- Good news for Bitcoin in Zimbabwe! — the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe have banned it completely. Financial institutions have 60 days to stop working with cryptocurrency exchanges, or allowing account holders to trade in “virtual currencies.”
- Actual Lambos sighted outside the Consensus blockchain convention in New York! — they were rented. “I never made money with crypto but I have ten lambos,” said Jon Nouri of Broadway Supercars, who rents Lamborghinis out for $1,000 a day. Cryptocurrency is “The Secret,” but on the blockchain. Dream it!
- Quinn DuPont‘s book Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains has its page up on Polity Books, Wiley and Amazon UK, and will officially be released in December! Includes useful new original research, including actual blockchain success stories — such as the Walmart supply chain pilot where the blockchain bit added nothing, but the people on the ground took the opportunity to use the funding to modernise and digitise stuff that had been waiting years …
- Bitmain are expanding their hard-won financial reach — they’ve invested $110 million in Circle (archive). Circle says Bitmain are interested in Circle’s forthcoming stablecoin, “the USD Coin, backed by fiat currency reserves.” No relation to any of the many other cryptos called “USD Coin.”
- Coinbase are adding high-speed trading (archive), hoping to attract the big money investors. And Gemini have gained permission to trade ZCash, with Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin coming in the future.
- KodakCoin will finally start its ICO on Monday 21 May. I’ll keep you updated.
- Bitcoin’s merchant story in 2018 — the experience of using Bitcoin to buy a shirt from Overstock. Overstock messed up the order, cancelled it, and told the customer he could collect his refund from Coinbase! A company he didn’t have an account with. Rather than just reinstating the order and sending him his shirt.
- Bitcoin Cash is expanding into the void — FT Alphaville on B Cash (to use the project’s official logo stylisation) raising a number in the code from 8 megabytes to 32 megabytes, and never mind that their blocks rarely go over 100 kilobytes. Because nobody uses Bitcoin Cash, not even traders — OKex dropped Bitcoin Cash in March because of “inadequate liquidity.” The article doesn’t cover the new smart contract functionality, but I expect that’ll be worth writing up when someone does something useful with it. CryptoFelons?
"Guys, no one's using our 8 lane highway."
"We need 32 lanes."
"You’re a genius."#Overheard #TransactionSuperhighway #Bcash pic.twitter.com/RriMsWlz33— Samson Mow (@Excellion) May 8, 2018
- And the latest CryptoKitties is Crypko.AI — generative adversarial network-created anime girls, on the blockchain. The video is one of the creepier things I’ve seen today. “100% the cryptocurrency of future school shooters” — @Buttcoin.
- Why Blockchain is Hard by Jimmy Song — a very good article on why “blockchain” is not widely applicable in business, and for the most part I heartily concur with it.
- Luke Kanies on all the good parts of blockchain — all the parts that aren’t blockchain. Part 1 in a series.
- I found out the name of the routing problem the Lightning Network has to solve, to get money from arbitrary person A to arbitrary person B across a mesh of unknown connections of varying usability (liquidity) — the Canadian Traveller Problem. Finding the best path is PSPACE-complete.
- My piece on eMusic has been reprinted in Hypebot. Please give them a click.
So @jpwarren @dobes, the last sentence of this grab from @davidgerard’s “Attack of the 50ft Blockchain” is a technique we should adopt as standard practice. pic.twitter.com/hmyv4Tzt4l
— Stilgherrian (@stilgherrian) May 5, 2018
https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/994548848512004097
Sometimes I wish bitcoin had come out slightly earlier so all the weirdos would be guzzling colloidal silver and turning blue instead of being mommy’s little carnivore and refusing to eat vegetables.
— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) May 13, 2018
hi just a reminder that this thing lives next door to one of you pic.twitter.com/BU3l3EEjeB
— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) May 14, 2018
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Delighted by the unexpected appearance of Philomena Cunk.
I recommend the Cunk later in the book too.