Daily TL;DR - January 4th (Your One Stop Daily News)

DAILY TL;DR W/ CHESLINK
JANUARY 1ST-5TH
January 4th

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 12/31
Market Cap: $592,941,301,681
24h Vol: $33,207,433,786
BTC Dominance: 38.0%

As of 1/2
Market Cap: $689,345,508,374
24h Vol: $41,942,917,374
BTC Dominance: 37.1%

As of 1/4
Market Cap: $760,334,933,927
24h Vol: $69,671,141,211
BTC Dominance: 33.2%

Marketcap to $10 Trillion
• https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/03/one-stock-analysts-10-trillion-bull-case-for-cryptocurrencies.html

"By utilizing decentralized computing and opensource software, we see a multi-trillion dollar market emerging," RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves says in a Wednesday report. He tells CNBC in a phone interview that his $10 trillion estimate comes from taking a third of the roughly $30 trillion in assets held in offshore funds and gold.

All these applications can create the next generation of the internet, or a "world computer," the value of which could rise into the trillions of dollars, Steves said in the report.

However, the growth of cryptocurrencies comes with very high risks. Steves pointed out in his report that many storage systems for bitcoin are hackable, and governments have no incentive to catch thieves of a currency not recognized as legal tender. Transactions are also often easily traceable. Finally, the RBC analyst noted that some cryptocurrencies as they exist today face challenges of being able to scale, and are subject to cyberattacks or manipulation.

BTC/BCH NEWS
Meryll Lynch Lynches Bitcoin
• https://sg.news.yahoo.com/merrill-lynch-bans-clients-investing-silbert-bitcoin-fund-005402490--sector.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bank of America Merrill Lynch banned clients from investing in one of bitcoin mogul Barry Silbert's top funds last month, according to a memo seen by Reuters.

As of Dec. 8, the Wall Street brokerage stopped approving new orders for the Bitcoin Investment Trust due to concerns about the "suitability and eligibility standards of this product," according to the memo sent to roughly 17,000 brokers at Merrill Lynch and Merrill Edge, a unit for clients who manage their own trades.

"We look forward to speaking with Merrill Lynch and addressing any questions or concerns they have about the Bitcoin Investment Trust," Silbert told Reuters in an email. "We are unaware of any similar policies at other brokerage firms."

China MAY Start to Regulate Bitcoin Mining
• https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/01/01/bitcoin-enters-new-year-not-bang-whimper/

China’s central bank told a top-level government internet finance group that the monetary authority can tell local governments to regulate the power usage of bitcoin miners to gradually reduce the scale of their production, a source said.

While the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) can’t directly regulate bitcoin miners’ power usage, it can ask local authorities to do so, the central bank told members of the Leading Group of Beijing Internet Financial Risks Remediation at a meeting at the end of 2017, the source said.

At the meeting, the PBOC said development of bitcoin mining will be limited, according to the source, who declined to be named as he is not authorised to speak on the matter. The PBOC could not be reached for immediate comment outside business hours.

China Mining Rumors Exaggerated
• https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/rumours-demise-chinese-bitcoin-mining-greatly-exaggerated/

A source in the Chinese finance industry told Finance Magnates that he believes that it would be very difficult for the government to enforce such a measure.

“Restrictions on mining has been a rumour for a few months, since the government banned (retroactively) ICOs and restricted cryptocurrencies. Mining is a very different affair. The only reasons the authorities would have to ban mining would be to indirectly hit cryptocurrencies, since most of the mining is for them, and because the electricity needs of mining, which rises in tandem with the price of Bitcoin, is partly paid for by the government,” he said.

Our source said that banning mining as a move against cryptocurrency dealings would also affect the many companies that deal with blockchain technology, often unrelated to cryptocurrency. He believes that unless the government finds some way to differentiate between the two, implementing restrictions would be difficult.

China MAY Lift Crypto Ban – Bobby Lee
• https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/03/china-to-eventually-lift-cryptocurrency-bitcoin-exchange-ban-bobby-lee-btcc.html

We know Bobby Lee the owner of one of the largest mining pools in China. He’s Charlie Lee’s brother, the creator of Litecoin. Bobby Lee, CEO and co-founder of BTCC, which closed down its China-facing trading operations in September 2017 after a well-publicized government crackdown, spoke to CNBC about the future of cryptocurrency in China.

"In this world, nothing is ever permanent," said Bobby Lee, CEO and co-founder of BTCC, which closed down its China-facing trading operations in September 2017 after a well-publicized government crackdown. "One day I think it's possible they'll lift the ban, so called, and they might reinstitute it and license it," Lee told CNBC's "Squawk Box." Still, Lee stopped short of offering a definitive timeline: "Frankly speaking, I don't know what kind of time frame that is, whether it's a few months, a few years or even a few decades, so it's hard to tell."

The entrepreneur explain that he "got out" of the Chinese bitcoin exchange business, and now instead focuses ambitions on an international trading platform, a mining and minting operation and a cryptocurrency wallet.

Bitcoin Cash Advantage
• https://coingeek.com/tx-highway-well-illustrate-bitcoin-cash-advantage/
Some interesting points are immediately observable. There are very little if any, small transactions on the BTC lane. On the other hand, BCH will feature many of these tiny vehicles, because it is economically viable to do so given the fees.

The single lane (BTC) is heavily congested. The ‘Segwit’ cars are amusingly trying to get in-front. Some other interesting additions include the Lightning Network ‘rail’ that’s under construction, and the closed second lane representing the failure of the 2X blocksize increase (which was supposed to happen in November). Have the sound up and you’ll hear frustrated drivers beeping at one another.

Bitcoin Cash Disadvantage
• http://nordic.businessinsider.com/a-swedish-blockchain-guru-explains-why-bitcoin-cash-is-no-cure-all-for-bitcoins-problems--/
”There can naturally be more transactions on block sizes of 8 Mb, but in practice, there is no big difference," Kempe explains, referring to less profitable and more time-consuming 'mining' in the bitcoin cash network.

"If [bitcoin cash] becomes popular, it will still be too expensive. With bigger blocks, it takes too long for bitcoin miners to ‘mine’ the currency.” In purely technical terms, the files that carry transactions will not be able to ’travel’ fast enough in the 8 Mb network. “On a global scale, many miners will have problems mining the currency,” Kempe says.

Kempe estimates that around 99 percent of blockchain-based applications he encounters cannot be run on public blockchains of the type that run bitcoin and bitcoin cash. Applications for storing patient data or food tracking, for instance, cannot tolerate transaction costs as high as those of cryptocurrencies. ”You have receipts and traceability, but if you need to pay 150 SEK ($18) every time a verification will be registered, it’s clear it won’t work.”

IN OTHER NEWS

XRP Pushes Past $3
• https://cointelegraph.com/news/ripple-pushes-past-3-reaches-almost-half-bitcoins-market-cap

Ripple (XRP), currently the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has continued its recent rally, crossing the $3 per coin mark. At press time, the altcoin was trading at an average of $3.12.

Ripple’s price has increased almost 49,000 percent over the past twelve months. The cryptocurrency passed $2 just last week, seeing a 130% increase since Dec 27. This has cemented Ripple’s number two position with a market cap of $121 bln, almost half that of Bitcoin.

Investors and cryptocurrency believers have been pursuing other altcoins recently as well, creating substantial gains in the top 30. The most notable gains include Cardano (ADA) and Stellar (XLM), which have both jumped more than 30% on the day, as well as Status (SNT), which saw an over 100 percent increase in the past 24 hours.

XRP vs XLM
• http://bitcoinist.com/ripple-vs-stellar-coin-will-win/

If Ripple is the Goldman Sachs of crypto, Stellar is its antagonist, Robin Hood, with the latter pointing out that the former is hanging onto to nearly 60% of the originally issued Ripple tokens. Which in my ledger implies they can easily manipulate their own market. For reference, 60% is a towering percentage of founder ownership.

In contrast, Stellar’s Robin Hood has bequeathed control of their excess supply of tokens to a non-profit called the Stellar Development Foundation which has no stock or profits given to individuals. Moreover, it’s backed by a benefactor, “No one has ever been fired for using IBM’s coin”. Yes, I made some of that up, but Watson ordered me to write it.

Ripple consists of ex-bankers and an advisory board of global financial institutions, while Stellar casts a group of start-up veterans like WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg Y Combinator President Sam Altman.

Dig a little deeper, and one also realizes that Ripple is funding its own competitor in Jed McCaleb, Co-Founder of Stellar.
McCaleb started out as a co-founder of Ripple but has been banished by its Sheriff and the rest of Rippleham. In a fitting twist of fate, McCabe still receives $20,000 per week from Ripple and a huge lump sum due in 2019.

Ripple (XRP) Stellar Lumens (STR)
Market Cap $84 billion $5.9 billion
Price $2.17 $0.33
Trading Volume 7.8 billion 518 million
Total Coins 100 billion 103 billion
Target Market Financial Institutions Companies & Individuals
Governance Centralized Decentralized
Transaction clearance 2- 4 seconds 2 – 4 seconds
Team Bankers Entrepreneurs
Major Partner Bank of America, Merrill Lynch IBM
Inflation Static/deflationary 1% inflation each year

Russia to Create Digital Currency
• https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/01/02/report-russia-exploring-development-cryptocurrency/

As previously mentioned The Bank of Israel, The Bank of England are creating their own cryptocurrencies.

According to the Financial Times, President Vladimir Putin (pictured, center) has given the green light to work on the establishment of the Cryptoruble. The report goes on to claim that economic adviser Sergei Glazev has told a government meeting that the Cryptoruble would be a useful tool to get around international sanctions because it would allow the government to “settle accounts with our counterparties all over the world with no regard for sanctions.” The Cryptoruble would have the same value as the ruble itself, but with restricted circulation.

African Holding Company: Ditch the Dollar!
• https://news.bitcoin.com/african-holding-company-vp-urges-central-bank-to-buy-bitcoin-and-ditch-dollar/

Concerned about the US dollar’s predicted drop in value, and many African countries relying on USD cash reserves, vice president of Groupe Nduom, a leading financial holding company, Papa-Wassa Chiefy Nduom, has taken to Linkedin and Twitter to make the case for less reliance on greenbacks and more investment in bitcoin.

Much more than a mere speculative instrument, Mr. Nduom views bitcoin as a chance for Africa to almost be borderless like the currency, building a less arbitrary group of political units, something Ghana’s independence leader referred to as “United States of Africa.” Bitcoin might also be a hedge against endemic government corruption, the sort he claims could easily steal fiat reserves. “That’s not so easy with reserves on a public blockchain that has never gone down and has the data being broadcast for free on a network of satellites,” he writes.

He limited his research to 13 African nations, English speaking mostly, and found rebalancing away from over-dependence on the dollar and more in cryptocurrencies could be very much worth the gamble. If response is any indication, his Tweets to this effect have gone viral with over 70K likes thus far.
“I will be looking for the first African Central Banker who says – I’m tired of putting my hat in my hand and begging – let’s take some risk and dig into this new global, permission-less, robust and extensible financial ecosystem. Everything we need to learn is for free on the internet,” he wrote.

Buy Alts… You’ll Be Rich
• http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/04/buy-ripple-tron-neo-xlm-get-rich-early-bitcoin-traders-7203240/

NEM, XLM, DASH, ETH, LTC, ADA, BCH, IOTA, NEO, TRON. Biggest winner out of these was NEO at 50,320%.

ARK Partnership
• https://coinidol.com/okex-and-ark-announce-partnership-with-trade-starting-swiftly/

The ARK Project and digital asset trader OKEx have partnered up, allowing ARK’s token to be traded. This opens up potential for ARK to grow increasingly popular due to its user-friendly platform that will allow for mass consumer adoption. OKEx is already a highly credible and comprehensive trading platform which offers up to 40 tradable tokens leading the cryptocurrency forward.

To raise awareness of ARK, OKEx will be holding a giveaway compiled of two stages with a total of 75,000 ARK coins. In the first stage, users who follow OKEx on various social media platforms like Facebook and Weixin will receive a code allowing for a chance to win 10,000 ARK tokens. The second phase will commence when the ARK trading volume on OKEx surpasses 10 millions tokens, all contributors to this process will have the opportunity to win a lucky draw. The remaining 65,000 tokens will be distributed to the winners. ARK wallets will be open to deposits on OKEx from December 20th, 2017 at 4:00PM (Hong Kong Time Zone).

Babb – Blockchain-Based Banking
• https://coinidol.com/okex-and-ark-announce-partnership-with-trade-starting-swiftly/

Blockchain-based banking startup BABB (Bank Account Based Blockchain) has appointed banking technology veteran, Paul Johnson who previously lead one of the UK’s leading challenger banks, Aldermore, as CIO to spearhead the development of the world’s first decentralised bank.

“I can only see blockchain technology as the next step in the evolution of payments and asset transfer in the future. The BABB proposition highlights this extremely well with the ‘everyone is a bank concept’ and I am excited to be joining the team to build this platform,” said Johnson of his new role.

BABB is developing a decentralised bank powered by blockchain technology that will enable anyone in the world access to a bank account for peer-to-peer financial services.

“Paul’s wealth of experience in planning for growth, resilience, cyber security, regulatory compliance, business operations and go-to market strategy will be of great value to BABB’s long term vision. We want to enable everyone to benefit from a banking, payments, and peer-to-peer lending services regardless of their background, location or income,” said Rushd Averroes, Founder and CEO of BABB.

With his extensive experience in working within the UK regulatory environment to deliver digital transformation for Aldermore, Johnson officially joins BABB this month as it prepares its two phase Initial Coin Offering (ICO) due to launch in January 2018. His immediate tasks will be to ensure BABB is fully technically compliant with UK banking regulations as it works towards its UK banking licence. BABB is already an FCA Authorised Payment Institution (API).

Further reading on the start of BABB can be found here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/babb-chapter-one-how-all-started-rushd-averro%C3%ABs/

Venezuela’s Petro Coin
• http://bitcoinist.com/860000-mine-venezuelan-petro/

Economically, Venezuela has been in terrible shape for a number of years. The failed socialist policies of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have destroyed the national economy, caused massive hyperinflation, and led to a humanitarian crisis where food and medicine are in short supply.

Maduro declared last December the creation of a national cryptocurrency called the Petro, and he recently announced that 860,811 young people have registered to mine the new virtual currency. This new virtual currency would allow the country to help negate the effects of US-led sanctions and would be based on the country’s stock of gold and diamond holdings, as well as over 5 billion barrels of oil.

Mining with Bodyheat – OMG Matrix.
• https://news.bitcoin.com/these-dutch-researchers-are-mining-cryptocurrencies-with-body-heat/

Manuel Beltrán, the founder of the Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO), is challenging the idea that technology cannot be sustained by our current resources, because he believes one supply — the human body — is very abundant. The institute has been running various operations that consist of researching and developing ‘biological labor’, with the current project tethered to mining cryptocurrencies. The most recent tests comprised of roughly 212 hours between many shifts and 37 workers participated in the experiment.

With a special suit and all those hours, the participants at IoHO generated 127.2 watts of power that mined 16,590 vertcoin, dash, ethereum, litecoin, startcoin, and lisk tokens. According to the researchers, humans can generate 100 watts while resting and most of the time 80 percent of the energy goes to waste.

IoHO thinks there is a great future ahead for data production labor and is heavily exploring the potential of the human body to produce capital. When mining the cryptocurrencies, ‘workers’ only have to lay down and “do nothing.” The bodysuit does all the ‘work’ and maintains their body temperature to produce human-generated data that’s rewarded in digital currencies.

Zuckerberg Coin
• https://www.bitsonline.com/mark-zuckerberg-cryptocurrencies/

“For example, one of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs decentralization. A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands. (The first four words of Facebook’s mission have always been “give people the power”.) Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force.

But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.

There are important counter-trends to this –like encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.

This will be a serious year of self-improvement and I’m looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together.”

Coinbase Not Adding New Coins
• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-04/ripple-slides-after-coinbase-says-not-adding-new-crypto-coins

Ripple, the white-hot crypto currency that more than doubled in the past week, plunged as much as 20 percent after Coinbase said it’s not adding any new coins to its exchange at this time.

Ripple fell to as low as $2.65 after reaching an all-time high of $3.30 earlier Thursday. The coin was down 1.1 percent on the day to $2.78 as of 2:52 p.m. in New York. Ripple last week surpassed ether as the world’s second-most valuable cryptocurrency after bitcoin.