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Game of Trolls: Justin Sun Sets Up Valentine’s Day Surprise Especially for Vitalik Buterin

Game of trolls: justin sun sets up valentine’s day surprise especially for vitalik buterin

Game of Trolls: Justin Sun Sets Up Valentine’s Day Surprise Especially for Vitalik Buterin

Photo: justin sun / instagram

Photo: Justin Sun / Instagram

Justin Sun, the CEO and Founder of Tron Foundation, has stated he is preparing a secret campaign for Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin amid the upcoming Valentines Day.

On Twitter, Sun wrote:

“Thank you @VitalikButerin for standing out! I have a secret campaign especially for you in #ValentinesDay! Don’t forget to join it! #TRON #TRX $TRX #BitTorrent #BTT $BTT”

Earlier, Justin Sun and Vitalik Buterin had a kind of conflict. Buterin publicly accused the Tron Foundation of plagiarizing the Ethereum whitepaper in their own. On Twitter, there were numerous disputes at that time. In response, Justin Sun adjusted the whitepaper in December of last year to make sure that this plagiarism was not taking place. As a result, Buterin changed his attitude towards Sun, BitTorrent, and the Tron Foundation as a whole since then.

Vitalik Buterin praised BitTorrent several times. In October 2017, Buterin pointed out that apart from bitcoin, BitTorrent has proved to have a real long-lasting use case for decentralized applications. In December 2018, Buterin brought attention to BitTorrent’s work as an app and said that BitTorrent was a metagame success. This was noticed by Tron enthusiast Misha Lederman.

Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of IOHK, and “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the creator of Bitcoin, have also spoken highly of the use-cases of BitTorrent at that time.

Currently, Sun and Buterin seem to have no reasons for arguments, however, at a recent blockchain conference held in San Franciso, Vitalik Buterin tried to cast shade on Ethereum alternatives like EOS, NEO, and Tron. He said then:

“So I’ve noticed a lot of misconceptions here. Because, like, there’s a lot of like, honestly, bad crypto projects that try to claim. ‘Oh, because we use fancy BFT, we can do 5,000 transactions per second and proof-of-work can only do 15.’”

Moreover, he mentioned that consensus is an important thing when talking about the ability of a blockchain to process transactions.

Ethereum to Rank Second Again

Ethereum surged over 14% from $105 to $120 by Saturday. Despite this has not been enough for it to dethrone XRP as the second largest currency, over the past 24 hours Eth has been climbing to reach $125 and eventually replace XRP, which moved down to the third spot.

Meanwhile, there is a kind of sad news for Ethereum. The company has long believed in decentralized applications (DApps) that seemed to be the leading use cases for blockchain. However, the recent statistical analysis has shown that such applications are unlikely to gain traction and become popular. According to research conducted by LongHash, a leading crypto information resource, a mere 180 out of 1812 Ethereum DApps associated ERC-20 transactions, which makes up only 10%.

Kevin Rooke, a Canadian crypto researcher and industry commentator, revealed on his Twitter account that 86% of live applications on the aforementioned blockchain had zero users on February 9. Moreover, a mere 7% of DApps running on Ethereum had more than zero ETH in transaction volumes over the 24 hours.

Further, Rooke revealed the amount of Ethereum tokens that are currently in circulation.

Despite the negative statistics of dApps work, there is positive news for the Ethereum team. It is known that the coin is in tough competition with XRP for being the second after bitcoin. Recently, Ethereum received this position back. Currently, its price makes up $120.79 per coin and market capitalization accounts for $12 660 049 552.

Published at Mon, 11 Feb 2019 09:48:56 +0000

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Cardano Blockchain's First Use Case: Proof of University Diplomas in Greece

cardano use case

Greek graduates may soon be able to prove their qualifications by way of a blockchain.

GRNET, the national research and education network of Greece, is working on a pilot project with blockchain research and development company IOHK to verify student diplomas on Cardano, a blockchain that launched in September.

The project is notable because it is the first official use case of Cardano, a proof-of-stake-based cryptocurrency and soon-to-be smart contract platform currently under development by IOHK.

The GRNET app will be built on Enterprise Cardano, a private or permissioned ledger version of Cardano. Unlike a public blockchain, where anyone can join in and participate, a private blockchain allows only a restricted set of users to validate block transactions.

So far, three Greek universities are participating in the project. While IOHK is providing the decentralized database, GRNET is providing the web front end and support and will bring together other universities participating beyond the pilot.

Funding for the project comes in part from Horizon 2020, a European program for research and innovation. Development of the prototype is already under way, Aggelos Kiayias, IOHK’s chief scientist, told bitcoin Magazine.    

Why Diplomas?

Given IOHK’s deep ties with academia, it is no surprise to find the company working on a project that involves universities. But why diplomas?

Putting diplomas on a blockchain takes the paperwork out of the process and makes it easy and simple to check if someone holds a degree.

Typically, when a student graduates, they receive a paper copy of a diploma signed by the dean and co-signed the university’s registrar. All of the students’ transcripts and records are stored in the university’s centralized database.

To confirm that a graduate has the degree they claim to have, an employer has to check the official diploma or call the university. The labor-intensive process makes it too easy for unqualified applicants to slip under the radar.

Putting documents and records on the blockchain eliminates opportunity for fraud in that it allows graduates and universities to “issue a proof that a qualification exists that is undeniable,” said Kiayias. “This is a point of reference that can be agreed [on] by everyone.”

Cryptographic Proof

But to protect student privacy, instead of putting an entire diploma on the blockchain, GRNET plans to put only a cryptographic hash of a diploma on the blockchain.

Digital documents are easy to alter in ways that are undetectable to the human eye. But as long as the digital version shown to an employer hashes to the same output as what is stored on the blockchain, that proves the document is the original, unaltered version.

“We cannot put any plaintext on the blockchain, as diplomas and transcripts are personal information. We only put hashes; we may put entire diplomas and transcripts, but they will always be encrypted,” Panos Louridas, GRNET consultant and associate professor at Athens University of Economics and Business, explained to bitcoin Magazine in an email.

This is not the first effort to store diplomas on the blockchain. In October, MIT announced its own pilot project to verify digital diplomas using the blockchain.   

But Louridas claims the GRNET pilot is different from prior projects in that it stores the entire chain of verification steps on the blockchain. Each step would be recorded as its own immutable transaction on a separate block in the blockchain.  

“You don’t really need a blockchain to store diplomas: a simple system with some digital signatures by the host institution would do,” he said. “We want to be able to record that somebody has asked for proof of a degree, that the proof has been granted, that the proof has been forwarded to a verifier, and that the verifier can verify that the degree is valid, and nobody can dispute any of the above steps.”

The three Greek universities taking part in the pilot include Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Democritus University of Thrace and Athens University of Economics and Business.


The post Cardano Blockchain's First Use Case: Proof of University Diplomas in Greece appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

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