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DORSEY'S FLAME: Bitcoin’s “lightning torch” saw none other than Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey snatch up the ongoing payment experiment and pass it on Tuesday.
As CoinDesk reported, users have been passing around a so-called “lightning torch” – a running game wherein each participant adds a little bitcoin to a lightning network payment, then passes it onto someone on Twitter that they trust. The effort aims to spread awareness of the technology, widely seen as the future of bitcoin payments since transactions are fast and scalable.
With Dorsey’s participation, the payment has now reached roughly 2,860,000 satoshis (worth nearly $100 at the time of press). To date, about 150 people have taken part in what has become a global exercise.
Crypto podcast host Matt Odell was the one nudging Dorsey to participate, tweeting: “You ready to carry the torch? Send me an invoice for 2,860,000 sats.”
Perhaps a bit unexpectedly, Dorsey responded on Twitter the next day, posting an invoice – similar to a regular invoice in that it’s used to request and retrieve a certain amount of funds. Odell then sent the necessary funds to Dorsey, before Dorsey tweeted simply: “Cool example of #BitcoinTwitter experimenting on the lightning network.” Full Story
GOOGLING ETC: Google’s big-data analytics platform, BigQuery, just quietly added support for ethereum classic (ETC) blockchain searches along with a range of other cryptocurrency networks – an effort that will make it easier for technologists to search the blockchain for specific pieces of data.
This move is just one of many the ETC community is pushing forward this winter to try to boost the niche cryptocurrency’s role in the broader marketplace, where it currently ranks via the CoinDesk Crypto-Economics Explorer as having less than 1 percent of the network activity displayed by bitcoin and just over 3 percent of the comparable developer benchmarks on GitHub.
Brazilian entrepreneur Edilson Osorio Junior, CEO of blockchain voting and verification startup OriginalMy, told CoinDesk that this BigQuery addition will make it easier for his startup to search for a specific vote or authenticated publication date for a piece of media content.
According to Yaz Khoury, director of developer relations at the nonprofit ETC Cooperative, Google’s staff took note of the increased focus on fostering use cases.
“They approached me,” Khoury said of Google, adding that BigQuery support is about “merging the gap between people who are very familiar with the blockchain data structure” and technologists who are more familiar with querying other types of data. Full Story
COINBASE ADDITIONS: San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced in a blog post Wednesday that its Coinbase Wallet app will be updated over the next week to add bitcoin support to all users on iOS and Android.
Coinbase Wallet already supports ethereum (ETH), ethereum classic (ETH) and “over 100,000” different ERC-20 tokens and ERC-721 collectibles built on ethereum, the exchange said, adding that it is also working on to add support for bitcoin cash (BCH), litecoin (LTC) and other major cryptos to its wallet going forward.
While with the main Coinbase app or Coinbase.com, users can buy cryptocurrencies and the exchange itself stores the keys centrally, with the Wallet app, users safeguard their own private keys. The app supports both SegWit and legacy bitcoin addresses for backwards compatibility.
Coinbase announced separately that customers in 32 EU and European Free Trade Association countries can now make withdrawals into their PayPal accounts. Full Stories |
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 Every quarter, CoinDesk Research takes stock of the key data, trends and events with its State of Blockchains reports. As our research efforts evolve and expand, we hope to provide amplification to a variety of perspectives within the crypto community. We reached out to analysts, builders, and lawyers to understand the industry from their unique vantage point. Check out the full article but here's a sample insight: "In the ecosystem of decentralized applications, use cases that get traction can be found in the metrics that are intrinsic to each project. In the case of Maker DAO, the sustained growth of created CDPs (Collateralized Debt Positions) throughout 2018 shows a real interest in decentralized credit. Other projects like Aragon, DAOStack and Democracy Earth benchmark the economic activity around DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). These metrics rather than the analogy of measuring Daily Active Users – as if blockchains served the same purpose of web based networks— are far more relevant to understand what's actually relevant in the dapp ecosystem." — Santiago Siri (@santisiri), Democracy Earth (Coder) We want to hear your perspective too! To add to the conversation, please fill out our survey. We will be releasing the results in the coming weeks. For more research insights, check out the CoinDesk Crypto-Economic Explorer here. |
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| BEARS IN CHARGE: Bitcoin has charted another bearish lower high along the downward sloping 6-hour chart’s 50-candle MA, after a failed falling-wedge breakout early today. As a result, recent lows near $3,300 may soon come into play. Bearish pressures would possibly weaken if the bulls can force a convincing 6-hour close above the 50-candle MA at $3,450. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST CNBC: In more Jack Dorsey news, the Twitter and Square founder has revealed he’s still a fan of the number one cryptocurrency by market cap. As reported by CNBC, Dorsey replied to a tweet on Tuesday that asked which cryptos or tokens he holds. "I only have bitcoin,” he said. Dorsey, whose Cash app allows users to buy and sell bitcoin, has previously predicted that the world and the internet will ultimately will have a single currency, and that it will be bitcoin. THE REST
FCA: The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has warned investors of the threat posed by investment scammers. The most commonly reported scams involved investments in shares and bonds, forex and cryptocurrencies by firms that are not authorised by the watchdog, it said. The FCA cited data from Action Fraud indicating that losses of over £197 million were reported in 2018, with over £29,000 being lost on average. Fraudsters are employing “increasingly sophisticated” tactics to get victims to invest in the schemes, it added. THE FINTECH TIMES: 2019 could be the year security tokens finally take off in the real-estate space, according to The Fintech Times. As a result it could soon be possible to buy a share of a property with its ownership being represented by a crypto token, in fact some firms are already starting to launch such schemes. One of the benefits of such a system would be that buyers become part owners of the company, allowing them to have a share in profits and dividends. Another would be that the barrier to entry would be drastically reduced. One source cited in the piece suggests that you would need £170,000 ($220,000) at a minimum to invest in shared property (in the U.K., at least), while transation costs maybe be several thousands of dollars or 5 percent in New York. Tokenizing the assets, though, potentially allows smaller investors into the market and cuts costs, make property investment more affordable. |
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