Issue #4 – January 8th

Happy New Year! Hope you will have a great one!

The Christmas time is over so finally we all can relieve and feel less guilty when spending time on crypto, and not with our families, right? Just kidding – I knew you guys did not feel any guilt. But in case, you really spent time with your loved ones and neglected crypto, you certainly want to catch up. So let’s roll! Here are the theses for 2018!

Bitcoin:

– If you didn’t know, Santa brought us some new Bitcoin forks, some of them you can already redeem on exchanges, see how.
– Segwit2x revived, but with different team and smelling fishy.
– Merrill Lynch is blocking their clients from trading bitcoin-related investments.
– Rootstock network launched their Beta, thus Ethereum-like smart contracts might be soon on Bitcoin too!
– Peter Thiel has been investing heavily into Bitcoin in the past months.
– Increasing Segwit adoption slowly drops the transaction fees.
– Jimmy Song is crafting a new open source book on programming BTC.
– Egypt announced the prohibition of Bitcoin transactions
– There is an ongoing discussion on the further development of the BTC protocol – Schnorr signatures are planned for the future – but what is it?
– Now you can practice trading with BTC futures via simulator launched by CME.
– Wikipedia published their annual chart of top 50 searched words in 2017 – guess what number belongs to Bitcoin?

Ethereum:

– Vitalik tackles questions on Sharding on Reddit. An overview of Sharding you can find here.
– Casper Alpha launched – here you can find testnet instructions.
– Also, a new Dapp browser called Toshi was launched by Coinbase. Check it out, it’s very interesting!
– In 2017 we could catch a glimpse of what’s coming in the future – digibles!
– What is an ERC721 standard? PS: Used by Cryptokitties.
– Now you can learn to code ETH Dapps via interaction with Zombies.

Altcoins:

– Blockstream’s Andres Poelstra explains Mimblewimble – one of the most awaited developments in the crypto space.
– Goldman Sachs will offer crypto trading for their clients!
– As it turns out, it won’t be so serious with Verge’s privacy after all.
– Detailed analysis of two very ambitious projects built on ETH – Request Network and OmiseGo.
– Cardano had a decent pump, and many ask how it works and how it compares to NEO or Ethereum – here you go!
– Maidsafe launched their Alpha 2. Here is a walk-through.
– And another analysis, this time how IOTA compares against RaiBlocks!
– Venezuela plans to start their own coin!
– Dogecoin reached the market cap of 1 billion dollars. Don’t worry I can’t believe that either.
– If you think, that the crypto bubble is about to burst – worry not – big investors are coming!
ICOs:
– ICOs have become already an established phenomenon – look on the review not only the past year, but also the years before.
 New, unusual way of doing an ICO.

Blockchain & Tech:

– Bulletproofs are the new black in crypto!
– Shocking revelation of a hardware bug that affects most of the devices on the planet! As long as you have HW wallet for your crypto, you can stay calm!
– Brazilian government plans to move its operations on the blockchain!
– VISA pressures WaveCrest, a debit card issuer, to close all prepaid crypto debit cards.
– So what are the most exciting blockchain technologies for 2018?
– Erik Vorhees has become one of the top crypto influencers, according to Coindesk.
– Very technical article on consensus mechanism as seen in Rchain.

I will be always happy to read your feedback, and suggestions on possible topics to include to the newsletter. If you would like to share some with me, please do so at stancel@blockchainslovakia.sk.

In case you want to show me some crypto love:

BTC: 3M5bzL8GDhDJoJ2RoRFcza917L1tEcPp3P
ETH: 0x62cE83a2C24686957d769bFd940B69ff568E760A
LTC: MVrjVKmQ5sGoMHJ1Np8Q2YEqWMCqkuu1yz
PIVX: DMJxf4ce3Le4qUyDVSA5TS2CRwFuatec75
DASH: XpQCnerF4wq1fQk9FVCjKE22juyYgqUMUo