Core magazine may 2018 by Juan Ignacio Figueroa

BLOCKCHAIN

MAY 2018 ISSUE 34

NEWS

MAGAZINE

https://soundcloud.com/coremediaradio

EDITORIAL

elcome to our monthly magazine here at Crypto Core Media. This May 2018 edition features a number of articles that acknowledge the contributions of several prominent personalities in the Cryptosphere. You can look forward to reading articles on Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood. There are also articles on Cornell Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s computer science professor Emin GĂźn Sirer, former JPMorgan blockchain head Amber Baldet, and World Economic Forum blockchain head Sheila Warren. In addition to bringing you high quality articles that inform readers about the key players in the crypto space, we have taken 4

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the time to conduct exclusive and in-depth interviews with a number of well-known crypto personalities. During the month of April, we interviewed Factom community leader Niels Klomp. Niels shared with us valuable information about the ongoing development of the Factom protocol, which aims to provide proof of authenticity for legal documents and research papers by leveraging blockchain technology. Other articles cover interviews from Quantum Resistant Ledger Market Manager Adam Koltun, Nobar.io CEO Joyjit Bhowmick, and Sheila Warren from the World Economic Forum. Quantum Resistant Ledger is a platform that aims to build quantum resistant blockchains. Quantum computers are advancing at a rapid rate, considering that the number of qubits used for processing are doubling every 18 months. This means that the processing

power of Quantum computers is increasing even faster. Unlike binary computers of today, which can only process information in two states (0 and 1), quantum computers are able to process data in multiple states. If this rate of development continues, quantum computers will be able to “crack” the blockchains of today, thus compromising their security. Therefore, it’s imperative that the larger crypto community be aware of this development, so that they know what to expect when quantum computers become a threat to the existing digital infrastructure. Meanwhile, our extensive interview with Nobar. io CEO Joyjit Bhowmick went over the concept of a “crypto E-commerce platform” that Joyjit and his team are planning to build. The CEO wants to develop practical use cases for cryptocurrencies in a market that he thinks is highly speculative and revolves mainly around trading. Joyjit wants to make cryptocurrencies more spendable by developing an e-commerce platform where you can purchase and sell everyday goods and services. While this is quite an ambitious project, reading this detailed article will make readers appreciate the process of analyzing a technical whitepaper and get them accustomed to analyzing an ICO project before actually investing in it. So, in a nutshell, it’s an excellent learning process.

informed us that there’s a lot of hype surrounding blockchain technology and that her team has created a tool that can be used by companies to determine if a blockchain-based solution is appropriate for their business model. In this month’s magazine, you will also come across an interview we conducted with C2Legacy founder Marie-Antoinette. C2Legacy is just a concept and idea at this point, as it will require heavy funding and development to be realized. The concept of C2Legacy is to be able to transfer digital assets to your family members, after your death. Although this is a potential practical use case for blockchain technology, it will require considerable time, money, and effort to develop. Nevertheless, at Crypto Core Media, we strive to acknowledge and support legitimate and positive contributions to the crypto community and industry. We sincerely hope that you enjoy reading this month’s edition of our magazine and our Super Bitcoin comic strips as well. We would also appreciate insightful and thoughtful feedback from you, so that we can continue to bring you the best and most unique crypto and blockchain related content possible. Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

In the month of April, as mentioned earlier, we also interviewed Sheila Warren - Blockchain and DLT Head at World Economic Forum. Sheila

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DIRECTORY Executive Board Vincent Pereira aka House house@coregroup.info Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

Futurist futurist@coregroup.info

Angelo Timoneri aka Lootz lootz@coregroup.info

Ignacio Figueroa aka TheWalk_er ignacio@coregroup.info

Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info Marlon Diaz aka MACO maco@coregroup.info Farrukh farrukh@coregroup.info Angel Figueroa angelfigueroa@coregroup.info

Staff

Nuno Menezes nuno@coregroup.info Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info Waleed Iqbal waleed@coregroup.info

@ccm_house https://plus.google.com/102527442008724559166?hl https://discord.gg/ADKFEqM https://www.pinterest.com.au/ccoremedia/ www.facebook.com/cryptocoremedia/ https://t.me/joinchat/FaE0dRAozOK3jSc7yG81Sg https://steemit.com/@cryptocoremedia https://www.reddit.com/user/houseofcore https://www.linkedin.com/company/crypto-core-pty-ltd/ https://plus.google.com/u/0/102527442008724559166

Table of Contents Proof that Blockchain, Bitcoin and other Cryptos Stand Cryptographically Strong

Connie Gallippi | True Decentralization Through Altruistic Giving

Sarah Jamie Lewis | Mainstreaming Anonymity and Privacy Through the Blockchain

Desiree Dickerson | A Woman for Women and Crypto

Roger Ver Loses Bitcoin Twitter Handle

The Ethereum Classic Story

Interview | Quantum Resistant Ledger – Future Compatible Technology

Potcoin | The Top Ranked Marijuana Cryptocurrency

Multi-State Quantum Blockchain Compared to a Time Machine

Interview | Cryptocurrency Startup Registers Business in Tech-Savvy Estonia

Bitcoin - Strangely Perfect and Brilliant Predictions

Status Token – Gateway to Ethereum dApps

HDD Mining | The Lesser-Known Child Of The Mining Family

Vitalik Buterin - Care Taker or Dictator?

Bitfinex Crypto Exchange Offers Best Trading Analysis Tools

Rhian Lewis | Crypto Developer And Advocate

Another Zclassic Fork ? Cryptomanran Claims He Has The Answers

Zilliqa Cryptocurrency Processes more transactions than Visa

Interview | Sheila Warren – Blockchain Head from World Economic Forum

Tiffany Madison | Guiding Blockchain Ventures to Success

Binance CEO Only Accepting Interviews from Crypto Holders

Ormeus Coin - Digital Money System Backed By $250 Million Mining Operation

Samson Williams | Blockchain Is NOT For Everyone

Catherine Coley | Stimulating Ripples in Blockchain and Global Banking

102

Perianne Boring | Beyond the Beauty of The Blockchain

104

Winning Poker Network by Phil Nagy, Accepting Crypto Since 2014

107

Crypto Wonder Woman | Fahima Marissa Anwar Creating a Legacy

110

Carolyn Reckhow | Using Blockchain Technology To Improve Institutions

112

Peter Szilagyi in a Tug of War with Coindesk As It Turns into Crypto’s Version of Dailymail

115

Aya Miyaguchi | Ethereum Foundation Director

117

Jeffrey Wilcke | Building Decentralized Applications with Global Adoption

120

C2Legacy | First Digital Will On Blockchain By Marie-Antoinette

122

Continues on next Page

Amber Baldet | Leading Blockchain Ventures to Success

125

Elizabeth McCauley | The Business Savvy Crypto Connector

127

Bytecoin – Highly Centralized Privacy Coin

129

Charlie Lee | The Man Behind Litecoin and “Good Guy” of Crypto Community

131

Bloomberg's Lily Katz On Cryptocurrencies

133

Emin GUn Sirer | The Blockchain Scientist

138

Blockchain Based Payments with Paytomat / Pundi X / LAPO

140

Dr. Julie Albright Unites Sociology and Crypto For Positive Societal Changes

144

Tony Gallippi – Delivering Financial Services to the Bitcoin Ecosystem

146

Factom Community and Blockchain | Explained by Niels Klomp

148

The Stratis Platform | Not Just A Bitcoin Copy Cat

152

Jimmy Song - Bitcoin will remain a Revolution

156

The Crypto Legend Of Ethereum Founder Gavin Wood

158

Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence on a Blockchain

160

Marie-Antoinette Tichler’s Solution to A Crypto Problem

163

Should I Get My Children Involved With Blockchain Technology?

165

C L A S S I F I E D S

170

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Proof that Blockchain, Bitcoin and other Cryptos Stand Cryptographically Strong

here are now an overwhelming number of legitimate projects and platforms being worked on that clearly indicate Bitcoin, Blockchain, and altcoins are not only here to stay, but will truly become mainstream a lot sooner than we might think. Let’s explore all the recent developments in this rapidly evolving ecosystem.

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Blockchain Technology is Advancing Rapidly Netherlands-based ING bank has been experimenting with blockchain technology for quite some time now. In fact, the giant financial institution has been working on zeroknowledge proofs for the past few months. According to the Director of Research at Coin Center, Peter Van Valken-

burgh, what zero-knowledge cryptography “potentially gives you is the ability for you to prove something about a data structure without revealing the data inside the data structure”. Notably, Zcash and then Komodo were one of the first crypto-platforms to implement zero-knowledge proofs, however, ING bank introduced, a few months back, a modified version called zero-knowledge range proofs (ZKRP). As the name suggests, zero-

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knowledge range proofs can prove whether any given number is within a specified range, while not having to disclose what the number actually is. ZKRP work by incorporating an additional layer of cryptography to a blockchain. Put simply, this allows for mortgage seekers to prove that their income falls within a particular range required for them to qualify. Additionally, if a payment is made, ZKRP can prove that the payment made falls within a certain range.

such as names and addresses. So, what potential of Set

could be the applications Membership?

Proof of Very Active & Competent Blockchain Community

Gomez explains that this method could be used to confirm if an individual actually Mariana Gomez de la lives in a country that is part of Villa, leader of ING the European Union, while not blockchain projects stated, disclosing which one. Therefore, this protects a person’s privacy by only revealing in“It can be used to protect formation about them which is the denomination of a absolutely necessary. Moreover, transaction, but still al- the codebase for Set Memberlowing validation that ship is completely open-source there’s enough money in and extensively peer-reviewed.

the participant account to settle the transaction.” The advantage of publicly sharAll this, however, is relatively old news. Now though, ING will be implementing zero-knowledge set membership. What this new proof will do is extend the ZKRP concept by allowing other types of data or information to be kept secret while proving its existence. This data can be about almost anything

ing your codebase greatly helps in improving it and making it as bug-free as possible. Notably, Zcash co-founder Madars Virza demonstrated that it’s theoretically possible to narrow down the interval range, thus revealing more specific information about a secret number. Reportedly, ING claims to have resolved this issue.

In support of ING’s initiatives, Zerocoin Electric Coin Company executive Jack Gavigan stated:

“I think that’s why you see companies like ING delving into this space, getting hands-on with the technology, and joining the broader community - because when this technology matures and is ready for prime time, they’ll be ready and able to hit the ground running.” In case you’re unaware, Zerocoin Electric Coin Company actively works to develop the Zcash platform.

Benefits of a Collaborative Development Community The benefits of having a collaborative development community can’t be emphasized enough. Jonathan Bootle from University College of London and Benedikt Bunz from Stanford introduced Core Magazine

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Bulletproofs. The academic paper on Bulletproofs states:

“Bulletproofs shrink the size of the cryptographic proof from over 10kB to less than 1kB. Moreover, bulletproofs support proof aggregation, so...If all Bitcoin transactions were confidential and used Bulletproofs, then the total size of the UTXO [unspent transaction output] set would be only 17 GB, compared to 160 GB with the currently used proofs.” Clearly, this seems like a dramatic improvement. Reports have surfaced that Silicon Valley’s Chain company is leveraging and expanding on this new tech. Meanwhile, JPMorgan is leading the charge among financial institutions by developing Quorum, a blockchain powered solution that uses zero-knowledge proofs to enable applications to execute much more efficient transactions. Quorum reportedly not only makes transactions much 14

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faster, but also allows applications requiring high throughput to process “private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants.”

Now, it’s not only privately run, money-hungry organizations that are immersed in the crypto and blockchain world.

ING claims that they have taken what Quorum does and taken it up a notch by making their version computationally less intensive. Gomez notes:

UNICEF now Raising Funds via Cryptocurrency Mining

“Zk-SNARKs, used in JPM Quorum, are known to be less efficient than the construction of zero knowledge proofs for a specific purpose, as is the case of zeroknowledge range proofs. Indeed, range proofs are at least an order of magnitude faster.” So, here we see that pure capitalism is also driving competing for-profit organizations to dedicate time, money, and human resources toward improving blockchain technology. It’s pretty obvious that they’re acting out of self-interest, however, their efforts are helping to grow the blockchain and crypto ecosystem as well.

Cryptocurrency mining, which requires a blockchain of course, is now being used by UNICEF Australia to “supply water, food, and vaccines to refugee children in Bangladesh.” This is done through the HopePage, which lets users donate to this charitable cause by simply keeping their webpage open, thus allowing their CPUs to be used to mine valuable cryptocurrency. This mined currency then goes toward helping those in need. Whenever users visit the website, they are asked just how much CPU power they’d like to donate, the range being between 20-80%. UNICEF Australia Director of Fundraising and Communications Jennifer Tierney stated:

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“We wanted to leverage new emerging technologies to raise awareness about current humanitarian crises and raise funds to support children caught up in them. The HopePage allows Australians to provide help and hope to vulnerable children by simply opening the page while they are online.”

show that Bitcoin, Blockchain, and other crypto platforms are being taken quite seriously by just about every type of organization that is out there. Those who’ve not jumped onto this promising technology will surely be left behind, and will Finally, we have Blocky, regret that they didn’t look into the leading character in a a lot sooner. So, if you’re still children’s book titled: A watching from the sidelines, Place in the Blockchain. please join this paradigm shift.

Educating Everyone, including Children About Blockchain and Crypto Tech

This book is authored by Brett Biery, a computer programmer and blockchain specialist. Biery, through this book, tries to capture all the emotions that children go through during their time at school and while trying to “fit in” with the rest of crowd. The “rest of the crowd” is actually represented by a blockchain, so that kids can learn by using vivid analogies.

Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

This initiative shows that crypto technology is not just being talked about. These developments also indicate that the cryptocurrency market could be beginning to move away from pure speculation and only being focused on the trading of digital curren- For the adult audience, Blockcies, as opposed to develop- chain head Sheila Warren ing their actual use cases. from World Economic Forum is working to help organizaThere are a number of note- tions learn how to incorporate worthy educational efforts that DLT into their existing busiare currently ongoing to help ness practices. Sheila says that bring more awareness to the blockchain is not suitable for crypto space. These efforts are everything, so has along with not limited to an adult audience. her colleagues released a tool that allows organizations to There’s now reportedly a book determine if and how to leverthat has been published which age this distributed ledger. teaches kids about Bitcoin and blockchain. In conclusion, these efforts Core Magazine

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Connie Gallippi | True Decentralization Through Altruistic Giving “Taking” Economy vs “Giving” Economy

f you’ve been in the blockchain and crypto space for a while, you must be familiar with the “taking” (sorry token) economy. Granted, Satoshi and Vitalik, founders of the two top cryptos, have/ had noble intentions, particularly that of decentralization, which 16

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seeks to close the gap between the haves and havenots. Unfortunately, with the hype and speculation, and everyone concerned only with becoming the next ‘Bitillionaire’, it’s easy to lose focus on the most important denominator: the underprivileged. Steering back this focus to a worthy cause is what Connie Gallippi is doing with her BitGive foundation.

Connie Gallippi - the Social and Environmental Justice Advocate

For over 14 years, Connie had worked with several environmental organizations in California, USA. She has spent a large part of her life offering these organizations her specialized skills in consulting, project management, policy and advocacy, fundraising and strategy development.

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After attending a San Francisco Bitcoin conference in mid-2013, Connie began a new adventure on leveraging blockchain technology to achieve true decentralization by empowering the underprivileged and underrepresented. This led to the establishment of the first Bitcoin 501(c)(3) nonprofit, BitGive.

Decentralized Giving on the Blockchain

Never before has a new technology gotten so much attention from corporate, governments and individuals alike. As most of this attention is being taken away by the volatility of the cryptomarket, the actual real world use cases, such as BitGive, stand out as one focused on giving back to the community. Founded by Connie Gallippi, the BitGive foundation is a nonprofit “vastly improving philanthropic impact with blockchain technology.” As Executive Director of the foundation, she acts as a spokesperson for promoting the social value of Bitcoin and mainstreaming female participation in the space.

Bitcoin Brings Clean, Safe Water to Sub Saharan Africa

About a year after BitGive’s launch, Connie launched a campaign seeking to raise $10,000 in Bitcoin for a water well project in Kenya. The crypto community’s response was beyond expectations, as over $11,000 in bitcoin was raised for the water well project located in the western region of Kakamega, Kenya. The water well in Kenya was set up in partnership with The Water Project that aims to bring clean and safe water to Sub Saharan Africa. The partnership came about after Peter Chasse, founder of The Water Project, announced they would now be accepting cryptocurrencies. First set of people to benefit were the Shisango Girls School and the more than 500 people in that locality. In March, 2015, in recognition of her achievements through BitGive, and in celebration of World Water Day, Bitcoin Magazine asked Connie to share her experience building a water well in Kenya, in her own words.

BitGive - Doing A World of Good

Although the water well in Kenya happens to be BitGive’s most prominent project, the foundation has been involved in several other charity activities. Its first project, after set up, was leading the first Bitcoin Black Friday charity drive, which raised funds for “Save the Children” from the Philippines’ typhoon disaster. Notable charity activities include campaigns to raise funds for tornado relief for US midwestern states; for stopping the spread of the ebola virus; and supporting TECHO in building homes in the favelas of Brazil. A more recent project is Medic Mobile, a platform that uses mobile technology to provide support to health-care workers stationed in remote communities of developing countries.

The Decentralization Movement Continues

As an advocate of true decentralization, by promoting the social side of Bitcoin and blockchain, Connie aims to keep utilizing Cryptos in a Core Magazine

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way that does a world of good. Alongside her Bitcoin nonprofit, BitGive, Connie still functions as a Board Member for California Urban Forests Council and also volunteers for several other social and environmental

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organizations. One way to measure the success of a new technology is to check its impact on the community through real life use cases. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s good to see organizations

zencash.com

like BitGive, founded by Connie Gallippi, continue impacting lives through philanthropy. Faith Obafemi aka Fizzymidas faith@coregroup.info

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Sarah Jamie Lewis | Mainstreaming Anonymity and Privacy Through the Blockchain

Meet the Queer Cyberpunk Lady Sarah Jamie Lewis

opular anonymity and open privacy researcher, who has been cited in academic and

journalistic publications, Sarah Jamie Lewis, is a 3-in1 cyberpunk, author and blockchain enthusiast. Her work focuses on visualizing threat models, analyzing existing frameworks for security loopholes and

building smart tools that keep corporations and individuals safe from threats, now and in the future. She is the author of Queer Privacy, â&#x20AC;&#x153;a collection of essays about community, family, coming out, dating, domestic Core Magazine

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violence, activism, sex work and suicide. We will talk about problems, we won’t always have solutions, and not all the stories have happy endings. After all, this is real life and we are building it together - one step at a time.” As a security expert, she has audited high profile websites like Amazon, checking for security vulnerabilities. Her kind of work means she has been given the opportunity to manage teams of software developers and computer scientists, in their quest to deliver secure, high performance architecture for various platforms. A programmer herself, Sarah Jamie Lewis is proficient in languages like C++, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python and SPL. She is also familiar with a host of libraries and services including DynamoDB, libsodium, MySql, OpenSSL, SQS, S3 and ZeroMq. Furthermore, Sarah has deep expertise in telecommunication and internet protocols involving: CAMEL, DIAMETER, INAP, RADIUS, SCTP, SIGTRAN, SS7, TCP and UDP.

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Queer Privacy, Queer Cyberpunk and A Blockchain

Although Sarah spends a lot of her time freelancing to pay the bills (as stated by her on her Patreon page), the bulk of her spare time is spent on her main project Onion Scan. A free and open source tool initiated by her for investigating the dark web. The sourcecode can be found on GitHub, including copious details about how it works. Each month, a progress report is published, giving details of how funds set apart for the project are spent and other information on the project. OnionScan is a work in progress with several contributors, some of which you can find on GitHub, working on the project simultaneously.

Queer Activities

For someone who lives an interesting queer life, Sarah Jamie Lewis has other projects in which she is actively involved. Some of these open source software projects can be found on Github. Her “day job” is as Executive Director at Open Privacy Research Society, a Canada based nonprofit.

In addition, Sarah regularly contributes essays on anonymity and privacy to Mascherari Press, an organization that publishes insights on the aforementioned topics. Their aim is for people to understand the impact of these topics, consider how they rely on them, and to learn how to build better tools to empower themselves and others. Whatever lifestyle one chooses to live, control of our privacy should always be in our hands. While this is near impossible with centralized systems, it is refreshing to see Sarah Jamie Lewis literally taking the bulls by the horn, using blockchain. Faith Obafemi aka Fizzymidas faith@coregroup.info

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Desiree Dickerson | A Woman for Women and Crypto Desiree Dickerson

esiree Dickerson did not get into the cryptocurrency world like most people do. It was not Bitcoin, but Dogecoin that she bumped into while lurking on Reddit. The rest of her journey is not so different from that of most leaders in the space.

She started to learn more about the technology. She did not stop there, but took up the next challenge. This was to roll up her sleeves and actually contribute in the cryptocurrency space. In this article, we will take a look at some of the things Desiree has been doing since getting into the crypto world.

Before Crypto Before finding Dogecoin, Desiree was a scientist. She has Biology a degree from the University of Chicago. Her second degree was in Biophysics and Physiology from Georgetown University Dickerson researched on â&#x20AC;&#x153;Effects of Naturally OccurCore Magazine

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ring Genetic Variation on the Severity of Mutation Phenotype in the Eye Development Pathway”. This was at the Kreitman Laboratory of Georgetown University’s Department of Ecology and Evolution. Desiree is still involved with research somehow. She is a project manager at Atlas Research. Atlas research works on helping their customers “plan and execute enterpriselevel transformation and performance improvement initiatives.”

Educating Others About Crypto

While speaking on the “Bad Crypto Podcast” recently, Desiree stated that it was good to spread crypto knowledge by sharing what we know about it with people around us. She does her bit by covering cryptocurrency stories and issues on 21 cryptos. She extends this to venture capital firms. As a technology consultant at Strategic Cyber Ventures, part of her job included examining cryptocurrency related investments and giving her expert views on them to senior executives of venture capital firms. 22

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Championing Women In Crypto and Beyond

Desiree Dickerson is a Blockchain and Digital Currency Fellow at Women for Women International. She has been involved with the organization’s programmes geared towards empowering women in post-conflict areas. Under their programme, women in such areas are given entrepreneurial skills as well as literacy and financial literacy skills. Further steps are taken to ensure the women who go through this program more willing able to take charge of the lives in terms of making decisions. When it comes to the “there aren’t enough women in crypto” issue, Dickerson is of the view that it is pointless to keep on stating the obvious. She believes it’s better to “promote the women currently leading crypto and blockchain efforts”. We, at Crypto Core Media, are of the same view. Check out our articles on top women in the cryptocurrency space if you haven’t yet done that. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

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Roger Ver Loses Bitcoin Twitter Handle

oger Ver and Bitcoin Cash followers went into a state of shock when they found that their @bitcoin twitter handle was suspended. The @bitcoin twitter handle had more than 650K followers and the handle was wrongly used to propagate Bitcoin Cash as Bitcoin. Let’s discuss the recent drama surrounding

this event.

Roger Ver Misguiding Noobs Roger Ver and the Bitcoin Cash team are in the habit of misguiding noobs to believe Bitcoin Cash as Bitcoin. They followed several tactics to wrongly guide the people towards Bitcoin Cash by creat-

ing brand confusion. The Bitcoin name was used by them several times while referencing Bitcoin Cash, and this created a lot of confusion and even loss of funds by newcomers when they wrongly sent the Bitcoin Cash tokens to the Bitcoin blockchain and vice-versa. The r/btc subreddit page on Reddit is using the BCH ticker, but still, it is basically hijacked by Core Magazine

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Bitcoin Cash team. Similarly, Bitcoin.com website is owned by Roger Ver and he uses it for propagating Bitcoin Cash news and events.

Bitcoin Twitter Handle Suspended The twitter handle that was under the control of the Bitcoin Cash team was suspended suddenly by the Twitter team. Roger and the BCash team were in a shock and they expressed their disappointment on Reddit and Twitter. The twitter handle might have been suspended due to the continuous complaints received from users due to the false propaganda and miscommunication spread by the Bitcoin Cash team using the handle. Roger was furious and tweeted that

“So this is how free speech dies...with thunderous applause. @bitcoin”

Crypto Celebrities Thrashing Roger Many Crypto celebrities showed their strong opposition to Roger’s statement on “Freedom of Speech”, because he is speaking of “Free Speech” while hijacking Bitcoin brand. 24

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Below are some of the tweets from famous Crypto celebrities

Allex Ferreira tweeted : “Twitter also think that #bitcoincash isn’t #Bitcoin.” Whale Panda tweeted : “Karma is a $BCH. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ What goes around comes around. Losing the millions you spend on getting the handle is pretty priceless though.” James Loop Tweeted :

In a sudden turn of events, people noticed that the Bitcoin twitter handle was owned by some random guy from Turkey. People started wondering how the handle was handed over to him suddenly. Michael Matthews from Bitcoin Cash team twitted : “I support the original owner of this account. Who the hell are you and how did you acquire this account” The guy was not aware of the significance of the twitter account and he was tweeting casually like “Turkey is cool”

Many people started to “Freedom of speech means that the contact him but he never regovernment won’t sponded. throw you in a cage Armin van Bitcoin tweeted for saying something to him it doesn’t condone. Freedom of speech “@Bitcoin Many doesn’t mean that people will approach you can do whatever you offering money you want on someone to buy your Twitter else’s property.” account. Remember that NONE of them are worthy to have Twist and Turns this account. Their

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motivations are driven by greed. Keep your account and you’ll play a key role for a better world to come.” To everyone’s surprise today, the owner shows someone else with the description that says “My name is Andrei from Moscow Russia “ and the account is protected. This has led to more confusion on the ownership change overnight.

Bitcoin Cash team saved the Archives

Bitcoin team was able to retrieve the archives of the old @ bitcoin twitter handle and the old tweets and messages were saved and were recoverable. But that cannot be used to send out more tweets or interact with the users. It only can be used to view the old tweets from this url .- https://web.archive.org/ web/20180106172947/https:/ twitter.com/Bitcoin It is very clear that the Twitter took action and suspended the @bitcoin twitter handle, but not clear on why the handle was handed over to some random people. Many

people were in the favor of handing over the handle to some responsible Bitcoin enthusiast and developers like Adam Back, Nick Szabo or Andrea Antonopoulos. But Andreas suggested that the handle should be burned and not used anymore. This was a very interesting turn of events that happened yesterday that took Twitter by storm. Kadhir Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

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The Ethereum Classic Story All You need to know about Ethereum Classic Ethereum Classic was born from one of the most debated controversies in the world of cryptocurrency. This was both an ethical and ideological struggle which split the community into two fronts. To understand how Ethereum Classic came to be, it is necessary to understand the circumstances surrounding its creation.

The DAO For those who don’t know, the ………… system operates by the use of smart contracts. A smart contract is the automated 26

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enforcement of the terms of an agreement. The DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – was an incredibly complex smart contract built over the Ethereum network, which was about to bring a new revolution to the financial sector. The DAO itself was designed to be an innovative decentralized investment fund that was going to be the centerpiece of the decentralized management for a whole lot of DApps (Decentralised applications) that would be developed in the Ethereum ecosystem and would be funded by the DAO. The way the, DAO worked, and was something unique. Anyone wanting to have a voice on how the development of a

particular project funded by the DAO should be conducted had to buy DAO Tokens. This would give you access to vote and deliberate on the way the plans should be heading as well as it was an indication that the user was officially part of the DAO community. In case a DAO proposal got at least 20% approval rate, then the required funds to kickstart the project would be released. On the other hand, if a user didn’t vote for a specific DApp that was approved for funding, they would be able to call for a split (Split Function) and take its tokens out or assign them on to another DAO or Child DAO and may even start accepting new proposals. With this technique, investors would always be in complete control of their investments

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and could step out or re-allocate funds anytime. However, to do so, the investor requesting the split would have to wait for 28 days to be able to regain full control over their tokens. Then, they would be able to withdraw the funds or reallocate them onto a new DAO. The features the DAO was introducing were both a novelty and unprecedented in the history of finance. The project was so sought after that 28 days after its formation, it raised more than $150 million in ether. It was able to gather about 14% of the total Ethereum tokens issued up to that date. The system looked perfect and the process seemed simple, but it had a fatal flaw. Experts in the community saw a loophole in the splitting process and promptly warned the developers about a possible attack vector. The team behind the DAO assured that this wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, this loophole resulted in a significant heist that started the discussion that led to the Ethereum split and the birth of Ethereum Classic.

The ‘Hack’ Someone managed to exploit the loophole and locked onethird of the total DAO funds

(which was around 50 million) onto his/her own Child DAO and made the split request. The hack was pretty ingenious indeed and followed all the rules implicit in the DAO protocol itself. At the time, many people in the community didn’t even consider this as a hack. But right after the Splitting request, the function needed to go through 2 steps: to give back the users Tokens or the Ether in exchange, and register the transaction in the blockchain thus updating the DAO’s internal token balance. The attacker was able to tamper with this process which gave him the ability to replicate the process over and over until $50 million worth of ether were withdrawn from the DAO onto the Child DAO.

The Aftermath of The Hack The events led the price of ether to abruptly fall from $20 to $13 in a matter of hours. After the hack, an intense debate began. While many community members were relentlessly pointing fingers and blaming Ethereum for the problem, others were trying to find a way to fix the issue and prevent the hacker from getting his hands on the stash before the splitting period

came to an end . The community was committed to solving the issue, and three viable options were presented: Take no action Implement a Hard fork Implement a Softfork While some people did not favor a change in the code as they consider it to go against the underlying essence of the technology presented by Satoshi Nakamoto claiming that “code is law”, others were decided to reverse this problem by implementing a Fork in the code in such a way that the Ethereum blockchain would have to follow a different route from that moment on. On the other hand, if nothing was done, the hack couldn’t be reversed. This would be the best case for the hacker. Soft Fork vs Hard Fork and the birth of Ethereum Classic The main distinction between a soft fork and a hard fork is that it doesn’t allow older versions to be recognized by newer versions. If a blockchain needs an update, there are only two ways of implementing it: a soft or a hard fork. While a soft fork is backwards compatible, a Hard fork is not. This means that you cannot open files that were initially stored in an older version with a recent Core Magazine

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version. This meant that a soft fork wouldn’t solve the problem and a hard fork would be the only viable option. The community then decided to go for the hard fork and reverse all the transactions up to the point before the hack started. Once the hard fork was implemented, the blockchain followed a new path. That was not all. The blockchain “puritans” kept the original blockchain! After the community’s decision of going for a hard fork, users that didn’t agree with the hard fork decided to maintain the original chain. Hence, Ethereum Classic aka ETC was born. Today, the total market cap for ETC is about $1.5 billion and is far below that of Ethereum according to coinmarketcap

The Philosophical debate The Ethereum split was indeed a controversial debate, as it represented a rupture of the immutability rule. Even though the Ethereum founders, Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin, as well as many other important figures of the community, switched onto a new chain, many others decided to keep the old chain and made it backwards incompatible. 28

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This decision was set upon the blockchain technology’s original principles, which meant that a blockchain’s immutability should be conserved. This was the golden rule that prohibited human intervention or tampering with the blockchain. While the majority of the community was willing to break this premise to prevent the hacker getting away with the heist, this was going against everything cryptocurrency stood for. Nevertheless, it was a democratic decision, and while it could be considered as an “anti-measure”, it was the majority decision. But for puritans such as Grayscale’s CEO Barry Silbert, this wasn’t the right decision, so it was decided that a split should be made, even if it meant that the hacker would keep their coins but at least the whole purpose of the blockchain wouldn’t be overridden in the first place.

ETC Pros and Cons Even though it appears the dispute is now settled, many people believe that Ethereum Classic is the original Ethereum, while others say it is a direct attack on Ethereum itself. After all, the struggle is still pretty much alive.

The central issue with ETC is that it is not compatible with the Ethereum Hard Fork. The most important members of the community have all migrated to the new chain and ETC will not be able to access futures updates done by Ethereum and remains immutable. Let’s check what the ETC Pros and Cons are: Pros Follows the “code is law” rule Sticks with the immutability of the blockchain Has the backing of prominent players Cons Cannot access updates (e.g. cannot move from POW to POS). The founders of Ethereum migrated to the new chain. Seen as an attack and an insult to the community. Nuno Menezes nuno@coregroup.info

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Interview | Quantum Resistant Ledger – Future Compatible Technology

Quantum Resistant Ledger uses XMSS Cryptography

n April 23rd, I interviewed Adam Koltun, Marketing Manager of The Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL). We discussed, in detail, the impact quantum computers will have on the future digital world and how the development of the QRL platform could contribute to this paradigm shift. Interestingly, QRL aims to be one of the very few quantum resistant cryptos. What this means is that its network will be able to withstand “classical and quantum computing attacks“. Covering the basics of quantum computing and related concepts is beyond the scope of this

article, so the interested reader can refer to useful links found below. Notably, QRL is among the few crypto platforms that use XMSS cryptography, which is not what Bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies use.

Current Stage / State of Quantum Computing

According to Adam, there is presently “no meaningful intersection” between cryptos and quantum computing. However, he also pointed to the steady rate of development of this nascent technology; in fact, Google has reportedly created the first 72-qubit gate-based superconducting system. This is a giant leap from the 50-qubit processor by IBM. The University of Massachu-

setts Boston graduate confirmed that quantum computing technology is progressing at a steady rate. While its current state poses no threat to current Blockchainbased systems, Adam says it’s “general rate of development is the real threat” due to its “fairly rapid acceleration”. Roughly, the QRL manager said, the number of qubits has been doubling every 18 months of late. And, he explained that given that each qubit exponentially increases the computational power of a quantum computing system, the actual processing power is increasing even faster.

In the Next 5-10 Years

The Quantum Resistant Ledger spokesman said that quantum Core Magazine

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computers might reach the stage of development in the next 5-10 years that would potentially enable them to attack the majority of today’s blockchain-powered networks. Adam noted that Shor’s algorithm, formulated in 1994, and related integer factoring methods can be implemented using a quantum computer. In simple terms, once the actual hardware and software needed to run these algorithms has been developed, they would be able to crack the cryptographic encryption techniques that Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrency platforms use. The anticipated problems or issues that will arise as a result of the emergence of this technology can be compared to the effects of global warming and rising floodwater, according to Adam. He then stated that once these mature quantum computers become a reality, it will be like a “light switch” and will have the “all of a sudden” effect. Clearly, we need to do all we can right now to prepare ourselves for when this happens.

Quantum Resistant Ledger Platforms – Preparing for the Future

There will be “no time to play catch up”, Adam says, and the current online security systems 30

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and protocols, such as SSL, will no longer be able to provide the same type of protection that they used to. That’s only if we do not prepare ourselves accordingly for this imminent change. The security of centralized systems is the least likely to be compromised because of quantum computers. That’s due to several solid reasons that Adam mentioned; one being that giant companies like Google and IBM are actually behind the development of quantum computers, so they will make sure that their services, such as Gmail and Google Chrome, will be modified in a manner which will make them resistant to “quantum attacks.” This makes sense because not only do these companies have the human resources necessary to handle such a task, but also the financial resources.

Decentralized Systems Much More Difficult to Migrate

There’s a lot of hype right now about how great decentralized systems are, however, Adam informed me that users of decentralized blockchain networks would have to manually transfer/ migrate their private keys and other private information over to a quantum resistant network.

Users of centralized networks would, on the other hand, not need to do much to transition, since it would be taken care of by their centrally managed systems. While continuing to discuss quantum computers and Quantum Resistant Ledger platforms, I asked Adam if Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency platforms would get hacked once this new technology becomes available. His response was that it depends on who gets their hands on it. Considering that the organizations that are controlling its development are companies like Google, IBM, US / Chinese / Russian governments, they might not do something like this. Furthermore, a company would be motivated to announce via a press release that it has developed the best quantum computer, so that their stock price goes up. But governments would probably keep something like this a secret for as long as they could, according to Adam.

Cryptocurrencies Pose No Threat to Microsoft Et al.

The QRL Marketing manager stated that cryptocurrencies are not a significant threat to Microsoft or other giant tech companies, because they serve different use cases. There are

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some things, though, such as the increase in cross-border payments using digital currencies that could destabilize or disrupt the current global financial system. But this would still be negligible given the relatively small size of the crypto market, compared to the multitrillion dollar traditional financial system. Additionally, cryptocurrencies will not likely replace fiat currencies according to Adam. He thinks that there is something about holding physical money in your hands that digital currencies cannot offer. Also, Adam predicts that the digital representation of fiat currency will increase in the future.

Quantum Resistant Ledger Development

The QRL founders originally proposed the idea of their platform in Bitcointalk forums. However, due to extreme difficulty in reaching consensus within the Bitcoin community, the founder of the Quantum Resistant Ledger platform decided to launch his own project. That’s how this crypto-platform’s development all began. The QRL codebase is completely open-source, like many other crypto projects, and cur-

rently programmers can only use its testnet to write code. Instead of developing a completely new programming language for their platform, the QRL team (mostly developers only at this point) decided to use the more standard and reliable object-oriented programming languages such as C++, Python, and Google’s gRPC. This, Adam explains, will remove the entry barrier of having to learn a brand new programming language, something developers have to do if they want to program on the Ethereum blockchain, which uses Solidity. Another benefit of not trying to “reinvent the wheel” here is that developers can “piggyback off testing” that has already been done by companies like Google. Adam also noted that in line with best practice, the Quantum Resistant Ledger codebase is adequately modularized. This makes the coding process more efficient.

“FutureCompatible” Platform

Should the current Blockchain Signature Scheme used by QRL become vulnerable, then Adam says it would be as simple as “swapping it out” of their current network and replacing

it with another one. Perhaps the larger cryptocurrency community should look more closely into the imminent security issues their platforms could face in another 5 or 10 years, assuming they are not doing so already. Already, the Quantum Resistant Ledger platform has amassed a marketcap of $65 million. As Adam noted, this is a lot of money and his team is confident that the mainnet will be highly secure, because there are two major audits coming up to ensure that proper security features have been implemented. The QRL team describes the process of building a crypto-platform to that of “building a house”, where you must have a solid foundation. Although there is still more I could tell you about my conversation with Adam, I will leave that for another article or interview, as we at Crypto Core Media look forward to future correspondence with the Quantum Resistant Ledger team. Also, I’d like to thank Adam for taking the time to speak with me. References: https://eprint.iacr. org/2011/484.pdf (XMSS Cryptography)

http://harleypatton.com/ papers/Shor’s.pdf (Shor’s Algorithm) Core Magazine

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Potcoin | The Top Ranked Marijuana Cryptocurrency Potcoin - Not Just for Pot Smokers

otcoin (POT) was released in January 2014 by 3 businessmen from Montreal,

Canada nicknamed Hasoshi (derived from combining hash, which is a powerful Marijuana extract, with Satoshi who is the founder of Bitcoin), Mr. Jones, and Smokemon 514. The

Potcoin genesis block was at exactly 4:20 pm, which is the most popular time in the day to smoke marijuana. The goal of Potcoin is to be the cryptocurrency of the $100 billion per year and rapidly Core Magazine

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growing legal industry.

marijuana

Legal marijuana is a new concept in the United States, and while it has been gaining traction, there are many legal pitfalls when selling or buying marijuana. This makes a decentralized cryptocurrency like Potcoin very useful for marijuana vendors and consumers. With this coin, money can’t be frozen or seized, unlike with centralized payment methods like credit cards and banks where the bank has complete control to stop a transaction for any reason. This gives vendors peace of mind that they won’t lose their money when using this coin.

Hard to Seize Money

Even cash isn’t ideal for a marijuana vendor. since the police or IRS can raid their business and seize the physical cash. Whereas with Potcoin, the money doesn’t exist physically and is secured with cryptography, so it is quite difficult even for the police to seize it. Also, this coin provides users with anonymity, so there’s no

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way for anyone to find out that they have been purchasing marijuana, let alone how much they have been buying and where they are buying it. Initially, Potcoin was basically a copy of Litecoin and used the Scrypt proof-of- work (PoW) algorithm, where mining machines including CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs secured and maintained the network by cryptographically hashing transactions into blocks. In 2015, the coin switched its algorithm to proof-of- stake velocity (PoSV). This is similar to Reddcoin, where users earn POT and secure the network just by keeping their coins in a wallet connected to the coin’s network. There were initially 420 POT rewarded to miners per block, but this has halved to 210 coins per block. There will be a maximum supply of 420 million POT.

Potcoin Might Be Worth Looking Into

There are currently 220 million POT in circulation, and with a value per POT near 11 cents this yields a market cap of $25 million. This is the highest market cap out of any marijuana themed cryptocurrency, and the 251st highest crypto market cap overall. Daily trading volume hovers between $500,000 and $1 million, indicating that Potcoin use is quite widespread, and it is fulfilling its goal as being a cryptocurrency for the marijuana industry. Considering the explosive growth of the marijuana industry, as legalization increases across the United States, combined with the explosive growth of cryptocurrency, it is probably a good idea to keep some POT in your portfolio. Zachary Mashiach

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Multi-State Quantum Blockchain Compared to a Time Machine Quantum Blockchain that Functions Like a Time Machine

ictoria University out in New Zealand aims to secure crypto futures by leveraging blockchain technology that shares characteristics similar

to that of a time machine. Yes, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s right â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a time machine. The idea/concept stems from research authored by Del Rajan et al. They have determined, through various Core Magazine

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studies, that 10 percent of world GDP will be from blockchain projects by 2027. However, these DLT networks could become vulnerable to potential attacks from powerful Quantum Computers, unless of course, you’re using a quantum blockchain. In order to prevent future attacks, a sequence of “entangled photons” must be used to implement a quantum blockchain. Per Spectrum, “Essentially, current records in a quantum blockchain are not merely linked to a record of the past, but rather a record in the past, one that does not exist anymore.”

Furthermore, the formal document states: “Our method involves encoding the blockchain into a temporal GHZ (Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger) state of photons that do not simultaneously coexist. It is shown

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that the entanglement in time, as opposed to an entanglement in space, provides the crucial quantum advantage. All the subcomponents of this system have already been shown to be experimentally realized. Perhaps more shockingly, our encoding procedure can be interpreted as non-classically influencing the past; hence this decentralized quantum blockchain can be viewed as a quantum networked time machine.” Analogy to a Time Machine Like the blockchain we discuss here everyday, a quantum blockchain will retain all the properties of a binary computer-based DLT – one of the most important ones being immutability. Notably, while the blockchain will be publicly viewable, the only way you would be able to modify it would be by altering the most recent version. The research paper further states that if anyone attempts to modify any photon, it would lead to the entire blockchain becoming invalid.

According to researchers, this type of technology is currently available. They explain that their algorithms effectively implement a blockchain by embedding it in “temporally entangled states“. Furthermore, the formal write up mentions that entanglement is done through time, and not space. This is the main advantage of a quantum blockchain over shall I say a traditional one. Reportedly, all the subcomponents of this type of DLT network have now been implemented in an experimental test phase. Please note that this article will serve as a prelude to our soon to be published article on the Quantum Resistant Ledger platform. FYI: IOTA is one of the main and very few cryptocurrency platforms that are already quantum resistant. Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

Women on crypto we need you!

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Bitcoin | aka World Reserve Currency “Died” Nearly 300 Times

itcoin has been reported to be dead several times in the past, but on the contrary, it is rising back stronger and growing bigger than ever to become the “World Reserve Currency”. At the time of writing, it has been reported dead 278 times. Let’s look at 38

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some of the famous quotes and statements by some prominent people and how they made a wrong judgment in predicting that Bitcoin will be dead forever awaiting the bubble to get burst.

Jamie Dimon calling Bitcoin a Fraud Jamie Dimon calling “Bitcoin a Fraud” was one of the most famous Bitcoin obituary stories because he is the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan -

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One of the four biggest banks in America and well-respected and highly followed personality in Wall Street. The moment he called Bitcoin a fraud and predicted the bubble to burst, the price dropped considerably in September 2017. He also went one step ahead in warning his employees that they will face severe consequences if they were found trading Bitcoin. But he admitted the fact that his daughter has invested in the currency against his wishes. Many people panic sold their Bitcoins and the price fell considerably. In Cryptocurrency space, this act of selling at the bottom price is termed as “Getting REKT”. Many people got Rekt and the price of bitcoin rose again to ATH within few months. It also went ahead and made history by nearly touching 20k in December. Later, Jamie Dimon regretted calling Bitcoin a fraud and admitted that the technology is here to stay. “Bitcoin Karma” won’t leave anybody, considering that recently JPMorgan was hit with a class-action suit for charging high fees and interest rates for customers buying cryptocurrencies using credit cards.

Lead Developer Hearn saying “It Failed” One of the Lead BTC developers, Mike Hearn, announced that he is leaving his BTC development team and sold all his Bitcoins. He further announced that he will no longer continue in the project because “It failed”. Hearn argued with other developers over the “Block Size Increase”. The size of one block was “One MegaByte” and he proposed an increase in size to accommodate more transactions per second. Below are his exact words from the medium post.

“Despite knowing that bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly,” This was during 2015 when the price of one BTC was trading at $430 and it fell to $390 due to his statement. Many gave up and sold their holdings thinking that the currency will never recover and will go back to zero, rest is history.

Mt.Gox got hacked Mt. Gox is a famous exchange in Japan launched in 2010. There were very few exchanges during initial years and Mt.Gox was considered the biggest exchange of that time handling 70% of total lume in circulation. In February 2014, the exchange announced that 850K bitcoins were missing and feared stolen. Then they found out that their exchange was hacked and lodged a complaint. As a result, the price fell considerably and Bitcoin was again considered dead. As usual, it raised from the ashes like a Phoenix and currently it is moving towards the prestigious “World Reserve Currency” title.

China Exchange Ban Chinese people are in the forefront in adopting any new technology. One can blindly invest in anything that Chinese adopt first. Likewise Chinese were dominating in global volume with 90% of the BTC volume coming from China during late 2016 and early 2017. China was trading 90% of the volume at the Core Magazine

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beginning of 2017 when the government started to crack down on exchanges. Many people were moving their Chinese Yuan outside the country using Bitcoin, and so to avoid capital flight, Chinese government made strict regulations and forced exchanges to follow KYC norms for new customers. These things didn’t stop people from trading BTC, so the government took the decision of shutting down all the exchanges in the mainland China. People again declared it dead since major volume is getting generated from China. Governments and banks always fail to understand that “Bitcoin is Antifragile” that can neither be confiscated nor be banned completely. The price fell sharply since many panic sold and declared it to be dead. But this proved to be another “Crypto Noise” and the Chinese people continued to trade secretly in foreign exchanges and even trading now at the time of writing by using Wechat Mobile app and Telegram. All major exchanges moved outside China to Hong Kong and Korea and continue to operate. Chinese Ban has proved that currency cannot be banned or abolished since they are decentralized and operate 40

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peer-to-peer. Andreas Antopolous always says

that no other asset or currency in the world possess. Bitcoin has never been hacked and the bitcoin network has been functioning for 99.992209701 % right from its time of inception in 2009.

“You can keep your country away from Bitcoin, but you cannot So next time when you hear keep your Bitcoin away the “Bitcoin is dead” narrative, from your country” just smile at them and ask The above are only a few samples were it was declared dead. There are hundreds of other incidents and events that also declared that “Bitcoin is dead”. For example, “There was a rumour that Bitcoin will head towards chain split before Segwit got activated”, “BCH forking from BTC and claiming to be real Bitcoin one “, “2X hardfork in November that was dropped at the last minute”,”Indian RBI requesting banks to seize support to exchanges recently”. In spite of so much negativity, Bitcoin continues to grow in popularity across the globe due to its “Sound Money” property

“Again?”

If you liked this article, check out our magazine, comic and this article as well! References: https://www. bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2018-04-11/jpmorgan-sued-over-cash-advancefees-for-cryptocurrency-buys Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

Cryptocurrencies are freeing humanity

#no more kingdoms

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Interview | Cryptocurrency Startup Registers Business in Tech-Savvy Estonia Cryptocurrency Startup Sets Up Shop in Estonia

stonia is a Northern European country with a population of 1.3 million. It has become well-known for using cutting-edge technology to help its citizens file taxes and conduct elections. In addition, the innovative nation has developed digital infrastructure that allows foreign businesses to enroll in its E-Residency program. With this E-Residency 44

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program, companies can legally operate as virtual business entities based in Estonia. Cryptocurrency startups have recently begun to take advantage of this opportunity.

has established a legal entity for his business in the highincome economy nation.

Notably, the developed country offers a businessfriendly environment, even to cryptocurrency startups and ICOs. Up till now, I had only read about this on the internet and not actually talked to anyone who had registered a business in Estonia. Yesterday, however, I interviewed Joyjit Bhowmick, the CEO of a cryptocurrency startup who

During our interview, Joyjit pointed out that the current cryptocurrency market was highly speculative. Digital currencies are being heavily traded and there are numerous crypto exchanges operating as well. Unfortunately, according to the Bangladeshi businessman, there are not nearly as many use cases compared to the daily trading volume of cryptocur-

Highly Speculative Cryptocurrency Market

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rencies. This, I think is a very astute observation. Initially, before speaking to Joyjit, I had incorrectly assumed that he was stating that all cryptocurrencies do not have use cases. Of course, this is simply not true. As most crypto enthusiasts would know, Bitcoin definitely has many use cases. One major one being that large cryptoplatforms such as Komodo and Factom back up their data to the Bitcoin blockchain 24 hours a day, at pre-determined periodic intervals. The Bitcoin blockchain is considered by most to be the most secure and reliable one out of the thousands of blockchains in the the crypto ecosystem.

Cryptos Have Use Cases – But We Need Many More While Joyjit acknowledged the various practical use cases for not only Bitcoin, but also Ethereum and a few other crypto-platforms, he did say that he wants the token for his crypto-platform to derive value from its actual usage, instead of baseless market speculation. This is partly how the idea and concept for Nobar.io came about. At first, Joyjit and his team members

had been focusing on learning about Blockchain and how or if it should be incorporated into a business. After the cryptocurrency market began to really take off, particularly in July 2017 as the CEO of nobar.io noted, his team naturally started paying more attention to it, like many others would admit to as well. Observing cryptos very closely, Joyjit’s team noticed that the digital currency market was quite fragmented. There were, definitely, use cases that had been developed by projects such as Paytomat, Lapo, and Pundi X that aim to provide payments solutions for cryptocurrencies.

Comprehensive E-Commerce Crypto Platform However, Joyjit believes that the above-mentioned projects are not aiming to provide a truly comprehensive E-commerce cryptocurrency platform. The CEO termed their project as building “The Complete Crypto Commerce”. Building on the concept of using cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange to buy and sell goods and services, Joyjit not only intends to provide a simple crypto-payments solu-

tion. Moreover, the ambitious entrepreneur wants to also develop an online E-commerce portal where users can directly and seamlessly use their BTC, Ether, LTC, BCH, and his company’s developed NBR tokens to pay for products and services. The NOBAR team wishes to provide a holistic solution on their platform where users can perform B2B, B2C, C2C, C2B, Ads, Job and POS (Point of Sale) payments activities with crypto payments. According to Joyjit, there are already individual services for freelancing work, B2C, B2B, and POS systems, but he wants to bring all these services to one go-to destination that he calls Nobar.io, where Nobar stands for No Barrier. Essentially, the Nobar.io team plans to surpass giants such as Amazon and Alibaba by not only offering a platform where users can engage in diversified commercial activities, but also do it using cryptocurrencies and the NBR token.

Building from Scratch Clearly, there will be numerous hurdles and obstacles that the Nobar.io team will have to face. One of the major ones Core Magazine

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that come to my mind is that of accepting cryptocurrencies as a form of payment, which Winning Poker Network CEO Phil Nagy brought to my attention. The most obvious problem with accepting cryptos is that you have to deal with their highly volatile nature. So, if you accept a $1,000 payment in BTC, that same BTC payment could be worth $500 in a few days. Therefore, you would have to stomach the losses. Only a company that has a very solid foundation would be able to handle this type of volatility. Moreover, retail giants like Amazon would struggle if they attempt to accept cryptos as payment because they process a very, very large number of transactions. So, for Amazon to start accepting cryptos, they would have to absorb the losses due to volatility a lot more than a much smaller company like the Winning Poker Network. What I can conclude here is that allowing for cryptocurrencies to be a payment option is something that is best suited for mid-sized companies. Most startups, as we know, fail. And for a startup to accept cryptocurrencies might not seem realistic. But, this is what Nobar.io is attempting to do. 46

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What Exactly Will Nobar.io Do? Nobar.io wants to: “disrupt the $4 trillion digital payment and e-commerce industry to provide a holistic solution to the spending problem of cryptocurrency and crypto token. By providing a platform where users will be able to spend their cryptocurrency and crypto token for wide range of transactional and commercial activities, the NOBAR platform’s user base is expected to have a sustainable steady growth. By doing this, we aim to create one of the largest usage commonalities in the crypto market.” As Joyjit himself admits, this will be a very challenging thing to do but he believes that he has the right vision, expert team members and determination to bring this project to fruition. That’s okay, I think, because billion dollar companies exist today because their founders accepted these challenges and worked hard to achieve what they had envisioned. Let me be very clear though. I am not saying that this project will be successful. There are numerous

obstacles that would prevent a project of this magnitude to actually become a reality.

Cryptocurrency Regulations One of the wisest business decisions that Joyjit and his team have taken is to establish a digital presence for their business in Estonia. Because of the country’s crypto-friendly laws, the Nobar.io CEO believes that fundraising for his business venture will be a lot easier. Currently, Joyjit is in Dhaka, Bangladesh and pretty much anything crypto-related including trading is banned. So, obviously it would not be advisable and maybe not even legally possible for him to raise funds for his startup in Bangladesh. Countries like the United States would also not be a good place to launch an ICO, because of the US Securities and Exchange commission classifying ICOs as securities offerings. Since they are now considered to be securities, they need to be registered as such. The registration process is quite lengthy and complicated, so Nobar.io has decided not to go through with all the hassle that is involved with launching

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an ICO in the United States.

Where will the Money Come From? Admittedly, the United States and Bangladesh are not the only places where funding for ICOs can come from. However, Joyjit mentioned a number of other countries where they would not be able to receive funding from investors due to regulatory restrictions. In light of these limitations, a good question to ask would be, where will the money come from? In response, the Nobar. io CEO said that they were not limiting their investors to ICOs. According to Joyjit, he not only plans to take advantage of the crypto-friendly laws in Estonia, but also intends to draw investments from accredited and private investors. This is not a new strategy by any means. In fact, my interview with Marie-Antoinette, the founder of C2Legacy, “a Digital Will platform on a blockchain that will securely and accurately validate the death of the legacy holder”, will also look to draw investments from accredited investors from the United States and Europe.

Given the large number of scams that have been orchestrated under the guise of ICOs, this is probably a wise way to secure investments for cryptocurrency and blockchain startups. Nevertheless, working within the legal framework of any jurisdiction can be quite challenging for any startup, and this might be even a lot more difficult for a cryptocurrency startup. That’s probably why the Nobar.io team has chosen Estonia as a starting point to relieve some of the legal and regulatory burden that is placed on tech startups.

Nobar.io Whitepaper So, how will the “master plan” unfold? The details are covered quite extensively in the company’s whitepaper. While I won’t go into all what is mentioned in this lengthy document, since you can refer to the write up itself, I will point out some noteworthy things about it. There are plenty of technical details that the whitepaper goes over, including the actual source code they appear to be using and working on. Perhaps the best thing I found was that the people

who are part of the Nobar.io team and their major role can be found in this whitepaper. Oftentimes, the identities of the individuals behind an ICO project are not made public. This is usually a red flag, which is not the case with this company. Obviously, this does not imply that the project will be a success. It does, however, show that the crypto startup is trying to be as transparent as possible.

How Does the Crypto Startup Plan to Address Scalability As most people would know, a significant problem plaguing major cryptocurrency platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are scalability issues. This occurs when a blockchain-based network grows larger and larger. When this happens, like it has with Bitcoin, transaction processing times increase sharply. Additionally, transaction fees go up quite a bit as well. Even while a highly skilled Bitcoin Core developer team is working around the clock to solve these issues, they are still a problem at this time. When I asked Joyjit how he Core Magazine

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plans to tackle this, he stated that only the payments process would be handled through a blockchain. The rest of the e-commerce infrastructure would be built using a more traditional, centralized, and proven e-commerce solution. Still, this would be a very challenging e-commerce system to implement because you are attempting to build one that will offer even more services and products than Amazon and Alibaba offer and integrating a crypto-platform into it as well. In response to this, the CEO explained that the cryptocurrency market is still relatively small compared to the 4 trillion USD e-commerce and digital payment industry and is still at its initial stages where people are learning how things work. According to the CEO it is great time to start building his platform and gradually penetrate to generate acceptability as the crypto industry grows.

Marketing Strategy & Implementation Details The Nobar.io CEO is currently running paid Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Linkedin ads to promote his business. This would seem a bit surprising as Facebook re48

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cently moved toward banning cryptocurrency-related Ads. But Joyjit pointed out to me that the way you fill out the information required to set up a Facebook Ad can allow you to advertise your crypto business on the giant social media platform. According to him, you need to basically follow the Facebook advertisement policies carefully to make it sound less promotional and specify that if a user intends to invest his money into Nobar.io, then he or she should perform their own research and accept responsibility for their own decisions. Joyjit is probably right about this because I have personally seen numerous crypto-related Ads on Facebook, even after they were supposedly banned. The CEO informed me that they have not begun their marketing on Twitter yet. And, recently they have added Mr Ismail Malik, the Editor in Chief at ICO Crowd as an Advisor for the project. They have also incorporated Mr Anil Kumar, Director of strategic partnerships at Trescon as their Advisor. Joyjit believes that now he has the complete team to develop this project to success. The NOBAR team has

a post token sale beachhead marketing strategy where they would penetrate the global market with their platform starting from their origin, Estonia. The CEO explains that they are going to market the platform gradually both function wise and region wise to steadily build up the user base on their platform.

$2 Million Soft Cap & Upcoming Media Partnerships Hopefully, if the company can manage to raise $2 million, then this soft cap target will allow them to build a basic e-commerce platform that will have most of the services that they aim to provide, but only be able to accept and process payments in Ether or the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s native NBR token. Users would not be able to pay for services using the other planned cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. To achieve the $20 million hard cap target, which would allow the crypto startup to implement all the promised features described in their whitepaper and website, the

Exclusive

company would need to let its presence be known. Of course, this would require working with various news media companies. When asked about which news media sites he had been planning on working with, Joyjit said that he had contacted Bit Crypto News, a Russian news agency. Also, the CEO has done a online interview with icotalk.tv, a YouTube channel, to explain what his crypto project is all about. Finally, when I asked him why he chose to do an interview with me, he responded by saying that he was looking to market his business through us, at Crypto Core Media. So,

I would like to welcome Joyjit Bhowmick and accept this offer on behalf of our company. Please note that, at Crypto Core Media, we strive to publish objective, unbiased, and accurate information obtained through investigative journalism. Inline with this approach, you can expect to read more from us as Nobar.io proceeds further with the plans outlined in their whitepaper, but from an informative and educational point of view. We also encourage our readers to learn more about the crypto projects they choose to involve themselves in.

References: https://www. bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2018-01-23/estonian-leader-doesn-t-rule-outico-idea-warns-on-regulation https://web.facebook.com/ nobar.io/?_rdc=1&_rdr https://www.linkedin. com/in/joyjit-bhowmick-934933116/ https://www.linkedin.com/ in/blockchain/

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Bitcoin - Strangely Perfect and Brilliant Predictions

itcoin has made history again yesterday when it made the biggest hourly gain of 10% with price trading at 8.1k at the time of writing. There are a few factors for this bull run that we will look into and we will also look into some historic predictions where Professor Milton predicted the emergence of cryptocurrencies way back in 1999.

Bitcoin Makes Its Biggest Hourly Gain

Bitcoin recorded its biggest

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hourly volume in history by climbing up by $1200 and it is currently sitting at 8100 at the time of writing. The price was very bearish for many months and everyone expected it to go down further,Â but to nearly everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surprise, the price climbed so quickly and we can say that the bulls are back again.

Investors/Traders confused over BTC price

Investors and traders were very much confused over the

sudden bull run of BTC. The reason is thatÂ there was no major announcements or developments related to the surge. There are times when the price just surges without any solid reasons and the investors get a pleasant surprise. There was a prolonged bear market for a few months and investors and traders got a welcome gift by this price rise.

The hidden reason behind this surge

It is widely believed that there is no particular reason for their price surge and it might

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be some Institutional Investors buying at the backend. But the likely reason has come out recently: someone revealed in a Reddit that the OTC for Hedge funds is approved and it happened between midnight and 8 AM Chicago time. That was the exact time the surge happened, so we can come to a conclusion that the price increase was due the abovesaid reasons and that was not made public to anyone. Only the people following the hedge funds closely were able to get the above information and were expecting the price increase. Also, the price rose today possibly due to American President Trump declaring a war on Syria and the US started bombing the country. Usually, War will help in the price surge due to the uncertainty and Bitcoin can help in times of uncertainty, since other currencies will probably go down due to pressure from war spending.

Historic Prediction of Bitcoin’s Emergence Like the above price prediction of Bitcoin, there are many cases where people were able

to predict the future of Bitcoin and they were able to visualize that the future money would be peer-to-peer using the internet. Notably, Professor Milton Friedman nailed it by saying that internet will play a major role in reducing the role of government in controlling the financial system. In his video that was recorded in 1999, he predicted that in the future there would be reliable e-cash that can be used to transfer funds from Person A to Person B without A knowing B and B knowing A. He went on to explain that Person A would be able to take a $20 bill electronically and “hand it over” to Person B and Person B would not know where it came from. He further added that this would be developed on top of the internet and it would thus make it easier for people to use the internet to transact.

Milton’s Brilliant Prediction of Future Money It is really mind-boggling to know that someone in 1999 has rightly predicted the emergence of Bitcoin and it is truly amazing that he explained the technical details exactly as they

are in the present form of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. So 20 years ago, Professor Milton basically predicted the rise of Bitcoin in that video. Bitcoin or cryptocurrency name was not mentioned by him; other than that, everything else was so perfect in his future prediction of digital money. There are many Technical Analysts who make price prediction on a daily basis, but most of them fail miserably. But there are few people, like the person on Reddit, who can predict the price rise perfectly by watching the important events closely. Also, we need to appreciate Profession Milton for predicting the emergence of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies way back in 1999 when nobody would have thought that our Internet would be used as a bank. If you liked this article, check out our magazine, comic and this article as well! Kadhir Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

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Status Token – Gateway to Ethereum dApps

tatus is an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain that acts as a gateway to Ethereum dApps. Status is a mobile-based decentralized operating system and a private messenger that acts like a light client to the entire Ethereum network. We’ll take a detailed look at this token and its use cases.

Ethereum Based Mobile Operating System

Status is a decentralized mobile operating system and a messenger that interacts 52

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with the Ethereum network and connects to other dApps through the smartphone app. In other words, this platform acts like a light client on Ethereum network to access other dApps without downloading each one of them. The platform will also help the Entire Ethereum network and take it to mass adoption by users since it acts as a gateway for the entire network. Smartphone users will find it very convenient to access all the decentralized applications with the touch of a button.

Status as a Social Media Platform

Status token fuels the Status network and one needs the SNT token to access the Status Ethereum Client. SNT stakeholders also help influence the network and only the SNT token holders are allowed to create a username on the platform and this will help in eliminating any spam accounts. Status will provide batch to a user to recognize him/her and for acquiring batch one should deposit some SNT against their username for premium status. This is equivalent to the “Blue Tick” on twitter recognizing

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celebrities and other famous personalities.

Different Dapps built on Status Operating System

There are different dApps already built on top of Status OS. Each one of them has a unique functionality and we will discuss each one of them uPort – It helps in identifying and registering an identity on the Ethereum network. It helps in verifying the user and also allows them to sign transactions. Gnosis – It allows users to predict in a prediction market and can win GNO tokens for a successful prediction. Oasis Exchange – It is a near instant exchange to convert between Ethereum and an ERC-20 token. ETHlance – This is like an e-recruitment portal where one can find a job or employers can post the job and one gets paid in Ether currency for the work done. Aragon – This platform helps in creating a decentralized organization using blockchain technology. They provide tools to run the organization as an entrepreneur. Etheisc – This application helps users to register for

Social insurance. In short, it is a decentralized insurance application for users to register for any basic coverage against death or illness. ujo – This application helps in managing music across the supply chain in a decentralized manner. It is a decentralized database that stores the rights and rights owners for music and also allows for royalty payment using smart contracts. There are many more exciting applications that are in the pipeline that will get added on top of Status Operating system. More application will enrich the ecosystem and help in wider adoption of not only Status, but also the Ethereum platform.

Status helps create a Decentralized Economy

Status platform not only acts as a decentralized OS on top of the Ethereum platform, but also helps build a decentralized economy. It helps in finding the DApps and other status users using the discover feature. It also helps in exchanging currency, ideas, and services across the platform in a decentralized manner. It further helps in the growth of the movement and also in wider adoption.

It even has a smart private messaging app that helps in chatting with friends in an encrypted manner using a peer-to-peer protocol. This messaging app can also be used for sending payments and Smart Contracts to other users on the platform. ETH can be sent across to anyone on the platform using this messenger app.

Governance Model in Status Platform

Status provides the stakeholders to have full control over the network and take decisions that involve software development also. Even though it doesn’t involve any cost to the user for voting, SNT tokens are used to take decisions on the network. The user is provided with an equal amount of decision token proportional to the number of SNT token he/ she owns during voting. Additionally, users can help in the curation of content on the application; similar to the Steemit application, users can downvote or upvote content and the voting strength will be determined by the number of SNT tokens held by the user. Just like on the earn.com Core Magazine

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website where the people get paid for replying to a message, we have similar functionality on Status. The stakeholder should set an amount of SNT token for outsiders to reply to their message. When the recipient replies to the message, he/she gets the deposited amount to their address.

So we have seen that the Status platform forms a gateway to the Ethereum network and also creates a decentralized ecosystem for users to access the different applications on the Ethereum network with the click of a button from their smartphone. This will surely

enrich the user experience and also help in wider adoption of the Ethereum platform at a global level. Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

HDD Mining | The Lesser-Known Child Of The Mining Family HDD Mining Not So Mainstream 54

Core Magazine

he cryptocurrency mining industry is a rapidly changing one. In recent years, the ability

to mine cryptocurrencies was always with the people who had GPUs, CPUs, or ASICs. More people getting into

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the mining business has led to an increased demand for these processors. As a result there have been shortages leading to an increase in the price of these chips. Due to the relative ease of access and setting up, GPUs seem to be the hardest hit. The lesser known alternative to these options is HDD mining. HDDs, or Hard Disk Drives, are among the core components of a PC. They offer a very economical solution for storage and are readily available in the market. HDDs are widely available because of developments in data storage technologies making them easier and cheaper to manufacture. It is also one of the easiest upgrades anyone could do to their existing PC to boost their available disk space and read/ write speeds. As this method of storage is getting dated, PC builders and enthusiasts are looking towards newer alternatives. SSDs or Solid State Drives, are the current points of interest. In addition to their small form factor, they offer superior speeds. The only con to all these pros is their price. Most users tend to go for a dual set up. A large HDD for file storage, and a smaller SSD for the OS and frequently used apps.

HDD mining is still a relatively unexplored branch of cryptocurrency mining, even though it makes practical sense. It is easy to set up and can be used for other purposes. Let’s look at two cryptocurrencies, Burstcoin and Siacoin, which take the full advantage of HDD mining .

Burstcoin

Burstcoin is one such cryptocurrency that uses HDDs to mine. Unlike Bitcoin’s Proof of work protocol, which validates every transaction by performing trillions of calculations per second, using a lot of energy and specialized hardware in the process, Burstcoin uses the Proof of capacity protocol, which takes the help of cheap and efficient hard drives to secure its network. Bitcoin mining tends to use arrays of GPUs and/or ASICs to mine profitably. Their use consumes a lot of energy and generates massive amounts of heat. HDD mining with Burstcoin doesn’t require any of that, with the only actual requirement being HDD storage space. HDDs or Hard disk drives use very little power to begin with. A thing to note is that HDDs only run when they need to, staying idle if no

mining is being done. How Does Burstcoin work? The way Burstcoin works is quite simple. The first step, after all the hardware installation is complete, is plotting the HDDs. Plotting is a way that miners pre-generate “plots”, which are pieces of data which contain all the computations needed to forge blocks. Plotting is done through a CPU or GPU and is a long, energy hungry process. Good news is that plotting only has to be done once to get the plotting files stored on the Hard Drive(s). The second step would be setting up your Burst account. A recipient would have to be added, and would receive a reward if your miner finds a block. If pool mining is your thing, you’ll have to set the recipient to the pool’s address. Otherwise, you can set it to your personal address. The mining then begins. Once the previous steps are complete, it is only a matter of launching the mining software. The plots on the HDDs would be read and an amount of time needed to forge the block. This is known as “deadline” and the process would repeat until the next block. In between mining Core Magazine

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the blocks, the HDD is idle, which allows it to be energy efficient.

Siacoin

Another coin which runs on HDD power is Siacoin. Siacoin, or Sia, is a decentralized cloud storage service running on blockchain which allows users to “rent out” their unused hard drive space in exchange for Siacoin. They aim to create a peer-to-peer storage solution which is not only reliable, but also cheaper. Compared to existing cloud storage providers like DropBox and Google, Siacoins main point is to offer complete privacy on the files stored. This means that only the user has access to the stored files. The decentralized nature of the storage network also means the files uploaded are protected against weaknesses of a traditional centralized system. The design also allows for redundant storage, preventing data loss from a single point of failure.

How Does Siacoin Work?

By creating a decentralized storage network where users can rent unused storage space, Siacoin takes a step back from traditional central 56

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storage solutions. Depending on how much space a provider has made available for cloud storage, they are paid using the cryptocurrency Siacoin itself. The storage platform is made up of providers and clients. Providers alllocate the storage space, while the clients rent it. The storage ecosystem aims to provide flexible options and will mostly be market driven. The platform runs on the Proof of storage protocol. This means the payments are only received by the provider upon presenting the specified number of proofs to the client. The proofs are to be submitted in a time frame specified on the contract. If the proof is not submitted within the time period, the payment is sent to a missed proof address until it is received. As Providers, individuals would be able to set their own prices, advertise their reliability and set penalties, in case of data loss and storage problems. They also have the right to deny a client storage space, if the data is of illegal, questionable or sensitive nature. As clients, individuals would be able to have multiple providers for their needs. The data uploaded could be divided between two or more providers to aid in redundancy and security. The two parties can mutu-

ally agree upon contracts that will be levied on the provider, in case they don’t provide proof of storage or withhold the data stored. All business on the Siacoin network is done through file contracts. The contracts outline the terms of an agreement and make sure that the parties cooperate. These contracts are stored on Siacoin’s own blockchain, while the data is stored on the providers HDDs. The contracts allow for flexible data storage options, depending on the need for it. If a client needs to store a large amount of data, while sacrificing reliability, it is doable. The same could be said about the provider, who may ask more for mass data storage but is willing to accept the compromise in reliability. Both parties can see each other’s reputations, and may judge accordingly. When a client creates a contract, they add an amount of Siacoin in it. This amount acts as advance payments which are deducted as files are uploaded. If the amount transferred to the contract is more than what was used, the remaining coins are returned to the client’s wallet.

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Conclusion

HDD mining, though not as profitable right now, could become more popular in the mining community, especially

as decentralized cloud storage gains momentum. What isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t realized is that HDD mining has a big safety net. If an individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s venture into mining proves unsuccessful, or if they

have a change of heart, the HDDs could just be reused for personal use. They could also be sold for money, as HDDs are always in demand.

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Vitalik Buterin - Care Taker or Dictator?

italik Buterin is the co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain and leader that the community follows. This leads to a question of whether Vitalik is a caretaker or dictator of the community. Let’s look into Vitalik’s life and his contribution to the Ethereum blockchain.

Vitalik’s Early Life

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian but his family moved to Canada. He was born in Kolomna, Moscow Oblast, Russia to Dmitry Buterin and Natalia Ameline. His father Dmitry is a computer scientist and so Vitalik naturally gained interest in the field. He

went on to study in Canada at the Abelard School and mentioned that his time in this school as the most interesting and productive part of his life. At Abelard, he formed a good network among the teachers and students and his interest in learning grew in this school due to their ability to teach everything in detail. Vitalik Core Magazine

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put a lot of effort into learning as much as he could and was highly interested in Math, programming, and economics. If you notice, these interests are required to become a successful blockchain developer. Vitalik learned about Bitcoin from his father in 2012. In 2013, he traveled around the world and met with other programmers to discuss starting the Ethereum Blockchain. He then returned home and published a white paper proposing Ethereum. To dedicate all his efforts to the platform’s development, Vitalik dropped out of the University of Waterloo and focused completely on Ethereum. He worked as a writer for Bitcoin Magazine, and was the first co-founder and leading writer for this magazine. He has also written about Bitcoin for other magazines like Bitcoin Weekly. He even held a position of the editorial board of Ledger - a journal that focuses on articles on cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Ethereum Blockchain Vitalik is the co-founder and inventor of Ethereum, a 60

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decentralized mining network and a software development platform combined into one. In short, it is called as a “World Computer” since any decentralized program can be run on its network without any additional infrastructure. Vitalik had a chance to interact with many cryptographers, mathematicians, and economists. These people gave him the knowledge to create the Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain has become the number two crypto platform in terms of market cap, second only to Bitcoin. Many Smart Contracts have been created on top of the Ethereum blockchain. ICOs became very famous and started to draw millions of dollars only after Ethereum came into existence. Most of the ICOs have been built on top of Ethereum and they used the Ethereum blockchain to build their own dApps.

DAO Hack Controversy

The first controversial incident happened which led the crypto community to criticize Vitalik as a dictator and Ethereum to be a centralized coin was the DAO hack. DAO is short for Decentralized Au-

tonomous Organization which acted as a decentralized venture capital fund. It was built as a Smart Contract on top of the Ethereum blockchain. DAO was a complex Smart Contract and there were a lot of areas in its codebase which were susceptible to bugs and vulnerabilities. On June 18th, the community and developers noticed that the funds were being drained out of the DAO contract. Overall, around 3.6 million Ether was stolen by an anonymous hacker. The hacker was able to use the vulnerability that existed in the splitting function.This bug was not from Ethereum but from DAO. Initially, a Soft fork was planned but programmers found out that the soft-fork was not possible due to the immutability of the Ethereum blockchain. The team then decided to hardfork in order to return all the Ether back to DAO. This hardfork created a lot of controversy among the Ethereum community, which split into two. One community wanted the hardfork but the other wanted the Ethereum blockchain to remain immutable like Bitcoin. Anti-hardfork community members argued that the code is law and the terms and conditions should be applicable to DAO also

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regardless of what had happened. They further argued that the blockchain is immutable and they should not change at any given time. The Community was asked to vote for this hardfork and the majority of them voted for the hardfork. The hardfork happened and Ethereum Classic was born out of this fork. This DAO hack incident was considered controversial and Vitalik was accused of helping his friends. Moreover, the larger Crypto community points to this incident to convince people that Ethereum is centralized and Vitalik is the dictator of this platform.

Vitalik Death Hoax

The problem a blockchain will face when it has a leader and is centralized was first known to the world when there was fake news on a troll site called 4Chan. The news claimed that Vitalik was dead in a car crash and this news started spreading like a wildfire. The Death hoax affected the price of Ethereum and it fell sharply by $4 Billion in market cap. Vitalik himself came out and posted a picture of him holding a block number from the Ethereum blockchain, thus confirming he was still alive at that block time.

Cryptospace again started to debate if Vitalik really died then the future of Ethereum would be in jeopardy. This is another important side effect when a crypto platform is controlled by a leader instead of it being decentralized like Bitcoin.

PoW to PoS change

Vitalik was also accused of dictating the decision making instead of taking general consensus when he proposed by himself that Ethereum will change from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. This change is a big change and the decision will decide the future of Ethereum. They planned to first change it to a hybrid of PoS and PoW and then change it completely to PoS. This decision was taken by Vitalik himself without any community consensus. This also led to the crypto community accusing him of dictatorship over the Ethereum blockchain.

EIP-999 Proposal

EIP-999 is a proposal that will help in releasing the freeze that locked 513K Ether in a Parity wallet. Parity wallet got frozen with $150 million of Ether funds due to a serious bug in the software. EIP-999 also requires a hardfork on Ethereum blockchain just

like DAO. According to our Coindesk article, there is a split in the Ethereum community over this hardfork. This is also controversial since the crypto community thinks that Vitalik will finally decide whether the network will move toward another hardfork to activate this proposal. This is another reason the community believes that Ethereum is a centralized network and it is dictated by its founder Vitalik. The above controversial decisions taken by Vitalik should have been avoided and he should have allowed the community to decide via a consensus. The hardfork should have been avoided since the blockchain is believed to be decentralized and immutable. Vitalik should stay away from taking critical decisions about Ethereum in the future for it to be considered a decentralized and leaderless blockchain. Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

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Tatiana Moroz â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Music Financed and Produced with Cryptocurrency Tatiana Moroz â&#x20AC;&#x201C; What can Bitcoin do for the Music Industry?

atiana Moroz is a North American country and folk

singer and songwriter that has embraced Bitcoin and the Blockchain. She used the technology to design a new business model for musicians to follow. This helps bridge the gap between artists and their fans. Fans are able to contribute to her work

directly and maintain a close relationship. Tatiana saw another incentive in using the technology. It allowed her to get rid of intermediaries and access a new funding method. Core Magazine

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Who is Tatiana Moroz ? Tatiana Moroz is one of the first artists ever to embrace the blockchain and libertarian activist communities. Her work is a new production of the folk style of the revolutionary 60’s and 70’s. There is, however, a trace of other genres of music like pop, rock and even blues. Tatiana was the first musician creating the world’s first ever artist cryptocurrency. She founded Crypto Media Hub, an advertising, PR, and marketing agency in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Tatiana also goes around speaking at conferences and performing all over the world advocating for Bitcoin. She has been a prominent figure when it comes to spreading the Bitcoin word and has appeared on multiple popular shows news sites such as the New York Times, International Business Times, Billboard, Infowars, and even at Fox’s Stossel Talks.

Tatiana and Cryptocurrency Tatiana Moroz was the first musician to introduce the concept of the “Artist 64

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Coin.” By introducing her own coin called “Tatianacoinn” in 2014, the libertarian singer-songwriter launched an unprecedented revolution in the music industry. Since then, Tatiana became an avid Bitcoin evangelist having written dozens and dozens of lyrics dedicated to cryptocurrency. Nowadays, Tatiana continues to be a fervent cryptocurrency advocate and even has her own crypto-related podcast streaming on several outlets. These outlets include the “Let’s Talk Bitcoin” network and weekly “ Tatiana Moroz Show.” Besides being the pioneer artist responsible for the creation of the first cryptocurrency in the music industry, Tatiana found a new method of funding artists, through a cryptocurrency-based platform, while also giving birth to a whole new way of involving the fans with the artists. Tatiana opted for the “Artist coin” model because she thought it could offer innovative ways for people to get involved with the artist work. She saw the potential to incentivize stronger relationships with fans while also giving them the ability to access all

kinds of goodies. Tokens could provide them with access to early releases, sponsorship opportunities, private performances, behind the scenes parties, and much more. On a publication on her LinkedIn page, she states:

“Tatianacoin is the first instance of what we call an ArtistCoin: a digital currency that removes the middleman and smooths contracts, payments and communications. ArtistCoins will enable songwriters, record labels, and publishers to seamlessly register their work, view tamper-proof payment contracts, and distribute songs with all the splits built in. This will streamline the licensing process and ensure all the parties are fairly compensated.”

Tatianacoin When she met Adam B Levine, the founder of “Let’s Talk Bitcoin” they started

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thinking about what Bitcoin could do for the music industry. This was the beginning of the whole adventure. They decided to issue Tatianacoin. Tatianacoin was powered by the Counterparty protocol (XCP), a distributed platform running on the Bitcoin protocol using the next generation cryptocurrency protocol which was then entitled Bitcoin 2.0. Tatianacoin would be sold using the same concept of crowdsale in which the user buys their tokens to support the artist and then could later redeem his tokens for special prizes. Tatiana commented:

“You could redeem your Tatianacoins for members only rewards including autographed memorabilia, advanced copies of music, swag, and access to exclusive events. We were even offering custom music, house concerts, and sponsorship opportunities!” While the Bitcoin protocol could be used for a financial purpose, it could also serve as a

base for issuing smart property or Tokens that could be used for different purposes. Having this in mind, Tatiana thought she could issue her own tokens and create a whole new economic ecosystem around her music on her own terms with freedom of decision. Tatianacoin would then allow for connecting fans directly to the artist. This would also serve as an example that could be emulated by other artists.

Keeping And Spreading The “Faith” In Crypto

If you liked this article, check out our magazine, comic and this article as well! This is not advice. Advice should be accepted by your chosen legal counsel only and financial advice should come from a licensed or certified financial professional. As always – do your homework and make decisions based on your own education. Seek information and look into projects before adding to or diversifying your portfolios. Nuno Menezes

Her last album “Keep The Faith” released March 31, 2017, was entirely produced and financed with cryptocurrency, and it is the living proof that she is getting somewhere. In public appearances, Tatiana passionately talks about bitcoin and how she is leading the music industry on the same path as cryptocurrency is. She always speaks and gives her support for the cause and never forgets to mention Ross Ulbricht and what his condition means to freedom. Make no mistakes. This lady has done more for bitcoin than a lot of famous Bitcoin figures joined together. Core Magazine

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Bitfinex Crypto Exchange Offers Best Trading Analysis Tools Bitfinex

itfinex is a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange owned by iFinex Inc. It is one of the biggest exchanges in terms of volume traded. 10% of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trading happens on this exchange. The exchange has also had its fair share of

controversies. For instance, there is the infamous hack that resulted in the loss of 120k Bitcoins in 2016. We will take a close look at Bitfinex and what the future may hold for it. Is it likely to grow bigger and better? Should we expect more controversies?

Bitfinex was established in 2012 for trading cryptocurrencies. It has since then grown to become one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms with over 10% of the overall global volume. Bitfinex is one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most advanced cryptocurrency exchanges. It facilities USDT (Tether) based trading of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. USDT is Core Magazine

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another cryptocurrency pegged at a value of 1 US dollar. Exchange trading, margin trading and margin funding are all allowed on the exchange.

sidered one of the darkest days in the history of Bitfinex and Bitcoin at large. The Bitcoin price crashed from 750 dollars to 480 dollars on that day. This hack is the second biggest loss Bitfinex is web-based but of bitcoins. Only in the 2014 has a mobile app too. Technical Mt. Gox saga has more Bitcoin analysis can be easily done on been stolen. the exchange since charting enabled by TradingView is The vulnerability was due provided. As a result, one gets to the partnership with a wala lot of technical analysis tools let provider known as Bitgo. to predict future price trends Bitfinex integrated Bitgo for and trade accordingly. In fact, an additional layer of security most trading analysts prefer to on transactions by creating a use Bitfinex charts when doing multi-signature wallet. The their analysis. keys were divided among the owners to avoid risk. This The Bitfinex order books are created the vulnerability and fully transparent, unlike that of customers were shocked to see some other exchanges. Users their accounts go dry on that can take a look at the sell/buy day. walls and use the information to guess the overall global trend of a coin in terms of where Tether Controversy the price might go in the near future. Fees charged by Bitfinex It was alleged that Tether, are relatively fair considering the cryptocurrency pegged to the quality of service they pro- the US dollar, was being used to vide to users. artificially push up the Bitcoin

Bitfinex Hack Bitfinex was hacked in August 2016. $60 million worth of Bitcoin was stolen in this hack. A total of 120k Bitcoins was lost during this hack. It is con68

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egy officer at Bifinex as well as director at Tether. Bitfinex was accused of printing USDT out of thin air and propping up the price of Bitcoin. It was reported that whenever tethers flow to Bitfinex exchange ,the prize of Bitcoin starts to rise further upwards.

The Cryptocurrency community became preoccupied in discussing this potential conflict of interest on social media and one group of Bitfinex and tether supporters started to defend the exchange and dismissed the accusations as mere FUD. But the opposite group wanted an independent audit by Tether to prove that all the USDT available in the market should be backed by real USD. They pressurized the management to appoint an independent auditor to examine if Tether was really backed by real money. At that time, Tether had a market cap of 2.2 Billion dollars. Many were very suspicious of the figure price on Bitfinex. Bitfinex and and wondered if there were real other exchanges like Poloniex dollars behind it. use USDT (tether) for buying Notably, Tether was workcryptocurrencies instead of actual USD. Tether was first ing with an independent auditing company Friedman LLP launched in 2015 but due to misunderstandings, Both Tether and Bitfinex Tether announced that their share the same management. relationship with Friedman was Phil Potter is the chief strat- dissolved. Below is the exact

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statement from the spokesperson of Tether

â&#x20AC;&#x153;We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved. Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success.â&#x20AC;? This brought about further suspicion with the dollar pegged cryptocurrency company. Later in December 2017, cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and Tether were Subpoenaed by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, but Bitfinex dismissed this as

a routine legal process from law enforcement agents. This news of US authorities sending a Subpoena created a lot of negative sentiments and the price of Bitcoin fell further. It has still not been proven by the exchange or Tether that they have the sufficient funds to cover the market cap of USDT. The USDT market cap at the time of writing is 2.2 Billion dollars and we strongly hope that they have the required money to back their claims, if not we could see another big fall in the price of Bitcoin if it all comes crushing down. This controversy has since died out but it would be great if Bitfinex is able to resolve the issue once and for all. Getting that sorted out and continuing to serve customers well should be enough to maintain their status as a top cryptocurrency exchange for the foreseeable future. Of course, they would also have to devise a strategy for navigating the increasingly unfriendly regulatory environment in various jurisdictions. Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

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Galia Benartzi and Her BNT Bancor Network Token

he crypto world is full of possibilities, unpredictable yet calculated highs or lows, rapid value crunches, and opportunities that are incredibly promising. Capable of creating a rational shift in the economic understanding of the present time, cryptocurrencies are a way to an exit of One World Order. This Crypto world that digital currencies have created has certainly gathered a lot of business 70

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intelligence since the launch of Bitcoin, which has further translated into an active investment intelligence. As many companies prepare to clone a cryptocurrency from the Bitcoin codebase, Bancor Protocol stands out and has attracted mainstream interest, as it promises novel improvements in the form of smart tokens. That said, Galia Benartzi, co-founder of Bancor, entrepreneur, investor, creator, and an achiever, represents an

important side of this idea is said to have the potential to contribute greatly to the different use cases for blockchain technology. Galia leads the Bancor company, which monetizes on the technology of “infusing” digital currencies with intrinsic “convertibility” via everyone’s favorite: smart contracts. Before we talk about Ms. Galia, let’s go over what Bancor is all about.

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A Bit About Bancor Bancor has reportedly created a system that enables token conversion by permitting users to exchange any token on its network using “algorithmically” determined rates. Moreover, Bancor’s official website says:

“The protocol utilizes “connector” modules, which hold balances of other ERC-20 tokens within a smart contract. The Bancor Formula constantly recalculates prices to maintain balance between Smart Tokens and their connectors.” This writing is not only vague, but also confusing like that found in the Ormeus Coin Whitepaper. Anyone with a solid understanding of computer science concepts, particularly data structures and modularized code, would naturally question what these “connector” modules actually are. Those looking to seriously invest their time, money, or effort into these projects would definitely want/deserve better explanations. There’s more I can say to literally tear this explanation apart. However, that could be something I can save for a potential interview with either Galia Benartzi or the Bancor technical team. Enough with the criticism...let’s talk more about...

Galia Benartzi - The Tech Wizard Galia, born to Israeli parents, was brought up in Silicon Valley and since 2013, she has

dedicated her efforts as a Venture Partner at Founders Fund where she worked on developing “community currencies”. Galia’s academic background includes a BA in Comparative Literature and an MA in International Economics from Dartmouth College and SAIS Johns Hopkins respectively. To her credit, she even co-founded a social gaming startup, Mytopia in 2005, which, after considerable success was acquired by an online gaming company called 888 back in 2010. She also helped develop a cross-platform solution called Particle Code that allows programmers to utilize an automated porting process. That sounds impressive, but what exactly are Galia’s contributions to the blockchain and crypto space? To find out, read on please.

Her Contribution to the Blockchain Space Galia, and her team at Bancor, have designed a tool that lets users collaborate, a bit like a shared accounting system. The inherent security of blockchain and cryptography, assuming it is coded properly, lets users network safely. Not only that, but as Galia explains to Finance Magnates -

“It’s a tool that lets us work together– it’s like our shared accounting system. When you can break this down securely, thanks to blockchain and cryptography, and allow more groups and networks of people to have their own value instruments. You can think of it like the efficiency that you might Core Magazine

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hope for out of local governments, where the local government knows the people better, and is closer to the issues, and can handle a specific issue within a neighborhood better than the federal government could handle it for you. It really is the same thing with monetary instruments.” While this explanation does not make much sense, Galia’s Bancor project claims to be a “decentralized liquidity network” which means that every token on the network is exchangeable with all other

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tokens on the same network..

One Final Thought

Notably, as I read through these explanations found on TechCrunch and Finance Magnates, it gave me all the impressions of a scam. So, as usual, I searched on Google, and I found plenty of that! Although this article will not “shed light” or analyze this, we will go on to mention a few more facts or maybe factoids. In 2017, Bancor announced that it had raised $153 Million at a Token Generation Event. Apparently, there were almost 11,000 buyers along with over 15k transactions. More than 79 million BNT tokens were also created. Since then, BNT

is said to have become a giant reserve. And, proponents of BNT boast that these big reserves have the potential to “transform” the blockchain industry. Not quite sure about that one. I would like to end this article by saying that my reactions and statements in this article are simply a natural response to all the publicly available information on the internet. In no way am I accusing Galia, Bancor, or any other crypto organization or entity of wrongdoing. I am only using my right to free speech to express my opinion about certain things which don’t make sense to me. Would be nice to speak with Ms. Galia or the Bancor team, assuming they want to

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Rhian Lewis | Crypto Developer And Advocate Rhian Lewis

hian Lewis is neck deep when it comes to involvement in cryptocurrency and Blockchain technology. Rhian is a software development engineer in test (SDET) and blockchain consultant at Salvia Media Services. She also happens to be the director of Salvia

Media Services. In this article, we specifically look at the blockchain side of her workÂ as well as other things she does in the cryptocurrency world. Journalist and quality assurance analyst are also professional titles Rhian Lewis goes by. She was an assistant editor at Time and a news reporter and editor at the World Entertainment News Network. Her

quality assurance analyst experience involves testing apps and websites among others for many top-notch organizations.

Her Involvement In Crypto With Salvia Media Services, as mentioned in the introduction, Rhian consults for businesses in Europe on blockchain related dealings. In Core Magazine

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addition, she offers education on blockchain technology. Rhian Lewis has also been educating the general cryptocurrency community with her presentations at several top conferences in the cryptocurrency space. If you also make such presentations or are planning to do so, you should read “in the beginning there was bitcoin”. Yes, she writes too. In this one, she talks about how it’s necessary to take a few minutes at the beginning of presentations to explain what blockchain is. This is to ensure that beginners are not left out from the onset of presentations. In “why I ran a group for women in Bitcoin”, we learn about her efforts in getting more women into the crypto space. With her efforts, she has brought together women from different professional backgrounds to the London women in bitcoin group she started with a friend in 2014.

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In her view, the women in Bitcoin group provides a welcoming environment for women who would otherwise have stayed away from Bitcoin for various reasons. She pointed out that unpleasant encounters at events faced by some women was one reason. Some women not being able to relate to the “male tech savvy bitcoiner” was another. That is not all the only crypto related work she has done. For those who have investments or holdings in various crypto assets and want an easy way of knowing the total value of their portfolio, she has created countmycrypto.com. Countmycrypto.com users are able to check the value of their digital asset portfolio in Bitcoin, the US dollar, the pound, and euro.

A Top Woman In The Space Rhian Lewis studied Economics at the University College London. This means we can assume she has a good understanding of Economics. Her LinkedIn page also states that she was a part of the anarchist group while studying at the university. Hopefully, we can find out if these two factors had anything to do with her interest in cryptocurrencies in a future interview. For now, this has been a look at the work of another top woman in the cryptocurrency space. She has done an amazing job of getting more women into the digital asset world, built software herself and shared her knowledge too. If you like this article, please check out our magazine. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

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Smart Contracts Improving Upward Mobility for Underprivileged Students

mart contracts, the self-executing marvels of blockchain infamy, are still a relatively new concept. Ethereum was the first blockchain to propagate smart contract functionality in 2015, yet in these last few years it has become the epicenter of decentralized utility. For all the efficiency that bitcoin lent to the financial sector and fiat money—eliminating middlemen, quickening transactions, and reducing fees—smart contracts give in kind to transactional

business flows in virtually every industry. This feature reduces overhead and can encourage creative new dynamics between participants of the same services. Instead of signing a contract and then manually handling payment and delivery per the agreement, smart contracts can accomplish all these activities autonomously. Smart contracts rely on blockchain’s immutable ledger to determine when to act, and how. In the supply chain and logistics industry, for

example, shippers can employ Internet of Things devices to constantly upload the temperature and location of each cargo container to the ledger. Due diligence required to verify goods at each point on the supply chain can be done automatically by smart contracts that know when goods have arrived and what state they’re in before giving the go-ahead (or warning) without human input. Fulfillment centers at the shipment’s destination can then reduce their margin of error when estimating lead times, allowing them to offer Core Magazine

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more competitive prices to buyers. The smallest inefficiencies in any process can be tackled with an intelligently developed smart contract, but the service marketplace is a different beast. It’s true that transactional activities are a smart contract’s milieu, but what about when people are transacting in something that’s completely intangible? Such is the problem facing the educational sector which has just started to employ smart contracts in pursuit of its own renaissance.

Educating the Educators A worthy purpose for smart contracts in the educational sphere is to increase access for the least privileged students. The service marketplace is difficult to consolidate as the “goods” for delivery are immaterial. Therefore, it’s largely been institutionalized, where the best teachers and tutors are gathered behind ivy-covered gates for only those individuals who can afford tuition to enter. This is somewhat ironic, considering that those with specialized skills and knowledge should be able to set the price 76

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to acquire it. However, schools represent a centralized institution whereby purveyors of this knowledge sell it to those willing to pay, with administration there to ensure quality and serve as the intermediary between teachers and students. The biggest problem with this system is that it leaves out students who can’t afford the prices that schools charge for tuition. For the benefits that institutional educational systems do provide—quality control, aggregated expertise, and degrees—they’ve priced out many of those who stand to benefit most from an education. It’s gotten easier to acquire knowledge with the web, but there is a huge gap between the proliferation of internet access and smartphones, and the spread of accessible education services. The current internet’s market for educational services, tutoring, and other skill acquisition lessons is fragmented and of questionable quality. Smart contracts, and those on blockchain specifically, are the best chance that the world’s most neglected students have. Their collective fate rests in the capable hands of some of the most innovative blockchain companies around, which is

more than encouraging.

Building a School on Blockchain A blockchain that consolidates service providers and connects them directly to students would serve a higher purpose in many Asian countries where education is strictly institutionalized. Mandatory, rigid schooling schedules in China and an overabundance of students means that those who are poorer, slower to grasp certain concepts, or challenged socially will fall behind fast. Teachers juggling hundreds of pupils have little time or incentive to give personal attention to those who need it, and students who get the short end of the stick are left with few alternatives. The culture itself discourages personal attention, favoring conformity instead, and outsiders are ignored rather than cheered to join the pack. In a country where the all-important college entrance exam is known to put struggling students deep into depression, a more flexible approach is needed. To answer this call, CoooCoin is already establishing a service marketplace on blockchain,

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which will create a centralized, easily searchable, and quality-controlled database of services for all vocations. Whether tutors for education, professional advancement, or entertainment, safe and secure agreements using smart contract technology are the glue that holds it all together. Smart contracts successfully overcome the various obstacles that have caused other ambitious platforms to fail. Namely, they’re low-overhead (saving money which would have otherwise required a fee model), enforceable (ledger data and a reviews system keeps teachers and students accountable), and incorporate smart charitable functionality as well. Enabling access to the economically underprivileged is the purpose of CoooNet, a peripheral service hosted by CoooCoin that assigns donor funds to the neediest students and matches them with volunteer experts as well. All students and teachers on CoooCoin can meet with the company’s comprehensive online whiteboard suite, which includes video and text chat, scanning, image linking and more. Another revolutionary idea using the blockchain for education is ODEM, or the On-Demand Education

Marketplace. ODEM creates a different sort of gig economy whereby students who want to learn a topic can post a request, and the system will ping its most relevant experts to respond. With an ever-growing database of answered requests and courses, ODEM relies on AI technology to scan and identify specific solutions for those with a tough question. BitDegree takes a different approach to on-chain education, by gamifying subjects like development and letting students earn achievements and rewards for their efforts. Smart contracts enable BitDegree to offer what the company refers to as ‘smart incentives’. Through its unique model, BitDegree uses decentralized contract power to automatically release coins to students who are doing well, but also to reward those who create highly viewed content like tutorials, eBooks or courses.

to brush up on their Cold War history, smart contracts encourage reliable remote relationships between knowledge suppliers and individuals hungry to learn more. The educational sector has admittedly been slow to catch on to the blockchain phenomenon, but the space itself and transitively its students, will eventually be amongst its greatest beneficiaries. DISCLAIMER: Crypto Core Media assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of the information in this article or any decisions made based on the information contained in this article. This article has been recommended by a third-party, and is purely for informational purposes. Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

An Equitable Education

In the future, blockchain will create a strong backbone for the spread of decentralized learning. Whether for professionals looking to learn a new skill and climb the corporate ladder, or students who need Core Magazine

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Another Zclassic Fork ? Cryptomanran Claims He Has The Answers

Coin For Privacy Forks?

Core media covered the recent Zclassic pump in this article a couple of days ago. We mentioned how crazy it was for a cryptocurrency that

had been declared dead by its developers to double in price in a matter of days. It turns out some investors were accumulating Zclassic based on rumors of another upcoming Zclassic fork. Ran Neuner, the

host of CNBC Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cryptotrader show, says he has the information on the so-called upcoming Zclassic fork.

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Cryptomanran Has Information On The Zclassic Fork Ran loves his altcoins and loves to trade even more. He has been quite open about being in it for the gains. As mentioned earlier, he plans to make this information on the rumored Zclassic fork public when his show airs later today. Below is the tweet with which he made the announcement. The Zclassic team tweeted in response to warn investors to be cautious and maintained that there wasn’t going to be any further development on the cryptocurrency.

“As said in March, all work has stopped on #Zclassic. Nothing about this has changed. Any proposed fork you may hear about does not have widespread consensus. Please use caution before

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participating in any fork that is promising guaranteed returns or may sound too good to be true.” This led to the price tumble back down to around $13. This was, however, not the end of the story.

Zclassic vrs Bitcoin Private The price of Bitcoin Private, which forked of Zclassic and Bitcoin in February 2018, is $38.15 at the time of writing. The deserted Zclassic is back up to $20.59. The effect of the warning from the Zclassic twitter handle was short lived. This also means the Zclassic price is slightly more than half of the Bitcoin Private price. A lot of effort was put into ensuring the Bitcoin Private fork was done well. At the moment, the price is still yet to reach

its opening price of about $62. With all this in mind, it is unlikely people are buying Zclassic just so they can have a privacy fork of another altcoin. At this point, it looks like the cryptocurrency market is all a game. Very few people actually care about genuine projects, good development teams or whether the cryptocurrency being invested in is needed in the first place. It’s all about making money off trades from market fluctuations and arbitrage no matter the means and most people are not even hiding their intentions. This is most likely the case with the current Zclassic price movements. Whether there is going to be a new fork is not what is relevant. People are just going to be trading for the short-term gains. Like the Zclassic team said, be careful if you want to play too. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

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Zilliqa Cryptocurrency Processes more transactions than Visa Zilliqa Crypto Tens of Millions of Dollars Daily Trading Volume

illiqa (ZIL) is a cryptocurrency which launched via an initial coin offering (ICO) at the beginning of

2018. The ZIL token was issued with ERC-20, which is an easy and popular way to create new cryptocurrencies with the Ethereum protocol. A total of 12.6 billion coins were created in the genesis block, and 6.5 billion coins are in circulation at this time. The price per ZIL is roughly 6 cents, yielding a market

cap of $463 million. This is in the top 50 market caps out of the thousands of different cryptocurrencies; combined with trading volume of tens of millions of dollars per day it is clear that ZIL is a widely used cryptocurrency and therefore important to know about if you are a crypto enthusiast, investor, or trader. Core Magazine

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Problems Plaguing Major Cryptos Like Bitcoin Transaction speed scaling has been a major obstacle for cryptocurrencies, and Zilliqa introduces revolutionary technology which tackles this problem. The most popular and valuable cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, and it currently has a market cap of $138 billion, yet it can only handle 3.3-7 transactions per second. Bitcoin block size is limited and each block can only include a certain amount of transactions. In order to get transactions confirmed as quick as possible, users increase the Bitcoin transaction fee to get in the front of the line, resulting in lesser fee transactions needing to wait until higher fee transactions are confirmed. This can result in a vicious cycle that leads to exorbitant fees. In late 2017, the average Bitcoin transaction fee hit $40, crippling its usability as a currency. Since that time, Bitcoin fees have steadily dropped and are now at a reasonable 20 cents per transaction. However, this fee spike scenario may occur again in the future, and regardless, there are still only 3.3-7 transactions per second 82

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on the Bitcoin network. This simply cannot compete with the transaction frequency of the global centralized banking system; Visa can handle 24,000 transactions per second.

As Many Transactions As Visa? Zilliqa is the first decentralized blockchain-based cryptocurrency that has the potential to compete with the transaction frequency of VISA. It uses proof-of-work (PoW) mining to maintain and secure its network like Bitcoin, but it partitions the mining network into shards which run in parallel. As the number of miners on the network increases, the number of shards running in parallel increases, and this exponentially increases the number of transactions that can be confirmed per second. Notably, Zilliqa ran a test where 2400 nodes were partitioned into 3 shards, and collectively 1400 transactions were being confirmed per second. With 10,000 nodes, this crypto-platform could rival the transaction frequency of Visa and Mastercard. There is no increase in fees as transactions increase on this network, due

to the increased capability to confirm transactions that correlates directly with network growth. Fees on this platform could be lower than Visa and Mastercard even at tens of thousands of transactions per second.

Potential to Beat Visa and Mastercard? Smart contract technology is integrated into the Zilliqa blockchain that can handle this immense number of transactions, and this provides the framework for building decentralized financial apps that can rival Visa. This crypto-platform seemingly solves the cryptocurrency scalability problem, and has the potential to handle more transactions than Visa since it is infinitely scalable. And transaction fees will be much lower than VISA. This is exactly the sort of innovation that is needed to make cryptocurrency spread across the globe and eventually become the primary means of monetary transfer. It appears that thisÂ crypto has the potential to become a frontrunner in the cryptocur-

The Interview rency world. ZIL is intimately tied to its network’s usage, and therefore it is probably good to buy ZIL for your cryptocurrency portfolio since Zilliqa usage and the price of ZIL will likely increase in the long term.

This is not advice. Advice should be accepted by your chosen legal counsel only and financial advice should come from a licensed or certified financial professional. As always

– do your homework and make decisions based on your own education. Seek information and look into projects before adding to or diversifying your portfolios.

Interview | Sheila Warren – Blockchain Head from World Economic Forum Sheila Warren Explains Decentralized Trust

recently interviewed Sheila Warren from the World Economic Forum (WEF). Sheila is

the Head of Blockchain and DLT (distributed ledger technology) at the WEF. Our discussion focused Core Magazine

The Interview mainly on the social aspects, infrastructure requirements, and psychological readiness of society to adopt blockchain technology. The Harvard University graduate started off by telling me that we need to help people develop a general understanding of blockchain. Additionally, she explained that the vast majority of people have learned and become accustomed to trusting centralized institutions such as banks. Now, with the emergence of blockchain, Sheila wants to help people understand that they can also place their trust in decentralized entities. The highly experienced attorney believes that decentralized organizations can be trusted even more than centralized ones.

Multiple Ways to Trust

Presumably, this is because decision-making power and control is not limited to only a few individuals or parties. Moreover, the general consensus among DLT experts is that decentralized organizations help increase accountability and transparency. This can be quite beneficial, according Sheila Warren, when trying to send funds to a group of people 84

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facing a humanitarian crisis. A real-world example of this, as Sheila pointed out, is of the World Food Programme (WFP) leveraging blockchain technology to provide payment vouchers to Syrian refugees in Jordan. Instead of using typical cash registers (or point of sales systems), iris scanners are used for customer identification. Through this system, entitlement payments are then processed after verifying data with United Nations databases.

Building Blocks – a United Nations Project

This WFP project is called Building Blocks. The payment system used for the project is based on a fork of the Ethereum protocol. By using a modified implementation of the Ethereum codebase, all transactions remain private and crypto miners are not required to validate them. Furthermore, as Sheila Warren explained, this type of system eliminates a lot of the extra payments that need to made to various financial services companies who serve as the trusted third-party when processing monetary transactions. Clearly, this approach saves

money, which can then be used by the refugees who really need it. While this is a great example of where blockchain technology can be used to serve humanity, Sheila Warren asserts that DLT is not needed in every scenario where data needs to be stored and processed. In many cases, even a simple Excel Spreadsheet can get the job done just fine.

Stop “Overhyping” Blockchain Technology

Notably, the World Economic Forum DLT head informed me that her organization is working toward cutting down all the unnecessary hype around blockchain. Sheila also mentioned that her organization provides a problem-oriented decision tree that can be used as a guide to determine which type of solution is needed to solve a particular problem. By using this decision tree, companies and individuals are able to identify the best or most appropriate technology for their specific needs. And oftentimes, it’s not blockchain. So then how can this public distributed ledger really help us? According to Sheila, the logistics and supply chain

The Interview management sector can benefit the most from blockchain technology. While I won’t get into the details of how and why, as this has been covered extensively by numerous articles on the internet, I will say that I am well aware of a number of logistics and supply companies who are looking to incorporate blockchain and even cryptocurrency into their business models. One of them being the Prime Shipping Foundation, as reported by Crypto Core Media back in February.

Digital Identity Solution

During the interview, Sheila stated that work is being done to develop a global digital identity solution which could possibly be implemented by using blockchain. Interestingly, there is a crypto-platform called Factom that has been developed to provide proof of authenticity for documents. While the Factom protocol itself is not exactly what’s required to create a digital identity system, it might be possible to use a similar concept and extend it to where it could accurately and reliably verify people’s identities. The idea of using block-

chain to conduct elections has been proposed on numerous occasions. In fact, it was even reported that Sierra Leone used Agora Voting’s blockchainbased software during their national elections. This was later reported as simply not true and fake news. While not directly touching on this particular example, Sheila Warren did say that she is a skeptic of using blockchain tech when it comes to conducting elections.

Blockchain Might Not be Suitable for Voting and Elections

She further explained that there are many things that this nascent technology cannot eliminate to actually make the election and voting process fully transparent and legitimate. One such problem that it cannot solve, as Sheila noted, is that of someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to cast your vote for someone you did not want to vote for. Therefore, elections could still be rigged even when blockchain is used.

permissioned blockchains have had their share of problems, according to the prominent attorney. When I asked about her thoughts on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, she said that this new form of digital money is not going to “die”. This type of news, in my opinion, is part of the whole FUD and misinformation propaganda, which I covered a few months back. I would like to conclude this article by saying that it was a great pleasure speaking to Sheila Warren. She is a prime example of the kind of responsible professionals we need more of in this emerging blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

Other notable things Sheila mentioned were that permissionless blockchains have proven to be beneficial in various scenarios. However, Core Magazine

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Tiffany Madison | Guiding Blockchain Ventures to Success Tiffany Madison - Advisory and Communications ExpertÂ

hen looking for an expert in corporate and sensitive communications, your search is sure to lead you toÂ Tiffany Madison, partner and cofounder at DecentraNet. Tiffany has not only worked in the usual corporate organizations, but 86

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was also a former presidential candidate. With her foray into blockchain, Tiffany Madison was convinced the space was in need of better communications management, leading to the launch of DecentraNet. Her company is a blockchain advisory firm that offers investment and advisory services to corporate entities and individuals alike. As a prolific writer and speaker at numerous inter-

national events, Madison has earned a thought-leader status in the blockchain and crypto space. She is also listed on ICO Bench as an expert in investment advisory, communications and solutions strategy. Being a blockchain personality with about 10,000 followers on social media, she uses the medium to share her insights on blockchain and crypto, including news and updates about DecentraNet with her fans. Before DecentraNet, Tif-

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fany Madison once worked as Vice President of Coin Congress, a crypto-focused event series founded by Brock Pierce. Such experiences, as far back as 2014, intimated her with the lack of diversity in the events happening in the space.

DecentraNet, Guiding the World’s Top Blockchain Companies Having a eureka moment of that multi-billion dollar idea is not sufficient to make it a success. Proper, expert guidance is required. Guiding top blockchain ventures to success is what DecentraNet, a full-scale blockchain consulting firm, is set to do. DecentraNet can help a blockchain startup launch their ICO from start to finish as their full-scale services include: whitepaper development and distribution; smart contracts development and tokenomics, marketing, branding and PR; legal, regulatory and compliance (KYC and AML); private capital and strategic partnerships; and token sale and campaign management.

Tiffany Madison brings her skills as a Strategist, Advisor, Communicator, Consultant, and Writer to DecentraNet which has earned her some amazing clients including: Nano Vision, DAOstack, Fr8, BuildCoin, Academy, and Loci among others. DecentraNet also played host to CryptoHQ at the World Economic Forum recently held in Davos.

Decentralizing Women’s Participation in Blockchain Being an expert in several key skills means Tiffany Madison can spread her tentacles outside DecentraNet. At the moment, she is an advisor for DeedCoin, a real estate use case blockchain project. It effectively replaces the traditional real estate agents and their 6% or more commissions with a DeedCoin agent that charges just 1%. Home buyers would have the chance to pay for a realtor’s services, partly or wholly in crypto.

recently granted interview to Lisa Winning of Forbes, Tiffany gave a few ways through which conscious efforts can be made regarding women inclusion in the dynamic space. First is creating new opportunities for women, by opening up job roles; another is offering women a platform to showcase their expertise. How else would this happen if all-male panels keep happening in events? Finally, she is convinced, mainstreaming crypto adoption would go a long way to increase women participation. In a space so bro-filled, it’s refreshing to see a woman, an expert communications and investment advisor, charging her way to prominence and relevance in the space while trampling down all obstacles to women inclusion. Faith Obafemi

As someone with a daughter and three nieces, plus a woman herself, Tiffany actively promotes the decentralization of women participation in blockchain and crypto. In her Core Magazine

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Binance CEO Only Accepting Interviews from Crypto Holders

inance CEO C h a n g p e n g Zhao announced today that he will not accept interviews from a journalists who don’t hold any cryptocurrencies. This is primarily due to the fact that non-holders do not understand or appreciate this amazing technology and they tend to ask questions that are silly and against the crypto community. Let’s look into this development in detail and how mainstream media and journalists handle Crypto news in an unprofessional and biased 88

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manner.

Binance Exchange Binance is one of the biggest exchanges in the world, handling huge volumes. Recently, it was reported that the exchange made a profit to the tune of $200 million; that’s more than the profit made by the Deutsche Bank. The bank only made a profit of $146 million dollars in the Q1, 2018. Binance also announced that it is moving to Malta, a Mediterranean island in Europe. The exchange is growing at a rapid pace and seems as if it

will continue to dominate the crypto market.

Mainstream Media Against Crypto The mainstream media and the non-crypto journalists often against this amazing technology. They try to create FUD to make the people panic sell due to their inaccurate reporting of Cryptocurrencies. The Mainstream media really doesn’t know how this works nor have many of them done any transactions using Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

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Their general perspective is that Bitcoin is used for drug business and also in money laundering, so they support strict regulations against cryptos. They really don’t know beyond this and have not done enough research to know about its benefits and use cases. It might also be a possibility that the Government and Banks might be sponsoring the media to write against crypto since they are afraid of the disruption this technology brings to their business.

Binance CEO’s stance Against Journalist Binance CEO has taken a tougher stance against the mainstream media and the irresponsible journalists due to their continuous attack on cryptocurrencies and their bad attitude toward them. Recently, Changpeng Zhao has hit back against Nikkei and called it “Irresponsible Journalism”. Nikkei reported a few weeks back that Japan’s Financial Services Agency was about to issue an exit order to this exchange. This is how Changpeng responded to the false news

“Nikkei showed irresponsible journalism. We are in constructive dialogs with Japan FSA, and have not received any mandates. It does not make sense for JFSA to tell a newspaper before telling us, while we have an active dialog going on with them,” This is not the only case when Zhao faced such false allegations, there are countless other times when they created panic by publishing false information and also the journalist would ask silly questions that are irrelevant to the crypto space. So he has taken a stance to accept media interview requests only from journalists who HODL some crypto. This way, he is ensuring that he is speaking to the right journalist who understands how cryptocurrency works and appreciates its use case. Some ignorant media persons keep bombarding Zhao with questions like “are bitcoins only used by drug lords?”.

“I learned most journalists are forbidden by their employers to hodl any crypto. Should they be forbidden to own fiat if they write about trade-wars? So now, we have journalists who have never done a single blockchain t ra n s a c t i o n w r i t i n g / ” te a ch i n g the public” about blockchain.” “Going forward, I am inclined to only accept media interview requests from journalists who HODL some crypto. So that I don’t have to repeatedly answer “are bitcoins only used by drug lords?” This is a right move by the exchange’s CEO to avoid some noise from media and also to safeguard him from some irrelevant questions that are really just a waste of time. Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

Below is the tweet from him related to his announcement.

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The Interview

Interview | Pakistan’s PAKCOIN Founder Discusses Future Development Plans Pakcoin Developer Continues to Work Despite Hostile Environment Today, I spoke to Abu Shaheer, the founder and developer of Pakcoin, Pakistan’s first cryptocurrency. Notably, Pakistan is a third-world country with an unfriendly business environment due to rampant corruption and extreme political instability. Fairly recently, the elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was disqualified 92

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and had to vacate his office once allegations of corruption had been confirmed against him. Due to such turmoil, the Pakistani Rupee has taken a sharp nosedive. Furthermore, Pakistan has a very low Human Development Index (HDI), a statistical indicator that measures the overall quality of life of a country’s citizens. Since I live here in Pakistan, I can tell you

that there are many day-to-day problems that people here go through which they really shouldn’t have to, considering we are well into the 21st century. These problems include frequent power outages, political strikes due to heated confrontations between the rule and opposing parties, and an alarming rate of extortion and other serious crimes.

The Interview

A Positive Side to Pakistan

The mere fact that there are people like Abu Shaheer working on developing a cryptocurrency platform such as Pakcoin, despite the turbulent conditions in Pakistan, shows that everything about Pakistan is not negative. In fact, some reports suggest that this nation has the world’s 4th most intelligent population. Also, there are highly skilled software developers who live and work in Pakistan. Notably, one young Pakistani developer and student created a full-fledged IDE for Assembly Language programmers. Then, there are also inspiring Youtubers such as Laiba Zaid, who have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers and subscribers on Instagram and Youtube because of their entertaining and informative videos on beauty, lifestyle, and fitness. So, it is these few people who are contributing to Pakistan’s deprived digital economy. Okay, so now I’ll recap what Mr. Abu Shaheer and I discussed today. Pakcoin Platform Objective Abu Shaheer explained to

me that the Pakcoin platform was a fork of Litecoin, which itself is a fork of Bitcoin. The coin’s founder admitted that there were no significant differences between the Litecoin platform and the one he has developed. He said that while he values innovation, he would first like to focus on the basics. By this, he means that he would like for cryptocurrencies like Pakcoin to actually start being used by people. Shaheer stressed, like many others that I’ve interviewed in the crypto space, that cryptocurrencies were still not very user-friendly, and it is particularly difficult for the layperson or common man to understand how they work and use. Therefore, the crypto developer has focused his efforts around making Pakcoin more accessible and usable by the local population. He plans to create an easy method by which Pakcoin currency can be transferred through a standard point-of-sales (POS) system to a merchant as payment.

Cryptocurrency Regulations

As our conversation went on, I had to ask Shaheer about his take on the recent attempt by the State Bank of Pakistan

(SBP) to ban cryptocurrencies. He rightly pointed out that the country’s State Bank did not have the authority to make laws. Of course, this is the case for almost all countries. However, the SBP did instruct all local banks to not process crypto-related transactions, thus creating a hostile and unfriendly environment for Pakistan’s small crypto-community. Usually what happens when governments try to restrict such activity, as Shaheer noted, is that people tend to use “backdoors” and this often involves some type of unlawful and harmful activity. Therefore, the Pakcoin developer said that it is best if the SBP would try to work cooperatively with the nation’s cryptocurrency users and encourage the development of a proper regulatory framework around Pakistan’s digital currency market. This seems like the most logical and practical approach. Moreover, the crypto space, along with blockchain, brings cutting-edge technology to Pakistan; the country has already been deprived too long from healthy economic growth and activity due to the corrupt “elite”. Projects like Pakcoin are one of the very few bright spots that this troubled country Core Magazine

The Interview has, so I think that the Pakistani government should try to accommodate such initiatives. Please note that this article has not covered everything that I discussed with Mr. Sha-

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heer. The interested readers may look forward to the other things we talked about in a later post, exclusively here on Crypto Core Media.

Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

Blockchain News

Ormeus Coin - Digital Money System Backed By $250 Million Mining Operation Ormeus Coin Backed by $250 Million Crypto Mining Operation

Ormeus Coin is a type of virtual currency payment network that is reportedly backed by a $250 million industrial mining business. When you visit the platform’s official

website, you will see it stated that the quarter of a billion dollar mining operation has been “fully-audited.” Additionally, revenue from this crypto mining networking is Core Magazine

Blockchain News

cryptographically linked to the Ormeus Reserve Vault (ORV). The link between the ORV and mining operation, according to the website, is established via “proof of asset technology” and Ethereum’s ERC-20 based smart contracts. Also per the website, Ormeus Coin has verifiable digital assets such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dash which are being generated through the company’s extensive mining equipment. In total, the monthly revenue from this intensive mining activity is a staggering $8 million.

Solid Investment Strategy Ormeus states that 40% of all the cryptocurrency generated from its giant mining operation will go toward purchasing mining equipment “with verified financial projections”. It is estimated, that by Q1 2019, monthly revenue will be around $511 million. This would equate to over $6 billion in annual revenue, solely from the company’s mining activity. In order to optimize the large-scale crypto mining process, the Ormeus Coin developers use a customized, proprietary Artificial Intel96

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ligence engine. This AI system is able to determine which digital currencies are the most lucrative to mine, and then proceeds to mine those specific cryptos.

Many Notable Targets Achieved The Ormeus organization had set a number of targets for the year 2017. These targets included launching the “ORME” ERC-20 complaint token and smart contracts, developing the Ormeus brand by hiring a competent core team, setting up a preliminary 30 PH/s mining infrastructure, launching the ORME ICO, and getting listed on a public exchange including CoinMarkerCap. As planned, all these targets have been successfully achieved. Other impressive future targets that need to completed are: Ormeus ATM and Debit Card, Altcoin Smart Contract, and the company’s own crypto wallet. Notably, the company also plans to hit 250 Petahash by end of 2018 and donate as much as 4% of its profits to charity by fourth quarter 2022.

Coin Distribution & Other Info To confirm the information mentioned above and learn about this platform’s coin distribution, please visit their website. You can also peruse the Ormeus Coin Whitepaper. Please note that the purpose of this article is only to inform our readers of various popular businesses in the crypto industry. This is not advice. Advice should be accepted by your chosen legal counsel only and financial advice should come from a licensed or certified financial professional. As always – do your homework and make decisions based on your own education. Seek information and look into projects before adding to or diversifying your portfolios. Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

Blockchain News

Samson Williams | Blockchain Is NOT For Everyone Samson Williams – Partner @ Axes and Eggs

esterday, I spoke to Samson Williams who is Partner at Axes and Eggs – a Blockchain & Cryptocurrency Consulting Company. And, if you go

to the company’s website, it says there very clearly what else they do. So, according to the official Axes and Eggs website, the company helps people Core Magazine

Blockchain News

mine cryptocurrencies, set up mining equipment, and help improve current mining operations. Wait. That’s not all. They also help established companies launch their own ICOs and educate children and executives about Blockchain technology. After talking to Samson Williams for well over an hour, I was amazed at just how much experience he has in just about every imaginable field and line of work. Before learning this though, the first question I asked Samson was how he was able to offer so many different crypto-related services.

Comprehensive & Extensive Crypto Services Initially, he responded by saying that “We have a team”. Still though, even companies tend to specialize in certain domains and usually do not offer such a comprehensive list of services. However, Samson Williams explained that since these areas were so interrelated, and even interdependent to a certain extent, Axes and Eggs is able to offer these services. And, not just “offer” them, but also do a damn good job of it! 98

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So, how exactly did Samson Williams end up working with cryptocurrencies? When asked, he explained that back in 2015, he started mining cryptos as a hobby. This “hobby” taught him a thing or two about how these digital entities function. While quickly learning the basics, this hobby turned into a serious business model by the time 2017 hit, especially when the digital currency market hit record highs in December, 2017.

The World Still has NO Idea What Crypto/Blockchain Is, Yet This is when Samson Williams realized that his “hobby” was actually turning into a viable business. So basically, as most crypto enthusiasts are aware, Bitcoin is nothing new. By new I mean, it’s not exactly “new, new”. Heck, it has been around since 2009. Unfortunately, due to the extreme socioeconomic inequality that still exists today, in addition to less than 50% of the world population having real access to the internet, the idea of Bitcoin, Blockchain, and cryptocurrencies is something that maybe 2% of the world

population is familiar with, according to Samson Williams. This is actually quite accurate, I would say. But out of that 2%, what is the real percentage of people who actually know what this stuff is? According to the articulate and highly intellectual entrepreneur: maybe one-tenth of a percent. That’s right, just 0.1%. Now that I am writing this and really thinking about it, I would argue that is probably closer to 0.05%. Anyway, I think you get the point.

Responsibility to Educate Business-savvy people, like Samson Williams, who realize this fact, not only use their rare skills to help them develop businesses that benefit themselves, but have also taken on the added responsibility of educating others about what this technology is all about. Moreover, the Axes and Eggs Partner wisely says, “Cultural Poverty is a learned behavior.” Being the only one in his family to have earned a college (university) education, he is what I consider the real-world example of a true outlier. So, just like poverty is passively learned and so is being and staying wealthy, those in power

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or control should taken on the responsibility to educate the less-fortunate. This is exactly what Samson Williams and other successful entrepreneurs that I talk to, DO. An excellent way to give back to society, if you ask me. Okay, let me get back to talking more about what Samson had to say…. While helping organizations adopt blockchain/crypto, Samson told me that “Blockchain is not for everyone.” His exact words were, “Blockchain is not like hot sauce!” This obviously means that you can’t sprinkle it everywhere. Moreover, If you’ve got something that you can do without it, and do it well, and using a blockchain has no added benefit, then simply don’t use it! If all you need to do is store some data, in many cases a simple Excel Spreadsheet will do the job just fine, according to Samson Williams.

Samson’s Prediction About Blockchain We keep hearing all these great explanations about what Blockchain is. That’s great! However, let’s just actually

use it. Let’s put it to use. The question people should really be asking is “What can it do for me?”, Samson says. Well, once this distributed ledger data structure truly becomes mainstream, people and future generations will not even know what it is. That’s because, the entrepreneur says, it will be kind of like riding a plane. He says he knows next to nothing about how an airplanes function or are made. But, he sure as hell uses one, and knows how to book his flights to places like Abu Dhabi and Dubai where he engages in his various business activities and ventures. So, just like people might not know how smartphones or wifi actually work or are built, they need them and are experts at using them. Coming from computer science background myself, I understand this concept quite well. For example, when you write programming code, you need not know how to program everything. That’s why you write modularized code. Each piece of modularized code, granted it’s written properly, will serve to accomplish one specific thing. All you need to do is “call” that segment of code, give it the input it requires

from you, in the format that it requires, and it will simply give you the results you are looking for. Those results, you can use to write an entirely different program of your own that does something completely different from the pieces of code (functions/procedures) it “calls”. The same way, smartphones are very intuitive and friendly to use. So, we need only know how to use them effectively to get what we want out of them. There’s no point in trying to learn how they work or are built, unless you want to for purely educational purposes, or want to become a mobile app developer or something. Let’s now move onto what the crypto businessman has to say about ICOs.

Samson’s Advice for ICOs One thing Samson made very clear during our interview is that he helps only legitimate and established businesses launch ICOs, if they need to. He explains that there is no point in trying or raising large sums of money, if your business model sucks. The real question is, “What will you do with that Core Magazine

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money?” Will you be able to use it to launch a successful business? If the answer is no, then forget about raising all that money in the first place. Furthermore, while offering professional consulting services to organizations wanting to launch ICOs, Samson draws on his experience from reading tons of whitepapers. This is something he started doing regularly and religiously when wanted to figure out which cryptocurrencies to mine. As a result of this research, he is now able to quickly and accurately analyze a company’s business model, and determine whether or not something seemingly crypto-related will actually work and is sustainable. By reading through so many whitepapers, he was able to branch off into blockchain and ICO advising and consultancy.

Minority Entry Barrier

Based on Samson’s extensive exposure and practical work experience with helping everyone from “working girls” recover and get back to leading a safe and healthy life to governmental organizations, he believes that the digital divide is even harder to overcome 100

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for minorities like African Americans. Therefore, he has used and continues to use his expertise and resources to help many African Americans of all age groups overcome various obstacles and challenges, in order to become more successful.

though he cannot confirm this.

He even gives the example of helping his own grandmother learn and use technology. Although he says she might not be as tech-savvy as she’d like to be, she is definitely more comfortable with it, largely due to Samson’s ability to explain technical things in a manner which is simple and easy to understand for people with a very limited technical background or aptitude.

Meanwhile, when discussing his own company’s website, he says they used the simplest website design templates possible. In fact, he used the ones that apparently Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway uses. Needless to say, he points out that his website is very easy to hack. Unfortunately for the would-be hackers, there’s no hidden treasure anywhere on his website. So, there’s really no incentive for them to hack it. Of course, he must have have stashed the valuable and highly sensitive information elsewhere. And, again, of course, he did not tell me where that is for obvious reasons.

Simple Website Design & Implementation

Traditional Businesses Are Shocked When…

As Samson Williams was discussing the topic of making technology more user-friendly and helping minorities to understand and embrace it, he began touching on the topic of Security. We all hear of crypto currency exchanges being hacked, and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of digital currency being stolen. Samson thinks there might be some insider foul play involved, al-

One of the great things about talking directly to real people in the crypto business is that you get to learn things which you really won’t find by simply writing articles that are essentially a regurgitation of what you read on the internet. And, as Samson aptly explains, when traditional organizations find out that they will have to become truly accountable and how everything will become

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much more transparent if they use a public blockchain, they are literally shocked! That’s just not the way they are used to doing things, or rather “getting away” with things. Although I personally know that central banks, and even Bank of America admit to being threatened by cryptocurrencies, and not just because of the transparent nature of most cryptos (with exception of privacy-focused coins for the most part), all this is rooted deeply in the human psyche and human psychology.

Anxiousness, Stress, Panic…in that Order Samson gives the example of three linear stages of realization in humans: 1) Anxiousness, 2) Stress, e) Panic. He used this example to talk about many different things in our society. For instance, he said that while working for Fannie Mae, he often helped people deal with foreclosure and their homes getting repossessed. These are the three mental stages that they typically went through when coming to grips with the ugly reality of losing the roof over their heads.

Similarly, when times get tough, and corrupt governments like Venezuela make their citizens suffer from crippling inflation, then the people first get anxious, then they get stressed out, and finally they panic. This panic then sometimes leads to finding a safe haven in something that breaks away from the traditional boundaries of the existing financial system. That “something” is now increasingly becoming cryptocurrencies. This, of course, is not me speaking. These are the exact words of Samson Williams. This is what Samson has learned not just from sitting in a classroom or being educated in a formal setting.

their businesses. He uses both his knowledge of these technologies and his ability to understand humans to deliver the best possible services to his clients. There’s still much more that I can tell you about this talented guy, but I think I will include that in another article on this awesome crypto personality. In the meantime, you can follow Samson on Twitter and Instagram at @ HustleFundBaby and connect with him via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ samson-williams-a7bb8513/ Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

Although his bachelors degree in Cultural Anthropology and academic background in Medical Anthropology, Emergency Management, and even law school has given him a solid foundation, which allows him to gain a better understanding of the human element behind crypto, it is his practical hands-on experience actually working with people facing real-life emergency and crisis situations. This valuable experience helps him offer crypto-related services like helping people set up crypto mining and blockchain in Core Magazine

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Catherine Coley | Stimulating Ripples in Blockchain and Global Banking Catherine Coley Global Banking on the Blockchain

atherine Coley is one smart foreign exchange expert who has been able to marry her skills in global banking with blockchain based solutions in foreign 102

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exchange. Starting off at the Hong Kong office of Morgan Stanley as a Foreign Exchange Analyst in 2011, and then later, the London office of Morgan Stanley, Catherine has spent years on international foreign exchange trading floors. A graduate of University of North Carolina of Chapel

Hill, she also holds a B.Scâ&#x20AC;&#x2039; in International studiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2039; from Kenan-Flagler Business School. After an eventful time in the active trading floors on two continents, and in the interim before Ripple, Catherine took up a role as the Foreign Exchange Advisor at Si licon Valley Bank. All the above experience

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and skills culminated in her landing a top role in the blockchain and crypto space as Head of Investor Relations at Ripple. She is quite active on social media where she shares her thoughts in the space, including news updates on Ripple.

Banks on the Blockchain: Ripple’s Rippling Success A definition of blockchain and crypto usually has a negative reference to banks, one of the third party institutions everyone wants to do away with. Interestingly, there’s a blockchain company making gigantic moves in the space with laser focus on banks. Ripple, also a distributed ledger technology (DLT) like the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain, is well known as the underlying

technology of its native token, XRP, most times also referred to as Ripple. Founded in 2012 as OpenCoin, before rebranding as Ripple Labs in 2015, the Ripple blockchain is a payments protocol and exchange network. Currently holding its position as the third biggest cryptocur rency, based on market ca p, Ripple’s MVP is essential ly payment services through products like: Money Tap, xCur rent, xRapid and xVia. Its rippling success is perhaps r elated to the large bank partnerships it is involved in. Just about a month ago, Ripple made a big announcement of its partnership with 61 major banks in Japan. On the co in market front, Ripple’s native cryptocurrency is doing well. The San Francisco born company sold nearly $1 00 million worth of

XRP tokens in the last quarter of 2017. Currently, the payment serv ices company has its crypt o trading at almost a dollar to one XRP.

Coley and Ripple Heading t he investor relations dep artment, Catherine Coley designs communication strategies that aim at pulling in more investors into Ripple. Her commi tment to her role at R ipple shows even in her onlin e interactions. She has a pin ned tweet on her twitter profile where she urges the crypto community to stop erroneous ly interchanging “XRP” for “Ripple” as though they were synonymous. Faith Obafemi

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Perianne Boring | Beyond the Beauty of The Blockchain Perianne Boring

egulators around the globe view cr yptocurrency in different lights. While some countries are taking a rigid stance against these 104

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virtual currencies, others are adopting it. However, someone needs to take the bull by the horn and keep lawmakers informed about cryptocurrencies and its underlying technology, the blockchain. Perianne Boringâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;the beauty of the

blockchain is one person who has taken up the task of taming the beast (policy makers). Perianne Boring is called the Beauty of the Blockchain not because of her looks alone. She runs a bl og on Forbes called

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“the beauty of the blockchain”. The blog gives her the opportunity to share her opinion as well as the op inions of investors, economist s, technologists and others on the blockchain. She is an economist, a journalist and a blockchain commentator and she brings a ting of diversity to the blockchain world.

Boring Economics When blockchain needed a voice to propagate its gospel, Perianne Boring was there. She has an MA in Economics & MBA from the University of Florida a nd this gives her an edge as she was a contributor on Forbes and was also the author of a column titled the “Boring Economics .” She has a wealth of experi ence as she was also an anchor for a television show called “Prime Interest,” an internati onal finance program that aired in over 100 countries to over 650 million viewers. She is also a blockchain professor at Goergetown.

ing the m ultiple uses cases of blockchai n technology as well as educat ing policymakers on the technology. This led to the creation of the Digital Chamber of Commerce in 2014 with the sole mission of creating an environment where blockchain based inn ovation and investment can thrive.

advocates for the fair treatment of blockc hain technology and its investors by tax regulators.

She spend s her time trying to help c lose the gap within the gover nment by educating and ensur ing that those who are creating policies do so with industry input and a knowledge and appre ciation of the poThere was a great need tential p romise of blockchain for commu nication between technology. policymak ers, the industry and regul ators and her career We hope y ou liked this as a legi slative analyst in the article. And if you did, check US House of Representatives out this article about another had prepa red her for educat- inspiring blockchain profesing policymakers on the effect sional. A lso, check out our exclusion has on the industry magazine! during po licy discussions. This is w hy she called for a Rebecca Asseh formal re presentation of the blockchain industry in D.C. by creating the Digital Chamber of Commerce.

Transformational Power of Blockchain

Perianne believes in the transform ational power of the blockchain, ...” this technology will lift a lot of people out of poverty and can help them engage in global commerce.” She is one the most notable personPerianne came up with the alities to follow on Twitter on formidabl e idea of advocat- blockchai n matters. She also

Bridging the Gap Between Policy Makers & the Industry

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Innovating in crypto news

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Winning Poker Network by Phil Nagy, Accepting Crypto Since 2014 Phil Nagy, From Winning Poker Network

recently spoke to Phil Nagy, CEO of the Winning Poker Network (WPN). Soon after talking to Phil for only a few minutes, I realized how passionate he was about cryptocurrencies and their practical use cases. You might

ask what cryptocurrencies have to do with poker? Well, WPN happens to be 6th largest online poker network in the world and their business has been accepting cryptocurrencies from players since 2014. In “crypt ocurrency years”, that is quite a long time and, as Phil explained to me, his company had to work through all the challenge s and obstacles that

come with accepting a completely n ew payment method. World Pok er Network, which has its bases in Bulgaria, South Korea, an d Costa Rica, can now be considered one of the pioneers in the “Crypto Poker” world because of the extensive knowledge and expertise they have acqu ired by processing cryptocurrency transactions for nearly four years now.

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Challenges When Accepting Cryptocurrency Payments Due to their highly volatile nature, c ryptocurrencies present a big challenge to businesses that try to accept them as payment. For instance, if you make a $100 payment with Bitcoin, that same $100 could be worth $50 by th e time payment is fully processed. So clearly, any business that accepts Bitcoins or any other crypto would have to find a way to deal with such volatility. This is e xactly what Phil Nagy and his WPN had to deal with . Notably, the lively CEO, or C hief Poker Player as he lik es to call himself, explains that their crypto business plan included accepting 60 differ ent cryptocurrencies. This was a really wise move, because i t allowed the business savv y CEO to engage in some qual ity data mining and research. Phil pointed out that by accepting so many different cryptos, his company was able to determ ine which cryptos were bein g used in various geographi cal locations across the world. The company then 108

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used this valuable information to further improve their crypto business model, in order to offer the best possible services to their loyal customers.

Exponential Rise In Cryptocurrency Transactions In late 2014, the time when WPN first started accepting and allow ing their customers to make deposits in cryptocurrencies, they only made up 2% of the gi ant poker network’s total tra nsaction volume. But now, Phil says that cryptorelated t ransactions account for approximately 60% of their total tra nsactions. He then mentioned that his company had to st omach a lot of the losses due to the extreme volatility of cryptos. However, due to the company’s hard work and persevera nce, they now have the expertise necessary to help other pok er and gambling companies start accepting and processin g crypto payments. Phil Nagy , who is heavily invested in cryptocurrencies himself, believes in educating people about digital currencies and developing more use cases for them. This, according to him, will greatly help in their

mainstream adoption. Phil also thinks one of the best ways to educate yourself and truly learn about cry ptocurrencies is by actually using them in betting. This is s pot on because that’s when you actually have something at stake, and one would be highly motivated to know what exac tly they are betting with.

Crypto By Experience Conference in Amsterdam Moreover, working through the different challenges of converting BTC to USD and match making with the help of highly skilled and professional traders, has given WPN a decisive edge in the “Crypto Poker” business. Phil Nagy now generously plans to give back to the Poker community and businesses by speaking about his company’s crypto business model at the Crypto By Experience conference scheduled in the month of July in Amsterdam. As Phil rightfully stated and emphasized numerous times during our interview, he believes in educating people about cryptocurrencies and trying to develop more practi-

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cal uses cases. Therefore, this is something he intends to do at the conference. Phil has also worked extensively with crypto and blockchain developers while integrating crypto payments into his business and knows, very well, how the development process works.

World Poker Network’s Cryptocurrency Exchange After gaining this valuable experience, Phil has decided to launch WPN’s own cryptocurrency exchange. According to the ambitious CEO, the exchange will be launched in the next 90 days. While discussing

the launch of his company’s own crypto exchange, Phil noted that he fully understands the importance of security when offering a digital currency exchange service. For this, the Chief Poker player says his company is fully prepared, and will make sure to developer a user-friendly and robust front-end. This would prevent malicious hackers from compromising the company’s online systems, and users can be rest assured that their funds will be safe. It was definitely a great learning experience for me when talking to Phil Nagy. Please stay tuned for more updates from Winning Poker

Network and Phil! If you like this article, please check out our magazine! Phil Nagy’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin. com/in/phillip-nagy/ Winning Poker Network Website: https://www.winningpokernetwork.com/ DISCLAIMER: This article is purely for informational purposes. Crypto Core Media assumes no responsibility regarding the accuracy of the information in this article. Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

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Crypto Wonder Woman | Fahima Marissa Anwar Creating a Legacy Fahima Marissa Anwar

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l o c k c h a i n technology has started a revolution that is sweeping across industries, institutions, and traditional boundaries. The

revolution is also affecting the dichotomy between gender-biased treatments in the tech industry, as more women are getting into the helm of affairs, when it

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comes to cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and their multiple use cases. One such notable woman pioneering the cutting-edge technology in the space is Fahima Marissa Anwar.

Integrating Marketing and Blockchain Technology Fahima is one of the crypto wonder women who is establishing their presence in the space by creating awareness and a path for others to follow. She is the Director for IVEP and works with Marketing & Communications. She is also the Senior Director of Global Marketing & Communications at Dubtokens, which is a blockchain-based utility token for Interactive Video & Experience Protocol. It allows users interact with real-time video content with their audience in a specialized manner. But let’s get back to... Fahima has more than 8 years experience as a content strategist and is bringing her knowledge and wealth of experience in e-commerce and marketing and blending it into the blockchain technology.

As a content strategist, Fahima truly understands the importance of quality content. The importance of the content reaching its target is also something she always aims for. This is why she shares her marketing knowledge coupled with DubToken’s blockchain solutions with her 3,392 followers on Twitter.

Blockchain Influencer Fahima artistically blends technology, cryptocurrency, and blockchain with her marketing expertise at DubTokens. She is also influencing other women and encouraging a change in the male-dominated crypto and blockchain space by purposefully creating a team that is made up of 90% females at IVEP. This is exactly what the blockchain space needs: more women in the blockchain industry creating a balance and making a difference.

influencer conference. Here, women from different backgrounds and careers can come together, make connections and share their knowledge. The crypto space is growing and crypto wonder women like Fahima Marissa Anwar is what the crypto space needs. The revolution sweeping across industries should not only affect the traditional industry, but also the gender bias paradigm that has plagued the industry for so long. If you like this article, please check out our magazine Rebecca Asseh

The need to encourage women to be more than moms but super moms has to lead to the creation of spaces where women can encourage each other to grow in all spheres. Fahima is the founder of one of such spaces, Spark Sessions, Canada’s largest Core Magazine

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Carolyn Reckhow | Using Blockchain Technology To Improve Institutions Carolyn Reckhow and ConsenSys

The advent of Blockchain technology did not just bring about the move towards a more decentralized financial system. The impact of the technology is being felt in various sectors of economies and different aspects of society. Consensus Systems works on building applications for various 112

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decentralized systems using Ethereum. Sharing the same goals as Consensus Systems is their director of operations. She is Carolyn Reckhow. In this article, we’ll learn about her role at Consensus Systems, her work on other blockchain related projects and her sociology background. Consensus Systems, shortened as ConsenSys, consists

of tech specialists and entrepreneurs and aims at creating the tools necessary for decentralized networks. These tools include the “infrastructure, applications and practices” to be used in the decentralized systems. Carolyn is a great fit for ConsenSys simply because they share the same goals. Carolyn is exploring her interest in

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blockchain technology and social innovation. She focuses on decentralization and the technologies that help bring about a shift from the dependence on centralized institutions requiring trust to a society where social, economic and political systems are global, interconnected and decentralized.

Co-Founder of Fabriq

In March 2015, Carolyn won a hackathon. She did this with the prototype of Fabric, an Ethereum based digital reputation system. Fabriq was open source as well. This is the idea behind Fabriq. Participants would have their profiles as well as the attributes relating to their reputation on the blockchain. The attributes are updated with time by way of smart contracts. Participants, reputation or social capital is measured in a token on the blockchain. In addition, Fabriq had a governance system. Carolyn gained some valuable experience from being a part of this project even though she spent just a few months on the team.

Coming From a Sociology Background

Carolyn Reckhow studied sociology at the Clark University and did her masters in social work at Boston University. This explains her quest to use blockchain technologies to bring about improvement in the way institutions in society are organized. She is an example of how anyone from any educational background can participate in the blockchain revolution. There is a common theme that runs through all the past and present projects and jobs Carolyn has been involved with. They have the goal of making society better in one way or the other. In spite of her many involvements, Carolyn has been doing voluntary work for MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge. She contributes as a member of the Enterprise Forum’s Clean Tech Committee. The organization works to demystify the technological advancements coming of Cambridge and Boston and ensure that they impact society positively.

a high school students’ summer programme known as Lean Gap. She has also been an outreach counselor at Riverside Community Care and Project coordinator at a Centre of Addictions Research and Services at Boston University.

Decentralized Systems for a Better

Just like we don’t need an ICO or a token for every single thing in this world, we don’t need to decentralize every system. However, work has to be done to bring about more decentralized systems where it is needed. We know this won’t just happen naturally just because we say “it is the future”. The tools needed to facilitate this movement have to be built and developed. That is what Carolyn Reckhow’s work is about. She successfully combined her expertise in sociology with blockchain technology to come out with improvements in the organizations in society. This has made her a leader in the blockchain industry already. Meltem Demirors agrees. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

Carolyn was head of staff at Core Magazine

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Peter Szilagyi in a Tug of War with Coindesk As It Turns into Crypto’s Version of Dailymail Peter Szilagyi

eter Szilagyi is the team lead for Ethereum and a senior developer for the platform. He is a multifaceted personality with contributions in other fields. He is the creator of the messaging app called Iris Cloud Messaging. There is some controversy in the cryptosphere about Peter and Coindesk,the cryptocurrency and blockchain publisher. It appears they have wrongly interpreted his stance on the upcoming proposal EIP-

999. We will look into this controversy in details.

The EIP-999 Proposal

EIP-999 is an Ethereum Improvement Proposal coded and drafted by Afri Schoedon. This proposal was drafted to unlock the Parity wallet (wallet owned by Parity Technologies) which was frozen in November 2017. The Parity wallet had $150 million worth of ETH in them during the freeze. The wallet got frozen due to a serious bug in the Parity Software.

The bug was first reported by an anonymous Github user with the pseudo name ‘Devopps99’. He found out when he tried to test functionality in the multi-sig wallet library contract. Devopps99 announced that the wallet was compromised and 580 wallets holding 513K ETH were locked in them. The value of the funds locked at the time of the event was around $150 million. The EIP-999 proposal would require a hardfork on the Ethereum network. Afri Schoedon stated that the proCore Magazine

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posal could be activated during the next Scheduled hardfork of Ethereum rather than doing a separate hardfork for unlocking Parity wallet alone.

Coindesk Article on EIP-999

Some in the cryptocurrency space claim coindesk has been biased in their reporting when it comes to Ethereum. It has been said in some circles that Coindesk used the EIP-999 issue to paint a picture of an Etherum community divided over the proposed hardfork. Coindesk interviewed Peter Szilagyi regarding the EIP-999 issue in their article published on 25th April. The title of the article could be considered deceptive. “Ethereum’s Top Developers Think A Blockchain Split Might Be Inevitable.” was the caption. Here, the article quotes Peter Szilagyi saying:

“We’re talking about exactly the same networks and we’re basically starting a tribalism war. I don’t think we’ll reach a consensus.” 116

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Peter in response, tweeted his original response to Coindesk and stated that some of his answers were ignored in the article. In the response, he mentioned that the Ethereum team was trying to reach consensus on the proposal and not destroy themselves. Below is his exact answer to a question from Coindesk author.

999 proposal

Coindesk: If a split happened, would it be a clean parity-Geth divide?

He also stated that he would not be attending Coindesk’s Consensus 2018 conference this year and asked others to do the same.

Peter: I think this is a horrible question and completely misses the point. We’re trying to reach consensus here, not destroy our work. He added that it was either Coindesk completely ignored his answers or it might have been too late for them to incorporate them in their article. Vitalik Supports Peter Szilagyi Vitalik, co-founder of Ethereum, is not a fan of Coindesk himself. He supported Peter and expressed his concerns over Coindesk’s biased approach towards Ethereum. Below is his tweet criticizing Coindesk for not incorporating Peter’s feedback into their article on the upcoming EIP-

Vitalik came out strongly against the Coindesk article and called it “Terrible”. He added that they published a sensationalist article claiming that the Ethereum chain would split when it was very clear that the EIP 999 was far from acceptance.

Cryptocurrency and Blockchain publishers should be cautious and unbiased while publishing a sensitive article like the above one because this space reacts quickly and news spreads like wildfire across social media. One needs to be careful in dealing with a sensitive topic to avoid panic among the community Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

SPECIAL ARTICLES

Aya Miyaguchi | Ethereum Foundation Director The Ethereum Foundation Has A New Director

eet the Ethereum Fo u n d a t i o nâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new director: Aya Miyaguchi. Aya took up this position in February 2018, but is no stranger to the cryptocurrency world.

She has served in various capacities at the Kraken exchange since 2013, and has been actively involved with other blockchain projects. Aya Miyaguchi has a BachCore Magazine

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elor of Arts certificate in English and American Literature from Nanzan University. She topped that up with an MBA in Marketing and Sustainable Business from San Francisco State University. She was also named on this list of five MBA holders making strides with cryptocurrency related businesses.

Aya Miyaguchi On Her Cryptocurrency Journey As mentioned in the introduction, Aya started working for Kraken Exchange in Japan in 2013. She started in the position of Vice President of Operations in Japan. After a year, she moved up to take the position of managing director at the same exchange. In 2017, she shifted from day-to-day management to an advisory role at Kraken. Kraken is one of the world’s major cryptocurrency exchanges and has operations in the United States, Canada, the EU, and Japan. Aya Miyaguchi was instrumental in the San Francisco based company’s Japan operations. All of Aya Miyaguchi’s work in the digital asset space was not done at Kraken. She founded the Japan Blockchain 118

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Association in 2016 and served as its Global Affiliations and Partnerships Head. The association has recently moved to merge with the Japan Cryptocurrency Business Association to form some sort of self-regulatory body for the cryptocurrency industry in the country. Another thing Aya did while at Kraken was join the OmiseGO project as an advisor in 2015. The Ethereum based OmiseGo aims at using its decentralized network to achieve financial inclusion for all. The catchy catchphrase “unbank the banked” was coined by them. Aya has been a part of the Ethereum Foundation since 2015. She contributed in various ways when Ming Chan was at the helm of affairs. She, for instance, helped make the organization more efficient in carrying out its mandate and was in charge of the smooth organization of Devcon events. Being the director of the Ethereum Foundation gives Aya Miyaguchi the opportunity to take the foundation to the next level.

Beyond Blockchain and Crypto Aya’s work outside the crypto world includes cofounding Table For Two. This is a non-profit organization that exists to help solve the world’s hunger and undernutrition problem. She was also a high school teacher at the Nagoya city Board of Education for 10 years. This was not just a job for her. With her hard work, her students’ college acceptance rate was the best the school had ever seen. It is this kind of work ethic that has brought about the impact felt everywhere she has worked. It has also seen her rise to the top in the crypto world. Her story is great so far, but there is sure to be more from her in the space. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

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POSITIONS VACANT Crypto Core Media is searching for part time and full time writers, researchers and journalists. If you think you have what it takes to be at the top of your game, please donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hesitate to contact us. office@ cryptocoremedia.com

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Jeffrey Wilcke | Building Decentralized Applications with Global Adoption Jeffrey Wilcke â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ethereum CoFounder

thereumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s three musketeers includes Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke. The co-founders created the Ethereum blockchain which has now 120

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become a popular platform for blockchain startups looking to launch Initial Coin Offerings (ICO). Ethereum as a blockchain platform came to prominence thanks to its versatile smart contracts. A graduate of HKU (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht), Jeffrey has worked in a number of organizations be-

fore becoming fully committed to Ethereum. Some of these include Noxa, Agile Pandas and Study Flow. Of course, he usually worked as a programmer in these places.

Blockchain News

as 2013, when work on the Ethereum blockchain project started, Jeffrey was a vocal and active figure in blockchain and crypto. His GitHub page has 45 repositories and almost 800 followers. A 2014 video produced by Jeffrey gives a detailed explanation of the Ethereum project, down to its unique features which distinguish it from BTC.

Some Controversy Building DApps on Ethereum Jeffrey Wilcke, a Dutch programmer, built the Ethereum blockchain using the Go programming language. The Ethereum blockchain is popular because, unlike the bitcoin blockchain, it functions as a platform for programmers versed in the fundamental languages to build next-generation decentralized applications on its blockchain. Since 2013, when Jeffrey started working on the Ethereum blockchain application using Go, he has remained the Go Team Lead for the project. In the early days, as far back

Not a dormant player in the space, Ethereum co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke has made significant contributions. Notable is helping fix the computational DDoS attack incident which occurred in late 2016. Although not a high level threat, it could delay the time for block confirmation. More recently, however, Jeffrey Wilcke has become something of a controversial figure in the blockchain and crypto space. The US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ethereum Classic event comes to mind. Jeffrey denied his involvement in a complaint filed against ETC with the SEC. ETC Trust, set up by Grayscale, intended to set aside the

management fees it collects for the development of ETC, over a period of three years. Jeffrey maintains he never filed a complaint against ETC for issuing securities contrary to SEC rules. He said all he had done was request for name removal as ETC was similar to ETH. We are not immediately concerned with whether or not Jeffrey made that complaint. But it’s interesting that his team member, Vitalik Buterin, will be boycotting this year’s Consensus. Reason for this being that Digital Currency Group (DCG), owners of Coin Desk, organizers of Consensus, have been shilling ETC and do not even own any ETH. This brings to mind the latest news by Binance CEO saying he would henceforth accept interviews from only reporters who own some crypto. Fair enough. How else would one “know” it if they don’t “use” it? Along with his other cofounders, it’s good to see Jeffrey Wilcke remain active in the space, even after years of a successful project launch. Faith Obafemi

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C2Legacy | First Digital Will On Blockchain By Marie-Antoinette Digital Will On A Blockchain

recently had the pleasure to sit down and conduct an interview with Marie-Antoinette, aka “Crypto Oprah” & Queen of Crypto. One of 122

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the main reasons I spoke to her is that she is behind the development of C2Legacy. This is one of the most useful and practical blockchainbased solutions I have come across in the evolving Crypto Industry. The concept behind C2Le-

gacy is to provide a legitimate, blockchain-powered solution which will serve as the world’s first Digital Will Platform. Exactly what this platform will offer has been explained very clearly on C2Legacy’s website:

“C2Legacy is the first Digital Will platform

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on a blockchain that will securely and accurately validate the death of the legacy holder using global, digital and decentralized Death Certificates or digital US-based Death Certificates. C2Legacy will enable the first Blockchainbased Death when our first legacy holder passes on. In addition, C2Legacy’s immutable platform allows you to secure your crypto and digital assets by attaching heirs and after death smart contracts will privately transfer your digital legacy. C2Legacy brings you peace of mind knowing that your cryptocurrency will not die with you and you can take care of your loved ones after you’re gone.”

Blockchain Is Here To Stay Marie-Antoinette, like many crypto experts, believes that Blockchain is here to stay. The former healthcare professional explains how this revolutionary distributed public ledger will transform the way we live, interact, and transact. Therefore, the Crypto Queen thinks legitimate projects that make use of blockchain technology to offer practical, realworld solutions to everyday problems will help the crypto and blockchain ecosystem grow and evolve. In order to make a meaningful contribution to the Blockchain industry, Marie-Antoinette has used her technical expertise and excellent social networking skills to put together a highly experienced and talented development team. This team, which includes IoT and AI expert CTO Barbara Jones, will mainly be using the Python programming language to create C2Legacy. Additionally, Marie-Antoinette is collaborating with Bitnation to design Smart Debt Contracts. These contracts, as Crypto Oprah explained to me, will be built off of Bitnation’s existing

smart love and smart marriage contracts.

Strategic Partnerships & Business Plan Notably, since C2Legacy will help pass on digital assets to their rightful heirs, MarieAntoinette has also strategically partnered with Estate Pass. This partnership appears to be a wise move, because Estate Pass has an established record of successfully managing the transfer of assets after the owner’s death. In order to fund the C2Legacy project, Marie-Antoinette says she will not be launching an ICO. Instead, she plans to raise funds through accredited US investors. After that, she would like to accumulate additional funds by reaching out to investors in Europe. The Crypto Queen has chosen Europe out of all other places in the world, because their financial system and infrastructure is similar to the of the US. This is yet another sensible decision by Marie-Antoinette, because it will help ensure that investments are being handled in a lawful manner.

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Crypto Regulation Is Necessary Per the Crypto Queen, cryptocurrency regulations are important and necessary. Having worked extensively for the US government, MarieAntoinette feels that there has to be some type of regulatory framework for digital currencies. This, according to her, will legitimize the crypto industry, and help it gain mainstream adoption. The Crypto Queen even has her own YouTube channel called “Behind the Blockchain”, where she discusses upcoming and ongoing projects in the Cryptosphere. While nobody can actually

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guarantee the success of projects like C2Legacy, including us here Crypto Core Media, we do think it is a great idea that aims to provide a potentially viable solution to a real-world problem. Moreover, the concept behind this blockchain-based project happens to reflect what we strive to do on a daily basis. That is: Scripting the Interface between Worlds where Blockchain Integrity and Human Wisdom lift together. Truth, fueled by encryption. And, HARNESSING THE BENEFITS OF TECHNOLOGY FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY

C2Legacy Website: https:// c2legacy.io Github Code Repository Link: https://github.com/ C2LegacyTechnologies BitcoinTalk Announcement Link: https://bitcointalk.org/ index.php?topic=3260014 Telegram Social Bounty Campaign Link: https://t.me/ c2legacybounty Reddit link: https://www. reddit.com/user/c2URlegacy/ Twitter profile: https:// twitter.com/C2legacy Facebook product page: https://www.facebook.com/C2LegacyLOC-1744472705848984/ Linkedin company link: https://www.linkedin.com/ company/11347145/ Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

Exclusive

Amber Baldet | Leading Blockchain Ventures to Success It Takes a Baldet and a Blockchain to Have Quorum

mber Baldet is a name that is often present in a sentence featuring JP Morgan Chase and blockchain. That’s because the very talented young lady, who appeared on Fortune’s 2017 “40 Under 40” list, was at the helm of JPMorgan

Chase’s Blockchain Center of Excellence (BCoE), responsible for the creation of Quorum. Like every other business seeking ways to remain relevant while also exploiting the myriad potentials of the new technology, blockchain, JPMorgan created Quorum. Baldet was responsible for putting together a formidable team that created a product which recorded huge success.

Quorum, a fork of the Ethereum blockchain, is a private, “permissionless” blockchain that offers financial and investment solutions. Unlike public blockchains, only nodes/ computers which have been given permission are allowed to join the network. Although a private blockchain, Quorum’s code is open source. It is said to be an improvement on Ethereum, in order to adequately cater for scaling, privacy and performance issues that arise Core Magazine

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from big businesses adopting blockchain.

Baldet Before Blockchain

Amber Baldet had a life before blockchain and JPMorgan, where she worked in companies like Capco, Avalon Research and Citigroup Alternative Investments / Old Lane LLP. Her roles in these former companies included strategy design, product and application development. Although she joined JPMorgan in 2010, it wasn’t until five years later before she was asked to head the BCoE team. Her duties among others included: designing a comprehensive blockchain strategy for JPMorgan, a Corporate and Investment Bank; developing innovative technology solutions; facilitating strategic investments; and of course, managing client happiness.

Accolades for Baldet in Blockchain

Flowing from her role in executing a successful blockchain product for JPMorgan, Baldet became recognized worldwide as an authority figure on blockchain and crypto. This has earned her numerous 126

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awards and accolades, some of which are mentioned below. In Fortune’s 2017 “40 under 40” list, Amber Baldet made number 31 on the list alongside notable Ethereum co-founder and writer Vitalik Buterin. Both were the only blockchain and crypto personalities featured on the list. CoinDesk also featured Baldet in their list of most influential people in blockchain in 2017. Notably, Baldet also plays a prominent role in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance where she chairs the Financial Industry Working Group.

Blockchain and Baldet, a Force to Reckon With

Since 2015, when Baldet started leading JPMorgan’s BCoE, she has become a regular face at blockchain and hacking events. She has been likened to Daenerys of Game of Thrones by Leigh Cuen of IBTimes, because of her long list of titles and impressive achievements. Baldet broke the norm that traditional institutions like banks were unlikely to innovate. She then became the face of an innovative bridge and seam-

less intersection of blockchain and the banking industry. The result is an exciting corporate blockchain project that has gained momentum and acceptance around the world.

Baldet Set to Begin a New Adventure

After an exciting time building a world class blockchain product for a world class bank, Amber Baldet is leaving to launch her own startup. Amber would be replaced at her role by Christine Moy, who happens to be Amber’s first hire at the inception of JPMorgan’s BCoE. While there are no details yet about the nature of the new startup, it is safe to assume that it would be a business involving blockchain. Like everyone else, her former bosses and colleagues also wish her success in her entrepreneurial adventures. At Crypto Core Media, we wish Amber Baldet and other hardworking professional in the cryptosphere all the success with their innovative endeavors. Faith Obafemi

Blockchain News

Elizabeth McCauley | The Business Savvy Crypto Connector Elizabeth McCauley

lizabeth McCauley is a Blockchain b u s i n e s s development and marketing consultant. Generally speaking, she looks out for

and grabs opportunities for the companies she consults for. Helping her clients secure strategic partnership worldwide to aid in achieving their set goals is a central part of what she does. She happily and proudly

juggles this job with being a mother and her interests in politics. In this article, we take a look at Elizabeth McCauley and her many involvements with various cryptocurrency related businesses throughout her career. Core Magazine

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Elizabeth McCauley & Politics Albeit being deeply involved with blockchain businesses at the moment, Elizabeth McCauley’s B.A Political Science certificate from Wheaton College is not a dusty one. She is very vocal about political issues on social media. In the earlier part of her work life, she also held several positions related to political science. She has worked for politicians both as an intern and a full-time worker. She was notably appointed as Assistant Staff at the United States Congress in 2012.

She also spent a little over a year at BitPay as an Accounts Manager. BitPay is a global bitcoin business that helps to make the spending and accepting of Bitcoin more convenient for users. While at BitPay, she also served as an advisor to the BitGive Foundation. Elizabeth’s term on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation came to an end recently in March 2018. She occupied the individual seat she was elected to serve in for four and half years. What the Bitcoin Foundation does is it aims to reach people worldwide with information on Bitcoin, its importance, how it can be used and the technology behind it.

Involvement in the McCauley’s Crypto Space Current Roles in There is quite a long list of the Cryptocurrency well-known cryptocurrency related businesses that Elizabeth Space has worked with in the past. In 2013, she started as communications manager at the Bitcoin magazine and has since gone full throttle. After a year at the Bitcoin magazine, she moved up to the position of director of operations and outreach. Here are some of the articles she wrote during her time with Bitcoin magazine. 128

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Elizabeth McCauley is one of the Code to Inspire directors. Code to Inspire empowers female students in Afghanistan by teaching them to code. Learning to code gives the students an opportunity to entrepreneurs and also secure freelance jobs. McCauley still sits on the board and contributes to the noble effort.

Our hardworking blockchain personality is also the Global business development head for India based Coinsecure. The cryptocurrency exchange aims at creating an entire ecosystem for Bitcoin in India and be the provider of all possible related services and products. McCauley is pivotal in their overseas partnerships needed to achieve their goals. It’s great to see different people with different skills getting into the cryptocurrency community to play various roles. It’s also great to see Elizabeth McCauley help businesses in the space grow as well as contribute to the great work being done at Code to Inspire. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

Blockchain News

Bytecoin – Highly Centralized Privacy Coin

ytecoin is another privacy coin like Monero, Zcash or Dash and helps in hiding the users’ transaction details and concealing senders’ addresses. It was started in 2012 and uses the Cryptonote algorithm for privacy features, but the major red flag is that it is highly centralized with 82% premined. Let’s discuss in detail what the positives and negatives of this coin are over other privacy coins in the market.

History of Bytecoin

Bytecoin was first started in 2012 as the first privacy coin to implement Cryptonote. Famous Privacy coins in the market like Monero and Dash are forks of BCN. It has a total supply of massive 184.47 billion coins, but its total circulating supply will reduce with time. It is very easy to mine BCN with your normal computer with less CPU power. It has a marketcap of 800 million USD at the time of writing with a price of $0..004287. Bytecoin is the first privacy

coin to implement the cryptographic protocol called the “Cryptonote”. This protocol was first endorsed by Bitcoin developer Greg Maxwell. Monero also uses this protocol since it was actually forked from Bytecoin itself. Cryptonote technology gives Bytecoin the muchneeded anonymity feature by hiding the user transactions details and the public key is accessible only by the sender who controls the private key. Whereas with non-privacy coins like Bitcoin, anyone can Core Magazine

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access the public keys and the transactions are fully visible on a public ledger. The transactions are not linkable when you use Bytecoin and so the mapping of transactions with the actual sender is impossible to trace.

are increasing exponentially for BCN and the marketing strategies are laid out for bigger adoption in the future.

Development and Adoption

Monero forked from BCN, but avoided to work with the latter’s development team. The main reason for this is that they accused BCN to be highly centralized with 82% of the coins being premined and held by some unknown actors.

Bytecoin has been increasing in price after major updates in December 2018. Also, the marketing team is pushing for major adoption in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Recently, its Android wallet app was released with new features. Many business and big exchanges have also started accepting BCN. Minergate is one of the biggest applications to accept BCN. Minergate is an application that can be installed to mine your BCN using your computer or smartphone. There are many other businesses and exchanges that accept BCN such as Mining applications like EOBOT, Miner Center and Democats; big exchanges like HitBtc, Poloniex, Changelly, changer,alcurex, Cryptopia etc. Applications like Cryptonator, Coinmill, and Bytecoiner also offer support for BCN. The adoption and ecosystem 130

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Controversy with Premine and Centralization

Below is the exact quote from the Lead developer of Monero – FluffyPony

“Even if you take the fact that Monero is clearly leading the innovation race, I would think it dangerous to touch a coin where 82% of it is held by unknown actors who were not publicly observed during the period where they supposedly mined the coin. Having a shady history does not set a good precedent.”

Moreover, market watchers and traders became highly suspicious when they noticed the sudden surge of BCN price in May 2017 when it was only $5 million for many years and started to pump to the $350 million in a matter of two months. Many suspected the sudden price surge in only two months to be because of the founders manipulating the market with pump and dump. Since 82% was premined, founders and developers have a massive control over the price of Bytecoin and the risk of pump and dump is imminent. Anonymous founders can dump BCN in the market at any time to crash its price. So even if BCN has good adoption and privacy features, it is little risky to hold due to the huge centralization of the coin. If you liked this article, check out our magazine, comic and this article as well! Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

Blockchain News

Charlie Lee | The Man Behind Litecoin and “Good Guy” of Crypto Community Charlie Lee

e cannot talk about top cryptocurrency personalities without mentioning Charlie Lee, the man who created Litecoin. If you are not already aware, Litecoin was created in 2011. This is how you know he was around in the very early days. Also, he does qualify as a crypto expert, even though he only calls himself a cryptocurrency enthusiast. Charlie graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Computer Science degree in 1999. By the end of 2000, he had added

a Computer science master’s certificate from the same university. He then worked as a software engineer at Kana Communications, Guidewire software, and Google. At Google, he was involved with work on the Chrome operating system, Google play games platform and Youtube mobile. In 2011, while working at Google, Charlie created Litecoin. He moved from Google to become one of Coinbase’s first employees in 2013. At Coinbase, he spent four years working as an engineering manager and director of engineering before leaving in 2017 to fully con-

centrate on Litecoin.

Creating Litecoin

2011 was the same year Charlie found out and learned about Bitcoin. Months after learning about the technology, dabbling in mining and buying some Bitcoin, he put his software engineering skills to test and created Litecoin. To create Litecoin, some changes or improvements were made to the Bitcoin source code. The main difference is the algorithms used by the two cryptocurrencies. Charlie Lee designed Litecoin to use Scrypt instead of Bitcoin’s SHA- 256. The cap on the total number of Core Magazine

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Bitcoins that would ever exist is 21 million. For Litecoin, this number is 84 million. The 10 minute average block time for Bitcoin was also reduced to 2.5 minutes on Litecoin.

it would be interesting to see how this narrative continues to work. Charlie, however, believes Litecoin would still be useful because Bitcoin with Lightning would still not be able to handle everybody’s Fast forward a couple of transactions. years later and Litecoin is being called a testbed for Bitcoin. Damned If He Does, Segregated Witness (Segwit) which was proposed for the Damned If He Bitcoin network was first Doesn’t implemented on Litecoin. The Litecoin is a solid project cryptocurrency is now one of but also benefits from Charlie the top altcoins with a good Lee’s “good guy” image in the development team. cryptocurrency space. Many holders of Litecoin, underMost altcoins are bashed standably, want Litecoin to do by Bitcoin maximalists for well. It helps if the creator of being Bitcoin clones and even their cryptocurrency helps in scams. Litecoin is mostly left promoting it as often as posout when these criticisms are sible. made. We can attribute that to the fact that Charlie Lee sucIn recent times, some memcessfully presented Litecoin as bers of the Litecoin community a complement to Bitcoin and have complained about Charlie not a competitor. The idea was talking more about Bitcoin on that Bitcoin would be used social media than Litecoin. as a store of value and larger Even more recently, he was payments while Litecoin takes criticized for making positive care of smaller payments or comments about Nano, another transactions. This made a lot of payment-focused cryptocursense in the second half of 2017 rency. when Bitcoin fees were high. Litecoin fees remained very Conversely, he has received low at the time and its network criticism for talking up the was as fast as usual. Now, with price of Litecoin too. As the increased adoption of Segwit creator of the coin, he was on Bitcoin and the introduc- expected to be holding a large tion of the Lightning network, number of coins. Promoting 132

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the cryptocurrency, therefore, seemed self-serving. Some people are of the view that it is not great for cryptocurrencies to have figureheads. The reasoning here is that such a leader can be coerced by other forces to do various things that might not augur well for the community behind the currency.

Selling All His Litecoin Holdings

On 20th December 2017, he took to Reddit and announced that he had sold all his Litecoin leaving just a few “physical Litecoins”. He added that he had donated the proceeds as well. “whenever I tweet about Litecoin price or even just good or bads news, I get accused of doing it for personal benefit” Selling all his Litecoin was a way to remove any doubt about the motives behind his tweets about Litecoin. Charlie continued to oversee development on Litecoin but as usual, there were mixed reactions to his decision. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

Blockchain News

Bloomberg's Lily Katz On Cryptocurrencies Lily Katz

aving Barack Obama on your twitter follower list definitely means something.

Lily Katz does. She is a Bloomberg News reporter and writes on topics related to fintech, real estate, insurance, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain. Our focus would be on the cryptocurrency

and blockchain part, as well as other contributions she has made to the space. Katz has a Bachelor of Arts certificate in Journalism from the University of Washington. Core Magazine

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On her way to her current position at Bloomberg news, she worked as an intern at King 5 news, Columns Magazine and University Marketing and Communications. She also worked as letters coordinator at the Seattle Times.

Coverage of Cryptocurrency Related Issues As mentioned earlier, Lily Katz’s writing isn’t limited to cryptocurrencies. She has, however, done a lot of writing on the topic. Katz has covered price action, businesses in the space, personalities, regulation amongst others. Here, she talks about the woes of Longfin Corp. The company had seen its share price skyrocket following it’s Initial Public Offer and acquisition of a “blockchain business”. This one gives an insight into the competition between Nvidia Corp. and Chinese mining chip making giant Bitmain. The article objectively

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spelled out how actions by Bitmain, a crypto company was going to affect Nvidia’s profits. With her piece on the Bitcoin conference held in a strip club, she captured a number of important aspects of the current state of the cryptocurrency space. All this was done without showing any bias. It has to do with making the community more welcoming for women. The article pointed out the fact that some newly rich members of the cryptocurrency space basically behaved like their wall street counterparts they love to criticize. It does not matter which piece it is. Be it a simple announcement or a controversial issue, Lily Katz has always been objective in her writing.

Objective Cryptocurrency Experts In Mainstream Media There was a time when die-hard bitcoiners longed for

any form of news on Bitcoin in mainstream media. These days, there is news on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the mainstream media almost on a daily basis. The problem is now about too much news containing inaccurate information or what is known as FUD- Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. For instance, towards the end of the last Bitcoin bull run, articles claiming that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin were not sustainable or eco-friendly due to the huge energy requirements for mining surfaced. It turns out the energy consumed by gold mining companies, data centers and the production of cash surpasses that of Bitcoin mining. It’s good to have crypto in the news but even better to have objective reporters and writers who understand the technology doing the coverage. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

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Emin GUn Sirer | The Blockchain Scientist Emin Gün Sirer

Cornell University professor Emin Gün Sirer is one of the well-known academics in the Bitcoin community. His interest areas include operating systems, peer-to-peer systems, and networking. It’s, therefore, no surprise that he finds himself sharing thoughts and analyzing cryptocurrencies 138

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as well as projects and issues in the cryptosphere from time to time. Between 1989 and 2000, Emin earned a B.S.E computer science degree from Princeton University and a PhD in the same program from the University of Washington. Apart from his work as

a professor, Emin is the codirector of IC3 which stands for Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts. Behind this institution are faculty members of Cornell and a few other universities. It aims to help turn cryptocurrency related innovations into realworld applications.

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Some Of His Views On Important Cryptocurrency Related Issues

About a month before the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) on the Ethereum network was hacked, Emin GünSirer, in a paper, expressed concerns about certain vulnerabilities that could be exploited. A total of nine issues were raised in this paper. A bias in the voting system of the DAO was one of the issues touched on. The paper also went on to propose possible solutions to the problems identified. As you probably know, the DAO disaster was resolved with a hardfork that led to a split in the Ethereum protocol. Emin did not foresee the 2016 Bitfinex hack, but came out with ways in which the hack and similar ones could be avoided in the future. His solution was the use of “vaults” to safely keep Bitcoins and protect them from theft. With the proposed Bitcoin vault abstraction, long-term holders get more options to use in securing their valuable coins. Holders would then be able to reclaim coins from hackers within 24 hours, using recovery

keys. Stolen Bitcoins could also be rendered useless to hackers by using this method. On the scaling debate, the professor is of the view that block size increase was the answer. He opined this in a presentation he made at the recently organized Satoshi Vision Conference. He, however, added that following the initial block size increase, it was not feasible to continuously increase it as a solution. He went on to talk about Bitcoin NG, a project he is working on. The Bitcoin NG project is one of the projects coming out of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts. The project is an attempt to come out with a next-generation blockchain that would solve the scaling problem.

Contributions to Development of Cryptocurrencies

Emin Gün Sirer has not only contributed with words. The TurkishAmerican professor was part of a team that came out with the Karma system in 2003. The Karma cryptocurrency was decentralized and used the proof of work mechanism. This was a first.

He was also involved with the creation of the Falcon relay network for Bitcoin. This innovation came out with a way of speeding up the process of transmitting blocks over the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer nature makes it censorship resistant but also slow. Miners on the network also tend to join their resources and mine in pools to offset some of the disadvantages of the slow nature of the network. Hence, by speeding up the process of transmitting blocks over the network, Falcon also makes the network more decentralized. Some in the cryptocurrency space often call out Emin for spreading fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) with some of his comments. However, in a community where most people religiously cheer their favorite projects and see no wrong with them, it is good to have people willing to point out any problems they notice. Also, with his contributions to the development of cryptocurrencies, Emin Gün Sirer has shown that he has got skin in the game. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info Core Magazine

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Blockchain Based Payments with Paytomat / Pundi X / LAPO Payment Solutions With Blockchain

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ou canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t walk into any restaurant and expect your crypto to be accepted as payment. Cryptocurrencies may have gone mainstream but

merchant adoption isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite there yet. A Bitcoin is worth thousands of dollars but for some reasons, not every merchant is ready to accept some for her products

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or services. We take a look at several payment focused cryptocurrencies in this article: Paytomat / Pundi X / Lapo – aimed at making it easier for merchants to accept cryptocurrencies and for holders to spend their coins. Over the last decade, cryptocurrencies have seen exponential increases in their prices. This has made it difficult for most holders to part with their coins and tokens. The cryptocurrencies simply became too valuable to spend. On the other hand, merchants would have to convert the crypto they receive as payments to local currencies on a daily basis to avoid having to stomach losses that might come with the frequent price swings. Merchants doing this daily conversion back to local currencies have to deal with liquidity problems. These are a few of the things limiting the spending of cryptocurrencies and merchant adoption. Let’s see how the above-mentioned payment solutions tackle these problems.

Paytomat

The above-stated hindrances to merchant adoption of cryptocurrencies are tackled by Paytomat. Their loyalty program is expected to encourage

holders of cryptocurrencies to use them for payments. For the merchants, Paytomat would handle the receiving of payments as well as the conversion of payments back to fiat currencies. You must have heard of other existing businesses like Bitpay that already provide similar services. You are also probably wondering why Paytomat needs a blockchain to do same. The answer is that Paytomat is planned to be a decentralized organization on its own. Also, the tokens on its blockchain, PTX and PTM are key in its incentive system. PTX tokens would serve as rewards for crypto holders who spend their coins using the Paytomat service. PTM tokens, in the same manner, would be used as rewards for merchants. The Paytomat (PTI) presale was done in April 2018. The public sale of the waves based token is scheduled to take place between 8th May and 25th May. Paytomat offers a broad range of features to facilitate payments with cryptocurrencies. The service comes with a multi currency wallet and a map showing geographical lo-

cations of merchants. The wallet also allows instant exchange of cryptocurrencies when payments are made. The loyalty program is also expected to be in place by the end of 2018. The Paytomat wallet would also come with advanced features like multisignature accounts and support for hardware wallets. There is also a special feature for bills payments as well as a “vault” for long-term holding.

Work Done So Far And What To Expect

The Paytomat service is already being used. Their wallet supports 11 cryptocurrencies. The purpose of the project, which is to allow merchants to easily accept cryptocurrencies, is already being achieved albeit on a small scale at the moment. Over 300 merchants use the service. In terms of what to expect from Paytomat in the future, the focus would be on increasing the number of merchants using their service. The loyalty program to encourage payments with crypto is also in the works.

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Lapo

Features Of LAPO

LAPO coin (LAX) is the stable coin of the LAPO platform. Stable coins are cryptocurrencies that retain all the cryptocurrency features, except for the volatility. They are often pegged to other stable currencies. One result of this is less risk for the users of the stable coin.

At the core of the services provided by LAPO is the point of sale app known as LAPO sales point. The app is for merchants to receive crypto payments easily using laptops, tablets or mobile phones. Merchants using LAPO would be able to create promotions and also advertise them on the LAPO platform.

With LAPO (LAX), there would be the LAPO stability fund purposely set up to reduce the shocks from price swings. The fund would buy or sell LAX tokens at various times to control the volatility of the token. This sounds like something central banks do, if you ask me. It probably goes against what cryptocurrencies were created for, but actions taken to reduce the risk associated with the token makes sense. The LAPO platform itself is also designed to help in the processing of crypto payments. It promises to provide businesses with the necessary set up to receive cryptocurrency payments at faster speeds and at lower costs.

LAPO also comes with a wallet that supports multiple cryptocurrencies. This wallet is expected to come with a welcoming user interface. There is the trading platform as well. With this, users would be able to trade their cryptocurrencies. A positive from this is that the exchange is decentralized. Tokens or cryptocurrencies traded on the platform are exchanged directly to the wallets of the parties involved in a particular trade. Also, with the LAPO bank, tokens can be converted to local currencies directly.

Not So Good Signs Mariyam, LAPO’s PR officer, told us that their test

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network would be open during the ICO. The ICO happens to be a week away. According to her, their new website which would better explain coin functionalities was also going to be released around the time of the ICO. Considering the fact that the link to the LAPO whitepaper on the official website leads somewhere else, a new website is in order. It must be said that not having the above done, with only a week left before their ICO, is not a very good sign. All the same, we will keep our fingers crossed and see how the LAPO team proceeds.

Pundi X Pundi X offers services similar to that of Paytomat and LAPO. The main solution they provide is helping merchants accept cryptocurrencies. Like the others, they also go a bit further to provide other products. Pundi wants to help developers and cryptocurrency holders reach more people with their products. They are “empowering blockchain developers and token holders to sell cryptocurrency and services at any physical store in the world.” This is new and brilliant. We all know

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tokens and cryptocurrencies are mostly traded online. This service by Pundi simply creates access to a lot of potential buyers that are not active on the internet. It may be hard to believe, especially in the developed world, that there exist a lot of people who are more comfortable buying things in brick and mortar stores than online. Also, with so many concerns about online scammers, selling cryptocurrencies and other related services and products in physical stores could work out well.

Buying Or Receiving Crypto With Pundi Pundi enables its users to buy crypto with bank cards, local currencies, mobile phone or the Pundi X Pass. By installing the Pundi wallets, a user can buy cryptocurrencies and also receive them as payment. The bank cards and cash can be used to purchase cryptocurrencies at the physical Pundi locations. The other option is the Pundi X pass. The pass, which comes with a QR code, provides an added layer of security

when buying and storing cryptocurrencies. The Pundi POS device seems to be quite handy for merchants who accept cryptocurrencies. In addition to processing payments, the accompanying software can handle other store management tasks like inventory management. It can also handle reward programs. The device can be used with the Pundi mobile app and the X pass when making or receiving payments.

Putting All Three Together

They are, however, at different stages of implementing their proposed solutions. Pundi X is ahead of the pack in this regard. They have working products that are already in use. Paytomat is working on reaching more merchants and users worldwide and LAPO is getting its ICO underway. On paper, their solutions are great. Those that have been implemented so far are also working quite well. We will keep an eye on how such blockchain based solutions for crypto payments develop. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

Businesses helping merchants accept crypto is not a new thing. Bitpay, one of the pioneers in this area, has been helping businesses accept cryptocurrencies as well as converting them to local currencies. Bitpay is, however, not a cryptocurrency. The company does not have its own token either. The three projects we looked at in this article come out with reasons for having blockchains as a part of the solution. The main reason for this has been the need for incentive systems and trading on the platformsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; own exchanges. Core Magazine

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Dr. Julie Albright Unites Sociology and Crypto For Positive Societal Changes Crypto Technology Is Changing Everything In Society

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r yptocurrencies and the technology behind them, like air, are filling any available space. The innovations in the space have brought about change in almost every sector that can be named. Players in healthcare,

banking, businesses and even governmental institutions are looking at ways to benefit and not be left behind. In this article, we will look at the cryptocurrency and blockchain revolution through the lens of Dr. Julie Albright. That is from the

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social and behavioral point of view. We will also look at her involvement in the cryptocurrency space in this regard. Dr. Albright has a PhD in Sociology and Marriage and Family Therapy. She holds two masters degrees as well. One in Sociology from the University of Southern California and another in Social and Systemic Studies from Nova Southeastern University. She is currently a Sociology lecturer at the University of Southern California. The degrees are not the only things making Dr. Julie Albright a highly qualified digital sociologist. She is also a consultant, keynote speaker, and author. In her upcoming book, she plans to tell us how people brought up in the age of computers are reshaping the American dream. “Left to Their Own Devices” is expected to be out towards the end of 2018.

cally studies societal changes caused by digital technologies for a living. It’s therefore not surprising that she noticed the cryptocurrency innovations and anticipated the changes it could bring about in all spheres of society. She also went ahead to partake and contribute to the industry in her own way. Her contributions in the space include advising and lending her credibility to ICO projects. The WishKnish project is an example of an ICO benefiting from her guidance and connections. The DNX Community, the Ethereum blockchain based digital nomad platform is another. DNX aims to have remote workers all over the world on its blockchain and help them work freely and on their terms. This would be made possible by using blockchain technology to remove the restrictions created by national borders and different local fiat currencies.

Sociology Meets Digital Technology

Getting Involved Is Not That Complicated

Once again, we have a great example of a person incorporating crypto into their life and work. As a digital sociologist, Dr. Albright basi-

“How does one participate in the cryptocurrency world?” Anyone looking for answers to this question can take a look at Dr. Albright’s profile. She was

a digital culture expert before the advent of cryptocurrencies, but got involved where it relates to her field of expertise. The answer is simple. One can find a way to incorporate cryptocurrencies into whatever one does or likes. It could be as simple as accepting Bitcoin as payment and as complex as being a blockchain developer if one has the skills for it. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

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Tony Gallippi – Delivering Financial Services to the Tony Gallippi

here are a lot of influential personalities in the world of Bitcoin. These prominent figures have made enormous contributions to help Bitcoin go mainstream. One of these influential figures is Tony Gallippi. Gallippi has been one of the biggest contributors when it comes to providing financial access to Bitcoin businesses. 146

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Anthony Gallippi, better known as Tony Gallipi, is one of the Co-founders of BitPay Inc. Bitpay is one of the most popular companies offering financial services for Bitcoin users. Gallippi completed a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is quite experienced in the marketing and sales area. He has more than 15 years of

experience in the area under his belt. He also has plenty of experience in working with the Robotics industry. This experience has made him a great asset for Bitpay. He is currently BitPay’s Executive Chairman but before this, he was representing the company as its Chief Executive Officer. Gallippi’s specialty is to manage all of the day-to-day operations as well

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as finding new business development partnerships. Before founding BitPay, he worked at Aerotech, an Industrial Devices Corporation as a District Sales Manager and Regional Sales Manager. Gallippi is also an honorary member of the Advisory Board at Money 20/20, LLC.

BitPay

In 2011, Gallippi and Stephen Pair launched what would later become the most popular Bitcoin financial services company. Since then, the company has been growing steadily and has offered secure and safe cryptocurrency processing for brick and mortar shops and online services. In the first year of its existence, the firm was able to grow from 100 to 1100 merchants using their cryptocurrency payment processing services. In 2013, the firm already had over 80 employees and was rapidly becoming one of the leading payment processing companies in the sector. In the same year, Gallippi and BitPay’s other co-founder Stephen Pair were featured on Atlanta’s TechEdge programme to discuss BitPay. He was able to bring WordPress and Woocomerce on as clients. With this last partnership,

BitPay was going to handle Amazon’s web store purchases. In 2014, BitPay was already an established company providing Bitcoin financial services in every part of the world. The team was also growing exponentially. At this time, Gallippi mentioned that the company was on course to surpass one million customers in 2016. During the same year, he announced the restructuring of the company’s pricing plans and started offering free plans with no fees charged to the merchant. He criticized credit card payments which can have fees up to 5%, in comparison to the zero fees offered by his company. With this, he was trying to increase the popularity of Bitcoin by showing that it could be way better than standard payments. The company was launched with the goal of providing payment and payout services to individuals and companies operating with the popular digital currency. Today, BitPay rivals Coinbase and serves a big percentage of businesses working with Bitcoin.

Gallippi’s Contribution to the Community

Since the company’s inception, Tony Gallippi has been the one luring a lot of public organizations to join the company’s services as merchants. This has been particularly positive for the industry as it raised the awareness about the Bitcoin technology. Gallippi has been on several talk shows and media discussions to advocate and educate people on the true potential of Bitcoin. In 2013, he was invited by the US Senate to talk about Bitcoin and the financial market. He left quite a good impression with his presentation at the Senate. Gallippi managed to show the Senate the real cost of credit card transactions in comparison with the use of digital currency. Anthony Gallippi’s contributions since getting on board the Bitcoin train in 2011 have greatly impacted the growth of the digital currency. It can be argued that the financial infrastructure he developed paved the way for Bitcoin to truly become the currency of the internet. Nuno Menezes Core Magazine

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Factom Community and Blockchain | Explained by Niels Klomp Factom Community Elects Niels Klomp

On April 18th, I spoke to Niels Klomp regarding his involvement with the Factom community, protocol and blockchain. Briefly, the purpose of the protocol and platform is to provide document authentication and verification solutions. Niels, who is the CTO of Sphereon, a startup that uses Factom to provide various digital document related services, had a lot of pertinent technical information to share with me. The tech-savvy entrepreneur first explained to me that he is a democratically elected, 148

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third-party representative of the active community behind the development of the Factom protocol. So, Niels is not part of the currently private Factom company itself. Interestingly, he is only among 1 out of 5 people elected by this cryptoplatform’s community. Niels also informed me that one of the main goals that they want to achieve is full and complete decentralization.

M3 – Full Decentralization

In order to achieve this target, the experienced software developer and system administrator said that the Factom

community has set up a few milestones. I won’t go into the details of every single milestone that has been completed. However, I will tell you what Niels told me. He mentioned that the community’s next major goal is to achieve Milestone 3 (M3). Primarily, this milestone aims to move the crypto-platform as close to full decentralization as possible. Niels, who was recently appointed (2 weeks ago) as a Factom community leader, says that he was chosen for the role based on his high technical expertise, business knowledge and acumen, and organizational skills. Among

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the five individuals selected by this platform’s community is one of the founders of Factom as well, according to Niels. Okay, so now that I have covered the important background information, let’s delve into the more technical aspects of the Factom protocol.

Proof of Authenticity

The blockchain-based Factom protocol presently has approximately 15 GB of data. Of course, that’s not a lot. One of the reasons for this is that the platform’s blockchain itself is not used to store the actual data. Instead, it serves as a means to provide proof of authenticity of documents. These documents can be almost anything, including legal, escrow or even mortgage related information. So, if a document has Factom’s official “seal of approval”, then users can be rest assured that its contents are original. What I mean by original here is that the person or entity that is listed as the document’s author is really/actually the author. Furthermore, the authenticity system guarantees that the document’s contents have not been tampered with

or corrupted in any way by third-parties.

Implementation Details

According to Niels, the Factom community has decided that they will appoint 65 nodes/servers to manage the essential functions of the crypto-platform. These nodes have been categorized, as Niels broke down for me, into Federated Nodes, Auth (Authentication) Nodes, and Follower Nodes. Although our interview did not allow for us to go into the intricacies of how these Nodes function together, the main concepts were covered quite clearly. The Sphereon CTO noted that the Federated and Auth Nodes would work towards making the Factom platform fully decentralized. The achievement of this goal, as mentioned previously, is referred to as M3 (Milestone 3). Currently, the Federated and Auth Nodes are operating in a more centralized manner. Ideally, the Factom community hopes to transition to a decentralized model in the foreseeable future.

Entry Credits and Factoids

Alright, so what about other details such as the monetary aspect of the Factom protocol? Well, the Sphereon CTO whose company offers a number of different services such as document processing, extraction, and conversion pointed out that users of the platform can choose between using non-transferable earned credits or the network’s Factoid cryptocurrency. Earned credits are a monetary mechanism which are, according to Niels, pegged to the US Dollar. Therefore, they serve as an alternative monetary option for companies who might not want to or not be able to use cryptos due to regulatory restrictions. So, basically you purchase earned credits with fiat currency and then use them to pay for services provided by the Factom protocol. Another monetary option, as mentioned, is to use the Factoid cryptocurrency, which is intimately tied to the usage of the the Factom protocol/ blockchain/network. Theoretically, as usage of the platform increases, so should the value of each Factoid. Also, Factoids Core Magazine

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can be and are burned, so that they are removed from existence when converted to Entry Credits. Additionally, a set/fixed number of Factoids are created at periodic intervals by the Federated and Auth Nodes.

Compensation for Services

Organizations or entities that choose to and qualify to serve as Auth/Federation/Follower Nodes will be rewarded with the Factoid cryptocurrency. The exact distribution of these Factoids will not be covered in this article. However, as Niels conveyed to me, a percentage of the Factoids will go toward funding the future growth and development of the Factom platform. This concept of Nodes and Elections is not exactly new to the crypto-community. On the Komodo Platform, the Komodo Pioneers group has a similar idea/concept of how they want to grow and develop their network/blockchain/platform. But let me clear though, I am not stating here that both platforms are using the exact same development strategy. It just appears that there some similarities between the two. 150

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So apparently, this might be a legitimate a viable strategy or game plan to use in order to not only grow a crypto-platform, but also to create a vibrant, competent and motivated community behind it. Now, let’s get back to the Factom Protocol, as it was explained to me by Niels Klomp.

Using the Bitcoin Blockchain

While Factom’s blockchain is fully functional and independent, it does currently rely on the Bitcoin blockchain to provide an added layer of security for its data. As mentioned previously, the Factom blockchain does not store the actual data. Instead, it stores the information/data necessary to prove the authenticity of documents. You can think of it as somewhat serving as a set of indices or pointers that link to the actual documents. These links contain the verification/authentication information that proves the genuineness of the documents they link to. This authentication data is copied over to the Bitcoin blockchain to ensure that the data is not corrupted.

A Work in Progress

This does not imply that the Factom blockchain is not secure. It is only one of many blockchain platforms that rely on the Bitcoin blockchain for added security. That’s because the Bitcoin blockchain is the most established, has never been hacked, and has a long record on its ledger of successfully completing more transactions than any other cryptocurrency platform. This is another solid reason why Bitcoin is not going to go away. While the Factom blockchain might have been built on solid technology, it needs to stand the test of time and prove its worth in the CryptoSphere. Notably, when I asked Niels Klomp if the Factom Blockhain can switch to a different blockchain, other than Bitcoin, for backups, he said that it’s something they are currently working on. This, in my opinion, shows Niels’ honesty and truthfulness about the current stage and state of development.

Realistic Outlook and Expectations

As most crypto watchers are aware, there are numerous so called “crypto businesses” that make the most outrageous

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claims, and yet, manage to suck and exit with lots of money. So, the best thing to do is do your research and consult a professional to help you make informed decisions. Anyway, I have digressed a bit here. Let me get back to covering more of the technical aspects of the Factom protocol and blockchain. Niels made it very clear to me that not all the data from the Factom blockchain is stored onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Rather, certain pertinent bits of data are copied over to the flagship cryptocurrency’s ledger every 10 minutes. If you do the math, that’s 6 entries per hour, and a total of 144 entries per day.

Complicated Concepts to Grasp

Partly due to the time limitations of our interview, I was unable to gather all the details regarding the ongoing development and present implementation of the Factom protocol. However, to be able to accurately convey and cover all the technical information would require more than 1 article. Therefore, you can look forward to more articles on this unique platform from us in the future.

Before I end this article, let’s cover a few more things. Assume that a malicious entity attempts to provide fake credentials so that they can gain unauthorized access to a any particular document stored on this crypto-platform. Quite simply, due to cryptographic security, the hash function that is executed after credentials are provided will simply not compute something which corresponds to validate the fictitious credentials provided. This way, access will be denied to unauthorized users. That, I believe, is the beauty of cryptography and mathematics.

Closing Remarks

As Niels remarked, the full technical details and aspects of the Factom protocol are quite complex and even very challenging to understand. That’s why he has taken on the role to educate as many people as possible to clarify and develop a better understanding of this platform. Although not going into the details of it, the Factom Community leader did say that there are a number of sophisticated data structures that make up the underlying foundation of the codebase on which the Factom protocol is built. He even said that there are even certain concepts and elements from Game Theory

and Economics that have been incorporated into this cryptotechnology. From the business point of view, the Factom organization has managed to form strategic partnerships for ongoing projects with a number of big name companies. However, due to the NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) that the company has understandably signed, the names of these big players will not be made public at this point. Presumably, once these collaborative projects have matured and achieved some level of success, then these companies might look into making an official announcement regarding their partnership and business relations with Factom. Even though I have not covered everything we discussed during our interview, I will save it for a future article that you will be able to read here, exclusively at Crypto Core Media. Have a great day, and thank you for reading my article. If you liked this article, check out our magazine, comic and this article as well! Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info Core Magazine

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The Stratis Platform | Not Just A Bitcoin Copy Cat Stratis Is...

tratis is a blockchain platform built using the same framework that Bitcoin was built on. Notably different from Bitcoin, Stratis is fueled by a Proof-Of- Stake (PoS) method of consensus, unlike the Proof of Work or PoW utilized on the Bitcoin network. PoS is not as voracious in its energy consumption as the gluttonous PoW protocols; and, less energy use equals lower electric costs, so add 152

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a check mark to the positive improvements.

learn how to create projects on the Stratis platform.

Stratis Is Unique, Yet Utilizes A TimeTested Foundation

The creators of Stratis call it a BaaS Platform or a Blockchain as a Service Platform, because of the varying use case applications when compared to other projects in the cryptosphere. Plainly stated, Stratis offers more practical uses than its predecessor, Bitcoin, and has a more easily adaptable (programming) language to build on than the other most common comparison, Ethereum.

Beyond the PoS difference, Stratis brings significant additions to the established and time-tested Bitcoin framework. Making their project stand out on its own, away from Bitcoin, are improvements such as smart contracts, customization-ready side chains, and a self-certifying school for programmers to

The Stratis platform is

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the base through which developers can build token projects using C# on the .Net framework. Utilizing the world’s most widely taught programming language, C#, means that a more robust selection of tools and projects will spring into existence at regular intervals.

Stratis Based Projects To Check Out The Stratis buzz got louder when the team began to announce their first ICO project partners, including Gluon and Beyond Global Trading. GLUON, which will be the first ICO to launch from the Stratis platform, is a project focused on improving the automobile industry. Interestingly, the Gluon team announced this as their second attempt to raise funds for their

project. On the official Gluon website, they explain in the FAQ that the reason the first ICO was unsuccessful was because the Ethereum chain was where they had originally launched. However, due to various performance-related issues, they decided that the Ethereum blockchain was not the right fit for their needs. Beyond Global Trading is the second ICO to announce a launch from the Stratis Blockchain Platform, and it aims to improve the way people trade, globally. The promises made by Beyond Global Trading (or BGT) include multi-national business relations, product creation policing and monitoring supply and manufacturing chains, from beginning to end, to help reduce abuse and counterfeit operations.

Get Some Stratis In Your Knowledge Base Much earlier than the promised time frame by nearly 6 months, the team released nStratis Development Framework (SDF), which enables blockchain development in the widely understood and used C#, and other languages supported by the .NET framework. This

release greatly accelerates the potential for development that will add to the open-source, cross-platform blockchain applications, even on Microsoft’s .Net framework. Before diving into the Github of it all, it is highly recommended that you check out the Whitepaper here. This all looks promising indeed, and at CORE, we are interested in hearing about your personal experience with this product, in comments below. Tell us what you think of this seemingly useful project and it’s new ICO launch announcements. If you like this article, please check out our magazine! Cheers! This is not advice. Advice should be accepted by your chosen legal counsel only and financial advice should come from a licensed or certified financial professional. As always - do your homework and make decisions based on your own education. Seek information and look into projects before adding to or diversifying your portfolios.

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IOTA Use Cases To Be Presented at Hannover Messe Deutsche Telekom to Present Use Cases for IOTA

annover Messe, l a u n c h e d by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, is the world’s largest tradeshow for industrial technology. It 154

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is being held in Hannover, Germany from April 23rd to April 27th. According to the IOTA founders, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, Bosch, and a few other big name companies will discuss use cases for the public distributed ledger. One of the main criticisms of cryptocurrencies, and platforms implemented using cryptographic algorithms, is

that their potential use cases have not been fully developed. However, the IOTA platform appears to not only have established strategic partnerships, but also has many practical use cases. Before we discuss them, let’s go over what this platform actually is and does.

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Tangle Based Crypto Platform

This crypto-platform uses distributed ledgers, but not a blockchain. The technology which forms the backbone of this crypto-platform is called a Tangle, which is implemented using Directed Acyclic Graphs. Using this approach does not require cryptocurrency miners, which are needed when using proof-of-work algorithms. With Tangle, the IOTA platform is still pretty much decentralized and there is no cost associated with using it. On the IOTA network, participants play an equal role. Whenever a transaction is processed, the entity issuing it must authenticate two previously issued transactions. The issuer does not get to choose which transactions to authenticate. Instead, these transactions are randomly presented to the user to validate. Notably, this process can run on almost any device and allows for fast micro transactions.

You Can Make Small Purchases with This Crypto

Micro transactions can be of the smallest amount possible, even fractions of cents. If you

compare this to Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies, many of which require miners to run, then it is not feasible to make small purchases such as buying yourself a pack of cigarettes. Moreover, as more people use the network, it becomes faster and more efficient. This appears to be in direct contrast to the Bitcoin network, because the more people that use it, the slower it becomes and transaction costs increase significantly.

Fujitsu and Deutsche Telekom Point out Use Cases for IOTA

Fujitsu, one of the companies that will present use cases for IOTA, which is reportedly able to integrate Internet of Things (IOT) on its network, has said:

“We demonstrate how component and process data can be tracked and unalterably saved to the IOTA Tangle in a Supply Chain Management context. Among other potential applications, IOTA can be deployed to

ensure the use of original components, as well as for warranty management.” Meanwhile, a Deutsche Telekom Executive noted: “We think it’s a great opportunity for Deustche Telekom to investigate and prototype future blockchain-based, datadriven business models with different partners. Compliance with data privacy regulations has to be regarded at every stage, and IOTA provides the right tech, right now.” https://www.fujitsu.com/ fts/microsite/hmi/experttalks/index.html https://blog.iota.org/ iota-data-marketplace-cb6be463ac7f Omar Faridi omar@coregroup.info

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Jimmy Song - Bitcoin will remain a Revolution

immy Song, in his latest Medium Post, has strongly mentioned that Bitcoin is here to stay and other Altcoins and ICOs are nowhere close in competing with Bitcoin. He also explains in detail â&#x20AC;&#x153;Why 156

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Bitcoin is Differentâ&#x20AC;?.

Jimmy Song Bitcoin Developer Jimmy Song did his graduation from the University of Michigan with a degree in

Mathematics in 1998. He worked as a Software Developer for various companies and in 2014 he joined Monetas for bitcoin integration. After that, he remained a Bitcoin developer for companies like Armory Technologies. He worked his

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way up to become a principal architect for Paxos for creating blockchain solutions. He is a well-known and respected personality in the Bitcoin community and runs a Programming Blockchain training program for students by traveling around the world. In 2018, he joined Blockchain Capital as a Venture partner. Notably, Jimmy Song is a Bitcoin Maximist and has always supported it in all his shows and tweets.

Why Bitcoin is Different In the recent Medium post by Jimmy song, he has answered the important questions on “What makes Bitcoin Different?” and “Why It is difficult to replicate Bitcoin in spite of so many Altcoins/ Forks and ICO tokens?”. In the post, he mentions three major reasons that distinguish Bitcoin from other coins:

Real Innovation Jimmy says that the biggest innovation has already been accomplished by Bitcoin and that innovation is a “Decentralized

Digital Scarcity”. All other altcoins, ICO or hardforks can boost themselves with useful new innovation/features, but they are very tiny compared to the towering innovation by Bitcoin. He goes on to explain that alternatives to Bitcoin have been proposed right from 2011 and also mentions some of the altcoins and ICOs that existed once, but disappeared over time. IxCoin, Tenebrix, Solidcoin and several others he mentions which are completely dead now. Also, he notes that some ICOs in the past that collected a huge sum of BTC (before Ethereum was created ICOs were done using Bitcoin) to the tune of 2000 BTC to 5000 BTC. However, they performed very poorly and didn’t provide any utility. Mastercoin and Factom are some of the ICOs that failed miserably.

Network Effect Jimmy mentions Network Effect to be another important reason for Bitcoin to rule the cryptocurrency space for the years to come. Bitcoin has the largest network and as time goes by, it adds more people to the network. The Network

effect plays in favor of Bitcoin, because of the fact that Bitcoin grows in utility since it has the most users. He also compares it to the example of getting accessories easily for a popular phone more than a phone that is rare.

Decentralization The other major advantage Bitcoin has over other altcoins/ ICOs is that it is completely decentralized and avoids a single point of failure. Other coins have founders to influence the direction in which the coin should travel, which is bad since that makes them prone to centralization. He then mentions that centralized authority might be suited for corporate companies, but is bad for currencies since the “quality” should stay the same for money or get better by time. Also, the centralized actors can change the rules of the currency in their favor. Other than Bitcoin, all other altcoins/ICOs have “centralization attributes” and the creator is the dictator, acting just like the government controlling their people. He notes that Ethereum as an example where the founder Vitalik dictated much of the decisions on his own (eg: Hard Fork after DAO hack, Proof Core Magazine

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of stake change) and enforced these quite strictly. So, Altcoins/ ICOs are no different from fiat since both are centralized to a significant extent, according to Jimmy. In the post, he emphasizes that Bitcoin cannot change without everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s consent and this makes it difficult to modify its scarcity, where other coins it appears only on paper or is temporary. He also credits Sathosi for disappearing at the initial stage itself to allow it to remain fully decentralized.

The Crypto Legend Of Ethereum Founder Gavin Wood

Difficult to Dethrone Bitcoin Gavin Wood The above-mentioned points by Jimmy seem to be sound arguments that it is difficult to dethrone Bitcoin from the top spot easily, due to the characteristics that no altcoin/ ICO posses. He concludes by saying that a big revolution such as Bitcoin is required to displace it. Meanwhile, tweaking a few variables (like adding privacy as a feature) is not enough and thousands of coins tried to replicate the properties over several years, but they failed miserably. That is why Bitcoin remains a Revolution.

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italik Buterin is the well-known one but Charles Hoskinson, Mihae Alisie, Anthony Di Lorio, Gavin Wood and Joseph Lubin were all involved with the creation of Ethereum. This is going to be a look at the work of Gavin Wood in the cryptocurrency world. Gavin Wood doubled as the Chief Technology Officer of Ethereum between 2013 and 2015. Grid Singularity and Parity Technologies are other organizations he has co-founded, apart from Ethereum.

Between 1998 and 2005, he received two certificates from the University of York. First was a master of engineering certificate in computer systems and software engineering. He followed that with a PhD in computer science. Like most people in this space, Gavin was not too excited about Bitcoin technology the first time he found out about it. Again, like most people currently involved with cryptocurrencies, he got hooked the second time. This time he looked at other use cases of the technology other than the currency use case. This and his getting to know Vitalik along the way led to the great work he has

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done in the cryptosphere. This was in 2013, the year the Ethereum idea was proposed, one year before the crowdsale and two years before the network actually went live. His Contribution To The Development Of Ethereum As mentioned earlier, Gavin worked on Ethereum as the CTO for the first two years of its existence. In that role, he was in charge of ensuring that all technical issues in the lead up to the launch of the platform were properly handled. He also worked on the code for Ethereumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first functional implementation. Parity Technologies is one of the means through which Gavin Wood aims to help the world get closer to having a decentralized internet. The company which is made up of mostly former Ethereum developers is into creating applications of blockchain technology for the use of organizations. The Parity Ethereum Client is one such application. Other contributions of Gavin and other former Ethereum developers is the Solidity

programming language. Gavin came up with the idea as well as the research paper on it. This language, which is used to create smart contracts on Ethereum and other blockchains, has been blamed for a couple of vulnerabilities that have been detected over the years. The 2016 DAO disaster is a well-known example. It is, however, still the main programming language for writing and implementing smart contracts on Ethereum. Work In The Cryptocurrency Space At Large Apart from Ethereum and Parity Technologies, Gavin works with other businesses and organizations in the cryptocurrency world. He is usually directly involved with these businesses but also acts in the capacity of advisor for some. Grid Singularity was founded by Gavin around the time Parity technologies was established. It, however, has a different focus. Grid Singularity puts the energy market on a decentralized exchange platform. There are also plans to have applications on the platform to serve various players in the energy market globally. Ambrosus

uses sensor systems, blockchain technology, and smart contracts to verify the quality, source and safety of food and medicine on the market. Gavin is involved with the provision of this service through Parity technologyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s partnership with Ambrosus. Melonport also has Gavin on their team as a technical advisor. The company is behind the asset management protocol known as Melon. The product here is a decentralized fund that is controlled by investors through an elected council. Working To Create a Truly Decentralized Internet Gavin has always been about making the internet better by making it more decentralized and allowing more anonymity. This shift from what we have now would go a long way in protecting the general public from large organizations with access to personal information of users of the internet. Gavin Woodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work with Ethereum, Parity and other organizations mentioned above have all been directed at achieving this goal. Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

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Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence on a Blockchain AI-Enabled Crypto Trading

achine Learning and AI are being introduced to help cryptocurrency traders. Reportedly, this technology works on a pre-programmed function that makes instant buy/sell decisions at a rapid pace. This is highly required 160

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in today’s environment where the trader is prone to commit errors due to his or her emotional influence or other psychological factors affecting their trade. We will see how blockchain-based development could help in making a near perfect trade and save money for the investor.

Extremely Volatile Cryptocurrency Trading Cryptocurrency trading is extremely volatile, but that also rewards the trader heavily and can even makes him/her rich instantly. There’s a saying: “If you can’t handle my 20% drop, you don’t deserve my 600% gain”. So, traders need to digest

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the drop in price to make humongous gains. However, the hard truth is that most traders don’t handle the trade properly due to their instant and poor decisions arising out of human emotions. They make errors in this extremely volatile cryptocurrency trading, which can and has caused them to lose a lot of money. There is also a report of a person who held 200 bitcoins and ended up with no bitcoins due to very poor decisions in trading, driven mostly by his emotions. Some argue that holding is the best strategy, but still there are many people who only want to “Buy low and Sell high”. As most crypto traders are aware, it is not easy to know the exact top and bottom, and traders lose a lot of money to trades performed out of haste and emotions.

Financial Institutions using AI Financial institutions and investment funds have already started using Artificial Intelligence to try to gain a strategic edge in making trades and generating profits. They have

very large amounts of data, provided by the global financial markets, that can help in creating the datasets. These datasets are then interpreted by the machine learning algorithms to automate the trade. This helps in high-frequency trading that can (potentially) perform buy/ sell decisions based on the predefined programs. This has reportedly helped in making better and quicker decisions, which is vital in trading to maximize profits.

Machine Learning in Blockchain Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies provide a high level of transparency, and this transparency can provide an enormous amount of data required by AI and Machine Learning. This is the perfect place for deploying AI and Machine learning algorithms. Blockchain contains the data and by deploying pre-programmed algorithms on the data, the trader can benefit by allowing AI to make the trading decisions, instead of making errors in judgement due to erratic human emotions. Signals is one such AI tool that works on blockchain technology. Signals combines

different types of information into a single platform, and helps traders build their own customized system of decision making. AI requires a huge amount of computational power and that is provided by the distributed power of the blockchain. The distributed computational power combines together to provide super-computer level capabilities, enabling machine learning algorithms to interpret the dataset and make the right decisions for the trader. Daneel Assistant Company is another company that helps in crypto trading using AI. They use IBM’s Watson (Most Powerful AI tool) to make the right decisions using data intelligence. Daneel literally acts like a personal assistant that advises the trader on the strategy after doing thorough research on sentiment, data, emotion, and language. The tool also understands the different “Feel” of the market like FOMO, FUD or REKT to make the right trading decisions. It even captures and analyzes data from all sorts of media and social networks to come up with reliable information. There are many other AI bots in the market, but the Core Magazine

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above mentioned are the most powerful and useful algorithms that help in doing perfect trading.

Machines Ignore Emotions Machines ignore emotions and do the trading purely on numbers and process humongous amount of datasets that human beings cannot. Another advantage of deep machine learning is that winning strategic patterns can be identified by the AI and it can, in turn, monetize the users through winning strategies and tokens. This is also built directly into the system. So, it has another major advantage of identifying the strategic pattern and also

rewarding the user.

Cryptocurrency Traders to benefit Institutional investors benefited the most after the introduction of automated trading. Similarly, introducing Machine learning and AI into a blockchain will benefit the cryptocurrency trader due to the fact that blockchain is decentralized and has a huge amount of data to feed the AI. So, the cryptocurrency trader could greatly benefit by using these applications to overcome the error committed in haste and other psychological factors. A number of people think that Artificial Intelligence will

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play an important and useful role in many aspects of our lives in the near future. It could even help crypto enthusiasts perform better trades. Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramaniam kadhir@coregroup.info

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Marie-Antoinette Tichler’s Solution to A Crypto Problem The Oprah and Queen of Crypto On The Move

arie-Antoinette Tichler has a couple of aliases beginning with “Crypto”. She is CryptOprah for obvious reasons. She hosts the “Crypto Vlog Show Behind the Blockchain” on her Youtube channel. She also refers to herself as the CryptoQueen,and is involved in many useful projects with

cryptocurrencies. This article focuses on Marie-Antoinette as a blockchain personality and her work so far in the cryptocurrency space. Records show that MarieAntoinette does not hesitate to go out and do her part to solve problems she identifies. The following are some of the organizations and initiatives set up to bring about some positive improvement in various spheres of life. Apart from hosting “Behind the Blockchain”, Marie-Antoinette

is the CEO and founder of C2Legacy as well as founding member and community outreach lead of the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. Outside Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency space, she is the founder of Coochie Power, an organization with women empowerment as its goal. Texting Organisation Against Distracted Driving (TOADD) is yet another organization started by MarieAntoinette Tichler. Before all these, Marie-Antoinette worked under Healthcare Management for the United Core Magazine

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States Air Force. Marie-Antoinette holds a Social Media Marketing graduate certificate from Drury University and a healthcare management degree from the Southern University at Carbondale.

financial education community center and wants to be the hub for education and networking in the Greater Georgia area when it comes to digital assets and blockchain technology. As mentioned earlier, the role of community outreach lead would be played by MarieAntoinette.

Marie-Antoinette’s Marie’s C2Legacy Crypto Related Passes Crypto Work Assets From With her Crypto Vlog Holders To Heirs Show, Marie-Antoinette aims at introducing more people to cryptocurrency technology. She interviews the creators and minds behind various cryptocurrency projects and breaks down the very technical issues into easily digestible interactions.

You can also catch MarieAntoinette at the Bitcoin Blacktie Ball and Crypto Quarterly Mixers events where she participates as co-host. Both events in Atlanta aim at exposing more people to cryptocurrencies and create an avenue for meeting and sharing ideas. Marie-Antoinette even has a new role at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. The Bitcoin embassy has been dubbed the 164

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Those who have made a considerable amount of wealth from cryptocurrencies have a number of headaches to deal with. The obvious one has to do with keeping the digital assets safe. Hardware wallets exist to tackle this problem and help holders sleep with peace of mind. One other difficulty has to do with figuring out a way to safely pass on the newly created wealth to heirs when one is no longer around. C2Legacy provides solutions to this problem. Smart contracts are used to transfer crypto assets from holders to their heirs once their death is confirmed and validated via a decentralized death certificates system. This is a very important and useful service

created by Marie-Antoinette with C2Legacy. We will be able to see how the solution works in reality after the first real transfer to the heir of a user of the service takes place. The service is not only suitable for individuals, but also hedge funds and blockchain companies.

Making Crypto More Useful In The Real World We need more projects coming out with real-world applications of blockchain technology. More engagement and education about digital assets and their use cases at the community level is also important. Marie-Antoinette is using her entrepreneurial skills to come out with a way to safely pass on crypto assets to others posthumously. She uses her social media skills to also educate and inform on cryptocurrency projects. She is, in a nutshell, bringing about change with crypto and also creating a solution to one of its problems Elikem Kofi Attah elikem@coregroup.info

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Should I Get My Children Involved With Blockchain Technology?

he answer to your child about blockchain this question is a technology. resonating yes! You need to tell your children Start with the about blockchain technology. It is not just about its link to basic concept cryptocurrencies, but with of blockchain so many other things about technology to happen in the future. So, letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s have a look at a very Here is some of the most simple way you can teach confusing stuff that needs to

be explained first. There can be many ways to start this conversation. For instance, you can give your child the example of a school. There is a school where the principal wants to ensure that all the teachers have accurate records of school-related information. However, there are some probCore Magazine

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lems in the traditional (current) record management systems used by schools. One issue arises when the principal and the teachers try to consolidate the records, because oftentimes there are discrepancies. Now, imagine the principal wants to create an immutable or unchangeable record about everything in the school. The principal comes up with this brilliant idea of creating multiple copies of the same record. The copies are distributed to all the administration personnel and teachers responsible for updating the school’s record. Whenever there is a change in any record in the school, the principal conveys that to the teacher and school administration. Everyone in the school then updates and matches the records with each other. Although, in the real world, it seems to be a manual and tedious process, it only takes seconds to update all the records in the computer world. So, if there is a change in any of the past records, and whenever everyone reconciles with the copies of the record that everyone in the school has, they are able to identify if there are any discrepancies. Then, if we create this record keeping on a massive technological scale 166

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with great computing power on its back, then this begins to resemble what is called a blockchain. Now, let’s take this example of record keeping in a school and apply different components of blockchain technology to it.

Decentralization

When trying to teach your kids about decentralization, the school scenario works quite well. In a decentralized model, there isn’t just one person in the school that is keeping all the records. With several people keeping the records, it is more safe and the school’s principal, administrator or record keeper can be kept accountable. That’s because decentralization means everyone can tally their records whenever they want to, in order to maintain the integrity of the information. This is quite useful and makes the school’s record keeping system more reliable. There is almost no chance of the data getting corrupted. For example, in case of funds, If everyone in a school’s record system knows where the funds are coming from, there is very little chance of fraudulent transactions taking place in the institution.

Distributed Ledger Distributed ledger implies that the records can be seen by anyone in the school’s management and even parents of the children studying there and even the children. No question is asked when someone tries to access the records. This ensures greater transparency and everyone understands how the school is managed. Now, imagine if there is a voting system in the school where parents are part of the management like in some community schools. If they know what is taking place inside the school, they can make better executive decisions. Even the school’s top management can make better decisions about the future of the institute by knowing, through immutable records, what’s happening where. Also, since all the members of school’s management have access to all the records, they can validate all the transactions.

Tamper-Proof Record Keeping The last thing that you need to tell your child is that, besides managing financial af-

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fairs, blockchain can be used to transparently record just about any type of data or information. So, the increased transparency prevents anyone from manipulating and corrupting the information. So, even if one or two persons make changes to system data, everyone would have to approve and reflect them in their records before it can be validated. The validation process is a self-reviewing system that quickly highlights the changes.

This level of check and balance keeps people with mischievous intentions at bay, not allowing them to to make any unwarranted changes.

Blockchain technology is not Bitcoin One of the most important things to make clear to your child is the difference between blockchain technology and Bitcoin. Unfortunately, even

many adults sometimes mix the two. Blockchain technology is a way of keeping records, financial and others. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that uses blockchain technology to process financial transactions and serve as a medium of exchange and store of value. So, what you can also explain is that Bitcoin is only one way we can use blockchain technology to our advantage. Farrukh

The Sun is for everyone, so is the blockchain!

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