In the traditional Sunday digest of BlockchainJournal – a critical vulnerability in the bitcoin network was found and eliminated, decision making on bitcoin-ETF, a new chip from Bitmain and Ripple rally was postponed.
Bitcoin
This week, the rate of the first crypto currency showed moderate growth, breaking the $ 6700 mark. Nevertheless, there were some obstacles.
So, on September 19, reports of hacking the Japanese stock exchange Zaif and stealing $ 60 million triggered a drop in quotations to the area of $ 6,100, but then a sharp increase to $ 6,500, probably against the background of buying 5 million futures contracts on the BitMEX exchange at $ 6469.2.
The next day, an unscheduled release of the Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 client took place, in which a critical vulnerability was removed , allowing a DoS attack on the bitcoin network and disabling up to 90% of the nodes. The cost of such an attack would be only 12.5 BTC.
Later it became known that the exploitation of a bug called CVE-2018-17144, which appeared in Bitcoin Core 0.14.0 in November 2016, allowed an attacker to artificially increase the emission of bitcoin, thereby devaluating coins. For some time developers have been hiding the scale of the problem solved in the new release in order to give the holders of the nodes time to update the software.
Another unpleasant news was the statement of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about the next postponement of the bitcoin-ETF solution from VanEck and SolidX. The agency contacted the community for more information.
It is noteworthy that such a negative background did not affect the quotes of the flagship market, which by the end of the week almost closely approached the key resistance level at around $ 6,800.
TradingView data
It should be added that this week Bitcoin Core developer Brian Bishop, together with the former representative of Morgan Stanley and Ernst & Young, appealed to the SEC to coordinate the regulatory policy regarding corporate implementation of bitcoin, in particular, the activity of the integrated platform for Bakkt digital assets.
They warned about the dangers of storing client funds on a single account and the inadmissibility of old standards for custodian services. In addition, in their opinion, Bakkt's concept has a place for shifting, when an organization that claims to own certain funds lends it to another organization, after which the latter claims the same thing, which leads to additional risks.
"Do not consider bitcoin as an ordinary financial tool, because it is not. Do not apply the old rules to the new system , "said former managing director of Morgan Stanley Caitlin Long.
Note that today, September 23, at the Baltic Honeybadger 2018 in Riga, the leading representatives of the community were represented by The B Foundation, which will focus on attracting funding for the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem and the Lightning Network.
In addition, the B Foundation intends to oversee the development of proprietary projects, bitcoin marketing and the development of usability and user experience solutions, and to sponsor student scholarships and bounty programs.
Another positive news was almost unnoticed by ordinary users. This is the plans of Grupo XP, the largest independent broker of Brazil, to launch the bitcoin-exchange XDEX in the coming months.
According to the company, currently about 3 million Brazilians are invested in bitcoin, and only 600,000 of the country's residents are in the securities market, which literally forced Grupo XP to rethink its priorities.
New developments in the field of mining
At the World Digital Mining Summit in Tbilisi, Bitmain presented a high-performance 7-nanometer BM1391 chip with an energy efficiency of 42 J / TH. The next-generation Antminer devices will already be equipped with a new development.
Another already 14-nanometer chip for optimization of mining was presented by Bitfury Group. The invention is called Bitfury Clarke ASIC. The developers claim that the new integrated microcircuit has the highest performance characteristics for bitcoin-mining from all existing ones.
The chip is fully optimized for Bitcoin Mining on SHA256. The hashing capacity is up to 120 Gigahets per second (GH / s) with energy costs of only 55 miljoules per gigache (mJ / GH). The minimum required mains voltage is 0.3 V.
During the Baltic Honeybadger 2018 in Riga, the operator Slush Pool – Braiins Systems, – introduced the alpha version of the open source operating system for mining devices called Braiins OS.
The development standardizes the operating principles of devices and their interaction with Slush Pool, and also excludes the possibility of introducing backdoors to activate malware into the firmware.
"Old good" rally Ripple
Earlier this week, representative of Ripple company Sagar Sarbhai informed that the full-scale launch of the commercial version of the xRapid platform will take place "approximately next month".
The solution is targeted at payment providers and financial institutions seeking to improve their user experience and minimize costs in the implementation of cross-border payments, as well as improve the speed of the latter.
Against the backdrop of the announcement, XRP quotations began rallying in the "best traditions" of last year, and at some point the asset even managed to temporarily shift Ethereum from the second place in the CoinMarketCap list, demonstrating more than 100% growth. Nevertheless, the explosive growth was followed by a correction.
Exchanges
Rally XRP significantly revived trading volumes on a number of exchanges, including Poloniex, Bittrex, Upbit, Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Binance and others.
Note that this week the Binance Exchange announced plans to launch 5 to 10 trading platforms supporting Fiat on five continents during the year, presented a rating platform for aggregating estimates of block projects, and also started the process of bringing to the market an additional 32 million tokens Binance Coin.
Earlier this week, Poloniex warned its users of the delisting of BitcoinDark (BTCD), Bitmark (BTM), Einsteinium (EMC2), GridCoin (GRC), NeosCoin (NEOS), PotCoin (POT), VeriCoin (VRC) and Bitcoin Plus (XBC), which will be held on September 25.
The Russian bill and the status of mining
The new version of the Russian draft law "On digital financial assets" does not define the concept of "crypto-currency", and mining is classified as the release of tokens to attract investment in capital.
The document also states that coins must be secured by the property of the issuer or third parties, and to protect unqualified investors, the issuer of tokens is required to indicate the maximum amount for which they can buy assets.
In addition, crypto-exchange exchanges will have to provide access to customer data at the request of government agencies.
The most significant changes in the document specifically for BlockchainJournal magazine were commented on by the director of Blockchain Lawyers' supplementary education program Igor Sudets.
Launching the Tezos core network
On Monday, September 17, the developers of the Tezos block-protocol announced the launch of the main project network.
It is noteworthy that the launch of a viable version of the software was made at the end of June. After that, in the listings of several exchanges, Tokens of the Tezos project appeared under the ticker XTZ.
However, only last weekend the developers announced the completion of the experimental mode and exit from the beta version.
Shortly after the launch of the main network on Monday, the Bitfinex Exchange announced the beginning of the token trading in pairs to BTC and USD.
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