On today's episode:
We’ll do yet another update on the BTC Bitcoin price technical analysis
We’ll briefly touch on a very interesting situation playing out on the Steem blockchain right now that I could really use some help with
And the main story for today is an Emergency security issue right in the very core of most modern computer processors.
Today’s episode is brought you to by Ledger hardware wallets. Secure your cryptocurrencies today:
https://www.ledgerwallet.com/r/d1da
Follow me on Steemit and earn crypto for your best comments: https://steemit.com/@marketingmonk
Story - Market Roundup 1:22
Charts
Bitcoin is testing 14,376 for the second day running, so far it’s holding with a little candle tail hanging below.
Nice tight trading range for today and yesterday, good to see because it means the market is taking its time to decide which way it wants to go. It’s always good to pause after breakout, do a civilised test of the price that broke and then make the next decisive move.
That’s what I see happening here.
https://onchainfx.com/
Biggest winners
Tron / TRX up 97%
NEM / XEM up 45%
Ripple number 2 coin by market cap based on coins in circulation, and the number 1 coin if we multiply the coin price by the total supply of Ripple.
*Click heading on OCFX to sort coins
Biggest losers
Bitcoin Cash / BCH down 15%
ByteBall / GBYTE down 9.5%
Dash gets pushed outside the top 10 due to the big increase in the price of TRON.
Tron is a Chinese smart contract platform for developing decentralisation and a self proclaimed Web 4.0 technology.
According to their website they are aiming to build a system that allows people to distribution digital content and entertainment for free using a blockchain and decentralised storage technology.
They also say that the first TRON compatible App will be Peiwo, which is this thing https://www.peiwo.cn/
Peiwo apparently already has 10 million users so Tron had better have sufficient capacity to handle them is all I can say.
Story - Steem Drama 7:38
I really wanted to talk about the Steem blockchain today but the security breach is so important I’ve got to focus on that immediately.
Just briefly though there is a very interesting experiment that is playing out right now on the Steem blockchain.
It’s basically putting the community powered delegated proof of stake system through the ringer to see how it handles a crisis.
One user i posting 10 times per day and being upvoted by a couple of whales resulting in an abuse of the reward pool.
A war of downvotes has now ensued that I have also become tangled in.
However I’m more than willing to take a hit on my personal Steem rewards if it stops one individual from clearly abusing the system and upsetting the wider community.
As far as I can tell a number of good whales have come to my aid out of the blue so I appreciate them for that.
I’ll endeavour to go into detail on this situation in a future video but for now if you’re not already following me on Steem, please do because your upvotes will help prevent retaliation against my objection to this users abusive behaviour.
Story - Emergency Security Breach That Affects EVERYONE
https://spectreattack.com/ 11:01
Now onto the emergency announcement for the day.
I’ll start with the solution… store your major cryptocurrency holdings in a hardware wallet.
There’s a reason I went with Ledger as the sponsor today.
If you have your funds in a Ledger wallet like I do, you can respond to these security breaches with the emotion of curiosity rather than panic because no matter how severe the breach your money is safe.
None of the three big players, Microsoft, Intel or AMD mention this on their homepage. Maybe to prevent confusion.
They could at least give some basic preventative advice.
Most likely Microsoft will push a Windows update to deal with this in the short term, however the problem is at the most fundamental hardware level.
*Watch the 20 second video on the Spectre Attack page
https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/584653
CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University…
Suggest that the solution to this security problem is to replace your computer processor. The question is with what?
An AMD processor it seems:
https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution
Security flaws in software are more easy to fix via an update you just download, that’s why we call it SOFTware. So any of the software systems listed on:
https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/584653
Will no doubt be handled by a software update.
However, the hardware is physical and thus not as easily fixed. Hence the advice to replace your processor.
So check which processor your device has and then see if it’s on the affected list, it most likely is.
One thing I will say though to make you feel better is that there is something very specific that has to happen in order for this security issue to be exploited.
