2017 has been an important day for both Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. While hopefully not as tumultuous, 2018 is looking like it will bring us a lot of interesting innovation in the space. Here are some of the things I'm personally looking forward to seeing unfold in the new year. ICO Securities After the SEC's investigative report on The DAO, we have seen a number of companies (mine included) start looking into ICO Securities. This might be a start of a new wave of ICOs that will be bigger than the entirety of the current market. If a lot of sentiments I've heard so far ..read more

2017 has been one of the most turbulent year in crypto history to date. We have seen important changes in technology and the political climate, divides in the community, as well as wild jumps in prices of many cryptos. I would like to take a moment to talk about a few key takeaways from this year and what I think had the most impact on the future of crypto. Bitcoin's second near-death experience Bitcoin has been declared dead so many times it has basically become a meme. As of the time of writing, there have been 222 obituaries proclaiming the death of the currency. I'm not here to talk abou ..read more

About half a year ago, SEC released an investigative report concluding that DAO Tokens were securities. Since then there have been a number of high profile cases reinforcing this classification world-wide - UIP, LLToken, CCC, and HMS had to issue refunds to the ICO purchasers in China, Protostarr closed up shop, REcoin and DRC World were charged with fraud and so on. On one hand, the future of ICOs may be looking grim, with the law enforcement making it harder for various projects to raise money by issuing tokens. On the other hand, the new classification of (some) IC ..read more

SegWit2x got cancelled, and with it probably the most heated "battle" in the Bitcoin space thus far draws to a close. There are many lessons to be learned from this ordeal as well as some other forks that are happening around Bitcoin - what constitutes "consensus" in the community, how will the future forks be handled and so on. One important aspect I haven't seen discussed as much currently is the ongoing issue of fork-proof replay protection - a feature that caused some controversy by its absence in SegWit2x and made Bitcoin Gold a laughing stock when they created a bounty for it v ..read more

Part of being a human is wanting to leave a mark on the world. Within us lies the deep need to be remembered, in some form, after we die. We see it in the Cueva de las Manos - Cave of the Hands, where the inhabitants left the outlines of their hands painted on the walls as early as 13'000 years ago. Cave of the Hands We hear the same plight from Horace some 2000 years ago in his Odes when he states "non omnis moriar" - "not all of me will die". Similarly, to condemn someone to be forgotten was a fate worse than death for the ancient Romans. It was called damnatio memoriae, or "the ..read more

While last week I criticised Ripple's XRPs, we can't equate the whole system to its currency. There are many fundamental features of the Ripple system that other cryptos can learn from. A lot of them are small and obscure to anyone who hasn't had a hands-on experience developing systems on top of cryptos. Luckily enough, that's my speciality. So here are a few features of the Ripple system that other cryptos can learn from, as viewed by a programmer. AccountTxnID and Memos Sometimes you need to send a transaction with some extra data attached. Whether it's an invoice ID, customer number ..read more

As some of you might know, I really like the idea behind the Ripple system. Creating a settlement layer based on trust and IOUs, being able to issue any asset easily, working quite well as a middleware layer, incentivising specialisation, creating a singularity of money, all of that is great. The system is not without its flaws however - centralisation of validators is an issue, and so is the token distribution. While both are interesting topics, with the recent meteoric rise in XRP price, I think it's worth focusing on that part of the discussion. Basics of Ripple and XRPs Ripple is a Crypto ..read more

The crypto markets seem to be in another bubble, orders of magnitude bigger than the last. However, this time a lot of the money is flowing into altcoins interestingly enough. How this situation will play out and where the market will stabilise at will be a really interesting story to watch unfold - whether Bitcoin will re-capture the market, or will some other crypto take its place. I would like to take this time to go over some of the history that brought us here however, as it's also a fascinating tale (if you like graphs). Here is a short version of the story, in one graph by Woobull: Bi ..read more

The crypto space is a strange place to be in over a long period of time. Once the coins you bought for a few dollars start becoming a noticeable portion of your net worth, you may start thinking to yourself - "should I work a normal job, or should I work for the cryptocurrency"? This mostly stems from the fact that you generally can't use a cryptocurrency without also being invested in it. I may hold $1000 in a credit card, but I don't own any shares in Visa or Mastercard. However, when I hold $1000 worth of bitcoins, I inevitably own a part of the Bitcoin economy. As its value rises and fall ..read more

Fiat-denominated IOUs have a long history in the crypto space. Ripple launched in 2012 with its host of fiat gateways. BitUSD and TetherUS began circulating in 2014. PayCoin launched and died in 2015. It seems that recently Tether has gotten itself into some banking problems and its price started to reflect that. While the ordeal is not great for the company or anyone holding the tokens, it's still an important lesson to be learned in the crypto space - a dollar is not a dollar is not a dollar. Related articles: The rise of fiat-denominated cryptos BitUSD vs USD IOUs Full Proof of Solv ..read more