All posts by : amir

Bitcoin bulls are looking for BTC to rebound off a support zone and if confirmed, ETC, LUNA, KLAY and AXS could push higher.

Bitcoin (BTC) is facing a stiff challenge from the bears near the $48,000 mark. As Cointelegraph reported earlier, the buy and sell levels show that sellers on Binance have held their ground at $48,000.

PlanB, the creator of the stock-to-flow Bitcoin price model, said if Bitcoin manages to close August above $47,000, the year-end “worst-case scenario” target price of $135,000 may come into play.

Despite the slight downturn, the institutional adoption of Bitcoin continues to increase. Filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission show that four wealth management firms have bought shares in Grayscale’s Bitcoin Investment Trust.

A survey of about 42,000 people in 27 countries by product comparison website Finder, showed a high adoption rate in Asia. Among the countries polled, Vietnam had the highest adoption rate at 41% while India and Indonesia had a 30% adoption rate.

Compared to their Asian counterparts, the respondents in the United Kingdom and the United States reported a low 8% and 9% adoption rate. However, the report warned that “due to the varying Google infrastructure in each territory, not all surveys were nationally representative.”

Will Bitcoin’s hesitation near the $48,000 mark result in profit-booking? Could altcoins attract funds that exit Bitcoin? Let’s study the charts of the top-5 cryptocurrencies that may extend their up-move in the next few days.

source: cintelegraph

The major software developer’s new plan to combat piracy relies on the transparency of blockchain technology.

Windows operating system and Office productivity suite have always been top performers on any software piracy platforms. So, it’s no wonder that Microsoft, the developer of both products, works hard to establish anti-piracy measures.

In a new paper released by Microsoft’s research department, with the participation of researchers from Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University, the Redmond-based software giant studied a blockchain-based incentive system to bolster anti-piracy campaigns.

As the title of the research, “Argus: A Fully Transparent Incentive System for Anti-Piracy Campaigns,” suggests, Microsoft’s new system relies on the transparency aspect of blockchain technology. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Argus aims to provide a trustless incentive mechanism while protecting data collected from the open anonymous population of piracy reporters.

“We see this as a distributed system problem,” the paper stated, “In the implementation, we overcome a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite full transparency.”

Argus enables backtracing of pirated content to the source with a corresponding watermark algorithm, which is detailed in the paper. Also named “proof of leakage,” each report of leaked content involves an information-hiding procedure. This way, no one but the informer can report the same watermarked copy without actually owning it.

The system also has incentive-reducing safeguards to prevent an informer from reporting the same leaked content over and over under different aliases. “With the security and practicality of Argus, we hope real-world antipiracy campaigns will be truly effective by shifting to a fully transparent incentive mechanism,” the report stated.

Detailing the issue of Ethereum network fees, the paper explained that the team optimized several cryptographic operations “so that the cost for piracy reporting is reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, which would otherwise correspond to thousands of transactions.”

source : cointelegraph