The developers behind Segwit2x, a controversial plan to increase the transaction capacity of the bitcoin blockchain, plan to announce a firm date for a hard fork today.

A copy of a forthcoming blog post obtained by CoinDesk indicates that the Segwit2x team plans to enable bitcoin’s miners to elect to run new software at block 494,784 on the blockchain, a block they expect will occur sometime in November of this year.

Falling victim to the global Petya cyberattack is set to cost Maersk, the world’s largest container ship and supply vessel operator, up to $300m in lost revenues.

The Danish transport and logistics conglomerate – which has offices in 130 countries and almost 90,000 employees – revealed predicted losses due to the ransomware infection in its second quarter financial report.

Graphics card (GPU) maker AMD is rolling out a new software driver geared specifically toward cryptocurrency mining.

While fungibility is an essential property of good money, Bitcoin has its limitations in this area. Numerous fungibility improvements have been proposed; however none of them have addressed the privacy issues in full. ZeroLink is first to offer protections against all the different ways a user’s privacy can be breached. The scope of ZeroLink is not limited to a single transaction, it extends to transaction chains and it addresses various network layer deanonymizations, however its scope is limited to Bitcoin’s first layer. Even if an off-chain anonymity solution gets widely adopted, ultimately the entrance and exit transactions will always be settled on-chain. Therefore there will always be need for on-chain privacy.

Ideal fungibility requires every Bitcoin transaction to be indistinguishable from each other, but it is an unrealistic goal. ZeroLink’s objective is to break all links between separate sets of coins. ZeroLink presents a wallet privacy framework coupled with Chaumian CoinJoin, which was first introduced in 2013 by Gregory Maxwell. A mixing round runs within seconds, its anonymity set can go beyond a single CoinJoin transaction’s if needed, and its DoS resilience presumes a transaction fee environment above $1 Bitcoin.

Hopefully, ZeroLink will enable the usage of Bitcoin in a fully anonymous way for the first time.

Today, New York-based Blockstack is launching a $25 million venture capital fund aimed at jumpstarting a new, decentralized version of the internet. But more notable than the money, is who’s allocating it. Unlike the many ICOs that are raising funds through retail investors, the Blockstack Signature Fund will only distribute money from active venture capitalists.

As such, Blockstack co-founder Muneeb Ali positioned the fund as a way to bring together decentralized app builders and the venture capital community.

Starting from version 3.11 of ProtonMail, it is now possible to pay for premium ProtonMail secure email account using Bitcoin. We have designed the payment system to work seamlessly so that Bitcoin payments are automatically converted to ProtonMail credits which can be used to pay for upgrades, pay invoices, or top up your account. This feature was long overdue, so we are glad to finally introduce this.

Switzerland’s Falcon Private Bank will begin supporting ether (ETH), litecoin (LTC) and bitcoin cash (BCH) on August 22, 2017, expanding its blockchain asset management services to more digital currencies.

Seattle, Washington United States  – Leading Swiss digital asset exchange, ShapeShift AG, has acquired Seattle-based KeepKey, a secure hardware wallet for digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Seemingly unrelated to the recent United States demanding of Greek police to arrest the alleged owner of BTC-e, the Belgian judicial police raided nine locations for the same reason. Not that the U.S. asked them to conduct the raids and subsequent arrests; according to the latest published news, the Belgian judicial police suspected several men of money laundering through LocalBitcoins.

Tierion recently raised $25 million USD in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for their Tierion Network, advertised as a “universal platform for data verification”; a less bombastic description could be to say that the Tierion Network supports a timestamping service, Chainpoint.

Unfortunately Tierion’s marketing efforts to investors contained a number of materially misleading and inaccurate claims about the Tierion Network and Chainpoint technology. In this article we’ll focus on their claims that the Tierion Network can generate proofs with very little latency, and their claims of high accuracy timestamps.