Two of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges announced today that they are supporting Segregated Witness, an improvement to the Bitcoin protcol that will allow it to support state channels. Lightning Network is Bitcoin's state channel network; it amounts to a unicast implementation of the Bitcoin procotol, used as a "second layer" to facilitate fast, cheap, anonymous payments atop the old, broadcast version of Bitcoin. It promises to lower Bitcoin transaction fees and make the network's throughput and speed superior to Visa and Mastercard, without diminishing Bitcoin's reliability.
News
Bitfinex adopts SegWit
(Medium)
We are proud to announce support for SegWit. https://t.co/FTCmRrRo2K pic.twitter.com/Kk2cA71wNN
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) February 20, 2018
Our engineering team has finished testing of SegWit for Bitcoin on Coinbase.
— Coinbase (@coinbase) February 20, 2018
We will be starting a phased launch to customers over the next few days and are targeting a 100% launch to all customers by mid next week.
ING says cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex has an account with it
(Reuters Staff)
"ING spokesman Harold Reusken confirmed in an email that Bitfinex has an account in the Netherlands but would not provide details on the amount held or whether ING also provides banking services for other Bitfinex-related companies."
ETF veteran goes crypto, predicting multi-trillion dollar market
(Bloomberg, by Camila Russo)
"Matt Hougan is leaving the exchange-traded-fund industry after 15 years and going all-in on cryptocurrencies as he predicts digital assets will transform investments just like ETFs did."
Attorney General Sessions announces new cybersecurity task force
(DOJ)
"The Attorney General has asked the Task Force to prioritize its study of efforts to interfere with our elections; efforts to interfere with our critical infrastructure; the use of the Internet to spread violent ideologies and to recruit followers; the mass theft of corporate, governmental, and private information; the use of technology to avoid or frustrate law enforcement; and the mass exploitation of computers and other digital devices to attack American citizens and businesses."
Commentary
Bitcoin’s transaction fee crisis is over—for now
(Arstechnica, by Timothy B. Lee)
"Instead of simply increasing the maximum block size, they've focused on a technological upgrade called Segregated Witness that separates cryptographic signatures from the rest of the blockchain data. These signatures aren't counted against that one-megabyte block-size limit, so this is a de facto block-size increase."
"Essentially, a crypto scammer aims to persuade 'unwitting investors' to buy fake coins by transferring either fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies. In this column we will only focus on the so-called ‘ICO exit’ scam, not thefts, hacks or Ponzi schemes."
Twitter commentary on Ethereum scaling solutions
Very good explainer of what’s happening on Ethereum. Confirms my pet thesis: Bitcoin is sovereign-grade protection while Ethereum is platform-grade protection. Platform giants will hurt from this in 10 years. https://t.co/4p2oVOyUEH
— Larry Sukernik (@lsukernik) February 17, 2018
Technical
Replay Attacks in IOTA
(Github, by Joseph Rebstock)
"My interest was specifically about how the network would handle inconsistent subtangles if it was presented with dozens of conflicting options. However during this research I found example of behaviour which seemed dangerous to the security of the network. This report presents those findings."
Tesla hackers hijacked Amazon Cloud account to mine cryptocurrency
(Fortune, by Robert Hackett)
"An unidentified hacker or hackers broke into a Tesla-owned Amazon cloud account and used it to “mine” cryptocurrency, security researchers said. The breach also exposed proprietary data for the electric carmaker."
Gold price fails to break through resistance level for 4+ years
Gold turning down from 4+ year resistance level $GLD $GC_F pic.twitter.com/83msDxOGl9
— Peter Brandt (@PeterLBrandt) February 20, 2018
Update
Monero is now accepted on Lynx Art Collection. Lynx Art
Zcash 1.0.15 update will release on Feb 26th. Github
Cardano held a launch event this morning for a new research project that analyzes quantum computing and its potential threat on blockchain security. Twitter
Charles Hoskinson and Prof. Aggelos Kiayias presented at the Scottish Blockchain Meetup at Edinburgh University over the weekend. Their talk was on third-gen blockchains and ongoing research themes. Youtube
Ouroboros, an integral part of Cardano, is the only provably secure, peer-reviewed proof of stake protocol to be implemented. IOHK’s researcher Dr. Peter Gaži presents Ouroboros at MIT in this video. Youtube
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