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A REAL BITCOIN O.G.: Martti "Sirius" Malmi, one of the first coders to work alongside Satoshi Nakamoto, revealed the new project he's working on exclusively to CoinDesk.
A new cryptocurrency called AXE is designed to fuel his new global project of creating a decentralized web, combining Malmi's Identifi online reputation system with database system GUN.
GUN is building decentralized social networks, akin to Reddit and YouTube, and Identifi adds a censorship-resistant identity layer. The project seeks no less than to disrupt the likes of Google and Facebook. Full Story
CAN'T TOUCH THIS: BBVA ran into a problem while trying to innovate with distributed ledger technology, underscoring the roadblocks faced by forward-thinking incumbents.
The Spanish multinational bank negotiated a corporate loan on a private Hyperledger blockchain and wanted to use the public ethereum ledger to notarize the agreements. But doing so would require purchasing a small amount of ether, and regulators have sent mixed signals on whether this was permissible.
So the bank just used an ethereum testnet to anchor the data, which is a bit like making a handprint in sand on the beach instead of wet cement on the sidewalk. Full story
GAMIFYING THE GAME: The National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) plans to launch a blockchain platform for players to share commentary, livestreams and other content.
FanChan is a product of a blockchain startup SportsCastr, and it’s expected to let the athletes earn additional income through broadcasting exclusive content to their fans, who will be able to subscribe and then reward players with tokens. Full story |
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Do you HODL or SPEDN? The double edged sword of crypto is that usage leads to price increasing but also could result in a loss of investment gains.
We asked our audience in the latest State of Blockchain Sentiment Survey about this issue. 70 percent thought HODLing was more important while 30 percent took the opposite opinion.
We also asked how frequently CoinDesk readers spend their coins, and the results reveal that almost no one uses their crypto on a regular basis.
Interestingly, bitcoin was the most spent coin, with only 73% of respondents saying they spend their bitcoin “almost never.” For comparison, 82% ethereum users and 89% of litecoin users “almost never” spend their coins.
These results could indicate that bitcoin users are more likely to spend their crypto, but it could also reflect that certain coins have more merchants or apps.
Find more insights in CoinDesk's Q2 State of Blockchain report. More research |
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| | BEARS UNCHAINED: Bitcoin is changing hands at $7,760 on Bitfinex Tuesday, down 4.5 percent in the last 24 hours, and the current volatility level makes a further sharp decline possible. Full story |
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BEST OF THE BEST
For a thoughtful reflection on bitcoin's history and the different ways the community has viewed it over the years, take some time to read this blog post by Hasufly and Nic Carter.
There have been multiple approaches to what bitcoin is and how we can use it: an experiment, a cheap p2p payments network, a censorship-resistant digital gold, a darknet currency, a reserve currency for the crypto industry, a programmable shared database and, lastly, an uncorrelated financial asset viewed as an investment vehicle.
Some of these concepts are bitterly incompatible with each other, like the concept of cheap payments versus that of a digital gold. And in the future, we may see a battle between proponents of anonymity and advocates of a transparent, KYC and AML-complaint bitcoin, the authors suggest.
THE REST
BLOOMBERG: The wire service offers a grim take on the prospects for enterprise blockchain vendors.
Forrester Research estimates that up to 90 percent of current corporate blockchain experiments will never become a part of real everyday operations. Some big companies now are delaying the planned release of their DLT systems.
Likewise, Gartner found that only 1 percent of CIOs reported any blockchain adoption in their firms and only 8 percent had plans or ongoing experiments with the technology.
NEW YORK TIMES: Columnist and longtime cryptocurrency doubter Paul Krugman explains his continued skepticism about the space: monetary systems like bitcoin appear to be too expensive and complicated in his view.
"Instead of money created by the click of a mouse, we have money that must be mined — created through resource-intensive computations," the economist writes.
Krugman comes to the conclusion that the black market is going to be the only place to use cryptocurrencies in the near future. Cue those fax machine memes.
MOTHERBOARD: California law enforcement reported they had caught a 20-year-old college student who had been robbing crypto investors using a technique known as SIM-swapping.
Joel Ortiz allegedly stole around $5 million in cryptocurrencies this year, before getting arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on his way to Europe.
Police said Ortiz tricked cell phone service providers to transfer the victims’ phone numbers to his SIM card and then hijacked their Gmail accounts and got access to their crypto accounts. |
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