Following the trend of Facebook and Google, Twitter has also decided to ban all cryptocurrency-related advertisements. This ban includes but is not limited to cryptocurrency exchanges, ICOs (Initial coin offerings). Token sales, and wallet services, with the only exceptions being public businesses which are listen on major stock exchanges. Following this announcement, the price of bitcoin fell around six percent, after already being far in the red for the week.
The Bank of England has released a document stating that the bank has partnered with several firms to undertake a Proof of Concept for interfacing with Distributed Ledger (blockchain) Technology, or DLT. The full document can be found here. () These firms include Baton Systems, Clearmatics Technologies Ltd, R3 and Token. These firms will be delving into understanding how new payment systems such as DLT can be used for the bank’s settlement systems. Although the bank concluded that DLT is not yet mature enough to form the basis of its Realtime Gross Settlement Systems, the bank’s willingness to perform a Proof of Concept is still of importance to the cryptocurrency community, as this could mean that the banking industry in general could be more amenable to crypto, as in the past banks and crypto technology have been seen as competitors or enemies, with many large banks even refusing to do business with cryptocurrency exchanges, and proponents of crypto using cryptocurrencies as a form of banking rather than a more traditional form of storing wealth.
Monero has updated their PoW (Proof of Work) algorithm in response to the announcement by Bitmain (perhaps better known for their brand of miners, Antminer) of the release of an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit, or a computer designed with the sole purpose of efficiently mining cryptocurrencies) designed to mine Monero and other coins using the CryptoNight hashing algorithm.
According to this GitHub post, () this change is intended “to prevent DoS attacks by ASICs,” but the update also increases the security of the coin by preventing the unlikely yet hypothetically possible threats of centralization or a 51% attack, since ASIC miners are many times more powerful than using the more traditional CPU (Central Processing Unit) or GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) mining techniques. These changes Monero’s hashing algorithm also follow up on promises made in this February blog post () “to maintain ASIC resistance by swiftly reacting to any potential threat from ASICs.”
Are likes the currency of the future? APPICS is a new ICO that intends to reward users with its tokens for their time spent on the platform, transforming likes into crypto. Built on the Steem blockchain, APPICS is one of the first to take advantage of the revolutionary method of monetizing digital content. Rather than generating tokens through traditional mining, tokens would be generated solely by contributing to the social network.
The APPICS whitepaper can be found here. () It details their plans for the future and their intentions for the social media platform. The whitepaper includes a number of interesting details on the platform, including its plan to distribute the rewards of its use. According to the whitepaper, “65% goes to the content creator, 25% to the voters/curators (users) and the remaining 10% will go towards sustaining the network.” This means that by simply using the APPICS social media, users will be rewarded with the currency. Every post would be able to earn rewards until seven days after post creation.
Each individual user would have the ability to receive rewards either in the form of the token (XAP) or “APPICS power” which would allow them to influence posts more through their likes. This process is called “powering up.” Users would also be able to trade their APPICS power for weekly XAP payments through a process called “powering down.” To prevent users from accumulating tokens through mass voting, voting power would be limited. Users would be able to select the amount of their total voting power to use with each like. “Full power” would use 2% of the user’s voting power, depleting from their total voting power. The whitepaper likens this to a swimming pool being constantly refilled by rain, comparing the voting power to water being drained from the pool. At the time of writing, Round A of the ICO has raised over 1.1 million USD and over 8 million of 16,635,184 tokens have been sold.
