Vitalik vs. CoinDesk

Daily Bit

I was going to publish my treatise on “Editors & Curators” today as a follow-up to my Monday post, but it keeps evolving. So I’m going to sit on it and polish over the weekend, and it will be my sign-off for the thirty day Daily Bit experiment.

(Great success! We’ll be back after Consensus.)

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One reason I’m pushing back the post is that I got pretty triggered today in defense of my former colleagues at CoinDesk, who were shit on hard by one of the industry’s top influencers.

Vitalik was wrong in his critique of the editorial team, showed an atypical lack of awareness about the state of content/media, and came across as petty. For someone I’ve admired for precocious maturity, humility, and patience, the spat was surprising.

CoinDesk is tough for me to speak about candidly and with full disclaimers for legal reasons, but suffice it to say that I know what the editorial team there does on a daily basis, and I know the ethics of the team in place. I also know the challenges modern media companies face.

Truth is rarely rewarded the same way as economic opportunism. And when it comes to crypto media, the standards for journalists are impossibly high, while they get paid like shit.

For $100 million dollar men to criticize those that stayed true to their calling and wrote about this industry unconflicted for peanuts during a 100x+ cycle since 2014 — all while the broader media complex (their safety net) disintegrates is a special kind of oblivious.

I’d chalk it up to stress or a mistake, but I don’t see Vitalik backing off anytime soon, now that he’s retweeting half-truths from Tim Swanson.

I could either get mad and retort, or regroup and explain. I’m trying to choose the latter from now on, which is what my upcoming post is about, anyway.

Monday.™

-TBI

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I Like Pictures

Yesterday I talked about the hype around EOS. Whether they dethrone Ethereum or not, there are certainly a lot of (GitHub) eyes on the project.

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Red Pillz

The volunteer army at Messari is building a free, open-source library that anyone can use as a resource, so you can go down the crypto rabbit hole a bit more efficiently.

Before you dive into today’s profile take a second to read our previous reports on Aragon and Filecoin. District0x is building a platform for the creation of decentralized marketplaces called districts. Think Craigslist, but with the users in control of how the platform is run. The project uses Aragon to create business entities and provide governance while IPFS is used for storage.

Check out the first two districts Ethlance and Name Bazaar to see where things are headed.

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TBI’s Compression Algorithm

Designated special economic zone in the Philippines for Crypto companies. Governments and regulators around the world, especially Asia, have tried to reign the boom of cryptocurrency trading. In an announcement yesterday, the Philippine government said it will allow 10 crypto firms to operate in a designated “economic zone” with tax breaks, as long as they can generate local employment, pay $100,000 in licensing fees, and invest at least $1 million over two years in local development. The 10 companies include platform and exchanges from Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and South Korea, and will be allowed to mine, launch token sales, and act as exchanges. The exchange of fiat money into virtual currency and vice versa, however, will be done offshore to avoid infringing on Philippine regulations. (Reuters)

Gemini welcomes market surveillance in its latest partnership with Nasdaq. U.S.-based Gemini hired Nasdaq to conduct market surveillance for Bitcoin and Ether trading on its platform by utilizing its SMART surveillance system to prevent potentially abusive or disorderly trading. In addition, Nasdaq also will surveil activity across the Gemini auction process that is used to determine the settlement price for the Bitcoin XBT futures contracts that trade on CBOE’s CFE Exchange. This move comes at a time when U.S. regulators are paying increasing attention to the transparency (or lack of) into the operation of cryptocurrency exchanges. Gemini’s latest move is a stark contrast to its rival Kracken, who has come out strongly against providing any transparency into its exchange policies, saying that most crypto traders do not care about market manipulation. (Bloomberg | Nasdaq)

Wall Street Journal’s Crypto Crime reporting. WSJ seems to think that we have entered into a new wave of crypto-crime. Newsflash: crime is not a new trend. (WSJ)

Quick Bits (Don’t read that, I read it for you)

Choke Points
+ OKex, Poloniex, and several exchanges suspend ERC-20 tokens deposits due to a smart contract bug known as “BatchOverFlow”, which allows attackers to create unlimited amounts of a number of different tokens.
+ Following India’s central bank ban on financial institution services to crypto exchanges, India-based Zebpa has introduced crypto-to-crypto trading on its platform.

Startup Signals
+ Blockstack has partnered up with ShapeShift to offer a $50,000 bounty to the developer who can best build an open-sourced universal crypto wallet.
The Aion Network, which seeks to set up protocols for a set of interconnected blockchains, launched its network this week.
+ Templum completes a $10 million round of financing, with a stake from SBI Holdings.

BigCo Noise
+ German bank VPE WertpapierhandelsBank AG (VPE) has partnered with Berlin-based solarisBank to launch a cryptocurrency trading service for institutional investors, becoming the first bank in Germany to offer crypto trading services.
+ Spanish bank Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) becomes the first global bank to conduct the entire loan process using Blockchain technology.

The Powers That Be
+ Several bitcoin miners and more than 600 mining computers were arrested in two different Chinese cities for bypassing electricity meters and stealing from local power grids.
+ Earlier this week, the Cabinet of Malta approved the Virtual Financial Assets Bill that provides a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings. The bill will now be debated before passed into law.

“Celebrities”
+ The 17 millionth bitcoin was mined earlier today, marking 80% of the total Bitcoin supply mined. How far we’ve come since Satoshi mined the first block in 2009.

Did I miss something big?

Send me the link, your twitter handle and your best imitation compression algorithm write up. If I really whiffed, I’ll include your bit tomorrow (with attribution).

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Shameless Plugs

Hit me up when I’m in your city!

Upcoming Travel:
+ Boston (4/25–4/27 — Pillar VC’s Unchained)
+ SF (5/1–5/3 — private event)
+ NYC (5/10–5/17 — Fluidity, Ethereal, Consensus, Token Summit)
+ Asia (Japan, Korea, Hong Kong early through mid-June)

My company, Messari, is hiring:
+ Front-end developer, Full-stack engineer, Data engineers, Blockchain engineers (TCR!)
+ Volunteer analysts and summer interns
+ Content curation lead (compression algo tinkerer)

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