Cropcoin(CROP)

The past couple of years have witnessed the cropping up of AI solutions across various sectors. Businesses have been leveraging AI tools to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and occasionally improve bottom lines. In a survey Forbes ran on the application of AI in the workforce, a whopping 64% of respondents anticipate that AI will improve […]

Tune.FM provides musicians with a platform to receive micropayments for streaming in its native JAM token (JAM).

In the fast-paced world of Web3, there's a new crop of startups that are ready to make a name for themselves in 2024.

According to data from the Token Unlocks web app, the unlock will occur this coming September 1, 2023. These 1.15 billion tokens will be worth approximately $57.5 million as of writing, as HBAR is currently trading at $0.05 according data from CoinMarketCap. Data also indicates that roughly 23.9% of the tokens will be allocated for ecosystem and open source development, 22.3% for purchase agreements, 14.8% on network governance and operations, and 7.7% for initial development costs and licensing. Despite initial challenges towards the end of the Q1 2023 due to an exploit in the Hedera mainnet, HBAR has seen a surge over the past two months. This is due to the recent integration of Hedera’s instant payment platform Dropp into the U.S. Federal Reserve’s FedNow platform as a service provider. FedNow introduced Dropp as an alternative to credit card payments, offering merchants the ability to accept small-value digital purchases without the burden of costly transaction fees. Dropp supports micropayments using HBAR, as well as the U.S. dollar and Circle's USDC, providing a pay-by-bank option for these transactions. Hedera has prided itself as the only public ledger to use the hashgraph consensus, making it a decentralized, open-source, proof-of-stake, EVM-compatible public ledger, using a leaderless consensus algorithm. This confers the network with the highest level of security and performance theoretically possible. Recerntly, it has also integrated ChatGPT for a more streamlined asset management and monitoring. It has also seen its userbase jump almost 300% from 3,500 to 13,500 by Q2 2023, year to-date, signalling . While the current metrics for the HBAR token warrant a cautious optimism, the potentialities latent in its integration of AI and the blockchain remain areas for speculation and enthusiasm. Investors and users should keep an eye on Hedera’s future plans after the unlock. Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

According to data from the Token Unlocks web app, the unlock will occur this coming September 1, 2023. These 1.15 billion tokens will be worth approximately $57.5 million as of writing, as HBAR is currently trading at $0.05 according data from CoinMarketCap. Data also indicates that roughly 23.9% of the tokens will be allocated for ecosystem and open source development, 22.3% for purchase agreements, 14.8% on network governance and operations, and 7.7% for initial development costs and licensing. Despite initial challenges towards the end of the Q1 2023 due to an exploit in the Hedera mainnet, HBAR has seen a surge over the past two months. This is due to the recent integration of Hedera’s instant payment platform Dropp into the U.S. Federal Reserve’s FedNow platform as a service provider. FedNow introduced Dropp as an alternative to credit card payments, offering merchants the ability to accept small-value digital purchases without the burden of costly transaction fees. Dropp supports micropayments using HBAR, as well as the U.S. dollar and Circle's USDC, providing a pay-by-bank option for these transactions. Hedera has prided itself as the only public ledger to use the hashgraph consensus, making it a decentralized, open-source, proof-of-stake, EVM-compatible public ledger, using a leaderless consensus algorithm. This confers the network with the highest level of security and performance theoretically possible. Recerntly, it has also integrated ChatGPT for a more streamlined asset management and monitoring. It has also seen its userbase jump almost 300% from 3,500 to 13,500 by Q2 2023, year to-date, signalling . While the current metrics for the HBAR token warrant a cautious optimism, the potentialities latent in its integration of AI and the blockchain remain areas for speculation and enthusiasm. Investors and users should keep an eye on Hedera’s future plans after the unlock. Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Nearly 30 fake PYUSD tokens cropped up in the wake of PayPal’s most recent announcement.

Blockchains’ tracing capacities can help certify that crops weren’t grown by razing woodlands or harvested with child labor.

Censo is the latest in a crop of cheap, open-source options for organizations looking to store digital assets.

According to my meticulous calculations, we are about 3,542 to-be-mined Bitcoin blocks away from the lifting of the red, velvet curtain at the Crypto movie premiere on 12 April. That means approximately 44,280 Bitcoin will be rewarded between now and the premiere, and at current market prices, that cryptocurrency cornucopia could be worth some USD 175.3 million – a not-so-paltry sum that would actually be a nice global box office rake for this fintech flick. Lionsgate Home Entertainment might agree with me. You see, a closer examination of Crypto’s production team reveals that Lionsgate is the big name distributing the movie to US theatres. Yes – that Lionsgate! With thematic thespian thrillers including American Psycho, Crash, The Bank Job, Divergent, and Robin Hood as titles in their hallowed Hollywood history, Crypto could logically be the next blockbuster-to-be in that series. Perhaps Patrick Bateman checks his digital wallet every morning after doing 1,000 crunches, or maybe Jason Statham’s Terry Leather character is now drilling into safety deposit boxes looking for crypto enthusiasts’ 24 seed words. It’s a damn good thing US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin occupies his present position in a building adjacent to Donald Trump’s White House. In a not-so-distant past, Mnuchin founded Dune Entertainment which financed the X-Men franchise and Avatar. He also served as Executive Producer of The Lego Movie, American Sniper, Entourage, and Wonder Woman, among many notable others. Had he not taken the road less taken, Mnuchin could be the one producing Crypto, rather than advocating cryptocurrency regulations at the Group of Twenty. The irony is almost too thick to contemplate and appreciate. While we’re on the subject of the glowing New Yorker who inhabits the building next to Mnuchin’s office, is it my imagination or does the 2-minute, 17-seconds trailer for Crypto resemble certain aspects of the slow motion train crash-of-a-movie at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that the entire world is tuned into every day? Let’s start with the obvious and see what we can easily glean from this trailer. In the opening scene of the trailer, Kurt Russell – looking like a withered scarecrow – solicits help in a farm field from a sharply-dressed mystery man with a lipworm who seconds later appears to be sitting behind a monitor and evaluating an ICO called Delta Coin. Incidentally, a quick review of Etherscan suggests there actually is a token called Delta Coin with a total supply of 5,000,000,000 DTC that is held by a mere six addresses. With the most recent transaction some 176 days ago, we may have to wait for the full movie to learn if the token was created for the movie. Alas, I digress. We soon learn that the Wall Street wunderkind was at the top of his class at – ahem – Wharton, before engaging in crypto due diligence and that Mr Lipworm prevented his firm from transacting business with a large counterparty, leading to pre-release speculation that Mr Lipworm might be infiltrating financial institutions as an undercover investigator. Moments later, our protagonist gets reassigned to a role in Albany, New York, that oft-forgotten, upstate New York micropolitan-of-a-state-capital where BitLicense was created by the New York State Department of Financial Services, much to the recent satisfaction of Robinhood Crypto and Libertyx. Donald Trump’s ongoing feud with policymakers in Albany and prosecutors in the Southern District of New York is not lost upon those of us on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean either. We soon learn that Mr Lipworm is indeed an Anti-Money Laundering Officer and after bro-hugging it out with a childhood friend, Mr Lipworm is next browsing a digital wallet where he encounters USD 10,463,502 million(!!!) in cryptocurrency. Assuming principal photography for Crypto took place in 2018, many of us might consider USD 10 million to be a slow week of ICO deal-making, practically a blip on the radar that even the flimsiest of unicorns-to-be or tenbaggers could relegate to “Chump Change” in the Use of Proceeds sections of their white papers. My, how times have changed! Mr Lipworm next apprises his AMLO apprentice that there is – gasp – no KYC or AML associated with the digital wallet they are scrutinising. A few bad Brooklyn accents later (is there such as thing as a good Brooklyn accent?), our hero is video conferencing with the Office of Foreign Assets Control and informing them of a “serious problem” involving money laundering by the Russian mafia. While we don’t see the action in the short clip, it is quite possible that the agent on the other end of the video conference marched right into Mnuchin’s Treasury office and informed our resident movie buff-cum-Treasury Secretary that Russia was evading US sanctions – in Albany, New York of all places. Crypto’s trailer doesn’t reveal whether the laundered money was to be used to purchase a penthouse in Trump’s scuttled Trump Tower Moscow project. In life-imitating-art creative liberty, many readers and viewers may be hoping that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation might arrive at that exact conclusion. Again, I digress. A couple of hayseeds soon find a napkin with a threatening note about an upcoming meeting and are forewarned that “COPS = RIP.” We can only guess that the good law enforcement agents of New York State are not loading up on XRP (Ripple) in their public pensions. Some sort of kidnapping – it’s a bit unclear if Kurt Russell himself is being used as cryptobait – soon transpires and we next see a couple of gangsters working their magic on someone’s neck with a stun gun. Whilst we do not hear their accents in the trailer, the credits to the movie list an Olga N. Bogdanova as a Russian dialect coach, so one can only assume that Mr Goldie Hawn was jacked from his upstate farm and shanghaied to Grozny or Siberia – or maybe that was Poughkeepsie. A few opaque plot twists later do little to reveal the denouement, so we can wrap this trailer analysis without a spoiler alert. Back when Donald Trump was just getting started in giving New York City’s skyline a facelift, Gordon Gekko taught us that “Greed is Good.” A bit underwhelming by comparison Crypto’s tagline is that “Fear is the Ultimate Currency.” The motion picture’s rating forewarns us that there are violence, sexuality, and drug use. Naturally there is! How else could a cryptocurrency trader make it through a 7-day trading week without some fisticuffs, a gratuitous orgy or three, and some booger sugar? While we likely won’t see cameos by Don Jr, Ivanka, or Kushner, Trumpgate may not be too far from moviegoers’ minds at times. Maybe Mr Lipworm is the OFAC stable pony who manages to find collusion with the Russians after all. Let’s just hope Goldie remembers where Kurt keeps his seed words.

A major highlight of the recent Baltic Honeybadger 2017 conference in Riga, Latvia was the final panel at the end of the second day of events, which consisted of a number of well-known developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem. During the panel discussion, the developers shared their thoughts on the current state of privacy in Bitcoin. Various participants on the panel pointed out the close relationship between privacy and scalability, the privacy issues with light wallets, and how the ecosystem is now on the cusp of a number of different privacy enhancements. Bitcoin Privacy Improves as the Technology Scales by Default The first panelist to comment on the topic of privacy in Bitcoin was applied cryptography consultant and sometimes Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd. For Todd, the main point he wanted to get across was that improved privacy is something that is inherently associated with better scalability of the system. “The whole reason why Bitcoin has such terrible privacy is everyone has everyone else’s transactions, and any scalability measure that makes Bitcoin scale better inevitably is going to make fewer people have fewer people’s data,” said Todd. Todd noted that people who use centralized off-chain services like Coinbase may have better privacy than those who are transacting on the public blockchain, depending on their threat model. For example, Coinbase knows everything that Coinbase users are doing, but North Korea knows nothing about these transactions because they’re processed on Coinbase’s internal servers. “As we go scale this tech up, if we do so successfully, we will get improved privacy no matter what we do,” added Todd, who pointed to the Lightning Network as a perfect example of this concept in practice. In terms of privacy-focused altcoins, such as Monero and Zcash, Todd claimed the scalability situation is actually worse. “Zcash and Monero both essentially have accumulators that mean that nodes need more data to go and process transactions,” explained Todd. “There are tradeoffs around this . . . but a lot of this tech isn’t there yet and it just makes things more complex.” Better Privacy Needs to Be Balanced with Usability When SatoshiLabs CTO Pavol Rusnak commented on Bitcoin privacy, he brought up the issue of usability in terms of future privacy improvements. In his view, there is a triangle of tradeoffs between privacy, security, and usability that must be understood. As a specific example, Rusnak pointed to MimbleWimble, which is a proposal for a much more private and scalable blockchain. Rusnak noted that while the proposal may improve the privacy situation, it also degrades usability by removing the ability to view one’s transaction history on the blockchain. “The question is: If there is a coin that has security and privacy but it loses usability because of its transaction history, will people be interested in using it?” asked Rusnak. “I think yes. But it’s still — we have a lot of people who are Trezor users and they really tend to look into their transaction history. They put labels everywhere.” Rusnak went on to add that there is no “silver bullet” that can be applied to every use case out there. The Privacy Problem for SPV Wallets As the microphone was handed over to Libbitcoin lead maintainer Eric Voskuil, he brought up the issue of wallets based on simplified payment verification (SPV). “I’d like to get client-server scenarios out of the P2P protocol,” said Voskuil. “I think it’s creeping in a bad direction.” In Voskuil’s view, shortcuts have been taken in order to implement more user-friendly bitcoin wallets. Some of these shortcuts have created new problems, and Voskuil specifically pointed to the issue of bloom filters, which are used in SPV wallets. “You can think of it as a DoS attack against nodes, it gives up privacy, there’s just nothing good about it,” said Voskuil. As Voskuil explained, those who use these bloom filters are giving some anonymous node on the network — which may actually be a node operated by a blockchain analytics company — an IP address to attach to a transaction. In Voskuil’s view, it would be better to simply connect to a server via the Tor network and publish a transaction there. That way, no one would know where it came from. Ciphrex CEO and Bitcoin Core contributor Eric Lombrozo agreed with Voskuil’s comments on bloom filters, and he indicated that the sync time associated with operating a full node is what pushes users to these less-secure, less-private wallets in the first place. “Right now, verification is not that cheap, and that’s a problem because then you basically end up outsourcing this to third parties, and that changes the entire security model of Bitcoin,” said Lombrozo. Lombrozo went on to refer to bloom filters as “a hack” that was never really fleshed out or well designed at all. “You don’t have to download entire blocks, but you do give up tremendous amounts of privacy,” Lombrozo added. In the past, Chaincode Labs’s Matt Corallo, who was a co-author of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) related to bloom filters, has said he regrets ever writing up the idea. Lombrozo also pointed to Lightning Network developers Olaoluwa Osuntokun and Alex Akselrod’s proposal for client-side filtering in light clients, which would improve the privacy issues related to the use of SPV. “It gives you better privacy,” explained Lombrozo. “You can actually download a filter associated with a block and on your node you can actually check whether that block might contain transactions you’re interested in before you download the entire block.” Lombrozo also brought up BIP 151, which was authored by Bitcoin Core contributor Jonas Schnelli. The point of this proposal is to encrypt the data being sent over the P2P protocol, which could offer an obvious privacy improvement for light clients in terms of making their network communications less public. Blockstream CEO Adam Back also agreed with the idea that bloom filters are not very good for user privacy. However, Back also clarified that most of the light wallets available today, even the ones on smartphones, are not pure SPV wallets. Instead, the user usually connects to a server provided by the wallet developer or points the wallet at the user’s own full node running at home (or some combination of the two). For this reason, Back wondered whether there is much of a need for SPV wallets in Bitcoin. “If you already have two crosschecks — a semi-trusted node and an option of your own node — then do we really need the SPV protocol?” asked Back. “Because you’re allowing yourself to be surrounded by people who are trying to spy on your privacy — the people doing the kind of Chainanalysis kinds of things are running lots of crawlers on the network and being SPV providers to many wallets.” On the Cusp of Improvements in Bitcoin Privacy The most privacy-focused individual on the panel may have been JoinMarket developer Adam Gibson. JoinMarket is the most widely-used implementation of CoinJoin, which is a way for users to mix their bitcoins with each other and obscure their transaction history. Gibson continued Todd’s point on the relationship between privacy and scalability by specifically talking about Blockstream Mathematician Andrew Poelstra’s concept of scriptless scripts. “The way I’d put it is it’s like taking the semantics of the transaction off chain, so you may still have a transaction but the meaning of it is obscured [and] it becomes a lot more private,” explained Gibson. “For example, you might do a coin swap where you and I swap the history of our coins, but we do it in such a way that it just looks like a totally ordinary transaction. In fact, it’s impossible to distinguish from an ordinary transaction.” According to Gibson, there are many other examples of ways in which data can be taken off of the base Bitcoin blockchain layer to improve privacy. Like Todd, Gibson pointed to the Lightning Network as another obvious example. Gibson also pointed out that he’s now more excited by the concept of Confidential Transactions due to a recent paper that describes a way to massively improve the efficiency of these types of transactions, which are meant to mask the amounts associated with transactions. The JoinMarket developer went on to describe a world where Confidential Transactions are combined with CoinJoin to mask the most important attributes of Bitcoin transactions. In fact, Gibson indicated that this sort of combination can be done in a manner that makes privacy-conscious transactions cheaper than traditional Bitcoin transactions. Gibson also pointed to Schnorr signatures and MAST as two other upcoming improvements that could have implications for user privacy, but he also indicated that there is not much users can do to improve their own privacy today — outside of using JoinMarket or practicing good Bitcoin privacy hygiene such as avoiding address reuse. This is all in addition to the previous privacy improvements for light clients described by Lombrozo. “There’s a lot of very close things at this point, which makes me a bit more positive than I might have been before,” concluded Gibson.

A major highlight of the recent Baltic Honeybadger 2017 conference in Riga, Latvia was the final panel at the end of the second day of events, which consisted of a number of well-known developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem. During the panel discussion, the developers shared their thoughts on the current state of privacy in Bitcoin. Various participants on the panel pointed out the close relationship between privacy and scalability, the privacy issues with light wallets, and how the ecosystem is now on the cusp of a number of different privacy enhancements. Bitcoin Privacy Improves as the Technology Scales by Default The first panelist to comment on the topic of privacy in Bitcoin was applied cryptography consultant and sometimes Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd. For Todd, the main point he wanted to get across was that improved privacy is something that is inherently associated with better scalability of the system. “The whole reason why Bitcoin has such terrible privacy is everyone has everyone else’s transactions, and any scalability measure that makes Bitcoin scale better inevitably is going to make fewer people have fewer people’s data,” said Todd. Todd noted that people who use centralized off-chain services like Coinbase may have better privacy than those who are transacting on the public blockchain, depending on their threat model. For example, Coinbase knows everything that Coinbase users are doing, but North Korea knows nothing about these transactions because they’re processed on Coinbase’s internal servers. “As we go scale this tech up, if we do so successfully, we will get improved privacy no matter what we do,” added Todd, who pointed to the Lightning Network as a perfect example of this concept in practice. In terms of privacy-focused altcoins, such as Monero and Zcash, Todd claimed the scalability situation is actually worse. “Zcash and Monero both essentially have accumulators that mean that nodes need more data to go and process transactions,” explained Todd. “There are tradeoffs around this . . . but a lot of this tech isn’t there yet and it just makes things more complex.” Better Privacy Needs to Be Balanced with Usability When SatoshiLabs CTO Pavol Rusnak commented on Bitcoin privacy, he brought up the issue of usability in terms of future privacy improvements. In his view, there is a triangle of tradeoffs between privacy, security, and usability that must be understood. As a specific example, Rusnak pointed to MimbleWimble, which is a proposal for a much more private and scalable blockchain. Rusnak noted that while the proposal may improve the privacy situation, it also degrades usability by removing the ability to view one’s transaction history on the blockchain. “The question is: If there is a coin that has security and privacy but it loses usability because of its transaction history, will people be interested in using it?” asked Rusnak. “I think yes. But it’s still — we have a lot of people who are Trezor users and they really tend to look into their transaction history. They put labels everywhere.” Rusnak went on to add that there is no “silver bullet” that can be applied to every use case out there. The Privacy Problem for SPV Wallets As the microphone was handed over to Libbitcoin lead maintainer Eric Voskuil, he brought up the issue of wallets based on simplified payment verification (SPV). “I’d like to get client-server scenarios out of the P2P protocol,” said Voskuil. “I think it’s creeping in a bad direction.” In Voskuil’s view, shortcuts have been taken in order to implement more user-friendly bitcoin wallets. Some of these shortcuts have created new problems, and Voskuil specifically pointed to the issue of bloom filters, which are used in SPV wallets. “You can think of it as a DoS attack against nodes, it gives up privacy, there’s just nothing good about it,” said Voskuil. As Voskuil explained, those who use these bloom filters are giving some anonymous node on the network — which may actually be a node operated by a blockchain analytics company — an IP address to attach to a transaction. In Voskuil’s view, it would be better to simply connect to a server via the Tor network and publish a transaction there. That way, no one would know where it came from. Ciphrex CEO and Bitcoin Core contributor Eric Lombrozo agreed with Voskuil’s comments on bloom filters, and he indicated that the sync time associated with operating a full node is what pushes users to these less-secure, less-private wallets in the first place. “Right now, verification is not that cheap, and that’s a problem because then you basically end up outsourcing this to third parties, and that changes the entire security model of Bitcoin,” said Lombrozo. Lombrozo went on to refer to bloom filters as “a hack” that was never really fleshed out or well designed at all. “You don’t have to download entire blocks, but you do give up tremendous amounts of privacy,” Lombrozo added. In the past, Chaincode Labs’s Matt Corallo, who was a co-author of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) related to bloom filters, has said he regrets ever writing up the idea. Lombrozo also pointed to Lightning Network developers Olaoluwa Osuntokun and Alex Akselrod’s proposal for client-side filtering in light clients, which would improve the privacy issues related to the use of SPV. “It gives you better privacy,” explained Lombrozo. “You can actually download a filter associated with a block and on your node you can actually check whether that block might contain transactions you’re interested in before you download the entire block.” Lombrozo also brought up BIP 151, which was authored by Bitcoin Core contributor Jonas Schnelli. The point of this proposal is to encrypt the data being sent over the P2P protocol, which could offer an obvious privacy improvement for light clients in terms of making their network communications less public. Blockstream CEO Adam Back also agreed with the idea that bloom filters are not very good for user privacy. However, Back also clarified that most of the light wallets available today, even the ones on smartphones, are not pure SPV wallets. Instead, the user usually connects to a server provided by the wallet developer or points the wallet at the user’s own full node running at home (or some combination of the two). For this reason, Back wondered whether there is much of a need for SPV wallets in Bitcoin. “If you already have two crosschecks — a semi-trusted node and an option of your own node — then do we really need the SPV protocol?” asked Back. “Because you’re allowing yourself to be surrounded by people who are trying to spy on your privacy — the people doing the kind of Chainanalysis kinds of things are running lots of crawlers on the network and being SPV providers to many wallets.” On the Cusp of Improvements in Bitcoin Privacy The most privacy-focused individual on the panel may have been JoinMarket developer Adam Gibson. JoinMarket is the most widely-used implementation of CoinJoin, which is a way for users to mix their bitcoins with each other and obscure their transaction history. Gibson continued Todd’s point on the relationship between privacy and scalability by specifically talking about Blockstream Mathematician Andrew Poelstra’s concept of scriptless scripts. “The way I’d put it is it’s like taking the semantics of the transaction off chain, so you may still have a transaction but the meaning of it is obscured [and] it becomes a lot more private,” explained Gibson. “For example, you might do a coin swap where you and I swap the history of our coins, but we do it in such a way that it just looks like a totally ordinary transaction. In fact, it’s impossible to distinguish from an ordinary transaction.” According to Gibson, there are many other examples of ways in which data can be taken off of the base Bitcoin blockchain layer to improve privacy. Like Todd, Gibson pointed to the Lightning Network as another obvious example. Gibson also pointed out that he’s now more excited by the concept of Confidential Transactions due to a recent paper that describes a way to massively improve the efficiency of these types of transactions, which are meant to mask the amounts associated with transactions. The JoinMarket developer went on to describe a world where Confidential Transactions are combined with CoinJoin to mask the most important attributes of Bitcoin transactions. In fact, Gibson indicated that this sort of combination can be done in a manner that makes privacy-conscious transactions cheaper than traditional Bitcoin transactions. Gibson also pointed to Schnorr signatures and MAST as two other upcoming improvements that could have implications for user privacy, but he also indicated that there is not much users can do to improve their own privacy today — outside of using JoinMarket or practicing good Bitcoin privacy hygiene such as avoiding address reuse. This is all in addition to the previous privacy improvements for light clients described by Lombrozo. “There’s a lot of very close things at this point, which makes me a bit more positive than I might have been before,” concluded Gibson.

So far in this series, we've already talked about what Bitcoin is, about how you can buy it, and how you can spend it, but how is it actually made? Bitcoin vs. Gold The short answer is that new Bitcoins are mined. However, since that is just giving a label, rather than a definition, you’re probably going to want to know a bit more than that. It’s perhaps easiest to compare Bitcoin to its nearest physical equivalent: gold. Just as existent banking systems are (or at least were) based on the quantity and value of gold in a given country’s banks, the security and validity of Bitcoin based on the quantity of Bitcoins currently available in the network. Likewise, the production of new amounts of both gold and Bitcoin meet the same paradox. As mining equipment becomes more and more powerful, so the amount of material to be mined becomes less and less, meaning that more effort is being pumped in to get the same net returns. However, this leads to a predictable and sustainable growth of the amount of either resource in the real world. Of course, in the case of gold, this is just how it worked out. Gold is an element, and therefore cannot be produced or created out of something else, no matter what any budding alchemist might tell you. Recent estimates hold the total amount of mined gold in the world to be somewhere in the region of 187,000 tonnes, with a further 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes being produced as a result of mining every year. As it becomes ever more scarce, new mining techniques and equipment must be discovered and invented in order to maintain that level of production. Bitcoin follows the same pattern, and deliberately so. Being a cryptocurrency, creating new Bitcoins could have been as easy as pressing the hash key on your laptop, but that would have been pointless: a free, abundant, and infinite supply of any commodity leads to devaluation and hyperinflation, and your billions and billions of Bitcoins would be worth less than the laptop that allowed you to make them. As with gold, scarcity and reliability are the cornerstones of Bitcoin. In a white paper that he published in 2008, Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto stated that the availability of Bitcoins would be capped at 21 million. By best estimates, almost 17 million of those Bitcoins have been created (or mined) as of 2017. But what of the mining itself? We can picture the notion of mining for gold – massive drills and diggers clawing out a mountainside to release the gold ore within, and so on – but what are we actually mining for when it comes to a pseudo-currency? To understand that, we need to talk about transactions, blocks, and blockchains. Transactions A transaction is any activity involving Bitcoins. If you buy a Bitcoin from a vendor, then that is a transaction. If you sell a Bitcoin to a buyer, then that is a transaction. If you purchase goods or services with a Bitcoin, then that is also a transaction. Think of each of them as being a line in a physical ledger, denoting money in and money out. Blocks If a transaction is a line in a ledger book, then a block is a page in the same book, essentially a collection of transactions. In real terms, a block is 1 megabyte (Mb) worth of transactions on the Bitcoin network. As each block (or page) is completed, the next transaction to be undertaken will fall into the next available block. A block is a permanent record of transactions on the Bitcoin network, and one that cannot be erased, removed or amended. Blockchain Again, if a transaction is a line in the ledger and if a block is a page in a ledger, then the blockchain is the ledger itself. Every ‘page’ filled in is a new block, or a new link on the chain. This blockchain stretches all the way back to the beginning of the Bitcoin revolution and the Genesis block that Satoshi Nakamoto released in 2008. If you purchase a Bitcoin from a vendor, then it is entirely possible, given enough time and patience, to trace the life of that Bitcoin all the way back along the blockchain, working your way through blocks (or pages, to return to our ledger analogy), all the way to the point where your Bitcoin was first created, or mined. Which leads us back to our original question: how is a Bitcoin made, and what is Bitcoin mining? Mining First of all, it’s important to realise that mining is just a piece of Bitcoin terminology. What Bitcoin miners are actually doing is auditing and verifying transactions on the network, specifically preventing a thing called double-spending, whereby someone could create an electronic copy of a Bitcoin, and spend it twice. Because every single Bitcoin transaction is held somewhere along the blockchain, the blockchain itself becomes the verification of legitimacy. If a transaction has made it into a block, and that block has made it on to the chain, then the sale or purchase in question was, by definition, a legitimate one. So, in order to maintain that legitimacy, every single transaction must be checked, in detail and in depth, to confirm the provenance of the bitcoins being used in the transaction, which is where the miners come in. The miners perform two tasks – the first is for the good of the network, and it is the verification of Bitcoin transactions. Once they have verified enough transactions to fill up a block (that is, 1Mb of transactions, you’ll remember, which could potentially equate to hundreds or even thousands of lines in our virtual ledger), they will be eligible to win a crop of newly-generated bitcoins. This, then, is the second task. The Bitcoins are generated by the networks own protocols, and are essentially up for grabs. At the moment, each new block allows the miner the opportunity to go for those bitcoins (currently 12.5 bitcoins are being generated, or mined, for each new block), and this is where the competition steps up. You see, verifying a block’s worth of transactions is pretty easy stuff. The next stage, to win the bitcoins themselves, only happens if you’re the first miner who happens to arrive at the correct answer to a specific numerical problem. In the Bitcoin network, this principle is referred to as proof of work. Proof of work You’ll be glad to know that there is no need to have experience with advanced computation skills or mathematics in order to provide your proof of work, as it is all done by your mining software. What that software is attempting to do is to generate what is known as a hash. A hash is a hexadecimal number that is 64-digits long, with each digit being one of sixteen designations (hence the word hexadecimal, from the Greek hexa meaning six, and “deca”, meaning ten: six plus ten). For Bitcoin purposes, the sixteen possible designations are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 0, a, b , c, d, e, and f. Now, the Bitcoin network produces a target hash, completely at random, with no formula for calculation, and no way of predicting it based on previous hashes – rather like a National Lottery Draw, for instance. Every hash is unique, and prior hashes have no bearing on the future. When a miner manages to complete a box of transaction audits, then they are allowed to have a guess at the value of the target hash, by producing their own hash. If the miner’s hash is equal to or lower than the target hash, and that miner is the first one to do so, then 12.5 Bitcoins will be generated (or minted if you want to think in terms of regular currency) and added to the existing pool of Bitcoins available for all. More specifically, those 12.5 Bitcoins are awarded to the miner who guessed the hash correctly. Now, if that all sounds a bit too easy, it almost certainly is. The odds of a lone miner making any serious cash out of mining for Bitcoins are stratospheric. Indeed, the odds of anyone hash producing a result that is under the target hash is less than 1 in a trillion. What allows Bitcoins to continue to be generated, and at such a rate (the average clearance time for a block is 10 minutes, with 12.5 Bitcoins being generated each time to account for same) is that there are loads of Bitcoin miners out there, using very sophisticated equipment and, perhaps more importantly, thousands of linked computers to do the computational work for them. There is dedicated mining hardware and software out there, capable of producing billions of hashes per second, spread over thousands of computers and, even then, there is no guarantee of success. Your newly-generated hash, even if it does meet the criteria, simply might not get there in time. Some other miner, or mining syndicate might have snagged that same hash mere seconds before you but, in the world of Bitcoin mining, the winners get the spoils. Lottery As mentioned above, the odds of a single user just happening to come across the right hexadecimal code in time to cash in are pretty unlikely and yet, with all those Bitcoins being spawned at the rate of 75 bitcoins per hour, and up for grabs, someone has to win it, and it could be a solo user. Think of bitcoin mining as a lottery because, quite literally, that’s what it is. While Bitcoin as a currency is one of the strongest and the most stable, getting your hands on those newly-minted bitcoins is going to take more than a little luck. First, there is your work for the network – that is, your verification of previous transactions, or lines in the ledger, to return to a previous analogy. 1Mb of transactions means that you’ve filled a block and that is essentially your lottery ticket, your eligibility to partake in a spot of hashing. Each hash attempt is a line of numbers on your ticket, and each line has a chance of winning the jackpot, so long as the numbers fit into a certain hexadecimal pattern. The good news is that you can submit your hashes as many times as you like, thousands and millions, and billions of times per second, which sounds great, except you probably still won’t hit the magic number, as every single newly generated hash retains the same odds of over a trillion to one. Again, just like the lottery, many people think of joining a syndicate. The rationale here is the same. One person, even one person with a decent mining set-up stands an infinitesimal chance of matching a hash. Two people combining hashes stand a slightly better chance, a couple of dozen even better, and a few thousand? Well, you get the idea. More people combining their blocks results in more hash attempts made over a given period of time, and a greater chance of getting the desired result. Of course, whenever you do win, you’ll make less, having to share your Bitcoins, or the value thereof with all of your fellow syndicate makers. You may also owe an additional fee to the syndicate organiser, who will normally take a percentage or two of any earnings, on the grounds that he is ensuring the legality of the exchange, and corralling all of the mining efforts of any given syndicate. However, it is a path worth pursuing. With Bitcoin currently valued at around $5,000 per bitcoin, and 12.5 of them available (or $62,500) every 10 minutes a sufficiently large and well-equipped mining syndicate can see decent profits as more people jump on board, prompting more transactions, blocks filled up quicker, and a swifter generation of more Bitcoins into the cybereconomy.

So far in this series, we've already talked about what Bitcoin is, about how you can buy it, and how you can spend it, but how is it actually made? Bitcoin vs. Gold The short answer is that new Bitcoins are mined. However, since that is just giving a label, rather than a definition, you’re probably going to want to know a bit more than that. It’s perhaps easiest to compare Bitcoin to its nearest physical equivalent: gold. Just as existent banking systems are (or at least were) based on the quantity and value of gold in a given country’s banks, the security and validity of Bitcoin based on the quantity of Bitcoins currently available in the network. Likewise, the production of new amounts of both gold and Bitcoin meet the same paradox. As mining equipment becomes more and more powerful, so the amount of material to be mined becomes less and less, meaning that more effort is being pumped in to get the same net returns. However, this leads to a predictable and sustainable growth of the amount of either resource in the real world. Of course, in the case of gold, this is just how it worked out. Gold is an element, and therefore cannot be produced or created out of something else, no matter what any budding alchemist might tell you. Recent estimates hold the total amount of mined gold in the world to be somewhere in the region of 187,000 tonnes, with a further 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes being produced as a result of mining every year. As it becomes ever more scarce, new mining techniques and equipment must be discovered and invented in order to maintain that level of production. Bitcoin follows the same pattern, and deliberately so. Being a cryptocurrency, creating new Bitcoins could have been as easy as pressing the hash key on your laptop, but that would have been pointless: a free, abundant, and infinite supply of any commodity leads to devaluation and hyperinflation, and your billions and billions of Bitcoins would be worth less than the laptop that allowed you to make them. As with gold, scarcity and reliability are the cornerstones of Bitcoin. In a white paper that he published in 2008, Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto stated that the availability of Bitcoins would be capped at 21 million. By best estimates, almost 17 million of those Bitcoins have been created (or mined) as of 2017. But what of the mining itself? We can picture the notion of mining for gold – massive drills and diggers clawing out a mountainside to release the gold ore within, and so on – but what are we actually mining for when it comes to a pseudo-currency? To understand that, we need to talk about transactions, blocks, and blockchains. Transactions A transaction is any activity involving Bitcoins. If you buy a Bitcoin from a vendor, then that is a transaction. If you sell a Bitcoin to a buyer, then that is a transaction. If you purchase goods or services with a Bitcoin, then that is also a transaction. Think of each of them as being a line in a physical ledger, denoting money in and money out. Blocks If a transaction is a line in a ledger book, then a block is a page in the same book, essentially a collection of transactions. In real terms, a block is 1 megabyte (Mb) worth of transactions on the Bitcoin network. As each block (or page) is completed, the next transaction to be undertaken will fall into the next available block. A block is a permanent record of transactions on the Bitcoin network, and one that cannot be erased, removed or amended. Blockchain Again, if a transaction is a line in the ledger and if a block is a page in a ledger, then the blockchain is the ledger itself. Every ‘page’ filled in is a new block, or a new link on the chain. This blockchain stretches all the way back to the beginning of the Bitcoin revolution and the Genesis block that Satoshi Nakamoto released in 2008. If you purchase a Bitcoin from a vendor, then it is entirely possible, given enough time and patience, to trace the life of that Bitcoin all the way back along the blockchain, working your way through blocks (or pages, to return to our ledger analogy), all the way to the point where your Bitcoin was first created, or mined. Which leads us back to our original question: how is a Bitcoin made, and what is Bitcoin mining? Mining First of all, it’s important to realise that mining is just a piece of Bitcoin terminology. What Bitcoin miners are actually doing is auditing and verifying transactions on the network, specifically preventing a thing called double-spending, whereby someone could create an electronic copy of a Bitcoin, and spend it twice. Because every single Bitcoin transaction is held somewhere along the blockchain, the blockchain itself becomes the verification of legitimacy. If a transaction has made it into a block, and that block has made it on to the chain, then the sale or purchase in question was, by definition, a legitimate one. So, in order to maintain that legitimacy, every single transaction must be checked, in detail and in depth, to confirm the provenance of the bitcoins being used in the transaction, which is where the miners come in. The miners perform two tasks – the first is for the good of the network, and it is the verification of Bitcoin transactions. Once they have verified enough transactions to fill up a block (that is, 1Mb of transactions, you’ll remember, which could potentially equate to hundreds or even thousands of lines in our virtual ledger), they will be eligible to win a crop of newly-generated bitcoins. This, then, is the second task. The Bitcoins are generated by the networks own protocols, and are essentially up for grabs. At the moment, each new block allows the miner the opportunity to go for those bitcoins (currently 12.5 bitcoins are being generated, or mined, for each new block), and this is where the competition steps up. You see, verifying a block’s worth of transactions is pretty easy stuff. The next stage, to win the bitcoins themselves, only happens if you’re the first miner who happens to arrive at the correct answer to a specific numerical problem. In the Bitcoin network, this principle is referred to as proof of work. Proof of work You’ll be glad to know that there is no need to have experience with advanced computation skills or mathematics in order to provide your proof of work, as it is all done by your mining software. What that software is attempting to do is to generate what is known as a hash. A hash is a hexadecimal number that is 64-digits long, with each digit being one of sixteen designations (hence the word hexadecimal, from the Greek hexa meaning six, and “deca”, meaning ten: six plus ten). For Bitcoin purposes, the sixteen possible designations are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 0, a, b , c, d, e, and f. Now, the Bitcoin network produces a target hash, completely at random, with no formula for calculation, and no way of predicting it based on previous hashes – rather like a National Lottery Draw, for instance. Every hash is unique, and prior hashes have no bearing on the future. When a miner manages to complete a box of transaction audits, then they are allowed to have a guess at the value of the target hash, by producing their own hash. If the miner’s hash is equal to or lower than the target hash, and that miner is the first one to do so, then 12.5 Bitcoins will be generated (or minted if you want to think in terms of regular currency) and added to the existing pool of Bitcoins available for all. More specifically, those 12.5 Bitcoins are awarded to the miner who guessed the hash correctly. Now, if that all sounds a bit too easy, it almost certainly is. The odds of a lone miner making any serious cash out of mining for Bitcoins are stratospheric. Indeed, the odds of anyone hash producing a result that is under the target hash is less than 1 in a trillion. What allows Bitcoins to continue to be generated, and at such a rate (the average clearance time for a block is 10 minutes, with 12.5 Bitcoins being generated each time to account for same) is that there are loads of Bitcoin miners out there, using very sophisticated equipment and, perhaps more importantly, thousands of linked computers to do the computational work for them. There is dedicated mining hardware and software out there, capable of producing billions of hashes per second, spread over thousands of computers and, even then, there is no guarantee of success. Your newly-generated hash, even if it does meet the criteria, simply might not get there in time. Some other miner, or mining syndicate might have snagged that same hash mere seconds before you but, in the world of Bitcoin mining, the winners get the spoils. Lottery As mentioned above, the odds of a single user just happening to come across the right hexadecimal code in time to cash in are pretty unlikely and yet, with all those Bitcoins being spawned at the rate of 75 bitcoins per hour, and up for grabs, someone has to win it, and it could be a solo user. Think of bitcoin mining as a lottery because, quite literally, that’s what it is. While Bitcoin as a currency is one of the strongest and the most stable, getting your hands on those newly-minted bitcoins is going to take more than a little luck. First, there is your work for the network – that is, your verification of previous transactions, or lines in the ledger, to return to a previous analogy. 1Mb of transactions means that you’ve filled a block and that is essentially your lottery ticket, your eligibility to partake in a spot of hashing. Each hash attempt is a line of numbers on your ticket, and each line has a chance of winning the jackpot, so long as the numbers fit into a certain hexadecimal pattern. The good news is that you can submit your hashes as many times as you like, thousands and millions, and billions of times per second, which sounds great, except you probably still won’t hit the magic number, as every single newly generated hash retains the same odds of over a trillion to one. Again, just like the lottery, many people think of joining a syndicate. The rationale here is the same. One person, even one person with a decent mining set-up stands an infinitesimal chance of matching a hash. Two people combining hashes stand a slightly better chance, a couple of dozen even better, and a few thousand? Well, you get the idea. More people combining their blocks results in more hash attempts made over a given period of time, and a greater chance of getting the desired result. Of course, whenever you do win, you’ll make less, having to share your Bitcoins, or the value thereof with all of your fellow syndicate makers. You may also owe an additional fee to the syndicate organiser, who will normally take a percentage or two of any earnings, on the grounds that he is ensuring the legality of the exchange, and corralling all of the mining efforts of any given syndicate. However, it is a path worth pursuing. With Bitcoin currently valued at around $5,000 per bitcoin, and 12.5 of them available (or $62,500) every 10 minutes a sufficiently large and well-equipped mining syndicate can see decent profits as more people jump on board, prompting more transactions, blocks filled up quicker, and a swifter generation of more Bitcoins into the cybereconomy.

No goal is more noble than helping the children in need around the world. Children bear the brunt of conflict, climate phenomena and poverty. They are also the future of human kind, so making sure they have all the resources needed to succeed, is probably the best way there is to build a better future. However, aid delivery to this highly vulnerable yet crucial segment of the world population, is mired in corruption, political strife and the interests of greedy parties. Fortunately, the world of cryptocurrency can offer a solution, and UNICEF, the UN body in charge of delivering aid to children, is jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon. UNICEF Ventures and Smart Contracts Besides the transparency that cryptocurrencies bring to international aid endeavors, they can also reduce the cost of aid delivery and can help the efforts be more practical. In a world in which internet access is becoming ubiquitous, it makes sense for an agency like UNICEF to consider cryptocurrencies, especially of they have smart contracts to back them up. This is precisely what UNICEF Ventures is interested in. Singularity Hub [https://singularityhub.com/2017/09/03/the-united-nations-and-the-ethereum-blockchain/?utm_content=buffer3465c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=googleplus-su&utm_campaign=buffer] recently reported that this branch, which is “dedicated to improving the organization’s ability to move funds”, is considering the technology. UN Aid Agencies Paving the Way for UNICEF The same article on Singularity Hub shows how other UN aid agencies are already using cryptocurrencies and smart contract platforms to deliver aid to those in need. The article sustains that the UN’s World Food Program already delivered Ethereum-powered food vouchers to Syrian refugees in Jordan. These vouchers help the UN with the following: They keep aid delivery costs low because less personnel are required to deliver the aid. Improves transparency, because aid can be verifiably delivered to the people in need. Reduces corruption, because no one can ‘massage numbers’ on a public, open blockchain. Children Could Benefit Twice from Cryptocurrency-Powered Aid Delivery In the case of UNICEF, there might be some additional benefits to delivering cryptocurrency-powered aid to children. Most children in need of aid have poor access to education. Some of them have no access to formal education for long periods of time, which perpetuates poverty. If children get aid in the form of cryptocurrency, or on the back of a smart contract, it gives UNICEF a unique opportunity to educate them about this new technology. This can spark their imagination in many ways, and can at least show them a skill that can become critical in the future. UNICEF’s Unique Opportunity Therefore, if UNICEF launches its own ICO, and it structures it properly, it could multiply the benefits it delivers to the children it takes care of. There is no doubt that this effort would require a deep-rooted change in the way the organization works and a change in its relationship with its donors, but this is a great opportunity that UNICEF should take advantage of. ICO markets are hot, and UNICEF might find a new crop of donors among philanthropic cryptocurrency enthusiasts, who would like to see a brighter future ahead, for those on which the future of the world depends. You love crypto & eSports? We want to get to know you. Please join us here: https://facebook.com/esportsdotcom/ Telegram: t.me/esportsERT

No goal is more noble than helping the children in need around the world. Children bear the brunt of conflict, climate phenomena and poverty. They are also the future of human kind, so making sure they have all the resources needed to succeed, is probably the best way there is to build a better future. However, aid delivery to this highly vulnerable yet crucial segment of the world population, is mired in corruption, political strife and the interests of greedy parties. Fortunately, the world of cryptocurrency can offer a solution, and UNICEF, the UN body in charge of delivering aid to children, is jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon. UNICEF Ventures and Smart Contracts Besides the transparency that cryptocurrencies bring to international aid endeavors, they can also reduce the cost of aid delivery and can help the efforts be more practical. In a world in which internet access is becoming ubiquitous, it makes sense for an agency like UNICEF to consider cryptocurrencies, especially of they have smart contracts to back them up. This is precisely what UNICEF Ventures is interested in. Singularity Hub [https://singularityhub.com/2017/09/03/the-united-nations-and-the-ethereum-blockchain/?utm_content=buffer3465c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=googleplus-su&utm_campaign=buffer] recently reported that this branch, which is “dedicated to improving the organization’s ability to move funds”, is considering the technology. UN Aid Agencies Paving the Way for UNICEF The same article on Singularity Hub shows how other UN aid agencies are already using cryptocurrencies and smart contract platforms to deliver aid to those in need. The article sustains that the UN’s World Food Program already delivered Ethereum-powered food vouchers to Syrian refugees in Jordan. These vouchers help the UN with the following: They keep aid delivery costs low because less personnel are required to deliver the aid. Improves transparency, because aid can be verifiably delivered to the people in need. Reduces corruption, because no one can ‘massage numbers’ on a public, open blockchain. Children Could Benefit Twice from Cryptocurrency-Powered Aid Delivery In the case of UNICEF, there might be some additional benefits to delivering cryptocurrency-powered aid to children. Most children in need of aid have poor access to education. Some of them have no access to formal education for long periods of time, which perpetuates poverty. If children get aid in the form of cryptocurrency, or on the back of a smart contract, it gives UNICEF a unique opportunity to educate them about this new technology. This can spark their imagination in many ways, and can at least show them a skill that can become critical in the future. UNICEF’s Unique Opportunity Therefore, if UNICEF launches its own ICO, and it structures it properly, it could multiply the benefits it delivers to the children it takes care of. There is no doubt that this effort would require a deep-rooted change in the way the organization works and a change in its relationship with its donors, but this is a great opportunity that UNICEF should take advantage of. ICO markets are hot, and UNICEF might find a new crop of donors among philanthropic cryptocurrency enthusiasts, who would like to see a brighter future ahead, for those on which the future of the world depends. You love crypto & eSports? We want to get to know you. Please join us here: https://facebook.com/esportsdotcom/ Telegram: t.me/esportsERT