Stellar advertises itself as an open-sourced, distributed payments infrastructure, built on the premise that the international community needs “a worldwide financial network open to anyone.” The project is filling this need, connecting individuals, institutions, and payment systems through its platform.

In doing so, the Stellar team wants to make monetary transactions cheaper, quicker, and more reliable than they are under current systems. Additionally, their protocol connects people from all over the world by allowing for more efficient cross-border payments.

In this guide, we get into all the details including:

• How Does Stellar Work?
• Stellar Team
• XLM Trading History
• Where to Buy XLM
• Where to Store XLM
• Stellar Roadmap
• Final Thoughts
• Additional Stellar Resources

How Does Stellar Work?

Like (almost) all other cryptocurrencies, Stellar bears that beautiful buzzword that has become the hallmark of blockchain technology: decentralization. The network runs on a web of decentralized servers supported by an international consortium of individuals and entities. These servers support the distributed ledger that keeps track of the network’s data and transactions.

In practice, the Stellar protocol functions like a more inclusive, more flexible PayPal. To start using it, you need to upload funds to an anchor on the network. Much like a bank or PayPal, this anchor then holds your money and issues credit to your virtual wallet in its stead.

You might be wondering why you need to exchange debit for credit with an anchor in the first place. Well, anchors serve as a bridge for any given currency and the Stellar network. The swap allows you to formally convert your funds into Stellar’s public ledger.

This integration means you can send funds instantly on the network without having to wait for a bank transfer, as with PayPal. It also streamlines cross-border payments. Let’s say you wanted to send funds to your impoverished expat brother living in France. You would use your credited USD balance to shoot him funds through the Stellar network. Stellar would then automatically convert the USD to EUR using the lowest exchange rate, and your brother’s account would be credited with the exchanged amount in EUR. After receiving the transfer, he can withdraw the funds from an anchor that supports EUR and go about living his Bohemian lifestyle.

Distributed Exchange

Stellar also offers you the option of placing exchange orders onto the public ledger to sell or buy other currencies. All rates are pre-determined by the individual placing the order, so they are not subject to the automatic exchange rate that Stellar applies to personal transfers.

If you wanted to exchange, say GBP for EUR, you’d place an order in Stellar’s order book. That order then enters the global marketplace, which you can also consult to see how your order stacks up against others like it. Note that this exchange is not limited to fiat currency only. It also includes cryptocurrency and fiat trading pairs as well.

Multi-Currency Transactions

As we previously noted, Stellar allows you to freely send money across borders without the hassle of formal banking procedures or currency exchange.

In order to accomplish this, the network does one of three things when you request a currency transfer:

• Stellar converts the funds with a previous offer on its order book and automatically facilitates the exchange.
• Stellar uses Lumens (XLM), its coin, as an intermediary for the exchange. It converts the funds from currency A into Lumens on the global marketplace, and then it takes those Lumens and converts them to currency B for the user receiving these funds.
• If there are no trading pairs in the exchange for the two currencies, Stellar searches for offers on the network that will lead to a chain conversion into the desired currency (e.g., USD to EUR, EUR to GBP, BGP to AUD, AUD to JPY).

This multi-currency exchange process is pretty ingenious, and it offers users a flexible approach to easily swap currencies on an international scale.

Stellar Team

Jed McCaleb is the face of Stellar. Previously, he created the infamous Mt. Gox, although he was no longer involved during the over $450 million hack. After that, he went on to found Ripple, Stellar’s most notable competitor. In 2013, he left Ripple due to differences in ideology against the rest of the leadership team. Shortly after, he started Stellar.

Stellar has one of the most impressive advisory boards of any other project in the cryptocurrency space. The list includes Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO), Matt Mullenweg (WordPress Founder), Naval Ravikant (AngelList Founder), and Sam Altman (Y Combinator President).

XLM Trading History

XLM has had an interesting trading history, to say the least. The coin experienced around a 5x increase in value at the end of 2014. However, that runup was shortlived, and the price slowly fell throughout all of 2015, 2016, and even the beginning of 2017.

It wasn’t until May 2017, that things really started to turn around for the coin. That month, the price skyrocketed from $0.00547 (~0.00000363 BTC) to just over $0.047 (~0.0000283 BTC) in four days. It’s not exactly clear what caused this monumental jump. It may have been a recent airdrop the team hosted, more people learning about to project, or just typical market shenanigans.

Following the early May rise, the XLM price more or less followed the rest of the market. It grew to an all-time high of over $0.91 (~0.000061 BTC) in January 2018 and fell for the remainder of that year. That said, XLM has weathered the bear market significantly better than most other altcoins. In fact, it’s only lost around 50 percent of its BTC value when many other coins have lost over 90.

The addition of more anchors, partners, and (obviously) users, should all impact the price in a positive way.

Where to Buy XLM

Stellar Lumens trades under both the XLM and STR ticker. The Stellar team changed the ticker from STR to XLM a while back, but some exchanges, such as Poloniex, haven’t bothered to change it.

Bittrex, Poloniex, and Binance account for a vast amount of XLM’s trading volume. Binance and Bittrex support both ETH and BTC trading pairs, while Poloniex supports BTC, USDT, and USDC only.

If you’d like to purchase XLM with USD or EUR, it’s worth taking a look at Kraken.

Where to Store XLM

Most of the wallets used to store XLM are either XLM specific or exist within Stellar’s network for use with its global marketplace. Stronghold, for instance, is the distributed exchange built into Stellar’s system, and StellarTerm is a client that allows you to access the distributed exchange to trade or send funds. The Stellar team has also created a Desktop Client that is specific to the XLM currency.

If you’re looking for a non-Stellar-exclusive wallet, the Ledger Nano S is probably the safest bet, but if you don’t have this hardware wallet, you could check out stargazer, Papaya, and Saza.

In a recent promotional stunt, Blockchain added support for XLM and gave away $25 worth of XLM when you verified your identity.

Stellar Roadmap

Stellar does not have a concrete roadmap on their website, but they do keep a regular blog.

In this blog, they post monthly roundups of that month’s biggest developments. For the October 2017 roundup, for instance, they recapped their partnerships with IBM and KlickEx for cross-border payments. They’ve also secured partnerships with Remitr, MSewa Software Solutions, PesaChoice, and Chaneum ICO Advisory Services.

In the vein of ICOs, the Stellar team believes that their network would be ideal for overseeing ICOs and blockchain startup fundraising. There’s a strong case to be made for the flexibility Stellar’s network offers to startup ventures, as it could facilitate a multitude of cryptocurrency and fiat payment options.

As mentioned above, Stellar partnered with the Blockchain wallet provider in November 2018. The partnership includes integrating XLM support into Blockchain and airdropping up to 500 million XLM to Blockchain users.

Final Thoughts

If Ripple (XRP) was built for financial institutions and banking giants, then Stellar Lumens goes to work for the common man. It has the potential to revamp how we process peer-to-peer transactions on a global scale.

Its versatility and use cases make it function like a financial Swiss Army Knife. With Stellar, you can handle micro-payments with nominal fees, send remittances without fretting over currency exchange or bank transfers, and settle payments in real time (2-5 seconds).

If the IBM and KlickEx partnerships weren’t enough to impress you, Deloitte, Parkway Projects, and Tempo have started building services on Stellar’s network.

Between these companies using Stellar for real-world adoption, its official partnerships, and the vision Stellar has for the future of currency exchange, we’re excited to see what the next few years have in store for the layman’s Ripple. We won’t tell you to put your money into it, but it’s worth getting to know.

Additional Stellar Resources

Website

Twitter

Github

Reddit

Blog

The post What Is Stellar (XLM)? | A Guide to the Common Man’s Financial Network appeared first on CoinCentral.

As this guide’s title suggests, iExec is a platform for decentralized cloud computing– think IBM or Microsoft cloud services, but broken up into multiple nodes for off-chain computing of blockchain applications. It’s a similar concept to Golem (supercomputing) and Siacoin (cloud storage), except it uses cloud services for processing power.

Its target audience is the blockchain realm itself and its budding ecosystem of DApps.

Blockchain and Cloud Computing

Before we break down how iExec functions, it’d be useful to look at centralized cloud computing as it stands today.  

Cloud computing has quickly become an industry standard for companies that want access to processing power without having to maintain expensive technological infrastructure.  Companies like Netflix, Apple, Etsy, and Xerox, for instance, manage some (or all) of their applications and data with cloud computing from companies like Amazon, Google, IBM, or Microsoft.  The reason is simple: if these companies already have tens of thousands of servers to support data-intensive computations, why not outsource their processing power?  Simply put, these services give businesses access to otherwise expensive resources.

iExec wants to provide the same service, but they want to decentralize it.  The market for this industry was $22.4bln in 2016, and it’s projected to reach $55bln by 2026.  More or less, the big players have cemented themselves as reliable providers, so why would iExec try to disrupt an industry that seems set in stone?

The simple answer is that they’re not trying to.  Instead, they want to be for decentralized applications what popular cloud computing services are for legacy businesses: the one-stop resource for blockchain cloud computing.

You might be asking, why does blockchain need this? Basically, if any of the smart contracts built on Ethereum (or any DApp platform) want to function properly in real-world use, they’ll need access to more computing than the Ethereum virtual machine provides. Ethereum’s virtual machine houses and executes smart contracts on the network’s nodes and mining programs.  

As DApps and smart contracts see adoption and widespread use, running all these computations through Ethereum’s blockchain would create a latency/scalability disaster of such magnitude that would render the network useless–just look at what a few million dollars worth of CryptoKitties did to Ethereum in a matter of days.

Essentially, iExec wants to create a network of computing resources that will allow the Ethereum ecosystem to scale to its potential in the future.

How Does iExec RLC Work?

To support DApps, smart contracts, and their platforms, iExec takes processing-intensive computations off-chain to keep a blockchain’s on-chain functions running smoothly.

To do this, iExec makes use of XtremWeb-HEP, an open-sourced Desktop Grid Software.  Desktop Grid computing (also known as Volunteer Computing) pools unused computing resources to be used by applications and platforms, and according to iExec’s whitepaper, XtremWeb-HEP “implements all the needed features” to make this possible on a global scale, including “fault-tolerance, multi-applications, multi-users, hybrid public/private infrastructure, deployment of virtual images, data management, security and accountability, and many more.”

Essentially, with this software, DApps can run their programs using any computing resource in the iExec framework. This means that developers and DApp users can commission processing power from a resource as small as a PC’s CPU to as large as a warehouse-sized data center. Options will be flexible, scalable, and free-market-driven, allowing users to find just the right amount of computing power for the task at hand.

iExec accomplishes this service matching using its smart contracts.  The Matchmaking algorithm, for example, takes resource requests on the network and matches them with an appropriate provider.  This smart contract basically looks at a DApp’s task and asks, “Can this computing resource run this program?”  If yes, then it’s a match made in heaven.  If not, then it’s time to move on (nothing personal).

In order to ensure that users are getting the resources they need, iExec uses a Proof of Contribution model.  This consensus algorithm makes sure that a provider provisions the computational power needed by the user, and it rewards this provider with RLC, iExec’s token, in return for these services.

iExec’s Platform Components

Taking a step outside of the software and technicals, let’s take a look at the pieces that make up iExec’s platform.  These include its marketplace, DApp store, and data marketplace.

Marketplace: The marketplace is iExec’s hub for providers and users to exchange RLC for computer resources.  Through the marketplace, individuals/developers running DApps can shop for the resources tailored to their application’s needs.  iExec comes with a Matchmaking smart contract that ensures that no provider is biting off more than it can chew when committing its processing power to a contract.  Moreover, a reputation smart contract manages a provider’s reliability.

Think of this like a Yelp review for computing resources.  This reputation system allows users to choose the level of reliability they want, paying less for a less reliable host if they so desire.  Thus, the marketplace is free-market driven, and the more providers and users on it, the more competition will dictate pricing.

DApp Store: Finally, a decentralized equivalent to application stores.  As its name suggests, the DApp store allows you to browse and purchase DApps that are built on or use iExec.  And the cool thing is the DApp store is live and already features applications you can purchase today.  Additionally, application providers can also submit their DApps for listing on the platform.

Data Marketplace: This marketplace is to data what the DApp store is to applications.  With it, data providers can sell their excess data to DApp providers or any other party willing to purchase it.  Ranging from athlete stats to government consensus data, the sky’s the limit to what you could market on this platform.  If someone is willing to buy it, you can use iExec to sell it. Unlike the DApp store (up and running) and Marketplace (set to release this year), the Data Marketplace is still in the conceptual stages of its development, so don’t expect it for some time yet.

iExec Team and What’s to Come

iExec’s core team consists of six PhDs, four of whom have been working in cloud computing since the early 2000s.

These four, Gilles Fedak, Haiwu He, Oleg Lodygensky, and Mircea Moca, have experience working at INRIA and CNRS developing programs for Desktop Grid computing.  iExec is the product of their collective experience, and after Gilles Fedak discovered Ethereum in 2016, the team found the solution to a problem they had been debating since 2012: how to create a distributed cloud based on Desktop Grid computing.

Thus, iExec was born, and the team has been making steady progress towards realizing their goal since. They maintain an active GitHub, updating it consistently with the open-sourced fruits of their labor, including iExec’s software development kit in November of 2017.

Most all of iExec’s v1 “Essential Edition” of its roadmap has been accomplished.  Up next is the v2 “Market Network,” which will look to expand on the DApp store and launch the network’s Marketplace.

When this Marketplace is launched, iExec will also undergo a decentralization process, as all data/computing centers are currently under the control of iExec’s team for reasons of convenience.  

The team will tackle V3-v5 in time, but most of these developments will come in the far future.

iExec’s Competition

In their whitepaper, the iExec team lays out the project’s competitive landscape and explains these competitors in relation to iExec.

They’re quick to note that decentralized cloud storage providers like Filecoin, Storj, and Siacoin are not direct competitors, and it’s easy to see why.  While iExec could theoretically take a step in this direction as it matures, it’s not a storage platform; it’s a computing platform.

This does put it in competition with other decentralized computing protocols like Golem and SOMN. Both of these, however, are taking aim at a different animal.  Essentially, they’re both building a decentralized supercomputer on blockchain technology, while iExec is targeting DApp development and sustainability.  Both look towards a future of a blockchain-powered, decentralized internet, but their functions, while sometimes similar, are more complementary than conflicting.

iExec Trading History

iExec had a brief stint in the market cap top 100 before the crash, only to settle back down below this threshold during the bloodbath.

At the time of writing,  iExec has a market cap of $239,425,224 and is valued at $3.31 per token.

Where to Buy iExec RLC

Coinbase, Binance, and HTX, account for the majority of RLC’s trading volume.  Each exchange sports BTC and ETH trading pairs, while you can also buy it directly with USD on Bitfinex.

Where to Store iExec RLC

RLC is an ERC20 token, so an Ethereum-compatible wallet will have you covered for storage, including MyEtherWallet, Nano Ledger S, Meta Mask, Exodus, Laxx, and imToken.

Final Thoughts

If iExec functions as intended, it could scale exponentially as more providers and computing resources join the network.  This could open the door for scalability solutions, sustainable DApp support, and future blockchain adoption.  It also provides a greener alternative to current cloud computing models, as resources are only used when they’re needed and in a less energy-intensive manner.

The project is certainly ambitious, but for what it’s worth, the iExec team has worked on successful projects before in the same vein.  They helped to develop the European Desktop Grid Infrastructure, a series of 200,000 nodes that executed more than a million tasks using Desktop Grid computing.  This project laid the foundation for iExec, while also demonstrating its feasibility.

We don’t know whether or not iExec will live up to its expectations, but we sure do have confidence that its team isn’t piddling around with this project.  It have the experience, the brainpower, and the determination to see this project through, and for the future of blockchain, only time will tell if it will take advantage of its growth potential. 

The post What is iExec RLC? A Beginner’s Guide to Decentralized Cloud Computing appeared first on CoinCentral.

For those who don’t know, a hard fork is a method for developers to update and alter Bitcoin’s software.  Once Bitcoin reaches a certain block height, miners switch from Bitcoin’s core software to the fork’s version.  After this split, miners begin mining the new currency’s blocks, creating a new chain entirely and a currency to go with it.  

Bitcoin Cash was the first hard fork to occur on Bitcoin’s blockchain, followed by Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond.  As you can probably imagine, hard forks have become a hot topic within the crypto community.  Many believe that they are necessary for improving the network and solving Bitcoin’s scalability issue, as with Bitcoin Cash.  Others have criticized them as money-making schemes, as anyone holding Bitcoin at the time of a fork receives an equal share of the new currency.  

Whether you love them or hate them, it’s important to understand what each fork is and what it wants to accomplish. Given the number coming up, there’s a lot of information to digest.  

That’s why we compiled information on each fork into manageable chunks, to make the research a bit easier to swallow. It’s time to dig in.

Super Bitcoin (SBTC)

Super Bitcoin was split at block 498888. It has a circulating supply of 21,210,000 SBTC, of which 210,000 was be pre-mined.

As its name suggests, Super Bitcoin is like Bitcoin on steroids.  Its team picked through what they liked best about the current Bitcoin protocol and introduced some added features that they believe will buff up the network.   Like Bitcoin Cash, it will increase block sizes from 1MB to 8MB to improve scalability.  It will run Bitcoin’s lightning network, and it plans to support anonymous payments with zero-knowledge proof by May of next year.

Funnily enough, Super Bitcoin’s distinguishing feature isn’t even Bitcoin-related–it comes from Ethereum.  The team wants to implement Ethereum-inspired smart contracts into Super Bitcoin’s program, which will allow third parties to build decentralized apps on the new protocol.

This is all the information as presented on Super Bitcoin’s website.  There’s no white paper, but there is a developer’s reference “to provide technical details and API information to help you start to build Bitcoin-based applications.”

The team includes INBlockchain Inc. founder Li Xiao Lai, Link Capital founder JaiPeng Lin, and Ranger Shi.  With their software upgrades, they hope to “revitalize [bitcoin’s] dominance,” which they believe has “lost a tremendous share of the cryptocurrency market.”  Oh yeah, and they want to “Make Bitcoin Great Again.”

Bitcoin Platinum (BTP)

We included Bitcoin Platinum and its “specifications” in an earlier draft of this article, but since then, it’s been exposed as a scam.

Apparently, the project was spearheaded by a South Korean teenager with the purpose of making money by shorting Bitcoin.  The teenager was hoping to profit off of Bitcoin’s short-term price trend, thinking that introducing a new fork might help him to do so.

In an admission of guilt, the teenager took to Twitter to apologize for the scam.

While we don’t approve of such fraudulent practices, you’ve got to hand it to the kid—it’s a more creative way to make money than a bake sale.

Lightning Bitcoin (LBTC)

Back to the allegedly real forks.  Our actual second fork should come on or around December 23rd at block 499,999, with a main-net launch the following week.

The purpose behind LBTC is to provide, that’s right, lightning-fast payments.  To do this, the currency will expand its block size to 2MB and sport a three-second block time.  The team hopes that these additions will help Lightning Bitcoin process anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 transactions per second.

Lightning Bitcoin is also making its mark on the fork scene by abandoning Bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Instead, it will opt for a delegated proof-of-stake system similar to Ark’s. In addition, LBTC will join SBTC by building smart contracts on its blockchain. These innovations will not be active upon the main net launch, but the team plans to have them developed by Q3 of 2018.

As of writing, the coin’s website is inactive.  There’s also little information on the team, with Jack Zhang, the project’s Chinese community leader, as the only verified member.  Supposedly, though, Lightning Bitcoin does have exchange support from CEX.io, BTCC, gate.io, and Coldlar wallet.

Bitcoin God (GOD)

Yes, it’s called Bitcoin GOD, and yes, its trading abbreviation is actually GOD.  This third and ungodly fork cam at block 501225, which gives it a tentative date of December 25th.  GOD’s creator, Chandler Guo, targeted this date “to be symbolic of me giving candy to all Bitcoin Holders.”  We can’t make this up–those are his own words.

Bitcoin God (GOD) will be forked off the main bitcoin chain at the block height of 501225, which will happen on December 25h to be symbolic of me giving candy to all Bitcoin Holders. The total amount will be 21 million. No pre-mine. pic.twitter.com/4T2lwojYTr

— ChandlerGuo 郭宏才 宝二爷 (@ChandlerGuo) December 4, 2017

So far, Bitcoin God is our group’s blackhorse. Little is known about it besides what was shared in Chandler Guo’s tweet and a WeChat screenshot. Besides the anticipated date, we only know that there will be a circulating supply of 21,000,000 GOD and that the coin will have no premine.

Bitcoin Uranium (BUM)

Can we stop to appreciate this fork’s trading ticker, for a second?  It’s like a physical reminder of how absurd all of these forks are getting.

Like Bitcoin God, Bitcoin Uranium has no website, and all of the information about the coin comes from an October 25th post on Bitcoin Talk.  The exact block height for the fork is yet to be determined, but a rough date sets the update for December 31st.  The 21,000,000 circulating supply will have no premise.

Judging by what we know about Bitcoin Uranium, its goals are in line with Bitcoin Platinum’s own.  Like BTP, it will be ASIC resistant, but its proof of work will use CPUs as well as GPUs.  Unlike its counterpart, though, it will decrease its block time even further to 1 minute and will stick with Segwit as opposed to Segwit 2x.

It’s also planning a number of features that will distinguish it from the rest of the pack.  For starters, Bitcoin Uranium’s block rewards will be halved every 450 days.  In the foreseeable future, it hopes to implement anonymous addresses, as well.

Currently, there’s no verifiable information about Bitcoin Uranium’s team, as the Bitcoin Talk forum only includes a link to the project’s Twitter and a GitHub for its mining commits.

Bitcoin Cash Plus (BCP)

Taking a note from Bitcoin Platinum’s playbook, Bitcoin Cash Plus also wants to fulfill the original promise of Bitcoin as “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash.”  Thankfully, Bitcoin Cash Plus actually has a website, but there’s no information about coin supply.  It does, however, say that the update is scheduled for block 501407, which will make it our first fork of the New Year on January 2nd.

Like some of the other forks, it utilizes the Equihash algorithm to prevent mining centralization with ASIC hardware, preferring GPU mining instead. It also offers on-chain scalability with 8MB blocks, the same as Super Bitcoin.

Unlike the other forks, it makes use of Bitcoin Cash’s Emergency Difficulty Adjustment.  This allows miners to easily switch between the BTC and BCP networks, protecting Bitcoin Cash Plus from hashing fluctuations by allowing it to decrease mining difficulty under emergency circumstances.  

So far, there’s no information regarding the team, but the website says this “[will] be updated soon.”  For now, the project’s practically inactive GitHub, Twitter, and Facebook are all we have.

Bitcoin Silver (BTCS)

If you Google Bitcoin Silver, the second result will give you a website that you can’t access. Since the website is down, another Bitcoin Talk forum will have to do for our review.

According to the October 24th forum, the fork is tentatively planned for some time in December, but the actual block height for the update is to be determined.  We do know that there will be a circulating supply of, you guessed it, 21,000,000 with a pre-mine.  

Bitcoin Silver is joining the GPU revolution with its Equihash algorithm, so as with BUM, BTP, and BCP, it will not allow ASIC mining.  With a 1MB block size and Segwit activated, it will have many of Bitcoin’s own trimmings, but along with ASIC-resistance, its impressive 30-second block time will distinguish it from its parent currency.

Yet again, we have no clear information about the team or how they plan to implement these changes.

Bitcoin Atom (BCA)

We’ve added Bitcoin Atom to this list after the fact.  News of the fork just came to light, and as such, we wanted to keep the info on here updated.

According to its website, Bitcoin Atom is an “evolved Bitcoin with atomic swaps and lightning network.”  As this raison d’être suggests, atomic swaps and lightning networks are intrinsic to Bitcoin Atomic’s design.  As detailed in the project’s Bitcoin Talk forum, “Atomic Swaps (AS), currently implemented via HTLCs on-chain and potentially via Lightning Network (LN) off-chain, bring an ability to swap assets directly between blockchains without any intermediaries involved. This ability is called atomic cross-chain trading, and we propose the Bitcoin Atom’s support for it at its core, by bringing AS API and a set of cross-chain trading utilities into the original Bitcoin core software and forking it into BCA.”  The team believes that these swaps will usher in a new era of decentralization to cryptocurrencies, allowing completely trustless, peer-to-peer exchanging without the need for any third party.

In addition, Bitcoin Atom will operate using a hybrid proof of work and proof of stake distributed consensus mechanism. The team believes this system will secure the currency against mining attacks and concentration of network power.

There’s no rough date for Bitcoin Atom’s birth into the crypto world, as the fork has not been scheduled for a specific block height yet. Per tradition, there will be a 21,000,000 supply.  The team has not revealed whether or not there will be a premine.

What Should We Think of All This?

One key takeaway from these forks is their similarities. At their core, BUM, BCP, and BTCS are all trying to solve Bitcoin’s mining centralization by employing the Equihash algorithm. All of them will integrate replay protection, and as far as this research suggests, all of them will implement Segwit. These comparisons exclude Bitcoin God because we don’t know enough about its development to detail its specifications.

These technological redundancies are not the only similarities of interest, though.  If we look at the Bitcoin Talk forums for BTCS and BUM, for instance, they all included copy-and-paste information about the coin’s goals and purpose.  You can see this at the top of each forum with its subheadings, and you can see it at the bottom under each coin’s FAQs.  What’s more, each forum was posted within a day of the other two: BTCS on the 24th of October, BUM, and BTP on the 25th within the same hour.  And each one bears some form of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, as if in uniform echo from shouting down the same cultural well.

The copycat nature of these forums and the intervals between their postings have us leary.  Couple this with the lack of clear information these projects give, and I’m downright conspiratorial about all these forks.  Bitcoin Platinum has already been exposed as a scam, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few more of these forks were busted, as well.  Super Bitcoin is the only fork that provides a team (minus Bitcoin God, with its one-man team of Chandler Guo), and on that note, only three of the proposed currencies have actual websites (LBTC, SBTC, BCP). 

All of these forks promise an airdrop of their currency into the wallets of Bitcoin holders, but I’m still unclear as to where you need to hold your Bitcoin to receive any of these forked currencies.

The post Recent and Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Forks: What You Need to Know appeared first on CoinCentral.

Coupled with the competitive nature of mining, Bitcoin’s exponential growth is largely to blame for this rampant energy consumption.  Mainstream public attention and a boom in transaction volume have only exacerbated the problem, as the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index estimates that mining power expenditures increased by 29.98% from October to November. 

At this exponential rate, the cryptocurrency’s meteoric rise has it on pace to consume more energy than the whole of the US by 2019.  

The Contributing Factors

In order to properly diagnose the root cause of this energy crisis, we have to dig into the relationship between Bitcoin’s network growth and its mining mechanics.

Under Bitcoin’s proof of work model, miners compete with each other to ensure a distributed consensus (the means by which Bitcoin circulates) on the blockchain.  Miners commit their computing power to verify the transactions sent through the network.  

To do so, the computers solve the encryption puzzles that secure each transaction and, once solved, store them as hashes in the blocks on the public ledger. The first miner to finish the current block receives a block reward in Bitcoin.

As you can see in the image, the competitive nature of proof of work incentivizes miners to commit as much processing power to the blockchain as possible.  The more powerful your mining rig, the faster you can solve the transaction encryptions, and the more likely you are to finish a block and receive its rewards.

Back in Bitcoin’s infancy, it used to be that you could reliably mine with a graphics card or a run-of-the-mill computer processor.  But those days are long gone.  As more miners jumped on the Bitcoin gravy train, more sophisticated mining software was developed to give miners an edge.  This hardware arms race culminated in application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining.  In TLDR terms, ASIC miners are processors that are more efficient and powerful than CPUs or GPUs.

And they left the original mining procedures in the dust.  Seriously, if you were trying to compete with ASIC mining rigs using your computer or graphics card, it’d be like trying to win the Monaco Grand Prix with a Vespa.  

Even a single ASIC isn’t enough to compete with the big-league mining pools.  The biggest mining cooperatives rig up hundreds of ASICs to create massive processor pools.  In order to stay competitive with other miners, these pools will add hardware to their rigs’ to increase overall hashing power (output).

You probably see where this is going.  Mining rigs obviously require electricity, and the harder they have to work, the more power they consume.  As such, proof of work’s competitive incentives invariably lead to an exponential increase in energy consumption.

And this doesn’t even include difficulty increases.  Every 2,016 blocks, Bitcoin undergoes a difficulty adjustment.  This adjustment is meant to scale block difficulty to match mining hash rates so that no miner solves algorithms too quickly, sucking up all the block rewards in the process.  What this means, though, is that the more miners there are on the network, the more difficult it becomes to solve the encrypted algorithms after each adjustment.  This would also mean that mining rigs have to work harder to stay competitive, thus consuming even more power.

Starting to get the picture?  The more people buy into Bitcoin, the more miners will be attracted to the currency for its valuation.  With more miners comes more energy consumption to fuel competition, and with a growing network, each difficulty adjustment will only exacerbate energy consumption by making miners work harder.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s turn this problem on its head and look at a potential solution.

Bitcoin on Proof-of-Stake? 

Proof of stake is an alternate algorithm for reaching a blockchain’s distributed consensus.  It came onto the scene in 2012, with Peercoin, NXT, and BlackCoin as its primary early adopters.

No miners exist under the proof of stake model.  Instead, they are replaced with validators (or forgers) who are in charge of validating transactions.  Typically, validators stake a certain amount of proof of stake currency in that blockchain’s core wallet.  

That currency’s network may then deterministically select them to construct the next block.  The selection mechanism varies by algorithm, as it may be chosen at random or based on a combination of variables, such as total wealth and the amount of time it has been staked.

It’s important to note that proof of stake offers no block rewards, only transaction fees, so theoretically, the model doesn’t engender the same competitive impulse as the proof of work system.  While you might receive more frequent selections and greater transaction fees the more you have staked, you aren’t trying to beat anyone to the punch like you would be with Bitcoin.

With proof of stake, you only need enough energy to power a blockchain’s core software.  No need to waste energy on an ASIC and a cryptographic hashing program.  To return to the racing analogy, it’s akin to being awarded a prize for starting your car instead of using it to race.  You wait in line at the starting gate for your participation trophy, and you don’t have to worry about wasting the extra gas to complete the race faster than your fellow competitors.  

In a nutshell, proof of stake significantly cuts back on energy use.  Not only does it employ a less energy-intensive program, but validators don’t have to up the ante against each other to remain viable as miners do under a proof of work consensus.  They don’t receive block rewards, but they also don’t have to face the outrageous energy costs that miners confront.  If we weigh proof of stake’s transaction fees without its significant operation costs, it comes out comparable to proof of work’s rewards against its costs, especially for those who can’t maintain expensive mining rigs.

Final Thoughts: Will Bitcoin on Proof of Stake Ever Happen?

In May 2017, Vitalik Buterin unveiled plans to transition the Ethereum blockchain to a proof of stake algorithm called Casper.  

Novel at the time, Proof-of-Stake’s launch on the second largest crypto asset was a huge endorsement for the proof-of-stake system; and the ecosystem has largely shifted towards PoS.

Proof of stake may very well be the future for blockchain.  Ethereum’s change indicates as much, as Vitalik Buterin sees value in the mechanism’s pros as they capitalize on Bitcoin’s cons.

Bitcoin’s energy crisis is one of the first truly substantial trials facing the cryptocurrency as it marches towards public prominence.  Pitfalls and obstacles such as these are to be expected in such a nascent technology, but it’s the responsibility of the community at large to adapt to these tribulations.  There’s no reason to think that addressing proof of work’s shortcomings should compromise our belief in Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation–quite the contrary.  If we want to see Bitcoin succeed, we must remain vigilant in our criticisms and proactive with our solutions, because as it currently stands, Bitcoin is on track to becoming unsustainable in the near future.

Perhaps proof of stake could avert Bitcoin from self-sabotage.  If Ethereum’s algorithm change means anything, it should be a clear signal to the crypto community that proof of work can not persist in its current state.  

The question is, will the market adapt?

The post Could Proof of Stake Eliminate Bitcoin’s Energy Costs? appeared first on CoinCentral.

The lightning network is here to help with that.  This concept is the brainchild of Thaddeus Dryja and Joseph Poon, and the duo presented it with a whitepaper back in 2015. If you’re not too keen on reading the lengthy paper chock-full of tech jargon, we’re gonna lay it out for you in layman’s terms here.

What is the Lightning Network?

On its most basic level, the lightning network is a method for Bitcoin users to exchange currency value off the Bitcoin blockchain.  This is accomplished using a few complex algorithms that interact with Bitcoin’s base script, and it allows for, that’s right, lightning quick payments at a fraction of the transaction fees. As such, it’s been presented as a necessary scalability tool, one that Bitcoin will need if it wants to be a viable payment option in the future.  This practice can extend to cross-chain atomic swaps.  These swaps are the same in practice, except that they take place between two different currencies/blockchains. We go over atomic swaps in more detail here.

Now that we’ve covered the much-too-simple explanation, it’s time for a lengthier one.

Lightning Network: How it Works

Opening a Bilateral Payment Channel

To get started using the lightning network, you’d want to set up a payment channel.  Payment channels are the transaction avenues through which the lightning network transfers value. To establish one, you have to open a transaction for this channel directly on the blockchain.

“But I thought you said all of this takes place off-chain?”  Don’t worry–it still does, but you first have to let the Bitcoin network know that you’re opening a transaction.  Once you’ve done this, you and the other party you’re transacting with will keep your own balance sheet of the exchanges you make on the channel.  Transactions and updated account balances will be recorded on this ledger every time funds are moved, and after you’ve conducted your business on the channel, you’ll broadcast the final result to the blockchain to close the account.

Multi-signature Wallets

“So if payment channels take place off-chain, where/how are the funds managed until they’re recorded onto the blockchain?”  What a good-looking question.  In order to use a payment channel, both parties need to send their funds to a multi-signature wallet address.

Let’s say Molly and Steve have placed bets on the outcome of the Super Bowl.  They each wager 1 BTC and want to make sure that the other holds his/her end of the bargain, so they deposit both of their funds into a multi-signature wallet.  This wallet functions like a safe for deposits, while a set of private keys for the transactions functions like combinations that allow either party to access the funds.  The funds will remain locked in the wallet until:

• both Molly and Steve sign a finalizing transaction with these private keys,
• one party decides to finalize the transaction themselves, or
• a time limit is reached and the transaction is automatically submitted.  Once this happens, the funds will be moved back to either party’s individual wallets.

In order to successfully set up the multi-signature wallet, both Molly and Steve create a value (essentially, a secret key to unlock transactions) which they then use to create a hash and send to each other.  Hold onto this information–it’s vital to understanding how commitment transactions work later.

Once Molly and Steve deposit their respective funds into the multi-signature wallet, they can then create what’s called an open transaction and broadcast it to the blockchain.  Once this is broadcasted, a series of commitment transactions are then used to manage funds.

Transferring Value with Commitment Transactions

Turns out, Molly won the bet, but she’s nice, so she says Steve only owes her 0.5 BTC instead of 1.  To initiate a transfer of this wealth, both Molly and Steve would update their respective balances in the payment channel by signing a commitment transaction.  Commitment transactions divide funds between both participants per their mutual agreement–in essence, these transactions act like IOUs that will be paid out once the payment channel is closed.  

For example, in order to exchange values, Molly signs a transaction that sends 1.5 BTC to herself and .5 to a new multi-signature wallet address. Then, she signs this transaction and sends its hash to Steve. In turn, Steve signs a commitment transaction to mirror Molly’s, wherein he sends .5 BTC to himself and 1.5 to another multi-signature wallet.  He then signs this and sends this transaction’s hash over to Molly.

So, we’ve got a) the original 2 BTC sitting in the payment channel’s multi-signature wallet, b) .5 BTC sitting in a multi-signature wallet that’s payable to Steve, and c) 1.5 BTC sitting in a multi-signature wallet that’s payable to Molly.  Effectively, once either party sends their respective transaction hashes, the balance sheet in the payment channel’s multi-signature would update as both parties have agreed to the transfer.  Viola, the currencies have been exchanged without using Bitcoin’s blockchain.

The values from these wallets can be unlocked only under three conditions:

1. a certain amount of time expires,
2. either party unlocks the funds from the multi-signature wallets they set up with the wallet’s value (key), or
3. both parties decide to sign off on the transaction together.  

It’s important to note that, if one party decides to close the channel and sign off on a transaction alone, s/he will have to wait a pre-determined amount of time (dictated by the contract) from the time that the transaction is signed to receive his/her funds.  This may seem excessive, but it’s imperative to prevent cheating through payment channels–more on this in a bit.

Recurring Payments/Updating the Channel

What if Molly and Steve want to keep updating the channel or make more than one exchange?

To illustrate this further, say Steve was paying Molly for a recurring service, like a haircut.  Steve deposits 0.2 BTC into their multi-signature wallet, and every time he gets his locks trimmed, he signs a commitment transaction to Molly for 0.001 BTC and sends it to the new multi-signature address.  To do this, he’d have to repeat the steps we just went over, sans opening a transaction on the network as that’s accomplished by the time the first commitment transaction is signed.

So, to process recurring payments, account balances in the multi-sig need to be updated each time.  To do this, every time Steve gets his haircut, he’d commit a new sum of money to the multi-signature wallet that he set up to pay Molly.  But in doing so, he creates a new value and a new hash for this new transaction.  Molly does the same, and when both parties exchange the new hashes, they also include the old values (keys) for the previous transaction.

In effect, this ensures that neither party can cheat the other.  If upon closing the payment channel Steve tries to cheat Molly out of her payments by broadcasting an old transaction amount, he’s in trouble.  

For instance, if when he closes the channel Steve owes Molly 1 BTC out of the original 2 BTC he deposited, but he signs the original transaction to give himself the original amount, Molly can call him on it because she has the values from all prior transactions.  What’s more, Steve has to wait before his transaction clears according to the timeframe both parties agreed on before conducting business, while Molly’s is instant.  Thus, if she sees that she’s been paid 0 BTC for her services, she can sign off on the 2 BTC in the multi-signature wallet because she has the key for this transaction, and thus, the ability to unlock its funds.

Thus, if one party attempts to defraud another, the counterparty is awarded all of the malicious party’s funds.  This penalty is in place to deter bad actors from abusing the payment channel’s shared fund allocation.

Additionally, node operators and miners who spot this foul play can act on Molly’s behalf if she’s not online to notice the cheating.  In compensation, these guardian angels are awarded a bounty (fee) in the transacted currency for their services.

Closing a Payment Channel

When Molly and Steve are ready to close out their accounts, they simply sign a transaction with their private keys to broadcast their final account balances to the blockchain. At this point, miners will verify it per usual and store it on the public ledger.  As with an opening transaction, this closing transaction is the only interaction that either party will have with Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Alternatively, two parties could also set an expiration date for the length of the contract.  For example, using the nLockTime algorithm, they could open a payment channel for 30 days, after which time, the channel will close and the final balances will be broadcasted to the blockchain.  Every time the parties want to update their balances, however, the expiration date is decreased.  So, if Molly and Steve were placing bets on multiple football games throughout a season, every time a wager was paid, the nLockTime contract would have a new, shortened expiration date (e.g., if the first commitment transaction would be finalized in 30 days, the second transaction would pay out in 29, then the third would pay out in 28, and so on).

The purpose of nLockTime contracts is simple: it keeps account balances up to date and prevents one party from falsifying an account statement.  Like we went over earlier, every time a commitment transaction is agreed upon, the old account balance is replaced with a fresh one, and each involved party has records of this new balance as well as an old transactions value (key).  If any party attempts to defraud the other, the fraudulent party will be penalized.

Multichannel Payments and Hash Time Locked Contracts

“What if Molly and Steve want to send Bitcoin to each other but they don’t have a payment channel open?”  Well, they can go through an intermediary.  We’ll call this guy Chuck–tell Chuck hello.

Turns out, Molly and Steve both have payment channels open with Chuck, so instead of opening up a new channel, they decide to us their respective bidirectional payment channels to trade through Chuck.

Now, this is theoretically a trusted trade, so the trick is facilitating the exchange in a secure way.  To do this, the Lightning Network implements Hash Time Locked Contracts (HTLCs).

Say Molly wants to give 0.5 BTC to Steve because she’s just really nice like that–seriously, what a peach.  In order to do so, Steve must create a string of cryptographic numbers called a value (essentially a confirmation code or key).  He then creates a hash of this value to send to Molly.  To simplify this written illustration, we’ll represent value with V and hash with H.

When Molly receives H, she shares it with Chuck.  At this point, Molly will only send Chuck the 0.5 BTC if he reveals V.  To get V, Chuck sends 0.5 of his own BTC to Steve in exchange for V.  Once he has this number, he sends V to Molly who then sends 0.5 BTC to Chuck.  And there you have it–Molly effectively transferred 0.5 BTC to Steve.

In case you got lost, here’s how it went down:

Steve creates V and H→ Steve sends H to Molly→ Molly sends H to Chuck→ Chuck sends BTC to Steve→ Steve sends V to Chuck→ Chuck sends V to Molly→ Molly sends BTC to Chuck

Thus, the value (V) serves as a confirmation code/key for the hash (H), which represents a receipt/lock for the transaction.

“That’s all fine and dandy, but how does Molly know that the value Chuck sends her is legit, and what’s keeping Steve from running away with the BTC Chuck pays him?”

Again, good questions.  Just as nLockTime keeps everyone honest in a bidirectional payment channel, Hash Time Locked Contracts keep parties accountable in this model.

With HTLCs, the Bitcoin funds being transacted are locked up yet again in a multi-signature wallet and can only be unlocked a) after the value (V) and hash (H) are presented or b) the contract expires after a timeout period.

In effect, this means that, when Molly and Chuck go into an agreement for Molly to pay Steve, she locks the Bitcoin she owes Chuck in a multi-signature wallet using the HTLC.  Once Chuck pays Steve and receives V, he can then enter V and H into the HTLC to be reimbursed with the Bitcoin Molly committed to the contract.  Alternatively, if Chuck fails to hold up his end of the bargain and the contract expires after, say, a week, then Molly’s Bitcoin is freed up and goes back into her personal wallet.

The same interaction takes place on Chuck and Steve’s own payment channel.  Chuck can not relinquish his Bitcoin to Steve until Steve reveals V.  Once Steve reveals V into the multi-sig contract, Chuck now has V and Steve receives his BTC.

This process could, theoretically, be run through multiple payment channels and multiple individuals.

Wrapping Up: Why the Lightning Network Matters

It’s a complicated topic.  Synthesizing this information into digestible chunks was hard enough, so cheers to you for sticking with it this long.

For a TL;DR recap: The Lightning Network is an off-chain system that allows individuals to swap currencies multiple times without having to put all of these transactions on-chain.  Instead, only two transactions (and opening and closing) are recorded on the blockchain, while all other transactions, as many as there may be, are processed through a secondary layer of off-chain nodes.

There are a couple of key benefits to this model:

Effective microtransactions: The Lightning Network is geared towards microtransactions.  Instead of having to pay exorbitant fees that may outweigh the value being transferred, the Lighting Network allows users to send small sums of currency to each other without having to go through the Bitcoin network directly.  They still have to pay a fee to node operates, but it is minuscule compared to Bitcoin’s usual network fee.

Scalability and latency solutions: Going along with the prior point, the Lightning Network would cut back on network bloat.  Reducing the number of on-chain transactions means less work for miners which, in turn, means faster transaction times and lower fees.  If every transaction doesn’t have to be put on the blockchain’s public ledger, the network would run much more smoothly.  Further, Lightning Network transactions would be much quicker than those on-chain.

You’re probably wondering how any average user would be able to navigate the multi-step process we just outlined properly.  Well, Dryja, Poon, and others are working on applications/interfaces that work out all of the complicated steps for you–all you have to do is press a few buttons.

The post What is the Lightning Network?  A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on CoinCentral.

IDEX aims to bring the conveniences and user-friendly nature of centralized exchanges but with DEX-like custody and security. It employs smart contracts that enable users to manage their private keys and trade in a secure, peer-to-peer environment.  It also features Ledger Nano S and Meta Mask Wallet integrations, safer alternatives for fund management than manually entering a private key, or trusting a third-party custodian.

When trading on IDEX, users still sign off on transactions with their private key, but the exchange broadcasts the transaction to the blockchain, enabling the exchange to update account balances and order books in real-time. This gives IDEX the user experience of a centralized exchange without sacrificing the security and user control of a decentralized exchange.

IDEX initially launched solely on Ethereum because Layer-2s, and now Layer-3s, didn’t exist. It has since moved to exploring an IDEX-specific “Layer-3” with the goal of ensuring the lowest fees and performance possible.

In normal human terms, IDEX has transitioned from using the pricy Ethereum base network to cheaper alternatives built on top of it, like Polygon and XCHAIN.

The following IDEX Review explores how IDEX works, and whether this decentralized exchange is a good fit for your trading needs. Note, trading on IDEX from the United States is currently blocked.

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About IDEX

IDEX launched in 2017 and has helped pioneer the path for the modern decentralized exchange. Despite it’s early entry into the DEX industry, however, it’s use base has lagged. The exchange currently has about $2.65m in Total Value Locked, about 1/7th of the 10th largest DEX, Balancer.

How IDEX Works

Smart contracts are the name of the game for any decentralized exchange. Users can manage all of their funds through the exchange’s smart contract. So long as no one else has their private key, their funds can’t be touched once they’ve been stored in the contract unless they’ve signed off on them.

Once on the exchange, you’ll notice that everything you need to trade is immediately in front of you: wallet balances, the trading chart, the order book, trading pairs, and other tools are all displayed on a single page.  It may seem overwhelming at first to have all of this bunched together, but we’ll be going over each component below–and having everything on one page actually makes exchanging a breeze.

First things first, you’ll need to deposit funds into the exchange’s smart contract to get started.  At the top right corner, there’s an account dropbox that allows you to integrate a new wallet or create one through the exchange.  If you decide to create one, the exchange will produce a private key for you and a Wallet Keystore File.  Whether you’re creating a new wallet or accessing an old one, you have four options for opening a wallet on the exchange:

1. Keystore File: You can directly upload your private key using a KeyStore file for an Ethereum address you created on the exchange or otherwise.
2. Manually Entered Private Key: You can choose to manually enter your private key to unlock an Ethereum address’ funds.
3. MetaMask: You can unlock your MetaMask wallet and access it through the exchange.
4. Ledger Nano S: You can integrate your Ledger Nano S into the exchange and deposit funds directly from it.

Hardware wallet integration is one of the greatest added benefits of using a decentralized exchange like IDEX.  Using a Ledger to trade on IDEX insulates you from risks like malware and phishing attacks. Meta Mask will protect you from phishing attacks but not malware; manually entering your private keys leaves your funds ripe for phishing and is the most vulnerable option for accessing funds.

Once you’ve got your funds in hand on the exchange, you have to deposit them into the exchange’s smart contract.  It seems like a silly extra step, but it’s actually in your favor, as this smart contract keeps your funds safe while you trade and allows the exchange to broadcast transactions directly to the network. You can deposit from your wallet into the exchange through the Quick Balances tab at the top of the page and adjust the gas price for this transaction at your leisure.

Once you’ve got funds on the exchange, you can start trading.  IDEX allows you to create market/limit orders, and unlike other DEXs, you can cancel trades without paying gas.

This is where IDEX separates itself from the decentralized milieu.  You can cancel trades on IDEX without having to pay extra because all trades are executed by the exchange itself.  Thus, when you sign off on a trade, you agree to make that trade, but the exchange’s smart contract is in charge of broadcasting it to the network, so until the transaction is sent to be mined, you can ask the exchange to rescind it.  

If you’ve ever tried to fill an order on EtherDelta, you’ve run the risk of having that transaction fail. Sometimes, orders are claimed by more than one party, and since the order book isn’t updated until after a transaction is processed on the network, a stale orderbook can result in users trying to make trades on orders that are already filled.  IDEX’s system cures this headache by updating the orderbook in real time after an order is filled.  This model offers users the advantage of user-controlled funds with the convenience of a freshly updated order system they’d find on a centralized exchange.

IDEX Account Security

In general, decentralized exchanges feature security buffs that centralized exchanges, by design, cannot support.  IDEX is no exception.  The exchange itself runs as a node on the Ethereum network, so it comes replete with all of the security a blockchain network entails for its users.

Further, the exchange’s smart contracts keep funds locked in until the private key signs a transaction to move them.  You could keep your funds on the exchange and not break a sweat over it being compromised like we’ve seen too many times with centralized ones.  The reason being, that there’s no central point of failure for a hacker to tap into funds.  All funds are held in smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, so there’s no threat of someone hacking into a wallet reserve because IDEX doesn’t hold user funds in one.

The Ledger Nano S integration is another of IDEX’s key benefits, and, taken with the exchange’s overall decentralized structure, it makes for one of the most secure trading experiences out there.

The only thing you’d have to worry about in terms of security is if IDEX’s domain name service provider is compromised and a hacker hijacks its URL.  We saw this happen to Ether Delta, but if something like this were to happen, your funds would be safe as long as you don’t manually enter your private keys into the fake website.

IDEX Trading Pairs

As we went over earlier, the exchange deals exclusively with Ethereum and ERC20 tokens. Specifically, IDEX offers 2 base trading pairs– ETH and USDC. 

As such, you won’t have access to anything outside the Ethereum family, but that still leaves you with plenty of options.  

IDEX Fees and Limits

IDEX charges a 0.1% fee for market makers (those who make liquidity by creating a new order for the order book) and 0.2% for takers (those who take liquidity by filling an order already on the book). Takers are also responsible for paying the gas fee for a transaction.

“Market takers are responsible for covering the gas fees associated with each trade. Given our design, the exchange must pay this gas fee, priced in ether, when dispatching the trade to the network and then deduct it from the balance of the market taker. When exchanging tokens for ether the amount of eth deducted matches that of the gas fee. When exchanging ether for tokens, IDEX deducts the equivalent amount of tokens based on the price of the asset in ETH. This price is calculated using the average of the last 10 trades.

Ethereum gas prices have been increasing, and often this fee is higher than the IDEX exchange fee of 0.2%. These high gas prices have led us to institute order minimums in an attempt to reduce costs for our users.”

Thus, the taker fee could be more than 0.2%, depending on the network’s traffic.  This also means that all orders must be at least 0.15 ETH for makers and 0.05 for takers so that the exchange can manage transaction fees efficiently.  In addition, there’s a 0.04 ETH minimum withdrawal amount for Ethereum and tokens alike.  IDEX does not have trading or withdrawal limits.

IDEX Customer Support

The exchange features a chat box where users and support teams alike can answer queries and concerns. Alex and Phil Wearn, IDEX’s founders, are also active on the project’s subreddit and usually respond promptly to customer questions and complaints.

The site also features a contact form for reaching out to the team and a Linktree link to various IDEX community channels.

IDEX Community Sentiment: Is IDEX Legit?

IDEX has been around since 2017– our initial review of the exchange was published in 2018. Since then, the exchange has remained relatively scandal-free. 

Final Thoughts: Can You Trust IDEX?

By all measures, IDEX lives up to its growing reputation as EtherDelta’s more attractive little brother (perhaps little only applies to age here, as IDEX actually outranks EtherDelta by trading volume).  The bi-layered transaction settlement model circumvents the same pitfalls that plague EtherDelta’s system, and it makes for a generally easier, less frustrating trading experience.

Still, this model has its drawbacks, namely that it makes the exchange not completely trustless.  You still control your private keys, but you’re relying on the exchange to execute trades for you, leaving the final step of the process somewhat centralized.  Thankfully, the IDEX has introduced the AURA token and their new staking model to solve this issue, so expect the exchange to become even more decentralized as 2018 progresses.

It’s still beholden to the Ethereum blockchain like any Ethereum-powered DEX, and at times of network trouble, users can run into problems.  All things considered, however, IDEX’s design mitigates many of the issues that network congestion can cause for a DEX, and its user experience/interface is cleaner than its competition.  IDEX is a rising star in the decentralized exchange space, and if you like EtherDelta but find yourself exasperated from using it, it’s definitely worth trying out.

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The post IDEX Review: Exploring the 6-Year Old Decentralized Exchange appeared first on CoinCentral.

And with good reason.  Last year alone, we saw a handful of exchanges, such as Bithumb and Youbit, get hit hard by hackers.  Centralized exchanges, while convenient, come with security vulnerabilities that leave coins ripe for the picking if a savvy hacker comes along looking for an easy harvest.  

No investor should unwillingly relinquish the fruits of his/her labor to malicious actors.  Luckily, there are safer alternatives to trading out there to protect your crypto cornucopia from harm, and they go by the name of decentralized exchanges.

DEXs allow you to exchange values from person to person, meaning that you never have to submit your private keys to a third party upon deposit.  With decentralized exchanges, you’re essentially exchanging IOUs with other traders until you wish to withdraw your funds, but with a DEX, you’re always in full control of your private keys and thus your coins.  

So we’ve compiled a list of the more popular DEXs out there so you can take your pick of the litter.  Note: this list is based on rankings per 24/hr trading volume, not based on any objective superiority in design or platform.

EtherDelta

Leading the pack at a $8.5mln in 24/hr volume is EtherDelta, a DEX that specializes in ERC20 tokens. It runs on the Ethereum blockchain, and if you’re looking to trade your ETH for an ERC20, it’ll have any and all tokens you’re looking for.

Deposits and withdrawals into the exchange are managed by smart contracts powered by Ethereum, and all transactions on the exchange (deposits, trades, and withdrawals) require gas to be processed through the network.

EtherDelta also integrates with Meta Mask and the Ledger Nano S, allowing you to send funding directly from these wallets into the exchange’s smart contract.  You can also create a wallet on the exchange’s website–just make sure to write down the private key, because without it, your funds will be stuck in this wallet for none to access.

Out of the three account managing options, creating a new wallet and private key is definitely the least secure.  Ether Delta’s DNS was hacked back in December of 2017, and the hacker phished funds through a fake website that allowed him to key log private keys.  The good news is, if you used a Nano Ledger S or Meta Mask while visiting the fake site, you would’ve been fine–only wallets where the private key was manually entered on the phony site fell prey to the attack.

Besides this security breach, Ether Delta’s Achilles heel is also its greatest strength: the Ethereum network.  The exchange’s smart contracts keep funds especially secured, locking them until they are signed by a user’s private keys, but this also means that the exchange can perform poorly if the Ethereum network is congested.  So if too many people are dropping obscene cash on Crypto Kitties, you might tear your hair out when your trades take hours or don’t go through at all.

IDEX

Coming in behind EtherDelta at $4.7mln in 24/hr volume is IDEX, another Ethereum-powered exchange.  Like its competitor, it offers pretty much every ERC20 token imaginable, funds are managed via smart contracts, and each transaction requires gas.

Unlike EtherDelta, however, IDEX acts as an arbiter for every trade, meaning that the IDEX smart contracts validate transactions before submitting them to the Ethereum network.  This serves a couple of functions.  First, it allows IDEX to quality control orders, making sure that every trade is valid before executing it and keeping a queue of transactions to streamline processing.  Second, IDEX can update account balances off-chain after they submit a transaction, allowing for the convenience of a centralized exchange without sacrificing security.

Generally, IDEX seems to process orders more quickly and efficiently than EtherDelta.  It lags less than EtherDelta, but it’s still beholden to the Ethereum Network like its counterpart.  Moreover, it has other downsides, including a $40 withdrawal minimum and a minimum of $150 for maker orders and $50 for taker trades.

OpenLedger DEX

In third at $1.5mln in 24/hr volume is the OpenLedger DEX.  This decentralized exchange is our first break from the more popular Ethereum options, as it is built on the Bitshares platform.

As a result, if you wanted to use OpenLedger and you already had a Bitshares account, you’d be all set. Alternatively, you can also set up an OpenLedger account or make an OpenLedger wallet.  The latter is a browser wallet, meaning that you’ll only be able to access it from the specific computer you opened the account on.  With the account options, however, you’ll be able to access the DEX from any computer.

A beautiful feature of the accounts: your username serves as your wallet ID.  Cool, right?  This means that you won’t have to keep track of a long-ass string of numerics to access your account.  

Once you’ve set up an accounts or wallet, you’ll be free to use it for trading on the OpenLedger DEX for a variety of coins.  Unlike IDEX or EtherDelta, your choices are not limited to ETH and ERC20 tokens.  You can trade for Bitcoin, altcoins, and even USD/EUR pairs in the form of BITUSD/BITEUR (Bitshare’s fiat-pegged assets).  Considering it’s built on Bitshare’s platform, Bitshare’s coin (BTS) is the DEX’s native coin.

Waves DEX

Coming in last with a 24/hr volume of $1mln we have Waves.  Like OpenLedger, Waves’ DEX offers more than just ERC20 tokens and ETH pairs.  It allows you to trade in USD, EUR, BTC, and WAVES, the Waves platform’s native coin.

If you hadn’t guessed already, we’ll go ahead and spoil it for you: yes, Waves’ DEX is *shockingly* build on Waves’ platform.  So you’d need to download Waves’ wallet before you can access the exchange. The reason is, the wallet integrates with the exchange, allowing you to trade directly from the wallet without having to deposit onto the exchange itself.

Waves set itself apart from other DEXs with its order-matching system.  Thanks to its novel design, all order matching is handled on a centralized server.  This allows users the ordering speed of a centralized exchange with the safety of a decentralized one, as all trades are executed on-chain wallet-to-wallet.  

Rising Stars

Before we conclude this article, it’s worth mentioning a few rising stars in the field that are looking to disrupt the current DEX model:

• Altcoin.io: This DEX will use atomic swaps to facilitate exchange trader-to-trader, offering what could be the most decentralized option available when it goes live.  Users need only deposit funds into altcoin.io’s wallet to begin swapping peer-to-peer.  For comparison, it’s like a decentralized Shapeshift–which is actually not a DEX, though it is often labeled as such.  Altcoin.io recently released a beta version of their product for test net coins only, and the team hopes to have a fully operational version launched in Q1 of 2018.
• 0x: The 0x decentralized exchanging platform is a complete 180 from the typical DEX experience.  With 0x, all orders (and their order book)are managed by an off-chain network layer, while all trades are executed on-chain. Moreover, anyone can run an exchange node to add liquidity to the network, a similar system to the anchors that make up Stellar’s infrastructure.  Lastly, 0x allows developers to build applications on its platform, so it’s similar to Waves or Ethereum in that respect.  
• Loopring: So this isn’t a DEX per se, but rather, a decentralized exchanging protocol.  With Loopring, users have access to orders on any market–decentralized or centralized–that has integrated with Loopring.  This not only gives users access to theoretically bottomless liquidity, but its ring-matching order system strings orders together, allowing for an order ring wherein each trade is responsible for satisfying another in the sequence.

Final Thoughts

There are a handful of other DEXs that we didn’t cover in this article, such as Stellar’s DEX, Bisq, and CryptoBridge.  These simply had lower volumes than the others we covered, as we chose not to cover any DEX under $1mln worth of 24/hr volume.

Each DEX comes with its own pros and cons.  Ethereum-based DEXs like EtherDelta and IDEX, for example, integrate with the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet, and this allows for the most secure trading available.  That said, they’re also the least user-friendly of the bunch, as they can falter from network bloat and congestion.

OpenLedger and Waves, on the other hand, offer more flexible trading pairs.  They may have fewer coins/tokens, but you’re not limited to ETH only trading pairs.  As a trade-off, you don’t have hardware wallet compatibility, and the wallets that you use for trading can be subject to hacking attempts and brute-force password-guessing attacks.

Whatever flavor trader you are, there’s a DEX out there for you to get a taste of.  So try ‘em out, find what you like, and get to trading your decentralized currency on a decentralized platform.

You can find a complete list of decentralized exchanges on inDEX, a project that tracks decentralized exchanges and lists their relevant information.

The post The Competition for the Best Decentralized Exchange in 2023 appeared first on CoinCentral.

Nano hopes to become what Bitcoin, at times, struggles to be: an efficient, viable alternative to fiat currencies.

In Nano’s white paper, the cryptocurrency’s development team raises concerns over the practicality of Bitcoin as a common currency. The concerns are as follows:

• Scalability issues have users facing high transaction fees, with a median fee of $10.38.
• Bitcoin’s high computational latency makes for an average transaction time of 164 minutes.
• Bitcoin’s proof of work consensus uses an estimated 27.28TWh annually, an average of 260KWh per transaction.

Using its own block-lattice structure, Nano wants to succeed where Bitcoin has fallen short. The cryptocurrency promises to deliver zero-fee transactions in real time without the same work-intensive overhead and energy consumption as Bitcoin.

If you think this all sounds too good to be true, pinch yourself and keep reading. In this guide we’ll go over:

• How Nano Works
• The Perks of a Block-Lattice Infrastructure
• Trading History
• Where to Buy Nano
• Where to Store Nano
• Nano Past, Present, and Future
• Final Thoughts
• Additional Resources

How Nano Works

Like IOTA, Nano uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) algorithm, but instead of using DAG for the tangle, the project employs its own novel tech called the block-lattice.

The block-lattice infrastructure operates like a blockchain but with a few key differences. To start, each account on Nano’s protocol has its own blockchain, called an account-chain. Only an account-chain’s user can modify his/her individual chain, and this allows each account-chain to be updated asynchronously of the rest of the block-lattice network.

In effect, this means that you can send and update blocks on your account-chain without relying on the whole network. To achieve this, any funds you send on Nano’s block-lattice require two transactions: a sender transaction and a receiver transaction. In order for a transaction to be settled, the receiving party must sign a block confirming that the funds were received. If only the sending party’s block is signed, a transaction is pended as unsettled. All transactions are sent in User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets, which keep computing costs low and allow senders to transfer funds even if a receiver is offline.

Block-Lattice Ledger

One of the block-lattice’s more attractive features is how its ledger handles and stores transactions. Each Nano transaction is its own block, and each new block replaces the one before it on its user’s account-chain. In order to maintain a proper account history, new blocks take a record of the account holder’s current balance and factor it into the processing transaction.  

To illustrate this, if you were sending NANO to someone, the transaction is verified by taking the difference between the send block and your current balance on the preceding block. On the other end of the transaction, the receive block would then add the amount to its account chain’s preceding block. The end result is a new block that records the updated balance of each user.

Under this system, Nano keeps a record of an account’s balance on its ledger, not a full history of all transactions like traditional distributed ledgers. This means that the Nano network only has to keep a record of each account on its full ledger. Instead of maintaining a record of all prior transactions, the network only stores account balances.

If you haven’t grasped why this may present a solution to Bitcoin’s latency and scalability issues, we’re about to go over some of its benefits below.

The Perks of a Block-Lattice Infrastructure

Improved Latency

Thanks to account-chains, each account and its chain can be updated asynchronously of the entire network. By implementing a dual-transaction mechanism, it’s up to both the receiver and sender of funds to verify a transaction. This eliminates the need for miners entirely and paves the way for instant and feeless transactions.

Scalability Solutions

All transactions on Nano are handled independently from the network’s main chain. They also fit into a single UDP packet and are recorded in their own blocks. Effectively, this does away with blocksize issues because nodes are not responsible for maintaining a comprehensive record of all network transactions. Instead, they only need to store the individual account balances of each account-chain rather than their entire ledger.  

With Bitcoin’s traditional distributed ledger, a transaction cannot be cleared until an entire block is built into the blockchain. These blocks act as comprehensive ledgers for the network’s financial information and include Bitcoin’s entire transaction history. As more information is stored, we’ve seen sluggish transaction times and high fees. Nano’s account-chains make for a lightweight infrastructure. And as a result, the block-lattice offers improved scalability compared to legacy blockchains.

Energy Efficiency and Decentralization

Nano keeps its network secure using a delegated proof of stake model (DPoS) similar to Ark. If any discrepancies arise with conflicting transactions, Nano delegates vote on which transaction to verify as valid. The DPoS offers a number of benefits compared to Bitcoin’s proof of work mechanism.

For one, without miners, Nano safeguards itself from mining attacks and the defacto centralization large mining pools have brought to Bitcoin’s network. Nano delegates hold a stake of its currency, so they are deterred from abusing their power lest they compromise the entire network’s legitimacy and thus their own investment.  

Further, because of the block-lattice structure, delegates only need to verify transactions if a problem arises. As a result, running a node on the Nano network consumes much less energy than if the nodes were operating under a proof of work model.

Trading History

Nano had an impressive rise up, from a price standpoint, at the end of 2017. But the coin has since fallen from grace. During the last two weeks of December that year, the Nano price skyrocketed from around $2.30 (~0.000114 BTC) to an all-time high of about $35.00 (~0.00248 BTC). We’ll do the math for you: a jump of over 1,400 percent in half a month.

Unfortunately, the Nano price has quickly and steadily fallen since reaching that high. You can pick some up for just over $0.95 (~0.00024 BTC)

As a cryptocurrency that’s directly competing with Bitcoin, it’s hard to imagine Nano recovering. The success of Bitcoin’s scaling solutions would most likely mean the end of the coin.

Where to Buy Nano

A good chunk of Nano’s trading occurs on Binance with either BTC or ETH. You can find BTC/NANO and ETH/NANO trading pairs with lower volumes on KuCoin and HitBTC, as well.

Where to Store Nano

The coin currently features two online wallet options (NanoWallet, NanoVault) and three mobile options (NanoWalletCompany, Canoe, NanoBlocks).

If you’re looking for additional security, the Ledger Nano S is another great option.

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Nano Past, Present, and Future

Since its launch in 2015 and re-branding in early 2018, the Nano team has made concerted efforts to develop their project and keep the community updated with their progress. The less-than-ten-person team is led by Colin LeMahieu, a software engineer with ten years experience under his belt.

In March 2018, the team accomplished an important milestone with their creation of Universal Blocks. Previously, the project used four types of blocks. Universal Blocks consolidate those four types into one block type. This milestone brought improved efficiency, more scalability, and opened up the possibility for several other features.

In April 2018, the team re-structured its long-term roadmap.  The web page includes thorough and ever-changing information on Nano’s development in four areas: experience, adoption, wallets, and protocol.

Final Thoughts

Nano could very well provide a working solution to Bitcoin’s scalability and latency issues. It could also significantly cut back on the energy consumption that has come to define proof of work mining.

If cryptocurrency truly wants to become a viable alternative to fiat currency, then we have to stamp out or reconcile the problems Bitcoin presents. If Nano functions as well in practice as it does on paper, you may be buying your pumpkin spiced latte with Nano in the coming years.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated by Steven Buchko on 2.19.19 to reflect the recent changes of the project.

Additional Resources

Website

Twitter

Discord

Github

Reddit

Medium

The post What Is Nano? | A Guide to the Instant, Zero-Fee Cryptocurrency appeared first on CoinCentral.

Siacoin, or Sia for short, provides a decentralized cloud storage option that competes with centralized legacy competitors such as DropBox, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. Using Sia, anyone can host or access encrypted storage through the platform, and all contracts, storage proofs, and transactions are verifiable using the blockchain’s public ledger.

Remember that old Apple marketing campaign when the iPhone was in its infancy and the app store craze was in full swing?  “There’s an app for that.”  Well, blockchain has taken the world for a ride with its own rise in popularity, and as use cases and adoption abound, a similar mantra could ring true: there’s a crypto for that.

Indeed, it seems like development teams are pushing crypto into any existing industry that might have a use case for blockchain. We’ve covered a few of these before, those projects with actual, working services. And, we’ll be covering one of those in more depth with this guide. In this Siacoin guide, we take a look at:

• How Does Siacoin Work?
• Why Sia?
• Siacoin Team and Competitors
• Trading History
• Where to Buy and Store SC
• Siacoin Roadmap
• Final Thoughts
• Additional Siacoin Resources

How Does Siacoin Work?

On a fundamental level, Sia takes cloud storage out of the hands of monolithic providers and puts it back into the hands of individuals. Doing so provides a peer-to-peer storage ecosystem that allows anyone to rent out or take advantage of spare hard drive space.

All services on the network receive Siacoin (SC) payments. And all transactions in the Sia ecosystem are secured through filing contracts and storage proofs.

Storage Ecosystem

Sia’s platform consists of both providers (hosts) and clients (users). Through the platform, users commission storage space from hosts, and the hosts are compensated for their services in Siacoin.  

The ecosystem provides flexible storage options and is largely free-market driven. Providers can set their own prices, advertise their level of reliability, and set standards for penalties should problems arise in storage (such as lost files). Additionally, they can choose to deny a client storage if they’re uncomfortable with the nature of that client’s data (e.g. sensitive, illegal, or ethically questionable materials).

Clients also have a series of protections in place to safeguard their own interests. They have the option to split copies of their data between multiple providers to ensure file security and retrievability. For instance, if a provider were to lose a client’s file or simply refuse to release it, the client could still retrieve their files from another provider’s storage. Both parties can also agree upon contractual penalties that a provider will incur if they don’t provide proof of storage.

Clients have the option to reward providers with uptime incentives on top of the storage fees, as well. With these payments, clients incentivize providers for being more attentive to their needs, which means providing faster document uploads, enhanced upkeep to process requests, etc.

File Contracts

When a client and a provider wish to conduct business, they agree to draft a file contract. While a provider’s hard drive stores all data, Sia’s blockchain stores the contracts for these arrangements.

These file contracts define the terms of a storage agreement and ensure that both parties conduct their business accordingly. Since the contract is stored on the blockchain public ledger, the original arrangement is verifiable and immutable once it has been submitted to the network.

As we went over above, contractual terms are flexible based on circumstance. If a client is willing to sacrifice reliability for affordability, it’s within their right. If a provider wants to charge more for storing mass amounts of data, and the client agrees to the terms of the contract, so be it. Users on the platform must govern their own provider choices based on a host’s reputation and storage requirements. Likewise, a provider must judge whether or not they can accommodate a client based on that client’s needs and demands.

Still, file contracts add a much-needed layer of security to the network. They define the duration of an agreement, how often a provider must submit proof of storage, and an agreed-upon payout.

When you create a contract as a client, you upload a balance of Siacoin into the contract for future payments. Thus, whenever you upload a document for storage, some of the money from this balance is transferred to the host. If you don’t use all of your balance and the terms of a contract end, the remaining coins return to your wallet.

Proof of Storage

Sia implements proof of storage to protect clients from fraudulent or malicious providers. In order to receive payment, a provider must present a certain number of proofs to the network within time frames specified by the terms of the file contract.  

If a provider fails to provide proof of storage within that window of time, the proper payment is sent to a missed proof address until proof is submitted. And, the provider may receive a penalty for their negligence. If a provider misses too many proof of storage mandates, the contract may terminate entirely.

When, however, a provider successfully provides proof of storage, the contract awards payment to a valid proof address. A series of spend conditions must be met before a provider can access these coins, including network signatures and time locks.

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Why Sia?

Sia’s platform offers a number of benefits compared to traditional cloud storage services.

• Privacy: All data processed on Sia’s network is encrypted. Unless a provider has the data’s private key, they cannot access your files, meaning you’re always in complete ownership/control of any materials you commit to storage. Under traditional models, the companies that host cloud storage have complete access to any data you relinquish to their servers.
• Affordability: Siacoin offers flexible, market-driven pricing options for its users. There’s no one-size-fits-all option for clients to choose from. For example, 1TB of data storage using Sia can cost as little as $2 a month, compared to Amazon’s services which run at $23 a month.
• Security: Again, all data on Sia is encrypted and processed through a decentralized network, keeping your material secured from the vulnerabilities of a centralized system. Moreover, Sia offers redundant storage. In splitting documents between multiple providers, Sia protects client data from a single point of failure.

Siacoin Team and Competitors

Sia is a project under Nebulous, Inc. that began in 2015. Unlike most other altcoins, Sia didn’t have a pre-mine and didn’t hold an ICO. Instead, the company has raised funds from First Star Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, and others.

The Boston-based team is led by co-founders David Vorick and Luke Champine. The pair are young, having graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute just five years ago.

Competition

There’s no shortage of decentralized storage systems in the blockchain industry. One competitor, Filecoin, had one of the largest ICOs, raising $257 million. They haven’t released a product yet, though.

Siacoin also competes with Storj and MaidSafe. Sia and Storj approach decentralized storage using similar strategies. However, Sia operates on its own blockchain while Storj is an ERC20 on Ethereum. Currently, SC has the highest market cap out of any of the competitors. 

Trading History

For the most part, the Siacoin price has followed the overall market. It’s had three significant jumps in its history.

The first occurred in the middle of 2016 when the price rose 1150% in less than two months. News of the upcoming v1.0 release in June 2016 most likely caused this growth spurt. Following that, SC fell for the remainder of 2016 and start of 2017.

The next set of meaningful price action was in May/June 2017. This movement directly followed a company update filled with positive news including the publication of a roadmap. In the middle of June, the SC price reached its all-time BTC high of 0.00000843 BTC. 

The most recent SC price jump coincided with the 2017 bull run in which it hit an all-time USD price of $0.10. Like most crypto-assets, Siacoin was hit hard in the 2018 correction. It seems to have currently found some support at around $0.002 (0.00000062 BTC).

With a product already in the market, increased adoption will have the most direct effect on the price. A few major partnership announcements could help as well. If past performance is any indicator of future results, though, it may take a market turnaround to get this coin moving.

Where to Buy and Store SC

You can buy Siacoin in either BTC or ETH trading pairs from Binance and Bittrex.  The former houses the bulk of SC trading with around 25 percent of the daily volume.

You also have mining as another method of obtaining some SC. Your two primary options for SC mining pools are Luxor and SiaMining.

There are two types of wallets made available by the Sia team. The first, Sia Daemon, is a command line interface (CLI) wallet available on Mac, Windows, and Linux. If you’re not tech-savvy, you should avoid this wallet. The second wallet is Sia UI. This graphical user interface (GUI) wallet is easier to use than Sia Daemon. 

Siacoin Roadmap

The Siacoin roadmap is publically available, so you can stay on top of whatever they’re currently working on. Right now in the short term, the team is looking to completely overhaul their user interface as well as add support for video streaming.

In the medium-to-long term, they plan to:

• Add simple file sharing (inside and outside Sia network)
• Support larger files (>10 TB) and tiny files (~100kb)
• Enable file recovery via wallet seed
• Create mobile wallets and light clients
• Much, much more

Final Thoughts

Siacoin is a refreshing project in a space that is full of promises, vapourware, and unproven products. The Sia team actually has a product that you can access today, and while there’s still room for improvement as the roadmap suggests, the service is still up and running.

Further, Sia offers a more flexible storage option for its users compared to other cloud storage providers. Its peer-to-peer ecosystem is directly in line with the decentralized, liberating nature of blockchain technology. The project’s endgame “is to become the storage layer of the decentralized internet, ensuring privacy and redundancy through decentralization, and entirely replacing existing cloud storage providers.”  

So as Sia–and blockchain–mature, we’ll see if it can cut out the middleman and achieve its long-term goal as the new industry standard for cloud storage.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated by Steven Buchko on 2.14.19 to reflect the recent changes of the project.

Additional Siacoin Resources

Website

Whitepaper

Roadmap

Blog

Discord

Gitlab

Twitter

The post What Is Siacoin (SC)? | A Guide to Decentralized Cloud Storage appeared first on CoinCentral.

Civic is a personal identity verification protocol that leverages distributed ledger technology to better manage digital identities. As with blockchain projects focusing on quality verification for consumer products, Civic envisions a safer, cheaper, more efficient identity verification method for individuals and industries around the globe.

Imagine how many times you’ve had to go through a Know Your Customer (KYC) verification process. Whenever you apply for a new job, open a bank account, or participate in an ICO, you have to submit proof of identity and wait for it to be verified. Depending on the service, this could take days or weeks, as organizations have to spend the time and resources authenticating this information with outdated systems.

Civic offers a new-age solution to this problem, one where a single input of your personal identity information allows any organization or service to cross-check it on the blockchain without asking you to provide the same data twice–personal identity verification that is transferable from one service to another.

In this Civic guide, we cover what you need to know, including:

• How Does Civic Work?
• Civic Team and Roadmap
• Trading
• Where to Buy CVC
• Where to Store CVC
• Final Thoughts
• Additional Civic Resources

How Does Civic Work?

Civic’s network accommodates three different–but interdependent–entities: users, validators, and service providers. The users are anyone who wishes to use the protocol to register an identity. Civic makes this easy and safe with its Secure Identity app.

Validators are responsible for verifying an identity’s authenticity on the blockchain’s distributed ledger. They can then sell this information to service providers who need to verify their customer’s identities, exchanging the data for CVC. Civic is built on the Ethereum blockchain and uses smart contracts to oversee data attestation and payout for this work.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XDGX41nr1o]

Secure Identity App

To get started with Civic, you need to download the Secure Identity app, either in its mobile or web form (or both). Setting up the application, you enter a variety of personal identity information, including your name, address, social security or tax identification number, passport number, driver’s license, etc. Without utilizing usernames and password, multi-factor biometrics, such as fingerprint scan, secure the application to keep it fully in your control.

The application also encrypts personal information with a private key issued by a third party wallet. This encryption provides a buffer between Civic and its users, giving you the peace of mind that Civic won’t access personal identity info without your consent.

In fact, Civic doesn’t store any personal information on the blockchain directly. Instead, it stores attestations of this information for reference. Storing references to the data instead of the data itself ensures that you are always in control of your own sensitive identity information while also providing proof that the validators have confirmed the authenticity of your data.

Secure Identity Platform and Ecosystem

As we went over earlier, validators and service providers make up the other half of the network. Whereas the Civic app accommodates users on the front-end, validators and providers are responsible for back-end services. These services include identity attestation and KYC confirmation.

Validators are responsible for verifying identities for the network, both on the blockchain and for service providers. If you want to submit personal identifying information to a service provider (e.g., an exchange, a bank, etc.), you submit the relevant info from your Civic app to a validation contract. These smart contracts act as escrow services for the transaction and provide validators with the identity data. After attesting that the information is authentic, the validators hash it onto the network. 

Something to note: a validator could be the service provider itself, and for a user identity’s first commit to the network, it likely would be. Moreover, in order to confirm a user’s identity, validators need to crosscheck their information with some other source (e.g., public records, financial records). A government, for example, would provide a wealth of information as an identity authenticator.

CVC Token and Civic Marketplace (Identity)

Once a validator verifies identity information, other service providers can buy access rights to this information on behalf of a user with CVC, Civic’s utility token. Validators can also sell rights to the information, with the user’s consent, on the Civic Marketplace, recently branded Identity. When a service provider pays for identity information, the CVC is placed in a validation contract. And, once the validator provides proof of the identity information, both it and the user receive CVC in return. This service is flexible, too, as validators can pick and choose which information to verify per a service provider’s request.

Say a service provider, like a credit score company, needs access to a client’s credit history and bank account information. After communicating with the user, the service provider would submit a data request to a prior validator, maybe a credit card company, bank, or other financial institution. This validator would retrieve the hash for the requested information from the blockchain to attest it with the information that the client currently provides. If everything checks out, the validator is paid for these services (as is the user) and the service provider approves the client’s identity.

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Civic Team and Roadmap

Co-founder and CEO Vinny Lingham is a serial entrepreneur with over ten years of e-commerce experience. A member of the Bitcoin Foundation, he’s also one of the sharks on Shark Tank South Africa.

Jonathan Smith, the project’s CTO and co-founder, has more than 15 years of experience with developing, technical analytics, and management for entities like Deloitte and RBS.

Civic already has a working product in its web and mobile app. And if you wanted to today, you could submit information to the network for attestation–so long as there’s a validator to verify it. In the 3rd quarter of 2018, the team rebranded the Civic Marketplace to Identity as well as implemented smart contracts and added support for fiat rates. 

It seems that the team’s focus has shifted from the core Civic offering to the Identity marketplace. The roadmap for the final quarter of 2018 included open-sourcing Identity and providing a Validator Toolkit. However, it appears that neither of those tasks has been accomplished yet. 

In 2019, the team plans to create Requester and Credential Wallet Toolkits. And, their ultimate goal is to have Identity fully launched sometime in the second quarter.

Competitors

Because Civic is an identity management solution, it’s two largest blockchain competitors are SelfKey (KEY) and THEKEY (TKY). As you probably figured out, Civic’s biggest differentiator from the other two is the absence of the word key from its name. Jokes aside, even though all three projects focus on identity management, they go about it in different ways.

Civic and SelfKey utilize the Ethereum blockchain while THEKEY sits atop NEO. It should come as no surprise, then, that THEKEY is more focused on the Asian market than the other two. Civic also emphasizes the use of biometrics which the other two competitors don’t share.  

Trading

The CVC token trading history has been disappointing, even considering the current bear market. After reaching $0.65 (~0.000183 BTC), its all-time high BTC value, one short month after launching, its done nothing but fallen. Although CVC’s USD value rose during the 2017 bull market, its BTC value didn’t come anywhere near its former high, demonstrating a poorer performance than the rest of the market.  

Even the project’s highly publicized (and most likely expensive) purchase of Identity.com in July 2018 couldn’t help the price. The CVC price is currently trading around $0.05 (~0.0000141 BTC).

CVC derives its value from activity on the Identity marketplace. Until this product goes live, it’s difficult to see the price gaining any traction. However, news of a partnership with a notable corporation or government entity could give this project the kickstart it needs.

Where to Buy CVC

Binance dominates the CVC market, accounting for almost 50 percent of the token’s 24-hour volume in either BTC or ETH. Bittrex and Huobi are two other popular options.

Where to Store CVC

As an ERC20 token, you can store CVC in an Ethereum wallet. Your choices include MyEtherWallet, Ledger Nano S, Trezor, and MetaMask, to name a few.

Final Thoughts

With Civic, reusable KYC and personal identity information could streamline identity verification for any relevant service. Service providers don’t have to expend the effort and money to verify a user’s identity. As long as a validator on the network has done the legwork for them, they only need to pay a fee in Civic to have the information process in real time. Users also don’t have to recommit the same information to different organizations in tireless succession–saving additional time and effort.

Behind all of this is the promise of greater identity security and integrity. The Civic app’s encryption and biometric locking mechanisms give users complete control over their identities, while the blockchain’s own encryption and distributed nature keep this information free from theft and exposure without user consent.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated by Steven Buchko on 1.16.19 to reflect the recent changes of the project.

Additional Civic Resources

Website

Twitter

Telegram

Reddit

Blog

The post What Is Civic (CVC)? | A Guide to Blockchain Identity Verification appeared first on CoinCentral.