Blockchain Bites: Data Unions. Hard forks. And the case of a Citi analyst for $ 300,000 BTC.

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A Citibank CEO thinks bitcoin could reach $ 318,000. MIT researchers blatantly reject blockchain-based voting. And the latest fork of Bitcoin Cash looks set to fail.

Upper shelf

Technical comparison?
A Citibank executive released a report predicting that bitcoin could reach $ 318,000 by December 2021. Using technical analysis and a comparison with gold markets in the 1970s, Citibank CEO Thomas Fitzpatrick stated that quantitative easing could lead to a breakout price movement for the largest cryptocurrency market cap. ClassicMacro, a pseudonymous Twitter account that surfaced in the report, countered the prediction by saying, “There is no advantage in guessing targets so far in time with the AT. All we know is that the price is likely to continue to rise. to go up. “

Six criticisms
Research director Fidelity Ria Bhutoria refuted six common criticisms of bitcoin in a recent viral blog post. Published Thursday, the corporate blog examined alleged errors that bitcoin’s volatility means it cannot be a store of value, that bitcoin collects energy, and that bitcoin fails as a payment mechanism for everyone but criminals. It highlighted the cryptocurrency settlement guarantee, supply inelasticity and decentralization. Bitcoin is growing because people recognize that it offers “perfect scarcity … irreversibility of transactions and resistance to seizure and censorship”.

Expanding galaxy
Commercial cryptocurrency bank Galaxy Digital has acquired two companies as it positions itself as the “go to” crypto platform for institutional buyers. Announced Friday, DrawBridge Lending, a “white glove” cryptographic service, and Blue Fire Capital, a futures market maker, are now under the Galaxy umbrella. Specifically, DrawBridge brings over $ 150 million in third-party assets to the company. The news came hours after Galaxy announced net profit of $ 44.3 million for the third quarter of 2020, well above a loss of $ 68.2 million in the same quarter last year.

Downvoted
A new MIT report categorically rejects blockchain-based e-voting as a tool for any political election. Following on from an earlier report describing the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of blockchain voting, the latest study suggests that many cryptographic proposals – such as zero-knowledge proof and authorized blockchains – add complexity and are not enough to meet the needs of a voting audience. Putting aside these digital “higher tolerances for failure” solutions, blockchains cannot stop voter coercion, while also introducing the persistent problem of key management. “I haven’t yet seen a blockchain system that I would trust with a county fair jellybean count, much less a presidential election,” wrote one of the authors.

Flash attack
Value DeFi joined exploited decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols this weekend, with a mischievous trader (or trader) getting away with around $ 6 million worth of cryptocurrencies. In what appears to be a flash loan attack, the attacker borrowed 80,000 ether from the DeFi Aave lending platform and used it to arbitrate two stablecoins in Value’s MultiStables vault. (Flash loans allow users to borrow unsecured funds because the lender expects the funds to be returned immediately.) The attacker has since returned $ 95,000 in DAI stablecoins. Separately, researchers from Israeli startup B.Protocol have found a new way to cut debt positions on MakerDAO.

Quick bites

  • If data is the form of work that drives capital creation in the modern economy, its producers should join the union, argues James Felton Keith. (CoinDesk – editorial)
  • Chinese cryptocurrency miners struggle to pay their electricity bills as regulators crack down on cryptocurrency trading. (CoinDesk)
  • Grayscale bought another 15,114 bitcoins ($ 241 million) in its largest increase to date. (Decrypt)
  • SEC President Jay Clayton resigns months before scheduled departure. (CoinDesk)
  • Binance will discontinue its British pound stablecoin, an “experiment” which was obviously not a success. (CoinDesk)

Market information

Bonds and BTC
The rising value of negative-yielding bonds could catalyze further institutional bitcoin purchases, according to reports from CoinDesk markets, Omkar Godbole. Bloomberg and Barclays’ global negative yielding debt index is now valued at $ 17.05 trillion, a lifetime high, a metric that measures how much bonds will pay less when their purchase price expires. Several analysts, including Singapore-based Signum Capital managing partner John Ng Pangilinan, said this trend could incentivize investors and companies to follow companies like MicroStrategy and Square by accumulating bitcoin or other inflation-resistant assets. “For our part, we are seeing an increase in the number of investors looking to earn a return on bitcoin lending,” Pangilinan said.

At stake

The fork that was not
Bitcoin Cash’s latest split looks like a disaster. In the latest “hard fork” of the network, two of the blockchain’s top clients, Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA) and Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN), are eliminating control of the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

A dispute between the parties arose after BCHA developer Amaury Séchet proposed an 8% “tax” on miners ‘profits to finance his groups’ development of the network. This so-called Infrastructure Funding Plan (IFP has faced strong opposition from the Bitcoin Cash community, including its most prominent supporter, Roger Ver, which led to the hard fork.

Ver said the proposal would lead to greater centralization of the network and said there were alternative ways to finance the development of Bitcoin Cash rather than a tax.

Now, one day after the controversial split, it appears that Séchet’s proposal will fail. According to data from coin.dance, the BCHN chain is currently 129 blocks ahead of the upstart chain, with no miners supporting BCHA. If BCH ABC doesn’t attract enough hash power to produce a viable blockchain, the ABC blockchain would theoretically “disappear,” CoinDesk’s Muyao Shen reported this weekend.

Until the situation is resolved, a number of major exchanges and cryptographic service providers have suspended BCH functionality. “We will reactivate the send / receive functions once we determine that the update is stable,” Coinbase said. Additionally, Decrypt reported that most exchanges will support whichever blockchain has the most hash power behind it.

Bitcoin Cash is no stranger to controversy. The network was born in 2017, after a controversial dispute among Bitcoin developers over the size of the block. At the time, Roger Ver led a group of stakeholders who believed that Bitcoin was failing as a payment system and proposed a marginal increase in the number of transactions that could be confirmed in a single block.

Following BCH’s hard fork from Bitcoin, a group led by Australian cryptographer Craig Wright wanted to further increase the block size, resulting in Bitcoin SV (short for Satoshi’s Vision, as Wright claimed to be the pseudonym founder of Bitcoin).

Many have criticized Bitcoin Cash’s “fork first” governance, which often introduces uncertainty to the market.

As Cointelegraph reports, Grayscale Investments’ Bitcoin Cash Trust fell $ 1.6 million following the announcement that the crypto asset would be forked on November 15. Grayscale, like CoinDesk, is a unit of the Digital Currency Group.

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