Ethereum Hardfork Next Week / First National Cryptocurrency

CrowdConscious

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The Cryptoverse

5 min readOct 5, 2018

Chris Coney’s ‘The Cryptoverse’ Curation by CrowdConscious.

On Today’s Episode of The Cryptoverse…

Chris goes over the Top 7 stories of the day, including the news about Venezuela’s Pero Dollar. Other stories include:

Poloniex cutting off margin trading to US customers,
Bitcoin lightning network startup ACINQ $1.7m raise,
Gemini Exchange’s Insurance coverage for digital assets,
ethereum’s Constantinople Hard Fork hitting testnet next week,
Coinbase’s continued addition of 25,000 customers/day despite bear market,

We hope you enjoy this episode of The Cryptoverse and that this style of content curation through Medium is something new to you. Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments.

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Episode Transcript, Notes & Links

Slow and Steady On The Markets Today

I’d call it a small green day with single digit gains across the board with the outlier being Siacoin up 17%.

There is some news going around about Siacoin doing a hardfork to make their blockchain resistant to ASIC mining machines so perhaps that’s got something to do with it.

The Poloniex Crypto Exchange Have Announced They Are Going To Remove Lending And Margin Trading For US Customers

https://blog.circle.com/2018/10/03/poloniex-to-remove-margin-and-lending-products-for-us-based-customers/

They say in the article posted on Circle’s blog they aim to do this by the end of the year.

They say they are doing this to ‘professionalise’ Poloniex but later say they are making sure they stay within the regulations.

The fact that they are withdrawing this service from the US specifically shows the sad state of affairs.

I haven’t used this service myself in a long time but I was quite fond of lending out my Bitcoin for daily interest payments, it got less and less profitable over time.

Acinq, Bitcoin Startup, Raises $1.7 Million to Double Down on Lightning Network Development

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-acinq-raises-1-7-million-lightning/

Acinq is a French company and one of three major software developers working on wallets and protocol development of the Bitcoin Lightning network which will enable off-chain instant payments for almost no fees.

A $1.7m investment is relatively small, however given that Acinq have manage to get this far with a team of just three people, it’s a reasonable amount.

While I personally am yet to see a business model for them, it’s most likely the common speculative punt Venture Capitalists make.

Investing is tech startups is kind of like roulette, you spread your chips all over the board and if you get a winner, you make a profit overall.

The Eclair lightning wallet is already available on Android if you want to download it but as an iPhone user I am still waiting.

You can however download the Zap desktop wallet which is a product of Lightning Labs.

I’ll put a link to that in the video description if you want to download it:

https://github.com/LN-Zap/zap-desktop/releases

Venezuela Makes History As President Maduro goes on TV and announces that the Petro Is To Official Become A National Currency

https://news.bitcoin.com/venezuela-petro-new-whitepaper/

The Petro was launched as a cryptocurrency backed by Venezuela’s oil reserves but is now also going to be backed by other natural resources in the country such as Gold, Diamond, Iron and Aluminum.

A new whitepaper has been released right along with this announcement.

All Venezuelans will now be allowed to purchase the Petro with Bolivars and use it to make international payments.

Here’s a shocking quote from the TV report, President Maduro said:

“Petro coins are now a legal substitute to dollars in real estate deals as well as paying for goods such as airline tickets, hotels and the like.”

It’s good to see the first ever national cryptocurrency but in my view, as long as the government continues it’s socialist policies such as price fixing, their crisis will continue to march forward.

The Petro is a strategy to get around trade sanctions by the looks of it.

Gemini Exchange Secures Insurance Coverage for Digital Assets

https://bitsonline.com/gemini-exchange-secures-insurance/

To me this headline is more important than meets the eye.

It means that financial institutions are now seeing the risk of being involved in cryptocurrencies as acceptable. Insurance is basically the business of pricing risk.

So Gemini is taking out insurance with Aon PLC to protect it’s digital wallet holdings from security breaches or employee theft.

It does not however protect against unauthorised access to your Gemini account. That means if your computer gets infected with a virus and a hacker remote controls your computer to log into your Gemini account and steal money, you’re on your own.

So ultimate security is still down to you.

Quick Reminder — Ethereum’s Constantinople Hard Fork Hits the Testnet Next Week

https://nulltx.com/ethereums-constantinople-hard-fork-hits-the-testnet-next-week/

There’s still no official date for this being rolled out to the main net, that will largely depend on how testing goes.

This will take Ethereum another step towards increasing it’s network capacity as it’s a preparation for technologies such as Proof of Stake and Sharing.

The mining reward is also due to be cut from 3 Ether per block to 2 as we have discussed in previous videos.

Stay tuned for more on this story as it develops.

Despite The Ongoing Bear Market Coinbase Continues To Add 25,000 New Customers Per Day

https://bitsonline.com/coinbase-25-million-users/

According to data from Altana Digital Currency Fund, Coinbase now has more than 25m customers.

What’s interesting is that it’s now impossible each of Coinbase’s customers to own 1 BTC each, because there simply isn’t enough supply either today or ever since 21m is the maximum supply of BTC.

The opportunity to join the ‘21m club’ will become less and less since Coinbase are going to continue to sign up tens of thousands of users per day.

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