Litecoin is Slumping Amid LitePay Fiasco, but That Could Change (Inverse.com)
Litecoin is not having a good time, but it could turn things around. The fifth-largest cryptocurrency was ranked as having a $10.8 billion market cap on Wednesday, after a price decline that started on February 26. That was also the official launch day of LitePay, a highly-anticipated payment system that’s suffered from setbacks that have irritated the community. As part of a wide-ranging update released Monday, LitePay claimed that its consumer debit card was still on hold due to “the negative perception and drastic actions card issuers have towards cryptocurrency companies.” The update was not warmly received by Litecoin users on Reddit, who questioned the stringent merchant registration process.
Ethereum Was ‘Significantly Less Secure Than Bitcoin’ Until Last Month (Motherboard.Vice.com)
Last week, a team of security researchers from Boston University and the University of Pittsburgh published a report detailing an attack that would allow anyone to double-spend ether, the in-house cryptocurrency on the Ethereum network, with relative ease. Double-spending uses the same cryptocurrency token for two different transactions—an analogy with the physical world is difficult, but imagine it as being able to spend the same bill twice thanks to some glitch in the laws of physics. Preventing double-spends is arguably one of the main functions of any blockchain technology, so an attack that enables double-spending is a critical threat to any cryptocurrency.
Ripple [XRP] Likely To Go Down (EthereumWorldNews.com)
Ripple is very much volatile this week, and there’s a good fundamental reason for that: this time, it’s because of the rumors saying Ripple might be added into the Coinbase listing. Technical background soon came in line with the fundamental one, but later the company denied the rumor, and Ripple immediately reversed, spiking lower. This Coinbase listing story looks very unlikely even at first sight. On the one hand, there are currently two legal actions against Coinbase regarding unclaimed property regulation and insider trading. Both actions are being investigated, and meanwhile Coinbase is not going to add any new cryptocurrencies into its lists.
US Town Plans Freeze on Energy-Hungry Bitcoin Mining Operations (Cryptovest.com)
The power demands of Bitcoin mining operations are proving a headache for Plattsburgh, and the mayor of this small town in New York State is proposing a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining. The plan is to suspend such activities for 18 months “to allow the City of Plattsburgh the opportunity to consider zoning and land use laws and municipal lighting department regulations before commercial cryptocurrency mining operations result in irreversible change to the character and direction of the City.”
Russia: Vladimir Putin Signals Obligatory Cryptocurrency Regulation Will Begin ‘July 1’ (CoinTelegraph.com)
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has signalled cryptocurrency regulation in the country should become law “by July 1” this year, according to the official government publication Parlamentskaya Gazeta Feb. 28. Putin has set in stone the release date for a regulatory package, now called the Digital Assets Regulation Bill, which first appeared last year. Its introduction will end years of uncertainty in which cryptocurrency – along with investors corporate and private – lay in a gray area, with local authorities in Russia taking various contradictory moves to decide which aspects of it were and were not legal. Last week, a court in St. Petersburg annulled a law enacted in July 2017 which suddenly banned the distribution of educational materials related to Bitcoin.
