Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Mining misfortune 😫

February 19, 2019

Bitmain Posts $500 Million Loss in Rough Third Quarter

Chinese mining giant Bitmain struggled through the third quarter according to a new CoinDesk report.

In a nutshell, the firm...

Brought in revenues of $200 million
Had a net loss of over $500 million
Lost $100 million in crypto holdings

Those numbers are a long shot away from Bitmain's first half of 2018 when it posted $2.8 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profits.

Misfortune in mining

The losses stem almost entirely from rough market conditions.

With miners making minimal profits right now, Bitmain hasn't had much luck selling its newly developed (and more expensive) equipment.

According to ASIC Miner Value, only one of Bitmain's Bitcoin miners, the Antminer S15, is actually profitable at this time.

Pre-IPO struggles

While the financials haven't been released publicly because of Bitmain's pending initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong, they are no help to the situation.

Previously, officials overseeing the listing at the Hong Kong Exchange (HKEx) shunned the crypto industry for its high volatility.

Now, with more evidence of a shaky future, HKEx may find Bitmain to risky for investors.

TIP

What to Look for in Scam ICOs, FBI Weighs In

In an interview with Netherlands-based news site Paypers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shared a number of red flags to look for before investing in an initial coin offering (ICO).

You should always watch out for...

False team experience
Fake traction or growth
Projects without physical addresses
Unrealistic and promised returns

In addition, investors should always understand which country's regulations the project is operating under since limitations can vary widely.

The FBI shared:

"Like any investment product, rates of return can never be guaranteed and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

BITCOIN

Out with the Like, in with the Lightning Tip

Twitter users are now tipping with Bitcoin lightning payments when the tweet is just too good for a like or retweet.

Thanks to the startup Tippin, a Google Chrome extension is now available.

After downloading, a tiny lightning bolt appears next to the like and retweet symbols that users can click to reveal a wallet address.

Less big, more small

The lightning network is making waves as micropayments splash back onto the Bitcoin scene after years of network fees that were too large.

For Tippin, it's just what the startup needed to bring its vision full circle.

Tippin engineer Sergio Abril told CoinDesk:

"In my opinion, tipping is going to be incredibly popular with lightning network; It's the first time we can send small amounts almost at no cost, and we can do it incredibly fast."

BITS

But wait, there's more...

💰 Seoul, South Korea is looking to invest more than $1 billion in blockchain and fintech startups by 2022.
🤝 Coinbase has acquired the blockchain intelligence startup Neutrino but it will continue to operate as a standalone business.
🔒 BitGo is offering $100 millionn in crypto insurance through the Lloyd's of London insurance market.

MEME

Bri7ryQf8RIt7CQA0WQsFjZPo7tcNZ28nih_2hs6xQU.jpg?fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&arh=2&w=640&s=f7336f0a414e141f45bed2dd026bbf6d

SHARE UNBANKD

If you ❤️ Unbankd, share us with your friends to help them get crypto smart too!

So far you have 0 referrals but we still have more rewards for you.

INVITE FRIENDS

Or copy & paste your unique link to share:
https://unbankd.co/?ref=192f87b56d

SUBSCRIBE	FEEDBACK	ADVERTISE

303 5th Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414

The above is not intended to be investment advice.

Copyright © 2018 Unbankd, All rights reserved.

If you don't absolutely love us, drop us.

Week 08: Komodo's Tech Tuesday. Blockchain Innovations For 2019 – Part 1.

Read Later

Forward

Tech Tuesday

If this is the first time you're reading our newsletter you can subscribe here and guarantee you don't miss out on important news.

Week 08

Blockchain Innovations For 2019 – Part 1

Leading blockchain innovations in 2019 are dominated by the implementation of a turing complete smart-UTXO model of cryptoconditions – originally a cryptographic encoding format from Ripple. Komodo lead developer jl777 saw great potential in the technology and worked with polyglot developer libscott through 2018 to continue and establish an ongoing list of open source innovation:

Create A Blockchain And Set Its Cryptoconditions (Smart-UTXO) Interoperability To Off/On/Scaling/Cross-Chain

When first developed and deployed to the ecosystem, backwards compatibility was for new blockchains to have no cryptoconditions support (e.g. -ac_cc=0). To enable cryptoconditions, create a blockchain with the -ac_cc=1 parameter.

Cryptoconditions features in the blockchain scalability solution of the multi-chain architecture (a.k.a. cluster) incorporating MoMoM technology. To enable a clustered multi-chain scaling solutions, -ac_cc parameter needs to be set between 2 & 100. All chains with the same seed nodes, same name, same supply and same -ac_cc parameter will function as a multi-chain cluster.

To gain the cross chain interoperability features of MoMoM technology, the -ac_cc parameter needs to be set at 101 or greater. Chains with the same ac_cc parameter will be able to reference transactions in the other chains sharing the same ac_cc parameter value. What types of transactions? Normal UTXO transactions as well as smart-UTXO based cryptoconditions transactions.

Cross Chain Fungibility

The scaling and cross-chain capabilities of Komodo technology (a.k.a. sharding) introduce the problem/solution of cross chain fungibility. The #kmdlabs discord channel first began testing the fungibility after we ran our first tests of 25k & 40k transactions per second on AWS infrastructure. Using "only" 64 chains in mid 2018 for these results, there was a small bug which needed to be fixed before aiming for 1 million tx/s and ways to validate them.

The cross chain transaction visibility was solved re-using insight explorers with some modifications and some further enhancements to transaction tracing. Testing began in week 37 2018 – many weeks of cross chain testing for 100% success rate and the ability for the public to view their transactions move across chains.

More public tests with easy to understand transaction origination and fungible migration are possible using modern web technologies. Look out for these public tests in the coming months as we gear up for 1 million transactions per second!

Ethereum Notarizations & ERC20 Migrations

Komodo began investigating ethereum implementations for broader ecosystem interoperability in the future. The first ethereum notarization happened on Friday August 31 2018, and a channel was dedicated to this testing. The BTC pubkey of a Komodo notary operator was included in a mandate contract, which was the keys that could do this ETH->KMD notarization.

Unfortunately, the bear market hit for longer than many expected, and the failure of many ICO projects compounded the lack of demand for further development.

There is some good news though, recently, a fintech startup called O Crypto Union has been migrating their initial investors from ERC20 to a Komodo blockchain solution.

Oracles (UTXO Based)

First introduced in week 37 2018 as a way for an oracle to publish off-chain data to be used in blockchain applications, a data provider sends updates to an oracle. Updates to the oracle are referenced by a "baton" transaction, and this set of updates acts like a linked-list in programming terms. The most recent update is at the top of the list. For sybil protection (spam), querying the oracle can be set up to have a cost for queries.

The following week, the oracles are being used for testing BTC price feeds for another cryptoconditions innovation (coin gateways). However, in the same week, the oracles are being used in another dApp testing round – for looking up blockhashes for transaction data. These are covered in the next section on "Instant Blockchain Payments, Bitcoin Hashrate Secured".

Through the latter half of the year, an ecosystem developer started a pet project to track his dog using an oracle and location services provided by a GPS recorder on his dog's collar. Dragon Hound was born.

Less exciting supply chain proof of concepts and certifications stored on-chain. More recent developments with the blockchain gaming technology that cryptoconditions has enabled further research into on-chain certification solutions.

Instant Blockchain Payments, Bitcoin Hashrate Secured

Throughout 2018, there was much hype about lightning network solving bitcoin's scalability problem. jl777 created an on-chain solution to instant payments which is secured by Komodo's Blockchain Security Service which is available to any blockchain. The problem with lightning is that it is very complicated. How can we say this? Komodo has an ecosystem project that implements lightning for in-game microtransactions for poker.

The simplicity of a channels cryptocondition is that it is backwards compatible with all existing wallets and infrastructure like explorers.

The very basic explanation in three steps is:

Set up a payment channel with your denominations (10k satoshi in this case)
Optionally, wait for the payment channel to be notarized by Komodo onto Bitcoin for bitcoin level security
Send out transactions to those payment channels to be spent like any other type of transaction, one at a time or in multiples, to the destination of your choosing

If you need to send 50k satoshi, authorize the release of 5 of those 10k payments by sending the payment details to the person's destination address.

Coin Gateways & Stablecoins

Tokenizing crypto coins (like BTC, but not as proxy tokens, binding tokens to the underlying asset) and then use the tokens to transact/swap against the tokenized crypto. Enforcing is done by blockchain enforcement, a 1:1 peg between a specific token and BTC (or any other peg) as well as an automated deposit/withdraw mechanism. This allows one to trade virtual BTC without any delay or expensive tx fees. Redeeming the token will unlock the BTC used to create the token. All blockchain enforced – across blockchains where necessary. Redeeming implies a lock between two different transaction types – the asset-token and the gateway.

This mechanism described above is from week 39 in 2018 and with it is a business use case for a coin gateway. Another use case for this mechanism is a stablecoin, which follows a similar workflow as the business use case linked to. We will cover this use case next Komodo Tech Tuesday, with more information about Komodo's asset tokenization capabilities including non-fungible tokens. The above section on ERC20 migrations features a stablecoin that has been created in the Komodo ecosystem. Here is a brief on that fintech project leaving ethereum and their stablecoin.

That's the end of part 1, any questions ask in the discord – lots of people keen to help you

KMDLABS discord channel (#kmdlabs) is dedicated to testing innovations, upgrades, new features and is a great way to get the necessary skills and knowledge for being a competent Notary Node operator.

Past Issues of Tech Tuesday

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

COIN	PRICE	24H

BTC	$3,984.16	+ 3.21%

ETH	$148.37	+ 2.32%

XRP	$0.336761	+ 5.94%

EOS	$3.63	+ 11.01%

LTC	$48.64	+ 4.01%