If Your Crypto Doesn’t Have a Mobile Wallet It’s Not Really a Currency
Anyone can create a cryptocurrency. It’s a surprisingly simple process, especially if you copy the codebase of an existing coin and give it a new name. That’s how many of the most popular cryptocurrencies such as litecoin were born. But creating a cryptocurrency and mining the genesis block isn’t enough: until that coin has its own mobile wallet and can be used to transact, it doesn’t deserve to be called a cryptocurrency.
Also read: The Bitcoin.com Podcast Network Presents: This Week In Bitcoin
Real Cryptos Reside on Your Cellphone
The internet was born on desktop devices but it now resides in our pockets – or more often our palms, since we rarely stop using our mobile devices long enough these days to put them away. When Satoshi published his white paper in October 2008, desktop was still the preferred means of doing business on the web, but all that was about to change. 14 months earlier, Steve Jobs had unveiled the iPhone, ushering in the stirrings of what would become the mobile revolution.
There was just one problem: most of these new cryptocurrencies weren’t actually spendable. They were more like future currencies, that would be usable in around 18 months’ time when the development team got round to releasing Android and iOS wallets. Bitcoin might be expensive to send and ripple might be pointless to send, but at least they can be used as a form of currency, P2P or P2B. Good luck transforming the lives of the unbanked with your “cheap and fast” transactions that can only be sent from desktop wallet to desktop wallet.
iOS Ain’t Easy
Ripple, cardano, stellar, IOTA, and EOS all lack proprietary iOS wallets, with ripple and stellar at least spendable using third party wallets. Venture outside the top 10 and very few coins have a mobile wallet; monero for example is still waiting on full iOS support. Mobile wallets take time and tinkering to perfect, so it’s not the fault of development teams that they’re unable to push these apps out overnight. But until they do, all their talk of being able to support thousands of transactions a second and enable peer to peer exchange is just that – talk.
Do you agree that cryptocurrencies without mobile support aren’t proper currencies? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, and Wikipedia.
Bitcoin Games is a provably fair gaming site with 99% or better expected returns. Try it out here.
The post If Your Crypto Doesn’t Have a Mobile Wallet It’s Not Really a Currency appeared first on Bitcoin News.
80 Percent of the Total Bitcoin Supply Have Now Been Mined
This weekend marks a milestone for bitcoin as 80 percent of the currency has now been mined into circulation, this means there’s only 20 percent left to mine. Satoshi Nakamoto’s protocol was one of the first to introduce digital scarcity and soon enough the digital asset will become even harder to obtain.
Also read: How to Dollar-Cost Average Buy and Hodl Cryptocurrency Like A Boss
There Are Only 4.2 Million Bitcoins Left to Mine
Solving the General’s Problem
This has given individuals reason to believe that Satoshi solved one of the hardest computational equations, the Byzantine General’s problem, a security flaw that had plagued computer scientists for decades. Essentially the problem exists with distributed networks as the issue brings certain faults or security flaws making it easy to attack. This, in turn, makes it hard for protocols to prove something because there is an unsolvability proof within the network.
With Satoshi’s Proof-of-Work in the original bitcoin protocol, the economic measure makes it difficult to attack by making threats to the network costly, and time-consuming. For the first time ever in the world of digital computing, Satoshi introduced an asset that couldn’t be copied or double spent. And at the same time, he limited the supply which also introduced digital scarcity like no other technology before it.
Digital Scarcity and the Next Halving
Because there are only 21 million bitcoins the cryptocurrency’s limited availability make the asset harder to acquire the more scarce it becomes. In most cases when an asset is limited and resources are harder to come by, the supply causes demand for the market. The supply of bitcoin shows a significant gap between how many there are and those who want to obtain some. A great majority of bitcoiners believe digital scarcity will make bitcoin more valuable over time, and with 16.8Mn mined so far it will get harder.
In addition to the difficulty in accessibility miners themselves are going to have to up their processing power constantly. In two years or less depending on hashrate speed, the next miner reward halving is approaching. This means instead of miners getting 12.5 BTC for every block they mine they will get 6.25 BTC in two years time. This network consensus agreement of a halving every four years will make bitcoins more difficult to obtain even for the large warehouses all over the world filled with data processors. Every one of them and ASIC technology itself will have to progress for mining operations to continue profiting. Of course, the price per bitcoin should also be higher than the cost to mine the currency as well.
Unlike Ripple’s 100 Billion There Will Only Be 21 Million Bitcoins
Another thing to consider while observing the vast blockchain environment is that Satoshi’s creation unlike the 1,300 other cryptocurrencies in existence has only 21 million. Other digital currencies have billions already in circulation and billions more to come using other less tested consensus mechanisms like Proof-of-Stake. So in essence bitcoin’s inventor created something unique and different than the digital goods we all swap today. Unlike your MP3s or digital movies, bitcoins cannot be copied, and this weekend 16.8 million of them have been mined, hoarded and a large number of them have been lost. To many cryptocurrency investors, this makes Satoshi’s invention a very valuable digital asset, unlike anything the world has ever seen.
What do you think about 80 percent of the bitcoins being mined into existence this weekend? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Images via New Line Cinema, WingNut Films, Pixabay, bitcoinblockhalf.com, the bitcoin white paper, and blockchain.info.
At Bitcoin.com there’s a bunch of free helpful services. For instance, check out our Tools page!
The post 80 Percent of the Total Bitcoin Supply Have Now Been Mined appeared first on Bitcoin News.
This Week in Bitcoin: Kraken, Korea and a Whole Lotta Crazy
This week in bitcoin was all about Korea, although every week in bitcoin is all about Korea. Markets dropping? Blame Korea. Markets soaring? Credit Korea. Zero fee trading sends a pointless altcoin pumping? You bet it comes from Korea. While real news, fake news, and news whose legitimacy is a matter of dispute emanated from the east, there were big stories breaking stateside, like the Miami bitcoin conference that can’t take bitcoin.
Also read: The Bitcoin.com Podcast Network Presents: This Week In Bitcoin
You Heard It Here First
We’re not prone to back slapping at news.Bitcoin.com, as smugness is never a good look. It would be fair to say however that a lot of this week’s biggest bitcoin stories started here before being picked up by the mainstream media, including European bank Nordea banning employees from owning cryptocurrency. Welcome to Miami where your dirty crypto’s no good, we reported, in another scoop, after the city’s annual bitcoin conference stopped accepting bitcoin, citing fees and congestion.
Bitcoin haters had a field day with that one including famed economist Paul Krugman, which gave us an opportunity to dredge up his most famous quote for posterity:
By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
That one never tires. It wasn’t just bitcoin conferences that declared they were no longer handling bitcoin; Microsoft also announced that it had stopped accepting bitcoin for similar reasons, before reneging and declaring that it’s now accepting bitcoin again. Glad we’ve cleared that one up.
Korean Gloom and Japanese Cheer
There were so many stories emanating from South Korea this week in bitcoin it’s hard to know where to start. It all started with officials urging other nations to support them in curbing crypto trading, and from there morphed into the country’s banks being forced to stop serving South Korean crypto exchanges. For more information on South Korean developments – as well as those originating in Brazil, Venezuela, and Japan – our trusty scribe Kevin Helms has got you covered. It was he who broke this week’s most uplifting story, about Japan’s virtual currency girls, writing:
Their songs incorporate reminders, advice, and warnings related to cryptocurrency trading. The girls receive their salaries in bitcoin and the show’s tickets and merchandise are also sold for the cryptocurrency.
Rumors of China banning bitcoin mining and South Korea shutting down exchanges for being complicit in money laundering have abounded. Despite these stories having been refuted or at least shown to be exaggerated, the fear has manifested in the markets, with bitcoin dropping to around $13,000 at its lowest point, and many of this year’s most hyped altcoins – ripple, tron, and stellar – losing as much as 25% of their value.
Ripplets were still seething over last week’s story about XRP gateways freezing customer funds, and thus didn’t take kindly to Monday’s piece on vaporware – cryptocurrency projects with market caps worth billions of dollars but no working product – in which tron, ripple, verge, and cardano were pilloried. That was this week’s second most popular story, second only to one about bitcoin diamond casually doing a 40x – and then predictably plummeting.
Release the Kraken
On Thursday, Kraken went down and then stayed down for no less than 40 hours while it chased down a pesky bug in the system. Upon its return, Kraken promised fee-free trading for all by means of apology. 48 hours since returning to life, Kraken still hasn’t enabled withdrawals however. It wasn’t the only exchange to experience problems this week. A number of cryptocurrency exchange oddities have surfaced lately, although the craziest tales, as always, come from the weird and wonderful world of ICOs.
The trouble with all this ICO madness is that applying rational thinking to projects doesn’t always work. This week, for example, the Peatcoin ICO was launched, promising “Tokenized investment in peat processing and extraction”. It would be easy to dismiss the project out of hand, as this writer did with Dentacoin earlier this year. The trouble is, the dental industry’s proprietary token now has a $2.5 billion market cap that fleetingly placed it higher than Zcash earlier this week. What a time to be alive.
See you next week for more strange stories from the world of bitcoin. In the meantime, don’t forget to check out the new Bitcoin.com podcast (just click on the embed link above). It rocks. You rock. We all rock.
What was your favorite story from this week in bitcoin? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
Keep track of the bitcoin exchange rate in real-time.
The post This Week in Bitcoin: Kraken, Korea and a Whole Lotta Crazy appeared first on Bitcoin News.
Pineapple Will Match up to $4M in Bitcoin to Test Curing PTSD With Psychedelic Drug
The bitcoin charity Pineapple Fund has already donated $1 million to aid in the testing of MDMA as a treatment for PTSD. It is now challenging the cryptocurrency community to donate more, and pledged to match donations up to $4 million.
Also Read: Pineapple Fund Donates $5 Million in Bitcoin as Seed Capital for the Poor
Curing PTSD with MDMA
Pine, the anonymous bitcoin whale behind the fund, commented: “I believe we, the cryptocurrency community, can fully fund Phase 3 trials. Prescription MDMA could be a gift to this world from the bitcoin community. Let’s make MDMA medicine a reality, and give the gift of an enjoyable life to those suffering from PTSD. If you believe that psychedelic drugs can have incredible therapeutic potential, then I believe this is one of the highest impact projects today.”
New Money, New Ideas
Mainly known as an illicit party drug under the names Ecstasy, Molly and others, MDMA still doesn’t have any accepted medical applications and is deemed illegal for personal use in most countries. While some established charities would have difficulties associating themselves or their donors with such an experiment, a fund created by an anonymous person will have no such qualms.
Other recent Pineapple Fund donation recipients include: Quill, which got $1 million to help them develop a new open source educational model that teaches kids critical thinking and science comprehension; Possible, an organization delivering integrated and scalable healthcare in Nepal which also got $1 million; Software Freedom Conservancy, home to projects like Git, Homebrew, QEMU, and Selenium; and Wings for Conservation, which is providing aerial support against elephant poachers in Chad. Last month the fund also donated $5 million to test universal basic income in Africa.
What other good causes should the bitcoin community should get behind? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
Want to create your own secure cold storage paper wallet? Check our tools section.
The post Pineapple Will Match up to $4M in Bitcoin to Test Curing PTSD With Psychedelic Drug appeared first on Bitcoin News.
Venezuela Urges 10 Other Countries to Adopt Its Oil-Backed Cryptocurrency
Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro has called for 10 other countries to adopt his planned oil-backed cryptocurrency, the petro. This move follows the country’s parliament declaring the issuance of this new currency illegal.
Also read: South Korea Urges 23 Countries, EU, and IMF to Collaborate on Curbing Crypto Trading
Maduro’s Proposal
Maduro held a meeting of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Treaty of Commerce of the Peoples (Alba – TCP) on Friday. Alba consists of Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Grenada, and Venezuela.
During the meeting, “Maduro called on the countries of the Alba to assume together the creation of the cryptocurrency, the petro,” Prensa Latina reported.
“I call on us to assume the petro as an integration currency of our peoples,” Efecto Cocuyo quoted him, adding that it is “imperative” to take the proposal with “maximum priority.” Maduro was then quoted by El Comercio:
I put on the table, brother governments of the ALBA, the proposal of the cryptocurrency, the petro, so that we assume it as one of the projects of the integration of the 21st century in a bold way, but also in a creative way.
An Ongoing Issue
Since its announcement in early December, Venezuela’s national cryptocurrency has been a topic of controversy. After assigning over 5 billion barrels of crude oil to back the new currency, Maduro ordered the issue of the first 100 million petros as well as organized a meeting of miners.
The petro is expected to launch in 6 weeks and will be pre-mined, Superintendent of Cryptocurrencies Carlos Vargas announced this week.
However, just one day before Vargas’ announcement, the Venezuelan Constituent National Assembly declared the cryptocurrency illegal. Parliamentarians unanimously voted “absolute nullity on the issuance of the petro cryptocurrency,” news.Bitcoin.com previously reported.
In a recent workshop hosted by the Central Bank of Venezuela called “The role of Venezuelan youth in disruptive technologies,” a response to the Assembly’s decision was prepared. On Friday, the Minister for Youth and Sports, Pedro Infante, said Venezuelan youth will propose to the Assembly “to create a special commission that will be in charge of debating the proposals presented by the various sectors, to carry out the financial system of the cryptocurrency Petro.” He elaborated, as posted on the Ministry of Communications website:
We are proposing that the ANC [Constituent National Assembly] has to set up a special commission to deal with the cryptocurrency issue. Appoint a commission with groups of experts to constantly debate to see what legislation is needed.
What do you think of Maduro asking 10 other countries to join in on the petro? Do you think they will adopt it? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock and the Venezuelan government.
Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.
The post Venezuela Urges 10 Other Countries to Adopt Its Oil-Backed Cryptocurrency appeared first on Bitcoin News.
Bitcoin Cash Miners Process Big Blocks Past 24h – Volume Approaches Litecoin
About 24-hours ago bitcoin cash (BCH) miners were processing a ton of large blocks between 2-8MB in size. Fees have remained considerably low, and the bitcoin cash daily transaction volume is nearing the same amount of transactions as the litecoin network.
Also read: Japan’s DMM Bitcoin Exchange Opens for Business With 7 Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin Cash Miners Are Clearing 8MB Blocks In One Fell Swoop
Bitcoin cash miners have been processing more larger blocks than usual over the past 24-hours, and many of them have been 8MB in size. There have been roughly 34,352 BCH blocks mined since August 1 and BCH is 8,714 blocks ahead of the bitcoin core chain. According to statistical data websites like Johoe’s mempool page, 2-8MB blocks have been clearing the BCH mempool (transaction queue) consistently. Over the past six months, the median BCH transaction (tx) size of 226-bytes costs $0.01-0.02 per tx. Average BCH fees have never exceeded more than 11 cents for median 226 sized transactions.
Skeptics Say No One Uses It But BCH Daily Transaction Volume Is Catching Up With the Litecoin Network
The bitcoin cash community has been excited about mining pools processing larger sized blocks over the past day. Mining pools processing 2-8MB blocks include Antpool, Viabtc, BTC.top, and four other BCH mining operations. Bitcoin cash block intervals have been taking place roughly every 10-20 minutes according to Coin Dance Cash statistics.
With fees so low, and the BCH mempool clearing so quickly many skeptics say the BCH network isn’t used much. However, the bitcoin cash 24-hour transaction rate has been climbing exponentially, and after six months of use, the network is close to being on par with the litecoin network’s daily transaction rate. In fact, the BCH daily transaction rate eclipses nearly 90 percent of the 1,300 other digital assets listed on Coinmarketcap.
Bitcoin Core: $15-50 Transactions at Any Given Time and Over 100,000 Unconfirmed Transactions Never Clear
At the time of writing the BCH transaction queue has only 10,000 unconfirmed transactions in the mempool. Meanwhile, the bitcoin core blockchain’s mempool is full and has been for weeks on end. This weekend’s bitcoin core unconfirmed transaction count is considered low but still has over 157,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to be processed.
Just 2-3 weeks prior, when the price of BTC was closer to $19K, those numbers were upwards of 250,000 to a 300,000 all-time high. At the time users were paying over 1,000 satoshis per byte, whereas at the moment most BTC users are spending an average of 500 satoshis/byte. This means using the bitcoin core network the median transaction size of 226 bytes results in a fee of 113,000 satoshis or $16 per transaction.
Multiple Inputs Make BTC Transactions Even More Costly
Over the past few weeks, the bitcoin core mempool has not dropped lower than 100,000 backed up transactions which has kept the fee market above $15 and upwards of $50 in some cases. Further, the $16 applies to only 226-byte transactions which typically have very little inputs. Bitcoin core transactions with multiple inputs (a feed of data) will charge a lot more for the fee, and some businesses are paying thousands of dollars to send funds. BCH transactions with multiple inputs and more than 226-bytes cost only a few pennies more to process.
A Great Example of Big Blocks in the Wild
The past 24-hours of big block mining has been a great example of seeing the chain operate this way. People can see how it affects the fee market, block intervals, and the processing of unconfirmed transactions in an on-chain environment. In addition to the bigger blocks since the hard fork, last November the BCH chain has kept an almost perfect profit parity with the BTC chain. This means the wild fluctuations between block intervals are gone, and miners are not bouncing back and forth between chains these days keeping things more consistent.
What do you think about bitcoin cash miners processing 2-8MB blocks over the past 24-hours? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments below.
Images via Pixabay, Johoe’s Mempool, Bitinfocharts.com, Blockchain.info, and Coin Dance Cash statistics.
Have you seen our new widget service? It allows anyone to embed informative Bitcoin.com widgets on their website.
The post Bitcoin Cash Miners Process Big Blocks Past 24h – Volume Approaches Litecoin appeared first on Bitcoin News.
Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/