“Crypto” Is Being Redefined as Cryptocurrencies – definitely true, I myself have to catch myself to be accurate.
The Lightning Network Could Make Bitcoin Faster—And Cheaper – almost three years after the paper, v1 was released. Well worth watching, because there are some seriously smart people working on this: Rusty Russell and Alex Bosworth.
Your Sloppy Bitcoin Drug Deals Will Haunt You For Years – researches at Qatar university, they’ve managed to find how you’ve spent your Bitcoin on the Silk Road.
In well over 100 cases, they could connect someone’s bitcoin payment on a dark web site to that person’s public account. In more than 20 instances, they say, they could easily link those public accounts to transactions specifically on the Silk Road, finding even some purchasers’ specific names and locations.
“When things are recorded in the blockchain, you can go back in history and reveal this information, to break the anonymity of users,” says Qatar University researcher Husam Al Jawaheri.
When A Small Leak Sinks A Great Ship: Deanonymizing Tor Hidden Service Users Through Bitcoin Transactions Analysis – the paper itself is quite a good read.
Here’s why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy – this is due to the Ethereum mining craze, people wanting GPUs. PiMP OS seems like a Linux distribution that costs $35; I wonder if they include the source?
Blockchains from a Distributed Computing Perspective – interesting to see that traditional distributed computing folk may not have accepted the idea of a blockchain with the original paper, but its clear that there is plenty of research going into this now.
SEC says bitcoin funds raise ‘investor protection issues’ – “There are a number of significant investor protection issues that need to be examined before sponsors begin offering these funds to investors”. The letter itself is very readable. Do people actually understand the risks and how the price can be manipulated via pump and dumps?
Bitcoin broker Coinbase booked $1 billion in revenue last year — so the company has told hovering VCs to back off – over $1 billion in revenue, valuation likely doubled, probably the most used broker for Bitcoin tranactions.
Coinbase makes money not on bitcoin’s price but on the volume of trades — charging both the buyer and seller usually a fee between 0.25 percent and 1 percent of the total transaction size through the site. The company serves as both an exchange and a broker of deals, though it does not serve as a market maker that holds bitcoin.
Bitcoin May Split 50 Times in 2018 as Forking Craze Accelerates – “Some 19 Bitcoin forks came out last year – but up to 50 more could happen this year.” Forks are easier to do than an ICO for sure.
In a country known for its “bitcoin zombies,” one-third of workers are crypto investors – more than a third of salaried South Koreans have invested in cryptocurrencies. 80% of respondents (from 941 sample size), are in their 20s and 30s, and “more than 80% made money from it, and about 20% made an average return of 425% on their investment, according to the survey. The average Korean investor owned some 5.66 million won ($5,260) in virtual currencies.”
Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum – read the paper.
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