Investors have purchased some $735 million worth of Venezuela’s oil-backed cryptocurrency on the very first day of pre-sale, according to President Nicolas Maduro, who praised it as means of breaching the US financial blockade.

“Today, a cryptocurrency is being born that can take on Superman,” Maduro announced on Tuesday, referring to the US as a comic character. The Venezuelan leader, however, provided no details about the first investors in the ‘petro’, which is backed by the country’s oil, gas, gold and diamond reserves.

“The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela guarantees that it will receive PETRO as a form of payment for national taxes, fees, contributions and public services, taking as a reference the previous day's Venezuelan oil basket price with a discount,” says the official website for the newly-launched asset, which is set to go public next month.

In a nutshell, it all comes down to being unable to back out if something goes wrong. For example, you buy a few bitcoins at a December high and expect the price to continue rising, which is kind of obvious. Instead, the price starts crashing down and you find yourself in a situation that you didn't envisage or consider beforehand. So your best option would be to bring things back where they were as fast as possible even if it means some loss.

This is huge news, the implications are just too big. I can't believe this is the only thread I've seen on these news, this should be on a sticky thread to remember how governments are already trying to manipulate the opinion of people to stop the fiat leak.

And then I have to hear how complete morons want to make the blocks huge when that would only make Bitcoin less censorship resistant.

Bitcoin is under attack on the media and on the technical side with the forking scammers. Stay alert.

But is it just me, or are we seeing just as many crypto ads as before?

How do these get through.

What are facebooks measures - is it real people reviewing the ads or just algorithms?

So here's my question:

What do you think about this project?

Do you guys think this can beat Bitcoin?

Do you think this project could be in the top 30 of coinmarketcap?

4 - Debt is always bad.

A California lawmaker wants to make the blockchain signatures and smart contracts legal. The Assembly member Ian Calderon has proposed last week the Assembly Bill 2658, which refers to the possibility of including the electronic records on a blockchain technology.

He stated that “A record that is secured through blockchain technology is an electronic record”. However, the existing regulation related to the digital records states that “a record or signature may not be denied legal effect or enforceability solely because it is in electronic form and that a contract may not be denied legal effect or enforceability solely because an electronic record was used in its formation”.

According to the Assembly Bill 2658, Ian Calderon states about the licenses that “The department may suspend a licensee from providing records by electronic transmission if there is a pattern or practices that demonstrate the licensee has failed to comply with the requirements of this section. A licensee may appeal the suspension and resume its electronic transmission of records upon communication from the department that the changes the licensee made to its process or system to comply with the requirements of this section are satisfactory.”

Correction : Petro is the unit name (like BTC), Mene is the Satoshi equivalent.

I think it will be a milestone in the cryptocurrency history.
At last, we will see if crypto is state resistant, and by state I mean USA/CIA.
For sure the CIA will try to attack the Petro which is threatening the USA petrodollar.

I'd be ready to invest, just for the middle finger to TPTB !!!

U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R.-Fl) and Robert Menendez (D.-NJ) have denounced Venezuela's planned cryptocurrency in a new letter.

In an open letter addressed to U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Rubio and Menendez asked how the Treasury Department was monitoring Venezuela's plan to create its own oil-backed cryptocurrency, which the country's president, Nicolas Maduro, has said will help the country avoid global financial sanctions.

The two senators want to know how the department will move to prevent the country from using the "petro" to bypass American sanctions. The letter noted that Venezuela has spent several years in an economic crisis, resulting in a lack of access to basic resources for most citizens.

U.S. online news publication Salon has adopted an unconventional alternative to ads to make money — using a reader's computing power to mine cryptocurrency.

News organizations rely on advertising revenue to make ends meet, and often advise against readers using ad blocking add-ons to support the running of the site.

But Salon, which is owned by Salon Media Group, is now giving readers that don't want ads to appear on content an option to "suppress ads." This allows Salon to use a reader's unused computing power to mine virtual currency.

Its virtual currency of choice? Monero, a privacy-focused coin.

To "mine" digital currencies, cryptocurrency miners work out complex mathematical solutions to add transactions to the underlying blockchain, or distributed ledger. Blockchains maintain a continuously growing log of transactions or other data across a network of computers.

"Your unused processing power are the resources you already have but are not actively using to its full potential at the time of browsing Salon.com," the online publication said on a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page.

"Mining uses more of your resources which means your computer works a bit harder and uses more electricity than if you were just passively browsing the site with ads.

Researchers took an automated walk through almost a million live Ethereum contracts to search for vulnerabilities. They successfully identified and tracked down 3,686 errors, with ties to millions of dollars worth of Ethereum, suggesting that about 0.36% of all Ethereum contracts might be flawed.

The system they used to uncover these errors was also able to uncover the famous Parity bug which recently locked away about $160 million at-the-time-worth of Ether forever, in one of history's more expensive programming errors.

The researchers divided the flawed contracts into three rough categories and gave each one a vaguely poetic name.

    Prodigal contracts – A contract which can be robbed and manipulated to carelessly release Ether to another address, such as in the DAO attack.
    Suicidal contracts – A contract which can be killed by an outside attacker.
    Greedy contracts – A contract which can be manipulated to lock away the Ether held.

Systems will frequently depend on multiple contracts, so incidents will often involve more than one of these. For example, the Parity library contract was suicidal, while the its wallet contracts were greedy.

Although there are many factors at play in causing the Industrial Revolution, the economic answer to this question has yet to be sussed out. However, no event has a single cause — the Civil War was not wholly caused by slavery and World War I was not wholly caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

Israel's government confirmed Monday that it would treat bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a kind of property for tax purposes.

The notice confirms past indications that the Tax Authority will regard cryptocurrencies as "a property, not a currency", making it therefore taxable as such. The Authority's position was first detailed in a draft circular issued in January of this year.

The circular explains that profits from cryptocurrencies will be subject to capital gains tax at rates between twenty percent and twenty-five percent, while individuals mining or trading cryptocurrencies in connection with businesses must pay a seventeen percent value-added tax (VAT) in addition to capital gains tax.

Is it safe to keep your all crypto currency at a single exchange (bitfinnix)?Or one should choose multiple exchanges.