The SEC is Probing Cryptocurrency Companies with Initial Coin Offerings (TheVerge.com)
This surplus of power is usually exported for profit, but it has recently been used as a marketing tool to draw in new high-energy businesses to Quebec. “We have made a lot of effort with the data centre industry to promote our own energy internationally and to present the benefits of our energy (clean, renewable, low rates, reliable grid),” said a Hydro-Québec spokesperson, in an email to MobileSyrup. “Cryptocurrency companies saw the advantage to come [to] Quebec.” Cheap hydro and reliable electricity is a must for miners because the rigs that mine cryptocurrencies need anywhere from 30 to 300 megawatts of electrical capacity, depending on the size of the mining operation.
Researchers Explore Eclipse Attacks on the Ethereum Blockchain (BitcoinMagazine.com)
An eclipse attack is a network-level attack on a blockchain, where an attacker essentially takes control of the peer-to-peer network, obscuring a node’s view of the blockchain. In a new paper titled “Low-Resource Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum’s Peer-to-Peer Network,” Sharon Goldberg, an associate professor at Boston University; Ethan Heilman, a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University; and Yuval Marcus, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, describe a way to carry out an eclipse attack on the Ethereum network.
Bitcoin Is ‘Gigantic Ponzi Scheme’ Used To Fund Terror, Says Diane Abbott (HuffingtonPost.co.uk)
Abbott said: “We are looking at the Bitcoin issue. One of the problems with Bitcoin is the extent to which it is just a gigantic Ponzi scheme. “And if everyone took their Bitcoin money and tried to buy a new car all at once the whole thing would collapse. “So, we are worried about the extent to which Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme but we are certainly worried about how in the here and now it is being used to fund terrorist activity and that is something we are looking at. “I think the people best placed to resolve some of the problems around Bitcoin will actually be people in the Treasury and people in the banking sector but I can’t say more than that.”
BTC Global Said to Have Scammed more than 27,000 Bitcoin Investors (BusinessLive.co.za)
More than 27‚500 people‚ including South Africans‚ Americans and Australians have been duped by the one of biggest bitcoin scams to hit SA. On Thursday, Hawks spokesperson Capt Lloyd Ramovha confirmed that the serious commercial crimes unit was investigating complaints against BTC global‚ a company in which thousands invested cryptocurrency valued at more than $50m by transferring bitcoin into an online wallet address. “I have spoken to one of the investigators in our team and he has confirmed that this matter came to them about two weeks ago. There are in excess of 25‚700 complainants with many outside SA.
Ripple’s xRapid to be Used by Cambridge for Faster Global Payments – Market Sentiment Turns Bullish! (Ambcrypto.com)
Cambridge Global Payments aims to provide faster global payments using Ripple’s xRapid technology. Cambridge is a subsidiary of Fleetcor Technologies and facilitates payments in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Australasia. Ripple, a remittance network written using C++, is a real-time gross settlement system (RTGS). Its digital currency (XRP) is an open payment network where the currency can be transferred. David Schwartz, Ripple’s Chief Cryptographer explained, “Payment systems today are where email was in the early ’80s. Every provider built their own system for their customers and if people used different systems they couldn’t easily interact with each other. Ripple is designed to connect different payment systems together.”
