The world is eagerly waiting for a next-generation, high-performance, permissionless blockchain, and this blockchain should be able to industrially scale all decentralized applications. So far, the crypto community has witnessed: Peer-to-peer blockchain networks that use all the peers to validate transactions and provide computation and storage — or traditional blockchains — such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. P2P blockchain networks that shard transactions, computation and storage — or sharding blockchains — such as Ethereum 2.0 and Zilliqa. Sharding mechanisms give hope for unlimited, sustainable scalability of blockchains, but many people in the blockchain space strongly believe that the scalability or sharding …
At a time when technology can be used as both a mechanism for privacy intrusions and a tool for protecting privacy, the prescient sentiment of cypherpunks in the 1990s of cryptography as the last defense against a digital surveillance dystopia rings truer than ever. And one of the most potent instruments for defending digital privacy has recently gained significant momentum thanks to the advent of cryptocurrencies. An iteration of zero-knowledge proofs, trustless zero-knowledge proof systems that are also referred to as zk-SNARKs are a powerful cryptographic primitive that can sever any tractable piece of data between two parties over a …
Peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency marketplace Paxful announced the introduction of support for trade between gold and Bitcoin (BTC) on the platform on April 7. With the announcement, Paxful now facilitates physical trading in 16 different countries. Cointelegraph spoke to Paxful CEO and Founder Ray Youssef, who attributed the decision to support gold to “surprisingly high” customer demand. When a trade is entered, the Bitcoin will remain in Paxful’s escrow until the physical delivery of the gold is confirmed. Transactions must be completed within 21 days of trade being opened on the platform. Paxful will not physically track or touch the gold …
Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency futures exchange CoinFlex has received $10 million through a funding round that closed last week. Recent funding and goal Asia-focused newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported the news on Aug. 26. According to the report, CoinFlex received funding from Bitcoin Cash (BCH) advocate and Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver, as well as Polychain Capital, NGC Ventures and Divergence Digital Currency. Polychain Capital and Digital Currency Group joined CoinFlex’s investment consortium back in March. CoinFlex is now reportedly looking to increase business from Asian retail investors. A safe haven from price manipulation? Per SCMP, CoinFlex describes itself as …
On December 9, investment writer Martin Tiller wrote for NASDAQ that the biggest danger to Bitcoin comes from libertarians who will “hurt the very cause that they are championing.” He argued in the article, entitled “The Biggest Dangers to Bitcoin Come from Proponents, Not Opponents,” that those who speak out against Bitcoin aren’t the ones who hurt it. We all know the “tired objections” about “bad actors” who “latch onto” Bitcoin, he says. If the digital currency fails, it will be due to those who support it: “What is probably the greatest danger to the future of Bitcoin, and maybe …