On Sunday, Matthew Mellon flew in a private jet to Cancun, Mexico, intending to check into a rehabilitation clinic. But the 54-year-old banking heir, who had been battling an addiction to opioid pills, never made it to the treatment facility.

“He never checked in,” says Alberto Sola, medical director of Clear Sky Recovery, a rehab clinic in Cancun. “He was supposed to check in to the clinic on Monday morning. Then Monday morning they told us he had died.”


In addition to leaving behind three children, Mellon’s death raises many unanswered questions, including what will happen to the estimated $500 million of XRP digital currency he owned. Mellon’s XRP had been worth well over $1 billion earlier in 2018 and he told Forbes in March he had been adding to the position as the price of the cryptocurrency plunged.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2018/04/19/the-last-days-of-banking-heir-matthew-mellon/#dea8f065d528

Any computer system wants to be free from the possibility of hacker attacks, especially if the service is related to money.

So, the main problem is: proof of stake is safer than proof of work?

Experts are worried about it, and there are several skeptics in the community.

Using a Proof-of-Work system, bad actors are cut out thanks to technological and economic disincentives.

In fact, programming an attack to a PoW network is very expensive, and you would need more money than you can be able to steal.

Instead, the underlying PoS algorithm must be as bulletproof as possible because, without especially penalties, a proof of stake-based network could be cheaper to attack.

To solve this issue, Buterin created the Casper protocol, designing an algorithm that can use the set some circumstances under which a bad validator might lose their deposit.

He explained: “Economic finality is accomplished in Casper by requiring validators to submit deposits to participate, and taking away their deposits if the protocol determines that they acted in some way that violates some set of rules (‘slashing conditions’).”

Slashing conditions refer to the circumstances above or laws that a user is not supposed to break.

Cryptocurrencies stopped growing because of the loss of volume that occur in daily transactions.

That means that people are trading less - Not so many people are buying and not so many people are selling.

Let’s take for example Ether, which surpassed $1 bln in daily volume at its peak in december in comparrison with $100 mln as of today 05.03.2018.

That could be a problem, imagine if something bad happens like Tether gets ceased by the SEC, the selling volume will surpass the buying volume by far, taking the prices in a downward spiral to hell.

In order for cryptocurrencies to start growing again, institutional money need to enter the market making the prices soar - That would increase the volume, making the big players re-enter the market followed by the new wave of adopters.

The next wave of news will either make or break them - A series of really good news are needed in order to make the market grow and only one bad thing to happen is needed to create panic followed by a selling spree.

Until now i have read only good news about them with more and more people, companies and even countries starting to embrace them.

The things happening with bitcoin are disappointing in away ...

On Thursday, the price of Bitcoin fluctuated by thousands of dollars in a 24-hour period. The Coinbase app — which lets you buy and sell cryptocurrencies, and is the number two free app in the App Store as of this writing — started freezing and throwing errors, which the company said was due to high traffic. At one point, I tested the app by trying to sell some of my (very small) amount of Bitcoin, and the app simply buckled. “Bitcoin sales are temporarily disabled,” it said in an error message.

This is not how Bitcoin was supposed to work.

In fact, most of the current Bitcoin economy, worth around $276 billion at the time of writing, is antithetical to the premise of Bitcoin.

Macallan Rare Cask

Let’s go back to the beginning of Bitcoin. The first stop for anyone seriously interested in Bitcoin is the Bitcoin white paper: the canonical document written by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2008. “I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Nakamoto wrote when he posted the proposal to a cryptocurrency mailing list. This sentence describes everything Bitcoin was intended to be, and the qualities that first got people excited about it, the key terms being “cash,” “peer-to-peer,” and “no trusted third party.”

Bitcoin, at its core, was supposed to be a way to pay for goods and services online — in Nakamoto’s words, Bitcoin would replace existing systems for “commerce on the internet.” In the early days of Bitcoin, evangelists tried to use it for everything, including salaries, pizza, and Bitcoin swag. This was in the spirit of Nakamoto’s proposal, but the network effects were not there. There simply weren’t enough merchants accepting Bitcoin, or enough customers holding the currency.

    “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.”
    — the Bitcoin white paper, 2008

This led to the rise of startups like BitPay, which facilitated Bitcoin payment for merchants like Microsoft and Overstock. BitPay was part of the early crop of Bitcoin’s finance industry, and while it and similar startups increased the usefulness of Bitcoin, they represented the sort of middleman Bitcoin was supposed to disintermediate.

After nearly nine years in existence, the closest thing to the kind of Bitcoin-powered payments Nakamoto envisioned is on dark-web markets: the websites like Valhalla or the now-defunct Silk Road that can only be accessed through the anonymizing network Tor. Bitcoin is the default currency on the dark web — but the speculators driving the current bubble are making it difficult to use Bitcoin for actual transactions. “I respectfully disagree Bitcoin,” one buyer commented on the dark-web subreddit. “Went to do a direct deal today with a vendor, realized my $250 purchase would end up costing me $315 or so with fees and would still take probably 24 hours to get to him.” “I personally think there needs to be a grand movement on markets and vendors... to move to an alternative crypto, one that is not so god damn volatile and that can actually be viable,” wrote another.

What about Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer network with no trusted third parties? “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without the burdens of going through a financial institution,” the Nakamoto wrote. This system very quickly fell apart.

In theory, you should be able to get your hands on Bitcoin without having to trade it for any real- world currency or interact with any financial institution. The function of the financial institutions is replaced by elegant cryptography and the distributed network of Bitcoin users’ computers. All you need to acquire Bitcoin is a computer connected to the internet. You download the Bitcoin client and either have someone send you Bitcoin in exchange for a good or service, or use your computer’s processing power to maintain the network and get rewarded in Bitcoin. Once you have Bitcoin, you can use the same tools to store and spend it.

But only the earliest, most dedicated Bitcoin users adopted this system; almost immediately, middlemen starting showing up. In October 2009, New Liberty Standard published a Bitcoin exchange rate based on the cost of electricity for a computer to mine Bitcoin, which established that one U.S. dollar was worth 1,309.03 BTC. In February 2010, The Bitcoin Market, the first of many Bitcoin exchanges, popped up. The notorious Mt. Gox exchange was established later that year. Even the dark-web markets, home to the purest use of Bitcoin, were middlemen, delivering messages between buyers and sellers and serving as an escrow service.

Bitcoin was designed so that users had to take care of their private cryptographic keys for every address they used, and Nakamoto advised making a new address for every transaction. This proved too confusing and burdensome, so along came wallet services, which stored users’ Bitcoins like a bank account and substituted a password for the private key. (The first wallet I used was MyBitcoin.com. It was “hacked” and I lost half my Bitcoins.) There are many, many other types of middlemen in the Bitcoin system now, including sellers of Bitcoin-specific hardware and server farms that have monopolized the creation of new Bitcoins.
The price of Bitcoin increased by thousands of dollars in one week.

The price of Bitcoin increased by thousands of dollars in one week. Coinbase

The existence of these middlemen also obviates another one of Bitcoin’s features: privacy. Middlemen like Coinbase are bound by know-your-customer laws and collect extensive information on their users.

The Bitcoin network is still technically peer-to-peer, but with so many middlemen, it might as well not be. This is not entirely the fault of the greedy middlemen; Bitcoin is simply too intimidating for most non-programmers to use without the help of apps like Coinbase.

Back to the current bubble. Remember how Coinbase, the San Francisco-based startup which raised more than $200 million in venture capital, put a freeze on my money? Whether it was out of incompetence or an attempt to save itself from selling at an inflated price (at one point, the price of Bitcoin was $3,000 higher on Coinbase than on other exchanges), this was exactly the kind of thing Bitcoin was supposed to prevent.

Bitcoin was supposed to disintermediate the finance industry — the system of banks and middlemen and transaction fees in which a single entity can hold your money hostage. Instead, it replicated this system and made it worse. Ordinary users all trust third parties to verify transactions and hold their money. The price is so volatile that no one wants to use Bitcoin for payments. And thanks to the current bubble, the electricity required to maintain the Bitcoin network is skyrocketing.

“Bitcoin was supposed to demonstrate the power of a true free market,” the developer Adam Chalmers tweeted on Wednesday afternoon, when the average price of Bitcoin was around $13,000. “Instead it's full of scams, rent-seekers, theft, useless for real purchases and accelerates climate change. Mission accomplished.”
A screenshot of the Coinbase app as it displayed an error: “Bitcoin sales are temporarily disabled.”

A screenshot of the Coinbase app as it displayed an error: “Bitcoin sales are temporarily disabled.” Adrjeffries / Twitter

When Nakamoto created the first Bitcoins, he included a bit of text: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The line served as a precise way to date the start of the blockchain, but it also seemed to be a reference to the ongoing financial crisis. In his other writings on forums and mailing lists — hundreds of posts before he mysteriously disappeared in April 2011 — Nakamoto expressed anger at the financial system that had precipitated the crisis. “He wanted to create a currency that was impervious to unpredictable monetary policies as well as to the predations of bankers and politicians,” wrote The New Yorker.

Nakamoto was a libertarian who wanted to create a system for payments that would circumvent governments, bankers, and corporations. Instead, Bitcoin is now a get-rich-quick scheme that retains none of the exciting, anarchist features it proposed and has created a secondary economy with financial shenanigans that mirror the ones that led to the global financial crisis. Goldman Sachs says it is “exploring” a Bitcoin trading operation, and on Monday, two finance companies will launch Bitcoin futures contracts so that even more betting on the price can take place. It’s as if we invented the internet and then turned it over to AT&T to operate with switchboards.

In an email to the Metzdowd cryptography mailing list in January 2009, shortly after Bitcoin launched, Nakamoto wrote about his vision for the currency. At first it would start “in a narrow niche like reward points, donation tokens, currency for a game or micropayments for adult sites,” he wrote. “Once it gets bootstrapped, there are so many applications if you could effortlessly pay a few cents to a website as easily as dropping coins in a vending machine.” Instead, it got Wall Streeted.


https://theoutline.com/post/2592/bitcoin-is-none-of-the-things-it-was-supposed-to-be

There is a groing believe that the partnerships published by IOTA are kind of fake !!

https://squawker.org/technology/proof-iota-is-falsifying-partnerships-with-big-tech/

Since November 28, news on thenextweb и Reuters, that IOTA cooperates with Microsoft, Samsung, Cisco, Volkswagen, Fujitsu and many other companies in a two-month project whose goal is to make the data market a truly global and decentralized joint effort.

A few days later the news spreadnumerous media, including CNBC, resulting in an 70% surge occurred on Sunday. Since then, IOTA has been steadily growing.

Everyone was thrilled with the promise that these partnerships could lead to IOTA and decentralization of data in general.

The only problem is whether all of the partnerships are real? Does the IOTA have anything to do with this, or was it a mistake made by the media?

Undoubtedly these companies talk with each other, there is no doubt about it. Microsoft and IOTA are going to meet in Paris 14 December. Fujitsu CEO Dr. Rolf Werner constantly expresses his love and support to the IOTA, but as for the official partnership ...

What about Cisco?

There is no official information, so the representatives of Squawker appealed to them directly. This is their answer:

"Thank you for reaching out to this. I confirmed that your suspicion was correct - Cisco did not unite with IOTA. "

Although both Cisco and IOTA are founding members of the Trusted IoT Alliance (sometimes abbreviated TIOTA). At the same time, this is the only link between the two companies. Squawker turned to Reuters.

- Christine Johansen: PUBLIC RELATIONS MANAGER.IMC

This same lack of official publication exists for Volkswagen. I cannot find anything on their sites and have also reached out for clarification.

Were the announcement of all of these fabricated partnerships part of an engineered pump and dump? Certainly seems like it.

When you have a market cap of just under $10 billion and you see close to $1.5 billion in market volume in one day, that to me raises major red flags.

IOTA’s Vulnerability Issue Discovered by MIT

Then I come across this, tweeted on Dec. 4th by Kyle Samani: cofounder and manager of a cryptocurrency fund called Multicoin Capital:



This is the article in which MIT disclosed IOTA’s vulnerability: Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA, written by Neha Narula: Director, Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab.

It is important to note that the vulnerability they discovered no longer exists in IOTA, however, Neha had this to say:

There are other red flags — unlike every other program running on your laptop or phone, IOTA uses ternary instead of binary. Since all computer hardware today uses binary, IOTA converts to ternary in software, which is less efficient and more complex. This complexity prevents IOTA from benefiting from existing security analysis tools that are designed to work with binary, and makes the code harder to read and understand. Another inefficiency is that transactions in IOTA are 10KB (in contrast, Bitcoin transactions are on average 600B), meaning that this is not well-suited to devices with limited storage, like those used for IoT, one of the developers’ primary use cases. The current IOTA tangle requires a trusted party (the coordinator) for security, suggesting that in its current form it’s not ready to run as a truly permissionless, decentralized system. Others have written about IOTA’s use of a trusted coordinator and asked about the incentive structure — whether users of their system have an incentive to converge the tangle if each acted selfishly.

… the fact that none of IOTA’s partners raised these concerns about a glaring vulnerability in a ~$2B cryptocurrency, or spoke about the other red flags, is worrisome.

Once again IOTA proves that due diligence is vital before making an investment decision.

The Treasury of the UK has announced plans to strongly regulate the transfer of cryptocurrencies with a view to cracking down on money laundering and tax evasion. The regulations have not been stipulated with specificity, but will certainly include anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) details.

The regulation is intended to take force before the end of 2017, or just at the beginning of 2018. The increased regulations, in line with the directives in the EU, are intended to limit the amount of anonymity possible for cryptocurrency traders. According to John Mann, one of the Treasury committee:

   

"These new forms of exchange are expanding rapidly and we've got to make sure we don't get left behind - that's particularly important in terms of money-laundering, terrorism or pure theft. I'm not convinced that the regulatory authorities are keeping up to speed. I would be surprised if the committee doesn't have an inquiry next year. It would be timely to have a proper look at what this means. It may be that we want to speed up our use of these kinds of thing in this country, but that makes it all the more important that we don't have a regulatory lag.”

https://cointelegraph.com/news/crackdown-on-bitcoin-in-uk-over-money-laundering-tax-evasion

What does the end of net neutrality mean for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin?

As Marvin Ammori, lawyer for the advocacy group Fight for the Future told Motherboard:

The average person goes to Coinbase to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Litecoin—the average on-ramp is an exchange, and those are easy to block. If Comcast is the monopoly provider in an area, the provider could decide there’s a preferred Bitcoin exchange.

Let’s break this down. From this statement alone — which is strictly hypothetical at this point — we can already spot a mountain of problems for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and countless others.

https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/11/28/the-death-of-net-neutrality-could-be-the-end-of-bitcoin/

Is it a new programming language? and what is it based on ? how is it different ?