Story - Ethereum Community Reject Hard Fork To Recover 500,000 Ether
https://themerkle.com/parity-will-not-pursue-hard-fork-to-unfreeze-500000-ether/
So just a quick back story to get everyone on the same page.
Parity technologies created a multi signature Ethereum wallet based on some code that the Ethereum foundation wrote and the community checked.
Parity made some further developments to it in their own version which turned out to have some bugs and security flaws.
As the story goes some ‘amateaur’ programmer managed to accidentally run a kill function that caused the smart contract to delete some of its own code.
Some of the code that was deleted was the feature that allows Ether to be withdrawn from these multi signature wallets.
Several ICOs including Iconomi now collectively have 500,000 Ether in these multi signature wallets with no way to withdraw or move the funds.
At today’s price of approx $800 that’s $400m.
The update today is that unlike when Ethereum hard forked to restore the funds stolen from The DAO, this time the Ethereum community has rejected the idea of doing a hard fork to forcibly re-insert the deleted withdrawal code and store the functionality to the multi sig wallet.
One of the most appealing features about a blockchain is it’s immutability, once data is saved it’s permanent and you can trust it 100%.
When Ethereum hard forked and basically re-wrote history to fix The DAO issue, it caused so much controversy that it gave birth to Ethereum Classic, which maintains the original version of history unchanged.
The bottom line is that this 500,000 Ether is still locked inside this smart contract with no way to get it out.
I’m glad that the Ethereum community has decided not to hard fork this time, however with Ethereum averaging 1m transactions per day now, it’s almost impossible to change history again.
There’s too much activity on the network now.
What do you think? How would you suggest they fix this? Is Parity Technologies even obligated to fix this? Let me know in the comments.
Story - Central Banks Will Add Bitcoin To Their Core Asset Holding In 2018
https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchaininfo-ceo-central-banks-will-hold-crypto-in-reserve-in-2018
This is accord to PEter Smith the CEO of Blockchain.info.
He said this in an interview on CNBC.
He said that in 2018 we will see central banks starting to hold digital currencies on their balance sheet alongside existing holdings of gold and various fiat currencies.
Those purchases will no doubt be done over the counter so they won’t show up on any exchange.
Peter also said following the acquisition of Bitcoin on central banking balance sheets he expects central banks to start issuing their own digital assets.
To my mind, the only real way to guarantee people will use the central bank tokens is to make it a legal requirement and then ban the alternatives.
So we’ll see what happens.
I think banning decentralised cryptocurrencies will just cause tons of people to run to private coins like Monero.
Story - Japanese Car Dealers Surge Ahead With Bitcoin Adoption
https://news.bitcoin.com/major-japanese-automotive-group-and-dealerships-embracing-bitcoin/
While it seems to be nothing but regulation and resistance to crypto in Europe and America, Japan is busy getting on with boost Bitcoins fundamentals.
Japan’s largest BTC exchange by volume, BitFlyer has just been appointed by Idom Inc to enable Bitcoin payments at its car dealerships across Japan.
They are starting with 26 dealerships and then rolling it out the their other 550 locations across the country.
The company has been around since 1994 and also owns a majority stake in an Australian car dealership Buick Holdings.
I reported on Japanese company GMO Internet starting to pay it’s employees in Bitcoin up to a limit of about $880…
Well this car dealership is going to accept payments of up to 100 million yen which is approx $888,000.
These stories are important because real world adoption is the only way to really secure the Bitcoin bubble from bursting and causing a significant crash in the price.
It’s just a question on whether adoption will happen fast enough and whether the Bitcoin network can handle the transaction volume.
