CoinGeek welcomes this opportunity to subject the merits of both BTC and Bitcoin Cash BCH to scrutiny in court.
Recently, a group of BTC devotees launched a website in hopes of gathering a crowd as well as some funds to aid their effort in filing a lawsuit against the website, Bitcoin.com. The group, which also has a dedicated Telegram group started by Twitter user @MoneyTrigz, alleges that Bitcoin.com’s user interface confuses buyers by using the same logo colour for both BTC and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). They add that referring to BTC as Bitcoin Core was enough to mislead BTC buyers into mistakenly purchasing BCH.
The group is now soliciting donations for their cause through their website bitcoincomlawsuit.info. Whether this complaint or its proponents have any viable claims is yet to be seen.
CoinGeek welcomes this as an opportunity to challenge the cultist dogma and subject to scrutiny the merits of BCH against that of BTC in court. Below is CoinGeek’s official statement about the matter.
A statement from Calvin Ayre, CoinGeek.com Founder
CoinGeek.com will support and join any lawsuit related to what is the real Bitcoin. We look forward to a court reviewing the original white paper and the evolution of the two major branches that are on the chain that originated with the bitcoin genesis block.
It is clear to anyone who knows the history and technology that Bitcoin BTC is inaccurately using the Bitcoin name and has forked to Segwit technology and is no longer bitcoin or even a cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin BCH forked back to being bitcoin after the Segwit fork and is staying true to the original white paper. CoinGeek has been studying how we could get this issue before a court and would welcome the opportunity to put our substantial resources into getting a judge to review the science and make a decision. We are confident there is only one outcome to this and that is that BTC has stolen the Bitcoin name for a Segwit technology alt coin.
Bitcoin.com has every right to also have its own opinion in this area and we support this 100 percent also. Nobody is in a better position to know bitcoin when they see it than bitcoin.com and Roger Ver who have been there since the very start.”
Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.
A column exploring blockchain-related possibilities in the far future.
Here, we look at blockchain technology in conjunction
with other developing technologies.
Disclaimer: this post may be closer to science fiction than fact.
It didn’t take long before technologists decided to combine artificial intelligence (AI) with blockchain technology. I’ve come across projects that use artificial intelligence to recognize patterns and combining these functions with smart contracts—bringing the power of both technologies to unprecedented scales.
The assemblage, called decentralized intelligence, is capable of automating consensus mechanisms as well as managerial decisions for blockchain-based organizations. By analyzing collected data, AI can make business decisions for decentralized applications and subsequently enforce them.
The implications of combining the two technologies are quite vast. And because these are both new and continuously developing territories, it’s hard to see their limits.
One of the biggest questions many have been wondering is whether it’s possible to automate entire governments using this combination. Some have actually started trying: the UK has started their test run for a blockchain-run social welfare system. Russia has also started using it for a voting system. Stretching this use case further, I imagine a world where cases taken to the International Court can instead be decided upon by neutral delegates from anywhere in the world through a blockchain-enabled voting system. Instead of years, decisions can be arrived at faster.
Government adoption
It’s easy to see how this transition can quickly spread throughout government systems. I asked Dr. Paolo Di Prodi, senior data scientist at FortiGuard Labs, Fortinet for his personal opinion on the matter (he would like to clarify that these are his own personal stances, and not his employer’s). Dr. Di Prodi worked very closely with machine learning applications for big firms, including the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) in the UK, and Microsoft.
Dr. Di Prodi thinks the UK’s blockchain test run is particularly interesting, but deploying the technology laterally, across all government agencies will be difficult—as interruptions are expected between administration changes.
“Yes, it will be interesting to see the outcome of that trial to manage welfare support payments in the UK. For me, it does solve a very practical security problem as well as an efficiency problem of receiving cash. The larger implication of adopting this payment system is that all the other interconnected services like housing services will need to be crypto-enabled to receive payments. This will reduce spending in processing and IT administration but of course will require an initial expenditure to modernize all the IT platforms which will need to come from the tax payers. The problem of deploying a blockchain solution is that it will span several administrations and thus will require a long term commitment from all political parties. I believe Russia or China will not have the same issue paradoxically.”
Additionally, the rise of AI in governance will be slow, especially because there are limitations arising now when it comes to acquiring the data needed to build machine learning models. Governments will probably remain cautious as the technology proceeds.
“One of the most interesting projects in this field is openmined.org which allows the construction of decentralized machine learning models without disclosing private personal data. Other companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple—under recent pressure of privacy concerns—are working on privacy preserving machine learning especially after the deployment of the GDPR regulation in Europe.
The largest concern for using AI at a government level and by AI—I mean a fully automated process, is that the decisions will be biased on the actual data as we have seen in the press recently about racial discrimination performed by the COMPAS program in US courts. The governments of this world will be probably still cautious about using AI for decision making but instead still rely on their data scientist to propose new policies. I believe an area where the government will invest more will be more in protecting and exchanging citizen data to improve the quality of service they provide,” Dr. Di Prodi wrote.
He also agrees with blockchain’s advantages as a consensus mechanism, and how it can help curb influence and illicit activities. But admits it has its limits in terms of battling human frailty.
“The citizen could even have a major role in deciding in real time via electronic voting. However a shift will be required to move from a democracy to a technocracy which might still suffer from the influence of lobbies and wealthy individuals perhaps in a lesser form. I think AI will not be able to solve the human nature of greed but with the power of data into the citizen’s hands will be more likely to expose frauds, evasion, crime and in general inefficiencies.”
Current Limitations
Data collection is crucial in building the necessities of decentralized intelligence, and machine learning as a whole. But data is as powerful as it is energy-intensive, Dr. Di Prodi says, yet he is optimistic that this hurdle will be overcome soon. He adds that a fully decentralized intelligence-run government depends on certain factors
“Yes this would be possible when we will live in a fully digitized word where we could possibly collect and process all the information from the macro to the micro economic factors. This will allow the government to run for example future scenario of the effect of a new tax structure, health service or pension scheme. More data will require more compute power and thus a larger footprint for the environment. Do you know for example that data centres across the world are already using 3% of global electricity supply? This means we will have to be more efficient in storing and computing data. The good news is that GPU and TPU are overcoming the limitation of the Moore’s Law suffered by CPU so there will be enough firepower to process all the data we need.”
Another obstacle he sees is the fact that although AI can be encoded with moral rules, these rules would have to be pre-set by humans themselves—something that is easier said than done due to highly relative and debatable morality standards.
“The AI will need to be programmed with moral rules, over population is a growing concern and we can’t really save the environment if we can’t reduce our birth rate thus consuming less. Look at what China did with the one child policy, most western countries define it as inhumane, but it was rationally the only choice to make the economy sustainable. The AI cannot make those sort of decisions for us, we are still responsible to program what is good and what is bad. To quote an old Latin proverb: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who watches the watchmen)?”
Is singularity in the horizon?
Dr. Di Prodi doesn’t think so—at least not in the near future.
“Well shallow or deep AI is still in its infancy, the most imminent risk to humans is just what I call ‘poor AI’. We have allowed companies like Uber (and others like Waymo, Cruise, etc.) to run their automated driving cars in our streets without thorough certification and testing. As a result, a few lethal accidents have skewed public perception of AI. There is of course debate whether the accident would have been avoided by a real person but in most accidents, it was evident that the supervisor in the car was not vigilant. I believe the technology right now could be best applied in reducing specific behavior like drowsy driving or driving under the influence of alcohol. I believe there is need to more regulation and testing for physical AI (any AI that interacts with the physical world), because the legal frameworks like the FMVSS in US don’t work for driverless cars.”
He says that developing AI in self-driving cars will help decrease car accidents—which he says keeps him up at night.
“All governments have the same issue and will have to work together to develop one. In the long term when all cars will be automated and being able to talk to each other, there will be far less accidents due to human error but is the transition from mixed automated and manual traffic that keeps me awake at night!”
“We are far away from the singularity point, some people say is 30 years away, and even if we achieve the computational power of the brain we are still far away from understanding how the human mind works,” he adds.
“I believe the most likely scenario will be an AI bug – where bug can be a programming error or unexpected behavior – like the flash crash of the markets in 2010 most likely caused by high frequency trading bots. The most danger comes where AI is used in a closed loop fashion with fast decision making, although we have a kill switch [if] we are not fast enough to press it as in the flash crash or in the self driving accident scenario.”
Virtually everyone by now has, at a minimum, a general idea of what cryptocurrency is. Spawned from the online gambling industry’s desire to get payment methods that are outside the traditional banking system, the digital currency promises to be a currency controlled by the entire system instead of a central bank. The idea is solid and has a great amount of merit, which is why BTC, the world’s first cryptocurrency, took off the way it did, skyrocketing in value from $1 to almost $20,000 in six years.
As with any product or service, BTC’s popularity gave rise to alternatives—about 1,100 of them at the moment. But just like the mighty Roman empire of Augustus, BTC’s dominance could be toppled. And according to a report published by MIT Technology Review, there are three ways the BTC kingdom “could be brought down.”
One way would be through a government takeover. Governments could create their own cryptocurrency, which would be issued by a central bank. The coin’s ledgers would be managed by authorized institutions (in an effort to maintain “decentralization”) which would, more than likely, be nothing more than large banks. Users would have to show their identity to set up a wallet with the central bank, and the practice could slowly do away with physical cash.
Models of this scenario have shown that central banks could actually perform better than BTC. The Bank of England, which analyzed a state-backed cryptocurrency in 2016, determined that a central bank-backed digital currency solution would result in an increase of 3% in the gross domestic product of the UK.
Another option to fell the cryptocurrency giant would be a sneak attack by Facebook. Yes, that Facebook. The scenario is simple: Facebook, with its supposed 2 billion users, launches its own cryptocurrency. It then uses its pull to convince a great number of BTC users to run proprietary Facebook-created BTC software, and ultimately control how well, or poorly, the coin performs.
One other kingdom-cracking solution would be to make BTC obsolete, unimportant. BTC Core developers’ resistance to changes has resulted in the network slowing down with backlogs of unconfirmed transactions that took hours to confirm and cost high fees to process. To put it simply, BTC is no longer a cryptocurrency as it does not scale and is expensive to transact in. Sidechains do not work and many current tech thought leaders believe it is impossible to get it to work.
The emperor’s reign is already faltering. Looking at the performance of coins such as Bitcoin Cash over the past week, virtually all have posted gains above 30%. All, that is, except for BTC. Bitcoin Cash is up a staggering 91% on the week, yet BTC has only gained 18%.
Bitcoin Cash is the only coin that follows the original Satoshi Nakamoto white paper, offering the best scaling and security features. It reverted to the unadulterated form of the blockchain to stay true to Satoshi’s vision: replace-by-fee was removed, the signatures are preserved, transactions are kept irreversible, fees are kept low, and the block size is increased to accommodate more users and keep transaction processes fast. Bitcoin Cash can do everything all the other platforms can do and more.
Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.
On August 1st, 2017, the Bitcoin network experienced an upgrade which saw the maximum capacity throughput multiplied by 8. Bitcoin Core developers’ resistance to upgrade their own software, meant that the majority of nodes did not receive the luxuries now enjoyed by the Bitcoin Cash community – namely, instant transactions, sub-cent fees, and a bigger pipeline. Their stance also created a polarity, which meant that the upgraded nodes were forced to re-stablish an entire eco-system.
The mere fact that in under one year, Bitcoin Cash has managed to establish itself on territory lost by Core, is very, very telling. Make no mistake it was from the ground up – Merchants, payment processors, exchanges, a new ticker, a new address format, some new development teams… The political climate was toxic, but as the movement to re-enable Bitcoin as Cash once again drew momentum, it became unstoppable.
The two biggest commerce based entities in the space – BitPay and Coinbase, have already integrated Bitcoin Cash (BCH) within their systems, and full integration is almost complete. A wave of app explosions has caused speculators to take sharp notice.
Applications that tie into the Bitcoin blockchain can realistically only take off the ground in a low-fee environment. Satoshi Nakamoto had created a profound technology, that invited developers all around the world to create applications in a permissionless environment. Fees were always meant to stay small. With tiny fees, comes the incentive to create and innovate, freely.
Satoshi once said “the fee the market would settle on should be minimal. If a node requires a higher fee, that node would be passing up all transactions with lower fees. It could do more volume and probably make more money by processing as many paying transactions as it can. The transition is not controlled by some human in charge of the system though, just individuals reacting on their own to market forces.”
Bitcoin was supposed to be a self-sustaining system. Free of dictatorial influence. It was almost complete – except for one aspect that required human intervention. – That was, raising the maximum blocksize (a capacity variable). Satoshi’s mistake was adding that one element of ‘trust’ in what was supposed to be inherently a trustless system. He trusted that humans would be incentivised to increase the capacity, in the best interests of the system, and themselves. What he did not anticipate was a corporate takeover.
So when he left an instruction to raise the blocksize “in versions way ahead” as he put it, Blockstream aligned Core developers chose to ignore it, and instead worked towards a second layer solution, which they hoped would turn profitable.
With Bitcoin Cash, effectively being the legitimate upgrade to Bitcoin, a revitalised eco-system of developers, merchants, businesses and enthusiasts have swarmed right back to the home, where most crypto purists, always wished it did.
So which BCH, Bitcoin has the express back on the rail, and on May 15, another major upgrade takes place, to yet again, increase the maximum transaction throughput, but also, to re-activate smart scripting capabilities that were in the original Satoshi codebase, but have laid dormant since… The upcoming hardfork is this time non political for BCH, which means there’ll be no coin-split.
On May 15, Bitcoin BCH becomes many things that Ethereum dreamed to be. While important scripting capabilities that work with strings and arithmetic operations are being reactivated, there’s still a few more that remain outstanding, which the community can look to re-enable in another future hard-fork.
What we do know is that the app-explosion that has materialised on the BCH blockchain is only going to become more acute, given the additional smart scripting options developers are provided.
Incredibly, in less than one year, we already have an incentive based content network like yours.org, a social platform: memo.cash, the SMS based CoinText, the tap’n’go HandCash, tipping bots, point of sale apps.
One keen redditor even noted how simple it would be to utilise the memo.cash platform to build a un-censorable file sharing capability.
When you have a coin, that can, and is allowed to grow, the sky’s the limit. And the market is beginning to realise this. Bring on May 15.
Eli Afram
@justicemate
Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.
A column exploring blockchain-related possibilities in the far future.
Here, we look at blockchain technology in conjunction
with other developing technologies.
Disclaimer: this post may be closer to science fiction than fact.
Consolidating wallets and identification systems into one digital wallet is something some start-ups are already starting to work on. Today, cryptocurrency wallets are largely desktop, hardware drive, or mobile-based. But with several other technologies developing simultaneously, it’s hard not to think how these devices may become obsolete in the near future.
So what comes after—what emerging technologies do we know of that may replace what we have now?
Chip Implants
This payment option is one of the most popular contenders in this race and is also a very common sci-fi detail. In fact, the concept of network-enabled chip implants has survived decades of science fiction and has been featured in shows and movies, including Andrew Niccol’s In Time (2011), and the Outer Limits, “Stream of Consciousness (1997).”
The concept is both badass and terrifying at the same time. And the most interesting thing is that this may actually become a reality soon. In 2016, a company aptly named Dangerous Things launched a product called xNT Tag, an implantable chip that can facilitate NFC transactions, including financial transactions like cryptocurrency payments.
This is the kind of stuff dystopian movies are made of. Unsurprisingly, the product has not obtained government approval and comes with a stern warning:
“This kit definitely contains dangerous things,” they wrote on their website.” Use of this device is strictly at your own risk.”
Still, Dangerous Things reached their $8,000 goal within a week of launching their Indiegogo fundraiser, and ended up with nearly four times that amount at $30,619, an indication that some are for it. Although most people would probably prefer a more medically established and “trust-worthy” source for something as sensitive as chip implants.
But here’s one argument against chip impants: as we all know, where money goes, crime follows. Will muggers start chopping off body parts to get the money? This is a gruesome thought. Although a simple multi-signature mechanism could deter such a modus—requiring passphrases for transaction confirmation in addition to the implants. But even with this in place, some may still try—God forbid you run across an ill-informed mugger.
Although highly convenient—not to mention superbly suave—another downside to chip implants is the fact that people will be reluctant to insert a device into their body, even if it’s just right under the skin. But assuming that a person is okay with this, there lies the question of privacy—can it be subjected to abuse, particularly in tracking individuals?
This would, of course, be a gross violation of rights. But it is worth noting that phones can already easily be monitored now (and can be tracked quietly in the background even when apps are inactive). But unlike phones, one would have to cut himself before an implant can be ditched.
Last month in Hong Kong, I asked Shyft Network’s CEO Bruce Silcoff—who himself is working on a blockchain-based universal ID system to help unbanked people gain access to financial services—what he thinks of an utterly dystopian possibility where it’s mandatory for humans to be implanted with such a chip upon birth. This was one of the worst case scenarios I could think of. And even he thinks it’s a scary thought.
“There are a few companies that have been working on a consolidating both the payment side and the identity side into one wallet. What does that look like—whether it’s a wearable, whether it’s embedded in you—I think that almost scares me a little bit if it’s embedded in you.”
“If we ever get to a day where government tells you, ‘you gotta put a chip in your body,’ that’s a problem,” he adds. Silcoff says there are ways for the government and society to work in harmony for a balance between freedom and regulatory obligations.
“There’s a fine line between freedom and convenience or advancement in technology,” Silcoff says. “as long as it’s up to the consumer—the individual person, to choose the form that they’re comfortable with—that they have their freedom of choice.”
Biometric Identification and Payments
I asked some friends at Coin Crunch, a team conducting Podcasts and Youtube videos where they review cryptocurrency projects and interview founders. And while many are putting their bets on implants, Coin Crunch’s Danny Fries has his money on biometrics—another popular contender in the race.
“I think it will be a bio recognition app as a primary security layer—fingerprint, facial recognition, and voice,” Fries says. “The benefits being that (1) you don’t have to remember your key and (2) the above three are entirely unique to individuals.”
“The main dangers I see are that facial / voice can be faked with some new tech… this will probably get worse as tech gets better. Example: (Lyrebird, a voice-cloning synthesizer),” Fries says. `
“One possible solution would be to combine a simple safeword / traditional memorable password with the voice recognition part,” he adds. Coin Crunch is a community of intelligent blockchain investors and technologists that focus on big picture ideas and the groundbreaking tech of new crypto projects, releasing content regularly on Youtube, and have had their fare share of technology assessments.
Fries’s bet is actually quite a viable horse: it may be easier for a biometrics-based system to gain widespread acceptance, having already been widely implemented in other applications. Another benefit that comes to mind is “distress detection,” which may be handy in identifying theft and hostile situations. This has been studied by researchers from the University of British Columbia.
If biometrics can go so far as to detect “distress” at a time when a transaction is being initiated, maybe it can trigger an alarm for authorities to monitor something that could potentially be a case of kidnap for extortion—something that may become dreadfully common these days.
Wearables
They don’t have the same sci-fi appeal that implants and biometrics do but wearable devices have an edge over other technologies: they’re not as intrusive as implants, and are already a far more common and easily accepted thing these days.
One disadvantage to wearables is that compared to the first two, there is a better chance of misplacing this device, although there are ways to locate a missing device using mobile phones. Stealing such wallets can be so easy for expertly dexterous, sleight-of-hand bandits, but again, multi-sig features can be a life-saver.
With so many developing technologies, the room for speculation is wide open. What do you think is the ultimate wallet of the future? Are there any technological developments worth watching and putting on the list?
“Utility” and “Scarcity” do wonders for value. It is the formula of these two fundamental attributes of “Value” that fashion incredible opportunities for investors.
There are two digital assets out there today, that scream the loudest. Namely, Monero (XMR) and BitcoinCash (BCH).
Why Monero?
Where do I begin – the reasons are countless. First and foremost it is today the most private crypto-currency in the space, second to none. Not only has the FBI flagged and named Monero as a concern for their chain analysis tools (which cannot decipher XMR transactions), but many ransomware attacks are now utilising Monero also. This may not come across in positive light, but it does highlight the fungible and private nature of the asset – which is important for money. Even ransomware attacks that use Bitcoin, are found to ‘shapeshift’ their revenue into Monero to avoid detection. Recently, Matt Suiche, founder of Dubai-based security firm Comae Technologies stated that Monero “is one of the favourites, if not the favourite” for ransomware, in an interview for Bloomberg.
I’ve been an avid supporter of Monero, and its development team for its unwavering dedication to fungibility and privacy. I’ve in the past praised leadership decisions which I noted to be a bar above most other dev teams in the crypto space, and in mid August 2017, I wrote a piece titled “Monero’s best market performance is yet to come” for CoinGeek which ended up being the most popular article on the site – by far at the time. Sure enough, a week after the release of that very article, the price had tripled independently of BTC movements.
The very reasons discussed in that article, stand today. Specifically, Monero’s supply curve this year continues to take a significant turn, with the supply tangent being even more pronounced than Bitcoin’s. The green line in the chart below shows today’s date.
Given that Monero’s aggressive mint rate in the early days, it is actually surprising to take note of its performance. It begs the question, if Monero can perform so well with such inflation, how much better will it do, with a somewhat more mature market, and far less emission rate over the next couple of years?
Monero recently created ripples within its community after a ‘contentious’ hard fork last weekend birthed a number of side projects – most of which are operating on the legacy chain. There were two prime reasons for the fork, the first was to increase privacy ‘even more’ by increasing the ring size to 7. This obscures transaction outputs in a pool of 7 outputs, and adds to a sender’s plausible deniability.
The second change was a rather contentious change to the proof of work algorithm. This has caused a wild stir in the community, which has led to another forking-crisis. It should be stated however, that the price impact on Monero itself has been minimal, if apparent at all. The stability of price following the split in chain, has re-assured investors.
So why did the proof of work need changing? Though my personal attitude leans towards a pro-free market, I cannot deny that a core tenet of Monero philosophy is – CPU/GPU mining. This has been made clear by Monero devs since its inception.
So what were the changes that killed off Bitmain’s ASICs?
Specifically, two functions in the CryptoNight algorithm.
The nature of these modifications mean that it’ll be even easier to further tweak the algorithm in future. I believe this is mightily important, as a precedent has now been set, and the team needs to continuously tweak the PoW algorithm to maintain its ASIC resistance. This is the path chosen.
At some point Monero devs may find an organic way to continuously change the mining algorithm at set block heights… This would be somewhat akin in style to their clever ‘adaptable blocksize’ technology. But an organic algorithm of this nature could also be gamed by a clever ASIC manufacturer since, the algorithm would inherently reveal the details of future changes. With some clever cryptography, this can be made more obscure, but requires significant work and testing.
The free market choice for those not opposed to ASIC mining remains on the legacy fork.
But with scalability improvements on the horizon, and more privacy enhancements to come later this year, Monero’s developers maintain a stronghold to steer the ship into successful territory.
What about Bitcoin Cash?
One of the things that first attracted me to Monero aside from its fungible/privacy properties, was its adaptable blocksize. BTC shot itself in the foot, and Bitcoin Cash has resurrected a fallen giant. BCH holds a roadmap for continuous on-chain scalability – and this trait is of unconditional importance. For mainstream ecommerce and merchant adoption, volatile fees are a death trap. Fees need to be low, and they need to be consistently low.
In 2017, Bitcoin Core lost swathes of territory and it remains the only year in which Bitcoin merchant adoption actually went backwards. Numerous key entities such as Steam and Fiverr dropped support.
This is where Bitcoin Cash has done something that is absolutely unprecedented in the crypto space. It has successfully managed to re-engage all the big players within less than one year of forking. Former Core Developer (and pro big blocks) Mike Hearn recently made the following comment regarding Bitcoin Cash (while referencing his BitcoinXT client):
“the sort of split BCH did is incredibly costly. You need new wallets, exchanges have to list the new currency, you need new miners, you need to build a new p2p network with a new set of nodes, new development team, new merchants and payment processors (or convert the existing ones) etc. You basically start over from scratch except for the open source code.” – Mike Hearn
Incredibly Bitcoin Cash has managed to do all of the above, as well as regain an abundance of BTC lost territory. Even Hearn, then later admits “The speed with which Bitcoin Cash has recovered infrastructure and rebuilt community is impressive.”
What does this have to do with the success of BCH? – EVERYTHING. Utility and adoption are key – something that the Monero community is well aware of also.
With Coinbase and BitPay featuring full integration, and Bitcoin Cash forum r/btc very recently overtaking the subscriber count of r/litecoin, the pendelum is in full swing.
What’s the outlook on price?
The entire crypto market is today pegged to the price of BTC. I’ve written about the Gartner hype cycle before and its fractal recurrence, and there is no doubt now that this pattern is consistently recurring. Until when? That’s anybody’s guess… Crypto adoption is STILL young, and STILL has a very long way to go. So let’s look at the charts from previous all-time highs.
Though timelines are skewed (ie the bigger the bubble, the bigger the time frame), it is undeniable that each successive cycle, not only repeats a very similar pattern, but it also dwarfs the previous.
With Bitcoin Cash’s massive inroads into adoption, and repossession of lost BTC ground, the next hype cycle, may very well see it catapult into uncharted territory.
Eli Afram
@justicemate
Note: Tokens in the SegWit chain are referred to as SegWit-Coin BTC (inaccurately called Bitcoin Legacy or Core by many) and SegWit Gold (SWG) and are no longer Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the only true Bitcoin as intended by the original Satoshi white paper. Bitcoin BCH is the only public block chain that offers safe and cheap microtransactions.
“Utility” and “Scarcity” do wonders for value. It is the formula of these two fundamental attributes of “Value” that fashion incredible opportunities for investors.
There are two digital assets out there today, that scream the loudest. Namely, Monero (XMR) and BitcoinCash (BCH).
Why Monero?
Where do I begin – the reasons are countless. First and foremost it is today the most private crypto-currency in the space, second to none. Not only has the FBI flagged and named Monero as a concern for their chain analysis tools (which cannot decipher XMR transactions), but many ransomware attacks are now utilising Monero also. This may not come across in positive light, but it does highlight the fungible and private nature of the asset – which is important for money. Even ransomware attacks that use Bitcoin, are found to ‘shapeshift’ their revenue into Monero to avoid detection. Recently, Matt Suiche, founder of Dubai-based security firm Comae Technologies stated that Monero “is one of the favourites, if not the favourite” for ransomware, in an interview for Bloomberg.
I’ve been an avid supporter of Monero, and its development team for its unwavering dedication to fungibility and privacy. I’ve in the past praised leadership decisions which I noted to be a bar above most other dev teams in the crypto space, and in mid August 2017, I wrote a piece titled “Monero’s best market performance is yet to come” for CoinGeek which ended up being the most popular article on the site – by far at the time. Sure enough, a week after the release of that very article, the price had tripled independently of BTC movements.
The very reasons discussed in that article, stand today. Specifically, Monero’s supply curve this year continues to take a significant turn, with the supply tangent being even more pronounced than Bitcoin’s. The green line in the chart below shows today’s date.
Given that Monero’s aggressive mint rate in the early days, it is actually surprising to take note of its performance. It begs the question, if Monero can perform so well with such inflation, how much better will it do, with a somewhat more mature market, and far less emission rate over the next couple of years?
Monero recently created ripples within its community after a ‘contentious’ hard fork last weekend birthed a number of side projects – most of which are operating on the legacy chain. There were two prime reasons for the fork, the first was to increase privacy ‘even more’ by increasing the ring size to 7. This obscures transaction outputs in a pool of 7 outputs, and adds to a sender’s plausible deniability.
The second change was a rather contentious change to the proof of work algorithm. This has caused a wild stir in the community, which has led to another forking-crisis. It should be stated however, that the price impact on Monero itself has been minimal, if apparent at all. The stability of price following the split in chain, has re-assured investors.
So why did the proof of work need changing? Though my personal attitude leans towards a pro-free market, I cannot deny that a core tenet of Monero philosophy is – CPU/GPU mining. This has been made clear by Monero devs since its inception.
So what were the changes that killed off Bitmain’s ASICs?
Specifically, two functions in the CryptoNight algorithm.
The nature of these modifications mean that it’ll be even easier to further tweak the algorithm in future. I believe this is mightily important, as a precedent has now been set, and the team needs to continuously tweak the PoW algorithm to maintain its ASIC resistance. This is the path chosen.
At some point Monero devs may find an organic way to continuously change the mining algorithm at set block heights… This would be somewhat akin in style to their clever ‘adaptable blocksize’ technology. But an organic algorithm of this nature could also be gamed by a clever ASIC manufacturer since, the algorithm would inherently reveal the details of future changes. With some clever cryptography, this can be made more obscure, but requires significant work and testing.
The free market choice for those not opposed to ASIC mining remains on the legacy fork.
But with scalability improvements on the horizon, and more privacy enhancements to come later this year, Monero’s developers maintain a stronghold to steer the ship into successful territory.
What about Bitcoin Cash?
One of the things that first attracted me to Monero aside from its fungible/privacy properties, was its adaptable blocksize. BTC shot itself in the foot, and Bitcoin Cash has resurrected a fallen giant. BCH holds a roadmap for continuous on-chain scalability – and this trait is of unconditional importance. For mainstream ecommerce and merchant adoption, volatile fees are a death trap. Fees need to be low, and they need to be consistently low.
In 2017, Bitcoin Core lost swathes of territory and it remains the only year in which Bitcoin merchant adoption actually went backwards. Numerous key entities such as Steam and Fiverr dropped support.
This is where Bitcoin Cash has done something that is absolutely unprecedented in the crypto space. It has successfully managed to re-engage all the big players within less than one year of forking. Former Core Developer (and pro big blocks) Mike Hearn recently made the following comment regarding Bitcoin Cash (while referencing his BitcoinXT client):
“the sort of split BCH did is incredibly costly. You need new wallets, exchanges have to list the new currency, you need new miners, you need to build a new p2p network with a new set of nodes, new development team, new merchants and payment processors (or convert the existing ones) etc. You basically start over from scratch except for the open source code.” – Mike Hearn
Incredibly Bitcoin Cash has managed to do all of the above, as well as regain an abundance of BTC lost territory. Even Hearn, then later admits “The speed with which Bitcoin Cash has recovered infrastructure and rebuilt community is impressive.”
What does this have to do with the success of BCH? – EVERYTHING. Utility and adoption are key – something that the Monero community is well aware of also.
With Coinbase and BitPay featuring full integration, and Bitcoin Cash forum r/btc very recently overtaking the subscriber count of r/litecoin, the pendelum is in full swing.
What’s the outlook on price?
The entire crypto market is today pegged to the price of BTC. I’ve written about the Gartner hype cycle before and its fractal recurrence, and there is no doubt now that this pattern is consistently recurring. Until when? That’s anybody’s guess… Crypto adoption is STILL young, and STILL has a very long way to go. So let’s look at the charts from previous all-time highs.
Though timelines are skewed (ie the bigger the bubble, the bigger the time frame), it is undeniable that each successive cycle, not only repeats a very similar pattern, but it also dwarfs the previous.
With Bitcoin Cash’s massive inroads into adoption, and repossession of lost BTC ground, the next hype cycle, may very well see it catapult into uncharted territory.
Eli Afram
@justicemate
Note: Tokens in the SegWit chain are referred to as SegWit-Coin BTC (inaccurately called Bitcoin Legacy or Core by many) and SegWit Gold (SWG) and are no longer Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the only true Bitcoin as intended by the original Satoshi white paper. Bitcoin BCH is the only public block chain that offers safe and cheap microtransactions.
A co-founder of the Tokyo Bitcoin Cash Meetup event has come up with a new suggestion for referring to fractions of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), in place of the current designation ‘bits.’
Ken Shishido made the comments towards the end of a presentation delivered at the Satoshi’s Vision Conference to an audience of cryptocurrency enthusiasts in Japan. In the alternative, he proposed the term ‘cash’, to refer to a specific fraction of BCH.
Under Shishido’s proposals, ‘cash’ would be the term given to units of one millionth of a BCH, a term he also posits as equivalent to 100 Satoshi.
A BUIP request has now been submitted by Shishido, which spells out suggested change in terminology, and his reasons for suggesting the change. Shishido said: “Bitcoin Cash strives for the worldwide adoption, and unit denomination and calculation must be easy for the average users for daily transactions—and, it needs to be differentiated from Bitcoin Core (BTC) to avoid confusion.”
“The “cash” denomination has been discussed and proposed by many people before. Authors of this BUIP take no credit for inventing the term. As BCH grows in price versus fiat currencies, it’s important to give users the ability to quickly and accurately calculate prices for transactions, savings and other economic activities,” he noted.
While the idea has found some pockets of support, particularly from those who feel there is a need for a more consumer-friendly denomination, not everyone is sold on the term ‘cash’.
For one thing, ‘cash’ is an uncountable noun, and the terminology creates several grammatical difficulties in application. This is not an easy taxonomy to use or say, and there are some obvious better alternatives.
It feels more comfortable to say “200 bucks” than “200 cash,” and the meaning is not as confusing in “bucks” as in “cash.” A simple formulation of, say, ‘Bucks’ (1/100th of a Bitcoin), ‘Beans’ (1/100th of a buck), ‘Bits’ (1/100th of a bean) and Satoshis (1/100th of a bit) could provide a more user-friendly alternative.
As well as providing the desired distinction from Segwit-Coin BTC denominations, the bucks, beans, bits and Satoshis structure makes far more sense, both grammatically and practically, to provide users with the functional denominations they require.
While Shishido’s BUIP may be along the right lines, it’s fair to say there’s still significant room for improvement.
Note: Tokens in the SegWit chain are referred to as SegWit-Coin BTC (inaccurately called Bitcoin Legacy or Core by many) and SegWit Gold (SWG) and are no longer Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the only true Bitcoin as intended by the original Satoshi white paper. Bitcoin BCH is the only public block chain that offers safe and cheap microtransactions.
Blockchain and cryptocurrency enthusiasts might have been disturbed by recent reports claiming there is child pornography on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, and suggesting that those downloading the blockchain could unwittingly fall foul of the law.
Far from a new story, the suggestion has been around for some time, along with other suggestions linking the blockchain to distribution of various other types of illicit material, including material concerned with terrorism.
The latest round of claims appeared to stem from a research paper from a group of academics at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, which suggested there could be risks for anyone downloading the blockchain, including consumers participating in cryptocurrency transactions:
“Blockchains…irrevocably record arbitrary data, ranging from short messages to pictures. This does not come without risk for users as each participant has to locally replicate the complete blockchain, particularly including potentially harmful content…Our analysis shows that certain content, e.g., illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal…our analysis reveals more than 1600 files on the blockchain, over 99% of which are texts or images. Among these files there is clearly objectionable content such as links to child pornography, which is distributed to all Bitcoin participants.”
The news might be understandably concerning for anyone currently involved, or hoping to get involved in blockchain. Yet it bears no relation to reality, and is just the latest example of fake news put out by those agitating against blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.
Aside from being false in its premise, the suggestion does not take account of the way information is stored within the blockchain. Blockchain commentator Nic Carter summed up the problems caused this lack of understanding.
Any journalist writing about arbitrary content injection into the Bitcoin blockchain should be extremely careful to detail to what extent that content exists, is extractable, viewable, etc.
Furthermore, there is a mens rea (guilty mind) component of child pornography offences, which would ultimately not be established in the event that a consumer downloaded offending data, and that the data was extractable. While most non-developers would struggle to extract any information from the blockchain in a meaningful way, even those who did would be unable to be held liable for any infringement. The issue is simply not relevant for consumer users of the blockchain.
Most likely the story, which has been around in various forms since 2013, comes as an intentional FUD attempt to undermine the technology from those opposed to its development.
Note: Tokens in the SegWit chain are referred to as SegWit-Coin BTC (inaccurately called Bitcoin Legacy or Core by many) and SegWit Gold (SWG) and are no longer Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the only true Bitcoin as intended by the original Satoshi white paper. Bitcoin BCH is the only public block chain that offers safe and cheap microtransactions.
If you haven’t heard already, the term zero-confirmation (0-conf) has been buzzing around the Bitcoin community lately. 0-conf, however, is more than just a buzzword. It’s the future of cryptocurrency-related transactions, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in particular.
Six confirmations have been the accepted standard safeguard against double spending for years, but with the improvements in transaction technology, zero-confirmation transactions are quickly gaining favor—especially among development groups and tech-savvy entrepreneurs.
But what about the smaller merchants, who don’t know much about Bitcoin and might think that 0-conf simply means “nothing” has been verified? Does the term 0-confirmation inspire trust?
Verified is not confirmed
To put it simply, zero-confirmation means that the transaction has been broadcasted to the network, but it still needs to be confirmed and written to the blockchain—a process that could take as long as 10 minutes on the Bitcoin BCH network.
This doesn’t instill confidence among users, particularly merchants who, upon seeing 0-conf on their screen, could take it to mean that the transaction hasn’t been processed. The dilemma prompted Yours.org user Slowsynapse to come up with a reasonable suggestion: Instead of calling it a 0-confirmation transaction, why not use the term “verified”?
In this case, “verified” means the transaction is still being validated, which could take 2 seconds or less. The “confirmed” status follows after a 10-minute settlement time, in which the validity of the transaction has been established or when merchants detects a double spend and moves to blacklist the customer.
In his Yours.org post, Slowsynapse wrote, “So imagine if you were showing off Bitcoin Cash, and the moment you hit send, a green ‘verified’ 0/3 confirmations showed up. I know it’s stupid, but I’m pretty sure people will go ‘wow that’s really fast and awesome’ instead of ‘why is it taking 10 minutes?’”
The idea is sheer brilliance in its simplicity. Using “verified” lets merchants know that their transaction has received its first confirmation on the network, and that the second confirmation—when the transaction gets written on the blockchain—is coming right up.
This process is safe for low ticket services and as easy as 1-2-3, which in this case stand for unverified>verified>confirmed.
What do you think about Slowsynapse suggestion? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Note: Tokens in the SegWit chain are referred to as SegWit1X (BTC) and SegWit Gold (SWG) and are no longer Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the only true Bitcoin as intended by the original Satoshi white paper. Bitcoin BCH is the only public block chain that offers safe and cheap microtransactions.
