Two years ago, in a professional financial sphere it was believed that bitcoin is doomed, but blockchain is exciting. A great number of thriving time-proven financial and banking companies launched their blockchain pilot projects and opened a lot of blockchain-related vacancies. Nevertheless, for some companies working on bitcoin software like headed by Elizabeth Stark as a CEO, this idea has never been an axiom. And nowadays, after the skyrocketing prices for bitcoin, ether, ripple, litecoin and other virtual assets that we had an opportunity to observe in December, 2017, the public’s attention once again was turned toward cryptocurrencies themselves.
Elizabeth Stark shared with her vision on these changes in perception: “When we first pitched my company Lightning Labs, we actually took the word ‘bitcoin’ out of our deck and our marketing material because it was so much about blockchain. Now, I feel like we’ve entered into a ‘bitcoin, not blockchain’ world, where people understand the value of cryptocurrency technology and what these can bring. You also have proof of work in bitcoin, you have the public/private key cryptography. There are other things that make bitcoin special. Somehow, the blockchain part got separated and became a thing.”
is an open protocol layer that is built on top of the bitcoin protocol. It ensures faster and cheaper transactions, thanks to the off-blockchain payments. We can say it in other worlds: while on a blockchain, which is a decentralized peer-to-peer ledger, all the transactions should be verified by thousands of computers, on Lightning, transactions verification is conducted off-chain between the participants of this transaction. In the case of verification procedures on Lightning, they rely on blockchain only for security reasons if something goes wrong. In the bitcoin Lightning Network white paper that was published in 2015 the project was described as “scalable off-chain instant payments.”
In March, Lightning Labs launched the beta of its Lightning software, LND, and it was the first so much-anticipated live software release for the Lightning protocol. Thanks to this step, now users are able to enjoy transferring bitcoin and litecoin to other users without settling those transactions on the blockchain. Currently, developers are hardly working on introducing apps for Lightning (called “Lapps”). Among their cutting-edge ideas is an ice cream delivery LDN service and many other projects.
Moreover, before the launch of Lightning software beta version, Lightning Labs launched their Lightning Desktop Wallet and provided their users with a possibility to get preliminary familiarized with their network. But after the network was launched Lightning Lab has joined their wallet with another wallet Zap, which has made the Lightning Network more accessible to the wide audience.
And Lightning Labs are not going to stop. Speaking about their future plans, Ms. Stark : “There’s all sorts of things that can be done when you have instant, high volume. We’re talking many thousands of transactions per second, one day maybe even millions per second… bitcoin at its base layer can’t do that. But Lightning, because it’s this layer on top of it, can. We want to go even beyond that.”
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Social networking website Twitter yet again cracks a whip on the misleading Twitter account ‘@bitcoin’, this time by completely suspending it. Advocates of bitcoin have been continuously reporting about the rogue behavior of @bitcoin while taking a pro-bitcoin stand and trying to defame the original cryptocurrency.
As a result of this, the bitcoin core supporters have been repeatedly asking for the shutdown of the account and the r/bitcoin brigade on Reddit has been repeatedly asking for the censorship of this BCH mouthpiece. After the separation of bitcoin Cash from the bitcoin network last year in August 2017 during the first hard fork on the bitcoin network, supporters of both have been often spotted in a verbal war with each other with both of them wanting to gain the lead in the scalability race.
Following the suspension, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee was quick to express his enthusiasm on Twitter:
Oh snap! 
— Charlie Lee [LTC] (@SatoshiLite)
One of the major reasons behind the suspension of @bitcoin could be spamming and impersonation. At the heart of this controversy is believed to be ‘bitcoin Jesus’ Roger Ver who is known for his pro-BCH stand in this highly divided competition. The account was suspended on April 8, Sunday. It is said that Twitter took the action after a number of complaints from Twitter users, and an army of bitcoin supporters is alleged to be behind this.
Following the suspension, Roger Ver was quick enough to Tweet about this matter on his Twitter handle calling it the detah of “free speech”.
So this is how free speech dies…with thunderous applause.
— Roger Ver (@rogerkver)
Once the most influential proponents of bitcoin, Ver was recently seen favoring BCH over BTC due to the latter’s latest scalability issues of high costs and slow transactions. As a result, Ver has been vocal of BCH gaining superiority over BTC.
Ver tweet sparked-off the discussion further with both the camps taking their sides and trying to prove the other one wrong. ‘Cypherpunk’ Jameson Lopp replied to Ver’s tweet, saying that “freedom of speech means that the government won’t throw you in a cage for saying something it doesn’t condone. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want on someone else’s property.”
On the other hand, a BCH supporter and Reddit user BeijingBitcoins wrote: “Welcome to the new Silicon Valley. All these guys who thought they were being disruptive to the old ways of doing things have instead amplified the censorship, information control, and social manipulation to levels that would have Orwell turning in his grave.”
bitcoin’s scalability issue has been a long-standing debate going on ever since the first hardfork in the bitcoin network. One of the major reasons of the fall of bitcoin since the mid-December 2017 is that due to huge investor rush and participation, the bitcoin network got completely clogged shooting up the transaction costs and slowing up the transactions speeds. As a result, many retail investors started pulling out their investments from Bitcoins and putting them in other alternatives like Ethereum and Ripple which were seen gaining momentum at the same time.
However, a good amount of progress has been done over the most proposed ‘‘ solution.
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Marc Benioff and Parket Harris, co-founders of San Francisco-based cloud computing company , revealed that the company has come to working on a blockchain product that could soon be listed in the company’s product offering.
Thoughts about the utilization of blockchain tech and possible ways of its application for Salesforce purposes came to Marc Benioff during his participation in the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. He recognized an opportunity to expand Salesforce in a meaningful manner after a conversation with a conference attendee.
In the interview (see the video above), Benioff said:
“I had been thinking a lot about what is Salesforce’s strategy around blockchain, and what is Salesforce’s strategies around cryptocurrencies and how will we relate to all of these things. He is actually a big believer in the power of serendipity, and he said just by having that conversation, it started him down the road to thinking more seriously about Salesforce’s role in this developing technology. He said the more he thought about it, the more he believed that Salesforce could make use of Blockchain. Then suddenly something clicked for him and he saw a way to put blockchain and cryptocurrencies to work in Salesforce. That’s kind of how it works and I hope by Dreamforce we will have a blockchain and cryptocurrency solution.”
He added:
“That’s kind of how it works and I hope by Dreamforce we will have a blockchain and cryptocurrency solution.”
This year Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual customer conference, is scheduled to be held in San Francisco during September 25-28.
Salesforce has always been a innovative company that is remaining up-to-date with evolving big technology. Founded back in 1999, Salesforce is the world’s number 1 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform in the cloud, which managed to replace traditional desktop CRM software. Salesforce services are accessible anytime from anywhere. As all Salesforce products run entirely in the cloud, there’s no expensive setup costs, no maintenance and employees can work from any device, which has an internet connection – smartphone, tablet or laptop.
CRM can be easily used by both small/medium businesses and large scale enterprises. Being already used by more than 150,000 companies, Salesforce generated an annual revenue of $8.40 billion in fiscal 2017.
All in all, blockchain technology is becoming more and more mainstream. with that said, one of the most blockchain-friendly states – Arizona – just advanced tech’s ranking , or the Corporations/Blockchain Technology bill, as an amendment to the Arizona Revised Statutes. The latter “signatures and records secured through blockchain technology and smart contracts.” With the amendment, data that is stored and shared by corporations via the blockchain also becomes valid.
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Robotina, a Slovenian company with almost thirty years experience in delivering energy solutions, has supplied thousands of String Monitoring Boxes (SMB) to ABB, the global leader in pioneering digital technologies, thus enabling greater control, productivity and cost efficiency in ABB’s solar power delivery.
For more than four decades, ABB has been at the forefront of digital technology innovation. The company, with over a century of heritage, operates globally and employs more than 130,000 people. Such success can only be built through partnership, and it has developed an excellent relationship with Robotina.
SMB’s assist in the monitoring of solar power systems and Robotina leads the way in developing systems that drive energy efficiency. The future of all industry is green, and companies like Robotina are leading the way, designing and supplying the technology required to solve the global energy crisis.
Now, just as ABB has benefited, so can all of us, as Robotina plans to expand its services into our homes. The team at Robotina has developed an Energy Management System (EMS) hardware device; a smart Internet of Things module that senses your energy usage, relaying this information back to Robotina.
But this is not just about data collection: Robotina can operate your energy system remotely, switching appliances on when the price is lowest, turning them off when they are not in use, and optimizing savings for you by using local weather forecasts to predict when your heating or air conditioning needs to be on. Their EMS has clear implication and applications for homes, buildings, businesses, retail, and manufacturing.
Exciting developments for 2018
Robotina’s crowdsale is as they continue to raise capital to extend their platform development on a massive scale.
The ROX token, which will be launched as part of Robotina’s Initial Coin Offering, consumers will have the chance to get in on the ground floor of this exciting development. ROX token-holders will benefit from discounts when these services go live and will have the chance to benefit from the investment opportunities afforded by the cryptocurrency revolution.
Global leaders like ABB know strong partnerships are the key to success; now all of us can benefit from having the expertise of Robotina in our homes and businesses, making the right energy-saving decisions for us.
Find out more here by reading the Robotina, and watch the.
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