“Nutty.”

No, developer James Hilliard isn’t describing his lunch.

Rather, that’s his choice of description for Segwit2x, the controversial technical roadmap announced by bitcoin’s startups and miners in May, and that has been the center of widespread debate ever since.

Like many developers, Hilliard is openly critical of the proposal and the timelines it is seeking to impose on development. Still, his skepticism is particularly notable as he’s played perhaps the biggest role in helping boost perceptions the plan is moving forward.

If you went so far as to argue he’s the reason the Segwit2x timeline is being met (and that bitcoin hasn’t split into two competing assets), you wouldn’t find many detractors.

That’s because Hilliard has been the driving force behind a code proposal called BIP 91. Aimed at coordinating miners to push through the long-awaited code optimization Segregated Witness (SegWit), it’s been called the first of the two pieces to the Segwit2x roadmap, though that may obscure that it was actually an outsider’s idea.

After BIP 91's approval by miners last week, and barring any bumps, SegWit could activate by the end of August. Not to be undersold, it’s a major milestone for the network, one that moves a long-heralded technical development out of political gridlock and one step closer to activation.

And to many, Hilliard deserves the credit.

Bitcoin still faces many challenges in becoming a globally accepted currency, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s commodity and derivatives strategist Francisco Blanch said in a sweeping Monday report comparing digital currencies’ growth to that of gold, silver and even salt in ancient times.

“A crucial hurdle” for bitcoin is whether major financial institutions will accept the digital currency as collateral, said Blanch, who is considered by many to be one of the best commodity analysts on Wall Street. “But we are not aware of any major institution that takes cryptocurrency as collateral at the moment.”

Bitcoin Cash’s sudden announcement on Saturday that they’ll go ahead with a fork on August 1 caught a lot of people, including myself, by surprise. In this article, I’m going to explain what Bitcoin Cash (aka BCC) is, how it affects you and how you should prepare for August 1.

On Monday, Kushner revealed that he had been contacted a week before the election by someone named “Guccifer400,” an apparent homage to Guccifer 2.0, the malicious hacker or hacking group that US intelligence chiefs have fingered as an attribution front for the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence directorate—though, not wholly convincingly.

“On October 30, 2016, I received a random email from the screenname Guccifer400,” Kushner said. “This email, which I interpreted as a hoax, was an extortion attempt and threatened to reveal candidate Trump’s tax returns and demanded that we send him 52 bitcoin in exchange for not publishing that information.”

Veritaseum has confirmed today that a hacker stole $8.4 million from the platform’s ICO on Sunday, July 23. This is the second ICO hack in the last week and the fourth hack of an Ethereum platform this month.

An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is similar to a classic IPO (Initial Public Offering), but instead of stocks in a company, buyers get tokens in an online platform. Users can keep tokens until the issuing company decides to buy them back, or they can sell the tokens to other users for Ethereum.

Veritaseum was holding its ICO over the weekend, allowing users to buy VERI tokens for a product the company was preparing to launch in the realm of financial services.

So what is the big deal? Now, Tumbler transactions look like classic 2–2 multi sig. The second big deal, is that since all those transactions will use segwit, the fees will be lower. Back of the calculation gives me 40% saving.
Last and not the least. On the pre-segwit TumbleBit model, Alice could not sign ahead of time Client Redeem and Client Offer Redeem. Which mean that she had to be online herself, to monitor that the Tumbler behave the right way to sign and broadcast the redeems just on time.
With malleability fixed, Client Redeem and Client Offer Redeem can be signed ahead of time and potentially given to a third party service who will broadcast them for you in case the Tumbler becomes unresponsive.
Welcome Segwit, this had been a bumpy road, but this will make Bitcoin Great Again! :)

I have been working on TumbleBit for quite a long time now. While CoinJoin is an old, well-understood, production tested technique with multiple implementations (JoinMarket, ShufflePuff, DarkWallet, SharedCoin,) modifications and/or improvements (CoinShuffle, CoinShuffle++), none of that can be said about TumbleBit. It’s a new technique, with a single protocol implementation (NTumbleBit), and its precursor proof of concept implementation (BUSEC/TumbleBit). In fact, so far my work concentrated around grasping the basic concepts and explaining them to wider audience (Understanding TumbleBit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), building TumbleBit enabling technologies (HBitcoin, DotNetTor, HiddenWallet, BreezeWallet) and procrastinating on smaller issues. I was not quite sure about the practical limitations of the concept. Now that I am in the middle of integrating TumbleBit into HiddenWallet, this has just changed and I am now able to properly write this long due article about Bitcoins’ two biggest and/or most hyped hopes of achieving privacy on-chain: TumbleBit and CoinJoin.

Update: Block 477115 is actually more interesting than 474294. It contains the transaction 7a122ef22468e4af16b010d7acf7aa81e5af3636423c613fd98246c179d79800 which is missing its parent 9639dd073e67efc879abb1075fafa4fa23d5fa427c129b2b1dd4f5a5520b408d. But the interesting part is that the parent transaction is actually lower down in the block. So the problem here is that the transactions are in the wrong order, which means that they are probably permuting the order of their transactions.

One thing to notice is that 477115 contains 256 transactions and 474294 contains 255 transactions, both of which are good numbers of transactions to have for asicboost. Furthermore, this problem could be caused by permuting transactions as would need to be done for asicboost.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about risk, wallet compatibility, and upgrade pacing, even among many core devs. Let’s focus on some basic aspects of software engineering and risk analysis.

I’m so tired of responding to the same untruthful points over and over again.

eff Garzik has been accused of a lot of things of late.

Since taking the lead on turning the Segwit2x scaling agreement into code, the CEO of blockchain startup Bloq has been accused of everything from closing off bitcoin’s open-source development to encouraging unnecessarily aggressive network changes to playing loose with facts to sway public sentiment on the plan.

But if the long-time developer, one of the first employed by a startup to work directly with bitcoin’s underlying software, has emerged as a lightning rod, Garzik seems enthusiastic about the role.

Fond of taking on critics head on in lengthy Twitter exchanges, Garzik may be unique among bitcoin developers in displaying a largely take-charge entrepreneurial mindset, one that finds him at odds with the project’s more security-conscious developer group, Bitcoin Core.

But if Garzik is under scrutiny now, he’s likely to be there for some time.

While there are a few steps left before bitcoin’s long-awaited capacity upgrade is a done deal (it’s looking increasingly likely that bitcoin miners will push a scaling upgrade by the end of August), the code changes he’s shepherding aren’t due to conclude until the fall.

That’s when they’ll perhaps hit a fever pitch that dwarfs the current debate, and in a new interview, Garzik doubled down on his intent to introduce the code for a hard fork that would further boost the network’s capabilities while putting it again on a path to a split.

Against this backdrop, Garzik sat down with CoinDesk to discuss his thoughts on the future of Segwit2x, addressing the key questions and controversies that have been bubbling behind the scenes of late.

Below, that interview is reproduced, though some of Garzik’s comments have been shortened for clarity.

As travelers to Cuba can attest, an unfortunate reality of cryptocurrency services today is often the poor customer support. After taking a vacation to the Caribbean island, Elliott Smith, a visual effects programmer from the UK, was sitting at the airport and, as is common after vacation, began catching up on his digital life. With a keen interest in bitcoin, Smith decided to open the Coinbase app and check the price of his holdings. After a quick look, he closed the app. He didn’t buy. He didn’t sell. He didn’t trade. And yet, when he got back home, he saw a disheartening message when he tried to login again.

Bitcoin’s popularity in India is steadily growing, particularly in the country’s third most populous city, Bangalore. Leading Indian bitcoin exchange Unocoin is based in the city, and has been helping merchants accept bitcoin there. Bitcoin.com talked to CEO Sathvik Vishwanath about the bitcoin economy in Bangalore and throughout India.

Every platform undergoes a tipping point on the journey to mass adoption, and the results are not always nice. In the early 1990s, Usenet was obscure and inaccessible enough that the only participants were tech-savvy mature adults. Every September, college freshmen would get brand new internet access, jump onto Usenet, and generally act like twits for a month until they were properly acculturated.

In 1993, AOL messed it all up. After Congress passed Al Gore’s bill for commercial internet use, Usenet access was granted to AOL’s entire customer base. What used to be a brief annual nuisance turned into an onslaught of AOL n00bs, who overwhelmed Usenet’s cultural institutions and turned the newsgroup into a noisome wasteland. Veteran users fled to gated communities, and September 1993 went down in history as the September that never ended.

4chan, Reddit, and Digg were all once well-kept gardens of polite discourse until Eternal September set in. Facebook set the scene for its own demise when Zuck extended signups to our parents. bleahhh.

Ethereum, on the other hand, was born into an Eternal September.

The Japan Cryptocurrency Business Association has issued an announcement regarding Bitcoin Cash (BCC), which it expects to result from a planned hard fork on August 1. Some of its 13 bitcoin exchange members have already issued preliminary notices detailing how they will deal with the upcoming cryptocurrency.

On 22 July 2017, the Chinese digital currency exchange ViaBTC added support for the trading of a possible new fork of Bitcoin that is being called “Bitcoin Cash” or “BCC”. This fork is based on the idea of UAHF, which is a contingency plan first proposed by Bitmain in April to protect the Bitcoin ecosystem from the threats proposed by the BIP148 fork (aka UASF). Because it is a contingency plan, the UAHF will be implemented by us only if the UASF fork happens and poses an imminent risk to the Bitcoin ecosystem. This has been further described in our blog post.

A regulatory exemption for digital currency traders in New Hampshire is set to take effect next week.

As reported last month by CoinDesk, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu signed HB 436 on June 2, which excludes “persons conducting business using transactions conducted in whole or in part in virtual currency” from the state’s money services rules. The measure was first introduced in January.

According to the text of the bill, which was finalized in late April, the new rules take place on August 1, or next Tuesday.

The meltdown in Venezuela’s currency is deepening as a crippling dollar shortage and a threat of oil sanctions take their toll on the economy. The black-market rate for the bolivar traded weaker than 8,700 per dollar for the first time, according to dolartoday.com on Friday, compared with the official rate of around 10 and a more widely used alternative rate of 2,757. That’s creating an illusion for foreigners observing the country’s stock market, which appears to be valued at $2.57 trillion – bigger than Germany’s, France’s, India’s or Canada’s – but is worth only $3 billion based on the black-market rate.

Jacek Czarnecki is general counsel at Neufund, and a lawyer specializing in blockchain technology. 

In this opinion piece, Czarnecki shines a light on how ICOs might be regulated in the European Union, proposing next steps and potential challenges ahead.

Crypto investors flock to a market where tech giants Amazon, Google and Facebook are absent  
4 Hours Ago | 00:47
Money is pouring into cryptocurrencies at a furious clip. You can call it a bubble, or the Wild West. Some say it’s reminiscent of dot-com stocks in 1999, or “tulip mania” from nearly 400 years ago.

There’s plenty of speculation, to be sure, and more risks than we can count.

But for entrepreneurs and tech investors, crypto and the underlying blockchain technology has a particularly attractive quality that’s unique in today’s tech landscape — it’s about the only high-growth area not occupied by the industry giants.

A private business in Kosovo is gearing up to install its first bitcoin ATM amid warnings from the country’s central bank.

According to regional news source Balkan Insight, the ATM is expected to be placed in the center of Pristina, the country’s capital city. Operated by IT systems firm Albvision Ltd, the machine will support transactions in bitcoin, and soon, 10 other cryptocurrencies.

The firm also has bitcoin ATMs planned for cities in two other Balkan countries: Tirana in Albania, and Skopje in the Republic of Macedonia.

Still, the decision to launch the unit has attracted attention from the country’s financial regulators, who stressed that cryptocurrencies are lacking consumer protections due to a lack of local regulation.

Launched jointly by Europol, the Dutch National Police, McAfee (then Intel Security), and Kaspersky Lab on July 25 2016, No More Ransom provided keys to unlocking encrypted files, as well as information on how to avoid succumbing to ransomware in the first place.

The portal initially provided decryption tools for four ransomware families: Shade, Rannoh, Rakhn, and CoinVault. It was collaborative work on decrypting CoinVault that led to the creation of a precursor to No More Ransom.

Last week, one of the final demons of the dotcom crash at the start of the 21st century was finally exorcised. The S&P 500 technology index, a gauge of the leading US internet stocks, passed the record that had stood since March 2000. Seventeen years after the bubble burst, technology investors feel much of the promise of the internet that led to such outlandish valuations has finally been realised, albeit much later than they had thought. But at the same time, many fear that a new bubble is forming, involving another technology that has huge potential but may also be dramatically overhyped: the blockchain.

The explosive growth of cryptocurrencies suggest there is more to the phenomenon than speculative froth. But what?

It looks like Electrum is safe to use. It has passed my audit, although I am no crypto expert but from what I have researched and learned it looks safe to me.

I am still skeptical about that custom_entropy thing, I should ask the dev what that does exactly, but other than that, default wallet generation is flawless. There are no backdoors in my opinion.

After all many thousands of people use Electrum, especially people holding large amounts there so it better damn be safe to use, and in my opinion it is.

I have analyzed it’s main seed generation code in this article. Of course the code is a lot more than this, but we already know that if you generate a seed on an Offline Computer with it, it should be safe. Now I haven’t looked into the network related parts of it, but I trust them to be safe.

For the first time ever, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has given permission to a private company to exchange and clear any number of cryptocurrency derivatives.

After three years of work, New York-based startup LedgerX was today granted a rare derivatives clearing organization (DCO) license allowing it to clear and custody financial instruments backed by bitcoin, ether and any number of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.

On July 2, Hyderabad police arrested three men for LSD and MDMA importation and distribution. The men ordered the drugs from a darknet supplier in Chicago and then distributed them amongst dozens of dealers. The dealers, in turn, spread the drugs throughout Hyderabad and Secunderabad where college students and members of the film industry.

We launched our first daily bitcoin auction on September 21, 2016. Encouraged by its success and ability to match buyers and sellers at a single moment of the day, we launched an East Asian Timezone daily auction on March 21, 2017. We would now like to offer the same kind of price discovery we have facilitated for bitcoin traders over the past year for ether traders. As a result, we will be launching a daily 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time ether auction starting on Friday, July 28, 2017! The mechanics will be the same as our bitcoin auctions; please see https://gemini.com/marketplace/#auction for details.