Libra Association: BTC isn't a means of payment / Germany's central bank wants to slow down Libra / Calibra seeks two marketing experts

Inside Libra presented by EquityMultiple.

Presented by Subscribe | View in browser 1. Dante Disparte, vice chair of the Libra Association, has said that Bitcoin isn't a means of payment. Speaking during the Digital Money Forum at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas yesterday, Disparte stated that he became interested in what Facebook is building with Libra because the crypto world isn't doing enough on payments. He went on to note that "Bitcoin as an asset class has proven that mathematical scarcity can support an incredibly exciting asset." Despite this, though, Akin Sawyerr, a strategy lead on the Decred project, argued that he wasn't convinced that several "self-interested companies" could do money better than a decentralized network. The Libra Association is attempting to launch the Libra stablecoin later this year, which it hopes will help millions of people who don't have access to financial services. However, since Facebook released the Libra whitepaper last June, the project has faced severe pushback from global regulators. –COINDESK       2. Germany's central bank president Jens Weidmann has said that Facebook's Libra needs to be slowed down with further regulations. In his opinion, the idea of Libra would be very risky to users as it would be tied to several different fiat currencies. He also went on to say that European banks should first look to improving their payment networks before considering the launch of a digital euro. In addition, Weidmann believes the main focus should be on reducing transaction times and making them more cost-effective, which, in turn, would reduce the threat of projects such as Libra. –CRYPTOPOLITAN       A MESSAGE FROM EQUITYMULTIPLE Making Real Estate Investing Simple, Accessible & Transparent. Build a Stronger Portfolio. Looking to diversify beyond stocks & bonds? EquityMultiple provides you access to the kinds of commercial real estate investments that were once open only to institutional investors. Start with just $10k & diversify across markets, property types, & risk/return profiles. Build a better portfolio. Invest Today   3. Calibra, Facebook's blockchain subsidiary, is seeking two marketing experts to help reach "billions of people" ahead of the launch of its Libra stablecoin. Calibra is specifically looking for a Head of Brand and a Head of Media, Digital Marketing and Community. Candidates are expected to have at least 15 years of marketing experience and 10 years of leadership experience. The job postings state that "our ultimate goal is to help billions of people with access to things they don't have now." –THE BLOCK       4. Ueli Maurer, Switzerland's president and finance minister, argues Facebook's Libra has failed. Speaking to Swiss broadcaster SRF, Maurer said that he doesn't think Libra has a chance in its current form, adding that "central banks will not accept the basket of currencies underpinning it." Yet, as this report points out, even if central banks don't accept the stablecoin, exchanges will still allow users to convert their digital assets to fiat. –THE NEXT WEB       5. This article looks at several crypto predictions for 2020. According to the author, Libra won't launch this year in the way that Facebook proposed. The article further highlights that Libra has "stained Facebook's reputation," arguing that the social media platform jumped on the blockchain bandwagon. If Facebook does move forward, the author believes Libra will be less crypto and more like conventional finance. –QUARTZ       6. Pantera Capital partner Paul Veradittakit has said that Libra will open up discussions on regulatory issues and data privacy. He went on to say that "ongoing criticism" of the social media platform's data scandals will highlight the need to improve a platform such as Libra and Calibra. –AMB CRYPTO       7. According to this piece, Facebook Pay, a payment system project built by the social media platform, has been better handled than Libra. Unlike Libra, which is positioned as a "simple global currency and financial infrastructure" that will record transactions on a blockchain, Facebook Pay is similar to PayPal and Venmo. However, whereas Libra has been faced with negative criticism from global regulators, Facebook has been keen to alleviate security concerns regarding Facebook Pay. –PAYMENTS SOURCE       8. According to Lisa Neigut, Lightning Developer at Blockstream, Libra will indirectly improve the general adoption of Bitcoin and other crypto-assets. Not only that, but the stablecoin will normalize the concept of avoiding credit card payments, which will provide people with a better idea of how cryptocurrency works. –AMB CRYPTO       9. Facebook's Libra is struggling to gain momentum within the crypto space because it is facing an uphill battle with regulatory issues, according to this article. Sinclair Davidson, an associate at RMIT University's Blockchain Innovation Hub, claims that crypto assets such as Libra could undermine the ability of states to use financial sanctions as a foreign policy tool. –WORLD FINANCE       10. In case you missed it, China's central bank, the People's Bank of China (PBoC) has said that stablecoins, such as Libra, are a threat to the Yuan, the country's national currency. The central bank's vice governor Chen Yulu stated that stablecoins could also weaken the efforts of capital controls and lead to volatile asset prices. –REUTERS       This newsletter was written and curated by Rebecca Campbell. She has been writing and reporting on various industries for the past 10 years, more specifically tech in the last three. Connect with her on Twitter. Edited by Sheena Vasani, Inside staff writer.       Ad Invest in Exclusive, Expertly Vetted Real Estate. From Anywhere. Start with just $10k.

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Kelly's conflict?

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January 8, 2019 WHAT CONFLICT? Kelly Loeffler, newly appointed U.S. senator and former Bakkt CEO, will join the committee that oversees the CFTC. The appointment has raised concerns of a conflict of interest, as Loeffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher, the founder and chief executive of ICE.  Full story LOW-PROFIT ATTACK: A recent study from Harvard researchers found Tezos is threatened by "selfish mining," a potential attack model for proof-of-stake (PoS) cryptocurrencies. Luckily for Tezos, the selfish mining concern can be patched through the network’s on-chain governance model, which conducts periodic votes for protocol changes in lieu of hard or soft forks. Full story PRO APP: Coinbase Pro released an Android app Tuesday, granting the exchange’s professional investors access to high-speed trades and other features. Coinbase Pro customers in more than 100 countries can access 50 different trading pairs via the new app, the firm said. Full story SLEEPING GIANT: According to Digital Assets Data, a fintech company building crypto data feeds, nearly 60 percent of all bitcoins remained dormant in 2019, the highest percentage of "hodled" bitcoins since early 2017.  BLOCKCHAIN INVENTION: Enterprise software vendor R3 has won a patent for a blockchain-based record system designed to make corporate information-sharing more efficient. Awarded Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the patent describes a system for "managing transactions in dynamic digital documents" that would provide companies with an immutable data record. Full story BULLS ON PARADE: Bitcoin jumped to seven-week highs early on Wednesday, bolstering the short-term bullish technical setup. The rally may now continue toward key Fibonacci resistance located above $8,600. Pullbacks, if any, are expected to be short-lived, and the bullish case will remain valid as long as support near $7,570 is intact. Full story BOT-COIN: Today on Markets Daily Adam B Levine and Brad Keoun are talking about the future of robotics, which might see robots paying robots in crypto, as machines begin to automate away our quotidian tasks. Full story WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER   Copyright © 2019 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.  Our mailing address is:  250 Park Avenue South New York, NY, 10003, US  Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list

Vyper support comes to ETC!

We are delighted to announce that ETC Cooperative has funded the Vyper team to add EVM target versioning which was gating for ETC support. Vyper previously targeted ETH Byzantium opcodes unconditionally.  These opcodes were missing from ETC until the Atlantis hardfork which happened in September 2019.  Now Vyper has support for three different EVM versions: ETH Byzantium (~=ETC Atlantis) ETH Constantinople (~=ETC Agharta) ETH Istanbul (~=ETC Aztlán) To select your target EVM, use vyper --evm-version whatever on the command-line. At the time of writing for ETC mainnet that would be vyper --evm-version atlantis. After this weekend it will be vyper --evm-version agharta.  ETC testnets are already Agharta-enabled. Head over to https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper to see the work-in-progress or to https://vyper.readthedocs.io/ for documentation. Congratulations to our friends on the Vyper team for this support and the raft of other features and fixes they just released. https://twitter.com/vyperlang/status/1214614961386926081 Please consider supporting their important work via Gitcoin donations with a time-sensitive opportunity to boost their funding via CLR matching until 21st January.  Support our developers 🙂 https://twitter.com/vyperlang/status/1214616299025960962   Bob Summerwill Executive Director ETC Cooperative   ETC Cooperative | 250 Park Ave S, New York This email was sent to contacto1745.send-mail@blogger.com | Unsubscribe | Forward this email to a friend

URGENT – ETC Agharta Update

At block 9,573,000 (estimated for 12th January 2020) we will hit an exciting milestone for Ethereum Classic with the Agharta protocol update. Bookmark this dashboard to track progress: https://etcnodes.org/agharta Node operators must update their nodes to stay in consensus with the rest of the ETC network.  To be crystal clear, this is not a contentious hard-fork.   There is no group within the ETC ecosystem who oppose these changes.  "New coins" will not be created.  This is a routine protocol upgrade.  Here are links to the latest installers: Hyperledger Besu 1.3.8 Parity-Ethereum 2.5.13 Multi-Geth 1.9.7 ETC Cooperative recommends Hyperledger Besu. ETC Agharta adds the ETH Constantinople opcodes to ETC mainnet.  The addition of the CREATE2 opcode will have huge benefit, because it enables the use of many state channels implementations on ETC which depend on that opcode so we were not previously possible on ETC. EIP 145 – Bitwise shifting operations EIP 1014 – Skinny CREATE2 EIP 1052 – EXTHASHCODE opcode ETC support was added to Hyperledger Besu in December 2019 (funded by ETC Cooperative and implemented by ChainSafe).  The codebase has a world class primary team behind it in the form of PegaSys, has permissive Apache 2.0 licensing and mature IP protection and mature governance under the Linux Foundation. In addition to ETH and ETC mainnet support (and Mordor and Kotti and Gorli) it also has EEA enterprise support.   All the ingredients are in place for this codebase to have a multi-decade lifespan, without the ability for changing business plans to derail it. In comparison, Parity Technologies have announced their intention to transition ownership of Parity-Ethereum to a DAO, with their own involvement being scaled back considerably.  There is huge legal uncertainty here.  Barring a fork of Parity-Ethereum to Apache 2.0 prior to transitioning to the DAO, it makes no sense for ETC Cooperative to participate there, regretful though that decision would be.   I have faith that Parity Technologies will not make the same mistake twice, and condemn Parity-Ethereum to the same fate as cpp-ethereum.   Parity-Ethereum have enforced a CLA (contributor licensing agreement) and could very easily fork-and-relicense to Apache 2.0.  There is no issue on the IP protection front – just the enterprise-unfriendly GPLv3 licensing.   See my Ethereum Everywhere post from 2016 for more on the dynamics at play. Similarly, the future for Geth and downstream is exceedingly uncertain IMHO, given the pending transition to ETH2.   That codebase also has same IP and licensing issues which hindered cpp-ethereum.  Unresolved today and exceedingly unlikely ever to be resolved, because these matters simply do not concern the maintainers. We have a fantastic new dashboard to help us through the transition in the form of https://etcnodes.org, which was commissioned by the ETC Cooperative, hosted by Bitfly.   This is an ETC equivalent to the popular https://ethernodes.org website which Bitfly also host. This main page shows all nodes seen by the crawler in the last 7 days, which shows Parity-Ethereum at over 50% of "market share": The Agharta tracking page shows all nodes seen by the crawler in the last 24 hours, along with what proportion of those nodes are running Agharta compatible versions, including the deprecated Geth Classic client, which is end-of-life.   Anybody running Geth Classic nodes should migrate to one of the other clients.  Of course, we would recommend Hyperledger Besu. Please join us on the ETC Discord to chat about Agharta and for any support you may need through this progress.   Bob Summerwill Executive Director Ethereum Classic Cooperative ETC Cooperative | 250 Park Ave S, New York This email was sent to contacto1745.send-mail@blogger.com | Unsubscribe | Forward this email to a friend

Kraken cooperates

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January 7, 2019 COSTLY DATA: Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has said law enforcement requests for user data in 2019 rose 49 percent compared with the previous year. The firm’s co-founder and CEO Jesse Powell tweeted that the internal costs of compliance came to more than $1 million. Full story NO THREAT: The chief economist at the IMF said digital currencies will not challenge the US dollar's role in global trade. In an op-ed for the Financial Times, Gita Gopinath said that although cryptocurrencies represented "intriguing possibilities," they lack the infrastructure and global acceptance needed to supplant the dollar. Full story JAPANESE GIANTS: The company behind a massive new bitcoin mine in Rockland, Texas has announced its first customers, SBI Holdings and GMO. The two Japanese companies will rent capacity at the site, which is under construction, is expected to have a capacity of 300 megawatts when it becomes operational later this quarter. ThFull story EASY DOES IT: Chinese internet giant Baidu has launched a blockchain-based service allowing developers and SMEs to build decentralized applications, or dapps. The new service, translated from the Chinese as Open Network, will enable users to develop and deploy applications without building their own blockchain platforms, according to local media reports. Full story STEPPING BACK: Telegram will not integrate a crypto wallet into its messaging app, at least until it gets the green light from U.S. regulators, the company said Monday. The post – which stresses that Telegram’s token “won't help you get rich” – comes as the company fights the SEC in court over its ICO. Full story BOTTOM IN? After a 15% rally in recent days, bitcoin saw rejection above the historically strong 100-day average resistance at $7,945 on Tuesday. The key hurdle could be scaled this week, though, as the daily chart is reporting an inverse head-and-shoulders breakout and short-term indicators are flashing bullish. Full story ON TAP: CoinDesk is on the floor at CES, the biggest tech show in the world! Join us on Jan. 8 from 6 - 8 p.m. at G.O.A.T. Sports Bar in Las Vegas for an evening of brews, bitcoin and blockchain. We're looking for cool crypto companies to interview. Full story WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER   Copyright © 2019 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.  Our mailing address is:  250 Park Avenue South New York, NY, 10003, US  Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list