YouTubers Get Hacked / Augur v2 / New Ethereum ASICs Coming

CrowdConscious

Published in

The Cryptoverse

7 min readOct 5, 2018

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

On Today’s Episode of The Cryptoverse…

Chris goes over the Top 10 stories of the day, some of which include:

BlackBerry, the phone company, launches blockchain-based healthcare platform,
1-year anniversary of Bitcoin SegWit,
Augur’s prediction market v2,
Abra’s new token,
UK Land registry begins blockchain research project,
and more!

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

Watch right here in the Medium article!

Episode Transcript, Notes & Links

Any BlackBerry Fans Out There? Well BlackBerry Is Introducing A Blockchain-Backed Healthcare Platform

https://cointelegraph.com/news/blackberry-introduces-blockchain-backed-platform-focused-on-healthcare-services

Leveraging the BlackBerry’s reputation for data security, they are partnering with ONEBIO to develop a system designed to store and share medical data that has been anonymized.

This Cointelegraph article states that BlackBerry reached an all time high of 50% in market share and bottomed out in 2016 at less than 0.1% market share.

Their new BlackBerry Evolve device is set for release on the 10th of October if you’re interested, and no it doesn’t have a physical keyboard by the looks of things.

We Have Just Passed The 1 Year Anniversary Of Bitcoin SegWit

https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018/10/one-year-after-launch-segwit-use-jumps-to-an-all-time-high-of-54/

If you weren’t around when this happened SegWit was an upgrade to the Bitcoin network that was discussed and anticipated for years and finally activated last year.

Because it was a soft fork it means both segwit and non-segwit transactions can still be done on the same network, allowing time for wallets, exchanges, nodes and miners to upgrade their systems in their own time.

Looking at the current data

https://transactionfee.info/charts/payments/segwit

Yesterday we hit 45%, meaning 45% of Bitcoin transactions where in the SegWit format and 55% are still using the old format.

This show how softfork upgrades are so much slower than hardforks, however they carry much lower risk of splitting the network.

Crypto Prediction Market Augur Is Gearing Up for Its First Major Upgrade

https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-prediction-market-augur-is-gearing-up-for-its-first-major-upgrade/

Augur was one of the first major crypto projects from a couple of years ago and it finally launched July 2018.

Peaking at 300 daily users it’s now down below 100 daily users.

This is largely down to the user experience but in my view the Ethereum network being at maximum capacity and the subsequent high fees compound the problem.

I have made several attempts myself to play around with Augur but each time I failed to actually get onto the network.

One major change that got my attention is the introduction of the DAI stablecoin. This is crucial if you are going to lock your money up in a prediction market for weeks or months.

If you hold Augur tokens you will be required to go through a manual process to migrate your tokens to the new contracts once they are deployed.

https://medium.com/@AugurProject/augur-v2-details-2547bbfc3c1f

I searched around for a timescale and found that Augur themselves state on their blog there is no expected timeline for v2 but I figured this story was worth reporting on in case you were losing faith in your Augur investment.

Abra’s new Token Makes Diverisified Crypto Investing a Breeze

https://nulltx.com/abras-new-token-makes-diverisified-crypto-investing-a-breeze/

So basically through the Abra app you purchase this token and the money is then spread across the top 10 cryptocurrencies and then rebalanced every month, simple as that.

However this isn’t necessarily the top 10 cryptocurrencies according to CoinMarketCap. Abra is using the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index fund which supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Stellar, EOS, Dash, Monero, ZCash, LiteCoin and Bitcoin cash.

This mechanism is technically similar to how an ETF works, but the ET in ETF stands for exchange traded, when really it should be ‘regulated’ exchange traded.

So that’s why Abra can’t call it an ETF because the product is not being traded on regulated financial exchanges.

UK Land Registry Begins New Phase of Blockchain Research Project

https://www.coindesk.com/uk-land-registry-begins-new-phase-of-blockchain-research-project/

As you probably well know the process of buying and selling property is so unbelievably slow that blockchain technology offers a real solution to this problem.

The UK Land Registry is going to develop an R3 Corda based blockchain.

The down side of that is they’re developing their own private blockchain, the upside is that Corda is open source, so that’s something.

What if ethereum never switches its core consensus algorithm?

https://www.coindesk.com/a-multi-million-dollar-bet-ethereums-proof-of-stake-isnt-coming-soon/

I mentioned this upcoming Ethereum hardfork as recently as yesterday as being a step of preparation for Ethereum’s move to proof of stake consensus.

While many of us talk about this as a foregone conclusion, it’s such a huge change to the Ethereum network that there is a possibility it might not happen.

And this lady called Chen Min who designs ASIC mining hardware ha so far invested $4m in developing ASIC miners for Ethereum.

If Ethereum does move to proof of stake the entire market for Ethereum mining hardware will disappear, so Chen is placing a risky bet.

So just to be clear, she is developing high performance Ethereum mining hardware to sell as a product. There’s no mention of her building her own farm, although that’s always a possibility.

And if Ethereum does move to proof of stake, Chen says she’ll just change her focus and sell her hardware to Ethereum Classic miners.

A Fourth Court Case Has Just Concluded That In The USA, Cryptocurrencies Are Classed As Commodities

https://news.bitcoin.com/court-cases-cryptocurrencies-commodities/

That means responsibility for regulating them falls under the jurisdiction of the CFTC or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The CFTC is chaired by our old friend Chris Giancarlo.

The latest case concerned ‘My Big Coin’ and whether their conduct was fraudulent. This ruling means the CFTC can now pursue the matter against the coin issuer.

On the one hand this will slow down innovation because small startups will have a lot of fear of falling foul of the law.

Other companies will have the administrative expense of getting legal and accounting advice so they don’t fall foul of the law…

But on the plus side, the level of clarity about exactly what is legal and illegal is increasing, which should give the companies who are compliant the confidence to get on developing their business.

According To Survey Data From Fundstrat 54% of Institutional Players Think Bitcoin Has Bottomed Out

https://cointelegraph.com/news/fundstrat-survey-54-of-institutional-players-think-bitcoin-price-has-already-bottomed

This sounds like good news to me as long as institutions make up the lion’s share of the trading volume, otherwise it matters not.

According to Bloomberg, this is the case since institutions naturally accounts for most Bitcoin trades over $100,000.

YouTube Stars Lose 1500 EOS After Downloading Malicious Wallet in App Store

https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018/10/youtube-stars-lose-1500-eos-after-downloading-malicious-wallet-in-app-store/

The Hodgetwins who have 4m subscribers and are famous for their comedy and fitness video have jumped on the crypto bandwagon without knowing what they are doing and lost about $8,500 of EOS.

They downloaded a wallet called EOSIO Wallet Explorer and say several transactions they did not authorise removed a total of 1,500 EOS.

This article concludes by saying [red]

But I would say more important than that is to be extremely careful where you get your cryptocurrency information from.

Preferably get it from someone with a computer science degree who has run business based on Internet technologies since 2005 and who has never lost any cryptocurrency either from a hack, social engineering or personal mistake.

That’s me, by the way.

Venezuela’s Petro White Paper ‘Blatantly’ Copied Dash, Ethereum Developer Says

https://cointelegraph.com/news/venezuelas-petro-white-paper-blatantly-copied-dash-ethereum-developer-says

We spoke about the updated Petro yesterday, well here’s more on that.

According to Ethereum core developer Joey Zhou, allow me to quote his tweet:

https://twitter.com/josephzhou/status/1047222363425787904

There are several spooky similarities with Dash including a masternode infrastructure, the X11 mining algorithm and instantsend.

This is no surprise given that Venezuela is the 2nd largest market for Dash and that around 100 new businesses start accepting Dash each week as the national currency hyperinflates.

President Maduro has no doubt become aware of Dash’s efforts to penetrate the Venezuelan market is pulling a classic Chinese knock off strategy, which in my view will ultimately fail.

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