As Western regulators sit on the sidelines of the cryptocurrency industry, Binance, one of the fastest growing exchanges, records a Q1 profit higher than that of Deusche Bank. Story below.
Deutsche Bank recorded a profit of $146 million in 2018 Q1, according to CNBC and Reuters. First shared by @alistairmilne
— Joseph Young (@iamjosephyoung) April 26, 2018
Binance recorded a profit of $200 million in 2018 Q1.
Cryptocurrency exchanges are beating the world's biggest banks in profitability. Insane.
Another perspective on cryptocurrencies and regulation
(MIT Media Lab, by Neha Narula)
"Regarding cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology more broadly, there are three important, interrelated things to consider: (1) Our high-level public policy goals like investor protection and market integrity, (2) the specific regulations we use to try to achieve them, and (3) the way market participants actually implement systems that comply with those rules."
Whether Ether is a security
(Preston Byrne)
"Summing up, unless we can show that this Ether has been sold into the wider market, this chart lends itself to the proposition that Ethereum is not as decentralized as we might hope. If true, this fact likely has legal consequences and rather undermines the 'Decentralisation Defence' being put to the regulators by industry lobbyists."
"Also, I've already contacted the SEC, FBI and other federal authorities regarding their activities on the market. I have all intentions of making an in-person visit either today (April 25th, 2018) or tomorrow to deliver all of these screenshots."
"Unfortunately, we are unlikely to see any comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the near future. The states are more proactive—for example, California has a ballot initiative called the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which would install GDPR-like requirements as to consent, disclosure and transparency for California residents."
A reflection on Microsoft Office
1/ It’s a toy. It’s the next big thing. Tech is magical. Tech is trivial. When talking about “blockchain” it is easy to debate in abstract.
— Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) April 26, 2018
But what about when you’re living a potential technology transition/disruption.
A story about Microsoft Office.
NVT and overconfidence bias
(Qiao Wang)
"So it turns out that NVT is a statistically significant predictor of 1-day return. (For people who have taken stat 101, the p-value here is 0.007). And the coefficient is negative, which makes sense: if NVT is high, we expect the market to fall. But here is the catch. You are right only 55.5% of the time."
Bitcoin Q&A: Lightning's security model
Online signature services are broken
(Hacking, distributed, by Emin Gün Sirer)
"The rise of cryptocurrencies has forced us to build key management infrastructure. Hardware wallets, whose sole function is to carry keys securely and issue signatures, are maturing, albeit slowly."
"This release of dcrd contains significant performance enhancements, infrastructure improvements, improved access to chain-related information for providing better SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) support, and other quality assurance changes. A significant amount of infrastructure work has also been done this release cycle towards being able to support several planned scalability optimizations."
Blockchains should not be democracies
(Hackernoon, by Hasseb Qureshi)
"Perhaps someday blockchains will be robust and stable enough to no longer need the guiding hand of capable technologists. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon. This technology is moving at too fast a pace, and any blockchain that gets mired in governance wars is simply going to be left behind."
Giving better code reviews
(Joel Kemp)
"We have to be pragmatic though. Issues with a hotfix can be addressed in a follow-up diff. Have we hit the point of diminishing returns with our comments? Are we spinning our wheels with subjective nitpicks?"
A method to fix arithmetic overflow issue in ETH
As it's Yet Another ETH Exploit time, let's propose a very simple way to combat the arithmetic overflow issue with bounded types. So simple that you can implement it in @rustlang today with zero runtime cost.
— Peter Todd (@peterktodd) April 25, 2018
tl;dr: The operation uint8 + uint should have the return type uint9. https://t.co/Do1lXFh5fk
We have learned that Monero Cash (CXMR)'s website is instructing you to import private keys or send Monero (XMR) into their closed-source wallet to get coins. Don't do this. We have added a red flag warning and reclassified the project. @cxmrcurrency @fluffypony @monerocurrency
— Forkdrop (@forkdrop) April 26, 2018
The slow but sure return of AMD in the datacenter
(The Next Platform, by Timothy Prickett Morgan)
"Gaming and cryptocurrency mining both helped pump up the Radeon products, too, which had better than seasonal growth. Su said that customers are testing the Radeon Instinct cards for machine learning workloads, and that it has the 'Navi' kickers to the Vega GPU accelerators running on Instinct cards in the labs and will have them shipping in samples later this year. The Navi GPUs use the 7 nanometer processes from GlobalFoundries, a big shrink from the 14 nanometer processes used with the Vega GPUs, and not only will pack more punch but will have optimizations aimed specifically at machine learning."