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SHREM WIN: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been ordered to pay back $45,000 in legal fees incurred by entrepreneur Charlie Shrem as part of an ongoing lawsuit that alleges he failed to broker a series of promised cryptocurrency purchases on their behalf.
In the order, filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York on Thursday, Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled Shrem should be reimbursed for a prior court ruling that gave the plaintiffs the ability to seize up to $30 million of his assets.
The initial order was rolled back on Nov. 8, at which point Shrem filed a motion to recoup attorney’s fees and related costs to defending the motion.
Lawyers for Winklevoss Capital had attempted to argue that Shrem should not recoup the funds for his costs, as he was only ultimately only charged a “de minimis amount” of less than $5. The court, however, ultimately rejected the idea that this invalidated Shrem’s claim, though the judge found the requested damages should be reduced by 40 percent on reviewing the charges.
Brian Klein, partner at Baker Marquart LLP, said of the ruling: “We are glad that the judge ruled for Charlie and ordered WCF to reimburse him for legal fees he incurred in overturning WCF’s approximately $30 million attachment order. This is another big step towards his full vindication.” Full Story
CODE TEASE: The latest code version for the lightning network – often trumpeted as the future of bitcoin payments – includes a “block size increase.”
One of the most active lightning implementations, LND, pushed out its newest “minor” release, version 0.5.2, of its beta code on Wednesday. Although it includes several changes from many contributors, the feature that’s sure to stick out to bitcoin veterans a “block size increase,” bringing to mind the parameter that the bitcoin community went to war over a couple years back.
But don’t worry: all hell isn’t about to break loose, as the feature is not really related. “It’s for the command line tool to be able to get a snapshot of the network. Thought I’d troll with the title lol,“ Lightning Labs developer Olaoluwa Osuntokun told CoinDesk.
Each node on the network stores a “graph” of its view of other lightning nodes on the network. That’s so that when a user sends a payment to someone else, the node can determine the best route to go through to reach its destination.
However, the graph has been ballooning as more people test out the lightning network, so developers have been brushing up against the limits. Thus, the team increased the “block size” of the graph, from 4MB to 50MB, so that developers can grab a larger snapshot.
On GitHub, one user wrote: “While we’re increasing the block size, we should also re-enable some deprecated features and then call it gRPC Cash!” he said, referencing the cryptocurrency bitcoin cash, which split off from bitcoin in the summer of 2017. Full Story
WHAT THIS BAKKT? Someone is poorly impersonating the highly anticipated bitcoin futures trading platform Bakkt in an apparent attempt to bilk people out of their bitcoin.
On Wednesday night, the CoinDesk news team received an email (subject line: “Bakkt News!”) claiming that the platform was set to launch on March 12. The email, sent from a gmail address and written in broken English, further stated that Bakkt would be seeking to raise $50 million in a second financing round and directed readers to a website, bakktplatform.io.
There, prospective investors are presented with a bitcoin address to send their money and asked to provide their own address to receive their “profits” from the investment. As of Thursday morning, no funds had been sent to the wallet.
The site (registered just a week ago through WhoisGuard, a domain owner-obscuring service in Panama, according to a WHOIS lookup) is a fake.
A spokesperson for Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Bakkt’s parent company, told CoinDesk: “that is not a Bakkt website and we wouldn’t have communicated in that way.”
Further, the email’s claims about Bakkt are dubious at best. For starters, Bakkt has no official launch date right now. The platform is still waiting on regulatory approval to begin listing its futures product, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is nowhere near such an approval.
Even more implausible, however, is the email’s announcement of a “Second Financing Round,” as Bakkt raised $182.5 million less than two months ago. Full Story |
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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: "Q4 proved yet again that yes, miners will go offline if unprofitable… and no this does not cause "death spirals." In that sense this was the most exciting quarter in years from a Bitcoin mining perspective. For the first time ever, the technological development of mining gear had matured to the point where the industry could observe meaningful, successive difficulty decreases on the back of large price contractions. As miners saw their cashflows turn negative, large amounts of unprofitable hardware was shut down and removed from the market. Furthermore, the system worked exactly as intended with difficulty coming down almost 40 percent and setting a new profitability equilibrium to reflect the reduced hashrate. Looking ahead towards the next price cycle and reward halving I am extremely excited for those miner entrepreneurs whose economic calculations were correct, and look forward to the improvements the disruption will bring to the industry." — Christopher Bendiksen (@ C_Bendiksen), CoinShares (Head of Research) 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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Flashback Friday.... Will Jack ever buy a cappuccino with Bitcoin? Last year at Consensus, Jack Dorsey shared his goal of buying a cappuccino with bitcoin. A year later and he's a few steps closer. Take a look below:
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| SUDDEN JUMP: Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency market ended its spell of low volatility today in bullish favor. Bitcoin broke out of its widely viewed falling wedge pattern to print a 10 percent 24-hour increase, though it has been outshined by litecoin which surged over 40 percent. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST CNBC: Cybercriminals are finding new ways to launder their ill-gotten loot, and that includes seeking out the help of dodgy Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts and cryptocurrency experts through the dark web, says a piece from CNBC. Over the last two years, online bad actors have increasingly focused on gig economy services like Uber and Airbnb to launder their money, according to Ziv Mador, chief of Trustwave's SpiderLabs research team. Their methods filter dirty money through the apps’ automated systems before they return to the cybercriminal untainted by their actions. In one common scenario common in China, the piece says, dishonest Uber drivers are paid for a trip via a stolen credit card, but the journey never takes place. Instead, the driver gets paid and sends some of the cash back to the criminal. Uber has cracked down on the scam since it came to light. A similar Airbnb scheme sees hosts paid for rentals that are never actually used. The criminals even place ads for such nefarious assistance on the dark web. The FBI is quoted by CNBC as saying that crypto payment processors are a popular way to launder funds from cybercrime, using “several transactional layers in order to mask the origins of the cash.” THE REST
BEAM PRIVACY: The Litecoin Foundation is looking to implement mimblewimble privacy protocols on the litecoin cryptocurrency, according to Beam Privacy, the group behind one of the major mimblewimble implementations. The group has already begun looking into potentially allowing litecoin to convert into a mimblewimble variant and back again, as a way to add privacy to the coin. This would enable confidential transactions as needed. All research conducted will ultimately be published under an open source license, the post added. FORBES: Blockchain startups are looking to bring digital communications into the present day by securing private data while still facilitating message transmission, says Forbes contributor Sherman Lee. Lee discusses how projects like Mainframe, Cent, Urbit and others are looking to make sure individuals can send each other messages efficiently, without risking being censored or having private data intercepted or sold to advertisers. Lee, who also founded the Raven Protocol, explained that as technology advances, users must actively participate in safeguarding their own data as they use digital services. |
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WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER  |
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