Lightning Hood Weekly Round-Up For The Past Week In Bitcoin, August 5–11, 2019
Bitcoin and Lightning Network News
Major Headlines
1.) The total computing power now dedicated to securing the bitcoin blockchain has set yet another record. According to data from mining services operator BTC.com, the average bitcoin mining hash rate over the last two weeks has reached 71.43 quintillion hashes per second (EH/s), up from 64.49EH/s on July 23. The threshold was breached as bitcoin adjusted its mining difficulty at block height 586,672 on Monday 2:52 UTC — that is a 6.94EH/s, or 10.78 percent jump since mid July
2.) In a major escalation against socialist president Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump’s administration has frozen all Venezuelan government assets. The United States’ hawkish move has been reflected in a new all-time-high for peer-to-peer trading volume on LocalBitcoins in the country.
3.) Bryan Bishop sent out a design to developers to create “vaults” which are particularly interesting as a bitcoin cold storage security mechanism because they enable a publicly observable delay period during which time a user could be alerted by a “watchtower” that a thief might be in the process of stealing their coins
4.) Coinbase Inc. must face a negligence lawsuit for allegedly botching the launch of its digital currency bitcoin cash, or BCH, through an apparent “incompetence born of haste,” a judge ruled
5.) Blockstream reveals Blockstream Mining and Pool that provides enterprise-class mining equipment colocation in their US & Canada data centers, and the first-ever Better Hash mining pool for a stronger, more decentralized Bitcoin network
6.) Governments of about 15 countries, including Australia, Singapore and the Group of 7 (G7) members, have joined hands to develop a system to fight money laundering in cryptocurrencies
7.) A senior official at China’s central bank announced at the China Finance 40 Group meeting today that the country will soon roll out its central bank digital currency (CBDC.) Mu Changchun, Deputy Chief in the Payment and Settlement Division of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC,) stated that the CBDC prototype exists and the PBOC’s Digital Money Research Group has already fully adopted the blockchain architecture for the currency. China’s CBDC will not rely entirely on a pure blockchain architecture, as this would not allow the currency to achieve the throughput required for retail usage
Community News And Developments
1.) BTC Sessions details how he turned a scam onto the scammer and donated the money to btceven
2.) Blue Wallet gets updated to version 4.2.0 that now allows users to connect to their own full node
3.) Lightning Koala announced that Koala Studio is shutting down and that he will be joining Alto Financial to help build the first US Bitcoin Brokerage with Lightning Network support
4.) Alex Bosworth provides an update on the routing fees his managed to be able to earn over the course of the last year
5.) Bitcoin Magazine switches from Bitpay to OpenNode
6.) The Casa Node gets updated with a variety of changes that address user requests and issues
7.) Rockstar Developer is joining Jack Mallers and the Zap team
8.) Breez Wallet gets updated with a host of new features and bug fixes
9.) Coinkite has created a Lightning Enabled vending machine by utilizing OpenNode as the backend
Research And Thought Pieces
1.) David Molnar in his article analyzes CoinJoins privacy in the perspective of address reuse
2.) Coincenter in their latest article outlines how the IRS’ recent educational letters to cryptocurrency users provides hidden tax guidance
3.) Jake Sylvestre outlines how Bitcoin could be ruined if rehypothecation occurs in Bitcoin
4.) Gigi publishes “Proof of Life,” the first piece of a four-part series on Bitcoin as a living organism
5.) Casa’s latest article details why you should never use your Lightning seed phrase on multiple wallets
6.) Parker Lewis outlines why Bitcoin is not too volatile
Podcasts And Videos
1.) Max Hillebrand, Bitcoin educator and World Crypto Net broadcaster joins Stephan in this newbie episode to talk about good practices with Hardware wallets and what we should think about
2.) Michael Flaxman, Bitcoin Educator and Developer joins Stephan in this episode (part of the SLP Hardware Wallet Interview series) to talk about the current state of Bitcoin Hardware Wallets. This episode covers the differences between some of the current popular Hardware Wallets, and give you a framework on how to think about Hardware Wallet security
Lightning Hood’s Selection For Meme Of The Week
If there are any other major news events or items we may have missed from the week please let us know! You can reach us on twitter @lightning_hood
See you guys next week! Click Here for the Lightning Resources Page.
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