Daily TL;DR - December 20th

Daily TL;DR
1
DAILY TL;DR W/ CHESLINK
DECEMBER 18TH-22ND
December 20th

1. BTC/BCH NEWS
2. IN OTHER NEWS

MARKETCAP ANALYSIS

Recap from 11/20
Market Cap: $243,311,416,536
24h Vol: $7,403,167,283
BTC Dominance: 56.2%

As of 12/11
Market Cap: $462,879,608,891
24h Vol: $25,098,117,991
BTC Dominance: 61.7%

As of 12/18
Market Cap: $598,523,879,891
24h Vol: $33,236,610,242
BTC Dominance: 52.8%

As of 12/20
Market Cap: $628,445,215,824
24h Vol: $52,537,317,094
BTC Dominance: 47.2%

BTC NEWS

Bitcoin Cash CNBC Collusion
• http://bitcoinist.com/cnbc-collusion-roger-ver-bcash/
As Bitcoin prices dropped below $17,000, BCH, which is also known as BCash, suddenly shot up in value on US exchange Coinbase, hitting around $9000.

The average price of 1 BCash coin across major exchanges is now almost $3500, a rise of 45% in 24 hours.

Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase
• https://blog.coinbase.com/buy-sell-send-and-receive-bitcoin-cash-on-coinbase-65f1b2c7214b
Update on December 19 at 8:15pm

Bitcoin Cash sends and receives are functional. Buys and sells on the Coinbase website and in our mobile apps will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will happen tomorrow.

There was a rumor that only BCH buys were working and only BTC/BCH sells.
Coinbase Investigates BCH Insider Trading
• https://www.investopedia.com/news/coinbase-investigates-possible-insider-trading-bitcoin-cash-announcement/

In a blog post published early Wednesday morning, CEO Brian Armstrong said the price of BCH on other exchanges began increasing hours before his company made its announcement, indicating that employees who knew about the launch engaged in insider trading. Armstrong added that Coinbase is currently looking into the matter. (See also: Coinbase Has More Users Than Schwab.)

“Given the price increase in the hours leading up the announcement, we will be conducting an investigation into this matter," he said. "If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies — directly or indirectly — I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action."

In the blog post, Armstrong explained that Coinbase staff, together with their family and friends, had been forbidden from trading BCH for the past month as the company prepared to make the coin available on its own exchange. He added that a similar policy was also adopted before the San Francisco-based firm began supporting Ether and Litecoin.

Australian Central Bank Denounces Bitcoin – Praises Ethereum
• http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/central-bank-chief-warns-over-bitcoin-valuations-20171219-h07a89.html
​Bitcoin has no fundamental value and is likely to end in tears once speculators discover how hard it can be to extricate their cash, Singapore's financial watchdog has warned.

Mr Mohanty, recruited from Citigroup to spearhead Singapore's fintech drive, said Ethereum had some social utility and plausible market value. It can be used for "smart contracts" and to secure access to valuable computing power.

"It at least has economic value. You can exchange ether to run software in the cloud," he said.

The real worth of fintech probably lies in boring, bread-and-butter changes. The crux is often helping banks and finance houses to move from a "closed-loop" system that cannot easily absorb new technology to a "plug-in" model that is far more flexible.

"The banks have legacy systems and don't have enough capital to upgrade everything. We're looking at the magic middle layer that allows fintech to be plugged in," Mr Mohanty said.

Bulletproofs > zSNARKS
• https://crypto.stanford.edu/bulletproofs/
Bulletproofs are short non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that require no trusted setup. A bulletproof can be used to convince a verifier that an encrypted plaintext is well formed. For example, prove that an encrypted number is in a given range, without revealing anything else about the number. Compared to SNARKs, Bulletproofs require no trusted setup. However, verifying a bulletproof is more time consuming than verifying a SNARK proof.

• https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1066.pdf
Bitcoin Banned in Kuwait
• https://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/894639/bitcoin-banned-Kuwait-KPMG
The Ministry said the Central Bank of Kuwait does not allow any banks or financial institutions to trade bitcoin following its sporadic vast increases in price.

Now the Ministry and Central Bank say they are not in a position to regulate bitcoin with sources branding proceeds from bitcoin trading "illegal and unclean money".

Sources from the Ministry said bitcoin trading is “out of control” of the official Kuwait financial organisations as the cryptocurrency is managed through the internet.

Bitcoin Philanthropy
• https://qz.com/1160997/a-bitcoin-millionaire-is-giving-away-a-fortune-to-psychedelic-research-curing-aging-and-clean-water/
Philanthropy has entered the bitcoin era. Last week, a cryptocurrency enthusiast named “Pine” founded the $86 million (5,057 BTC) Pineapple Fund (motto: “Because once you have enough money, money doesn’t matter.”). As of Dec. 19, the Pineapple Fund had committed about $8 million to eight charities.

MAPS confirmed that the Pineapple Fund had donated 59.89 Bitcoin (BTC), worth $1,000,000, to the non-profit this week. The money will help fund MAPS’ upcoming $26 million Phase 3 clinical trials for psychotherapy with MDMA (similar to the drug Ecstasy) to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
But Pine’s gift was only the start for MAPS. On Sunday (Dec. 17), MAPS received another $1 million or so (51.5 BTC) from an anonymous donor. That exceeds the $120,800 it has received in cryptocurrencies since 2013, said Brad Burge, MAPS’ communications director.

Burge thinks it’s the start of something bigger. Charities that wish to receive cryptocurrencies merely need to post a public “wallet,” a number identifying an online address, where donors can make deposits. Most non-profits still don’t have them. “I expect over the next new months it will become pretty standard,” he said.
UpBit Controversy
• https://news.bitcoin.com/major-korean-crypto-exchange-upbit-at-center-of-regulatory-controversy/

“However, there are concerns that Upbit, which is the number one player in Korea, is not participating in the Blockchain Association’s self-regulation,” Inews24reported, adding that this could undermine the industry’s efforts.

The Korean Blockchain Industry Association announced on Friday the self-regulatory measures, created at the recommendation of the government. 14 exchanges have jointly declared that they will implement the changes, including the country’s other major exchanges – Bithumb, Coinone, and Korbit. Citing “Upbit is not a member of the Blockchain Association and has no obligation to comply.”

IN OTHER NEWS
Charlie Lee Sells All His LTC
• https://news.bitcoin.com/litecoin-creator-charlie-lee-reveals-he-sold-all-his-litecoin/

Founder of litecoin Charlie Lee has informed the community today that he no longer has any meaningful direct exposure to the cryptocurrency, having sold and donated all his LTC holdings in recent past days. Writing on Reddit he explains that this was done to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest when promoting LTC as someone with so much social influence.

Lee reassures his followers that this does not mean he is quitting litecoin and will still spend all his time working on the cryptocurrency he created. Lee also explains that he will continue to benefit from the growth of litecoin – just not by holding the cryptocurrency itself.

Interesting because of those old Tweets:

Ripple Launched Infrastructure Innovation Initiative
• https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/72050/ripple-launches-infrastructure-innovation-initiative?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=finextrafeed
At Ripple, we’re focused on engaging with commercial banks to implement production-grade enterprise systems — using DLT — to support cross-border payments. In fact, we recently celebrated a significant milestone — we added the 100th client to RippleNet. What’s more, banks like Siam Commercial in Thailand, Standard Chartered in Singapore, Axis in India and Rakbank in the UAE are already sending and receiving payments in commercial volumes. In Japan, 61 members of the Japan Bank Consortium are in pre-production stage on a hosted Ripple platform.

The Ripple xCurrent product — a solution that allows banks to settle cross-border payments with end-to-end tracking instantly — is now enterprise-tested. Also, the public XRP Ledger, operating since late 2013, successfully completed 35 million ledger updates without failure and offered throughput of 1,500 transactions per second.

Ripple is now taking the next logical step to help build the Internet of Value, by establishing an Infrastructure Innovation initiative. We’ll offer our technology products and deep expertise in both payment systems and DLT to enable central banks and market infrastructures to innovate on their own digital journey. We can provide proven building blocks for both regulators and commercial banks to pilot real-world solutions in collaboration with the Ripple team. We’re excited about the possibilities for innovation — to create regional networks, to reduce the systemic costs of payments, to open up networks to new participants while managing risks tightly with more granular information and smart automation.

“My first priority will be piloting interoperability between payment systems, the use of DLT for domestic clearing and settlement and novel applications of xCurrent as well as our digital asset XRP,” said Rao. “I look forward to exciting new initiatives in building the Internet of Value in 2018!”

4 Interesting VR Platforms
• https://www.investopedia.com/news/4-new-platforms-combining-vr-and-blockchain/?utm_campaign=rss_headlines&utm_source=rss_www&utm_medium=referral

1. Decentraland
   Though VR can now claim a purpose in the fields of science, engineering and more, Decentraland takes it back to its roots: the gaming world. This virtual world is accessible through any normal VR headset and is hosted entirely on the blockchain. Accordingly, it has some unique implications, including the ability to verifiably own the property that one inhabits.
   Players must register themselves on the ledger to participate, and can use cryptocurrency to record their irrefutable ownership over parcels of land onto it. A player’s virtual land can be developed (literally) with houses, businesses or other services just like in the popular game Second Life, and monetized accordingly. Virtual denizens have flocked to the “terraforming” event to reserve their spot in Genesis City, helping Decentraland raise $24 million in a crowdsale for the project within just 35 seconds.

2. Ceek
   One of the most applicable uses of virtual reality is to transport the viewer to a place they cannot be physically. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a custom virtual world, and this is what Ceek demonstrates to an enthusiastic public. Ceek enlists an impressive combination of VR production and blockchain smart contracts to allow anyone with a headset to attend live VR concerts and other events with their favorite celebrities and musicians.

3. GazeCoin
   GazeCoin is a unique blockchain solution that seeks to solve the issue that advertisers have in the new VR medium. Where current advertising methods for VR are still optimized for framed media, this approach is difficult to measure in terms of results because users aren’t interacting with a mouse. Key performance indicators have largely gone undeveloped for VR until now.
   GazeCoin uses a custom engine to track a VR viewer’s eye movements, which can determine exactly how much attention they’re paying to sponsored content, rewarding them and advertisers proportionately. Brands who develop their own VR experiences can create derivative tokens built on the GazeCoin platform as well, providing them with a proprietary token while also contributing value to the underlying blockchain.

4. Blockchain 3D Explorer
   While it’s somewhat of a novel idea, those who are curious about the inner workings of the admittedly complicated blockchain can view it working in real time in a virtual reality environment. The simple 3D rendering of the decentralized ledger is a thing to behold and helps put in perspective how the network is organized. One can even pinpoint exact transactions on the network and watch as they move from node to node.
   Blockchain 3D Explorer is an excellent tool for teaching blockchain to the uninitiated, made even better because it’s provided for free on the various platforms that support it, including Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

IOTA
• http://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/robert-bosch-venture-capital-makes-first-investment-in-distributed-ledger-technology-137411.html

Stuttgart, Germany – Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC), the corporate venture capital company of the Bosch Group, has purchased a significant amount of IOTA tokens, one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world. In doing so it hopes to intensify the collaboration with the IOTA Foundation, an open-source non-profit foundation from Germany. RBVC also intends to elevate the technology to maturity by bringing it closer to Bosch’s global ecosystem and key partners.

“Distributed ledger technology will play an important role in the industry of tomorrow,” said Dr. Ingo Ramesohl, Managing Director at RBVC. “Bosch is one of the pioneers actively driving the adoption of distributed ledger technology in the automotive and Internet of Things (IoT) industry. The investment in IOTA’s token, the first ever token investment of RBVC, will help us working closely with the IOTA Foundation to explore the industrialization of this exciting technology.”

RBVC’s investment broadens the potential for new business models for the IoT in any number of verticals and uniquely positions IOTA and Bosch to take on the challenges of IoT together. Dr. Hongquan Jiang, Partner at RBVC, will join the IOTA Foundation’s advisory board. The investment follows the successful launch of IOTA’s data marketplace, with more than 30 leading companies worldwide participating.

• https://twitter.com/iotatoken/status/943111784214523904?ref_src=twcamp%5Eshare%7Ctwsrc%5Eios%7Ctwgr%5Ecom.iwilab.KakaoTalk.Share

The much anticipated new wallet release is here: https://t.co/0PR0v64PIz
This new wallet introduces some major changes, such as moving away from Reattachements, to Transaction Promotion, which has proven to significantly increase tx confirmations and the Tangle reliability.