How About an ICO?
Company’s Stocks Rocket 400%
On Blockchain Rebranding

It’s not just initial coin offerings (ICOs) that are acting like magic

– the word ‘Blockchain’ has just revolutionized one company’s finances by 400 percent. UK-based On-Line PLC, which supplies Internet-related software through various subsidiaries, saw its share price rocket from £15 ($19.60) to a high of £84 ($110) in hours after it announced it was adding ‘Blockchain’ to its name. On-Line, which has been around since the start of the Internet boom in 1996, saw unprecedented trading based on the news, Bloomberg reports. Shares in the company are currently retracing after the sudden spike to circle around £60. The performance mimics that of multiple altcoins following news about their interaction with the mainstream cryptocurrency market.

“We feel the time is right to re-name the company to reflect these developments, where we believe the future growth will be in our sector,” a statement released Thursday explains, calling Blockchain “new and exciting.” The day’s growth puts On-Line’s market cap at £4.17 mln and reflects the continued buzz around Blockchain which is seeing an increasing number of corporations go in for experimenting with it. This week, ratings agency Moody’s nonetheless said Blockchain’s disruptive potential still made it a distant threat, albeit one which would likely inevitably shake up the norm when it hit.

Chinese Might be Able to Trade
Bitcoin Again Soon

19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,

the most important conference in China this year, ended on Oct. 24. With the end of the conference, some temporary regulations and policies are canceled as well. Among the regulations, the shutdown of Bitcoin trading in China might be one. On Oct. 28 ZB.com, which is a new cryptocurrency trading platform, announced that all trading functionality will be available from Nov. 1. Users can sign up for accounts and deposit now.

The platform claims that people all over the world, including those in mainland China, can exchange and trade on the platform. The languages of the website are Chinese and English. However, it’s too soon to state that the regulation toward Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is invalid. Maybe the platform will be closed by the government soon. Nevertheless, there are also people saying that the Chinese government is behind the platform.

Offline trades become popular after regulation

For now, nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen after Nov. 1. It's good news if Chinese Bitcoin traders may operate more easily. Since the shutdown of Bitcoin trading platforms in China, people have started to trade Bitcoin through Taobao, which is the Chinese version of eBay which belongs to Alibaba Group, Wechat chatting group, and QQ chatting group. Offline trades have become popular between Chinese Bitcoin traders.

Chuck Reynolds

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UK Auditors Blast NHS ‘Basic’ Security Failures Over WannaCry Cyberattack

The UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) has said the country’s health service failed

to “follow best practices” to prevent the WannaCry cyberattack. The National Health Service (NHS) was one of the first major victims of May’s international Bitcoin ransomware, which demanded users pay $300 in order to regain access to infected computers. Despite being a “relatively unsophisticated attack,” the NAO said in a new report, the NHS was easy prey. WannaCry “could have been prevented by the NHS following basic IT security best practice.”

“There are more sophisticated cyber-threats out there than WannaCry, so the Department (of Health) and the NHS need to get their act together to ensure the NHS is better protected against future attacks,” it advised. The report comes as a new variety of ransomware known as Bad Rabbit makes its way across the world, infecting public computer systems in Russia, Ukraine, elsewhere in Europe and even Japan. WannaCry was the most prolific attack of its kind, spreading easily due to a conspicuous lack of security guarding the IT systems of its victims.

“The NHS could have fended off this attack if it had taken simple steps to protect its computers and medical equipment,” Meg Hillier, chair of the UK government’s public accounts committee reiterated. “…The NHS and the department need to get serious about cybersecurity or the next incident could be far worse.” Though the discovery of an antidote, WannaCry’s effect was limited after a certain point, and the attack was notable for the correspondingly meager amounts collected by hackers. This led Russia’s Internet advisor Herman Klimenko even to suggest the perpetrators were children.

Japan’s Quoine – Too Much Interest
to Handle from ‘Desperate’
Chinese Exchanges

China’s Bitcoin-to-fiat exchange and ICO ban

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Hong Kong and Singapore Will Launch Blockchain-Based Project to Link Their Trade Finance Platforms

 Hong Kong and Singapore announced that they are going to cooperate

on a cross-border trade project based on Blockchain technology by linking their trade finance platforms. The announcement from Hong Kong Monetary Authority reads: “The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) signed and exchanged a Co-operation Agreement (“Agreement”) in Hong Kong today (25 Oct. 2017) to strengthen co-operation on fintech, with a view to bolster ties between the two cities and fostering fintech development within the region.” Last year, HKMA with banks including HSBC and Standard Chartered worked on building a trade finance platform by using Blockchain technology to digitize and share trade documents, automate processes and reduce the risk of fraud.

At the same time, Singapore planned to build a similar platform as well. The cooperation between Hong Kong and Singapore on this project will “enhance the trade finance corridor between the two financial centers,” according to Ravi Menon, managing director of MAS. What’s more, the platform could significantly increase the efficiency of trade finance in the future. It will replace humans to do time-consuming paperwork. HKMA and MAS stated that linking the two platforms is just a part of a broader plan between their future collaboration on the Blockchain and other fintech projects. Details about the cooperation will be announced by the two authorities next month.

Threat of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies Distant But Inevitable, Says Moody’s

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

A veteran researcher behind two influential papers in the emerging field

of crypto-economics is gearing up to launch a new cryptocurrency. Revealed in an exclusive interview with CoinDesk, Yonatan Sompolinsky, author of the GHOST protocol and co-author of the SPECTRE protocol, intends to release the as-yet unnamed project in late 2018. Based on his body of work, the project aims to solve one of the industry's biggest challenges: the speed at which transactions are disseminated and recorded by distributed ledger systems.

Founders of the project include SPECTRE co-author Yoad Lewenberg, and researcher Ethan Hileman, who worked with the team behind bitcoin privacy project TumbleBit. However, the team is not only equipped with developers, but also business experts – including Guy Corem, the former CEO of Israeli-based bitcoin mining firm Spondoolies-Tech, which raised more than $12 million in venture funding before shuttering operations.

Together, the team has founded a new startup called DAGlabs, which is said to be raising $15 million as part of a Series A round. Yet, it's the vision for the project that is perhaps most notable, given how it intends to achieve its goal. Rather than using a blockchain system, the public cryptocurrency will be among the first to operate via a system called a direct acyclic graph (DAG) – technology that Sompolinsky framed as a way to finally create a viable payments rail with distributed ledger concepts.

Sompolinsky told CoinDesk:

"We want to change blockchain into blockDAG. Whether you buy coins or not, you should think about this technology as the next step, releasing the blockchain from the naivety of the chain structure. You will feel this is the natural step towards using a real system."

For all the innovation, however, also notable is what the new cryptocurrency will share with bitcoin, today the largest and most valuable blockchain system, but one that is seen as increasingly less relevant for payments. According to the DAGlabs team, the new cryptocurrency will use a proof-of-work mining algorithm in which anyone who purchases hardware can compete for its rewards. That said, Sompolinsky doesn't see bitcoin and other proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies as competitors, so to speak. "I'm not competing with this entire plethora of new blockchains. We have a very boutique and niche and specific one and a well-defined one. We want to scale up layer one," he said.

Record of science

As told by Sompolinsky, the project is also a critique on the current state of blockchain development, which he views as having been held back by in-fighting. In particular, he cited his experience with arguments about capacity levels on bitcoin, in which developers have often tried to push solutions to scalability in a way that did not change or update the first layer of the system – the blockchain itself. Referring to last year's Satoshi Roundtable summit, an invite-only event in Cancun, Mexico, he recalled an experience where he was shocked by the state of the conversation.

"Cancun was an eye-opener for me. In Cancun, everyone was fighting about 1 MB to 2 MB … no one was talking about increasing on-chain scalability," he said. Sompolinsky framed the new cryptocurrency as a "vehicle" to enable researchers to take the next step in evaluating this line of exploration, one he argued will benefit from being tested under open market conditions. But given the slate of open-source projects utilizing the initial coin offering (ICO) model as a way to solicit market funding, often for untested concepts, he was also keen to differentiate his project as one based on years of accumulated research.

"There are not 800 projects that implement a concept like DAG. Very, very few, maybe less than five that I know of, try to scale up the layer one. There are not 800 projects that say we should abandon the concept of the chain in favor of a graph of blocks," he said. Among those that do are IOTA and bytecoin, the former being one of the few cryptocurrencies yet to garner a total market capitalization of more than $1 billion.

When complete, the final network should appeal to anyone who wants to use a cryptocurrency with "very fast confirmation and low fees," although that's not to say the concept has been perfected. According to Sompolinsky, there are still plenty of items up for debate. For example, he is still open-minded about how he will structure any issuance, stating he is most strongly considering the model used by Zcash Company – the creators of the zcash protocol – wherein accredited investors are given tokens in stages for their support.

How it works

Still, even those experienced in the field of cryptocurrency may find the concept odd. After all, after the hype around cryptocurrency faded, the so-called "underlying blockchain technology" was often touted as the real secret sauce. That notable researchers would stake a counter-thesis then, is of interest, though it's arguably been a development that has simply received less attention over the years.

Explored by Sompolinsky since his earliest work, the idea is that the process of ordering transactions into blocks, then selecting one to add to the chain, could be better optimized. In the SPECTRE concept, blocks are created at the rate of about 10 per second (as opposed to, say, ethereum where one block is created every 12 seconds). All of these blocks are referenced in a DAG, and multiple, interwoven threads of blocks are created. Then, the most valid transaction history is "voted" in by miners selecting the most inter-referential block graph.

And because this allows for such a high quantity of transactions to be performed on the network, the transaction history won't be permanently stored. Instead, transaction history will only be stored for a limited amount of time, and once it has been validated, will be removed. Other barriers, including backbone congestions and bandwidth, could lie ahead, though. The team intends to address these potential issues by building incentives into the protocol that encourage participating agents to behave correctly.

Still, if the concept on the whole sounds familiar, you've likely come across it when reading about ethereum, which incorporated some of these ideas in how it rewards so-called "uncle blocks" – those that are not selected for inclusion in the ethereum blockchain, but still include useful work. Although uncles aren't considered ultimately valid, they're still profitable to mine, and still get referenced in the blockchain ledger itself.

Indeed, what might be most notable about the SPECTRE project is that Sompolinsky's ideas have often proved to be of influence. For example, Casper, ethereum's hotly debated proof-of-stake protocol, derives its name from the GHOST protocol (a play on the "Casper the Friendly Ghost" cartoon series).

What's left

While the bones of the project are in place, there's still a few questions that need to be fleshed out before the cryptocurrency can be taken to market. Currently under development, the final protocol will be introduced in an upcoming white paper called SPECTRE2. The tech will then begin testing in autumn next year, and by winter, the new cryptocurrency will be launched. Ongoing updates will then continue apace.

For one, DAGlabs has been working on combining the SPECTRE cryptocurrency with MimbleWimble, the natively private cryptocurrency that has been the cause of much excitement in the community. Further down the line, the platform also wants to allow DAG-based smart contracts to be written into the platform.

But the final step that DAGlabs is pivoting towards is perhaps as ambitious as the cryptocurrency itself. Once the team has established a functioning cryptocurrency, they intend to allow the DAG infrastructure to facilitate something along the lines of "merged mining," which is when the underlying hardware can be used to support a number of cryptocurrencies simultaneously. Still, it's the manner in which Sompolinsky will launch the project that he ultimately wants to call attention to – calling the years of research and engagement with the open-source community, a "respectable" path to market.

He concluded:

"The easy path for me was to do an ICO; way easier than what I'm doing now. I'm going for the more respectable path of an equity."

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

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North Korea could be secretly mining cryptocurrency on your computer

North Korea has a cryptocurrency infatuation.

Its government has been accused of unleashing a global ransomware attack to raise bitcoin, mining the cryptocurrency within its borders, and hacking South Korean bitcoin exchanges. Now, research firm Recorded Future says there’s a strong chance Kim Jong-un’s regime is experimenting with malware that secretly mines currency using other people’s computers.

Malware crypto-mining is a new global trend among hackers, says a new report (pdf) from Recorded Future, which monitors discussions among “the criminal underground” on the so-called dark web. Starting this year, hackers seem to be shifting away from high-intensity, widespread ransomware attacks, towards “long-term, low velocity” crypto-mining in the background.

Recorded Future has not detected specific instances of North Korean malware mining, but believes that the regime has the knowhow, motive, and interest in cryptocurrencies to execute similar attacks. “North Korean threat actors have prior experience in assembling and managing botnets, bitcoin mining, and cryptocurrency theft, as well as in custom altering publicly available malware; three elements that would be key to effectively creating and managing a network of covert cryptocurrency miners,” Recorded Future’s report reads.

Recorded Future says hackers are shifting to malware mining because ransomware attacks became too egregious, attracting law enforcement’s attention instead of generating the steady stream of income attackers had grown to expect since the method became fashionable in 2015. “Outrageous attacks on healthcare facilities and municipal transit systems culminated in the unprecedented WannaCry and NotPetya campaigns,” according to Recorded Future’s report. “Overnight, ransomware was recognized as an act of cyberterrorism.”

With ransomware a hot potato, hackers turned to installing hidden crypto-miners on others’ machines. This has turned out to be a relatively stable, low-fuss way of getting cash, according to Recorded Future. One hacker on a Russian-language forum expressed surprise at how easy it was to create a network of secret cryptominers: “I’ve used ‘bots’ already under my control to upload 110 miners before going to sleep. By the time I woke up 108 were still alive, which took me by surprise. I expected half would be dead by then.“

The cryptocurrencies most popularly mined in secret are monero, and zcash, says Andrei Barysevich, an author of the Recorded Future report. These cryptocurrencies require less computational resources to mine profitably compared to something like bitcoin. However, one malware mining example obtained by the firm hijacked a computer’s graphics card to mine ethereum.

There’s no blanket way to detect a malware miner on your computer right now because the method is new, and the software keeps changing, Barysevich says. But a noticeable slowdown in a computer’s performance could suggest that it it’s surreptitiously churning out a cryptocurrency—possibly destined for a North Korean digital wallet.

North Korea may be mining bitcoin in addition to hacking it

Last month, North Korea was banned from exporting coal to China, its biggest buyer. The rogue regime may have found a new use for these idle coal supplies: powering bitcoin mines. That’s according to research by Recorded Future, an information security firm that counts the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm among its investors, and security non-profit Team Cymru. The research identified activity that the firms believe is bitcoin mining in North Korea starting on May 17. The analysts don’t know if the mining is ongoing, but the activity was present in the last data point Recorded Future collected, from July 6, the firm told Quartz.

Bitcoin mining consumes large amounts of electricity to feed the vast computational power necessary for miners to release new supplies of bitcoin. The bitcoin network releases 12.5 bitcoins (about $50,000 worth, at the current bitcoin price) every 10 minutes to a miner as an incentive for checking bitcoin transactions and adding them to the cryptocurrency’s immutable, distributed ledger, known as the blockchain.

Bitcoin mines are generally large server farms containing thousands of machines specifically designed to mine the cryptocurrency. One of the world’s largest bitcoin mines, in Inner Mongolia, runs an electricity bill of $39,000 a day. North Korea is among the top 10 net exporters of coal globally, according to the International Energy Agency (pdf, p.17). Since the country can no longer earn revenue from coal exports, it makes sense that it might put some coal to use generating electricity for a bitcoin mine.

Recorded Future also found that North Korean elites, who have unrestricted access to the internet, were using virtual private networks (VPNs) to make online purchases with bitcoin. These North Korean VPN users were also checking their Gmail accounts, logging into Twitter, buying expensive sneakers, and watching porn. The firm was able to track the activity because the VPNs and other traffic-masking techniques were used incorrectly, it said.

The researchers couldn’t tell how much processing power North Korea’s suspected bitcoin mines possess. But they believe it’s just one part of a larger strategy to generate revenue for the increasingly isolated regime. Previously FireEye, another security firm, found evidence that North Korean hackers were targeting South Korean bitcoin exchanges to steal their crypto funds. North Korea is also believed to be behind the global ransomware attack WannaCry, which froze computer systems and demanded a bitcoin payment to unlock them.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
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Bank of America Files Patent for Blockchain-based Processing System

Bank of America has filed a pair of patents for a Blockchain-based system

aimed to improve the tracking of file transfer processing in real time. Under the system, a Blockchain can be integrated with communications and memory devices to facilitate the data processing process. Based on the patent applications as of mid-October 2017, the bank proposes the use of a Blockchain to facilitate the transferring of large volumes of data while simultaneously tracking the data through the use of cryptographic keys during the transfer process.

The system will be able to handle two types of data processing, namely, the actual data transfer itself, and the log of the cryptographic keys identifying each data packet and its present processing stage.

Part of the patent applications read:

"The present invention is directed to providing a novel technical solution that reduces transactional and informational complexities and transforms the processing of electronic files and management of data contained within such files."

Bank of America’s research efforts on Blockchain

The latest applications are part of the major American bank’s effort to establish a portfolio of protected applications of Blockchain technology. The bank has already filed over 20 patents related to the technology or digital currencies since 2014 as of August. Among the patents filed are three patents based on the use of distributed ledgers to authenticate the veracity of information and the parties who handle it and two patents based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) payment system that is powered by a Blockchain. The mega-bank has also filed a batch of patents covering almost the entire cryptocurrency exchange and payment process including transaction validation, risk detection, real-time conversion, as well as online and offline storage.

World’s Largest Money Manager Says No Fair Value for Bitcoin

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Digital Currency Looks to Solve Cannabis Industry’s Cash Problem

Digital currencies may solve some the legal cannabis industry’s

woes by becoming an alternative to cash payments. Despite recent state-level ballot initiatives across the US that legalizes marijuana in one form or another, the drug still remains illegal at the federal level. While it’s unlikely the feds are going to go after legal cannabis dispensaries any time soon, the legal murkiness does create one serious problem.

Cash-only

Banks won’t deal with cannabis dispensaries. Consider the ramifications. No banking means no payment processing, which means customers can’t use credit or debit cards to make purchases. According to a 2016 survey, 75 percent of customers prefer to pay with credit or debit cards, with only 11 percent preferring to pay with cash. Unfortunately, dispensaries can’t give customers what they want – payment methods other than cash – because banks won’t do business with them. Consequently, the customer is inconvenienced and the merchant loses potential sales.

A lack of banking causes even more serious problems. Since the industry is forced to accept only cash for payments, marijuana dispensaries are an excellent target for robbers and thieves due to the large amount of cash they keep on premises. There’s still a larger problem than that, which is perhaps the biggest of all: dispensaries have great difficulty paying their expenses. Utilities, tax assessors and vendors would much rather not be paid in cash, and some vendors may not even accept cash payments. The cost of protecting large sums of cash is prohibitive. The need for armored cars, safes and guards depletes the bottom line. It’s been estimated that cash handling expenses can amount to 10-15 percent of sales.

Changes are coming

Seeing an opportunity to gain access to a $6.7 bln market, the digital currency Dash partnered with Alt Thirty Six in April 2017. The Dash network, through its decentralized self-funding mechanism, is paying the company $496,000 to integrate Dash as a payment option in the cannabis industry’s point of sale (POS) systems. The vendor also has skin in the game, having spent nearly $700,000 of their own money developing the POS platform. As part of this arrangement, Dash will be the only digital currency offered by the point of sale platform. According to the budget proposal submitted to the

Dash network:

“We have three major verticals identified and solidified reseller partnerships that will adopt the Alt Thirty Six + Dash payment solutions:

• Independent Software Vendors (ISV) – Music & celebrity apparel company (100+ online stores), online marketing automation partner (600+ clients), and more.
• Value Added Reseller (VAR) –IBM, Sirius Computer Solutions, Industry Specific point-of-sale (POS) Partners
• Ecommerce Retailers – Sirius Computer Solutions​”

The vendor has been making monthly progress reports to the Dash community and work continues apace. The platform’s initial release is scheduled for December of this year.

Going mainstream

The road to mainstream adoption of digital currency has to begin somewhere, and perhaps no other industry needs cryptocurrency as much as this one. Many have suggested that digital currencies could gain adoption by saving vendors money on credit card fees, and this is certainly possible. But such fees usually amount to no more than three percent.

With the legal marijuana industry, Dash has the potential to save merchants up to 15 percent, which would be a massive boon to their bottom line. Dash is suitable for point of sale use because of its InstantSend feature. Transactions sent via InstantSend are fully confirmed and irreversible in four seconds. Bitcoin transactions, by comparison, usually aren’t considered fully “settled” until six confirmations are received, which can take an hour or more.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
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A blockchain startup focused on know-your-customer (KYC) solutions

has raised $1.6 million in a new seed funding round. Norbloc's round was led by Marathon Venture Capital, a VC firm based in Greece that launched in March. Other participants in the round include Digital Currency Group, Inbox Capital, Back in Black, as well as the founding team of classifieds website Avito, the startup announced today.

The startup is one of a growing number of companies focusing on KYC, or the process by which financial institutions verify the identity of their clients. It's a use case that has attracted the interest of a number of banks (and investors), and has been the subject of a number of enterprise-level pilots to date.

Astyanax Kanakakis, Norbloc's co-founder and CEO, previously worked for parent company of now-defunct bitcoin mining firm KnCMiner and later served as chairman of XBT Provider, which launched a bitcoin-tied investment product on Nasdaq Nordic in 2015. In statements, he said the startup plans to use the new seed funding to expand its existing team.

"We will be drawing on the expertise and experience of our investors and our advisors as we move forward. We will use the funding to continue to build the business and acquire talent across the four markets that we are now active in," he said.

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Marketing Dept
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Why former NFL player Sidney Rice
is participating in a cryptocurrency
token sale today

Sidney Rice has been a busy investor

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
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