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Will Proof-Of-Stake Go out of Fashion?

Almost every innovation in the field of cryptocurrencies was made to solve numerous Bitcoin’s flaws. Curiously enough, every implementation of such innovative solutions ended up as a side project, while Bitcoin continues to dominate the market.
PoS (Proof-of-Stake) is one such innovation, developed to improve on Bitcoin’s insanely expensive algorithm of consensus. Some view it as the inevitable evolutionary step, others believe it can never be as reliable and secure as PoW. In this article, we will explore the pros and cons of PoS and present some expert opinions.
Why PoS?
PoW’s problems became apparent to some members of the community even before they fully manifested themselves. Proof-of-stake was conceptually developed as early as 2011. The principle of operation of this alternative consensus algorithm is to use blockchain’s internal resource (coins locked in the wallet) instead of consuming an external resource (electricity and computing power).
One of the problem


The computer processing power of the bitcoin network is growing again – albeit slowly – as major Chinese miner manufacturers gradually resume business after the coronavirus outbreak delayed shipments.

The average hashing power on bitcoin (BTC) over the past seven days has reached a new high of around 117.5 exahashes per second (EH/s), up 5.4 percent from where it stagnated for a month beginning Jan. 28, according to data from PoolIn, which, along side with F2pool, are currently the two largest bitcoin mining pools.

Data from BTC.com further estimates bitcoin's mining difficulty, a measure of competitiveness in the field, will increase by 2.15 percent when it adjusts itself in about five days thanks to the increased hashing power in the current period.

The growth comes as major Chinese miner manufacturers have gradually resumed shipments over the past one to two weeks. The coronavirus outbreak had forced many businesses across the country to extend the Chinese New York holiday since the end of January.


Russian Promises: Norilsk Nickel’s Tokenization Platform May Catalyze the Slowly Developing Russian Crypto Legislation


Russian Central Bank has approved the digital platform of Norilsk Nickel for trading tokens backed by commodities. On February 17, the Central Bank confirmed that the platform’s testing was successfully completed. It took place in the regulator’s own “sandbox.”

Norilsk Nickel is a major mining and smelting company, co-owned by a Russian oligarch and unlikely crypto-enthusiast Vladimir Potanin who had announced that Norilsk Nickel may launch a blockchain-fueled token back in 2018.

Initially perceived as a stablecoin backed by the company’s commodities, the current iteration of Norilsk Nickel’s platform allows organizations to issue custom tokens, which can then be exchanged for goods, financial instruments, real estate, services, or other assets.


E as in Estonia: EU’s Digitalization Spearhead With Debatable Blockchain Capabilities

For an outsider, the stories about the digital age Estonians live in are fascinating. The country is widely considered to harbor the world’s most digitized society, most technology-enabled government, and first-ever blockchain system serving a state government.
Estonia is truly a pleasant place to live, we’ve checked. But right now we are more interested in the blockchain aspect of the country’s all-digital inner workings.
Being hailed as the blockchain pioneer, Estonia and its innovations leave room for certain misconceptions and exaggeration, especially regarding the country’s blockchain reliance. In this piece, we look for the actual role of the technology there.
e-Estonia: Nation-Wide Innovation Effort
Thanks to the e-Estonia Briefing Centre and e-estonia.com, there is quite a lot of readily available information on the digitization initiative led by the Estonian government.


ePayments Blocking: Facts and Conclusions

On February 11th, the UK’s FCA has blocked the operation of ePayments due to the company’s failure to comply with AML requirements. Pursuant to the regulator’s request, ePayments froze nearly a million customer accounts.
In this feature, we take a look at why regulators block financial services and how to avoid getting your money in trouble.
What Is Money Laundering?
There is clean and dirty money. If an artist sells his or her painting at an auction, this money is clean which can be proven by the receipt from the auction house. If an official takes a bribe, it’s dirty money and their legality cannot be proven.
To make their money clean, criminals launder it using fictitious companies, mixing money flows, or mirror transactions. Every year, nearly $2 billion of dirty money are legalized. In order to tackle this problem, the G7 nations established the FATF (Financial Action Task Force).
The FATF develops the anti-money laundering rules (AML).


U.S. Treasury Promised New Cryptocurrency Regulation: What May Come Along?

On February 12th, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is going to release new cryptocurrency regulations with “significant new requirements” regarding crypto.
The statement took place in a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. Senator Maggie Hassan pointed out the difficulties of fighting illegal activities with cryptocurrencies and asked Mr. Mnuchin how the Treasury’s budget increase helps the cause.
“How will the Treasury’s proposed budget increases assist the Department in monitoring suspicious cryptocurrency transactions and prosecuting terrorists and other criminal organizations financing illicit activities with cryptocurrency,” Senator Hassan enquired.


Lending Tops Crypto-Industry by ROI: What Can Go Wrong?

Lending is named the most profitable sector of the crypto-industry by return on investment. The niche keeps attracting capital and is expected to grow further in 2020. Akin to DeFi in general, the niche holds a lot of promise, but there is the other side to consider.
forklog.media rounds up the relevant numbers, suggested risks, and perspectives from traditional finance veterans and people from the crypto-industry.
ROI Distribution In Crypto-Industry
The metric enjoying media attention is the median return on investment in USD for the past year and 90 days. The numbers were published by Longhash and the dataset for 349 tokens came from an analytics firm Messari. The analysts divided the tokens by sector: lending, scaling, exchange, stablecoin, etc. Lending, the sector in question, includes 8 tokens, only five of which had a positive ROI: Maker, Nexo, Ripio Credit Network, Aave, and Cred.


Samson Mow: Bitcoin Is a Way to Prevent an Orwellian Future

There are certain polarizing topics in the cryptocurrency community: which of Bitcoin forks is the true Bitcoin, what consensus algorithms are really viable, what coins will dominate the markets of the future.
Blockstream’s Chief Security Officer and a seasoned game developer Samson Mow shared his perspective on these and other hot questions in the crypto-industry in a recent interview for 48show. We’ve picked and transcribed the most important bits from the conversation.
First Steps in Crypto
Max Keidun: What were you doing before you joined the crypto community? What is your background?
Samson Mow: Before Bitcoin, I was in the game industry. I’m still in the game industry. I have a game company that’s been operational for 8 years now. Yeah, my background is doing real-time strategy games, AAA titles, and stuff like that. I just kind of fell into Bitcoin because I took an interest in it as it was very unique.


DeFi Passed $1B Total Value Locked: Grain of Salt

According to DeFi Pulse, last week, the total dollar worth of funds locked in Ethereum-powered DeFi projects passed the $1 billion mark. Currently, the Total Value Locked metric is $1.04 billion.
The news of this milestone for DeFi resonated with an optimistic part of the crypto-community. While the $1B mark is rather a good sign for the nascent economic sector, there are things to consider before making conclusions.
What Happened?
On Friday, February 7th, DeFi Pulse estimated the total dollar value of the assets held in Ethereum smart contracts of DeFi projects to be over $1 billion.
This number represents the assets like Ether or Dai people have locked in for different purposes: lending, swaps, hedging, etc. What is important, it doesn’t directly represent revenues or investment related to DeFi projects.


How Miners Brace Themselves For Halving, and How It Can Impact Bitcoin

Halving is probably the most anticipated event of 2020 in the crypto-industry. It is a scheduled decrease in block reward from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC. Since the transaction fees comprise a small fraction of miners’ income, they will basically have half of the money cut out.
In this article we look at how the mining industry is preparing for the halving event and what does it change for miners.
Forewarned Is Forearmed
For the last year, the hash rate of Bitcoin has been growing almost uninterrupted. As a result, mining difficulty has grown as well. This happened partly because more devices got hooked up for mining and partly because of the shift to new better devices.
Back in 2019, JPMorgan Chase experts noted that Bitcoin is worth less than the costs to mine. At that time, miners had to spend $4060 to get 1 Bitcoin worth around $3600. This level was surpassed in April and isn’t anywhere close since then.


Why Bitcoin Full Nodes Remain Unpaid

NEWS AND ANALYSIS 05.02.2020
Full nodes are the backbone of the Bitcoin ecosystem. They verify transactions, but also maintain decentralization and users’ confidentiality. Yet, there is no direct monetary incentive for running a full node, which has its costs and risks.

In this feature, we take a look at the existing non-monetary incentives to set up and run a private node and the reasoning behind this apparently irrational design decision in the first cryptocurrency.

What’s a Full Node?
A node in a distributed network is a connected device running certain software, serving as a point of interaction and connection. There are four types of nodes in Bitcoin: full nodes, supernodes, mining nodes, and light nodes.

Full nodes verify transactions and blocks in the blockchain.


Our dear friends! Happy New Year! We promise that in the new year we will become even better and will delight you with the most relevant and interesting news! And may this new year bring all the good:
To children - joy, as before,
Adults - happiness and hope.
Let the New Year Santa Claus
Will give happiness a whole cart
Strong health in addition,
In all conceived luck
Peace, friendship, jokes, affection,
That life was like in a fairy tale!


Paraguay is preparing to take its nascent cryptocurrency industry mainstream.
Last week, the Latin American country’s anti-money-laundering (AML) chief, the Secretary for Preventing Money and Property Laundering (SEPRELAD), announced a nationwide crypto survey. Every one of Paraguay’s virtual asset service providers (VASPs) was directed to open their books to the government for the first time. The self-reported information was due Dec. 20.
Impelled by the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) June guidance on VASPs, the mass audit will help Paraguay’s government understand its domestic crypto industry, SEPRELAD officials told CoinDesk. And it will pave the way for the country’s first crypto-specific regulations, set to roll out in the first half of 2020.


According to CEO of Bitcoin.com, BTC is Gold, BSV is Scam, and BCH is Money


The recently appointed CEO of Bitcoin.com Stefan Rust learned about Bitcoin in 2012, when a developer from Guatemala asked him to pay in BTC. Unlike many early adopters, Rust didn’t think it was a nonsense at the time.
Before joining Bitcoin.com, a controversial website owned by Roger Ver, Stefan Rust co-founded a non-bitcoin startup Exicon to provide major corporations like Sony, Oracle and Qualcomm with developer and application management services.
“I joined Bitcoin.com in February and secured three deals in two months. Then Roger asked me to become a CEO”.
In an exclusive interview with ForkLog Stefan Rust shares his views on Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash controversy, reveals his thoughts about Bitcoin SV and Craig Wright and explains why he decided to move his wealth from BTC to BCH.


SwiftCash is an open-source, self-funded system of decentralized governance and economy born out of a desire to create a digital store of value with a consistent and stable growth model, as well as a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency for daily transactional use. SwiftCash uses the revolutionary Proof-of-Stake algorithm to reach consensus and allows up to 70% of future block rewards to be spent on proposals that are embraced by the community — stakeholders. Therefore, 30% of maximum monthly inflation goes directly to stakeholders who help secure the network, and whether the rest is mined or how it’s spent will also be decided by the stakeholders.

Website: https://swiftcash.cc
Whitepaper: https://swiftcash.cc/assets/whitepaper.pdf
Explorer: https://explorer.swiftcash.cc
Exchange: https://crex24.com/exchange/SWIFT-BTC
Discord: http://discord.swiftcash.cc/
Telegram: https://t.me/swiftcashcc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/swiftcashcc


Why the ECB Is Getting in on the Stablecoin Game

Welcome to The Breakdown with Nathaniel Whittemore. Starting off this episode we discuss European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde’s comments on stablecoins that inflamed Crypto Twitter yesterday. She said projects in the space indicated clear demand even as she gave bitcoin a bit of a backhanded compliment.
Meanwhile, two hugely hyped projects – Orchid and Filecoin – have both resurfaced. What might this mean for the token narrative going into 2020? We'll explore what the growth of these tokens means for the market in general.
Lastly, in her end-of-year piece for CoinDesk, Jill Carlson triggered an avalanche of commentary by arguing that crypto isn’t supposed to be mainstream because its primary use case is for censored transactions. We'll go deep on that subject on today's podcast.


Ukraine legalized cryptocurrency: telling how to exchange bitcoin for fiat and not become illegal FATF for combating money laundering and terrorist financing, including the provision on virtual assets. The event is rightfully historical, since this is a document, Ukraine was the first in the post-Soviet space to legalize the terminology of the cryptocurrency market throughout the country. The FATF legislation requires the AML norm by the end of June 2020.
At the same time, a number of experts are skeptical about the fact that the regulation of cryptocurrencies in Ukraine began with a “prohibitive” law, and Bitcoin owners fear that now their assets may be seized to establish a source of income.
What awaits Ukrainians who want to exchange bitcoin for fiat or use cryptocurrencies for cross-border payments?


Blockchain-based consumer lender Figure Technologies has added Morgan Creek Digital’s Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano, one of the sector’s most exuberant supporters, to its board. It's also announced a $103 million funding round.

Figure plans to use the funds to expand its lending products that run on a blockchain, but the Series C funding round was primarily opportunistic, said chief executive Mike Cagney.

“The company has plenty of cash from an execution standpoint,” said Cagney, who previously led online consumer finance company SoFi.

Morgan Creek pushed the idea of the round, and Figure agreed to it to add Pompliano on its board and secure other strategic partners, including Japan’s MUFG (the bank’s VC arm participated in the round), Cagney said.


Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has said his institution is looking into the possibility of developing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

▶️
In a Nov. 19 letter responding to questions from lawmakers Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) and Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) in late September, Powell said the Fed has noted the efforts of other nations to explore a CBDC option, and that it continues to "carefully analyze the costs and benefits of pursuing such an initiative in the U.S."
In their letter to Powell, Hill and Foster had expressed concerns over the potential risks to the dollar if another nation or private company creates a widely used cryptocurrency, and asked whether the central bank is look pursuing such an option.
While the U.S. central bank is looking at whether a fully digital dollar would offer benefits to the U.S., Powell said the Fed is not actively developing one. Further, a digital national currency may not offer advantages to the U.S. that it may do to other nations.
As an example, some countries have seen a "rapid migration by comsumers away from cash, while demand for cash in the U.S. remains robust," Powell said. Similarly, payments systems in some jurisdictions may be slow and unreliable, and a digital fiat may offer an improvement for comsumers. On the other hand, payments in the U.S. are "innovative and competitive" and consumers have no shortage of options, according to Powell.
Introducing a digital dollar would also raise "important" questions regarding law, monetary policy, financial stability, regulation and operations, the Fed chief said. For example, would a "general purpose" CBDC be classed as legal tender and what are the "rights and obligations" of participants in such a system?
The digital dollar may also raise concerns about privacy and IT security if, unlike cash, all the Fed must maintain a record of all transactions made with the CBDC. Ushering in the new technology would also mean there would have to be decisions made over whether the digital currency would earn interest, and would its supply be capped.
Overall, Powell concluded that the Fed has "not identified potential material benefits of [a] general purpose CBDC to the implementation of monetary policy relative to our existing tools."


LedgerX Launches Physically-Settled Bitcoin Futures Ahead of Bakkt and ErisX

The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) stated that LedgerX has “not yet been approved by the Commission” to offer physically settled bitcoin futures.

Crypto derivatives provider LedgerX announced it has launched the first physically-settled Bitcoin futures contracts on the U.S. market. The contracts, which pay traders out in Bitcoin, will be available to both institutional and retail investors subject to know-your-customer (KYC) procedure.

Retail customers can trade the product using the company’s new Omni platform, while institutional clients can trade futures as with any of LedgerX’s other products.

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