Hut 8 Mining Corp. has raised $8.3 million from the sale of 6% of its shares to investors. The Canadian bitcoin miner originally intended to raise $7.5 million from the sale, but it was oversubscribed.
Totonto Stock Exchange-listed Hut 8 issued about 5.8 million “units” at a price of $1.45 each. Each unit is comprised of one common share. From this, investors have the option to buy another share for $1.80 between now and December 2021.
The Alberta-based miner said funds from the offering will be used to upgrade its range of mining hardware including Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) miners. The upgrade will add up to 275 petahash per second (PH/s) to Hut 8’s existing mining capacity of 952 PH/s.
Once installed, the new machines, which include “more efficient processing chips from Microbt” will also add 12.6 megawatts (MW) of power to the company’s current 107 MW maximum operating capacity.
“Hut 8 has been testing the Microbt equipment for the past three months in preparation of this upgrade… [we] expect to receive equipment between July and November 2020,” said the firm in a press statement.
In recent months, Hut 8 has seen the amount of bitcoin mined at its data centers in Canada decline. During the first quarter of 2020, the company extracted 1,116 BTC, down 54% from 2,405 BTC mined in the comparable year ago period.
The company blamed the decline on “the increasing network difficulty” which “impacted…production negatively with much fewer bitcoin mined.” For the March quarter, Hut 8 reported that its net loss widened to $8.4 million from $6.1 million a year earlier.
The Canadian miner is now hoping that its latest acquisition of more efficient mining equipment will help turnaround company fortunes, already facing a squeeze from the recent bitcoin supply cut event, which reduced the bonus paid to miners by 50% to 6.25 BTC per block.
Shares of Hut 8 are up 2% at CAD$1 (~$0.73) in Toronto trading on Tuesday. Over the last 52 weeks, the stock has reached a low of $0.37 and a high of $1.99.
What do you think about Hut 8’s bitcoin mining ambitions? Let us know in the comments section below.
During the last seven days, the price of bitcoin has dropped 4.8% from a high of $9,700 on June 24, to a low of $8,965 on June 27. Since then the price has increased and the price per bitcoin is back above the $9k zone but much lower than before. The lower price has affected the profits of miners hashing away to find blocks on the network. Ever since they lost 50% of the block reward on May 11, gathering profits have been tough on miners with bitcoin prices at these levels.
Mining bitcoin is an extremely competitive industry and after the BTC reward halving on May 11, 2020, it has been much harder to mine the rare digital currency. At the time of publication, the price of a single BTC has been hovering between $9,050 to $9,250 during the last few days.
This has given the crypto asset an overall market valuation of between $165 billion to $170 billion during the course of the week. The price is over 4.8% lower than it was on June 24, when BTC prices were hovering around $9,700 last Wednesday.
Of course, the price of BTC directly affects miners and the tens of thousands of ASIC mining rigs housed in warehouses all around the world. An example of this trend is how the Bitmain Antminer S19 Pro (110TH/s) is the only profitable machine if a mining operation is paying $0.12 per kilowatt-hour (kWh).
With this electrical cost, the Antminer S19 Pro would only make $0.97 per day while a number of other miners would be mining at a loss. Now we all know that in places like China and other regions worldwide, those operations pay much less than $0.12 per kWh.
Top 15 SHA256 ASIC mining rigs at an electrical rate of $0.12 per kWh.
At today’s BTC exchange rates and at a much lower rate of $0.04 per kWh, a much larger number of SHA256 miners would be profitable. At $0.04 per kWh, a total of 49 SHA256 ASIC mining rigs are profitable at today’s spot market price.
The top five mining rigs making the most profit at the electrical rate of $0.04 per kWh, includes the Bitmain Antminer S19 Pro (110TH/s), Bitmain Antminer S19 (95TH/s), MicroBT Whatsminer M30S (86TH/s), Bitmain Antminer T19 (84TH/s), and the Bitmain Antminer S17+ (73TH/s).
The machines that are making the worst profits at $0.04 per kWh and BTC’s current exchange rate include miners like the GMO miner B2 (24TH/s), Innosilicon T2 Turbo (24TH/s), Bitmain Antminer S9 SE (16TH/s), Bitfily Snow Panther B1+ (25.5TH/s), and the Canaan AvalonMiner 921 (20TH/s).
Top 15 SHA256 ASIC mining rigs at an electrical rate of $0.04 per kWh.
Miners who are mining BTC at a loss at $0.04 per kWh include Bitfily Snow Panther B1 (16TH/s), Aladdin Miner (16TH/s), and the Ebang Ebit E10 (18TH/s). ASIC mining rigs that offer terahash below the 20TH/s level are likely not making profits unless they are paying less than $0.04 per kWh. Many of these older generation mining rigs would need to pay around $0.01 per kWh or get electricity for free.
Just like the blockchain analytics provider Tradeblock wrote in a report back in February, the company said that it estimated the cost to mine BTC should be over $12,500 after the halving.
“The [data] suggests that miners are likely expecting the price of bitcoin to rise to higher levels (above $12,000-15,000 per BTC) around the halving allowing them to continue to generate a profit,” Tradeblock wrote at the time. “Or they likely will look to reduce resources following the halving resulting in a hash rate decline as profitability falls,” the company added.
The price of BTC has yet to keep the $10k zone for very long and every time it does it’s been pushed back down below the psychological region. If the price of BTC does in fact jump back to above $12,000-15,000 per BTC like Tradeblock’s report suggested, miners of course, would do a whole lot better.
At $12,000-15,000 per bitcoin, older generation miners that process hashpower below the 20 terahash per second level would likely be turned right back on. It’s likely that many older generation miners with low terahash outputs are sitting and waiting to do just that.
What do you think about the profitability of ASIC mining rigs at today’s exchange rates? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
This week a number of Kleiman v. Wright lawsuit depositions have recently published and are now available for public viewing. One specific deposition with the former Bitcoin Core lead maintainer, Gavin Andresen, casts doubt on the claim that Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Moreover, the Bitcoinsv supporter Daniel Krawisz has been speaking out about Wright and mentions there is “plagiarism in several of Craig Wright’s works.”
For well over five years now, Craig Steven Wright, has publicly claimed that he invented Bitcoin and that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. This claim has pushed Wright to court because the family of the now-deceased Dave Kleiman thinks that Wright’s multi-year business relationship with Dave means that they both created Bitcoin. The ostensible story has been debunked so much that the greater crypto community does not believe in any of Wright’s tales.
This week, a number of depositions have been published and one interesting one stems from the former Bitcoin Core lead maintainer Gavin Andresen. In May 2016, Andresen abruptly came out and told the public he believed Wright was Satoshi. However, not too long after that, he explained that he may have been confused. The same day Andresen said he believed Wright was Satoshi, Bitcoin Core developers removed Andresen’s Github commit privileges to the Bitcoin codebase. No one’s really discussed the matter with Andresen until now at least publicly.
The Australian Craig Steven Wright has claimed he is Satoshi Nakamoto for the last five years, but has yet to prove this to the greater cryptocurrency community.
When asked about that particular moment in time, Andresen said he could have been fooled. “There are places in the private proving session where I could have been fooled, where somebody could have switched out the software that was being used or, perhaps, the laptop that was delivered was not a brand-new laptop, and it had been tampered with in some way. I was also jet-lagged,” Andresen said in the deposition.
He added:
I was not in the headspace of this is going to prove to the world that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. I was in the headspace of, you know, this will prove to me beyond a reasonable doubt that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. And my doubts arise because the proof that was presented to me is very different from the pseudo proof that was later presented to the world.
The entire deposition is very long and it discusses a variety of different meetings. Overall when he was asked about Wright’s Satoshi story, Andresen said he had “doubts.” “I have many, many doubts in my head about what parts of — What things Craig told me are true and what are not true,” Andresen stated further. The Andresen deposition may be changing the minds of many hardcore followers. Despite the fact that a good number of BSV supporters adore Wright and follow his every move, there are a number of individuals who have denounced him and want to focus on just BSV.
One person who has been vocal about Craig Wright lately is the well known Bitcoin advocate Daniel Krawisz. Krawisz supports Bitcoinsv (BSV) and in the past, he favored Craig Wright. However, more recently Krawisz has been speaking out against Wright and his story. On June 28, Krawisz tweeted:
There’s plagiarism in several of Craig Wright’s works. It’s easy to see if you look. Example. It would be a lot better if people stopped treating him like a hero and just made bitcoin successful on their own.
There have been many responses to Krawisz’s tweets about Craig Wright and even a response tweet from the billionaire gambling mogul Calvin Ayre. Many people thanked Krawisz for being honest, even though they said they didn’t like BSV. Others explained that the only reason why BSV exists is because of Craig Wright. “BSV exists because of Craig Wright, even the claim in its name. You got bamboozled,” one person wrote to Krawisz.
What do you think about the Gavin Andresen deposition and Daniel Krawisz’s recent change of opinion? Let us know what you think about this story in the comments below.
The amount of bitcoin that has not moved in over a year is at an all-time high. The last peak was in 2016, before the bitcoin bull run that saw the price spike to $20K. Several forecasting models have predicted that the price of bitcoin will reach $20K this year and the next bull run could start as soon as next month.
Data Resembles Previous Bitcoin’s Bull Run
The amount of bitcoin that has not moved in over a year is at 61.59% of the entire supply on Monday, an all-time high, according to blockchain data intelligence provider Glassnode. The company tweeted Sunday:
The last time we saw this amount of bitcoin that had not moved in over a year was in early 2016 – preceding BTC’s bull run to $20K.
The amount of bitcoin that has not moved in over one year, two years, and three years, according to data provider Glassnode.
Furthermore, the amount of bitcoin that has not moved in over two years is at about 44%, also approaching a new all-time high. This data shows “that we are in a period of sustained hodling,” Glassnode asserted in its latest publication of The Week On-Chain, published Monday. “This clear hodling behavior is macro bullish for bitcoin, supporting the narrative that BTC is a store of value,” the company added, elaborating:
As we have seen in the past, long-term hodling is usually followed by bull markets.
Glassnode continued, “It shows that investors overwhelmingly believe that, at current prices, BTC is worth holding rather than selling — suggesting that sentiment favors the price going up.”
While the all-time-high unmoved coins data has sparked an expectation among some traders of an imminent bull run, Twitter user “Joseph” pointed out that this may not be the case. He examined “the last two times the previous supply last active peak was breached.” One was in 2012, which did directly precede a bitcoin bull run. However, he explained that in 2014, the bottom “wasn’t in yet,” adding that “there was an extended consolidation period remaining before the bull run.”
The chart of the amount of unmoved bitcoin posted by Twitter user Joseph, showing the previous all-time highs and what happened to the price of bitcoin each time. Original chart provided by Glassnode.
Meanwhile, the topic of when the next bitcoin bull run will be has gained much attention. Analyst Willy Woo recently tweeted about a new pricing model he was working on that suggests that a bull run could be a month away. Several sources have predicted that the price of bitcoin will return to $20K in 2020.
When do you think the next bitcoin bull run will be? Let us know in the comments section below.
On June 28, 2020, the team behind Ghost Coin revealed a partnership with the digital currency payment processor Ivendpay. Ghost is a project led by the notorious John McAfee and according to the recent announcement, 60 vending machines in Hong Kong will support the privacy-centric coin for payments.
It’s surely never a dull day in John McAfee’s world and this week his Ghost Coin team revealed a collaboration with the crypto payment startup Ivendpay. The startup is a multi-currency payment system that allows people to accept cryptocurrency and other types of electronic fiat payments.
Ivendpay supports bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), bitcoin cash (BCH), binance coin (BNB), and more crypto coins at numerous vending machines and points of sale. The company also offers a payment device called the mPOS terminal which enables crypto payments leveraging NFC technology, a dual-screen, and a printer for receipts.
On Sunday, the official Twitter account for the Ghost Coin project led by McAfee revealed a collaboration with Ivendpay. “When we first launched Ghost our vision was not only to focus on privacy, but also on real user adoption,” the Ghost account tweeted. The tweet continued:
We are happy to announce that we have partnered with Ivendpay to deploy Ghost as a form of payment in over 60 vending machines across HK including Hong Kong Disneyland.
Sergey Danilov, the founder of Ivendpay, believes that cryptocurrency support will benefit existing payment systems for automatic and retail trade. “Tens of thousands of small transactions worldwide will drum up cryptocurrencies’ capitalization,” said Danilov. News.Bitcoin.com reported on the Ghost project in mid-April, back when McAfee announced the launch and stressed that “governments will be unable to shut [ghost] down.”
Ghost also went live last week on McAfee’s new distributed exchange, and the Bitcoin.com exchange listed the ESH token at the end of May, in preparation for McAfee’s Ghost Airdrop. The Ghost network’s mainnet is live today and the coin’s creators claim the tokens are privacy-centric.
According to the white paper or “litepaper”, the proof-of-stake (PoS) ghost token’s “transactions use a state of the art escrow pool to shield and erase the history of transactions.”
“[Ghost] transactions will be verified using zero-knowledge proofs and ZcashSapling, Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs), ‘The Sapling Protocol,’” the paper highlights. Just recently the Ghost project released the Ghost Wallet 2.0.6 and another concept called ghostfundme.com.
Now with the partnership with Ivendpay, it will allow for ghost tokens to pay for a number of products in 60 vending machines across Hong Kong. The news follows the recent reports of a number of vending machines throughout Hong Kong that accept bitcoin cash (BCH) and ethereum (ETH).
For years now the concept of leveraging cryptocurrencies with vending machines has been a popular trend, this is natural because the two ideas go hand in hand. With coins that leverage low transaction fees, it seems the popular trend with vending machines will continue, at least on certain networks.
What do you think about the 60 vending machines in Hong Kong that will accept ghost token via Ivendpay? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments below.
The crypto industry in India is experiencing massive growth, according to a new survey of crypto banks and exchanges. Despite the country’s deepening coronavirus crisis, crypto exchanges say trading volumes and the number of signups continue to grow substantially.
India’s Cryptocurrency Trading 2020
Indian media agency Bit2buzz has conducted a survey of local crypto banks and exchanges on the demographics and trading behaviors of India’s crypto industry. The survey aims to understand “trading behaviors of Indians, women representations, and participation, the effect of covid-19 on Indian crypto blockchain entities, and how these crypto and blockchain companies are making waves in India,” the media outlet described.
Participating crypto exchanges included Wazirx, Unocoin, Coindcx, Pocketbits, and Bitbns. Cashaa, Bank of Hodlers, and Oropocket were also surveyed. Most of the respondents “reported major youth [ages 18-35] population using their platforms,” Bit2buzz wrote, adding that Unocoin and Bank of Hodlers “witnessed heavy traffic from the middle-aged group [ages 35 – 50].”
The survey also focuses on women trading and holding cryptocurrency in India. Coinmarketcap recently published a report stating that the number of women in the crypto industry rose by 43.24% in the first quarter. Bit2buzz has gathered India-specific data of female crypto traders.
The portion of women crypto investors in India at various crypto exchanges. Source: Bit2buzz
Unocoin revealed to the media outlet that almost 15% of its users are female while Bitbns said 11% and Pocketbits said nearly 2%. The percentages of female users at surveyed crypto banks are significantly higher than at exchanges. Oropocket claims to have over 39% female users, Cashaa 30%, and Bank of Hodlers 5%. Data from Wazirx and Coindcx were not included, the publication noted.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic has greatly affected the Indian economy. However, while most industries suffer, crypto “companies have seen a massive surge,” the survey shows, reiterating that crypto banks and exchanges “Saw massive growth in trading patterns due to covid-19 pandemic.”
Coindcx CEO Sumit Gupta shared that the daily trading volume on his exchange was around $15 million, adding that growth has continued on his exchange. He pointed out that Indians are highly active during the lockdown as they have a “chance to learn more about the benefits they could accrue with crypto, as well as to learn how to engage in the trading of crypto,” elaborating:
The lockdown due to the covid-19 pandemic meant that Indians spent more time at home, sustaining the national interest and curiosity in cryptocurrencies that was already high due to the favorable supreme court verdict.
Pocketbits CEO Sohail Merchant is seeing the same trend, confirming that both the volumes and overall interest on his exchange have risen due to users having more free time to research and trade. Wazirx CEO Nischal Shetty said trading volume has increased 470% on his exchange and he is seeing a tremendous increase in user signups. Cashaa told the media outlet that it is opening more bank accounts, noting a volume increase of more than 800%. Meanwhile, Unocoin, Bitbns, and Bank of Hodlers claim no major impacts on their platforms resulting from the covid-19 pandemic.
Recently, a rumor about the Indian government reconsidering banning cryptocurrency has swept across the country, but five exchange executives have told news.Bitcoin.com that a ban is unlikely. India is set to significantly increase its crypto market share globally this year. While the government is discussing crypto regulation, the central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has confirmed that cryptocurrency is not banned in India.
What do you think about this survey? Let us know in the comments section below.
A new, comprehensive analysis has predicted the price of bitcoin to reach almost $20K this year and will keep rising to almost $400K by 2030. The researchers have also predicted the future prices of several other major cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin cash, ethereum, and litecoin.
New Bitcoin Price Forecast
The June edition of the Crypto Research Report (CRR) reveals price predictions for several cryptocurrencies: bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, litecoin, and stellar. This is the 10th publication of the CRR report and it covers a popular valuation method used to forecast bitcoin’s future price called the “equation of exchange” model.
“The equation of exchange model is an absolute approach to valuing crypto assets,” the report begins. “This means that the model gives a target price that crypto assets should be priced at based on assumptions regarding changes in supply and demand.” Noting that “The absolute valuation approach is inspired by Mill’s equation of exchange, later formulated by Irving Fisher,” the CRR team detailed:
In this model, the percentage of the total addressable market (TAM) can be used to estimate a crypto asset’s implied future price.
After examining “all the variables and addressable markets,” the CRR researchers arrived at future price estimates for BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, and XLM. They expect the price of bitcoin to rise to $19,044 in 2020, $341,000 in 2025, and $397,727 in 2030. Ethereum’s price is expected to reach $331, $3,549, and $3,644 respectively while bitcoin cash’s price should climb to $414, $6,690, and $13,016 during the same time periods.
The price predictions for bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, litecoin, and stellar by the Crypto Research Report team. Source: Crypto Research Report, June edition.
The target addressable market for all cryptocurrencies today is approximately $212 trillion, the report notes. It includes unit of account and medium of exchange, consumer loans, offshore accounts, reserve currency, store of value, online transactions, remittance, micropayments, unbanked, gaming, crypto trading, ICO funding, and STO funding. The largest use case for cryptocurrencies is as a medium of exchange, the CRR research team found, elaborating:
We believe that bitcoin is still at the very start of its adoption curve. The price of $7,200 at the end of 2019 suggests that bitcoin has penetrated less than 0.44% of its total addressable markets. If this penetration manages to reach 10%, its non-discounted utility price should reach nearly $400,000.
The CRR analysis estimates that there are more than 40 million cryptocurrency users globally, and the number of crypto users in a country is positively correlated to the country’s GDP per capita. High GDP means more cryptocurrency adoption in the country.
Furthermore, “On-chain velocity for most coins is decreasing, while off-chain velocity is increasing, currently at an all-time high,” the report highlights, discussing in-depth how speculation and savings outpace all other uses of cryptocurrencies. They provided “evidence that growth in speculative transactions on exchanges is faster than the growth in using cryptocurrencies to buy goods and services.” The full Crypto Research Report can be found here.
What do you think about this price prediction? Let us know in the comments section below.
U.S. contract mining firm Core Scientific has agreed on a deal to buy 17,600 mining rigs from Chinese bitcoin hardware maker Bitmain Technologies Inc.
The company is buying Bitmain’s next-generation bitcoin (BTC) miner, the Antminer S19, it said in a statement on June 29. The miners will be fully installed at data centers operated by Core Scientific in the U.S. over the next four months, it added.
Washington-based Core Scientific did not provide details about cost, but the deal might come to a total of between $30 million and $42 million. Each S19 machine is currently selling at $1,785 while the newer S19 Pro is going for $2,407, according to the Bitmain shop.
Core Scientific said that the purchase is on behalf of its institutional customers and for its own use. It also claims the deal to be the largest acquisition of S19 BTC miners by a single blockchain hosting company.
Company president and chief executive officer Kevin Turner commented:
Core Scientific has received and begun testing the first of Bitmain’s newest ASIC miners, and has seen material success in increasing existing hashrate to achieve a 110 TH/s ± 3%.
Bitmain confirmed the deal in a blog post. The Antminer 19 series uses the latest generation of SHA256 Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) from Bitmain, making it more energy-efficient compared to previous models from the Beijing-based entity.
According to F2pool, a large global bitcoin mining network, the Antminer S19 model generates up to $3.03 of profit each day. The Antminer S19 Pro, Bitmain’s latest offering, makes a profit of $4.12 per day. The figures are based on an average electricity cost of $0.05 per kilowatt-hour (kWh).
The Antminer S19 has a computing power or hashrate of 95 terahash per second (TH/s) and power efficiency of 37.5 joules per terahash (J/TH). The Pro version comes with 110 TH/s and a power efficiency of 29.5 J/TH.
Bitcoin miners have been forced to look for more efficient mining equipment since the supply cut event of May 11, which slashed miner revenue by 50% from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC per block. The United States appears to be upping its game on this front.
What do you think about Core Scientific’s ambitions? Let us know in the comments section below.
This month Bitcoin.com launched two services that help facilitate bitcoin cash adoption and crypto remittance via email. In a recent video on June 5, Bitcoin.com’s Roger Ver showcased gifts.bitcoin.com, a new feature that allows individuals to send BCH gift cards via email. Additionally, Bitcoin.com also launched send.bitcoin.com, a tool that provides users with the ability to send money in a number of local currencies by leveraging bitcoin cash.
Bitcoin.com is excited to launch two new features this month that provide more cryptocurrency accessibility on a global scale. Both new features work with email and they both make sending gifts and remittances easy by using the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network. On June 5, 2020, Bitcoin.com’s Roger Ver introduced gifts.bitcoin.com which gives any individual the ability to send BCH to anyone, anywhere in the world via email.
The basics of using gifts.bitcoin.com are relatively intuitive and you simply press the “go” tab to create some new gifts. After that, you just need to confirm the recovery seed and begin to build the gift. Essentially this entails setting the amount, the currency, and the email address where you would like to send your gifts.
From here you will be given an invoice so you can pay using your bitcoin cash wallet and the receiver simply needs to check their inbox to claim their gifts. The four-minute Youtube video with Ver offers a visual step-by-step on how to use gifts.bitcoin.com.
The website also shows there have been 2,010 BCH gifts claimed, 386 expired, and 240 unclaimed out of 83.6 BCH at the time of publication.
Not too long after the release of the gifts.bitcoin.com service, Bitcoin.com also launched send.bitcoin.com. The service provides users with the ability to quickly send BCH payments to any email address. The tool is lightning fast and Ver recently explained in an interview that anyone in any country can leverage the service.
“It doesn’t matter what nationality they are, what country they reside in, or anything else,” Ver explained three days ago. “If they can access email, they can access their Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin.com never keeps a copy of the private key.”
Ver also explained that if the transaction is not claimed the sender will get the funds back. “We keep a signed transaction to refund the BCH back to the sender after the specified number of days have elapsed. That way, if the recipient never claims their bitcoin cash, the sender will automatically get it back,” he added.
Similarly to the gifting service, send.bitcoin.com is very easy to use. All you have to do is fill in the destination email address and senders name, add a memo, select the amount to send, select a local currency from a myriad of options, and add your email address to receive notifications (optional).
Lastly, you need to fill out the refund address and choose an expiration date. Simply pay the given amount after all the fields are complete and again the receiver simply needs to check their inbox to claim their bitcoin cash (BCH).
At Bitcoin.com we’re excited to offer world-class cryptocurrency tools that provide people with ways to promote economic freedom. Bitcoin.com, one of the world’s oldest and most established cryptocurrency innovators with millions of wallet holders worldwide. Our hope is that tools like gifts.bitcoin.com and send.bitcoin.com will continue to bolster and accelerate bitcoin cash adoption.
What do you think about Bitcoin.com’s new services? Let us know in the comments section below.
On June 24, the block explorer and blockchain data platform, Blockchair, announced the launch of a new privacy tool called the “Privacy-o-meter.” According to Blockchair, the new service combats blockchain surveillance companies by highlighting privacy issues for crypto transactions.
This week the blockchain explorer and crypto analytics firm, Blockchair, revealed a new tool that aims to show people some of the privacy issues involved with crypto transactions they send.
The team has explained that in the future there will be other features coming like address clustering/tagging and other insights that companies like Chainaylsis offer.
Blockchair’s Privacy-o-Meter
Blockchair was founded in 2016 and has been a popular service that offers data insights to over 15 different blockchains. Some of the supported coins Blockchair’s service tracks include ethereum (ETH), bitcoin cash (BCH), bitcoin (BTC), cardano (ADA), and others.
The explorer lets people check hashes, addresses, blocks, and embedded text data. There are other types of unique blockchain data and halving counters as well.
Last Wednesday, the official Blockchair Twitter account tweeted about the latest service saying:
Today we release Privacy-o-meter — a tool for Bitcoin users and developers to assess the privacy level of their transactions. Many of you have heard about blockchain surveillance companies. Privacy-o-meter is the first step to defend yourself against heuristics they use.
Blockchair also says that the Privacy-o-meter will “warn you if you’re doing things like reusing addresses or sending round amounts that lead to deteriorating your privacy.”
Blockchair’s Privacy-o-Meter
The user simply searchers for a transaction hash and they will be able to visualize the privacy score. For now, the block explorer company is offering Privacy-o-meter services for bitcoin (BTC) with “other cryptos are coming soon.”
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) supporters were pleased with the announcement and one individual wrote: “You rock, keep up the great work my friends.” Blockchair CEO, Nikita Zhavoronkov explained that the team would “launch [bitcoin cash] (BCH) support as soon as we’ve implemented Cashshuffle and Cashfusion detection.”
What do you think about Blockchair’s Privacy-o-meter service? Let us know in the comments section below.
Decentralized finance (Defi) protocol Balancer was on Sunday hacked for more than $450,000 worth of cryptocurrency.
In two separate transactions, an attacker targeted two pools containing Ethereum-based tokens with transfer fees – or so-called deflationary tokens.
Pools with Sta and Stonk tokens were affected by this exploit, Balancer, an automated market marker protocol, said on June 29.
The hacker made off with around 601 ether, 11 wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), 22,600 chainlink (LINK), and 61,000 synthetix (SNX) – altogether totaling more than $451,000.
According to an analysis by Dex aggregator 1inch.exchange, the attacker used a smart contract to automate multiple actions in a single transaction. First, the hacker obtained a flash loan of $23 million worth of ethereum from the crypto-lending platform Dydx.
The money was used to swap Weth to Statera (Sta), a so-called deflationary token, back and forth 24 times until the Sta balance was totally drained. With Sta, at least one percent of the token is programmed to burn with every transaction.
However, the Balancer pool apparently failed to account for this mechanism. So, the Sta balance declined by one percent every time the attacker made their 24 swaps. After this, the hacker exchanged 1 weiSta, or the equivalent of a billionth of a token, to Weth several times.
Due to Sta token transfer fee implementation, the pool never received statera, but still proceeded to release the wrapped ether regardless, said 1inch. The same step was repeated to drain WBTC, SNX, and link token balances from the pool, it added.
Finally, the attacker repaid the $23 million Dydx loan. Later, they converted the Sta tokens to Balancer pool tokens and eventually into ethereum via Uniswap, which was then cashed out.
1inch noted that the attack was carried out by a “sophisticated smart contract engineer” who is deeply knowledgeable about decentralized finance and its protocols.
Balancer claimed that “we were not aware this specific type of attack was possible, [but] we have consistently…warned about the unintended effects ERC20s with transfer fees could have in the protocol.”
To prevent future attacks, the platform said that it will start to add ‘transfer fee tokens to the UI blacklist similarly to what we have done for no bool transfer tokens.”
“We will be adding more documentation around the risks of how these pools work and how broken or maliciously designed tokens can potentially drain assets from a pool,” it added.
A number of Defi platforms have been hacked this year. In February, Bzx protocol was attacked twice while Maker lost around $8.3 million in March. Uniswap and Dforce were drained of $300,000 and $25 million, respectively, although this later amount was returned by the hacker in April.
What do you think about the Balancer pool hack? Let us know in the comments section below.
The infamous and controversial owner of the website bitcoin.org, Cobra, is under fire recently and a number of community members have asked to see the website removed from his possession. The initial argument was sparked by the website’s maintainer, Will Binns, who told the public that bitcoin.org was in “danger of being compromised.” Since then, Cobra has decided to fire Binns and the crypto community has been very focused on watching this quarrel unfold.
During the last few years, news.Bitcoin.com has reported on the curious case of Cobra, the peculiar anon with a lot of power. Just recently, bitcoiners have been arguing about Cobra’s ownership of bitcoin.org. Cobra has always been controversial and he’s asked the community to change the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm.
Cobra also asked the community and fellow bitcoin.org maintainers to change certain statements Satoshi Nakamoto made in the Bitcoin white paper. Five days ago, bitcoin.org maintainer Will Binns told the community via Github, that he believes Cobra is participating in compromising the website where the “latest version of Bitcoin Core software” stems from.
“Bitcoin.org, where many people also download the latest version of Bitcoin Core software, is now in danger of becoming compromised, if it hasn’t just happened,” Binns said.
“Cobra-Bitcoin has removed my access and seized control of the site and accompanying code repositories. I do not believe Cobra is the sole and lawful owner, nor does he have any right to do these things without just cause. Cobra has referenced recent messages I sent in regular conversation regarding my work and the management of bitcoin.org as reasons for my departure. This has been taken out of context in an attempt to manipulate public opinion and infringe upon my rights, along with the rights of others,” Binns added. The bitcoin.org software maintainer further stated:
I believe he is looking to illegally transfer ownership of the site without due process, and this may only be the beginning. I’m writing this message to request assistance setting up a legal fund and the help of experts, to help stop this. In the interim, the website’s treasury will be placed under the control of a trusted third party. The funds are safe, the site is not.
Cobra explained that he had “removed Will Binns as the site’s maintainer,” in another Github post called “Regarding Will Binns #3397.” “During a conversation on Twitter, he had claimed that his work contributing to bitcoin.org conferred on him more authority than what I had agreed with him. I won’t engage with him beyond attempting to retrieve the community’s donations from wallets he has control over,” Cobra told the community members on Github.
The website’s owner continued by stating:
This may seem harsh, but any further communication with him risks putting this project in an unfortunate situation. So I had to be brisk and terminate his relationship with us. I’ll be taking over the day-to-day activities on the site more actively from now on; if any contributors or translators are in any group chats with him, please make alternative groups so you can continue work on the site.
Interestingly the former Blockstream employee and Bitcoin Core developer, Gregory Maxwell, seemed to agree with Cobra’s stance. “Your position appears to be a misplaced and inappropriate response to Cobra suggesting that he was considering not handing you unilateral control of Bitcoin.org. I hope you reconsider your approach,” Maxwell explained in the post reply toward Binns.
Another software developer wrote: “From my experience, even though I’ve not always agreed with [Cobra] on certain things, I think he’s shown good character, and as others have stated, he has acted as a trustworthy steward over the years.”
Bitcoin Core developer, David Harding, stood up for Binns when Cobra called Binns a scammer. “I’ve been interacting with Will Binns for over six years now, first on Bitcoin.org and later as coworkers,” Harding wrote.
“We haven’t always gotten along, but I’ve never seen him try to scam anyone. Quite the reverse — I’ve seen him selflessly contribute to this project and others for no tangible return. I don’t know what’s happening in that conversation and I understand the need to be clear about who has what rights, but I don’t think a single confused conversation warrants the character assassination of a long-time contributor to multiple open-source documentation projects.”
Whatever the case may be, Binns has lost his position and there is literally ‘trouble in paradise’ when it comes to the web portal bitcoin.org. Cobra has always been a controversial figure and no one knows who he or Theymos is.
His sidekick Theymos is also an anon who once in a while participates in the bitcoin.org operations and discussions. Theymos also has complete control over r/bitcoin, the unofficial bitcoin wiki, and bitcointalk.org too. Both Cobra and Theymos, however, have been around since the early days. They both are mysterious and have maintained a lot of power, as far as bitcoin domain real estate is concerned ever since Satoshi left.
What do you think about the quarrel over bitcoin.org’s ownership? Let us know in the comments section below.
The financial crisis in Lebanon has seen its currency, the Lebanese pound, fall 80%. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has estimated that the country’s central bank has accumulated losses as much as 170 trillion pounds. The disagreement between the Lebanese government and the central bank has stalled bailout discussions.
The economic and financial crisis in Lebanon has deepened as the local currency has been in a free-fall. The Lebanese pound sold at a rate of 8,000 to the U.S. dollar on Sunday at local exchanges, losing about 80% of its value over the past 10 months.
The IMF has warned Lebanon that its central bank, Banque du Liban, has accumulated losses of up to 170 trillion pounds, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. The publication explained that the central bank has used “a series of sovereign debt and currency swaps with local lenders … to shore up the banking sector, attract foreign currency and stabilize the Lebanese pound.” Citing people familiar with the matter, the publication reported that the IMF told the Lebanese finance minister and central bank governor:
That activity, combined with the impact of Lebanon’s default in March on the bank’s sovereign bond holdings and a collapse in the value of the currency, has resulted in accumulated losses of about L£170tn.
The losses equate to 91% of Lebanon’s total economic output in 2019 and are almost equal to the total value of the deposits held by the central bank from the country’s commercial banks, the news outlet conveyed. The pound had been pegged at 1,507.5 to the U.S. dollar since 1997.
An IMF spokesperson said last week, “Our estimates are broadly consistent with those in the government’s plan.” The central bank and some members of parliament, however, argued that the losses are substantially lower.
The disagreement between the Lebanese government and the central bank has put the prospect of obtaining much-needed emergency financing from the IMF at risk. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said Friday that she did not “expect progress in the negotiations with the Lebanese officials.” Georgieva added: “IMF officials are still working with Lebanon, but it is not clear whether it is possible for the country’s leaders, active parties, and society to agree on implementing the reforms needed to stabilize the economy and boost economic growth.”
However, “Not accepting the diagnostic simply means that the IMF [will] walk away,” commented Henri Chaoul, a banker and former advisor to the government in the IMF talks. He resigned from his advisory role at the Ministry of Finance on June 17. Lebanon’s fiscal and monetary policy has come undone over the past six months, following weeks of anti-government protests.
What do you think about the crisis in Lebanon? Let us know in the comments section below.
With the fourth of July approaching, many Americans will have to contemplate whether or not the holiday is an empty affair. After the last thirteen weeks of Covid-19 lockdowns, business shutdowns, and police brutality, the lack of liberty and freedoms in the U.S. has never been more apparent. With ideas like bitcoin and concepts that bolster secession, the day is coming when money is completely removed from the state, just as the state was separated from the church centuries ago.
Roughly six days prior to the empty holiday, as I read the letters of Independence pronouncement adopted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1776, I say to myself “Americans are not free.” The majority in the United States have surrendered their freedoms and civil liberties to the collective mob. Many individualists are quite certain that most Americans don’t believe in those declarations of independence, and the 27 grievances against tyranny written hundreds of years ago.
One reason that validates this opinion as truth, is because the U.S. government has transgressed upon the citizenry. They have quite literally violated every one of the 27 grievances. Yet the majority of U.S. citizens are too comfortable and too lost in the sea of distraction to even notice.
One thing I will be promoting on July 4, 2020, is real independence and the use of counter-economics, in order to separate finance from the state. The separation of money and state is the ideal solution for striking the root. The New Ideal author, Onkar Ghate, describes it very well in an April 2019 essay.
The essay explains how Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, and James Madison all vowed to separate the church from state, as this was a fundamental right of sovereign individuals. However, the philosophy can easily be applied to finance too, as Ghate and many others have argued for economic freedom for many decades.
“The arguments for intellectual freedom and economic freedom share the same root: the requirements of the rational mind to guide the individual,” Ghate’s essay details.
Ghate’s explains how the well known novelist, Ayn Rand, took the individualist ideas from Jefferson, Madison, and Locke and extended it to all human actions like “education, scientific research, the arts,” and especially finance. Rand argued “that governmental schools, governmental funding of scientific research, and governmental funding of the arts violate the individual’s right to intellectual freedom,” Ghate’s essay highlights. The author also adds:
Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
The founder of Shapeshift, Erik Voorhees, said in March 2015 at the Texas Bitcoin Conference, the reason he has bolstered the idea of bitcoin is because he wants to separate finance from the state.
“It is that narrative of human development under which I believe that we now have other fights to fight, and I would say in the realm of bitcoin it is mainly the separation of money and state,” Voorhees explained on stage. The Shapeshift CEO added:
Money is absolutely as fundamental to our lives as religion, and for many people it is far more fundamental to their lives as religion. It affects how your life unfolds. The choices that you make about money dictate the ramifications of your life and those around you. And so, to have an institution like money so controlled by a central entity — by a monopoly — is absurd. It is immoral. We should get rid of it.
Similarly, the American populace has the right to separate themselves, and “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” This is clearly stated on the Declaration of Independence parchment.
Essentially, the letters of Independence highlight that Americans, but more importantly all sovereign earthlings, should simply declare the separation. “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation,” the transcription of the stone engraving of the parchment Declaration of Independence stresses. All sovereign individuals have a right to separate their finances from the state, just as they have the right to separate religious beliefs from government affairs.
By leveraging precious metals, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC), bitcoin cash (BCH), dash (DASH), litecoin (LTC), monero (XMR) ethereum (ETH) and many others, while also practicing barter and trade techniques, it will help strengthen the counter-economy. The counter-economy, at some point, will grow so large that it eclipses the fraudulent and manipulated economy created by the oligarchs and status quo.
Without funding, the state will not be able to continue the endless wars. Without the participation of people using the oligarchs’ promissory notes, taxation will take place less and less. Even Edward Snowden, the famous U.S. whistleblower explained in an interview published by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2018, that bitcoin would help cushion financial liberties. Snowden also once said on Twitter that “new technologies raise the possibility of unstoppable tax protests.”
“I like Bitcoin transactions in that they are impartial — They can’t really be stopped or reversed, without the explicit, voluntary participation by the people involved,” Snowden said during the interview. “Let’s say Bank of America doesn’t want to process a payment for someone like me. In the old financial system, they’ve got an enormous amount of clout, as do their peers, and can make that happen. If a teenager in Venezuela wants to get paid in hard currency for a web development gig they did for someone in Paris, something prohibited by local currency controls, cryptocurrencies can make it possible.” Snowden continued by adding:
Bitcoin may not yet really be private money, but it is the first ‘free’ money.
On July 4, 2020, and just like every Independence Day I’ve celebrated in the past decade, I will let people know that the freedom they honor every year is lacking. In fact, freedom, at least going by the American writings written in the 1700s, is barely existent. The only way to separate ourselves from the beast of government is to separate money from it immediately.
Essentially, the state won’t have a choice and even right now, government fiat must compete with a $250 billion dollar free market filled with over 5,000 cryptocurrencies. During the 2015 Texas Bitcoin Conference, Vorhees further explained that people leveraging bitcoin will help bolster the need for change.
“It seems crazy to say this, but perhaps we should permit competition in money, permit competition in financial structures, just as we permit competition in religion,” Vorhees concluded. “We allow multiple churches to exist. Why do we do that? And why don’t we do that with money? I think it’s a hypocrisy that our children will someday look back on and realize, ‘Wow, that was really obvious.’ And Bitcoin is what will bring that change about.”
If Americans truly believe in the letters of independence, then they should separate themselves from the very government that transgresses against them. Right now, believers of the non-aggression axiom have lots of choices to make and many forms of human action can help fulfill decentralized goals.
There is no doubt, cryptocurrency and Satoshi’s vision was founded with the ideals of separation of state and money. Instead of focusing on red white and blue paper plates and patriotic t-shirts from Walmart, maybe Americans should invoke the revolutionary spirit they once held, and actually do something about this tyrannical beast who has devoured their freedoms.
If you are interested in learning about the many methods of crypto anarchy and the myriad of ways to opt-out and vacate the state – Check out these essays below.
