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Cons of Cryptocurrency: the Other Face of Digital Coins – CryptoNewsZ

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So finally, Cryptocurrency is slowly winning hearts and has started gaining traction around the world. To the extent that, a few Asian countries which used to hold a negative stance regarding cryptocurrencies, have started to consider the same with a bit optimistic approach. For these, the credit goes to the benefits which these digital currencies bring on the table. However, what we are discussing today is the less talked about aspect of cryptos: the cons of cryptos.

While every coin has two sides, a large part of the crypto-community has focussed on the positive side of this newly arrived technology most of the time. It is crucial to know what disadvantages cryptocurrencies hold, how they can be tackled and what benefits they can bring in. Major drawbacks of the digital currencies include:

The constantly fluctuating prices of cryptos have infused the instability in the market and therefore, making it a risky affair. Such volatile nature of the market keeps the investors in angst and worried regarding his returns. This level of volatility, which is largely due to a lack of inherent value, paints the existence of cryptocurrencies as a bubble.

Despite the rapid spread of digital currencies in daily use, there is a significant amount of hesitation regarding its use as a payment mode. The risk that the method of crypto payment poses has played its role along with the lack of awareness here. Also, the escalating numbers of fraud and theft incidents have caused people to look at cryptos with a bit of skepticism.

Cryptocurrencies being decentralized, appear difficult to regulate. Due to that, several criminal activities find their way easily to disrupt the ethos within crypto space. The anonymity factor in crypto-space seems to be a major reason behind it. However, anonymity, at times comes across as a protection layer against hacking.

Moreover, the way the crypto market depends upon Bitcoin whales also emerges as a threat to the rest of the investors, as this whales can turn the tide at any point in time for the market.

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Cons of Cryptocurrency: the Other Face of Digital Coins - CryptoNewsZ

NTT offers researchers $1 million salaries in bid to lure top talent in cryptography, quantum computing – The Japan Times

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Telecom giant NTT Group is offering record pay to hire top scientists as it looks to match some of the basic research prowess of global powerhouses including Alphabet Inc. and Apple Inc.

The former Japanese telephone monopoly has set annual salaries of as much as $1 million (108.45 million) for researchers at its labs in Palo Alto, California, said Kazuhiro Gomi, president of the companys research arm. Thats more than the company pays its chief executive officer and 41-year veteran Jun Sawada, and a rare step for a traditional Japanese company like NTT.

The increased investment in basic science comes as NTT is regrouping its businesses to focus more on cloud computing services and data centers amid a dimming outlook for profit from its mainstay mobile phone carrier. Having star scientists on the labs payroll, backed by a 25 billion five-year budget, helps the group draw better technology workers and partners as it wages a global war for the top talent it needs to expand globally, Gomi said.

We are competing with companies like Google and Apple, said Gomi, explaining that the company had traditionally followed the Japanese norm of modest pay. It wouldnt be possible several years back.

Tatsuaki Okamoto, director of cryptography & information security for NTT Research, is an example of a star that has helped draw in other top researchers in encryption, where interest in cryptocurrencies has led to surging demand for expertise. Okamoto, an NTT R&D fellow since 1999, is known globally as a key researcher on block-chain technologies for cryptocurrencies.

The talent NTT is gathering is focused on cryptography, quantum computing and medical informatics in a bet that these fields can yield breakthroughs on a horizon of five years or more, said Kei Karasawa, vice president of corporate strategy for NTT Research.

The lab also needs big name scientists because for most top researchers, high pay alone isnt enough, said Karasawa. Scientists strongly prefer to work with the leaders in their field, he said.

Moreover, NTTs pay isnt at the top of the range in all fields. Oracle Corp., the software-maker racing to catch Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. in cloud computing, offered a pay package worth $6 million to hire a single expert in artificial intelligence, Business Insider reported. And while $1 million a year dwarfs the pay of many IT professionals, its far less than what most chief executives make at global companies of NTTs scale.

That too is a contrast with Japan, where average CEO pay at top companies is less than $1 million, compared with more than 10 times that for the average U.S. boss of a big firm.

NTT is pushing for overseas growth while forecasting a 13 percent drop in net income at NTT Docomo Inc. this fiscal year, following a 16 percent decline in the previous year. NTT said it was forming a global technology and services provider by combining the capabilities of 28 of its companies including NTT Communications Corp., Dimension Data Holdings PLC and NTT Security Corp. The goal is to create a top 5 global technology and business solutions provider with $20 billion in revenue outside Japan, Sawada said at the time.

Cryptography, the science of encoding and decoding data to maintain privacy, is fundamental to the internets security and plays a role in blockchain and cryptocurrencies, two red-hot areas of research and development. Quantum computing, which uses properties of quantum mechanics to speed up processing, has the potential to help discover new drugs and improve the algorithms that shape industrial logistics and supply chains.

The third area, medical informatics, presents an opportunity to apply powerful computing technologies to mapping molecules in a way that can help scientists better understand viruses and how to combat them.

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NTT offers researchers $1 million salaries in bid to lure top talent in cryptography, quantum computing - The Japan Times

Quantum Computing: Challenges, Trends and the Road Ahead – CMSWire

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PHOTO:Joshua Ness

Recently, Google announced another major milestone in the development of Quantum Computing. According to Google, and despite skepticism from some of its competitors, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced that it had achieved quantum supremacy. While the announcement is still undergoing peer review by others in the industry, what no one is challenging is the progress being made in the development of technologies that will have implications for both public and private companies, and even for governments.

Roger A. Grimes, a data-driven defense evangelist at UK-basedKnowBe4 explained that the quantum supremacy is the moment in time when a quantum computer finally does something that a traditional, binary, classical, computer cannot. It can be achieved in terms of raw computational speed or performing even an otherwise ordinary math problem that a classical computer simply isn't capable of (i.e. it doesn't have to be speed related). Google's report seems to indicate it was a bit of both. According to the report Google was able to accomplish in three minutes using a quantum computer what the world's fastest computer would take 10,000 years to do.

Grimes explained that ever since Richard Feynman talked about using the fantastic properties of quantum mechanics to make a new paradigm of computing in 1959, the world has waited for the day when quantum supremacy would happen. The first quantum computer was made in 1998 and it has taken mankind another 21 years to get them to the point to where they will begin to take over tasks and new tasks that regular computers can't perform. After this moment, no serious large company, government, or country will want to stay on or focus on the older types of computers. There was a computer world before and there is now a new computer world, shiny and new, after, he said.

Yes, traditional computers will stay in our lives for decades to come, but a technological wall has been breached, and it means wondrous new things, both good and bad.

The result is that within the next decade, any company or organization without a quantum computer will be old.

Related Article:Will Quantum Computing Break Blockchain?

So why is this important? Quantum computers will allow us to better understand how the universe works. Quantum mechanics, particles, and properties are how everything in the universe works. Up until this point, it was impossible to model how everything in the universe (or multiple universes, for that matter) truly works. It's all been theory and speculation.

Now, with enough serious quantum computers, for the first time, we can literally model and figure out how everything that is works. We will get better weather prediction, better chemicals, better medicines with less side effects, better traffic management, better artificial intelligence, and better be able to predict and detect where scarce resources, like gas and oil, are. Everything can be better predicted and focused, he added.

Keep in mind at this point in time, though, that quantum supremacy is a technical term used by the academic community to mean when a quantum computer can do just one thing faster than a classical computer, Professor Yehuda Lindell,CEO and co-founder ofUnbound Tech.

However, this is not what we think about when we hear supremacy, nor is it really relevant to cryptography and other application domains. In particular, what businesses and other enterprises are really interested in knowing is when quantum computers will be able to solve hard important problems faster than classical computers, and when quantum computers will be able to break cryptography. I personally believe that this is many years away. I will say at least a decade, but I think it will be more like two decades at least. I also want to stress that this is still an if and not a when, he said.

Keep in mind, though, the fact that small quantum computers have been built does not mean that quantum computers at the scale and accuracy needed to break cryptography will ever be built. The problems that need to be overcome are considerable.

Related Article:Quantum Computing Brings Potential and Risk to the Enterprise

Alex Costas, software engineer of Tampa, Fla.-basedSchellman & Company, an independent security and privacy compliance assessor (www.schellmanco.com), points to some of the problems that quantum computers will be able to address in the future.

Quantum computing, he said, promises to solve problems and drive simulations that have been computationally or physically intractable with conventional hardware, such as simulating the interactions of a novel pharmaceutical in vivo, creating secret messages that destroy themselves when read, or covertly monitoring remote systems without the need for an internet connection. This may all sound well and good, except for the fact that internet security is for the most part predicated on the following assumption: it is hard to factor large numbers into their prime components, he said.

It is not so hard as it may seem. There are quite a few asymmetric schemes (e.g. NTRU, McEliece, etc) that don't rely on prime factorization for their difficulty and have no efficient quantum (or classical) solution yet. Aside from that, secret key cryptography (e.g. AES) is not affected by these kinds of attacks, and quantum effects can also be leveraged to protect these secret keys as well

All that said, quantum computing technology has the potential to be a major driver of futurebreakthrough advances in areas such as artificial intelligence and healthcare, according to Anis Uzzaman, CEO of San Jose, Calif.-basedPegasus Tech Ventures. Many of the opportunities for investments in hardware are now in the later stage, but the broader investment community should look out for the enabling technologies and software that will start to emerge for the hardware platforms.

The United States and China are the two heavyweights competing for leadership in quantum computing. While the United States has a first-move advantage and maintains a lead, China is making heavy investments in pursuit of a variety of breakthroughs. Quantum computing applications may not reach mainstream consumer applications for a little while longer, but there will definitely be a variety of companies across a range of industries that look integrate this technology over the next 3-5 years, he said.

Current quantum computers are far from where we need them to be for practical applications due to their high level of "noise" (errors), Leonard Wossnig, CEO of UK-based Rahko, wrote on a blogon the a Quantneo online magazine, the publication of a web community focusing on business applications for Quantum Information Science (QIS).

If we cannot find a way to use these current and near-term quantum computers, he wrote, we will need to wait for fully-error-corrected "universal" machines to be developed to see real significant benefit (15-20 years by many estimates). This is where the software becomes much more than a necessary complement to the hardware. Quantum software has the potential to significantly accelerate our pathway to practically useful quantum computers.

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Quantum Computing: Challenges, Trends and the Road Ahead - CMSWire

Want To Create A First-Of-Its-Kind Company? Five Tips For Success At The Front Edge Of Possible – Forbes

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New tech offers entrepreneurs great opportunity to do something that has never been done beforebut ... [+] it comes with a tradeoff.

Over 500 million years ago, a spectacular array of new species emerged over a relatively short geological period. Called the Cambrian explosion, this era brought us most of the animal phyla we know today. Fast forward to modern times, and our most explosive periods of innovation are driven by technology. Once the basic infrastructure of the internet and mobile computing had been built out, for example, concentrated innovation brought us a wealth of new categories wed never seen before at scale (including software-as-a-service, social media, and the sharing economy). Now, in this moment, simultaneous and significant advancement across a range of powerful tech, including AI, IoT, robotics, cryptography and blockchains are launching us into another Cambrian-like explosion.

The Paradox Of Innovation At The Front Edge

This opportunity presents entrepreneurs with a paradox. This tech gives them an evolved, rich toolset with which to create first-of-their-kind companies. But with a technology still forming, and both the new business models it supports and regulatory landscape unclear, its extremely difficult to know in which direction to build.

Advice From A Founder Of Three Successful Firsts

For UC Berkeleys Silicon Valley Innovation Week, I discussed this paradox with Chris Larsen, founder of the first online lending company, Eloan (in 1996, a year before the domain Google.com was registered), the first US peer-to-peer lender, Prosper, and Ripple, an early player in blockchain-driven global payments. Here are a few insights that came from the conversation.

Chris Larsen and Alison McCauley discuss entrepreneurialism at the front edge of innovation for UC ... [+] Berkeley's Innovation Week.

1. Ignore The Experts: Trust Your Gut

One of the hardest parts of doing something that has never been done before is to know what to ignore, and what to take in. When you are forging new ground, you will have all these experts saying it is not going to work, it would have been done already, or that the big guys are going to kill you, described Larsen. But if its obvious, its probably too late. He spoke about how in the early days of the web, the common belief was that no one in their right mind would ever put financial data on the internet. The hardest thing is ignoring advice from people you respect. If they are saying its a great idea, it is probably too late. Yet, Larsen advised, Dont ignore the good advice. There may be a nugget that helps you adjust your model.

But how do you hone your inner compass? Larsen talked about how the real magic comes from finding new ways to connect the dots, which means entrepreneurs cant be too heads-down in their particular domain. He advised reading about the future, and looking for what really resonates with you. And he spoke about how he does a lot of writing, because it is so helpful for exploring different angles. Its the Stockdale Paradox, facing the brutal facts, but always having faith that it is going to work out. The faith is what gets you through.

2. Connect To Hearts Before You Build

Ive seen many early stage founders attempt a tech-first approach to their business: build cool technology, then try to connect it to hearts and minds. Larsen emphasizes the importance of honing your vision first. Dont start until you have that story perfected in a way that you can reach the hearts of really smart people, he explains. Only then can you effectively recruit for talent and raise funds. This is how you win: really great things happen when peoples hearts are in it. But, Larsen emphasizes, Its got to be genuine.

This ability to articulate such a strong vision for the future becomes essential when things get hard, a natural phase of any startup looking to do what is considered impossible. Before you get to product-market fit, there is always a little bit of stumbling in the dark. We call it crossing the desert. You only have a little bit of water, and maybe you are going in circles.

3. Build, Dont Disrupt

The hallways of Silicon Valley ring with talk of disruption. Disruption is a bad thing, asserts Larsen. Twenty years ago technology wasnt all that important in the world, but now its everywhere. In that setting, Talking about disruption, as if thats good, is incredibly arrogant. It sets a tone that everything else besides what we are doing is somehow bad. Its a toxic idea. I think we need to think of ourselves as builders, not disruptors. The world needs to be constructing and building things.

4. Cut The Lifeboats

Larsen shared how he wouldnt have started his first company if it werent for a Stanford business school professor saying a single sentence to him at just the right time: Cut the lifeboats. The professor was commenting about how, at that time, the graduates were making risk averse choices in their careers. Start companies, encouraged Larsen. If you fail, it will be good experience anyway, and you can get backed again. We are in a period of incredible change, so there is so much opportunity. So many domains are changing simultaneously, and the magic that can come from connecting this with that has never been greater. And there have never been more investors that want to back startups.

5. Know When To Replace Yourself

Few CEOs, Larsen explained, have both the skill set to sell the impossible dream in the early days and the discipline to take the company all the way. Once you get to product-market fit, if you dont have discipline, you are toast, says Larsen. The timing is crucial, he advises. Wait until you have demonstrated you have the right product, which will help you recruit the right person, but dont wait too long, Larsen explains.

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Want To Create A First-Of-Its-Kind Company? Five Tips For Success At The Front Edge Of Possible - Forbes

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Reaches Over 100 Certified Kubernetes Vendors – Container Journal

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More than 100 vendors now provide certified, conformant Kubernetes products

SAN DIEGO November 19, 2019 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced that it has surpassed 100 vendors with Certified Kubernetes products as part of the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program. A certified vendor is an organization that provides a Kubernetes distribution, hosted platform, or installer.

CNCF runs the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program to ensure that every vendors version of Kubernetes, or open source community version, remains conformant and supports the required APIs so users can rely on a seamless, stable experience. The program was created two years ago with 32 founding vendors. To become certified, vendors use an automated test suite to demonstrate conformance, which CNCF reviews and certifies via a public process.

Certification is essential because it provides consistency across different commercial and open source implementations of Kubernetes, said Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Reaching this milestone of 100 vendors is indicative of the ubiquitous adoption of Kubernetes across cloud and enterprise software companies ranging from startups to the biggest technology vendors in the world.

To remain certified, vendors provide the latest version of Kubernetes at least yearly, ensuring that users have access to the latest features the community has worked hard to deliver. Any vendor is invited and encouraged to run the conformance test suite and submit for review and certification by CNCF. End users should make sure their vendor partners certify their Kubernetes offering and can confirm that certification using the same open source test suite.

To learn more about the program, see FAQs here.

Additional Resources

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industrys top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 500 members, including the worlds largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit http://www.cncf.io.

###

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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Cloud Native Computing Foundation Reaches Over 100 Certified Kubernetes Vendors - Container Journal

From Bitcoin To No Coin, Crypto World Under Pressure As Governments React – Forbes

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LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 20: A visual representation of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin on November ... [+] 20, 2018 in London, England. Cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin showed unprecedented growth in 2017, growing more than 5000%, with market-leader Bitcoin topping out at nearly 20,000 USD per Bitcoin just before the new year. Since then however, the whole cryptocurrency sector has declined dramatically losing over 80% it's value. In recent days, Bitcoin has dropped sharply to new yearly-lows to around 4300 USD at the time of writing. The sector has divided opinions within financial circles with some leading figures claiming it's revolutionary effects on the monetary system, whilst others calling it nothing other than a speculative bubble. (Photo by Jordan Mansfield/Getty Images)

Things are stirring in the cryptocurrency world. There is a burgeoning debate about central bank issued digital currencies, and in the past month bitcoin has fallen by over twenty percent.

In its short life as a trading asset, bitcoin has appeared to move in sync with equities, so this recent move may spark some concern. A more intriguing, related question is whether bitcoin is an indicator of risk appetite or a beneficiary of risk aversion. Indeed, within the less independent crypto currency community there is a view abroad that bitcoin and crypto currencies are a safe haven in the same way people might for instance, regard gold.

Bitcoin Down Over 20%

My own sense is that crypto currencies in general and bitcoin specifically are not safe havens. They have failed the purpose they were intended to fulfill in that they are not actively used as a means of exchange. Few retailers accept them, fewer consumers actively use them and transaction costs are still very high.

The technology associated with cryptocurrencies is also complex enough to dissuade most households from using them. For many people the process of setting up a crypto wallet, and mentally translating crypto prices into everyday currencies is too demanding to bother with. This ease of use is a cognitive barrier to entry and something that will take time for many to overcome, even Millennials.

In addition, the infrastructure around cryptocurrencies is fragile in at least two respects. Parts of that system, such as exchanges are prone to hacking and ransoming, and can also be shut down at the whim of governments.

Bitcoin Not A Safe Haven

From the point of view of cryptocurrencies as assets, very basic data analysis suggests that optically bitcoin has a low correlation with safe havens like gold. This does not mean that bitcoin is a good diversifier or a safe haven. It has been highly volatile over the past two years and is subject to trading and liquidity risks not normally associated with safe havens.

A further clue as to the true nature of cryptocurrencies as investable assets comes from the community of people who hold and trade them. The micro-structure (or plumbing) of markets, as well as the anthropology and sociology of those who populate them (which will have to be the subject of a future missive) is crucial to the way they behave and subsequently to their risk characteristics.

In this light the fact that the biggest holder of bitcoins is apparently the FBI says a lot. A good deal of trading in cryptocurrencies takes place in Asia, other emerging markets like Russia and in hubs like Zug.

Though admittedly not scientific, nor thorough, I suspect that many bitcoin traders also trade equity futures and currencies and use the same equity trading rules (technical) to buy and sell bitcoin (cryptos now have their own rating system, FCAS). If this generalization holds, it suggests that risk budgeting may drive a positive correlation between cryptocurrencies and equities, especially at market highs and lows.

Another observation is that for its size (the top ten cryptocurrencies barely add up to the market cap of Citigroup) the crypto market attracts an inordinately large amount of attention, which may draw money in at high points. To my mind this points to bitcoin having a pro-cyclical bias in terms of its riskiness as a trading asset.

Authorities React With Digital Currencies

On a structural basis the fall in bitcoin may also signal trouble in the cryptocurrency world, which effectively exists to create means of exchange beyond the normal frameworks of governments and central banks. Note that bitcoin rallied to its year high in the immediate aftermath of Facebooks announcement of the Libra project in mid June.

The current disarray surrounding Facebooks Libra project is a sign of the operating and regulatory complexities facing cryptocurrencies. More powerful still is the incentive that central banks and fiscal authorities around the world have for the bitcoin not to succeed. Witness as an example the vigour with which the Chinese who tightly control money flows have clamped down on cryptocurrency exchanges.

The next steps in the crypto or digital currency (they are almost the same in that crypto currencies are digital currencies that use cryptography) industry for central banks to issue their own coins, and for the digital payments industry. More thorough regulation, cleaner cross-border payment processes and more reliable identification mechanisms will be part of the workload of central banks and governments.

It all suggests that instead of being a safe haven, bitcoin may become extinct.

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From Bitcoin To No Coin, Crypto World Under Pressure As Governments React - Forbes

Bitcoin Isnt Down Because of China, Its Down Because You Dont Need It – Forbes

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BEIJING, Nov. 7, 2019 -- A visitor tours a display center of the National Big Data Comprehensive ... [+] Pilot Area in southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 22, 2019. (Photo by Ou Dongqu/Xinhua via Getty) (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu via Getty Images)

Crypto markets are not reeling this week because China is cracking down on Blockchain. Tokens have been getting slammed since the summer because most of them are unnecessary, and because the need for coins that may offer some utility is not as imminent as buyers thought it would be. This is most obvious with King Crypto, bitcoin, whose purported use-case as a store of value is not looking very compelling.

The risk-reward in bitcoin has always been an extreme one, which is why its biggest proponents/salespeople assigned astronomic price targets to it. Widespread adoption is an extremely low-probability event with an enormous payoff if the stars align. And lets be clear: the things that need to happen for the world to turn to bitcoin complete central bank impotence, widespread currency debasement, falling equity markets and the abandonment of traditional gold means betting on bitcoin is essentially betting against the house. Hence the short bankers, long bitcoin meme. To say bitcoin will offer a 100x return yet also say its a highly probabilistic event is inherently contradictory and hugely dishonest.

The market is now realizing this. As the global economic slowdown of the last nine months shows signs of stabilization and the Federal Reserve sees no need for more interest-rate cuts, the case for bitcoin is taking body blows. None of the stories about adoption are turning out, big tech giants from Facebook to Google are doing everything possible to dominate electronic pay and finance, and projects designed to make bitcoin a means of exchange are either slow, fruitless, or both.

In short, the house does not look like its in a losing position just yet. And so bitcoin is getting killed. Sure, the U.S. and China could have a major fallout, get into a currency war, and Chinese citizens could rush to crypto as a way to get money out of the system. Thats why bitcoin will never be worthless, and why every investor should watch its price action, but that scenario is looking way, way further away from reality than the cryptoknights had so many believe.

Bitcoins violent moves are a factor of the speculative nature described above. Because its probability of success is low, it is closer to a roulette wheel than any traditional asset class. Average people were lured into the bitcoin sales pitch in 2017 when the economy was tearing hot, cash flow was heavy, stocks were churning out huge gains, and people could afford to take a gamble. Why not roll the dice?

Now those buyers are losing faith in their chances of winning, and are using this years rally to get out. As the fundamental reason for owning bitcoin as a store of value also loses luster amid a stabilizing economic situation, the true believers may start bailing out too. If it continues, it should be a warning sign to more traditional investors who made a similar bet in gold, and maybe even those who ran to Treasury bonds as a hedge against chaos, too.

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Bitcoin Isnt Down Because of China, Its Down Because You Dont Need It - Forbes

Bitcoin Is Dying, for at Least the 378th Time to Date – BeInCrypto

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Bitcoin and leading cryptocurrency prices have taken a major hit over the last couple of days. As you might expect, there are no shortage of volunteers to deliver its last rites given the recent volatility.

Over the last 24 hours, Bitcoin has shed around $14 billion from its total market capitalization. This has brought the price down to around $7,180 at the time of writing.

Altcoins have generally fared worse in percentage terms. Ether and Bitcoin Cash have dropped by around 11.95 percent over the last 24-hours, and Litecoin by more than 10 percent.

As has become tradition, the sudden drops in prices have been accompanied by proud declarations of Bitcoins death. The latest is from Mark Dow, a global macro trader, author, and former policy economist at the US Treasury and IMF.

Typically, as in the above case, those most eager to write Bitcoin off after violent moves to the downside are those with closest connections to the existing financial system. Dow has also been a consistent critic of the cryptocurrency himself over the years. In 2013, he tweeted:

Bitcoins history is littered with so-called Bitcoin Obituaries. In fact, they have become so common that 99Bitcoins hosts a page dedicated to them. So far, Bitcoin has apparently been on deaths door (or through it) a total of 377 times.

There has been at least one news article published on the cryptocurrencys demise every year since 2010. The latest listed on the site was delivered by US entrepreneur and investor Jim Rogers via Portfolio Wealth Globals YouTube channel. No doubt, there will be more in the works given the recent Bitcoin volatility.

Yet, despite the number of deaths that have punctuated its short life, Bitcoin remains. It still functions as it did yesterday, last week, or last year. People used it and will continue to use it at much lower prices than it has recently fallen to.

If Bitcoin is here to replace the entire central banking system, as many believe it is, it will obviously not be a quick and easy transition. This will be a multi-decade story if it does happen at all. Bitcoin is software at the end of the day. It has no company to promote it and stands opposed to the most powerful industry on the planet. Hiccups in price are to be expected in such a small, uncertain, but growing market. They have also been a constant throughout Bitcoins history. To write Bitcoin off because of such is about as naive as believing that a peaceful overthrow of the worlds central banks will be done and dusted in a couple of years.

Images are courtesy of Twitter, Shutterstock.

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Bitcoin Is Dying, for at Least the 378th Time to Date - BeInCrypto

Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index Hits 23 Good Sign, Crypto Analyst Claims – U.Today

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While the crypto headlines have been focused on yesterday's Bitcoin (BTC) price collapse, Redditors have noticed an interesting thing going on in the crypto market. The following figure eloquently illustrates what can occur simultaneously - greed and fear.

Yesterday's rapid price drop resulted in multiple Bitcoin jokes, including one as a Black Friday sale. The price of the cryptocurrency even dipped below $6,900 USD on some exchanges. This led to a call for widespread liquidation, as the 24-hour trading volume from yesterday totaled more than $34.24 billion USD.

Image by:https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/historical-data/

As a result, yesterday was the fifth largest trading volume on record for BTC.

Was it really that much? Well to start, the number increased 55% in one day. Such results were higher one month ago, when the price of BTC increased by 17.4% in a couple of hours. This was the last time that BTC was in the five-digit category. The trading volume was 2.5 times less on the 17th of December 2017, when the price of BTC was at an all-time high (ATH) of $20,089 USD.

Prior to yesterday's price drop, a community obsessed with fear missed two potentially interesting indicators. Investor and engineer Preston Pysh noticed that theMayer Multiple was lower than yesterday, which has only occurred 5% of the time in BTC's price history.

This indicator also shows that the current price of BTC is divided by its 200-day daily moving average. Since its creation, the Mayer Multiple daily average for BTC is1.45. The Mayer Multiple from yesterday was 0.78, and some people used that as a factor in determining whether BTC was overbought, fairly priced, or undervalued.

Well-known crypto analyst PlanB called this behavior "normal" for BTC and showed how its price could reach $100,000 USD between 2020 and 2022. Yesterday also saw a whale finalize a huge transaction worth more than $330 million USD. Such a transaction can be placed among the all-time top 10 transactions.

Is the game over for bears? Share your opinions on Twitter!

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Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index Hits 23 Good Sign, Crypto Analyst Claims - U.Today

The Debate Over How to Encrypt the Internet of Things – WIRED

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Internet-connected gadgets like lightbulbs and fitness trackers are notorious for poor security. That's partly because theyre often made cheaply and with haste, which leads to careless mistakes and outsourcing of problematic parts. But its also partly due to the lack of computing power in the first place; it's not so easy to encrypt all that data with limited resources. Or at least thats how the conventional wisdom goes.

But real-world data suggests that many of those ubiquitous tiny gadgets can run versions of traditional, time-tested encryption schemes. A team from the Swiss IoT encryption firm Teserakt argues that there's no need to reinvent the wheel when the real solution is simply holding IoT manufacturers to higher standards. They made their case at a National Institute of Standards and Technology conference in Maryland this month focused on developing lightweight cryptography for embedded devices.

But traditional cryptography, particularly the stalwart Advanced Encryption Standard, often works just fine in IoT devices, says Antony Vennard, Teserakt's chief engineer. The researchers have even observed a number of situations where security-conscious manufactures found ways to incorporate it, like in the embedded systems of cars. And other, independent studies have had similar findings.

"The lightweight competition is based on the idea that for embedded devicesthings like industrial controllers and smart cards like chip credit cardsAES is too heavy, too big. Using it takes up too much space and power," Vennard says. "But my passport has a chip in it that can run AES. Modern smart cards can run it. Fitness trackers like FitBits can run it. In our experience, AES is pretty much everywhere, even in embedded devices."

"Where it could get confusing is where people arent sure what level of security they need."

Antony Vennard, Teserakt

Its important to talk about the actual utility of lightweight encryption now, because it takes years for the cryptography community to develop and vet a new encryption scheme to ensure that its safe to use. NIST has already been working on lightweight cryptography since 2015. And once those standards are in place, it takes even more time to gain real-world experience implementing the scheme to catch mistakes. It adds a lot of time and potential risk to the process of securing these devices. If you can make existing encryption algorithms work on them instead, all the better.

In February, for example, Google debuted a method for encrypting most low-end Android devices regardless of how piddly their processors. Rather than a novel encryption scheme, it relied on clever implementations of AES and other existing cryptographic methods to reduce the chance of introducing a fundamental flaw. The method, dubbed Adiantum, is an impressive solution to one of Android's more daunting problems. But Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green points out that the lengths Google had to go to to achieve it may actually indicate a need for lightweight cryptography, rather than showing that it's worth sticking with AES. "It's not actually a great argument for 'AES is fast enough,'" Green says.

Though it may be possible to implement traditional encryption more widely than the IoT industry currently believes, Vennard admits that there are situations where lightweight encryption would be useful. Certain devices, particularly things like simple sensors in industrial control settings, are powered by microcontrollers so rudimentary that they really would require special encryption techniques to secure. But Vennard argues that the key is clearly defining these categories rather than creating a situation where developers and manufacturers don't know which cryptographic techniques should be used where.

"There are some cases where you might need lightweight crypto, but where it could get confusing is where people arent sure what level of security they need," Vennard says. "If people can use AESwe have about 20 years of experience implementing AESbut don't, that's a risk, because implementing something new is tricky."

It's also always possible that the US government knows something private researchers don't. Along with NIST, the National Security Agency, for example, has stressed the importance of developing next-generation cryptography schemes. That's partly because of the threat to encryption posed by the rise of quantum computing, but it's also because of the IoT security crisis.

Read the original post:
The Debate Over How to Encrypt the Internet of Things - WIRED


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