CNN reports that government of the United Kingdom is forbidding a buyer who paid 146,500 pounds formerly known as sterling for a watercolor painting from taking it to his home (archived) outside of Britain. According to the Kingdom's government it hopes that the ban will encourage the buyer, who purchased the piece as the highest bidder at Christie's auction house would make the decision to sell the painting on to a buyer intending to keep the watercolor in the United Kingdom. This is in spite of the fact that no such buyer for the artwork was interested in outbidding the actual purchaser in an auction. The export ban was put into place by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey. Continue reading
Category Archives: Altcoins
Concerns for the Toomim Brothers Mining
BIP-101 requires 750 of the last 1000 consecutive blocks to have a version bits set to 0x20000007 in hex to trigger a hard fork to remove the block size limit. Qntra recently published an article indicating the negligible miner support for XT, of which Jonathan Toomim commented the brothers' mining initiative would be supporting BIP-101 with blocks they solve. This lead into a brief investigation of the Toomim brothers who use GPG, yet are not in the Web of Trust. Continue reading
BitBet Prediction Market Opens XTCoin Bet, Pool already over 100 BTC
Today BitBet has opened a bet on whether Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's XTCoin forking effort will succeed. The bet which closes to new betting July 2nd, 2016 and resolves on August 1st, 2016 enumerates a number of conditions under which the XT effort could be considered a failure. These metrics include sufficient mining of XT blocks to trigger the fork, the mining of a block over 1000000 bytes with the XT block version number, the mining difficulty of the XTCoin chain, and the price of XTCoin compared to Bitcoin. Back in March the largest Bitcoin bet in terms of value was resolved on the BitBet platform with a total of 5514.62 BTC in wager on the proposition that Bitcoin would surpass Berkshire Hathaway as an investment. At the time of this writing 100.09 Bitcoin have been bet on the side of the XT coup failing, while only 1.02 Bitcoin have been wagered that XTCoin will succeed.
Collected Notes on the XT Client and XTCoin fork
Several days after the Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced their coup attempt it is becoming clear that the XT effort is an effort to misrepresent a neutered, less robust, and rapidly changing system as Bitcoin. A number of parties are catching onto the false sense of urgency which has been pushed hard by Gavin Andressen over the past year and supported by a number of flooding attacks presented as "stress tests." Continually the coup's propaganda has been crashing into the hard face of reality as the reaction to the flooding attacks show Bitcoin works as advertised when the attack ends up allowing for a demonstration of transaction fee markets. Continue reading
Shutdown Notice Startup Shutdownify Lastest Failed Startup
In the world of Silicon Valley startups Shutdownify sought to make the process of failed startups shutting down a cleaner and more uniform process. Today Shutdownify announced it would be following in its customer's footsteps (archived) and utilizing its own services as the failure startup's niche was not sustainable as a business.
Coinwallet Plans Spam While the Spamming is Cheap
Last month a venture calling itself "Coinwallet" flooded the Bitcoin network with spam in what the company called a "stress test." The spam delayed underpaying transactions without fees insufficient to secure space to be confirmed in a block resulting in a scenario where a fee market for block space could develop. A Coinwallet representative recently stated the company will be performing another stress test in early September, claiming there will close to 4.6 GB worth of spam that will flood the network. Continue reading
No XTCoin Support Committed to the Blockchain Yet
Days after Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced a not quite Bitcoin client that when triggered by a particular set of events create an altchain, miner adoption of their forking client remains so low not a single block containing a vote for their coup has been committed to the blockchain. This is in the face of a self declared mining operation claiming a third of a petahash swearing their fealty to Hearn and Andressen's new pet altcoin. In the time since Hearn announced the fork though a pseudonode implementation which passes most tests to be counted as a forking XT node has been published alongside a full node Bitcoin Client which appears to be an XTCoin node in everything except actually forking over to XTCoin if a fork is actually ever triggered. With this early reception to Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's fork ultimatum the chances of an actual XTCoin creating fork occurring appear to be low.
Hearn Releases Code to Potentially Fork XTC from Bitcoin
This weekend Mike Hearn announced the release of a version of his BitcoinXT client which would hard fork a new altcoin referred to here as XTCoin from the Bitcoin network. Should enough blocks be mined which profess to contain a vote to trigger Hearn's XTCoin fork, the XTCoin blockchain would split from the Bitcoin Blockchain an allow blocks to be mined at a maximum size of 8 megabytes each growing exponentially to a maximum size of 8 gigabytes 20 years after XTCoin forks should XTCoin somehow manage to keep enough hashpower to continue producing new blocks over the entire span of time. As mentioned in the Hard Fork Missile Crisis XTCoin, like any other altcoin forked from Bitcoin and fraudulently misrepresenting itself as Bitcoin would come under devastating economic attack which would almost certainly render further mining on the XTCoin chain a costly money losing endeavor. Continue reading
Zynga Continues Bleeding
A recent filing (archived) with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission show that one once hyped Facebook centric "game" maker Zynga is continuing to bleed both users and money. Zynga has lost more than 73 million United States dollars since the beginning of 2015. From 2012 through the close of 2014 Zynga has lost roughly 472 million United States dollars. Average monthly users of Zynga's products was reported to have fallen from 121 million in 2014's second quarter to 83 million the second quarter of this year, a decline of 32 percent. In spite of Zynga's hemorrhaging wallet and shrinking userbase shares still manage to trade on Nasdaq (archived) at $2.64 per share implying a market cap of $2,072,302,357 on a earnings per share of negative 19 cents.
Selkis Tips Fiat Agenda For Bitcoin
Ryan Selkis, known on social media as @TwoBitIdiot, has begun concern trolling over "wealth concentration" in Bitcoin and proposed moving Bitcoin to a permanently inflationary reward schedule by 2020. Such a change would of course never be implemented in actual Bitcoin, but the fact that it is being introduced by someone titled "Director of Investments" at some organization calling itself the "Digital Currency Group" strongly suggests that fiat interests in the United States that would like to not only inflate the blockchain in order to force centralization. It suggests United States based fiat interests would like to destroy the very image of what Bitcoin is. Continue reading