December 4, 2018
Bitcoin's difficulty drops 15.1%, Fidelity & Bitmain make more investments, Vertcoin a victim of 51% attack... again
Just a quick reminder that this newsletter is intended to be short and concise. We try to on purposely limit our curation to provide only the best, verified & most important events happening within the blockchain industry. Hopefully you find this newsletter as useful as we do, as we understand your time is important to you!
There is a lot of talk about the “mining death spiral” of Bitcoin, where it is no longer profitable for many miners to keep contributing their resources to the ecosystem = decline of hashrate = decline of price. Ari Paul explains that miners will have to uneconomically mine for ~2 weeks to reduce difficulty level to eliminate the problem.
Bitcoin just had it’s second largest drop in mining difficulty in history at -15.1%. This also makes the capital cost of a 51% attack significantly cheaper at around a range of $10 million. Not all are in agreement that Bitcoin is in a mining death spiral though: Opinion piece by Arjun Balaji of The Block.
Amazon Managed Blockchain released by AWS. Fully managed service that makes it easy to create & manage scalable blockchain networks using popular open source frameworks (Hyperledger & Ethereum).
PIVX released their v3.0 mobile wallet. It will be the first Zerocoin privacy-enabled mobile wallet.
More news below!
Events
Blockcast Events:
December 16, 2018 @ 11am: Blockcast Media Workshop
Upcoming Toronto Area Blockchain Events
December 6, 2018 @ 7pm: Block 8: Enterprise Blockchain Radically Simplified
December 10, 2018 @ 6pm: Polkadot - Toronto - Community Launch
Upcoming Significant Blockchain Events [All times in EST (-4 UTC)]:
January 16, 2019: Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork (Tentative)
January 24, 2018: Bakkt Launch (Delayed until Jan 2019)
For further significant events, check our Google Calendar.
News:
Security
Vertcoin (VTC) is currently being 51% attacked
Education
Justin Drake explains Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity) at a blockchain workshop in Cambridge
Guide to Hashing Algorithms by Consensys Media
Amount of Ethereum locked up in decentralized finance applications (MakerDAO off by default)
Legal
SEC charges Floyd Mayweather, DJ Khaled for promoting ICOs without disclosing payments
Marco Santori: A federal court in California just ruled against the SEC in an ICO case, explaining what a plaintiff will now have to prove for an ICO to be a security.
Developers
Geth v.1.8.19 and Parity v2.2.2 are released with upgrades to faster block processing/propagation times
AZTEC: Zero-knowledge proof for confidential transactions on ETH mainnet
General
Fidelity, Bitmain and More Invest $27 Million in Crypto Trading Platform ErisX
VeChainThor Node Tokenization and Mobile Wallet Update
Digix Dev Update 4 Dec 2018 — DigixDAO progress
Am I missing something? Suggestions for improvement? Send me your news & thoughts to phil@blockcast.media
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