A little-known cryptocurrency called Syscoin reluctantly stole the spotlight today. The price of Syscoin spiked from 0.00003 BTC to 96 BTC, followed by a precipitous crash, and an attack on the Syscoin chain itself. The exchange Binance (which lost funds to the attack) responded cheekily by announcing a cold storage system called SAFU, an acronym known around the Internet to mean "Situation All Fucked Up."
Reaction to the price jump
Right after the incident, the Syscoin team launched an investigation and requested exchanges to halt trading the coin.
Reddit discussion
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Speculation on the cause of the issue
Concurrently, Binance announced an update to reset their existing API keys. This not the first time Binance API keys have been hacked.
Possibility of a rollback
Incident recap on irregular SYS trading
(Binance Blog)
"To protect the future interests of all users, Binance will create a Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU). Starting from 2018/07/14, we will allocate 10% of all trading fees received into SAFU to offer protection to our users and their funds in extreme cases. This fund will be stored in a separate cold wallet."
Technical Updates
Discussion on mining with photonic ASIC
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Thread on why the network is so clogged
Tether on strings? Crypto debates fresh round of manipulation claims
(CoinDesk, by Christine Kim)
"The same concepts of supply and demand that informed the Bloomberg article were used in turn by Kraken to argue they promote stability in tether prices. They can also be used to point out the inherent vulnerabilities in a fixed pegged currency, crypto or not."
The Digest: Ripple is giving away its cryptocurrency to get people to use it
(Futurism, by Kristin Houser)
"Ripple can play such a big role in how people use XRP (and how much there is) because of how the coin is generated. While the number of bitcoin transactions determines the number of bitcoins in the world (more transactions = more mining = more bitcoins), all the XRP in the world was simply created in 2013. At that time, Ripple generated 100 billion XRP, keeping 80 percent for itself."
Chris Dixon on how trust is the best Lego block
(Unchained)
Letter from a Birmingham Museum
(Epsilon Theory, by W. Ben Hunt)
"This is the awesome power of effective Narratives and the Common Knowledge Game. They don’t control us directly, like high-pressure fire hoses and billy clubs. No, they’re much more effective than that. Narratives and the Common Knowledge Game drive us to control OURSELVES."
