Hello everyone!

I wish you a great and successful year ahead! It has been quite some time since the last update. Nothing has happened in crypto in the past three months — said no one ever — so we got a lot to cover! It has been a crazy ride (or fall would be more precise) for all of us I am sure, but if not now when else we have a better opportunity to demonstrate our belief in Satoshi’s vision? See interesting contemplations of Zooko Wilcox on Twitter.

– Year 2018 in Bitcoin by numbers.
– The Bitcoin blockchain can be effectively reached from anywhere in the world, thanks to Blockstream.
– Blockstream also launched Liquid network.
– Now you can order Bitcoin Lightning nodes by Casa – see the review.
– Benefits of Bitcoin being written in C++.
– Recent developments in Neutrino.
– Bitcoin is soon to be on Ethereum blockchain.
– Bakkt ahs been postponed till end of January.
–  Nice dive into identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. But Co-inventor of blockchain begs to disagree.
– “We can do better than Bitcoin”, says Free Software Messiah Richard Stallman.
– Philosophical teachings of Bitcoin.
– The Ultimate Guide to Rootstock.
–  New monitoring tool for the Lightning Network by Bitfury.
– Great contemplation on Post-Bitcoin Maximalism.
– Europol stated bitcoins were not used for funding of any terror attacks.Ethereum: 

– Here you can find all the lectures fomr Devcon4 in Prague.
– And here is one of the best talks from Devcon by Cory Doctorow of Electronic Frontiers Foundation on.
– Also, a great talk from Web3 Summit in Berlin on decentralization in the information age.
– Update from the most active ERC-20 projects
– State of Dapps as of November
– Zcash and Monero turned into Ethereum-based smart contracts?
–  Vlad Zamfir vs Gavin Wood on blockchain governance.
– Moving ERC721 tokens between Ethereum and PlasmaChain.
– Vitalik reflecting on the lessons learned from first 5 years of ETH.
– PlasmaChain announced first external validators.
– Plasma and The Raiden network explained.
– Now you can transfer DAI in a Zcash-like fashion on Ethereum.
– Vlad Zamfir’s piece on Blockchain governance.
– ERC725 Alliance focsued on identity has been launched.
– And identity solutions on Ethereum explained.Altcoins: 

– Deep dive into Zero-Knowledge proofs
– Binance is launching Binancechain with intention to compete with Ethereum.
– Under the hood of Mimble Wimble and both of its implementations – Grin and Beam.
– Both of the implementations work with Dandelion protocol which you can read about here.
– Update from the development activities of Monero, Lisk, Waves, Ziliqa and 0x.
– David Chaum’s talk on “The Decentralized Dream” at Websummit and his new coin.
– Bitcoin Cash is rolling out new checkpoint mechanism.
– Understanding Bitcoin Cash hardfork. And after fork report.
– A brief history and deep dive into Monero
– Facebook has announced new stable coin for Whatsapp!
– Analysis of the ChainLink – the decentralised oracle network.

Blockchain Tech & Trends: 

– Bitwala is live again!
– Best tools for Blockchain developers.
– Advantages of functional languages for blockchain protocols.
– Analyses of the correlations between hashrates and price movements by Ambroid.
– “Blockchain” is a semantic wasteland. What a great piece!
– Security tokens are about the hit the world by storm!
– Andy Warhol’s masterpiece was tokenized and sold on auction.

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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