Summary

Nicehash is an excellent platform for people looking for multipool mining or a way to buy and sell hashpower. The platform is very transparent about its business and has built up a solid reputation over the past three years.

It is not all that easy to find a legitimate cryptocurrency cloud mining service. Nicehash is one of the few companies people can trust these days. The platform specializes in cloud mining, hash rental services, and multipool mining. It is refreshing to see legitimate companies pop up now and the in the landscape filled with Ponzi Schemes. Now is a good time to look at what Nicehash offers to its customers and why they are so successful.

Most cryptocurrency cloud mining scams ask users to make a Bitcoin investment, so they can earn a passive income. Unfortunately, a lot of those are Ponzi schemes. However, Nicehash is doing things in a professional manner and without putting users at risk of losing any funds. In fact, they are one of a handful of legitimate companies in the world of cryptocurrency cloud mining.

Nicehash first came to the market in April of 2014 and has quickly grown to be one of the most reliable online mining hashrate marketplaces in the world. The company specializes in added-value services for miners, traders, and investors alike. Providing customer support services helped Nicehash achieve success. So far, the team is doing an outstanding job in this regard, as they have no negative reviews.

What makes NiceHash so unique is how they let users buy and sell hashing power on demand. Contracts can run for as little as one hour, and the maximum duration can be agreed upon by the buyer and seller. The platforms marketplace is filled with available orders, which can be filtered based on mining algorithm, and geographical locations. Reducing latency between the miner and the mining pool is of the utmost importance to maximize potential earnings.

It is worth mentioning Nicehash is not the only company providing a cryptocurrency mining hashrate marketplace. Mining Rig Rentals is one of their main competitors in this space, as they provide a powerful service as well. It is good to see competing peer-to-peer mining hashpower rental marketplaces. Competitionallows for far more flexibility than one would get through traditional cloud mining.

Nicehash also provides users with their own mining software clients, which is a nice addition. Plus, their own multipool servers allow miners to point their eligible hardware to the pool and earn mining revenue in the process. Nicehash supports a few dozen mining algorithms, including X11, Scrypt, Keccak, Decred, Cryptonight, and Pascal. Pointing aminer at this pool allows users to earn revenue without having to worry about anything, as earnings are calculated and paid out automatically.

The main question is whether or not miners should sell their hashpower or point it to the multipool. It heavily depends on how much risk one is willing to take. Using the multipool means investing in the mined coins, which can be a financial risk.One could always rent out the hashpower and keep mining the multipool as long as the contract is not picked up by a buyer. That way, users can get the best of both worlds.

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Cryptocurrency Hash Rental Service Review Nicehash - The Merkle

It was announced recently from ElliottWaveTrader.net (EWT), a live Trading Room of market analysis, based on Elliott Wave principle, that due to high demand and many requests, they will start a cryptocurrency service based onElliott Wave analysis. To lead this new service, the firm has brought on Ryan Wilday.

Ryan has over 17 years experience trading equities, futures, and options. He was introduced to cryptocurrency in 2013 by a programmer friend and began mining and trading shortly thereafter.

The EWT team stated:

Though he read Prechters Elliott Wave Principle in the early 2000s, he didnt make practical use of the theory until joining EWT in 2015. Today he melds his deep knowledge of the cryptocurrency market with Elliott Wave theory and Fibonacci Pinball.

Ryans service will be opening in August of 2017, more information will be forthcoming on the launch.

ElliottWaveTrader benefits traders looking to anticipate the direction of U.S. & world equity indices, stocks, bonds, precious metals, energy & forex over a time horizon of several days to several months.

The site also features insights and interaction by its community of traders, many of them professionals, as members are encouraged to post questions and contribute their own analysis in the interactive room.

How the cryptocurrency market and certain assets within react to Elliot Wave analysis will be quite interesting to observe.

Read more here:
ElliottWaveTrader launching cryptocurrency service - CryptoNinjas - CryptoNinjas

News world

The South Korean government is expected to consider legislation that is intended to increase consumer trust in cryptocurrencies.

South Korean lawmakers will be presenting several bills that will affect the legal status of cryptocurrencies. According to the Korea Herald, Rep. Park Yong-jin of the Democratic Party stated on July 3, 2017 that he will introduce three revisions in July that will build a set of regulatory frameworks for digital currencies. According to Park, the legislation is intended to fill the void of a state-led protection that guarantees digital currencys value, and eradicate the possibility of wreaking havoc on national economy from digital currency bubble burst.

One bill aims to revise the Electronic Financial Transactions Act. If approved, the bill will require traders, brokers, and other businesses involved in cryptocurrency transactions to get regulatory approval from the Financial Services Commission, maintain data processing facilities, and have at least 500 million won ($436,300) in capital.

Tax laws will also be revised to allow Korean financial authorities to pursue tax evaders who do not pay income or corporate tax from digital currency transactions. According to Park and the Financial Supervisory Service, although virtual currency exchanges hold a large amount of market power in the countrys cryptocurrency space, there is no legal ground for their business.

The move for more robust regulation comes after a mishap with South Korean exchange Yapizon, when it fell victim to a massive bitcoin heist in April. In the incident, a hacker swiped four hot wallets and made off with 3831 bitcoin, which at the time totaled to about $5 million. To resolve the problem, Yapizon implemented a clever accounting scheme in which it essentially provided users with IOUs. At the time of the occurrence, the South Korean government authorities lacked regulation to handle such calamities. Parks proposals lookto fill this void and increase trust in one of South Koreas emerging markets.

Cryptocurrency investments have also been on the rise in East Asian markets. To promote growth and innovation in FinTech companies operating in foreign exchange markets, the South Korean Ministry of Strategy and Finance in May decided to revamp capital requirements, which will go into effect July 18.

Dan is a US Army veteran and Los Angeles-based writer passionate about science and technology, current events, human rights, economic impacts, and strategic calculus. Dan is a full time staff writer for ETHNews and holds value in Ether.

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South Korea Will Introduce Legislation To Legalize Cryptocurrencies - ETHNews

Cryptocurrency lending is about to boom. Today, crypto-currency lending is a field that does not have a plausible service provider due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of crypto-currency. The underlying issue with crypto-lending is the repayments of loans. How do people that do not know each other trust each other?

Trustless lending. ETHLend is a decentralized crypto-currency lending application that runs on Ethereum network, which is accessible through MetaMask, an Ethereum network browser. ETHLend solves the issue of trust by allowing the borrower to secure a crypto-loan with ERC-20 compatible Ethereum-based tokens. ERC-20 tokens can represent any value (such as shares or commodities). If the borrower does not repay the loan, the pledged tokens are transferred to the lender, who can sell the tokens on exchange to regain any losses.

Today, tokens are used mainly for fundraising. However, there are tokens that represent value from the real world, such as the DigixDAO token. Each DigixDAO token represents 1 gram of gold by tokenization. Even if tokens are associated with volatility, factually tokens are sufficient for securing a loan. First, the market price of tokens are usually available at different exchanges. Secondly, the volatility can be assessed and taken into account.

Alternatively, ETHLend provides another option, where the borrower can use Ethereum Name Service domain (ENS domain) as a collateral for the loan. ENS domains by design locks Ether (ETH) when the domain name is auctioned. Since ENS domains are transferrable, they can be easily used as a collateral against Ether loans. For example, borrower has ENS domain that has locked 10 ETH. The borrower cannot use this locked Ether. However, the borrower can pledge this domain for a loan to receive 10 ETH. If the borrower does not repay the loan back, the ENS domain is transferred to the lender (who can auction it to regain any losses).

Decentralized lending removes barriers and lowers costs on interest. ETHLend aims to provide a global liquidity pool between peers. The decentralized model and the use of crypto-currency is the proper solution to achieve ETHLends goal. Global liquidity pool means that a borrower in the US would not be limited solely to local lenders and US banks. Instead, the borrower can access funding from all parts of the world, such as Asia and Europe. Moreover, ETHLend wants to remind that there is 2 billion people without the access to any banking system. Lending crypto-currency would mean additionally access to finance for the unbanked.

Big plans for ETHLend. According to the white paper, there are lot of technical upgrades coming up for ETHLend, such as unsecured lending where borrower does not need a collateral to get a loan. Moreover, lending reputation system is about to be launched, where the borrower is rewarded with ETHLends native Credit Token (CRE), which can be used as a collateral by sparing other ERC-20 tokens.

We interviewed the Founder of ETHLend, a law student from Finland and a blockchain developer, to get more insights over the project.

Who are the people behind ETHLend?

We are a dedicated team of 14 people. We are working hard to provide blockchain technology for the mainstream. We want to democratize lending. This means that we want to remove interest rate differences between different countries and provide liquidity to lower interest rates in general. This would mean that borrowers would pay less in interest costs when there is more competition in a global scale. Moreover, we want to serve people that the banks are not serving due to the lack of banking infrastructure.

Is lending secure on ETHLend?

ETHLend is a decentralized application that runs on Ethereum blockchain network. We use Smart Contracts for the loan transactions. This means that each loan that is deployed on Ethereum blockchain cannot be changed, stopped or compromised by a third party (not even ETHLend).

Moreover, since all transactions are decentralized, we do not hold any assets or data. All assets such as ETH, ERC-20 tokens or ENS domains are held by the Smart Contracts. Any lender or borrower can explore loans on blockexplorer, therefore we are transparent by design.

What crypto-currencies can I borrow and lend?

Now, Ether (ETH) lending is available. We chose to use ETH since that is the native token of the Ethereum network that we have built our application on. We are planning to add other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and other altcoins. To get ETHLend to the mainstream, we think that Bitcoin is essential.

Why did you build on top of Ethereum network?

We decided to use Ethereum for three reasons. First, Ethereum has well established Smart Contracts, which allows to perform complex transactions such as lending and handling the collateral. Secondly, by using ETH, we do not have to communicate with two blockchains, which would not be ideal way to start a simple DAPP development. Lastly, even though ETH has a different purpose than Bitcoin, ETH is widely used as cryptocurrency.

How ETHLend differs from other blockchain projects?

We started by developing the application. We first created the decentralized application, instead of writing a white paper and opening a flashy website. I personally wanted to understand how decentralized lending would work in practice. As coming from a legal background and not from technical, I wanted to try it first and then write an analysis on my practical findings, the white paper.

Moreover, we have an amazing team working on ETHLend. I have never seen such extensive collaboration that we have at ETHLend. Practically we are all living in different parts of the world, but initially we have the same goal: to provide fair lending for all by using blockchain technology. We are also happy to have more people involved through our Slack.

What is your focus on the development?

Since we have an Ethereum-based application that runs stable, we are now focusing on adding more functionalities and user experience. Our goal here is to make decentralized lending as easy and accessible as possible. We want to keep the learning curve as low as possible. As a part of the user experience, we are adding more languages and ways to easily calculate the value of the collateral to avoid unnecessary loan requests.

Is there going to be an ICO?

We are going to have a token sale on early September. Our aim is to fund the further development of ETHLend and provide the largest lending market that works on a global scale. We want our future token holders to be part of it.

How the tokens are distributed?

We are distributing 1 billion Credit Tokens (CRE) for sale. There will be no follow up sales and all unsold CRE is burned. Additionally, 300 million CRE is allocated to the development fund as an incentive for our founders and developers to remain with the project. The development fund tokens will have a 24-month vesting model, which means that during this period, tokens are gradually released from lockup on each 6-months-period.

Getting ready for token sale. According to Stani, the ETHLend team is preparing for the upcoming token sale. The aim is to provide decentralized, secure, fair and democratic token sale. ETHLend is currently developing the Smart Contract for the token sale. However, the precise date of the token sale is not disclosed. ETHLend will inform the date of the token sale within couple of weeks.

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The Rise of Decentralized P2P Crypto-Currency Lending - NEWSBTC - newsBTC

On June 22, the FBI presented their annualInternet Crime Report, this one for 2016. By using the reports from the Internet Crime Complaint Center, they are able topublish the yearly document outlining trends and instances of Internet crimes. Still, these reports maynot be enough if they want to view the wholesituation since it is suspected that only 15% of victims actually report their situation.

Multiple hot topics fromthe last year were highlighted, including the massive BEC loss. BEC (Business Email Compromise) was an incident that ended with the loss of over $360 million. Currently, this is the largest known attackfrom last yearwith countlessvictims. BEC turned out to be a very sophisticated scam, and it only targeted foreign and international companies.

Another major point in the report is ransomware, which is growing more and more popular as an attack form. Ransomware works by locking the infected devices and holding documents for ransom. The criminals are able to use it to send messages to their victims, and those mostly include a ransom demand. More often than not, they would put a bitcoin price and a link to the bitcoin wallet. Over $2.4 million was lost to ransomware last year, and 2,673 reports were identified.

Othermajor attacksoutlined in the reportare tech support frauds. Tech fraudscammers managed to steal $7.8 million. The scam pretty much follows the same process every time. The scammer gets on the phone with their victims by various means. They then try to convince the victim that something is wrong with their device. The criminalstry to get control of the computer and then offer their services in dealing with the problem in return for money or gift cards.

Over 17,146 individual cases of extortion were recorded as well, and the total loss here is over $15 million, all of which happened online. FBIs report mostly points out physical threats that were made via the internet. Basically, criminals demand money or something valuable, or they will cause the victim physical injuries. There were also reports of threats like releasing sensitive data, and even sextortion.

Other forms of online crimes include DDoS attacks, schemes revolving around government impersonations, hitman schemes, as well as loan schemes, and even breaches of high-profile data. Criminals mostly demand payment in Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency. It is easier to move around, and also has more security layers which make it harder to trace.

Reportedonline crimes rose 3.7% in 2016. Apart from the US, the most infected foreign countries are Canada, India, UK, Australia, and France. When it comes to the individual states within the US, California suffered the most. It is followed by Texas and Florida which both had over 21,000 reports.

Another part of the report also included the affected age groups. According to the FBI, those above 60 had suffered the most and lost over $339 million last year. Next are those between the ages of 30 and 39, who lost around $190 million. Lastly, the younger users, mostly those around and under 20 years of age were much fewer in number. They also suffered less damage, which was only estimated to be around $6.7 million.

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FBI Says Hackers Managed to Extort $28 Million in Cryptocurrencies - The Merkle