Two crypto enthusiasts just made a $10,000 Bitcoin bet on the next US president using a smart contract. According to a Sept. 8 post from podcaster Marty Bent, the Bitcoin (BTC) mainnet has seen its first ever discreet log contract (DLC), which he calls “a very important moment in Bitcoin history”. Fitting in with the general theme of 2020, the smart contract is highly political. Nicolas Dorier, a man who claimed to have made BitPay obsolete as a developer of BTCPay, made a bet using a DLC about the next…
Month: September 2020
DeFi goes boom as top tokens crash by 50% in one week
The decentralized finance (DeFi) bubble appears to have popped for the time being, with half a dozen top DeFi tokens shedding half of their fiat value over the past seven days. According to crypto market data firm Messari’s list of DeFi assets, 32 of 34 markets are down over the past week — with only PowerPool (CVP) and SushiSwap (SUSHI) posting seven-day price gains. The markets hardest hit include Curve — which is down 65% this week, followed by Meta with a 58% loss, Ren with 52%, AirSwap with 51%,…
Brave browser adds new tricks to protect crypto users from phishing attacks
According to a Sept. 8 tweet from Brave, the privacy-based browser has incorporated open source solutions from cybersecurity firm PhishFort. The aim is to help prevent phishing attacks — a scam that usually involves tricking a victim into giving up personal information with a fake email that leads to a fake website. Brave stated that the firm’s software would detect crypto scams and warn users about suspicious domains. Details about the integration are scant at present, however a PhishFort report from June said that: “when the reward is as valuable…
No, a quantum computer won’t instantly reward you with 69,000 Bitcoins … yet
A Bitcoin wallet with nearly $700 million is up for grabs — but anyone intending to be a “crypto thief” and nab it will have to crack the password first. Crypto Twitter user Alon Gal has put out a call to his 29,900 followers for solutions on how to gain access to 69370.22 Bitcoin (BTC), worth roughly $695.4 million as of this writing. According to the Sept. 8 post from Gal, the wallet has been passed between hackers for the past two years without success at determining the password. Source:…
Dave Portnoy shrugs off $700K stock loss, weeks after crying over $25k Bitcoin dump
Dave Portnoy, Barstool Sports’ founder, admitted he lost $700,000 trading stocks on Sept. 8, expressing the importance of “strong hands.” “To steal a line from my crypto friends — you can’t have weak hands,” Portnoy said in a Sept. 8 Twitter video. “If you have weak hands, this game is not for you.” Weak hands refers to someone selling their trading or investing position out of fear after (or during) a price decline. Stocks have suffered declining prices recently, including today, on which Portnoy boasted of his hand strength. “Do…
‘It’s about to get very interesting,’ says Bitcoin stock-to-flow model creator
PlanB, the man behind the widely-referenced stock-to-flow Bitcoin (BTC) value charts, described exciting times ahead for the asset. “We’re four months after the halving, and it’s about to get very interesting,” anonymous Twitter analyst PlanB said in a Sept. 4 podcast interview with Peter McCormack. PlanB’s stock-to-flow, or S2F, model has tracked Bitcoin’s price activity in line with its halving events, finding rising prices following such events based on Bitcoin’s decreasing inflation rate via mining. The model predicts Bitcoin hitting near $288,000 per coin by the time its next halving arrives. Although PlanB…
Semantic debate may account for Wladimir van der Laan’s Bitcoin Core departure
On September 7, Bitcoin Core developer Wladimir van der Laan tweeted that he may be “done with coins” all together. He later confirmed to Cointelegraph that he was indeed taking a break from his duties as a Core developer and one of the custodians of the project’s Github repository. One of the factors that led him to this decision was a Twitter storm that lasted for days and was caused by the renaming of a variable that specifies a list of characters that cannot appear in filenames due to operating system…
Fueled by DeFi and ready to disrupt the status quo
Uniswap recently surpassed Coinbase Pro in trading volume, overtaking one of the most popular centralized exchanges in the space after reaching around half a billion dollars in daily volume. Although Coinbase Pro is by no means the largest exchange out there, it seems that the decentralized sector is catching up to traditional crypto trading platforms. Uniswap is a decentralized exchange and automated liquidity protocol where users can buy and sell ERC-20 tokens and supply liquidity in order to earn exchange fees. This means that the more volume exchanged on the…
A new decentralized exchange lets users trade commodity and crypto derivatives
Fetch.ai is launching Mettalex, a decentralized exchange that allows its users to trade commodity and crypto derivatives. The users will be able to gain exposure to traditional crypto trading pairs as well as commodities like gold, silver, cobalt, oil, and even the stock market indices. Humayun Sheikh, who serves as CEO to both projects, told Cointelegraph that in addition to providing exposure to new investment products for the crypto community, it presents three main competitive advantages to commodity traders: “One very key advantage for them is that they can build…
Global P2P trade volume plummets amid crypto crash
The recent crypto market slump has driven massive trade volumes on centralized exchanges, but peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platforms actually saw a sharp decline in activity. Latin-America was the only region to buck the trend. The top region for P2P trade, the United States, posted a 42% slump in peer-to-peer volume this week — plummeting from $23.4 million to nearly $13.6 million. Sub-Saharan African has been the second-largest region for P2P trade after North America for much of 2020. It saw P2P volume fall 32%, from roughly $12.9 million to $8.7…