Issue #5 – January 21st

Hello everyone!

After two weeks, it’s time for an update again! It is always good to start the new year with a decent amount of self-reflection. Just as Jamie Dimon did, when he conveyed his regret over calling Bitcoin a fraud. Well done Jamie — you stepped out to this year with the right foot! In general, a lot has been going on in crypto and the alts, but in my opinion, the intensity of events in the BTC world outpaced all the other coins. See for yourself.

Bitcoin:

– Bitcoin’s future, with advancements of the Lightning network, seems to be brighter than ever! So once again, why is LN so important?
– Moreover, the mempool is clearing, fees are dropping down, and Coinbase finally implemented batching and enabled Segwit.
– Some of the Core devs also published a paper elaborating implementation of the Schnorr signatures into the Bitcoin protocol – enhancing privacy and scalability at the same time.
– Gregory Maxwell, Bitcoin Core’s dev, left his engagement at Blockstream to focus solely on development of BTC.
– The same company, Blockstream, also launched Lightning Charge — a micropayment processing system that will make it simpler for developers to build apps on top of the Lightning Network.
– Some BTC folks got excited about NiPoPoW – “Non-Interactive Proofs of Proofs of Work”.
– KFC Canada started to accept bitcoins too!
– Beautiful overview of the organic development of not only the Bitcoin ecosystem — demonstrated by many kinds of data.
– A serious vulnerability was discovered in the Electrum wallet, a software considered to be one of the safest one to interact with Bitcoin network.
– The Bitfury group unveiled new solution for forensic analysis on the Bitcoin network.
– Nice explanation of the cryptographic hash functions used in Bitcoin.
– A new report on Bitcoin and money laundering suggests illicit transactions make up less than 1% of BTC transactions.

Ethereum:

– Vitalik came up with a new model for ICOs – DAICO. He also was a guest on the Unchained podcast.
– Bitmex Research group put together a nice time-line of the all events related to the DAO hack.
– KyberNetwork launched on the Ropsten testnet. They also announced a new partnership with ICON.
–  OmiseGo devs wrote a piece on construction of a Plasma chain – an anticipated Ethereum scaling solution. Somebody else wrote then nice overview of the whole OmiseGo project.
– If you are a developer, you may find it useful to read what obstacles you might face while developing ETH-related apps.

Altcoins:

– France declared war to cryptocurrencies!
– Kodak has learnt a lesson from the past, and plans to release a coin to catch up with the blockchain industry.
– Binance, one of the largest altcoin exchanges, saw an exponential growth in the past days.
– The team behind one of the most decent altcoins out there, Basic Attention Token, decided to gave away a good bunch coins to the users of their Brave browser.
– Bancor, one of the most prominent ICOs from the past year, partnered once again with TAAS in order to create a TAAS/BNT Token relay.
– Brendan Bernstein of Tetras Capital Partners wrote a nice piece on investing in alts.
– Have you heard of EOS? It’s been in TOP 10 coins for some time already – let’s look what is under the hood there.
– As you may have noticed, it is trendy for an altcoin exchange to launch their own token, but what is the reason behind it?
– An interesting piece contemplating insider trading at Coinbase, related to Litecoin.

ICOs:

– Telegram plans to do a robust ICO soon, even though they received lots of critique regarding their supposedly leaked white paper, some folks in the industry don’t hide their excitement about it.
–  Overview of seven platforms that facilitate ICOs.

Blockchain & Tech:

– Overview of the ways blockchain tech is utilized in the corporate environment.
– Folks at Blockgeeks put together all the potential attack vectors that cryptocurrencies face today.
– Mike Novogratz came with a new plan, after scrapping the idea of setting up a crypto fund.

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