Bitcoin Cash (BCH) on the edge of an abyss while Bitcoin Core releases a new update

• Bitmain
  fires the entire Copernicus team focused on BCH

A Tweet done
from a Chief Strategy Officer at Blockstream and former Chief Operating Officer of the BTCC
The agent Samson Mow suggests that the Chinese mining giant Bitcoin has followed
on the recent downsizing reports and fired the entire team of Copernicus, which
he was working on the development of the Bitcoin Cash client.

Apparently, the dismissal was done in a sincere, calm, with
former employees have now received only a week's notice to pack up and leave.
This report comes on the back of two previous Bitmain downsizing news
stories; one suggested that the company has closed an important research center in
Israel while the other saw Dovey Wan – an influential crypto and known Bitcoin maximalist
– To transmit information on the LinkedIn LinkedIn posts confirming further redundancies.

Sources suggest that Bitmain did not handle the recent cryptography
market decline very well, mainly because they continued to expand their operations
at a time when the interest in the mining crypts was stagnating. Other projects like ConsenSys,
Steemit and RChain have recently revealed they are suffering from similar problems,
and all have accused their falling prices of cryptocurrency
difficult situations.

• Bitcoin extraction
  more ecological than the game and many other industries, reveals a study

Recently we have heard many Bitcoin deniers criticizing the
cryptocurrency for its alleged waste of energy. From the guardian to the New York Times,
many news belonging to the "old factory" have failed to understand why
exactly Bitcoin uses as much energy as it does, because that use of energy is good
and why it's not even that expensive compared to others on a large scale
industries. The problem was recently dealt with by Coinshares, a digital popular
asset management and research platform, which has underlined some of the main ones
misconceptions about Bitcoin extraction.

In a study presented in a white paper entitled "The Bitcoin Mining
Network: trends, composition, cost of marginal creation, consumption of electricity
& Fonti ", investigated members of Coinshares Research and Three Body Capital
geographical distribution, composition, efficiency, consumption of electricity and
sources of electricity, trends in the hash rate, hardware costs, hardware efficiency
and marginal costs of creating the Bitcoin mining network.

The study goes on to explain that while Bitcoin was being extracted
certainly it is not a low energy ordeal, but in the end it is much more ecological than
almost every other major industry on the planet. He also discovered that most
of the mining sector (77%) is carried out in areas with large amounts of unused renewable resources
energy, which means that the practice is not as big as a waste of news
it must be.

Among other things, the study compares and counterpoints Bitcoin
mine against the game:

"While we find the notion of attacking a creation of value
industry based on its consumption of electricity freely purchased by the will
sellers in the open market are pretty absurd, if one were to leave anyway
such a spurious argument humbly suggests that efforts could be better
directed towards other electricity applications. For example, there
are around 85m PlayStation4, 40m Xbox One and 15m Nintendo Wii U console.
distributed among global families. Their average weighing weighed on the gameplay
it is about 120W. Assuming they are played on a modern 40-inch LED TV
only 40 W, for 4 hours a day, and at least 20 hours a day, at a weighted average
of 10 W, these gaming systems attract more power (4.9 GW) than the whole
Bitcoin mining network (4.7 GW). "

you can control
this interesting study in full here.

• Bitcoin
  Core 0.17.1 released

Bitcoin has welcomed its fans, owners and miners with some
Positive Christmas news as its Core software saw the 0.17.1 update released.

The software update has been taken around for a while and the
the release comes after conducting extensive tests on multiple operations
systems that use the Linux kernel, macOS 10.10+ and Windows 7 and later. Altogether,
0.17.1 is a minor update, which mainly leads to hot fixes, bug fixes and slight performance
improvements to 0.17.0.

In particular, changes have been made to the p2p e protocol
network nodes, portfolios, RPCs and other APIs, GUI, compilation system, test and quality control
and of course documentation. Nodes running the previous version of
the software must shut down completely before installing the update. you
can check the full version (as well as in-depth instructions on how to install
here.

• XRP is more decentralized than Bitcoin e
  Ethereum, says Brad Garlinghouse

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of the San Francisco startup
Ripple has focused many of his efforts in the past to defend cryptocurrency
his company did, XRP. Many critics have pointed out in the past that the XRP is heavy
centralized cryptocurrency, mainly due to the way its validator network is
structured and due to the fact that Ripple still has a large amount of XRP
supply.

Recently Garlinghouse held an "AMA end of the year"
who addressed the criticism and explained that XRP is indeed
decentralized. Explaining that the position of Ripple on XRP is decentralized
was known years ago, he added that people will spread "FUD" rather than
taking time to research the project and the cryptocurrency.

Ripple's main man went on to explain that Ripple at the moment
manages only seven chain validators, equal to about 4% of all public validations
of the XRP blockchain. Although this may be true, there are reports that affirm it
Ripple delegated the validation rights to these "independent" validators
themselves, which attenuates his topic of decentralization. However,
in his well known XRP-maximal tone, Garlinghouse jumped at the two
remaining members of the top 3 crypt:

"Of almost everyone
measures now, the Led XRP register is more decentralized than the Bitcoin o register
Ethereum ledger, where you have a very small number of miners who control you
know well over 50% of mining power ".