South Korean Government Bans Officials From Crypto Holding And Trading
The government has banned its own officials from holding and trading , which is considered to be ‘the first time the government has formulated a virtual currency ban for all public officials,” Maeil Business on March 1.
According to Maeil Business, the Ministry of Personnel Management issued a document entitled “Virtual currency holdings and transaction-related information for civil servants” stating that officials who are found to be involved in cryptocurrency trading are “in violation of the prohibition of forbearance obligations under the civil servants’ law” and are subject to disciplinary actions, especially if the banned activities occur during work hours.
The statement stressed that the ban will be applied to all government ministries. “Even if there is no job relevance [public officials] could be subject to discipline.” Each ministry will be responsible for pursuing whichever disciplinary response it deems appropriate, according to Maeil Business.
The government stance toward cryptocurrencies in South Korea, reportedly the for cryptocurrencies after the and as of February 2018, has at times been unclear. In December 2017, crypto markets reacted to confusion regarding on cryptocurrencies in the country. Later the government confirmed that it had to ban or “suppress” cryptocurrency trading.
According to Maeil Business, the Financial Services Commission (FSC), the Fair Trade Commission, and the head of the Office for Government Policy Coordination Hong Nam-ki, had previously warned their employees to abstain from cryptocurrency investments.
, South Korean officials from the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) were accused of insider cryptocurrency trading. FSS chief Choi Hyung-sik later confirmed the accusations.
Speaking on November 25 at , Ethereum inventor and co-founder Vitalik Buterin his vision for Ethereum 2.0. He described major changes in Ethereum’s architecture that are likely to be implemented over the next few years to improve Ethereum in terms of privacy, safety (consensus safety and smart contract safety) and, of course, scalability, which was the main focus of Buterin’s talk.
Buterin doesn’t seem worried about competitors. “The Ethereum killer is Ethereum, the Ethereum of China is Ethereum, the Ethereum of Taiwan is Ethereum… 2.0,” he said.
The fact that Ethereum is booming seems to confirm Buterin’s optimism. ETH’s price has been relentlessly climbing, recently reaching almost $500, and Ethereum is handling than all other major blockchains combined.
Decentralization, scalability and security are among the important properties that blockchain systems should have, but there are conflicts. Off-chain solutions are useful, but limited. According to Buterin, it’s very easy to have two of these properties but very hard to have all three. However, Ethereum’s ambitious goal should be that of achieving all three at the same time. “We want to scale to thousands of transactions per second, on chain, without any supernodes,” reads one of Buterin’s slides.
Sharding
— dividing a blockchain network into several smaller component networks (called shards) capable of processing transactions in parallel — is considered to be a promising way to achieve high throughputs comparable to the thousands of transactions per second of traditional payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard.
“You can think of [sharding] as, in a fairly simple version, creating a blockchain where you have, let’s say, a hundred different universes, and each of these universes is a different account space,” said Buterin. “So you can have an account in some universe or you can have a contract in some universe and you can send a transaction in some universe, and if you send a transaction in some universe it only affects stuff in some universe.
“But these kind of 100 universes are not just separate blockchains; they are systems that are also interconnected with each other,” continued Buterin. “Particularly, they share consensus. So in order to break even one of them, you have to break the whole thing.”
Buterin went on to describe relatively easy and more sophisticated ways to implement sharding in the Ethereum blockchain, outlining a sharding roadmap that foresees, at least initially, the creation of new “universes” that don’t impact the main chain while permitting iterative experimentation, such as introducing higher levels of scalability, starting with “quadratic scalability as nodes validate certain shards and act as light clients for other shards.”
Privacy
Buterin noted that zero-knowledge proof (zk-Snarks) privacy technology equivalent to has been implemented in , offering application developers new ways to implement tighter privacy. These new privacy tools will permit showing transactions to specific parties while hiding them from public view. Buterin went as far as saying that the privacy problem is now three quarters of the way to being solved.
Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake
A major upgrade to Ethereum will be the introduction of (PoS) in which, according to Buterin, might be ready by next summer. With the first release of Casper, Ethereum will transition from pure Proof of Work (PoW) to hybrid PoW/PoS. “In this scheme, all of the proof-of-work mechanics will continue to exist, but additional proof-of-stake mechanics will be added,” .
The main reason why PoS is seen as a necessary development is, of course, the need to reduce the energy requirements of PoW blockchains like the current versions of Ethereum and bitcoin. claims that bitcoin mining consumes as much power in a year as 159 countries, which is clearly far too much, and Buterin admitted that today’s Ethereum isn’t any better than bitcoin in that respect.
Smart Contract Security
Smart contracts implemented with Turing-complete programming languages are arguably the main innovation introduced by Ethereum. While smart contracts are finding countless applications and moving lots of money, the security and safety of Ethereum smart contracts have been questioned. Buterin confirmed that Ethereum will eventually introduce formal verification for smart contracts and that a new Python-like smart-contract programming language — dubbed “” — is being implemented to enable the development of safer Ethereum applications.
While Buterin hasn’t said anything that he has not said in previous talks and papers, his BeyondBlock talk served as a useful confirmation and summary of the ambitious Ethereum development roadmap.
Besides Buterin’s talk, all the talks given at BeyondBlock Taipei 2017 are included in the full video recordings of and .
Re: [ANN] Bitconnect Coin – Decentralized Cryptocurrency I’m fine with a coin surging and continuing to grow. I just don’t like the idea of huge backroom hashing power mining 95% of all coins. wouldn’t the […]
bitcoin is a decentralized system of digital cash in which users don’t need to trust anyone else with their money; however, the full benefits of this technology are only seen when users operate a on the network. The vast majority of bitcoin users do not operate their own full nodes, but one man is trying to change that with a piece of hardware he calls the bitcoin Block Clock Jr.
There are for individual Bitcoiners to operate a full node. Full nodes are responsible for validating transactions and blocks on the bitcoin network. Only by running full nodes can users know with full certainty that they received a valid payment. Additionally, the more users that run full nodes, the more decentralized the bitcoin network is, making it harder to shut down or corrupt.
And as Co-Founder David Vorick at this year’s MIT bitcoin Expo, those who do not operate their own full nodes do not get a say in the matter when hard forks are deployed on the network. “If you’re not running a full node … your opinion on whether or not you like a hard fork is less relevant because, ultimately, if you’re not validating the rules and someone gives you a transaction following a different rule set, you don’t have a way to detect that,” he explained.
Running a full node, however, has been a rather expensive proposition. As a result, larger, economically invested entities that are better able to support full nodes have had more of a say.
According to Vorick, users can be dragged along with miners and large businesses if the cost of running a full node is too high: “If full nodes are expensive to run, only people who are capable of running nodes really have any say in what happens in a contentious upgrade.”
is the man behind the bitcoin Block Clock. A sound engineer by trade, he has been working in his spare time on creating full nodes that are both affordable and fun to use. During a recent discussion with bitcoin Magazine, Zipkin revealed his desire to create a piece of hardware for operating a low-cost bitcoin full node that isn’t boring.
When commenting on his reasoning for creating the bitcoin Block Clock, Zipkin pointed to the made by before they were acquired by .
“I always wanted one, but they disappeared when they got bought out, so I decided to build my own,” said Zipkin.
While there are other full node options out there, such as , Zipkin wanted to make something that was more than a piece of computer hardware that would sit on the floor next to a router. Zipkin wanted to turn a bitcoin full node into a work of art, and that’s exactly what he did.
Zipkin built the last year, and it was on display at the in May of 2016. After receiving positive feedback at the event and , Zipkin decided to make a smaller version of the full node hardware to sell.
The bitcoin Block Clock included a screen that displayed various live information about the bitcoin network. Zipkin put the original version of the bitcoin Block Clock for sale on and , but it hasn’t sold.
“I priced it pretty high because it’s art and I love it and kind of want to keep it,” explained Zipkin. “So of course it still has not sold.”
In an effort to create a version of the bitcoin Block Clock that could be produced at a lower price, Zipkin turned to and , which is an implementation of the bitcoin protocol written in .
“I discovered Bcoin was super easy to install and use, and the codebase was easier for me to review because it’s in Javascript instead of C++, and was built from scratch by a small group of developers (basically just two guys), so everything is really well labeled and consistent,” explained Zipkin.
Of course, the problem with using SPV mode is that it’s not a full node and the device won’t receive all of the information related to a new bitcoin block as it’s mined on the network. Zipkin opted for the option in Bcoin in an effort to lower the system resources required to operate the node on Raspberry Pi Zero.
“With pruning, I get all the fun block details I wanted to display,” said Zipkin. “I even submitted a pull request (which got merged!) to Bcoin to make my application work even easier.”
Zipkin described the LED displays on the bitcoin Block Clock Jr. as follows:
“The bitcoin Block Clock Jr. has two LED rings. The outer ring of 24 LEDs indicates recent blocks. Each LED represents 2 minutes, and they “tick” clockwise around the ring. The color of the LED is determined by the block’s version (BIP 9 version bits combined with keywords from the Coinbase scriptSig like “/EXTBLK” or “/EB1/AD6/”). The inner 16-LED ring indicates the progress of the current difficulty period (2,016 blocks, or about two weeks). It starts blue and gradually turns more and more red as the meter fills up. The tiny little display screen indicates some details about the latest block: height, size, version (and extra scriptSig version) and the adjustment period progress. I added a little web interface so I could turn the lights off at night without having to SSH into the Pi every time.”
An Economical Way to Contribute to the Network
While Zipkin noted that the original bitcoin Block Clock displays much more information and also comes with full wallet functionality, he also pointed out that the latest model proves that bitcoin users only need about $20 to run their own full nodes (at least in pruned mode).
Having said that, Zipkin admitted that the bitcoin Block Clock Jr. can struggle to keep up with the network at times.
“Bcoin plus my Python script and all the GPIO display output just barely hangs in there on this tiny underpowered computer,” said Zipkin. “The Python script has a method to restart Bcoin when it crashes and monitor it as it catches up to the network.”
All of the technical details of the bitcoin Block Clock Jr. are open source and .
Zipkin has now placed the bitcoin Block Clock Jr. for sale on and .
![Re: [ann] bitconnect coin - decentralized cryptocurrency](https://ohiobitcoin.com/storage/2017/04/Nm7gfB.jpg "Re: [ann] bitconnect coin - decentralized cryptocurrency")
