Your Crypto News on Steemit January 20, 2018

• Crypto-Ruble should come in mid-2019!
• Decentralized Accounting: Blockchain is Our Future!
• Botnet: Mirai's Successor Satori targets Ethereum Miner!
• Otcrit Platform: Exchange of Reports and Cryptocurrencies!
• For IBM, a Golden Age is coming now!
• The Protection of Privacy - Part 3 (Zcash)

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The launch of the state-controlled cryptocurrency Crypto-Ruble has now been announced for mid-next year. An attempt to bring the crypto trade in controlled areas.

As can be seen from a statement by the Russian Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Association, the Crypto-Ruble is expected to come next year. However, the proposed means of payment is not a separate cryptocurrency. Rather, the Crypto-Ruble should be a digital copy of the analogue ruble.

The authorities are hoping for some benefits from this digitization of the currency. By attaching to the ruble, the authorities want to prevent first, that the cryptocurrency is subject to speculation. In addition, the authorities want to record all transactions in a closed network. To this end, the authorities can trace back any payment transactions with the "cryptocurrency". Chairman of the Russian Crypto and Blockchain Association Arseniy Shcheltsin said in the publication that the launch of the cryptocurrency is intended above all to improve the efficiency of payment transactions within public institutions.

Another advantage the government hopes foreign investors can invest in Russian projects without much effort. As a result, they also want to remain connected to the field of digital currencies with a possible exchange of cryptocurrencies in the Crypto-Ruble.

The relevant draft laws are expected to come in November of this year. Both the Central Bank, the Ministry of Communications and the Board of Directors around Putin must agree by then.

Crypto-Ruble: attempt to re-centralize

The current events in Russia, much as in South Korea, show a disagreement in government circles, especially in terms of cryptocurrencies and their regulation. While public figures in Russia condemned Bitcoin & Co., the legalization of crypto-commerce was recently debated. But this is only limited - after all, trade should only take place on centrally controlled platforms. What is being attempted here is ultimately a re-centralization of decentralized processes. It remains to be seen whether the central institutions will prevail with their attempts to regulate.

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The process is counter to our need for central registers and instances. But the technology made famous by Bitcoin places the net back in our hands.

When, in the 34th century, the first cuneiform tablets were filled with centralized registers of land sales, government revenue and credit, the process of centralized accounting that has shaped our culture to such an extent that we consider it immutable emerged: trust in key business we are a central authority, a central book. If one farmer buys a field from another, this transaction is now kept in a register, just like in ancient Egypt. This land register takes its unassailable position from the fact that it is led by (hopefully) incorruptible officials. These in turn represent the power of the state, which in the best case is even democratically legitimized. The principle of state central trust is enormously practical. It has given us identity cards and passports that allow us to travel and prove who we are and to which people we belong. Because immigration officials do not trust us, but the authority that issued the passport.

With the emergence of banking, managing such centralized registers turned out to be a business model: not the state, but a for-profit company keeps our account. It makes it possible to do business with people or companies who do not know us at all and live at the other end of the world. The bank posts an amount from my account and adds it to my business partner's account; the business is settled. This works because the recipient of the money trusts that the bank would pay him in cash the increase in his account on demand. As long as you do not want too many account holders at the same time, the banking system works.

With digitalization, over the past 20 years, new, profitable business models have emerged in the area of ​​centralized trusted instances, which in no time have created the most valuable companies of all time: Google and Facebook. Our trust in central authorities over millennia allows us to assume that the search query "buy bikes" on Google provides the most relevant results. Even though we actually know that Google is a stock corporation and presents us with the search results that will make it the most profitable. We also know that Facebook delivers subjective and partially sponsored opinions in its newsfeed. Nevertheless, Facebook can influence the outcome of elections and thus our lives. Facebook has become the central source of information. This shows that central authorities in a digital world become a problem when they are not committed to the common good but to profit.

It is unlikely that Google and Facebook, or even Amazon, Uber, Airbnb will be nationalized, decide to serve only the good of humanity from now on. So a solution has to be found in which the new needs of humanity - search, digital identity, Internet commerce, exchange of information - are met without central authority and yet neutral and truthful.

Although such a solution exists in the form of blockchain technology, it is difficult for us to get involved in it because we are still looking for the central instance for cultural reasons. However, that does not exist in the blockchain. A blockchain, like the land register or the old cuneiform tablet, is a register in which all transactions are written down chronologically. Thus the blockchain, like the bank or land registry, is a source of truth. Only the type of accounting changes. Not a central state or private-sector authority generates the trust, but the consensus between as many bookkeepers as possible.

In a blockchain each accountant keeps an exact copy of the complete book. A new transaction can only take place if the accountants agree to add it to the book. Of course, the accountants must check that the transaction is legal. For this they must understand whether z. B. the seller of a country is registered as the owner at all. If consensus is reached, all accountants are required to add the new transaction to their copy of the book so that they all have an identical book again. This decentralized book is called blockchain.

This is the real alternative to the banking system

Subjectively, the process sounds anarchic and untrustworthy. Objectively, however, a hacker, a crazy bank employee or a system failure are enough to plunder an account in a normal bank account. On a blockchain, the hacker may be able to attack an accountant, but not thousands at the same time. The system is safer. It just contradicts our need for centralized instances.

The blockchain technology has received great attention via Bitcoin. In this blockchain, since 2008, all transactions have been continuously audited and recorded by thousands of accountants. To transfer a Bitcoin to someone at the other end of the world, all I need is his account number (and of course a Bitcoin on my account). This works without a bank, and the recipient can trust that he has received a real Bitcoin because thousands of accountants will always confirm that he is the legitimate owner of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have not rocked the international banking system. However, the excited comments of the bank managers show that real alternatives to the established system arise here.

Similarly, it will soon be behaving with many central services on the Internet: the alternative taxi network will connect the driver directly with the passenger, the alternative hotel network tenants and landlords. This is possible because the data is no longer centrally accessible to a company, but accessible to everyone and stored transparently in decentralized blockchains. Every taxi service in the world can then access this data and offer its services. However, none of the services has more exclusive access to the data.

It's worth watching the activities, because they will put the Internet back in the hands of the users and make every one of them the master of their data. Provided we learn to trust without central authority.

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A new version of the Satori botnet, a successor to Mirai, steals the revenues of the operators on mining machines. The malicious code probably abuses weak spots in the software Claymore.

Satori, the successor to the infamous IoT botnet Mirai, has recently targeted computers that are digging cryptocurrencies. New are attacks on mining rigs for the currency Ethereum. This is the first time that online criminals have targeted Ethereum on a large scale.

The botnet has been abusing a vulnerability in the Claymore mining software since January 8th. This is used by users in mining pools to mine the cryptocurrencies Ethereum and Decred. The malicious code swaps the wallet address of the victims without further ado, resulting in the computers digging unnoticed for the mastermind of the botnet. Thus, the attackers have earned just over 2 ETH (currently just under 2300 USD). It is estimated that the attackers have up to a hundred computers under their control.

Go on, there is nothing to see here

Security researchers at the Chinese company Netlab 360 became aware of the attacks. They assume that the botnet malicious code is a new version of the already well-known Satori malware. The vulnerability in Claymore is exactly exploited to put the mining systems in the botnet, the researchers said. Several holes in the software would theoretically be in question.

The masterminds of the botnet make good use of the computing power of their victims. (Image: Dwarfpool / Fabian A. Scherschel)

Funnily enough, the "developer" of the malicious code thinks its software is doing "no evil" and has left an e-mail address under which he should be contactable.

His statement is obviously incorrect because the software redirects the proceeds to other wallets; Apart from the fact that she obviously uninvited nestles on the systems.

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The crypto economy is growing at unprecedented speed and the market could soon reach a market cap of $ 1 trillion. However, a major problem in this industry is the lack of transparency and authentic information. The European start-up Otcrit therefore wants to position itself with a new approach in the field of crypto currency exchanges.

The Otcrit platform allows experts and crypto enthusiasts to share their expertise. Users receive valuable insights in crypto currencies and ICOs. Projects that receive the best ratings from the community and analysts are listed on the Otcritex Exchange.

Users have access to a wealth of detailed technical analysis and reports in the form of reports. With this information density, Otcrit aims to take cryptocurrency trading to a new level and make it possible to distinguish innovative projects from fraudulent scams.

The team will go online with the beta version following the pre-sale, which begins on February 15, 2018. After the release, the Otcrit platform will be available to the entire community, sharing their knowledge, networking and reporting.

The features of the platform will be very comprehensive:

• Otcrit will create a large database of all companies and their team members, in which users can get an accurate picture of the respective projects, founders, developers and partnerships.
• It integrates a calendar and a newsfeed that informs about all important events that affect courses.
• The platform will also list the Otcrit Top 100 Index - a cryptocurrency index that only includes the best cryptocurrencies and ICOs.

The founders want to make trading via the platform more widely available - without high spreads. Rather, the community is financially involved: 10% of the trading fee, subscription and benchmark profit goes to all OTC token holders. These distributions are paid weekly in ETH. The team also has a comprehensive $ 2 million bounty program that distributes OTC tokens to content creators.

Disclaimer: The information presented in this post is not a recommendation for purchase or sale. It is only an opinion of me the author. They serve merely to describe the project and are not to be understood as an investment analysis.

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IBM is future-oriented and plays successfully in every hot IT topic: AI, cloud, data security, blockchain.

IBM, a global corporation in transition, was in a sales hole for a long time. Despite the fact that the group for the first time in six years shows a sales increase, the stock falls off. A sign of investor short-sightedness, as IBM has positioned itself well for the future.

The days of large computers and mainframe systems are over, not only in the IT world, but also in BigBlue007. Although IBM has long been active in the direction of quantum computers, Wall Street still seems to rate the US company on the basis of past standards. That IBM has not stuck in the old hardware world, but has become a fixture in the cloud market, seems not to have arrived. In other words, the slump in the share price can not be explained in the last quarter despite a four percent increase in sales. After 23 quarters of sales stagnation and now a positive forecast, the share fell 3.5% after the close in New York. The future bets of CEO Ginny Rometti will be very successful over the next few years.

IBM and the cloud market

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty. Now close, strategic partners in the cloud and AI market. (Photo: IBM)

IBM announces more than 30 percent revenue growth in the cloud segment in the last quarter. Last year, the Group converted 17 billion with the cloud, 5.5 billion of them in the last quarter of the year alone. Fittingly, IBM today announces a strategic cooperation with Salesforce and becomes the preferred cloud provider for the CRM giant.

IBM now operates 60 data centers worldwide for its cloud in 19 countries. At the same time, the Group is stuck in the cloud in just about any future topic: Internet of Things, Blockchain or AI with the KI platform Watson.

AI: IBM's all-rounder Watson

With Watson, IBM has created an AI platform that is today one of the leading self-learning systems. Through ready-to-use SaaS solutions or through API, big companies like Salesforce use Watson's artificial intelligence for their own cloud platforms or software products. IBM uses data from many of its own and external sources: commerce, weather, healthcare or industrial production. Recently, IBM holds a patent that allows an intelligent cloud to manage and plan its own resources. IBM's patent wealth is a chapter in itself, more than 100,000 holds the group and is again with around 9,000 patents front-runner in the US Patent Office. 1,900 patents deal with the cloud, and some with the blockchain.

IBM and the blockchain technology

The fact that IBM is at the forefront of the blockchain theme seems to know the whole IT world but not the stock market. In a survey of founders, CEOs, and IT experts by Juniper Research, IBM took first place when asked about the company that has worked most successfully with the blockchain.

With UBS and Commerzbank, IBM is working on a blockchain solution for international trading, with Maersk shipping company on a similar solution for the transport of goods by container ship. In the grocery market, IBM is working with Unilever, Nestle and Dole on a block chain for the food industry. Just recently, the company launched Walmart and Chinese giant Jd.com, the first blockchain for more food safety in the food industry.

The IBM annual and quarterly results

Quarterly sales increased four percent to $ 22.5 billion, and IBM expects sales to increase each quarter next year. The good last quarter was not quite enough to compensate for losses in sales of the previous period: The year ends at a total of 79.1 billion US dollars, with a drop in sales of about one percent.

The fact that the stock still sinks despite positive sales performance and years of increase in the dividend disbursements probably depends on two factors: First, a tax reform of US President Trump, the company by revaluations at a loss of 5.5 billion US dollars so that the overall result of 2017 ended with a loss of 1.05 billion. Instead of a profit of 4.45 billion. On the other hand, this depends on the short-sightedness of investors who do not appreciate how forward-looking IBM is positioned. The Handelsblatt quotes the analyst David Bahnsen of the Hightower Bahnsen Group, which assumes that the entire growth area around cloud, artificial intelligence, blockchain and software is not even priced by the market.

Around 46 percent of IBM's revenue is made up of the new technologies, and the share is rising in leaps and bounds. The recently announced strategic partnership for Salesforce's flagship KI platform Einstein is a sign of future growth. Rometti's long-term planning is now on its way, and IBM will once again embark on a Golden Age.

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About the column

In this column I take a closer look at one aspect of cryptocurrencies: the protection of privacy. In each issue, I'll take a closer look at a cryptocurrency and see how the privacy of the user is protected.

Introduction

Zcash (ZEC) is an innovative cryptocurrency that allows users to optionally keep their transactions secret. Let's take a look at how Zcash works and how it really is about privacy.

Particularities

In many ways, Zcash is similar to Bitcoin. The biggest difference is the application of Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) in the Zcash protocol. The ZKP is a relatively new breakthrough in cryptography. In Zcash, the correctness of a transaction can be mathematically proven without revealing its content. The ZKPs allow a black box in the blockchain where the owners and the property itself are completely invisible.

In a hidden transaction, the mathematical proof of their validity is then calculated using the so-called zk-SNARKs. For this you send an amount to a secret address (also called Shielded Address). Shielded Addresses start with a "z".

The creation of the Genesis Block on October 28, 2016 is also exceptional for a blockchain project. Due to the ZKPs, the team went through a "Trusted Setup" behind Zcash. A ceremony was carried out in which public parameters were generated in front of the public and secured so that no hack could happen. The English podcast RadioLab has published an interesting episode about the history of the ceremony. The creation of public parameters produced as a by-product so-called "toxic waste". With this waste, a hacker could generate as many new coins as he likes. The last step of the ceremony was therefore to destroy the used computers.

Zcash is the name of The Zcash Company, which attracted well-known investors and cooperation partners for its technology. So Zcash advertises with Gavin Andresen and Vitalik Buterin as Adviser and Roger Ver as an investor on their homepage. Also, the big US bank JPMorgan 2017 showed interest in the possibilities offered by Zero Knowledge Proofs for their own blockchain platform. After all, privacy is also important for commercial commerce, as a company is unlikely to want the competition to track transactional traffic.

Weaknesses

The biggest burden for Zcash at the moment is the hardware requirement to generate a Zero Knowledge Proof. The task requires four gigabytes of random access memory (RAM) and just under two minutes of computation time. Users who do not have the hardware they need, for example because they have an older phone, can not effectively make private transactions.

A fundamental weakness of Zcash is the optional privacy. A sound currency makes it impossible to determine its value based on the history of a given coin. When $ ZEC is sent from a Shielded Address to a Transparent Address, the blockchain indicates that the coins came from the black box. Zcash is therefore not completely fungible.

A certain degree of centralization in the form of the Zcash Company, in contrast to the open-source project approach of Bitcoin, for example, can also be considered critical. The Zcash protocol also includes a so-called Founder's Reward. He will pay the Zcash team 10% of the final money of 21 million ZEC within four years, that is 2.1 million ZEC.

Current state of the technology (Development)

Zero Knowledge Proofs are relatively new and computationally intensive. For Zcash, there is no mobile wallet yet with the ability to make a hidden transaction. The technical requirements are still disproportionate to the current development of technology. This is also reflected in moderate use of shielded transactions.

Zk-SNARKs encounter open ears in the blockchain world. The Metropolis update also brings the zk-SNARKs to the Ethereum blockchain.

View in the future

The Sapling update scheduled for 2018 is expected to reduce the hardware requirements for zero knowledge proofing by 80% of the time required (from 37 seconds to 7 seconds) and 98% of RAM required (from 4 GB to 40 MB). This update resolves the issues listed above. 2018 can be a significant year for Zcash. In general, it can be said that the zk-SNARKS are better researched and used more efficiently as time goes by.

I personally find it interesting to set up a blockchain based entirely on ZKPs - that is, every transaction is hidden. So far, it has not been technically possible to run a blockchain with only Shielded Transactions, but maybe this will be possible in a few years.

Summary

Zcash is a unique project because it brings a new cryptographic achievement to the game: the Zero Knowledge Proof. This technology is not yet fully developed and currently needs, as of January 2018, many resources. The Zcash Company is the driving force behind the project, looking for solutions to the existing inefficiencies. Not everything in Zcash is invisible to a third party. If you want to stay completely private, you should only use Shielded Transactions.

If you like to read Part 1 (Bitcoin) just click HERE!

If you like to read Part 2 (Monero) just click HERE!

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@danyelk