Category: Commentary

June 2017 may be remembered as the month that the true ‘flippening’ occurred, from bitcoin to litecoin, precipitated by a Prague-based group promoting and educating the public on crypto-anarchist philosophy. The stakes are high for bitcoin, with a face-off between Bitmain, threatening a User-Activated Hard Fork, and those seeking to eliminate miner influence over SegWit adoption, the User-Activated Soft Fork...

READ MORE

The Bancor Network, a blockchain project endorsed by prominent billionaire investor Tim Draper, recently raised $150 million in an initial coin offering (ICO). However, the development team behind Bancor was criticized for the abrupt extension of investment period and its untested code. On June 12, Bancor extended the investment timeframe of its ICO by three hours due to supposed attacks...

READ MORE

Bitcoin passes a new all-time high at $2933. Usually, this should spark unconditional cheering. But this time it is overshadowed by a worry; will other coins surpass Bitcoin? Will the flippening happen - will there be a change at the lead of cryptocurrency markets? Let’s start with the good, the wonderful news; bitcoins are traded for more than $2,800. This...

READ MORE

The User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) wants to enforce SegWit against the will of the miners. After the movement had gained a growing momentum, it had to gulp serious drawbacks in the past weeks. Neither exchanges, miners nor Core developers stand behind it. Is this the end of the self-declared user’s revolt? Basically, the whole UASF story is about the question...

READ MORE

An open access, peer-reviewed research paper published on May 12, 2017, by researchers from Korea University and Kangnam University in South Korea has explained a method for predicting the fluctuation in the bitcoin price and transactions based on user opinions posted on online forums. The paper, entitled "When Bitcoin encounters information in an online forum: Using text mining to analyze...

READ MORE

US Judges uphold Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence Reuters reported on May 31, as the self-confessed mastermind of the infamous Silk Road deep web marketplace lost an appeal to overturn his conviction. On May 31, 2017, the Court of Appeals in New York rejected the appeal, where Ulbricht’s lawyers argued that their client was not given a fair trial due to...

READ MORE

Did we, finally, do it? A consortium of Bitcoin companies and miners announced an agreement about the year long fight for an increase of Bitcoin’s capacity; SegWit should be activated soon, and a hard fork will increase the block size limit to 2MB sometime during the next six months. What is known about the agreement, what is unclear? And how...

READ MORE

With bitcoin skyrocketing in price and looking to break $3,000 if the current trajectory holds, how much is too much? What is one bitcoin really worth? BitVal, a beta metric, tries to put a valuation measure on the cryptocurrency in a way that makes logical sense. For stocks, this value is typically derived from the earnings of the underlying firm...

READ MORE

When the miners display inertia, the users do it by themselves; the movement for BIP148, the user-activated soft fork, is gaining momentum. On August 1 the soft fork will activate. We explain what is behind the keyword #UASF. Suddenly things can happen quickly. Front and center in the Bitcoin community these days you see the promotion of #UASF, the User-Activated...

READ MORE

Never before has the Bitcoin Blockchain seen such a large traffic jam. The number of unconfirmed transactions reached a level, at which it hurts. The Bitcoin economy is not amused; BitPay’s Stephen Pair speaks out with exceptional clarity, while Barry Silbert of the Digital Currency Group tries to establish a broad alliance for a new compromise. At least there is...

READ MORE