January 8, 2019

Ethereum [ETH] Rinkeby Testnet hardfork will land on January 9, 2019, says core developer

The whole Ethereum community has been engulfed with the upcoming hard fork, Constantinople. The hard fork that was supposed to go live in 2018 is finally going to meet its end. The hard fork is scheduled to take place around January 16, 2019, and will take place on block #7080000.

The team has been working on the hard fork since 2017 and proposes key upgrades to the network. The main Ethereum Improvement Protocol includes the reduction of the block mining reward issuance to 2 ETH and delaying the difficulty bomb for almost 12 months.

As the hard fork is approaching closer, the total clients ready for the upgrade are recorded to be 981, i.e., 12.7% of all clients on the network. At the time of writing, the total number of clients for Geth and Parity were 7709, out of which Geth 1.8.20 clients are 281 and the remaining are Parity 2.1.10+ or 2.2.5+ clients.

Peter Szilagyi, a core developer at Ethereum said:

“#Ethereum mainnet Constantinople hardfork (16th of January) is fast approaching. Please make sure you are running Geth 1.8.20+ or Parity 2.1.10+/2.2.5+ to avoid unpleasant surprises!”

Additionally, Peter also announced the schedule for Ethereum Rinkeby on his official Twitter handle. According to an article by Geoff Hayes, Rinkeby is one among the three Testnet of Ethereum, similar to the “production bitcoin”. The other two Testnet’s are Ropsten and Kovan. Rinkeby Testnet is a proof-of-authority bitcoin, which was initiated by the Geth team to test the upgrade before it goes live on the main chain.

He also said:

“Rinkeby #Ethereum testnet hardfork will land around 13:00 UTC on Wednesday, 9th of January! Last call to update your nodes. Also, please ensure you’re either running with `–rinkeby`, or that you `geth init`-ed your node with the updated genesis spec from //www.rinkeby.io/#geth “

Prior to Rinkeby Testnet, the Ropsten Testnet hard fork went live in the month of October 2018. However, there were several issues encountered during the Ropsten Testnet, resulting in the postponement of the Constantinople hard fork on the main chain.

In a post-mortem report, a core developer of Ethereum, Lane Rettig stated that they had discovered a consensus bug in the Parity implementation of Ethereum. He also stated that there were concerns in terms of lack of miners on Parity, Geth or Aleth for Ropsten.

The post Ethereum [ETH] Rinkeby Testnet hardfork will land on January 9, 2019, says core developer appeared first on AMBCrypto.

Published at Tue, 08 Jan 2019 20:03:43 +0000

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December 12, 2017

Bulgaria Could Slash its National Debt Thanks to Seized BTC

Whilst early investors are rejoicing about the recent surge in the price of bitcoin, the increase is delighting elsewhere too. As part of a national anti-corruption operation in Bulgaria back in May, the government there seized 213,519 BTC from organised criminals. Today, these coins are worth $3.6 billion, or to put it another way, around one fifth of the entire country’s national debt. At the time they were seized, they were only worth $500 million.

The confiscations followed a widespread crackdown by the Southeast European Law Enforcement Centre (SELC). ZeroHedge report that it was in response to cases of customs fraud perpetrated by organised criminals. A large-scale search of over 100 properties led to 23 arrests. Of this number, five were Bulgarian customs officers. Computers, tablets, bank documents, and other communications equipment were also seized. The story was picked up by Russia Today. According to them, the SELC said:

The organized criminal group consisted of Bulgarian nationals with connections in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Greece, Romania, and Serbia.

Local police contend that the group had managed to infect customs’ computer systems with a virus. The goal was to falsify data about shipping containers. They would mark certain containers waiting to be exported as having already gone through the necessary checks prior to departure. Naturally, unchecked shipments could contain literally anything, and having such a compromised route for illicit goods is a very valuable asset to a criminal network. The SELC believe that the decision was made to use bitcoin as a way of storing profits because it’s more difficult to track and follow than traditional currencies.

What’s perhaps more interesting than the seizure itself is what the Bulgarian government plans on doing with the coins. For now, there has been no official announcement. Will they follow the US example of privately auctioning confiscated coin being as such a windfall could dramatically aid their economy. One Twitter user expressed the fear that’s sure to have crossed many minds:

If Bulgaria dump its $btc we are f*cked!#bitcoin #crypto #wtf

— Satoshi Haze (@SatoshiHaze) December 7, 2017

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The temptation to flood the market with the seized coins must be strong being as Bulgaria could immediately repay 18% of their national debt instantly. However, they could equally decide to take the riskier strategy of becoming a long-term hoarder of the cryptocurrency and potentially use it to back their own currency in the future. Just a thought, Bulgaria. We wouldn’t want you to do anything too hasty now.

Image: ShutterStock

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