Quick Update

No, I'm still alive

Hey folks Some of you were worried, I'm alive, just travelling (if you want to know, the last three countries I visited were Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Hungary).   I most likely won't tell you where I'm going next because I'm one of those paranoid types and I'm to young to take an L.   Anyways, I'm mostly emailing you to apologize that I haven't been consistent with sending out CoinSheet.   My biggest issue frustration is that most cryptocurrency news aren't actually news, rather it's a misty haze of cow dung. Contrary to popular belief, important developments usually* don't happen everyday.   Long story short, I'm working on setting up mass-SMS messaging so I can conveniently send out alerts about things that I think are important.   While I'm working on that, you can join the TG group below to see what types of messages I will be sending, and their frequency. http://t.me/coinsheets   Cheers, Dmitriy Our mailing address is: CoinSheet 427 N Tatnall St #84981 Wilmington, DE 19801 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

#74: How “crypto Mom” softened the blow of Bitcoin’s latest setback

Close, but no cigar

Sponsored by Owl Labs Chain Letter Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and why they matter 07.31: Close, but no cigar Welcome to Chain Letter! Great to have you. Here's what's new in the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. SEC to Bitcoin community: No Bitcoin ETF for you! The 3-1 vote to reject a Bitcoin-based exchange traded fund proposed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss is strike two for the twins in their quest to establish an ETF—and it’s a legitimate setback for the larger Bitcoin community. Many observers think a regulated ETF would lead to an influx of institutional investors and, in turn, further legitimize the market. That will have to wait. The SEC issued a lengthy analysis (PDF) explaining the decision, but what it comes down to is that the agency can’t be sure Bitcoin’s price isn’t being manipulated. It argued that the ability to surveil the Bitcoin market, where much of the trading goes on via unregulated exchanges in other countries, is too limited. It cites academic research suggesting that certain of those exchanges may have propped up Bitcoin’s price at times last year. And it says it cannot conclude that the Winklevoss’s fund would be sufficiently resistant to fraud. The decision didn’t shut the door on Bitcoin ETFs, though; the SEC is still considering four proposals. Running to “Crypto Mom.” That lone dissenting vote? It came from SEC commissioner Hester Peirce, who argues that her colleagues focused too much on potential manipulation in the underlying Bitcoin “spot market,” and not enough on the ability of the exchange intending to list the ETF to police manipulation. Peirce reasons that blocking the ETF will harm innovation by discouraging additional institutional participation, which itself would “ameliorate many of the Commission’s concerns with the Bitcoin market” by pushing it become more transparent and protective of investors. Peirce’s dissent has been a hit among Bitcoin fans, who have rallied to balloon her Twitter following in show of support. The episode is reminiscent of the enthusiastic response to Commodity Futures Trading Commission head J. Christopher Giancarlo’s use of Bitcoin slang while testifying in Congress in February, after which the online crypto community dubbed Giancarlo “crypto Dad.” Welcome, “crypto Mom.” Paul Krugman comes out as a full-blown crypto skeptic. The Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist used his latest offering to explain why he doesn’t expect cryptocurrency to make much of an impact beyond “a potential equilibrium in which Bitcoin (although probably not other cryptocurrencies) remain in use mainly for black market transactions and tax evasion.” You should check out Krugman’s argument yourself, but in short he says transacting in cryptocurrencies costs too much, and that digital currencies risk losing all value due the “absence of tethering.” Unlike cryptocurrencies, whose value could collapse if people lose faith, “fiat currencies have underlying value because men with guns say they do,” he writes. Sponsor Message Meeting Owl's new smart 360° technology is changing video conferencing Meeting Owl is the first 360° smart conferencing camera. It combines mic, camera and speaker into one device. Put it in the center of your meeting, and it will learn where everyone is in the room and automatically shift focus to different people as they speak. Now when someone joins a meeting remotely, they'll see what's happening as if they're right there. Jeremy Smith of Pendo.io says, "It's almost like you're all in the same room." Use the 30-day return policy to try the Meeting Owl in your own office. See if the Meeting Owl is a fit for you Loose Change Fill your pockets with these newsy tidbits. • Looking for a place to do an ICO without the regulatory scrutiny? Try Bermuda, Gibraltar, Malta, or Liechtenstein. (New York Times) • Coinbase has hired its first chief compliance officer. (Reuters) • Nasdaq recently held a closed-door meeting with representatives from cryptocurrency exchanges to encourage the industry to improve its image. (Bloomberg) • Bitmain, which generated $1.1 billion in profit in the first quarter of this year, has announced a new funding round that values the company at roughly $14 billion. (Fortune) • Video game platform Steam has pulled an indie game that was allegedly hijacking users’ computers to mine digital coins. (Motherboard) • Mark Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and other high-profile investors have backed cryptocurrency investment firm Scalar Capital. (Forbes) EmTech is approaching, will you be there?   Our flagship EmTech event will examine this year’s most significant news on emerging technologies. Hear from technology and business leaders driving the new global economy. Learn more here. The Money Quote   “The disconnect between the hype and the reality is significant—I’ve never seen anything like it.”   —Rajesh Kandaswamy, an analyst at Gartner. Bloomberg reports that many American companies will wind down their blockchain experiments this year, and in most cases they don't have plans to integrate the technology into real business operations. We hope you enjoyed today's tour of what's new in the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Send us some feedback, or follow me @mike_orcutt. Know someone who might enjoy reading Chain Letter? Was this forwarded to you, and you'd like to see more? Discover the emerging tech that will change the world. Attend EmTech 2018 September 11-14, MIT Media Lab Cambridge, MA View this in a browser You received this newsletter because you subscribed with the email address: contacto1745.send-mail@blogger.com edit preferences   |   unsubscribe   |   follow us      MIT Technology Review One Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142

Crypto comeback

Satoshi's first collaborator returns, a bank has trouble innovating, footballers will livestream for tokens

To view this email as a web page, go here.

Sponsored by   July 31, 2018 A REAL BITCOIN O.G.: Martti "Sirius" Malmi, one of the first coders to work alongside Satoshi Nakamoto, revealed the new project he's working on exclusively to CoinDesk.  A new cryptocurrency called AXE is designed to fuel his new global project of creating a decentralized web, combining Malmi's Identifi online reputation system with database system GUN.  GUN is building decentralized social networks, akin to Reddit and YouTube, and Identifi adds a censorship-resistant identity layer. The project seeks no less than to disrupt the likes of Google and Facebook. Full Story CAN'T TOUCH THIS: BBVA ran into a problem while trying to innovate with distributed ledger technology, underscoring the roadblocks faced by forward-thinking incumbents.  The Spanish multinational bank negotiated a corporate loan on a private Hyperledger blockchain and wanted to use the public ethereum ledger to notarize the agreements. But doing so would require purchasing a small amount of ether, and regulators have sent mixed signals on whether this was permissible. So the bank just used an ethereum testnet to anchor the data, which is a bit like making a handprint in sand on the beach instead of wet cement on the sidewalk. Full story GAMIFYING THE GAME: The National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) plans to launch a blockchain platform for players to share commentary, livestreams and other content. FanChan is a product of a blockchain startup SportsCastr, and it’s expected to let the athletes earn additional income through broadcasting exclusive content to their fans, who will be able to subscribe and then reward players with tokens. Full story   Do you HODL or SPEDN? The double edged sword of crypto is that usage leads to price increasing but also could result in a loss of investment gains. We asked our audience in the latest State of Blockchain Sentiment Survey about this issue. 70 percent thought HODLing was more important while 30 percent took the opposite opinion. We also asked how frequently CoinDesk readers spend their coins, and the results reveal that almost no one uses their crypto on a regular basis.  Interestingly, bitcoin was the most spent coin, with only 73% of respondents saying they spend their bitcoin “almost never.” For comparison, 82% ethereum users and 89% of litecoin users “almost never” spend their coins. These results could indicate that bitcoin users are more likely to spend their crypto, but it could also reflect that certain coins have more merchants or apps. Find more insights in CoinDesk's Q2 State of Blockchain report. More research SPONSOR SECTION   The Oxford Fintech Programme gives you the tools you need to build the future of transactions and commerce. In this online fintech programme, you'll explore emerging technologies that will disrupt marketplaces and financial services, and examine the state of the industry and plan disruptive intra- or entre-preneurial interventions.  Find Out More   BEARS UNCHAINED: Bitcoin is changing hands at $7,760 on Bitfinex Tuesday, down 4.5 percent in the last 24 hours, and the current volatility level makes a further sharp decline possible. Full story BEST OF THE BEST For a thoughtful reflection on bitcoin's history and the different ways the community has viewed it over the years, take some time to read this blog post by Hasufly and Nic Carter.     There have been multiple approaches to what bitcoin is and how we can use it: an experiment, a cheap p2p payments network, a censorship-resistant digital gold, a darknet currency, a reserve currency for the crypto industry, a programmable shared database and, lastly, an uncorrelated financial asset viewed as an investment vehicle.  Some of these concepts are bitterly incompatible with each other, like the concept of cheap payments versus that of a digital gold. And in the future, we may see a battle between proponents of anonymity and advocates of a transparent, KYC and AML-complaint bitcoin, the authors suggest.       THE REST BLOOMBERG: The wire service offers a grim take on the prospects for enterprise blockchain vendors. Forrester Research estimates that up to 90 percent of current corporate blockchain experiments will never become a part of real everyday operations. Some big companies now are delaying the planned release of their DLT systems.  Likewise, Gartner found that only 1 percent of CIOs reported any blockchain adoption in their firms and only 8 percent had plans or ongoing experiments with the technology.  NEW YORK TIMES: Columnist and longtime cryptocurrency doubter Paul Krugman explains his continued skepticism about the space: monetary systems like bitcoin appear to be too expensive and complicated in his view. "Instead of money created by the click of a mouse, we have money that must be mined — created through resource-intensive computations," the economist writes.  Krugman comes to the conclusion that the black market is going to be the only place to use cryptocurrencies in the near future. Cue those fax machine memes. MOTHERBOARD: California law enforcement reported they had caught a 20-year-old college student who had been robbing crypto investors using a technique known as SIM-swapping. Joel Ortiz allegedly stole around $5 million in cryptocurrencies this year, before getting arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on his way to Europe. Police said Ortiz tricked cell phone service providers to transfer the victims’ phone numbers to his SIM card and then hijacked their Gmail accounts and got access to their crypto accounts.    We've launched our new podcast, Late Confirmation, which are the top stories in the blockchain world, delivered daily from the team at CoinDesk, sponsored by Oxford Fintech Programme.  Listen to Latest Episode and Subscribe   WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER   ConsenSys Jobs Blockchain Jobs Circle Jobs BitGo Jobs Copyright © 2018 CoinDesk. All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 636 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY, 10011, US Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list

Bitmain Reports $1.1 Billion in Profit in Just a Quarter

July 31, 2018

Read in Browser

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” - Albert Einstein

Happy Tuesday! Fun Fact: Hester M. Peirce (SEC Commissioner who defended Bitcoin after the SEC denied a Bitcoin ETF) gained 14,000 Twitter followers almost overnight. The crypto community support is amazing!

Cheers,
Blockchain Brew Team

MARKET

COIN	PRICE	24H
BTC	$7,841.772154	-3.66%
ETH	$434.928365	-5.59%
XRP	$0.432977	-3.49%
BCH	$784.782795	-3.61%
EOS	$7.287324	-10.41%

*Information as of 9:30 AM EST

---

NEWS

Bitmain Reports $1.1 Billion in Profit in Just a Quarter

PROFITS

• According to a report from Fortune, Bitmain generated $1.1 billion dollars in profit in just the first quarter of 2018 alone
• This is especially incredible, because Bitmain was able to make this crazy profit during a time period that most cryptocurrencies lost ~70% of their value
• The company's conservative estimates for profit in all of 2018 is $2 to $3 billion, and for comparison, Bitmain made $1.2 billion in profit in all of 2017
• Bitmain generated a similar amount of profit as the chipmaking behemoth Nvidia ($150 billion market cap), who made $1.2 billion in profit in Q1

EXPANDING OPERATIONS

• With all of this profit and the funding that Bitmain already has raised, the company is making moves to expand its operations
• Bitmain has made investments into Block.one, Circle, and Opera, and also has made investments into artificial intelligence
• It has also brought some of its operations to North America, opening a mining center in Quebec and an office in Silicon Valley

IPO INCOMING

• The company has been long rumored to be contemplating raising more capital through an initial public offering
• Fortune's report indicates that Bitmain is in the final stages of holding an IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and it will happen "very soon"
• Bitmain supposedly hopes to raise $1 billion at a $14 billion valuation

---

OPINION

Another Hedge Fund Manager Extremely Bullish on Bitcoin

MARK YUSKO

• Mark Yusko is the founder of North Carolina-based Morgan Creek Capital Management
• Earlier this year, Yusko’s fund was able to raise $500 million in capital to create a cryptocurrency hedge fund

BTC BULL

• There has been a plethora of famous investors who have made predictions about where Bitcoin is headed, Yusko’s predictions may be the boldest
• At the end of last year, Yusko gave his opinion that Bitcoin would one day be $1 million per coin, but said this will take at least a decade
• Yusko took to Twitter to update his prediction on Bitcoin, calling $25,000 at the end of this year and $500,000 by the end of 2024
• The hedge fund investor downplays the crypto’s recent price movements, saying it’s all “just noise” and investors must think long term

PREDICTION FRENZY

• It seems nowadays everyone is giving their prediction on where Bitcoin’s price will go
• It’s a big competition to be the one to predict the next financial revolution
• However, for every bullish predictor there is a bearish one and because Bitcoin is a polarizing subject, everyone can’t agree on the same valuation
• Decades from now, it will be fun to look back on all these predictions, someone is surely going to be very right and someone will also be very wrong

---

TECH

Litecoin Confirmed to be in First Blockchain Phone

HTC EXODUS

• The Exodus by HTC will be the first phone dedicated to blockchain
• Each phone will act as a node to create a decentralized network that will enable to have ownership of the data on their phone
• Early access of the Exodus phone will be available in Q3 of this year

LTC IN EXODUS

• It has been thought that the Exodus will only support BTC and ETH, but Charlie Lee announced that the Exodus phone will support Litecoin
• Charlie Lee will also act as an advisor to the team working on the Exodus phone
• The phone will support the Lightning Network for both Bitcoin and Litecoin, which will help drive the adoption of the technology

Lee made the announcement on Twitter saying:

“Met the HTC Exodus team last week and was really excited to hear the phone will support LTC and Lightning Network on Litecoin natively! I will be an advisor as I see having a secure crypto phone that makes LN simple is needed for mass adoption. P.S. No, they will not remove BTC.”

---

INSTITUTION

Meet The Cryptocurrency Hedge Fund That Has a Lifetime Return of 10,136%

PANTERA CAPITAL

• Pantera Capital was the first cryptocurrency fund and is arguably the most notable
• The fund just celebrated its fifth year of investing in cryptocurrencies

CRAZY RETURNS

• When Bitcoin was around $100 in 2013, Pantera issued a letter to its investors predicting that Bitcoin will one day be $5,000 and people called them crazy
• Five years later, Bitcoin is still in a downtrend from $20,000, but still far above $5,000
• Being the first established crypto hedge fund has given Pantera an advantage, they were able to get in early and have made a 10,136% since inception

NEW PREDICTION

• Pantera got their $5,000 prediction right and now they have made another bullish price prediction for Bitcoin
• Dan Morehead, Pantera’s CEO and founder predicts that the Bitcoin price will end 2018 trading around $21,000 and surge to $67,500 in 2019
• Morehead has had a fantastic track record so far and it seems like other investors share a similar vision

---

MORE BREWING

• National Football League Union Partners With Blockchain Startup
• Coinbase Hires Pershing's Head of Compliance
• Bitcoin's Second-Ever Developer Is Back (With a Big Vision for Crypto)

---

TODAY IN CRYPTO

Ethereum Classic (ETC)

Emerald SDK Release

Sidechains support in Emerald Project & Emerald SDK First Release

PROOF | SOURCE

Cardano (ADA)

IELE VM Testnet

IELE VM, a register-based machine inspired by LLVM, will be released on testnet between June and July.

PROOF | SOURCE

IOTA (MIOTA)

STARTUP AUTOBAHN

"On Expo Day taking place in July 2018 the partners and network of STARTUP AUTOBAHN will hear about many more joint projects "

PROOF | SOURCE

Pundi X (NPXS)

Monthly Airdrop Snapshot

"All the Pundi X token holders are eligible for this giveaway mechanism till January 2021. The unlock token happens every month."

PROOF | SOURCE

Bitcoin Diamond (BCD)

Lightning Network

Bitcoin Diamond version of Lightning Network is expected to be deployed on July 31st, after complete assessment by developers and testers.

PROOF | SOURCE

Today in Crypto is powered by coinmarketcal.com

---

COIN OF THE DAY

Holo (HOT)
Holochain enables a distributed web with user autonomy built directly into its architecture and protocols. Data is about remembering our lived and shared experiences. Distributing the storage and processing of that data can change how we coordinate and interact. With digital integration under user control, Holochain liberates our online lives from corporate control over our choices and information.
WEBSITE | TWITTER | REDDIT

---

MEME

SUBSCRIBE | FEEDBACK | ADVERTISE

The above is not intended to be investment advice.

1317 8th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414.

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

Copyright © 2018 Blockchain Brew, All rights reserved.