Ethereum Upgrade Delayed / BitPay Integrates StableCoins

CrowdConscious

Published in

The Cryptoverse

7 min readOct 16, 2018

Chris Coney’s ‘The Cryptoverse’ crypto podcast curation by CrowdConscious.

On Today’s Episode of The Cryptoverse…

Here are Chris’ top 5 crypto news stories of the day including the ability to send and receive crypto using only SMS, a delay in an upgrade to the ethereum mainnet, a chart of the day and some graphs showing the number of ICOs increasing while the amount of money being invested is decreasing.

Please feel free to provide feedback in the comments or clap for/share the article if you found it insightful or have suggestions on how to improve the news coverage.

Enjoy!

Watch The Cryptoverse right here in the article!

Episode Transcript, Notes & Links

CoinText just added the ability to settle BitPay invoices by SMS

I know there are a lot of Bitcoin Cash haters out there, but if I find something innovative that pushes crypto forward I have to give credit to it.

https://cointext.io/en/

CoinText is exactly what it sounds like, a service where you can send, receive and store Bitcoin Cash with just SMS.

And it works in all these countries so far including all of Europe, Australia, Hong Kong, South Africa, all of North America and Mexico plus Chile and Argentina.

These are the 3 basic commands: Balance, Receive, Send.

You can send to either a phone number or a Bitcoin Cash address.

If you send to someones phone number a Bitcoin Cash wallet is automatically created for them to interactive with via SMS.

Now they have launched a buy command

Where all you do is text the word ‘Buy’ and then paste in the URL given to you by BitPay at the checkout and that’s it.

This may seem simple on the surface, but to my mind this has enormous potential for crypto adoption.

I say that because ALL the infrastructure is already there and requires ZERO effort on the users part.

If we want people to adopt crypto there needs to be little to no friction. At least less friction than they experience from the existing banking system.

But even thinking like that may be falling into the same old trap of only focusing on getting people to switch from the old banking system.

What about the Venezuelans?

What about any community around the world that has a no Internet but has cellphone reception?

Can you tell me a service better than this?

Say you’re at a meetup talking to someone about crypto and you want to get them started.

All you need is their phone number, and you can text them some Bitcoin Cash.

They can then turn around and do the same for someone else. And on and on it goes.

Now yes, this is somewhat of a trusted system since CoinText are generating your Bitcoin Cash wallet and hosting your private key.

But that’s OK as long as you know that.

And also that is required in order to make it this easy.

AND it’s not a problem because you shouldn’t be storing huge amounts of money on your phone anyway.

AND, for those people with no Internet and a cellphone connection, the benefits outweigh the risks. And if they don’t they don’t have to use it.

Oh and one final small detail, it also supports Dash and LiteCoin, just thought I would mention that :).

And to complete the one two punch for BitPay….

BitPay Introduces Stable Coin Settlements in Gemini Dollars and Circle USD Coin

https://blog.bitpay.com/stable-coin-settlement/

This is a brilliant move in my view, and one I am extremely happy about given my recent comments about a crypto based forex market.

But more than that though, this overcomes a huge objection from merchants as to:

(a) why they don’t want to accept crypto as payment and

(b) why, when they do accept it as payment they immediately tell it for fiat currency.

To my mind, getting them to keep the value in the crypto economy, even if it’s in a stablecoin for the time being is a sign of progress.

It’s one step towards making centralised exchanges and fiat gateways redundant.

I mean imagine if we got to a situation where stablecoins like Gemini and Circle dollars were technically backed by USD dollars in a bank account, but no one ever redeemed them.

At that point we could consider the stablecoins to retain the value purely by the market having confidence in them… which is the only reason fiat dollars have value anyway.

The only problem I have with this news is that BitPay are offering settlement in Gemini and Circle Dollars. Not the ideal choice for me.

I keep banging on about free market stablecoins like DAI, bitUSD and Kowala dollars which don’t have the centralisation risk like Gemini dollars do.

Remember that as stated in the whitepaper, the code for the Gemini dollar token allows them to be frozen and transactions stopped, which I believe is a feature required by Gemini’s regulators.

Having decentralised exchanges with free market stablecoins like DAI, bitUSD and Kowala is the ultimate endgame which I’m pleased to see we are taking small and gradual steps towards.

Part 1 of Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrade is now up and running on the ropsten testnet

https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-next-blockchain-upgrade-faces-delay-after-testing-failure/

There was a couple of hiccups which probably means a delay in deploying this upgrade to the mainnet.

To quote Ethereum developer Lane Rettig:

“We should take our time to understand what went wrong and how to avoid issues like this in the future — not just the low-level code issue but all of the related issues (the mining issue, communication issues over the weekend, how it wasn’t caught by the tests, etc.) There’s a lot of forensics still to be done.”

One unfortunate thing that happened was ethereum reached the target block number slight ahead of schedule, which meant the hard fork happened on a weekend when many developers were not paying attention.

Blockchains can’t really tell the time, they go by block numbers which are each supposed to be a certain time apart.

However, because a block can be found slightly sooner or later than the target block time, timing calculations can be off.

I don’t think that’s anyone’s fault really.

I do feel for the Ethereum developers though.

On one hand they are being good stewards by taking the time to analyse the problem on the testnet before thinking about rolling it out on the mainnet…

However, at the same time, Ethereum has a dozen or so other projects trying to take the crown.

At the end of the day my goal is to focus on useful stuff that is being built on these platforms, rather than the platforms themselves.

The number of ICOs being launched has continued to increase in 2018 while the total amount raised has declined

https://cointelegraph.com/news/september-ico-market-overview-trends-capitalization-localization

This is according to research from ICO bench and reported by cointelegraph.

So here is a graph that charts September 2017 to September 2018.

The total amount of funds raised each month is the orange line and is measured by the left scale…

And the number of ICOs is the white line and is measured by the right scale.

This, at a glance gives you a clear insight into how things have changed.

The number of ICOs peaked in June 2018 at near the 300 mark as the total amount raised continues on a downtrend.

So the amount of competition for investors money has been increasing while the pool of investment money has been shrinking.

If you want a shocking statistic, here you go.

The good news for Ethereum is that it remains the kind of token platforms.

There are more charts and data in this article if you care to dig into it, but I’m just going to remind you again…

The Truth About ICOs in 2019 and Beyond (DEEP DIVE)

If you haven’t yet watched my video called The Truth About ICOs in 2019 and Beyond (DEEP DIVE)… please do so because I believe it provides a perspective which will help you understand the problem with the entire ICO market.

Chart of the day

BTCUSD

After the flash rally yesterday Bitcoin is still trading at a premium on Bitfinex vs Bitstamp or Coinbase.

A $300 premium actually.

Something I missed in report yesterday was that there was a fake screenshot going around which looked like a Binance support article announcing they were de-listing Tether.

The first thing I did when I saw that was go to the Binance support website and try and find it, but it was nowhere to be seen.

Anyone who reacted to that fake image should have done the same, but instead a ton of people just acted.

If they go broke, it will have a lot more to do with that lack of self control than any volatility in the crypto markets.

That’s why I keep encouraging everyone to step up their meditation game.

●▬ Recent Episodes From The Cryptoverse▬▬▬▬▬●