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PORN PAYMENTS: Since raising $6 million in a 2017 initial coin offering (ICO), porn industry startup SpankChain has differentiated itself from the token-sale pack by delivering a platform with thousands of users.
Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, SpankChain boasted 6,136 active users as of October, and has paid out around $72,422 in cryptocurrency to 31 webcam models since the site launched in April.
And several freelance SpankChain performers say they are now earning more on the platform than any mainstream porn site, as it takes only 5 percent of their earnings compared to the industry standard 50 percent.
“I crunched the numbers,” performer River Sunshine told CoinDesk. “I was making on three sites combined, 6 percent of what I made in the same 30-day period on SpankChain.”
Sunshine and her colleagues are examples of sex industry veterans who were introduced to cryptocurrency through SpankChain. They generally cash out the platform’s ethereum-based SPANK tokens as needed for weekly expenses, storing the rest as some form of digital asset for long-term savings.
“I feel more in control of my money than I did using the banks and payment processors on other sites,” Sunshine said. Full Story
MINER SHUTDOWN: Between 600,000 and 800,000 bitcoin miners have shut down since mid-November amid declines in price and hashrate across the network, according to the world's third-largest mining pool.
Mao Shixing, founder of F2pool, said his firm’s estimate takes into account the total network hashrate drop and the average hash power of older mining machines that are having a hard time generating profits.
Mao explained that those who have halted operations are likely to be using older models, such as Bitmain's Antminer T9+ and Canaan Creative's AvalonMiner 741. These miners have an average hash power of around 10 TH/s and are estimated to be losing money right now.
However, the fact that some mining farms have unplugged doesn’t necessarily mean they are out of the game for good.
“Bitcoin mining is always a dynamically adjusted process,” Mao said, meaning when the hashrate drops, so does the mining difficulty. “The change of bitcoin’s mining difficulty normally has a lag of about 14 days [following a hashrate change]. After this wave of shutdowns, those players who opted to stay in may have a better life.” Full Story
RIPPLE ROLLOUT: Ripple is rolling out a new version of its most popular product, xCurrent, which is more closely integrated with Ripple’s other major offering, xRapid. That product notably uses the cryptocurrency XRP to provide what the company calls “on-demand liquidity” in cross-border transactions.
The roll-out of the new xCurrent 4.0 began in September, a company spokesperson told CoinDesk, and customers – which include American Express, Santander and Itaú – are currently being transitioned to the new version.
Yet the xRapid integration, Birla stressed, is entirely optional, and so far, a Ripple spokesperson told CoinDesk, no xCurrent 4.0 users have opted for xRapid integration, and by extension XRP.
“In other countries, where there’s not good regulatory clearance or digital asset infrastructure, you just continue to use xCurrent as-is, with fiat liquidity,” Ripple’s SVP of product Asheesh Birla told CoinDesk. Full Story |
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CoinDesk’s Crypto-Economics Explorer aggregates data points across the industry to measure the size and opportunity of crypto markets. In addition to price and market cap, CoinDesk’s explorer provides users with a comprehensive way to view the crypto-economic forces that shape an asset’s market maturity, growth, and potential.
Network interest is important in determining the activity occurring within a blockchain’s internal ecosystem.
Top 5 by Transaction Count: - EOS 7.03M
- TRX 1.65M
- ETH 529K
- BTC 239K
- XRP 157K
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|  Jay Clayton Chairman of the SEC |
 Kelly Loeffler CEO of Bakkt |
|  Dr. Mohamed A. El-Erian Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz |
 Jeffrey Sprecher Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange & Chairman and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. |
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| DEFENSIVE PLAY: Bitcoin defended the three-year-long rising trendline yesterday, validating the oversold conditions reported by technical indicators since last week. Further, the 4-hour chart is showing a bullish divergence of the RSI and the falling channel breakout. As a result, a stronger corrective rally to $4,500 could unfold in the next 48 hours. The bullish case, however, would weaken if prices fall back below the long-term rising trendline support of $3,830. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST WALL STREET JOURNAL: Since before the creation of his blockchain-based trading platform tZero in 2015, Patrick Byrne, CEO of e-commerce giant Overstock, has been a strong believer in the potential of blockchain to change the future of commerce. So strong, in fact, that he told the WSJ that he doesn’t mind that the startup is currently burning up money while it seeks regulatory approvals before commercial launch. “I don’t care whether tZero is losing $2 million a month,” Byrne said. “We think we’ve got cold fusion on the blockchain side.” Byrne’s also planning to sell Overstock’s retail business in a bid to follow his blockchain dreams – he now runs a stable of projects working with the tech. While that news was already in the public arena, Byrne now says he expects the deal could be closed by February, although he didn't disclose the names of potential suitors.
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THE NEXT WEB: The Brave browser project launched with the aim of letting users reward content creators via a decentralized browser and as a result side-step the need for online ads and ad-blockers. However, since the reward – Brave's own BAT token – is tradable on various cryptocurrency exchanges, fraudsters have started exploiting the system to get free tokens. Brave co-founder Brendan Eich acknowledged there's a problem to The Next Web, saying "Brave's hundreds to thousands of fraudulent users" are presently receiving grants – and many of them are bots. Not only that but Brave has been criticized for having T&Cs that, some claim, allow Brave admins to take “unclaimed” tokens after 90-days. The project’s anti-fraud procedures are also claimed to be preventing some users from claiming their BAT donations for a different 90-day period. So BAT could potentially be grabbed from innocent users. Eich denied the claims, though, saying, "There's nothing we can do to touch your BAT. BAT in a wallet you control cannot be 'confiscated.'" Further, the project's grant expiration policy is not a way to confiscate BAT, he said. FINANCIAL TIMES: Mike Novogratz, ex-Goldman Sachs partner and founder of crypto merchant bank Galaxy Digital, says this year has been tough for his company, adding that it “sucks to build a business in a bear market,” according to a piece from the FT. Still, he predicted that financial institutions will transition from investing in cryptocurrency funds to investing in cryptocurrencies proper in the first quarter of next year. “You’ll see that flip next year. That’s when prices start moving again,” he said. |
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WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER  |
Consensus: Invest Keynotes |
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|  Jay Clayton Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission |
| Dr. Mohamed A. El-Erian Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz |
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