1 bitcoin = $7,486
Market Cap = $127 billion
Lightning Labs Launches Beta With Twitter CEO Backing
California startup Lightning Labs has officially launched a of its software (LND), making available what investors and project leads say is the first thoroughly tested version of the tech to date.
bitcoin-centric startups Blockstream and ACINQ have released software compliant with the candidate version 1.0 of the Lightning protocol specification .
Investors are using the launch to signal their interest. Lightning Labs has raised $2.5 million from nearly a dozen investors including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Square Capital executive Jacqueline Reses, litecoin creator Charlie Lee and former PayPal COO David Sacks.
But it’s important to note that even this beta should be used with caution. Stark’s team built in a few safety measures to limit the amount of cryptocurrency people can send for now to roughly $1,400 worth per channel, or around $400 per payment.
The target demographic for the release is developers and “advanced users” who are able to run a full node and use LND’s command-line interface. –
MINING
Monero Hardforking PoW Every 6 months to Brick ASICs
We are pleased to announce the all-new Antminer X3, to mine cryptocurrencies based on the CryptoNight hashing algorithm.
This Bitmain asic will be useless and we will see how powerless the miners ultimately are, equal participants of decentralized consensus/market forces serving users.
ASIC’s improve security, as it increases the long term investment of miners, making an attack less likely. So I’m not sure what the Monero community is thinking.
The Monero code was forked from the CryptoNote reference implementation. In the CryptoNote whitepaper (), one of the identified deficiencies of bitcoin is the Proof of Work due to its centralizing nature.
In order to create a more egalitarian mining network and foster decentralization, the original CryptoNote developers created the Cryptonight Proof of Work function to “close the gap between CPU (majority) and GPU/FPGA/ASIC (minority) miners.”
We concede that ASICs may be inevitable, but we feel that any transition to an ASIC-dominated network needs to be as egalitarian as possible in order to foster decentralization. At this point in time, we suspect that any newly developed Cryptonight ASIC will not be egalitarian and will not foster a decentralized network.
In sum, we strongly believe that it’s beneficial to preserve our ASIC resistance. Therefore, we will perform an emergency hard fork to curb any potential threat from ASICs if needed.
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CRYPTO ASSETS
Market Cap = $280 billion
Decentraland
I think Decentraland is likely to be one of the primary places people use collectible NFTs [non-fungible tokens]. –
I’m betting that is the killer app for VR. Virtual land ownership, in world currency ($MANA) and ownership/trading of digital goods will deliver the missing ingredient to VR -> greed & speculation. The ability to make money will draw the masses. –
Multiple Blockchains/Currencies
Ted Rogers: There may be as much need for multiple blockchains/multiple currencies as there is for multiple internets, i.e., none at all.
Tor, I2P, freenet, zeronet…
G20 Summit: Money Laundering Act for Exchanges
It means more mass-surveillance of personal financial transactions, and more criminalization of privacy.
This is all based on the idea that it’s justifiable to criminalize victimless behaviour as a preemptive measure against crime. It’s a recipe for tyranny and a repressive society. –
COMPANIES / PROJECTS / PRODUCTS
OB1 Raises $5 million to Grow World’s Largest Decentralized Marketplace
Since the launch of the updated 2.0 platform near the end of 2017, over 40,000 nodes globally have joined the network. OpenBazaar is the only e-commerce marketplace that offers secure, commission-free trade for both buyers and sellers.
The round is led by , the venture capital arm of the OMERS pension fund. is also contributing to this round
OB1’s plans for this year include releasing web and mobile versions of the application as well as giving users new ways to trade with each other, such as making requests and buying and selling cryptocurrencies.
OB1 is also expanding the services it offers to users on OpenBazaar, such as the Verified Moderators program, released this week. –
SpaceX Reusable Rockets
Customers have accepted “flight-proven” first stages much faster than I expected. About half of our launches this year will be on reused first stages. –
The First SpaceX BFR Could Make Orbital Launches by 2020
People have told me that my timelines historically have been optimistic. I am trying to recalibrate.
What I do know is we are building the first ship. We will be able to do do short flights in the first half of next year.
It’s a big booster and ship. Saturn V thrust x2.
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SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell revealed that the company intends to conduct the first orbital launches of BFR as early as 2020, with suborbital spaceship tests beginning in the first half of 2019.
Composed of a single massive booster and an equally massive second stage/spaceship (BFS), the rocket is meant to enable the affordable expansion of permanent human outposts on Mars and throughout the inner solar system by making good on the decades-old promise of fully reusable launch vehicles. –
PLACES
A Perfect Crypto Storm is Brewing in the Philippines
Coins.ph have quickly established themselves as a reliable mobile money and bitcoin wallet in the Philippines, gaining around two million customers in the last four years, even as they went head to head with giant national telecom companies for market share.
Other notable local blockchain startups have also gained traction in the last two years, most of them tackling the $27 billion Philippines remittance industry. The industry is not just growing, it’s thriving.
Some other notable developments are rumors of a crypto-haven opening in a special economic zone, talks of big mining operations setting up here, more merchants and retail stores willing to accept cryptocurrencies, and a rapid acceleration of awareness and recognition of the industry by local mainstream media. –
UNBOUNDED PROGRESS
Technology
90% of adults on earth have a mobile phone now, and two thirds and growing have a smartphone. We sometimes forget how completely insane it would have sounded 30 years ago to suggest that would happen.
Even people working in the mobile business mostly thought this would be a premium product for people in rich countries. Very few people ever thought this was for farmers in remote rural parts of Africa. –
Elon Musk on Self-Driving Cars
I think probably by the end of next year, self driving will encompass essentially all modes driving and be at least 100-200% safer than a person. We’re talking 18 months from now.
NHTSA did a study on Tesla’s autopilot version 1 which is relatively primitive and found that it was a 45 percent reduction in highway accidents. And that’s despite autopilot 1 being just version 1.
Version 2 I think will be at least two or three times better. That’s the current version that’s running right now. So the improvement is really dramatic. –
VR Still a Novelty But Better Technology on the Way
Compelling virtual reality shipped to developers and consumers nearly two years ago. The first flagship headsets arrived from Oculus and HTC back in the spring of 2016, offering enough resolution, frame rate, field of view, latency mitigation and position-tracking to produce believable visual immersion.
But no one seems to know what to do with it. To date, no killer app has extended the promise of VR from a novelty to a sticky experience or utility that reaches beyond enthusiasts to resonate with the consumer center of mass.
This isn’t to say that great experiences don’t exist. Apps like Tilt Brush, Elite: Dangerous and Google Earth VR have earned rave reviews and plaudits from enthusiasts. But we have yet to see a household phenomenon like Halo or Lotus 1-2-3 — applications that single-handedly propelled their respective platforms to wide use.
Quality, accessibility and ecosystem maturity are probably the biggest practical barriers gating the VR killer app. The current generation of flagship headsets are cumbersome and expensive to set up and run. Though deep price cuts across flagship wearables powered VR headsets in Q3 2017, and both Oculus and HTC moved hundreds of thousands of high-end, PC-based units, individual install bases remain low enough to deter AAA studios.
But better technology is on the way: HTC recently announced the Vive Pro, sporting improved resolution, spatial audio and a wireless adapter to do away with clunky wires.
Google, Samsung, Lenovo and Oculus are working on standalone headsets that run without a PC or smartphone under the hood. Dozens of startups are developing peripherals and software to improve the VR experience, from haptics that mimic touch to pupil tracking that enables realistic eye contact. –
China, Unhampered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene-Editing Trials
A U.S. Crispr trial spends nearly 2 years seeking clearance; a Chinese doctor gets OK in an afternoon
In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool.
U.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven’t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn’t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.
In a quirk of the globalized technology arena, Dr. Wu can forge ahead with the tool because he faces few regulatory hurdles to testing it on humans. His hospital’s review board took just an afternoon to sign off on his trial. He didn’t need national regulators’ approval and has few reporting requirements.
Dr. Wu’s team at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital has been drawing blood from esophageal-cancer patients, shipping it by high-speed rail to a lab that modifies disease-fighting cells using Crispr-Cas9 by deleting a gene that interferes with the immune system’s ability to fight cancer. His team then infuses the cells back into the patients, hoping the reprogrammed DNA will destroy the disease.
A cancer patient at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital goes through a procedure that includes infusing his own cells after genetic editing using Crispr.
In contrast, what’s expected to be the first human Crispr trial outside China has yet to begin. The University of Pennsylvania has spent nearly two years addressing federal and other requirements, including numerous safety checks designed to minimize risks to patients. While Penn hasn’t received final federal clearance to proceed, “we hope to get clearance soon,” a Penn spokeswoman said.
Dr. June, lead scientist for the Crispr research team at Penn, says the Penn study will test whether Crispr is safe and “isn’t designed to see if we can cure patients.”
Dr. Wu says he sees saving patients’ lives as paramount. He began by testing Crispr on three patients and has modified genes of more than a dozen. He says he is planning other trials with lung-cancer and pancreatic-cancer patients.
At the time of the NIH hearing, Dr. June’s lab had run a variety of tests to see if Crispr made unintended cuts in cells. He says the FDA wanted still more. Dr. Wu says he didn’t have the time to do such tests because his terminally-ill patients needed treatment urgently.
Dr. Wu agrees risks could surface, calling Crispr “a two-edged sword.” Some “see the potential damage,” he says. “We see the potential benefits.” He says speed is critical because his patients face imminent death. “If we don’t try, we will never know.”
None of the Chinese trials has published results. While Dr. Wu and other doctors say some patients’ conditions improved, at least 15 of the known 86 patients have died of what doctors in the trials say were their diseases.
More U.S. Crispr trials are expected to open in the next 18 months, led by publicly traded companies started by scientists associated with the tool. –
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