Paris Blockchain Week Summit rescheduled due to Corona Virus fears. PBWSummit will now take place in December.

https://twitter.com/cryptoassethq/status/1234532400496988174


At Paris Blockchain Week Summit, we pride ourselves on being a truly global event, with thousands of industry leaders, journalists and innovators in the blockchain space coming together to further the development of blockchain technology.

Over the past weeks, we have been closely monitoring global developments around the Coronavirus outbreak. The security and safety of our attendees, speakers and sponsors will always be our top priority. In addition, the recent guidelines issued by the French government which prohibit large gatherings put the status of the event at risk. With this in mind, we now feel that postponing the summit is the best and safest option.

[“Blockchains always come with limitations,” said Stadelmann. “All blockchains come with limitations. Limitations in transactions per second in the maximum block size, and so on.]

Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann has been doing this stuff most of his life. His background is in IT, engineering, and software development. He comes particularly from an OpSec and DevSec background, before he started actively engaging and researching the cryptographic space and decentralized software applications. Komodo is a multi-chain platform enabling developers to multiple chain architecture.

“I thought [blockchains] were basically driving freedom, freedom of speech, and all these things,” said Stadelmann, who actively coded during high school and University.

“I started with a C++ coding language and I quickly dove into intrusion detection system development,” he said, referring to software that tracks traffic on a network. “You’d basically end up coding pretty close to the physical layer, the networking layer.”

Stadelmann also worked on installing the software on relay nodes for central European governments. “We developed systems that did not just track and detect intrusions and malicious packages, but also injected additional data into these malicious packages, and tracked it back to its source and origin.”

The Bitcoin protocol is written in C. The first person to help Satoshi Nakamoto write code, Hal Finney, specialized in C++. Stadelmann says that while knowing C++ helped transition into the blockchain industry, it’s not a prerequisite. He says, if anything, it might have saved him time understanding the code. Anyone with a coding background, including Javascript, can go deep into the blockchain tech stack.

Most of Komodo’s software is written in C++ and C. But, they’ve also imported Rust, Mozilla’s programming language, which Stadelmann thinks gives Komodo certain advantages, especially when it comes to things like static analysis, memory efficiency, and overall performance.

“This new Rust layer that we are using is really saving us time in developing software, but also the end results are crazy, and we are seeing an increase in performance and efficiency,” he said.

But it’s not just limited to these few coding languages. “I’d say our team is really using most of the existing and popular coding languages and technologies, such as Flutter, for example, a new technology provided by Google that enables you to develop mobile applications in a very efficient way.”

With the aforementioned technologies, Komodo has built one code base to underpin multiple operating systems and platforms. Their cross chain Atomic Swap Dex technology features a multicoin wallet with a native Dex, and is currently available for iOS and Android.

“We try to really stay open, not just like when it comes to crypto and to blockchain, but even when it comes to utilizing new coding languages, new tech stacks,” said Stadelmann. “We’ve really tried to keep evolving and continuously improving and optimizing, not just our applications, but even the underlying tech stack that we’re utilizing for these applications.”

Komodo recently rolled out a new feature module enabling anyone to create their own stablecoin in just a few clicks or commands. The stablecoins are collateralized with Bitcoin protocol-based cryptocurrencies. While the stablecoin module is one module of many others on the Komodo blockchain, Stadelmann believes it is a key piece of the Komodo architecture.

These stable coins link to the traditional fiat world into the traditional financial system. “And we believe the next step is getting the stablecoin tech actively used and adopted in an AtomicDEX. And, also to be fair, this is not limited just to our next technology. I mean any other DEX, and any other blockchain project can utilize this tech to get stablecoin out.”

To a certain degree, coding in C++ made the implementation of such stablecoins easier to rollout. “At the end of the day, this experience allows us to design this technology, and the architecture of such a stablecoin module, in an efficient way,” he said.

Anyone can create a chain of their own blockchain, called a smart chain, with the help of dozens of modules designed by Komodo. The PEX CC module is a stablecoin module, for instance.

While some stablecoins have a centralized component, Komodo is decentralized. “Let’s say you wouldn’t want to rely on these already existing stablecoins, because of various reasons,” said Stadelmann. “One of these reasons is the lack of transparency, for instance. We do not know if specific stablecoins are backed [by what the proprietors claim]. Most of these layers, DEXs, trading platforms, et cetera, still operate more or less [like the] Wild Wild West.”

Komodo also provides modules to enable cell data on the blockchain and to spin up a lottery system for users in a decentralized blockchain-based fashion. “We even have a module, which is called tokens and assets module, which would allow you or any user to just tokenize whatever you want to tokenize.”

source: https://cryptographicasset.com/blockhains-drive-for-freedom-stablecoins-and-smart-chains/

Komodo also features a multichain architecture. “Blockchains always come with limitations,” said Stadelmann. “All blockchains come with limitations. Limitations in transactions per second in the maximum block size, and so on. So we gave the Komodo platform the ability to spin up parallel chains, sidechains, which would literally like interoperate with the base change.”

Let’s say you created a chain X and chain X reached its limit due to so many transactions taking place, blocks being overfilled, and the fees going crazy.  “We need to scale this somehow.”

Komodo solves this by generating a second chain, which is part of a cluster. “The cluster is formed with the main chain and the side chain, so we have like a scaling protocol that would allow you to literally send coins from chain A to chain B. At that moment, they will literally be burned on chain A, and reissued on chain B, the second chain. This cross chain burning protocol will allow you to remain fully in sync, and would also mean that you have technically two chains.”

That means two times the limit, two times the underlying infrastructure, two times the block sizes, and so on. “This is something that scales up infinitely. We could literally set up a thousand side chains. That was how we achieved a million transactions per second. We [conducted] an experiment to prove that Komodo scales efficiently and easily. That’s something we did last year.”

The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), which was set up in 2008 to combat risks to the financial sector after the financial crisis, believes stablecoins could cause potential problems if they gained wider use.

“If a stablecoin became widely adopted as a means of payment or store of value, disruptions to the stablecoin system could affect the wider economy,” the regulators stated in its financial report for 2019. “Financial regulators should review existing and planned digital asset arrangements and their risks, as appropriate.”

The panel added in the report: “The council recommends that federal and state regulators continue to examine risks to the financial system posed by new and emerging uses of digital assets and distributed ledger technologies.”

The FSOC also evoked Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and acknowledged that trading data “was sparse and may be unreliable.” The panel is also unconvinced that distributed ledger technology could lead to the economic boon may major corporations claim it could.

“The ultimate success of the technology, including applications in the financial sector, is not yet certain,” the report stated. “Some early efforts have not resulted in the anticipated efficiency gains and other promised benefits, and as a result, have been scaled back, refocused, or abandoned.”

United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin heads the FSOC panel, and its voting members include Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as Heath Tarbert, the new chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The report also highlighted “risks to consumers, investors and businesses associated with potential losses or instability in market prices” as well as “illicit financial risks; risks to national security; cybersecurity and privacy risks; and risks to international monetary and payment system integrity.”

Last month, the U.S. Federal Reserve warned that increasing use of cryptocurrencies known as “stablecoins” lacked safeguards and regulations, and could promote crimes such as money laundering and terrorism financing.

The warnings, published as part of a November Financial Stability Report, warned of financial crimes made possible be stablecoins. The value of a stablecoin are determined by underlying assets or basket of assets, including the U.S. dollars, euros, and even gold.

“The possibility for a stablecoin payment network to quickly achieve global scale introduces important challenges and risks related to financial stability, monetary policy, safeguards against money laundering and terrorist financing, and consumer and investor protection,” the report states.

Stablecoin initiatives out of Facebook and China, which the Federal Reserve calls “global stablecoins”, could be adopted in the mainstream, but problem could arise.

“The inability to convert stablecoins into domestic currency on demand or to settle payments on time could create credit and liquidity dislocations in the economy,” the Federal Reserve report warns. “If a stablecoin’s credit, liquidity, market and operational risks are managed ineffectively, it could face a loss of confidence. This loss of confidence could lead to a run, where many holders attempt to liquidate their stablecoins at the same time.”

The report adds: “The anonymity often found in stablecoins could be used to obscure financial transparency and facilitate money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes. Financial institutions are subject to customer due diligence and other anti-money-laundering regulations intended to help detect and disrupt illicit activity. Addressing such vulnerabilities is critical for any stablecoin.”

source: https://goldsilverbitcoin.com/top-us-financial-regulators-warn-against-perils-of-stablecoins/

[honeypots]

Bitcoiners participate in Proof of Keys by taking possession of all bitcoins held by third parties. “By demanding and taking possession of their assets, individuals will learn real fast with blockchain proof whether they are part of the elite HODLers or not,” reads the movement’s website. “Proof of Keys is the annual HODLer initiation.”

Proof of Keys is a celebration of our monetary sovereignty,  explains Trace Mayer, host of The Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast. “We do that by actually flexing our monetary sovereignty muscles. We show how strong we are and we do that by proving the keys.” What’s that mean?

more info about the annual event: https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinoconnell/2020/02/17/bitcoin-investor-trace-mayer-others-want-to-take-your-monetary-sovereignty/#65066f4b509e

“We run a full node and we hold our own private keys to our Bitcoin and any other crypto, ether, litecoin, et. cetera,” said Mayer. “And we withdraw all of our crypto from any third party, from any exchange, from any lending service, from anywhere.”

Mayer believes Proof of Keys teaches us a key lesson. “We don't necessarily know who the bad actors are until we start flexing those [monetary sovereignty] muscles,” he said. “So, Proof of Keys is how we do that. Centralized third parties having giant stockpiles of Bitcoin and crypto goes against the decentralization characteristics or nature [of blockchain].”

These centralized third parties become honeypots, targets for hackers. “Whether those hackers are elicit actors or whether those hackers are governments or lawyers or regulators trying to look for fines, compliance costs––or stuff like that––is very dangerous.”

He encourages people to dig up their old Bitcoin accounts with exchanges and withdraw their bitcoin. “See if you can get it,” he goads. “See if they'll actually process the withdrawal and send [your bitcoin] to you.”

[On the mining front:]

Trace Mayer expertly speaks on all the development going on in the Bitcoin space. “There are hundreds and hundreds of open source developers working on the Bitcoin core software,” he said. “The Bitcoin core software is the backbone of the Bitcoin network. It’s the most widely deployed implementation for all the network consensus. I really liked the work that Bitcoin core developers have been doing.” At the time of writing, 760 issues and 359 pull requests on the GitHub repository, found at GitHub.com/Bitcoin/Bitcoin, showcase ongoing Bitcoin development. Mayer then rattles off a list of Bitcoin innovation:

The Lightning network (Introduces channel factories and private messages on Bitcoin’s second layer)
Blockstream’s Atomic swaps on Liquid, a sidechain-based settlement network for traders and exchanges.
Blockstream’s Elements, an open source, sidechain-capable blockchain platform, providing access to powerful features such as Confidential Transactions and Issued Assets.
RSK (for the development of smart contracts on Bitcoin’s second layer)

On the mining front:
The Fiber Network for connecting all the miners
Matt Corallo’s Stratum Version 2 Protocol, (“going to make it a lot better for individual miners to control how the blocks get created instead of the mining pool screening it,” says Mayer).
Mining derivatives (“like hashing contracts, will likely trade on a CFTC regulated swap execution facility,” says Mayer).


On the privacy front; particularly confidential transactions:
CoinJoin
Mimblewimble
Dandelion
Bulletproof (shorter proofs for more efficient confidential transactions)
SNICKER (coin mixing)
Value Shuffle (coin mixing)


Smart Contracts
Mast (Merklized Abstract Syntax Tree, for smaller transaction sizes, more privacy, and larger smart contracts)
Taproot (for expanding Bitcoin smart contract flexibility)
Graph root 
Tap script (Improvement’s to Bitcoin’s script structure)
“We’ve got performance and usability increases, Schnorr signature cross input aggregation, Multisig, neutrino, erlay, and transaction accumulators,” he said. “Then there’s things like BTCPay for merchants to accept Bitcoin with open source software. It’s free. There’s just so much innovation happening on Bitcoin. People are largely ignorant of that, if they’re not closely following the space with the technological competence to kind of be looking and watching all the stuff that’s happening. Bitcoin is in forward motion like never before.”

Could state actors could stop Bitcoin? “It’s in the universe of the game theory,” says Mayer. “But, right now, [cryptocurrencies] are so inconsequential, they don’t really matter at all. It’s just not even worth [the government’s] time to think about it. Bitcoin, specifically, is built in a very force multiplier type of way, where it’s just so difficult to try and hack it. And there’s been a huge bounty there, $150 billion now, and that bounty has been there the whole time––the last eleven years.” Still, no significant hack.

“Bitcoin gets stronger and stronger and any potential weaknesses keep getting further reinforced and strengthened,” he said. “By the time it might matter for a state actor to try and hack it, it’ll be way too big. And all of those potential weaknesses will have already been closed off and highly defended against.”

What if the Chinese Communist Party decides to shut down the many Chinese-based Bitcoin mines, which help to secure the Bitcoin network? “The geographic distribution diversity is increasing,” ripostes Mayer. “Even Bitmain has announced a major new Bitcoin mine in Texas. And Version 2 Stratum Protocol is going to make it even more distributed with the individual or retail miners being able to control what happens in terms of the transactions that go into blocks. Instead of the pool operator controlling that, the individual miners will be controlling that.”


More info/other articles: https://cryptographicasset.com/the-state-of-bitcoin-according-to-btc-investor-trace-mayer/

[source/ learn for some practical examples of these words: https://changeoutput.com/what-is-hodl-a-guide-to-crypto-slang-like-to-the-moon-wreckt-bearwhale-and-more/]

The Bitcoin community has developed its own set of slangs on the chats where it meets––such as r/bitcoin, BitcoinTalk, Telegram chat rooms, and more. Log on, and you’ll see mass misspelling: “hodl” instead of “hold” or “Reckt” instead of “wrecked.” You’ll hear of bagholders and BearWhales.



Hodl
The word “Hodl” came to fruition during the bitcoin price collapse in 2013, when,. A post on BitcoinTalk read “I AM HODLING”, a cri de couer.

No coiner
A no coiner is the opposite of a hodler. A no coiner has no cryptocurrency assets; of course, particularly Bitcoin.


Sats
Short for satoshi, A Sat is the smallest unit of Bitcoin recorded on the Bitcoin Blockchain. It is like bitcoin’s version of the penny. It carries a value of 0.00000001 BTC, one-hundred-millionth of a single Bitcoin.


FoMo
Fomo is anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website. Sufferers of FOMO might buy crypto based on emotion.

Shill
An individual promoting altcoins for their own benefit, taking payment. A shill is a one who discreetly advertises a project without specific merit by spreading ‘buzz’, when in fact they are potentially being paid for their services.

Bear
The term Bear stems from traditional trading lingo. A bear is a person who thinks, in any market, that the price will fall.

BearWhale
A “BearWhale” is a big-time trader who is bearish on the Bitcoin price. A BearWhale is prone to making large sells which could hamper the overall bitcoin market.

Goxxed
Goxed means you’ve lost money at the hands of someone else. This term references the MtGox (bitcoin exchange) bankruptcy back in 2011, when many people lost their money. If you’ve been goxed, your coins were being held on a third party exchange that was either hacked or scammed its users, and now you’re a no-coiner. Spelled “Goxxed” or “goxed”.

Sh-tcoin
A sh*tcoin is a token based on vaporware, which refers to non-existent technology promoted through marketing and communication efforts. A shitcoin doesn’t have to be worthless, in terms of price, but just needs to have zero applications. Oftentimes, shitcoins are pump-and-dump schemes with value based on speculation.

Bagholder
A Bagholder is a person who purchases Bitcoin at the top of the market. It also refers to altcoins, many of which are pump-and-dump schemes.

An investor who has been hodling for too long, and is left to face the consequences. Also refers to the many pump-and-dump schemes involving thinly traded “altcoins” (cryptocurrencies that aren’t bitcoin, which function more like penny stocks) on the scene. Bagholder is often referred in the macro to people who don’t hold crypto, but only fiat-based assets.

Rekt
Rekt comes from “wrecked”. It denotes someone who made a bad investment, mostly due to buying or selling at the wrong time. For instance, a Bitcoiner sells his bitcoin holder, rendering him a no coiner, before the coins started going “to the moon”. That investor just got rekt. The term hails from online gaming, and means to utterly be destroyed or ruined.

Buy Wall
A buy wall results from a single huge buy order or multiple large buy orders made at the same price in the order book of a particular market. Buy walls can be created by a wealthy individual, group of traders or institutions.

To the moon!
This rallying cry refers to the sky-high price expectations by Bitcoin bulls. A derivative, “To mars!”, highlights even loftier expectations for the Bitcoin price. You can say, mooning, and common related questions, include “When Moon?” and  “When Lambo?”

Choyna
Bitcoin slang for China, a country that is in many ways an epicenter of Bitcoin activity due to its active trading and mining industries. Prominent bitcoin trader Flibbr credits “Choyna”. Choyna is an imitation of Donald Trump saying “China”.


source/ learn for some practical examples of these words: https://changeoutput.com/what-is-hodl-a-guide-to-crypto-slang-like-to-the-moon-wreckt-bearwhale-and-more/

["Nobody outside of "full-time" crypto cares about anything other than BTC.]

When Ryan Selkis, founder of Messari.io, tweeted the following:

"Nobody outside of "full-time" crypto cares about anything other than BTC.

ETH, XRP, BCH, LTC, EOS are bigger than the rest of the market combined, and BTC is bigger than everything else combined.

This video goes a little bit into deep on that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AleTHYBRzrA&feature=youtu.be



What are your thoughts and/or opinions?

[This feature would allow financial firms and investment firms to spin up a stablecoin within minutes,]

What if you could launch your own stablecoin with just a few clicks or commands? The Komodo blockchain wants to make this possible.

Komodo, a multi-chain blockchain platform or “composable Smart Chain platform,” seeks to enable third-parties to create their own customizable blockchains, called Komodo Smart Chains. The platform recently released new beta features to their test net that would enable the creation of stablecoins collateralized with Bitcoin protocol-based cryptocurrencies.

The team calls Komodo a “composable platform,” because users can compose their own blockchain, which is completely independent of Komodo, with its Antara Framework. These blockchains can be notarized to the Bitcoin network, which is good for security, and are customizable through Komodo’s modules.

The platform has enabled anyone with some coding experience to create their own Bitcoin protocol-based cryptocurrencies using Komodo’s Antara composer, a web application for creating your own blockchain. A “Prices” and “Pegs” feature, which is currently being trialed in alpha, will soon make it possible to create stablecoins and cryptocurrencies pegged to assets like stocks and commodities.

The Prices Module will track the price of an asset in the real world, providing meta-data to the Komodo Smart Chain. The Pegs Module has been designed by the Komodo team to make use of that meta-data on the blockchain. Anyone could then lock Bitcoin-protocol based funds to the Pegs Module and then withdraw up to 90% of the fund’s value in stablecoin form, which can then be exchanged for other assets with other people on the stablecoin network through an atomic swap, a smart contract technology enabling people to exchange cryptocurrency for another without centralized intermediaries, such as exchanges. All stablecoins deployed on a Komodo Smart Chain can be listed on the native AtomicDEX or decentralized exchange.

“If you wanted to create a chain, you could do that right now, alone at your computer, without any external support, without any funds—without anything—and you can just like spin up your own blockchain,” said Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann of the platform’s smart chain functionality. “This blockchain would literally inherit all of Komodo’s technologies and features—every wallet, every dapp,  every system that we brought out for Komodo is automatically compatible with your smart chain.” 

Komodo’s stablecoin functionality could allow anyone to create a stablecoin-backed by Bitcoin, Komodo’s native cryptocurrency, KMD, as well as others, and then anchor it to the Bitcoin network for security.

“Anyone can spin up and use a smart chain and stablecoin,” said Stadelmann, who has specialized in programming language C++  and today is a proponent of Rust, a programming language created by Mozilla. The process behind creating your own stablecoin on a Komodo smart chain will be blockchain-based and decentralized.

“There is full transparency,” said Stadelmann. “The biggest problem with [certain] stablecoins is the lack of transparency. We believe that our technology, and the way that we implemented the stablecoin module, provides 100% transparency.”

Komodo, which is based on a fork of the Bitcoin technology called Zcash, is in talks with partners in finance, who are interested in the ability to easily and securely create their own stablecoins. “This feature would allow financial firms and investment firms to spin up a stablecoin within  minutes,” said Stadelmann. “So you literally have a stablecoin for specific projects, for specific use cases, for specific products, for specific trading engines.”

source/learn more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinoconnell/2020/02/10/in-the-future-you-can-create-your-own-stablecoin-with-just-a-few-clicks-or-commands/#fbc0d0b4af24

The MakerDAO stablecoin, DAI, is pegged to the $1 US Dollar, not by holding US dollar reserves in a bank account equivalent to the amount of tokens in the system like the stablecoin Tether, but, rather, by holding in a smart contract collateralized assets, such as Ethereum, another cryptocurrency, and, in the future perhaps, tokenized real world assets. Holders can earn on the DAI they own. A decentralized and publicly controlled governance system manages the DAI interest rate –– that is, the cost of generating DAI––and the return on DAI.

“You can directly impact the supply and demand,” said Christensen. “For instance, if the price of DAI is below $1, then [we] need to contract the supply, we need to make DAI more scarce, and we need to make it more appealing for people to hold DAI. So, the governance process then comes to consensus around [making] it more appealing to hold DAI. That means the DAI savings rate needs to go up, and we need to make it less appealing to generate DAI, because we want to contract supply.”

In order to support the DAI price, the system also needs to increase its stability fee, which is the cost of borrowing DAI with collateral or generating DAI through the protocol. “This way it’s kind of a balancing act, where these rates keep changing as long as DAI is not trading close to $1 and then, as they change, they push it in the direction of $1.” This is how DAI has managed to stay stable and pegged to the US dollar for more than two years.

The science behind MakerDAO is based on basic microeconomics and applied in a novel way with blockchain.“What I found when I designed the MakerDAO protocol is that, on the one hand we need to draw on these basic concepts in microeconomics like supply and demand, and the fact that if you increase demand for a stablecoin, that should drive the price up. You want to increase demand for the stablecoin when the price is below $1. Similarly, if you decrease supply by making it more difficult to generate the coin or make it more expensive to borrow,  that will push the price up. You can also do the opposite: if the price of the stablecoin is too high, you can actually decrease demand or you can increase supply.” Christensen argues there’s also some parallels with biochemistry.

“You can really compare it to homeostasis,” he says. “If the stablecoin deviates away from $1, there needs to be a response that then brings it back in line and then cuts off the response, so it goes back to $1 and then there’s no more change in the rates and the system.”

While many think the Maker protocol is complicated, and that there are many moving parts, Christensen argues it is an elegant mechanism that has been simplified as much as possible. “The basic mechanics of how it’s controlled and the incentives of the people running the governance, the MKR token holders, all comes together to create a system that is able to, on the one hand, be fully decentralized and fully transparent without a central authority having some sort of special access to the system, and, at the same time, provide the stability that people are used to from the regular banking system and the regular financial system.” MKR represents the utility token, governance token and recapitalization resource of the Maker system.

Heretofore, Maker users have conducted on the platform risky operations around leverage. “We’re now seeing this even greater group of people come into the system and start using the protocol, not for this very advanced use case of accessing leverage, but, rather, just as a stability hedge, if they think that their own currency has too much inflation or maybe because they [want] the low risk, but still decent yield, that the DAI savings rate and DeFi offers. This can be a very appealing financial product to have access to in addition to what they have access to locally.”

The Maker protocol is designed to ultimately be completely controlled by a decentralized governance process, by the MKR holders, and separate from the MakerDAO foundation and the original development team. “One of the things that’s really important is the decentralized governance of the protocol,” said Christensen. “That the community’s able to run it completely on its own, and that the community also has the ability to grow the system as they want to grow it.” That includes adding new stablecoins beyond the US Dollar.

“I would expect that the first one will be the euro,” said Christensen. Next comes other major world currencies, such as the Renminbi and other major Asian currencies. The goal in the long run is for every single currency to be in stablecoin format in the Maker protocol, and potentially assets beyond stablecoins, too, such as synthetic assets including stocks or commodities.

“We want to make all of these things available to everyone, instead of just [to the] very few people, relatively speaking, that today have access to the global financial system, while billions of others are left completely on the fringes,” he said.

In order to make DeFi available to everyone, Maker has long planned multi-collateral DAI, which Christensen calls the full realization of the Maker protocol. The company has been working on it for the past five years.

“Single collateral DAI [was] really more of an initial version that we decided to create so that we could start testing out what a decentralized stablecoin would look like in practice,” said Christensen. “And we could allow the ecosystem around the stablecoin to begin forming. But, now, with the launch of Multi-Collateral DAI, we actually have the full system live. That means we can start accessing the full range of features that decentralized finance makes possible. That includes [using] multiple collateral types.”

Multi-collateral DAI, according to Christensen, is Maker’s main feature, but he also points to other features as important, including the DAI savings rate. “This is the first time there is a low risk savings return available in crypto on a USD denominated stable coin,” he says. “And, in many ways, the DAI savings rate is actually what’s more exciting in the short run, because the multi-collateral feature, while it is the most important, will take a couple of months, and even years, to fully roll out and see its potential.”

The system has the capability to support any number of collateral types in the long run. “Today it actually only supports two collateral types, Ethereum and then the Ethereum-based token, called Basic Attention Token (BAT).” BAT was founded by Brandon Eich, the creator of JavaScript, a high-level programming language.

Once multi-collateral DAI becomes reality, and the community and ecosystem around the protocol has grown, Maker will be ready to take the next step. “What’s going to start happening is a lot more new assets are going to be onboarded and that will include all the different Ethereum-based tokens and cross-chain assets like Bitcoin,” said Christensen. “What’s most exciting is that it will also start to include Ethereum-based tokenized real world assets that will be brought onto the Ethereum blockchain, and then used as collateral in the Maker protocol.”

It will be possible to use things like gold and real estate, as well, says Christensen. “Tokenized gold in, let’s say, a vault in Singapore, for instance, or real estate in America, where the deed is tokenized, and that token is then used as collateral, in order to get a low rate loan from a decentralized protocol, or even do things like trade finance. Small businesses [can access] the blockchain, in order to get a direct line of credit that’s based on their invoices, which are then tokenized.”

full article: https://cryptographicasset.com/makerdao-ceo-theres-going-to-be-a-new-wave-of-innovation-thats-difficult-to-predict/

[When you’re looking to be a government regulated entity, you have to follow all the rules. You can’t allow anonymity anymore]

The NYDFS rejected Seattle-based cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex’s BitLicense application, and the resulting rejection letter serves as a blueprint for anyone looking to do crypto business in the Empire State.

For securities lawyer Jason Seibert, who has served on several landmark crypto cases, the crux of Bittrex’s rejection letter is on Page 4 in Paragraph D.  He says it offers the 10,000-foot view of what it takes to operate a crypto exchange.

“…Bittrex has failed to demonstrate responsibility, financial and business experience, or the character and fitness to warrant the belief that its business will be conducted honestly, fairly, equitably and carefully,” reads the NYDFS rejection letter of Bittrex, which requested that the exchange provide within two weeks of the rejection  written confirmation that it had stopped operating in New York State and doing business with its residents.

What’s clear is that anyone looking to operate as an exchange in New York State must abide by the Five Pillars of KYC and AML:

internal controls;
the designation of a Bank Secrecy Act (BSA)/AML officer;
a BSA/AML training program;
independent testing to test programs;
and a risk-based, customer due-diligence procedure
“For instance, you have to be able to know if there’s somebody that’s on a sanctions list or an OFAC list,” explains Mr. Seibert, referencing the Office of Foreign Assets Control. “So,  it becomes an issue if an exchange doesn’t even know who their customers are due to the ability for users to create a false name or an alias account.”

Seibert points out that no one is going to win points with the regulator when they allow Elvis Presley to trade, as was the case with Bittrex.

“An exchange must see some form of ID, some sort of registration, some sort of link between an actual person and an account,” explains Seibert. “You can run an actual ID against a database like OFAC to make sure that it isn’t a sanctioned Russian who’s not supposed to be doing business in the United States or someone laundering money through a cryptocurrency exchange because they’ve created a false account. That’s the issue with these anonymous accounts. When you’re looking to be a government regulated entity, you have to follow all the rules. You can’t allow anonymity anymore.”

But, anonymity is the lifeblood of cryptocurrency. And that goal to be able to do things anonymously, to have your money, spend your money, trade your money, and do anything you want without the government knowing, doesn’t fly with regulators.

“The goal for a lot of people in this space is to be able to do things anonymously,” says Seibert. “So, when certain people started finding out that you were going to have to have a verified account with your real name like Poloniex did, a lot of people close their accounts. They go someplace where they can be anonymous.” A lot of exchanges, in addition, were not designed to have AML and KYC control.

“They didn’t know the policy, didn’t do the training, and quite frankly, I don’t think they really wanted to do that because it was contrary to whatever their internal beliefs were,” said Seibert. “In their minds, they’re not there to be the world’s police, and to prevent illegal transactions, money laundering and sanctioned money from traveling internationally. An exchange cannot list tokens without the required due diligence to know if they were security or not, what was being offered, and who was offering them.”

Seibert evokes the Petro cryptocurrency from Venezuela, for instance. “Absolutely sanctioned,” he says. “Nobody in the United States is allowed to buy it or should be allowed to buy it because it’s viewed as getting around sanctions on human rights violations. You’re not supposed to buy Venezuelan oil.”

So, for any exchange, listing the Petro token would be a violation. Same goes for an unknown token with unknown issuers and uses.

“You could start avoiding sanctions by having this anonymous token created that certain parties may be trading back and forth in order to launder money,” explains Seibert.

What’s more, all employees at an exchange must be trained on AML and KYC policies and procedures. In the case of Bittrex, NYDFS said people were not trained and policies and procedures were inadequate. Bittrex said their framework had been approved by outside counsel, but it’s unclear who the outside counsel was and if their compliance framework ran the prescribed way.

“You can have a fully approved and creative plan and you put it on your desk, but then not execute it,” says Seibert. “If they did have an approved framework by competent outside counsel, then how is it that DFS found that their compliance was insufficient?”

full story: https://cryptographicasset.com/a-few-things-you-should-know-about-getting-a-bitlicense/

[Nobody outside of *full-time* crypto cares about anything other than BTC.The next five largest assets are bigger than the rest of the market combined, and BTC is bigger than everything else combined.BTC.ETH, XRP, BCH, LTC, EOS.That's it. That's the game today.]

"Nobody outside of *full-time* crypto cares about anything other than BTC.

The next five largest assets are bigger than the rest of the market combined, and BTC is bigger than everything else combined.

BTC.

ETH, XRP, BCH, LTC, EOS.

That's it. That's the game today."

Tweet by Ryan Selkis, founder of Messari, who started his Bitcoin career out as something of a mudraking journalist, made a tweet recently we thought we would riff on a bit.


source: ttps://changeoutput.com/bitcoin-ethereum-xrp-bitcoin-cash-litecoin-eos-the-only-games-in-crypto-town/


What are your thoughts?
Which other altcoin projects have greater potential in 2020 than these ones?

[How’s it work?]

Skysthelimit.org, a non-profit supporting underrepresented young adult entrepreneurs, provides a similar digital experience to matchmaking apps, but is for entrepreneurs and business mentors. It uses the same artificial intelligence that social networking sites use, only its goal is not to, say, create addictive habits online to sell more ads, but instead to match entrepreneurs with a network of volunteer business mentors. Skysthelimit.org develops the social capital of first-time entrepreneurs to increase their chances of building successful businesses quicker.

The 501(c)(3) tech nonprofit, which was founded by Blockchain.com co-founder Nic Cary and lifelong friend Bo Ghirardelli, is based in Oakland, CA and uses data from entrepreneurs and volunteers, such as skills, industry, location, and stage of business, to predict and recommend high-quality matches.

How’s it work?

“The way we match entrepreneurs with business advisors and mentors are not too dissimilar to how a dating app will look at your preferences, and use its algorithm to make a recommendation,” said Mr. Ghirardelli. The platform encourages entrepreneurs and volunteers to start a conversation using in-app messaging.

“We are building a digital experience that really mimics how people build relationships naturally,” said Mr. Ghirardelli. “It’s not too different from how we meet someone new in the professional world. There is some kind of intro email, then we have our first few meetings, and eventually we decide whether it is a good fit to keep collaborating together. Unlike in dating platforms, we guide our entrepreneurs and mentors to commit to each other to set expectations around their collaboration—whether they’re working on creating a business plan or launching a digital marketing campaign for a young entrepreneur’s new product line.” These collaborations help a first-time entrepreneur develop social capital, vital business knowledge, connections, and confidence.


“We can use data to help instantly create better, more positive outcomes for our community,” said Mr. Cary. “We can A/B test new features rapidly, and analyze results in real-time. Like other tech platforms, we look at users’ time on site, we’re looking at satisfaction, surveys, and we can study all the points across the conversion funnel through our whole pathway to business ownership, and start to refine that process in an intentional way because we sit on a lot of data.”

Who is elected?

Skysthelimit.org has a unique startup grants program, powered by a custom Hyperledger blockchain, where the community of entrepreneurs, volunteers, and donors vote each month on eligible young entrepreneurs to select who wins these grants to help them launch their business.



source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinoconnell/2020/02/03/how-a-blockchaincom-founder-is-fighting-poverty/#14ffd3299f03

[source: cryptographicasset.com/hedera-hashgraph-cpo-big-companies-are-embracing-the-open-source-movement/]

Lionel Chocron, Chief Product Officer at Hedera Hashgraph, began building three to five years ago at Oracle a portfolio of private ledger cloud solutions for large companies. Customers at Oracle were adopting blockchain technology quicker than they were adopting AI and IoT, because, he believes, distributed ledgers represent low risk ways to prove use cases compared to AI and IoT.

“You can isolate a set of processes on the use case and decide to fork that info on a private or public ledger and, thanks to the companies like the Oracles, IBMs and Microsofts of the world, who have now cloud-based blockchain platforms, it is pretty easy to enable a proof of concept that you can trigger in a few weeks,” said Chocron. “The ease of adoption through the cloud providers––the key ones being Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others––is making it much easier for people to access and test the technology.”

Chocron helps companies adopt Hedera Hashgraph’s distributed ledger technology. He says they are not choosing DLT just for the sake of doing it, though. “[They] make a decision on supply chain, on identity management, on settlement or payment,” says Chocron. “That’s the use case [they] care about. If we and the other players in the market want to enable companies to adopt distributed ledger technology, we need to find a way to integrate ourselves into this ecosystem.” Part of this is working on technology like Hyperledger, which is working with many global companies.

Towards this end, Hedera Hashgraph is building a native integration with the open-source Hyperledger distributed ledger so as to enable private ledger use cases. Chocron believes an open-source approach is important for enterprise technology.

Chocron’s open-source experience dates back to his days at Oracle. The programming language Java is owned by Oracle, and it is open source today. “There’s a major component of Oracle that is OS, and it’s just going to continue to increase,” said Chocron. “Look at Microsoft, which maybe 10 years ago was probably viewed as a non-open source player in the market and faced harsh critiques because of that. And now you look at where Microsoft is, they’ve open sourced a lot of their new innovation. The big companies, especially today, have really engaged and embraced the open source movement for the past five to 10 years. And this is just reaffirming what you see in the blockchain space. A lot of that is going to be open source.”

As you are releasing your technology, innovators do need to follow specific frameworks so that the community can embrace it even faster,  said Chocron. “So we have to raise the bar in terms of both documentation and access to reports.”

Open source also entails a different way of engaging the community. “Our developers are heavily engaged in participating, reviewing, and contributing to code,” said Chocron of Hedera Hashgraph. “This is actually a very nice way, when you’re a small company, to get a bigger community to actually contribute to the evolution of technology. We see that as very positive. The bottom layer, which is the platform itself, won’t be fully open-source. It will be an open review, but everything else will be open-source.”

source: cryptographicasset.com/hedera-hashgraph-cpo-big-companies-are-embracing-the-open-source-movement/

[With the drone attack and news of Iran general Qasem Soleimani’s death, what could a destabilizing Middle East region mean for gold prices and why? What is unique today in 2020 about the relationship between gold and Middle East stability?]

Edmond Bugos, gold analyst at the Dollar Vigilante, was kind enough to answer our questions. Thank you to Ed for his insightful, Austrian-minded look at current events and the gold market. Bugos talks geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, and how those might play out, as well as the implications there for gold. He also discusses how Bitcoin has been a boon for the precious metals market.

With the drone attack and news of Iran general Qasem Soleimani’s death, what could a destabilizing Middle East region mean for gold prices and why? What is unique today in 2020 about the relationship between gold and Middle East stability?

The destabilization seems to have one obvious result, it keeps US troops committed to being there longer. Some analysis has revealed that the US has been targeting that general for some time, and that Trump got suckered into a geopolitical play. Some of the motivations can be part of distracting from various problems at home, including the impeachment proceedings, a wilting boom, Epstein, who knows. The why’s in any situation like this are mind boggling, which is why Jefferson and Washington and others warned about entanglements with foreign governments.

The gold price has been strong all year on account of what has been happening in the economy, and how the Fed has dealt with it. Investors largely see through the artificial illusion driven by the piling on of debt. So gold is no longer cheap, not as cheap as silver. The Iranaian affair has hastened some of my upside targets. When these kinds of things occur you usually get a spike in risk premiums, gold drives higher, and then it fades away if the affair does, a peace dividend drives it back to where it was.

So it’s often good to short these moves. But something about the situation is troubling. The two sides have been simmering for some time. And both of the States are failing. Both of them need to point to some exterior demon to save face for what’s going on at home. So the potential for escalation at some point is likely to underpin gold prices for now.

There has been a lot of attention on Bitcoin over the past decade. Do you think this has taken attention away from gold and silver? How has the Bitcoin market affected gold and silver’s place in the world?

Not at all. Bitcoin is a gift to the gold story. It widens the audience for it. It’s the same story. They have the same enemies and the same friends. It’s just a shame you have some of the hard core gold bugs that refuse to attribute value to anything that is not tangible, as though the internet itself never produced an intangible asset. But humans are humans. On the crypto side you have the maximalists who believe crypto will destroy everything traditional. They remind me of the internet maximalists back in the nineties who thought of mining as part of an old economy that need not exist now that we had the internet. So they put off a lot of gold bugs because they are not that smart to begin with. A lot of them are hung up on the idea that bitcoin is not tangible, or that anyone can create a cryptocurrency since it’s just code (so they even call it ‘fiat’), or that it doesn’t satisfy Ludwig von Mises’s regression theorem, or that gold is better money, and so on.

All of these are misguided criticisms that puts them at odds with the crypto entrepreneurs, but not all of them are hardcore hard asset types. The Austrians themselves are divided over whether to place relevance on the fact that bitcoin had an original value as a commodity or not, and regardless that Walter Block answered this question by explaining what Mises really meant about the regression theorem. But a lot of gold bugs remember they are not necessarily all in the same political sphere. Some of them are neocons, minarchists, and even communists.

I now see four worthy and sounder opponents for government fiat currencies, including the US dollar: gold, silver, bitcoin and monero. The four amigos, I call them. They move together and they lead the commodity complex because as you know commodity cycles are largely monetary.

You tweeted in November “It is no longer in the interests of the American establishment to promote capitalism at home or abroad, especially abroad.”  What do you mean by this?

America used to promote freedom around the world when its rivals ran more totalitarian dictatorships, like the Soviets or the Chinese during the Cold War era. It had the world’s most capital friendly markets. If you were running from another government you could keep your capital in America relatively safe and private. The dollar was a black market currency around the world and thus enabled many humans to survive the atrocities of their governments. So, in effect, by promoting freedom it was undermining foreign regimes. But today, by promoting freedom, it is undermining its own regime, its own empire, its own criminal institutions at home and abroad.

Should anyone actually create a free market system anywhere on this planet of any magnitude it would hasten the dollar’s demise today. It would make for a bad comparison, undoubtedly.


Does the situation in Hong Kong have implications for the gold market? Why? Why not?

I’m not sure. But I do think the situation in Hong Kong is a symptom of the failure of “democracy” and of government in many places, not just HK. You see unrest everywhere because of untenable policies causing increasing discontent. In Chile. In Argentina. In Venezuela. In Nicaragua. In Greece. South Africa. Many places in the Middle East. Even in America and the UK. In France. It is everywhere. The reasons may all be specifically different but it is amazing to me that few people are looking for the common thread in all of it. Bad or oppressive policies.

Why do we need regulators to protect us from bitcoin for Pete’s sake? To me that’s just another data point exposing our situation for what it is, we are not free, we have slave masters.

What is meant by this quote of yours? “Investors are playing poker and calling the Fed’s hand.”

By pushing the stock market up before the Fed has decided to cut rates it forces the Fed to give in or face the consequences of a sell off. Sometimes the market plays dead, sometimes it is calling a bluff. In this case, it was calling a bluff. The Fed is out of resolve.

Any other thoughts on the state of gold and silver?

Many. I’m bullish. This next decade should go to precious metals bulls as the excesses and imbalances of the last ten years unwind, and the Fed inflates to try to offset the unwind. The public debt situation is untenable and not conducive to the Fed’s position because an inflation that produces real price rises is going to drive interest rates higher and wreak havoc on the government’s finances, which is likely to incentivize further inflation, and catalyze a vicious circle that can only end in stagflation, if it continues, or a systematic liquidation of public sector assets.

Unfortunately, the low interest rate policy has been around a long time now and has created a situation in debts both private and public that has eroded the central bank’s resolve.

In the late seventies the government debt to GDP ratio was just 10% so they could afford a reset and a spiral in interest rates. Back then, the Fed still had resolve. Today it is much weakened.

The US dollar’s role as a reserve currency has become obsolete and the incentives to keep capital in America are not so great anymore, comparatively speaking. As the speculative bubbles of the last decade unwind you will see a dollar crisis like no other that will drive gold to $5k, or $10k, maybe higher if someone like Sanders ever got in and turned America into Venezuela.

In the short term the gold market has accumulated some risk because of speculation about the Fed and Iran, so some caution is prudent here. But I can’t see anything bearish for gold or silver in the years ahead other than the odd correction after they have run for several months.

source: goldsilverbitcoin.com/dollar-vigilante-ed-bugos-on-iran-gold-bitcoin-monero-us-national-debt-the-dollar/

La stablecoin de MakerDAO, DAI, está vinculada al dólar estadounidense por la cantidad de $1, no manteniendo por reservas de dólares estadounidenses en una cuenta bancaria equivalente a la cantidad de tokens en el sistema como el stablecoin Tether, sino, más bien, manteniendo en un contrato inteligente de activos colateralizados, como Ethereum, otra criptomoneda y, en el futuro, tal vez, activos tokenizados del mundo real. Los titulares pueden ganar con el DAI que poseen. Un sistema de gobernanza descentralizado y controlado públicamente gestiona la tasa de interés DAI, es decir, el costo de generar DAI, y los retornos de DAI.

“Puedes afectar directamente la oferta y la demanda”, dijo Christensen. “Por ejemplo, si el precio de DAI es inferior a $1, entonces [tenemos] que reducir el suministro, necesitamos hacer que DAI sea más escaso y que sea más atractivo para las personas tener DAI. Entonces, el proceso de gobernanza llega a un consenso en torno a [hacerlo] más atractivo para tener DAI. Eso significa que la tasa de ahorro de DAI debe aumentar, y debemos hacerlo menos atractivo para generar DAI, porque queremos reducir el suministro”.

Para respaldar el precio DAI, el sistema también necesita aumentar su tarifa de estabilidad, que es el costo de pedir prestado DAI con una garantía o el poder generar DAI a través del protocolo. “De esta manera es una especie de acto de equilibrio, donde estas tasas siguen cambiando siempre que DAI no se negocie cerca de $1 y luego, a medida que cambian, lo empujan en la dirección de $1”. Así es como DAI ha logrado mantenerse estable y vinculado al dólar estadounidense por más de dos años.

La ciencia detrás de MakerDAO se basa en la microeconomía básica y se aplica de una manera novedosa con blockchain. “Lo que encontré cuando diseñé el protocolo MakerDAO es que, por un lado, necesitamos recurrir a estos conceptos básicos en microeconomía como la oferta y la demanda, y el hecho de que si aumenta la demanda de una stablecoin, eso debería elevar el precio. Tu quieres aumentar la demanda del stablecoin cuando el precio es inferior a $1. Del mismo modo, si disminuye la oferta al hacer que sea más difícil generar la moneda o hacer que sea más caro pedir prestado, eso elevará el precio. También se puede hacer lo contrario: si el precio del stablecoin es demasiado alto, en realidad puedes disminuir la demanda o puedes aumentar la oferta”. Christensen argumenta que también hay algunos paralelos con la bioquímica.

“Realmente se puede comparar con la homeostasis”, dice. “Si la stablecoin se desvía de $1, debe haber una respuesta que la vuelva a poner en línea y luego la corte, por lo que vuelve a $1 y luego no hay más cambios en las tarifas y el sistema”.

Si bien muchos piensan que el protocolo Maker es complicado y que hay muchas partes móviles, Christensen argumenta que es un mecanismo elegante que se ha simplificado lo más posible. “La mecánica básica de cómo se controla y los incentivos de las personas que dirigen el gobierno, los poseedores de tokens MKR, se unen para crear un sistema que, por un lado, puede ser completamente descentralizado y totalmente transparente sin una autoridad central tener algún tipo de acceso especial al sistema y, al mismo tiempo, proporcionar la estabilidad a la que las personas están acostumbradas desde el sistema bancario regular y el sistema financiero regular ”. MKR representa el token de utilidad, el token de gobierno y el recurso de recapitalización del Sistema de fabricante.

Hasta ahora, los usuarios de Maker han llevado a cabo en la plataforma operaciones riesgosas en torno al apalancamiento. “Ahora vemos a este grupo aún mayor de personas ingresa al sistema y comienza a usar el protocolo, no para un caso de uso muy avanzado de acceso al apalancamiento, sino más bien como una protección de estabilidad, si piensan que su propia moneda tiene demasiada inflación o tal vez porque [quieren] el bajo riesgo, pero aún un rendimiento decente, que ofrece la tasa de ahorro de DAI y DeFi (finanza descentralizada). Este puede ser un producto financiero muy atractivo al que tener acceso además de a lo que se tiene acceso localmente”.

El protocolo Maker ultimadamente está diseñado para ser controlado por un proceso de gobierno descentralizado, por los titulares de MKR, y separado de la fundación MakerDAO y el equipo de desarrollo original.

“Una de las cosas que es realmente importante es la gobernanza descentralizada del protocolo”, dijo Christensen. “Que la comunidad puede ejecutarlo completamente por sí misma, y ​​que la comunidad también tiene la capacidad de hacer crecer el sistema como quieran”. Eso incluye agregar nuevas stablecoins más allá del dólar estadounidense.

“Esperaría que el primero sea el euro”, dijo Christensen. Luego vienen otras monedas mundiales importantes, como el Renminbi y otras monedas asiáticas importantes. El objetivo a largo plazo es que cada moneda esté en formato de stablecoin en el protocolo Maker, y potencialmente también activos más allá de las stablecoins, como activos sintéticos, incluidas acciones o productos básicos.

“Queremos poner todas estas cosas a disposición de todos, en vez de solo [para] las pocas personas, relativamente hablando, que hoy tienen acceso al sistema financiero global, mientras que miles de millones de personas quedan completamente al margen”, el dijo.

Con el fin de hacer que las finanzas descentralizadas estén disponible para todos, Maker ha planeado durante mucho tiempo DAI multlateral, que Christensen llama la plena realización del protocolo Maker. La compañía ha estado trabajando en ello durante los últimos cinco años.

“El DAI de colateral sencilla [era] realmente más como una versión inicial que decidimos crear para poder comenzar a probar cómo sería una stablecoin descentralizada en la práctica”, dijo Christensen. “Y podríamos permitir que el ecosistema alrededor del stablecoin comience a formarse. Pero, ahora, con el lanzamiento de DAI Multi-Colateral, en realidad tenemos el sistema completo en vivo. Eso significa que podemos comenzar a acceder a la gama completa de características que las finanzas descentralizadas hacen posible. Eso incluye [usar] múltiples tipos de garantías”.

La DAI multi-colateral, según Christensen, es la característica principal de Maker, pero también señala otras características como importantes, incluida la tasa de ahorro de DAI. “Esta es la primera vez que hay un retorno de ahorro de bajo riesgo disponible en cripto en una stablecoin denominada en USD”, dice. “Y, en muchos sentidos, la tasa de ahorro de DAI es en realidad lo más emocionante a corto plazo, porque la función de múltiples garantías, si bien es la más importante, llevará un par de meses, e incluso años, para implementarse por completo y ver su potencial “.

El sistema tiene la capacidad de admitir cualquier cantidad de tipos de garantías a largo plazo. “Hoy en día solo es compatible con dos tipos colaterales, Ethereum y luego el token basado en Ethereum, llamado Basic Attention Token (BAT)”. BAT fue fundada por Brandon Eich, el creador de JavaScript, un lenguaje de programación de alto nivel.

Una vez que la DAI multi-colateral se haga realidad, y la comunidad y el ecosistema alrededor del protocolo hayan crecido, Maker estará listo para dar el siguiente paso. “Lo que va a comenzar a suceder es que se incorporarán muchos más activos nuevos y eso incluirá todos los diferentes tokens basados ​​en Ethereum y activos de cadena cruzada como Bitcoin”, dijo Christensen. “Lo más emocionante es que también comenzará a incluir activos del mundo real tokenizados basados ​​en Ethereum que se incorporarán a la cadena de bloques de Ethereum y luego se usarán como garantía en el protocolo Maker”.

También será posible usar cosas como oro y bienes raíces, dice Christensen. “Oro tokenizado en, digamos, una bóveda en Singapur, por ejemplo, o bienes raíces en Estados Unidos, donde el título se tokeniza, y ese token luego se usa como garantía, para obtener un préstamo a tasa baja de un protocolo descentralizado, o incluso hacer cosas como la financiación del comercio. Las pequeñas empresas [pueden acceder] a blockchain para obtener una línea de crédito directa basada en sus facturas, que luego se tokenizan”.

La fundación Maker se centra en investigar, experimentar y probar nuevos usos del sistema. “Está ejecutando pruebas y prácticas sobre cómo lidiar con cosas como el cumplimiento y la regulación en torno a estas cosas, y conciliar que estamos tratando de incorporar los activos regulados del mundo real en un protocolo descentralizado, ultimadamente, sin autoridad, y cómo [a] reconciliar esas dos cosas “, dijo Christensen. “Es posible. Hemos realizado muchas pruebas muy exitosas con diferentes compañías de todo el mundo que han estado tokenizando varios activos y luego hemos realizado pruebas, esencialmente, donde simulamos cómo sería usar esos activos como garantía en Maker, y luego calculó cuánto dinero ahorrarían en términos de las tasas de interés que tienen que pagar a los bancos”.

Christensen cree que los activos financieros y los mercados financieros probablemente se convertirán en tokens con el tiempo, debido a la eficiencia inherente de blockchain. “Eso es solo el comienzo, y cuando vayas más allá de eso, habrá una nueva ola de innovación que es difícil de predecir, pero que sin duda va a poner de cabeza al sistema financiero e inyectar este valor y las ventajas de la tecnología blockchain.”

En última instancia, Christensen no cree que las finanzas descentralizadas reemplacen el sistema financiero actual. Hasta cierto punto, el sistema financiero ––los bancos, las instituciones y los gobiernos– adoptarán comercialmente las finanzas descentralizadas y las acogerán, usándolas para mejorar su propia eficiencia, transparencia y cumplimiento. De cualquier manera, habrá mucha interrupción y destrucción creativa.

“Realmente todo se basará en esta dinámica de, en algún momento, el sistema existente se dará cuenta de que quien se mueva primero, y quien realmente aprenda cómo aprovechar esta tecnología y cómo usarla para proporcionar mejores servicios, obtendrá un ventaja masiva en el mercado”, dice. Tether se usa hoy para facilitar la cripto liquidez y la cripto especulación, por ejemplo. Las empresas de importación y exportación también lo están utilizando, lo que refuerza la adopción de base de las criptomonedas en todo el mundo, no solo para especular. Sin embargo, la stablecoin DAI y el protocolo Maker proporcionan algo único, en la medida en que no hay forma de obtener un retorno de su Tether.

Continuar leyendo: https://cryptographicasset.com/ceo-de-makerdao-va-a-haber-una-nueva-ola-de-innovacion-dificil-de-predecir/

En el espíritu del código abierto, Hal Finney es un cofundador de Bitcoin. Él intercambió correos electrónicos con Satoshi Nakamoto y sugirió correcciones de bugs y errores, y también filosofó sobre la macro de hacia dónde se dirige Bitcoin en el futuro, qué cambios podrían hacerse en el código para mejorarlo, e incluso ideas sobre cuál es la “historia central de Bitcoin.”

Finney recibió un título de ingeniería del Instituto de Tecnología de California (CIT). Como el segundo desarrollador contratado por la corporación PGO, trabajó junto a Phil Zimmerman, el creador de Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), que es el software de cifrado de correo electrónico más utilizado en el mundo. Finney reestructuró gran parte del código para PGP en nombre de Zimmerman, aunque esto no se hizo público debido a los problemas legales que enfrentó el mismo creador; Zimmerman fue casi acusado de violaciones del control de exportación de armas.

Finney le dijo a Andy Greenberg que trabajó estrechamente con Zimmerman para codificar “la mayor parte de los cambios” de PGP 1.0 a PGP 2.0, y rara vez se le acreditó por ese trabajo.

Finney, quien en su último año de preparatoria en 1974 fue votado como “el más listo” por sus compañeros, administró en la década de 1990 el primer servicio de correos electrónicos que era criptográficamente seguro.

Aquí nos enfrentamos a los problemas de pérdida de privacidad, computación invasiva, bases de datos masivas, más centralización, y Chaum ofrece una dirección completamente diferente a seguir, una que pone el poder en manos de individuos en lugar de gobiernos y corporaciones”, escribió Finney en la lista de correo de Cypherpunks en 1992, en referencia al defensor de la privacidad David Chaum. “La computadora puede usarse como una herramienta para liberar y proteger a las personas, en vez de controlarlas”.

Escribió en la lista en 1993: “Con dinero en efectivo digital y tarjetas inteligentes, deberías poder participar en… transacciones sin ninguna organización o institución que pueda violar tu privacidad o robarte tu dinero. Puedes protegerte a ti mismo, en vez de tener que confiar en los demás. Esto pone más poder en manos del consumidor”.

En BitcoinTalk, un popular foro de Internet, Finney, que recibió la primera transacción de Bitcoin de Nakamoto, detalló su descubrimiento, y también detalló los primeros días trabajando en Bitcoin.

Cuando Satoshi anunció el primer lanzamiento del software, lo tomé de inmediato. Creo que fui la primera persona además de Satoshi en ejecutar bitcoin. Yo miné el bloque 70 y algo, y recibí la primera transacción de bitcoin, cuando Satoshi me envió diez monedas como prueba. Mantuve una conversación por correo electrónico con Satoshi durante los siguientes días, principalmente informando de bugs y errores, y él reparándolos.

Finney simplemente no era tan cínico como otros criptógrafos. “Los criptógrafos han visto demasiados grandes esquemas por novatos despistados”, escribió Finney en el foro BitcoinTalk en 2013. “Yo era más idealista; Siempre me ha encantado la criptografía, el misterio y la paradoja de la misma”.

En los primeros días de Bitcoin, uno no necesitaba unidades de procesamiento de gráficos (GPU), un circuito electrónico especializado diseñado para manipular y alterar rápidamente la memoria para acelerar la creación de imágenes, pero también es aplicable a otros procesos, para minar Bitcoins. Podrías minar bitcoins con CPU, y Finney lo hizo. Dejó de minar después de varios bloques, citando el fuerte ruido y que el minar calentaba su computadora. Finney admite que desearía haber seguido minando, pero lo vio como “medio vaso lleno, medio vaso vacío”.

Finney hizo más de 300 publicaciones en BitcoinTalk, abarcando debates sobre la minería, la informática y la economía de Bitcoin. Dio su opinión sobre muchas cosas, incluido lo que es Bitcoin.

“Veo que Bitcoin está convirtiéndose en una moneda de reserva para los bancos, desempeñando el mismo papel que el oro en los primeros días de la banca”, escribió. “Los bancos podrían emitir efectivo digital con mayor anonimato y transacciones más livianas y más eficientes”.

Los giros de precios entretuvieron a Finney. “Tengo callo en el juego”, escribió. “Pero llegué a mis bitcoins por suerte, con poco crédito para mí. Viví el accidente de 2011. Así que lo he visto antes. Lo que fácil viene, fácil se va.”

Publicó en Twitter en lo que se encontraba trabajando. “Pensando en cómo reducir las emisiones de CO2 de una implementación generalizada de Bitcoin”, tuiteó el 27 de enero de 2009.

También indagó en el anonimato de la red Bitcoin:

Los médicos diagnosticaron en 2009 a Finney con ELA, esclerosis lateral amiotrófica, y escribió sobre esto en BitcoinTalk.

“Estaba en la mejor forma de mi vida a principios de ese año”, escribió. “Perdí mucho peso y corrí distancias largas. Había corrido varias medios maratones y estaba empezando a entrenar para un maratón completo. Hice mis incrementos hasta más de 20 millas de carrera, y pensé que estaba listo. Fue entonces cuando todo salió mal”.

Su cuerpo comenzó a fallar. “Se me dificultó el hablar, perdí fuerza en mis manos y mis piernas tardaron en recuperarse. En agosto de 2009, me dieron el diagnóstico de ELA, también llamada enfermedad de Lou Gehrig, por el famoso jugador de béisbol que la contrajo”.

La ELA funciona al matar las neuronas motoras, que son responsables de transportar señales desde el cerebro a los músculos, causando primero debilidad y finalmente parálisis. Por lo general, es fatal entre 2 y 5 años, pero Stephen Hawking, la persona con más vida diagnosticada con ELA, ha vivido con ELA durante 40 años.

“Mis síntomas fueron leves al principio y seguí trabajando, pero la fatiga y los problemas de voz me obligaron a retirarme a principios de 2011”, dijo Finney. “Desde entonces, la enfermedad ha continuado su progresión inexorable. Hoy estoy esencialmente paralizado. Me alimentan a través de un tubo y mi respiración es asistida a través de otro tubo. Opero la computadora usando un sistema comercial de seguimiento de ojos. También tiene un sintetizador de voz, así que esta es mi voz ahora. Paso todo el día en mi silla de ruedas eléctrica. Trabajé una interfaz usando un arduino para poder ajustar la posición de mi silla de ruedas usando mis ojos “.

Agregó: “Ha sido un ajuste, pero mi vida no es tan mala. Todavía puedo leer, escuchar música y ver televisión y películas. Recientemente descubrí que incluso puedo escribir código. Es muy lento, probablemente 50 veces más lento que antes. Pero todavía me encanta la programación y me da metas. Actualmente estoy trabajando en algo que sugirió Mike Hearn, usando las características de seguridad de los procesadores modernos, diseñados para admitir “Computación de confianza”, para fortalecer las billeteras de Bitcoin. Está casi listo para ser lanzado. Solo tengo que hacer la documentación.

Escribió sobre el diagnóstico en Less Wrong llamado “Dying Outside”, una referencia que podría esperar para mantener un funcionamiento cognitivo completo incluso cuando su cuerpo le falló.

Finney se consideraba todavía bastante afortunado. “Incluso con la ELA, mi vida es muy satisfactoria”, dijo Finney. “Pero mi esperanza de vida es limitada. Esas discusiones sobre la herencia de tus bitcoins son más que de interés académico. Mis bitcoins se almacenan en nuestra caja de seguridad, y mi hijo y mi hija son expertos en tecnología. Creo que son lo suficientemente seguros. Me siento cómodo con mi legado”.

A medida que los músculos de Finney se debilitaban, todavía codificaba Bitcoin. Mejoró la criptografía de curva elíptica de Bitcoin, acelerando la transparencia de la red hasta en un 20%. Una vez que perdió su capacidad de escribir código, todavía codificó utilizando un software de seguimiento ocular. Trabajó en un programa llamado bcflick, un programa para proteger mejor las billeteras de Bitcoin.

Finney estaba muy orgulloso de su trabajo en PGP. “Aunque no me sorprendería que mis pequeñas contribuciones a Bitcoin, particularmente mi optimización de las matemáticas de la curva elíptica, puedan ser la contribución duradera de mi trabajo”.

Andy Greenberg de Forbes entrevistó a Finney en marzo de 2014, quien respondió preguntas levantando los ojos para decir sí y bajando para no debido al progreso de las enfermedades. Greenberg le preguntó a Finney si era Satoshi Nakamoto, el creador de Bitcoin. Con la mirada baja, Finney dijo que no, que no era. Greenberg hizo una pregunta ligeramente diferente.

“Me senté junto a Finney nuevamente y le pregunté si, en el sentido de la contribución de código abierto, se consideraba uno de los creadores de Bitcoin”, escribió Greenberg.

Finney levantó los ojos y las cejas, señalando que sí. Entonces Greenberg le preguntó si estaba orgulloso de ese trabajo. “Finney volvió a levantar los ojos y sonrió”.

Cuando Newsweek afirmó haber encontrado a Satoshi Nakamoto en un hombre de 64 años llamado Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, un conocido de Greenberg envió un correo electrónico al reportero, señalando la coincidencia de que Finney había vivido durante casi una década en la misma ciudad que Dorian. Greenberg quería saber si Finney era en realidad Nakamoto. La esposa de Finney, Fran, facilitó la reunión.

Greenberg había enviado los escritos de Finney para ser analizados la firma de análisis de escritura Juola & Associates. John Noecker, el científico jefe de la firma, dijo que el estilo de escritura de Finney coincidía con el de Nakamoto mejor que cualquier otro candidato que hayan considerado. Noecker pensó que Finney podría haber estado detrás del libro blanco de Bitcoin.

“Entonces, me parece”, escribió en un correo electrónico a Greenberg, “que puede haber encontrado el verdadero Satoshi Nakamoto”.

Continuar leyendo: https://changeoutput.com/historia-hal-finney/

The MakerDAO stablecoin, DAI, is pegged to the $1 US Dollar, not by holding US dollar reserves in a bank account equivalent to the amount of tokens in the system like the stablecoin Tether, but, rather, by holding in a smart contract collateralized assets, such as Ethereum, another cryptocurrency, and, in the future perhaps, tokenized real world assets. Holders can earn on the DAI they own. A decentralized and publicly controlled governance system manages the DAI interest rate –– that is, the cost of generating DAI––and the return on DAI.

“You can directly impact the supply and demand,” said Christensen. “For instance, if the price of DAI is below $1, then [we] need to contract the supply, we need to make DAI more scarce, and we need to make it more appealing for people to hold DAI. So, the governance process then comes to consensus around [making] it more appealing to hold DAI. That means the DAI savings rate needs to go up, and we need to make it less appealing to generate DAI, because we want to contract supply.”

In order to support the DAI price, the system also needs to increase its stability fee, which is the cost of borrowing DAI with collateral or generating DAI through the protocol. “This way it’s kind of a balancing act, where these rates keep changing as long as DAI is not trading close to $1 and then, as they change, they push it in the direction of $1.” This is how DAI has managed to stay stable and pegged to the US dollar for more than two years.

The science behind MakerDAO is based on basic microeconomics and applied in a novel way with blockchain.“What I found when I designed the MakerDAO protocol is that, on the one hand we need to draw on these basic concepts in microeconomics like supply and demand, and the fact that if you increase demand for a stablecoin, that should drive the price up. You want to increase demand for the stablecoin when the price is below $1. Similarly, if you decrease supply by making it more difficult to generate the coin or make it more expensive to borrow,  that will push the price up. You can also do the opposite: if the price of the stablecoin is too high, you can actually decrease demand or you can increase supply.” Christensen argues there’s also some parallels with biochemistry.

“You can really compare it to homeostasis,” he says. “If the stablecoin deviates away from $1, there needs to be a response that then brings it back in line and then cuts off the response, so it goes back to $1 and then there’s no more change in the rates and the system.”

While many think the Maker protocol is complicated, and that there are many moving parts, Christensen argues it is an elegant mechanism that has been simplified as much as possible. “The basic mechanics of how it’s controlled and the incentives of the people running the governance, the MKR token holders, all comes together to create a system that is able to, on the one hand, be fully decentralized and fully transparent without a central authority having some sort of special access to the system, and, at the same time, provide the stability that people are used to from the regular banking system and the regular financial system.” MKR represents the utility token, governance token and recapitalization resource of the Maker system.

Heretofore, Maker users have conducted on the platform risky operations around leverage. “We’re now seeing this even greater group of people come into the system and start using the protocol, not for this very advanced use case of accessing leverage, but, rather, just as a stability hedge, if they think that their own currency has too much inflation or maybe because they [want] the low risk, but still decent yield, that the DAI savings rate and DeFi offers. This can be a very appealing financial product to have access to in addition to what they have access to locally.”

The Maker protocol is designed to ultimately be completely controlled by a decentralized governance process, by the MKR holders, and separate from the MakerDAO foundation and the original development team. “One of the things that’s really important is the decentralized governance of the protocol,” said Christensen. “That the community’s able to run it completely on its own, and that the community also has the ability to grow the system as they want to grow it.” That includes adding new stablecoins beyond the US Dollar.

“I would expect that the first one will be the euro,” said Christensen. Next comes other major world currencies, such as the Renminbi and other major Asian currencies. The goal in the long run is for every single currency to be in stablecoin format in the Maker protocol, and potentially assets beyond stablecoins, too, such as synthetic assets including stocks or commodities.

“We want to make all of these things available to everyone, instead of just [to the] very few people, relatively speaking, that today have access to the global financial system, while billions of others are left completely on the fringes,” he said.

In order to make DeFi available to everyone, Maker has long planned multi-collateral DAI, which Christensen calls the full realization of the Maker protocol. The company has been working on it for the past five years.

“Single collateral DAI [was] really more of an initial version that we decided to create so that we could start testing out what a decentralized stablecoin would look like in practice,” said Christensen. “And we could allow the ecosystem around the stablecoin to begin forming. But, now, with the launch of Multi-Collateral DAI, we actually have the full system live. That means we can start accessing the full range of features that decentralized finance makes possible. That includes [using] multiple collateral types.”

Multi-collateral DAI, according to Christensen, is Maker’s main feature, but he also points to other features as important, including the DAI savings rate. “This is the first time there is a low risk savings return available in crypto on a USD denominated stable coin,” he says. “And, in many ways, the DAI savings rate is actually what’s more exciting in the short run, because the multi-collateral feature, while it is the most important, will take a couple of months, and even years, to fully roll out and see its potential.”

The system has the capability to support any number of collateral types in the long run. “Today it actually only supports two collateral types, Ethereum and then the Ethereum-based token, called Basic Attention Token (BAT).” BAT was founded by Brandon Eich, the creator of JavaScript, a high-level programming language.

Once multi-collateral DAI becomes reality, and the community and ecosystem around the protocol has grown, Maker will be ready to take the next step. “What’s going to start happening is a lot more new assets are going to be onboarded and that will include all the different Ethereum-based tokens and cross-chain assets like Bitcoin,” said Christensen. “What’s most exciting is that it will also start to include Ethereum-based tokenized real world assets that will be brought onto the Ethereum blockchain, and then used as collateral in the Maker protocol.”

It will be possible to use things like gold and real estate, as well, says Christensen. “Tokenized gold in, let’s say, a vault in Singapore, for instance, or real estate in America, where the deed is tokenized, and that token is then used as collateral, in order to get a low rate loan from a decentralized protocol, or even do things like trade finance. Small businesses [can access] the blockchain, in order to get a direct line of credit that’s based on their invoices, which are then tokenized.”


Read full article: https://cryptographicasset.com/makerdao-ceo-theres-going-to-be-a-new-wave-of-innovation-thats-difficult-to-predict/

[The pilot explores reporting scenarios on a user’s holdings within Gemini Custody. The pilot reports holdings on two cryptocurrencies, which have been chosen for liquidity reasons. The pilot applied to holdings such as security tokens, too. Users can consolidate the reporting of their digital assets, which have been serviced by Gemini, an independent digital asset custodian, with traditional assets serviced by State Street.]

State Street today announced it would launch a new digital asset pilot with Gemini Trust Company, LLC, a cryptocurrency exchange and custodian launched by the Winklevoss twins.

The pilot explores reporting scenarios on a user’s holdings within Gemini Custody. The pilot reports holdings on two cryptocurrencies, which have been chosen for liquidity reasons. The pilot applied to holdings such as security tokens, too. Users can consolidate the reporting of their digital assets, which have been serviced by Gemini, an independent digital asset custodian, with traditional assets serviced by State Street.

“We want to evolve our business with our clients’ needs. The digital asset space is still nascent, yet it promises opportunities that could fundamentally impact how we do things in the future,” said Ralph Achkar, managing director, Digital Product Development & Innovation at State Street. “There is small, but growing demand from our clients for solutions of this type and many technical, operational, regulatory, and legal considerations to be addressed. That is why we have opted for an open model, and started a pilot with Gemini as an established, regulated player in the digital asset space.

“Given State Street’s leadership position in asset servicing, this project felt like a natural extension of those services as we continue to explore and evaluate opportunities to provide innovative solutions to our clients.”

State Street Corporation provides financial services to institutional investors, such as investment servicing, investment management and investment research and trading. It has $32.90 trillion in assets under custody and administration and $2.95 trillion in assets under management.

“Working with State Street is a major milestone for Gemini and digital assets as a mainstream asset class. With trillions of dollars in assets under management, State Street will never compromise on security — and neither will we,” said Tyler Winklevoss, CEO of Gemini, which allows customers to buy, sell, and store cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ether, Litecoin, and zcash. “Traditional investors will more seamlessly be able to allocate capital in their portfolio to digital assets through trusted and regulated financial institutions — helping us build a better bridge to the future of money.”

source: https://goldsilverbitcoin.com/state-street-and-gemini-announce-digital-asset-pilot/

[The First Ever Bitcoin Transaction]

Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto reportedly began working on Bitcoin in 2007, and then published the white paper on Halloween, October 31, 2008. In just eight-pages, Nakamoto describes how Byzantine General’s Theory could be solved.

In the earliest days of Bitcoin, once the genesis block had been mined on Jan 3, 2009, Nakamoto sent messages back and forth with people such as Hal Finney, Mike Hearn, and Gavin Andresen discussing the network. A lot of this discussion took place on BitcoinTalk.org, a forum created by Nakamoto.

Check out below the top ten events (in one man’s opinion) of the first full decade of Bitcoin.

The First Ever Bitcoin Transaction
Nine days after the genesis block was mined, the first ever Bitcoin transaction was sent from Nakamoto to Hal Finney, a cryptographer who had created a proof of work system before Bitcoin existed.

Finney lived in the Los Angeles area, not too far from Dorian Nakamoto, the man who Newsweek doxxed in 2014 as the inventor of Bitcoin, though this theory has largely been debunked. Finney was later diagnosed with ALS and died almost five years later at the age of 58. He is survived by his wife, Fran, and their two children.

Wikileaks Accepts Bitcoin
WikiLeaks announced in 2011 on Twitter that it would begin accepting Bitcoin donations. In one of his last posts on BitcoinTalk.org, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned WikiLeaks.

"The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way,” he wrote in 2010. “I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”

When WikiLeaks greenlit Bitcoin, Nakamoto shared his thoughts: "It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us."

Gavin Andresen Inherits Role as Chief Developer from Nakamoto
When Nakamoto handed the network alert key and control of the Bitcoin code repository to Gavin Andresen in 2011, analysts estimated the creator had by then mined approximately one million bitcoins.

Andresen was now chief developer of the open source code. In 2012, Andresen, who established the Bitcoin Foundation in 2012 in order to educate regulators about the nascent digital currency, received invites from the likes of the CIA. The Bitcoin community vehemently debated his decision to speak with the agency about Bitcoin, as dug up by Bitcoin investor Tuur Demeester.

"Last email I sent him I told him I was going to talk at the CIA,” wrote Andresen of Nakamoto in a 2012 thread.

The First ASIC Miner Ships
Then Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik, who now runs Bloq, received the first ASIC Bitcoin miner. ASIC stands for “application-specific integrated chips.” These chips are designed specifically for mining GPU coins. A Bitcoin ASIC miner specializes in hashing the SHA-256, Bitcoin’s cryptographic hash algorithm.

Garzik tweeted: “My wife informs me that a package from China arrived. Will investigate when I return home. #Bitcoin.”

Garzik reported his Avalon A3256 had paid for itself by February 9, 2013. “Including electricity costs, the Avalon ASIC #bitcoin miner has now paid for itself,” he tweeted.

Bitcoin Pizza
Laszlo Hanyecz (laszlo), who had made contributions to bitcoin’s source code,  made the first documented purchase of a good with bitcoin when he bought two Domino’s pizzas from jercos, who reportedly was 18 at the time of the transaction, for 10,000 BTC.

Laszlo posted on May 17, 2010 his request to purchase bitcoin. He reported the transaction to the Bitcoin community on May 22. Bitcoins were quoted at $41 at the time of the offer.

“I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza. Thanks jercos!”

The Pizza Index refers to the value of the bitcoins spent on the pizzas were they sold for US dollars, not Pizza.  That amount topped $15.5 million in April 2017.

May 22 is known as Bitcoin Pizza Day.

Rise and Fall of Silk Road
Silk Road, which was named after the trade route connecting Europe to East Asia, was created by developer and administrator Ross Ulbricht. The website operated as a Tor hidden service. While Ulbricht has admitted to creating the site, he has not admitted to running it the whole time it was online.

The Silk Road was considered by users to be almost entirely anonymous. On the Silk Road, users enjoyed enhanced privacy, sometimes to the point of anonymity, where they shopped for mostly cannabis, but, also, mushrooms, acid, and more.

Ulbricht, a first-time offender, was sentenced to 2 life sentences plus 40 years without parole. The Silk Road prohibited the sale of weapons and stolen info.

Mt. Gox Collapse
Before it shuttered, Mt. Gox handled 70% of all Bitcoin transactions. The Tokyo-based exchange filed for bankruptcy protection under Japanese law in early 2014

With an approximate value of $460 million at the time, 850,000 bitcoins had gone missing, though 200,000 were found. $27 million in bank deposits could not be accounted for.

Site owner Mark Karpeles blamed hackers. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department believes 643,000 bitcoins went missing as a result of fraud. Bankruptcy proceedings took place in April 2014 and continue until today.


2013 Unintentional Bitcoin Fork
In March 2013, the blockchain temporarily split into two independent chains with different rules due to a bug in version 0.8 of the bitcoin software.

Miners, merchants, and users ran a new, divergent version of bitcoin. The old version of bitcoin and the new version were not compatible. Mining pools running the new version 0.8.0 were asked to rollback to version 0.7 to create a single blockchain compatible with all bitcoin software. Merchants did not have to do anything.

The core developers released a 0.8.1 version that avoids creating blocks that are incompatible with older versions.

Mike Hearn Leaves
Bitcoin lead developer Mike Hearn blogged in 2016 that his time in Bitcoin was over. He had sold his remaining holdings and had taken a job at R3 CEV, an enterprise consortium working on blockchain for enterprise.

Hearn, who had spent more than five years working on the web-based currency, had left the development team.

“Despite knowing that bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly,” Hearn wrote on Medium. Before leaving, Hearn and Andresen had disagreed with other developers over whether the “blocks” in which bitcoin transactions are processed should be enlarged.

Hearn called the block capacity at the time of one megabyte “an entirely artificial capacity cap.”  Hearn and Andresen had proposed an alternative, Bitcoin XT.

“If an IT system runs out of capacity like that then all kinds of things go wrong – all hell breaks loose,” he said in an interview with Reuters.

Hearn said at the time that the bitcoin community had “failed” at governance of Bitcoin’s code.

Pirateat40
On the Bitcointalk.org forum in November 2011, Pirateat40 promised investors a 7 percent weekly return on deposits of more than 25,000 BTC, a sum worth more than $275,000 at the time.

Pirateat40 shut down the fund in August of 2012. He said it had gotten too big for him to manage. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Trendon Shavers, the man behind Pirateat40, with operating an illegal Ponzi scheme worth about $4.5 million at the time. Shavers was ordered to pay more than $40 million in disgorgement or illegal profits, including $150,000 civil penalty.

His lawyer, Jason Seibert, has defended Shavers, noting that it wasn’t a Ponzi scheme, like so many assumed. "He paid as many people back as he could in the most fair way he could do it, but not everyone got paid back," the securities lawyer said. "So people assumed it must be a Ponzi scheme."

Notable Mention: Block Size Debate
More an ongoing debate than an event, the Bitcoin block size takes the cake as the most hotly contested blockchain issue in the history of Bitcoin. Satoshi limited Bitcoin’s block size to 1MB in 2010, which didn’t become a public issue until March 2013.

Since the Bitcoin network batches transactions into blockchains, they are released to the network approximately every ten minutes. The Bitcoin max block size parameters limits “on-chain” transactions, which leads to network congestion and higher transaction fees, especially when in times of feverish demand.

Garzik posted about the block size in 2010, suggesting the network support more than 3-10 transactions per second. It was rejected. Nakamoto had bequeathed BitcoinTalk.org to a moderator under the moniker ‘Theymos’,  who noted this would represent a consensus parameter change and would need to be coordinated across the network.

source: forbes.com/sites/justinoconnell/2019/12/18/these-are-the-top-ten-events-of-bitcoins-first-decade/

CK Umachi and Dick Kim, both of whom work for Pacific Gas Electric (PG&E), the California natural gas and electric company, spoke about the company’s work on blockchain at Blockchain Expo 2019 in Santa Clara, California.

Both work on a team called Grid Edge, where they focus on forward facing trends and technologies, including electrification, microgrids and blockchain. At the heart of their work is the changing grid.

Before working on it at PG&E, Umachi and Kim both had a personal interest in blockchain. Umachi started investing in cryptocurrency back in 2017, when the hype was at its peak. After the fact, he decided to start looking into what the heck crypto was anyway, and that led him down the “blockchain rabbit hole.”

Umachi did a lot of mining with a bunch of different cryptocurrencies. He says he keeps his house heated for a good portion of the year just through that, but that might just be a joke he tells. 

CK Umachi discusses what PG&E is doing with blockchain at Blockchain Expo 2019.
CK Umachi discusses what PG&E is doing with blockchain at Blockchain Expo 2019. AUTHOR
Umachi and Kim took the audience through why PG&E is interested in blockchain at all, what they've done so far, and what’s on the horizon.

“I guess PG&E is probably not the first company that popped into your head when you're thinking about blockchain,” Umachi said. 

The Grid Edge group thinks about how trends could potentially impact PG&E, and blockchain registered as something to be aware of. The team there has been thinking about it through two strategic lenses. On one hand, blockchain will enable value capture or creation for the traditional utility, and their job is to figure out how that might exactly work itself out. The other question is how and when should PG&E act on this.

“To start thinking about this, we really spent a lot of time just looking internally at what our processes are, reaching out to different internal stakeholders, and understanding where this could potentially have some benefit,” said Umachi.

What the Grid Edge team is really talking about is transactive energy and potential peer-to-peer energy strategies. The Grid Edge team also focuses on policy and regulation, too, since a lot of the policy and regulation has yet to be worked out for a nascent technology like blockchain.

“Understanding how we could start to use blockchain with the current state of the blockchain regulation,” he said. “And then also thinking through what would need to change with the regulations specific to the utility to even enable us to use blockchain to its maximum potential.”

Then there’s market research to be done; benchmarking, understanding what’s out there, and what people have done in this space. “There's been a lot of energy spent in the energy space with blockchain over the last couple of years,” says Umachi.

CK Umachi and Dick Kim, two 'blockheads', talk Blockchain at PG&E
CK Umachi and Dick Kim, two 'blockheads', talk Blockchain at PG&EAUTHOR
A lot of work as been done in Europe applying blockchain to the grid, but less so in the U.S. Umachi, Kim, and the rest of the Grid Edge team want to know what other utilities have done, what startups are up to, and what vendors they might work with.

“Technology scanning and assessment,” Umachi calls it. “Understanding that there are a ton of protocols, a ton of different platforms. Understanding what are these core blockchain protocols and platforms that we could be using—what are the differences, what are the nuances.”

And then the Grid Edge team has got to understand how tomorrow’s technology, like blockchain, will interface with PG&Es existing infrastructure. “We have a lot of legacy infrastructure,” said Umachi. “If we're talking about moving towards a blockchain-enabled future, you have to do a lot of deep thought about how you could make that transition happen.”

A lot of the team’s work comes down to understanding what blockchain technology is all about. “Specifically. with all the hype surrounding it, really understanding what it can and can't do,” Umachi said.

Once all that work is done—the learning, networking, and ruminating—well, then comes the real work. That’s the use cases, of course.  “Figuring out how we can actually get our hands dirty with this,” said Umachi.

When it comes to getting hands dirty, PG&E leaves that to a group called internally ‘the blockheads.’ This informal group formed out of employees who showed some interest in blockchain tech. They hail from throughout the company. There’s Umachi, there’s Kim, and there’s also Tim, Liz, and the others.

This group examines what PG&E processes the blockchain could improve. They initially came up with 45 potential use cases for blockchain at PG&E. But, blockchain today probably couldn’t help with most of these in its current state. They whittled these down to a few use cases they could explore. Their focus was on how blockchain could help PG&E grow its business and how they could make it more efficient, as well as aligning with the company’s strategic imperatives.

They started testing blockchain to see how it could improve existing processes with the idea of innovating for a more sustainable future for California.

“That’s something that’s been on our radar for quite awhile,” said Umachi. There’s something called the low carbon fuel standards in California. That got them looking at carbon credits in the state.

PG&E's Blockchain architecture
PG&E's Blockchain architectureAUTHOR
They wanted to know if they could use blockchain as a tool for transaction and settlement for distributed energy resources; mostly for carbon credits at electric vehicle charging stations. And then, they’ve got to figure out a way to make all of this cost-effective, says Umachi. “Can blockchain provide a robust chain of custody tracking in line of sight traceability for utility assets to ensure that we are not losing them, that we can maximize the ability to find these when we need them, cut costs on having to reorder materials that we have access to?”

Kim admits that, for a lot of what PG&E is doing on the edge of the grid, blockchain is not required. Hence, the continued to research towards “understanding what are the value propositions of blockchain.”

Umachi and Kim touched on the auditability piece of blockchain. This might not help at PG&E per se, but it could help out the regulators. As the number of electric vehicles in the state starts to multiply, it's going to be difficult for the state to be able to manage and audit all the charge events across the state in order to know who is owed how many carbon credits.

“You can have that immutable record and find a way for them to kind of navigate that easily using a UI,” said Umachi. “That would be a way for them to audit and ensure that these transactions and these charge events are real.”

source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinoconnell/2019/12/15/what-the-blockheads-at-pacific-gas--electric-are-doing-with-blockchain/