13 November 2017 | SUBSCRIBE
You may not realise, but blockchain is in the middle of a full blown war. Billions have been won and lost this week, in a whole series of tactical moves in the war for control over the future of… well, no one can even agree on what that future should be. That’s half the issue - bitcoin can’t be everything.
The cancellation of segwit2x - a proposed bitcoin fork set to happen this coming week - has seen $20 billion wiped off bitcoin’s market cap, whilst bitcoin cash (which shares more characteristics with the proposed segwit2x fork), was at one point up $30billion, or 4X it’s market cap.
I’m not sure how anyone can truly still believe these blockchains are any different to the centralised governments or companies that have come before - currently. If you don’t think this is about money, power, and control, and you don’t think the game is oh-not-so-very-different to the world it’s attempting to replace - just with even less transparency - then, I’m not sure we are watching the same show!
---
We’ve also lost ~1M ether in the Parity ‘hack’ detailed in #disasteroftheweek, which will, I believe, actually highlight the maturity of the Ethereum ecosystem versus when the DAO (loss of 3.6M ether) occurred. When that happened, Ethereum was forked, to recover the funds.
That is entirely possible now, but it won’t happen. Ethereum is a different beast - processing ~500k transactions/day versus ~40k transactions/day at the time of the DAO. It’s implausible to roll back several million transactions for such a relatively small amount.
But the questions remains - what size loss will result in a renege on the rules? Because there is a number, as, if 100% was lost, Ethereum would be over. But how about if 5% was lost, or 10%?
As history, and blockchain has shown, the rules are there to be broken, repeatedly, when the situation serves someone so.
More than $300m of cryptocurrency has been lost after a curious developer accidentally took control of Parity wallets, and proceeded to send the funds into ether - I mean, the ether - that unknown place that you can never return from - not the currency.This would be the second hack to impact Parity after $30 million of ether were stolen in July. And there will be more, it will just be the magnitude of severity, not whether they will occur.
Last week highlights:
Upcoming:
Guide of what bitcoin forks are and why they happen. The big paradigm of tokenization of securities. STARKs, Part I: Proofs with Polynomials by Vitalik Buterin. Read more about Trade, the new blockchain trading platform.
Blockspot Conference 2017 - Lisbon, PT - November 13, 2017
Blockchain for Wall Street - New York, U.S.A - November 14, 2017
Digital Commodities Summit - London, UK - November 14, 2017
Finance Magnates London Summit 2017 - London, UK - November 14-15, 2017
Blockchain in Healthcare - Boston, U.S.A - November 16, 2017
Follow us on Steemit: https://steemit.com/@the-reserve
Follow us on FB: https://www.facebook.com/BReserve/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Blockchain_Res
Follow us on Medium: https://medium.com/the-reserve
© Copyright 2017 Blockchain Reserve Limited.
