryptocurrency ban.

“If something wants to be treated as money, you have to be able to spend, save and calculate with it… However, things are not often bought with cryptocurrencies, it is too volatile for savings and its value is expressed in real money”, she said.

Clearly, such views are not shared by those that do save, spend and calculate with currencies such as Bitcoin on a daily basis. In Holland, the current figure is estimated to be about half a million households where a form of cryptocurrency is invested in or used.

She continued, clearly following the trend by banks to separate cryptocurrency from the technology behind it:

“So we do not consider it to be money as such… Nevertheless, the central bank does consider the technology behind bitcoins – blockchain – to be extremely interesting. We have been experimenting with the technology for the past three years and have developed four prototypes.”

Dutch finance minister Wopke Hoekstra wants to see European intervention in order to combat risk such as a ban on risky financial products and limiting the use of credit cards so that cryptocurrency can’t be purchased with them.

In contrast, the Dutch government’s CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) has released a report claiming that cryptocurrencies present a low risk to financial stability in the country. The report, published on 29 May, was initiated in order to establish if cryptocurrencies posed any kind of economic risk in the light of its increasing use and popularity in Holland.

Because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies reached the news often in 2017, approximately 60% of the households in the Netherlands who invest in cryptocurrencies started doing so in 2017. In the first three quarters of 2017, there were approximately 44,000 transactions in Bitcoin from the Netherlands on a trading platform called BTC Direct, according to Statistica.

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The post Half a Million Dutch Households Own Crypto but Central Bank Still Wary appeared first on BitcoinNews.com.

What Has Caused the Bitcoin Price to Drop Below $7,000 in the Past 48 Hours?

Over the past 48 hours, the Bitcoin price has dropped by more than eight percent from $7,500 to $6,890, despite having seen some of the most positive developments in the history of the crypto market. OTC Sell-Off The vast majority of short-term traders and casual investors utilize cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitfinex, Binance, OKEx,…

The post What Has Caused the Bitcoin Price to Drop Below $7,000 in the Past 48 Hours? appeared first on NewsBTC.

Over the past 48 hours, the Bitcoin price has dropped by more than eight percent from $7,500 to $6,890, despite having seen some of the most positive developments in the history of the crypto market.

Bitcoin 1-day price chart, provided by Cryptowat.ch

OTC Sell-Off

The vast majority of short-term traders and casual investors utilize cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitfinex, Binance, OKEx, Huobi, and UPbit to buy and sell major digital assets. Developments in the cryptocurrency sector pertaining to merchant adoption, institutionalization of cryptocurrencies, and technical breakthroughs can have a significant impact on the cryptocurrency exchange market.

However, according to Tabb Group’s report, the over-the-counter (OTC) market of Bitcoin is incomparably larger than its exchange market, by at least two to three-fold. Hence, if the cryptocurrency exchange market only accounts for 25 percent of the global market’s liquidity or volume, it is more likely that large-scale retail traders in the OTC market are manipulating the price of Bitcoin, rather than individual investors in the public exchange market.

If the OTC market’s dominance is accurately measured, then it also opens up an argument about the causation of price movements in the Bitcoin market. Specifically, it is difficult to justify the short-term movements of Bitcoin and other digital assets based on developments in the cryptocurrency sector because news can only have an impact on a market that moves swiftly and can reflect the result of timely events, such as the approval of an ETF or the integration of cryptocurrencies by a large retailer.

The OTC market, due to the sheer size of its orders, move slowly, often with the involvement of agents and brokers. Billionaire investors and institutions that intend to purchase at least several thousand BTC rely on the OTC market to process large orders, because doing so in the cryptocurrency exchange market could lead the price of Bitcoin to experience intensified movements on both the upside and downside.

If a large order in the OTC market is liquidated, it takes the public cryptocurrency exchange market a few days to reflect. As such, it is possible that most of the sell-offs seen in the cryptocurrency exchange market, as seen in the case of July 27 and August 7, are likely caused by the liquidation of large orders in the OTC market, rather than an abrupt switch in trend in the public cryptocurrency exchange market that cannot be tied to a certain event.

Market Manipulation

In the past 48 hours, the cryptocurrency sector has seen the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Starbucks, and Microsoft, the world’s largest stock market, coffee retailer, and technology conglomerate, lead a collaborative effort to increase the usability of digital assets for casual users and the mainstream.

The NYSE emphasized that Bitcoin has the potential to become the first worldwide currency of the world, competing against reserve currencies and government-backed fiat money.

”Bitcoin would greatly simplify the movement of global money. It has the potential to become the first worldwide currency,” ICE founder, Chairman, and CEO Jeffrey Sprecher said.

It is plausible that the OTC market has substantially increased the volatility of the market with the liquidation of large buy and sell orders, and in a period like this, it can be said with certainty that developments and news are not affecting the cryptocurrency market and its valuation.

Featured Image From Shutterstock, Bitcoin Price Chart From Cryptowat.ch