Looking to dip my toes into some crypto-coins from Canadian Exchanges and am having difficulty finding current reviews of the exchanges I'm considering the following and looking to make smallish trades with a few exchanges to see what I can do in 6-12 months while I learn the ropes. Seems tho that any reviews I can find on most of these are a year or more and hard to see what is legit vs bluffery. The "predatory exchange checklist" sub has been helpful, for some in narrowing things down for me - hoping the hive-mind can give me some last-minute pointers. https://www.reddit.com/BitcoinCA/comments/getkpf/psa_predatory_exchange_checklist/ I'm thinking of starting off with Ethereum, Stellar, Ripple or even Bitcoin Cash to start exploring. I have my own off-line wallet and am hoping to diversify a bit in the process. For exchanges, I'm leaning towards Coinsmart or Newton but would appreciate any advice (good or bad) to help steer me in the right direction if at all possible. I'm ok with a bit of a leap of faith in my first foray as I'll be limiting my exposure, and try to make sure my risks are educated wherever possible. Candidates exchanges:
coinsmart (based in Toronto, seems to support most of the markets I'm interested in, fees seem reasonable at a glance)
Summary of Tau-Chain Monthly Video Update - July 2020
Karim Agoras Live: Five functionalities complete: 1. Registration 2. Login 3. User Profile Page 4. Calendar 5. Categories List 6. Wallet Screen Payments: Decided that implementing lightning would be too complex. Instead, we decided to implement our own micropayment mechanism using the native BTC multisig addresses. We are going to use the Omni wallet for payments. TML: Continued debugging, getting a TML demo and test cases ready. Hiring: More hiring efforts to increase team size. Timelines: Committing ourselves to a release of Agoras Live and a basic version of discussions in TML in 2020. Umar: Been working on making improvements to the context free grammar parsing. We now are able to add constraints to productions in the grammar, allowing us to recognize grammars that are context sensitive. Developed test cases for that, too. Tomas: Fixed issues in TML and ran several steps in a TML program. Now adding more tests to make sure everything is stable and won’t break. Also been working on a TML tutorial, a recorded script based on the intro to TML which was contained in the TML Playground. Also new features are going to be covered such as arithmetics. Kilian: More outreach & follow-ups to potential partner universities. Positive response by a professor based in Toronto, presented to him our project. Also, response by KULeuven, Belgium, who unfortunately don’t see a good fit in our project. We’ve had one applicant for the IDNI Grant program and currently are evaluating his proposal. Also, we’ve had an applicant from Bangalore, India for the IDNI Ambassador program and we also have been discussing his proposal. Translation Bounties: We’ve had the blog post “The New Tau” translated to Chinese and have been reviewing the translation. We are going to publish the translation on our website and on the Bitcointalk Chinese forum section. Still to be claimed: German translation of “The New Tau”. Done more effort on reach out to potential tribe channels: Research groups, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups. Most represented keywords: Complex Adaptive Systems, NLP, Computational Linguistics. Usual feedback: Likes but no further interaction. Created an FAQ answering all possible questions surrounding IDNI, Tau & Agoras Idea: Hosting a virtual panel to spread the word about our project among the scientific community, as well as to create some visual content for our community. Two professors are interested in participating, one from Argentina with a focus in semantic parsing, the other one from the University of Washington with a focus on human-computer interaction and social computing. First step: organizing a pre-panel discussion where in 1on1 calls with the professors we get an opinion of them about what we are doing. Andrei: Agoras Live: Implemented mail system so users now get their mails (e.g. registration email). Improved UX together with Mo’az, e.g. user profiles. Token creation for accessing calls to identify and charge users. Customized Jitsi interface to suit our needs: E.g. display of how much time passed in a call and how much it costs. Next up: Further improve UX; make sure everything works as intended. Mo’az: Almost finished the IDNI website. Added two more pages: Events & Bounties in collaboration with Fola & Kilian. Agoras Live: Finetuned all the website’s components in collaboration with Andrei. Juan: Continued working on the payments system for Agoras Live. Had some delays due to the complexity of debugging such applications. Still, we made significant progress and got the funding transactions implemented over the Lightning network through the Omni layer. Spent time analyzing the minimum amount of BTC to pay for the fees associated to the Omni transactions. We aren’t using segregated witness native addresses and instead are using embedded segregated witness. So transaction sizes are enlarged and transaction fees are a bit higher. So there is a bit of finetuning analysis needed in order to enable the multisig address to pay for the closing & refund transactions. So to provide payment channels over the Omni layer, the main remaining technical detail we have to solve at this point is the closing transaction & the refund transaction. Fola: Have been continuing to look for great talent in different areas. Continued working on website with Mo’az and Kilian. Been working on the branding for Tau & Agoras. Been getting external support to make sure the branding for Tau & Agoras will be as professional as it can be. Working on marketing efforts needed for the release of Agoras Live to get the media pack for marketing ready. Working together with external people to put a plan together for listing the Agoras token on more prominent exchanges as we get closer to release of Agoras Live. Ohad: Continued working on restricted versions of second-order logic to understand how to implement them. There is a translation in the literature about how to convert second-order logic by Horn into Datalog. Also, I have been revisiting papers that deal with descriptive complexity of higher-order logic. They mention that they have a translation from second-order logic to QBF. I wasn’t able to find where they explain this translation but I wrote one of them and he said he will send me the paper. If so, that will be very good because we already have a QBF solver. Any binary decision diagram is already a QBF solver, so we can just translate arbitrary second-order logic formulas into QBF. This will be very helpful for us to implement second-order logic. Also, those papers mention several aspects that are relevant for self-interpretation, the laws of laws. Apparently, they suggest that certain fragments of higher-order logic may also support the laws of laws. But this is part of the papers that I didn’t have access to, so I have to wait to get further clarification. I also pushed the whitepaper significantly this month and hope we will be finishing it soon. Also, I was thinking about some optimizations for the parser and also was looking into the Lightning network. It was my mistake that I haven’t done so beforehand and if I had done it beforehand, I would have understood earlier, that Lightning is too much. It is too drastic of a change to how traditional payments work and there apparently is no reason to believe that it is secure. So I’m glad I discovered better now than later that it’s not something we’d like to rely on, although we can have it as an optional feature. Q&A: Q: With the project development taking longer than other projects such as Tezos, when can AGRS holders expect something to be released and, how can you reassure us that we made the right decision? A: With regards to when we see some releases, it seems that we will see some releases in 2020. For comparing to Ethereum and Tezos: Let’s first talk about funding. Both projects had a lot of money. For Ethereum, the reason for is that it has probably done one of the most aggressive marketing campaigns in history. It was completely lacking any kind of honesty. It was simply aggressive. None of Ethereum’s visions and promises became true. It simply became an insecure platform for scams. None of their vision of creating a world computer, of creating a better society, a better currency, became true. Because of this aggressive marketing, they not only raised a lot of money, they also took the price to be so high in the market. If you remember the campaign of the flipping, they did a whole campaign on how they would overtake the marketcap of Bitcoin. For Tezos, they made maybe the largest ICO in history in terms of money, mainly because they came at the right time, at the top of the bubble in 2017, and also their promises for better coordination didn’t come true. Their solution is based on voting and based on Turing completeness and the only reason why they managed to gain such a market cap as of today, is not because they offer better currency, better society, better anything. It basically is a Ponzi-scheme because they offer very high interest rate by very high inflation (5,51%). The only reason why people buy Tezos is to get into this Ponzi-scheme. Because both Tezos and Ethereum lack any true economical or technological substance, their value will not sustain and this is true for almost all projects in the cryptocurrency world. In the software, high-tech market, if you come up with good tech and you do all the right things, you succeed big time. But if you don’t have it and you are purely relying on brainwashing people, it will not sustain. Of course, our solution is so disruptive and sustainable. We offer to do advancements for humanity and for economy. Q: What three subjects would you first like to see discussed on Tau? A: Of course, picking three subjects now is a bit speculative, but the first thing that comes to mind is the definitions of what good and bad means and what better and worse means. The second subject is the governance model over Tau. The third one is the specification of Tau itself and how to make it grow and evolve even more to suit wider audiences. The whole point of Tau is people collaborating in order to define Tau itself and to improve it over time, so it will improve up to infinity. This is the main thing, especially initially, that the Tau developers (or rather users) advance the platform more and more. Q: What is stopping programmers using TML right now? If nothing, what is your opinion on why they aren’t? A: There is nothing essentially missing in TML in order to let it release. And in fact, we are now working towards packaging it and bringing it towards a release level. For things like documentation, bug fixes, minor features, minor optimizations. We indeed actively work towards releasing TML 1.0 and then we can publish it in e.g. developers channels for them to use it.
I've recently found a job working remotely as a "customer service assistant" and the job description included various assignments like doing research, answering customer service emails, but also bookkeeping/finance for them. I gave employers my name, address, phone number, and photo ID for employment and began working. At first when it started everything looked normal. They gave me tasks to do such as doing research on products and presenting pros/cons as if I were a regular intern. However, 2 days ago they asked me to do the bookkeeping/finance stuff for them and had me create an account on Shakepay which is a bitcoin and other currency online wallet for fund transfers. They then used Interac e-Transfer to give me $2000 directly to my bank account and asked me to transfer that into Shakepay. I, incredibly stupidly, accepted the $2000 e-Transfer. However, this is when I realized that this could very well be a scam so I quickly called my bank and told them about this and they had me come into a branch to solve this for me. The bank said that they've never heard of someone wanting to send back/nullify an e-Transfer but it could be a scam as I've explained. Regardless, the bank said that they would call Interac and have the $2000 put on hold. While all this was happening, the employer kept asking me to transfer the funds to Shakepay immediately as if the money were from me personally. And that if I didn't they will report me and start a fraud case. Now, I've cut out all contact with the employer and told them that I have had the funds they transferred put on hold so I won't be liable to it. Anyhow, to me this seems like some sort of scam, perhaps a e-Transfer bounce scam or a money laundering scam. Am I at all in trouble? I've asked the bank and the teller told me that I am perfectly fine now when they put the funds on hold but I still worry. This is in Toronto.
Bylls — the Canadian Bitcoin bill payment service by Bull Bitcoin — celebrates its 6th birthday
I sometimes find it hard to believe that it has already been 6 years since the public launch of Bylls on January 13 2014. What started out as a simple and humble “garage startup”, the world’s first Bitcoin bill payment service, evolved into so much more. Bylls eventually became the company that people know today as Bull Bitcoin, and it is from Bylls’ UASF advocacy that sprouted the Cyphernode open-source project. I also like to think of Bylls as a “bitcoin culture” institution that served as the vanguard of the Bitcoin Maximalist and Cypherpunk movements within the Bitcoin exchange and payments industry. Happy Birthday Bylls! 🎂
What is Bylls?
For those of you who don’t know about Bylls, here’s a short summary:
Bylls lets Bitcoin users pay any bill in Canada with Bitcoin. We offer a comprehensive list of nearly 9000 billers (credit cards, utilities, telcos, taxes, brokerage accounts, law firms, “joe the plumber”, etc.)
Bylls lets Bitcoin users pay anyone or any business in Canada with Bitcoin by adding them as a personal payee (rent, employees, suppliers, friends).
The recipient of the payment doesn’t need to do anything and doesn’t even need to know you are using Bitcoin, as long as they are on our biller list or the user has his banking details.
Bylls is available exclusively to residents of Canada and all the recipients must also be, exclusively, individuals or companies residing in Canada.
Mission: Building the software and financial infrastructure for the Bitcoin Standard.
Short history of world’s first Bitcoin bill payment service
Bylls was founded in 2013 by Eric Spano, a Montreal entrepreneur part of the original Bitcoin Embassy team. Eric, one of my earliest and most influential mentors, is a true Bitcoin OG. Check out his 2014 Bitcoin Ted Talk or his 2019 Podcast on Tales From the Crypt which describes in great detail the inception of Bylls. When Bylls was launched, I was Public Affairs Director at the Bitcoin Embassy, the world’s first physical Bitcoin hub (a 14,000 square feet building downtown Montreal). Bylls was effectively a one-man operation, with Eric doing pretty much everything himself. I wasn’t directly involved with the company, but Bylls was one of the startups in the Embassy’s incubator program, so I was helping out in various ways. My first “public appearance” in the Bitcoin industry was actually to man the Bylls booth at the Toronto Bitcoin Expo in 2014! In 2015, Eric was offered a huge career opportunity that he couldn’t accept without stepping down from running Bylls. It was to me an inconceivable tragedy for Bitcoin to let Bylls quitely close down. For the past 2 years, whenever somebody asked me “what can you do with Bitcoin?”, I would always reply “well, for starters, you can pay all your bills in Canada, even your taxes and your credit card”. What was I going to say now? I had just founded my company Satoshi Portal Inc. with the aim of developing a non-custodial Bitcoin exchange (which eventually became Bull Bitcoin). And so, I acquired Bylls from Eric and it immediately became the focus of all my energy. For the first year, our team consisted of only 2 people including our lead developer Arthur which is still working on Bylls features to this day. From the beginning until today, we are still 100% self-funded. We grew organically and slowly. My philosophy on entrepreneurship and startup scaling is articulated in this medium post.It has been an incredibly intense journey. I cannot think of a more challenging professional experience than being a startup founder and entrepreneur in the Bitcoin industry. The number of Bitcoin startups that have perished since is a stark reminder. Some of them sank quietly, but many went down in flames taking down their users with them. The fact that Bylls is still standing — without VC funding and with its reputation intact — is my proudest achievement. Over the past 4 years. we completely redesigned the software, continuously adding new features, but the core of the service remained the same. Most importantly, we added the ability for users to pay any individual or business in Canada by creating a personal biller from their bank details. Previously, they were limited to Bylls’ biller list of around 9000 billers. One of the defining moments in the history of Bylls was UASF. Bylls was one of the first Bitcoin companies to support BIP-148 for the activation of Segwit (second after Bitconic). Not only that, but we were the first to run a public BIP-148 block explorer and public UASF electrum server. We had done a “seppuku pledge” regarding BIP-148, meaning that we would only accept coins from the UASF segwit chain and would pay the Bitcoin market price for them. If UASF had failed, we would not have survived. This cemented our ideology of “skin-in-the-game”. We would never compromise on our values, no matter the cost. Our policy on forks (2017) was described here. But the jist of it is:
Satoshi Portal is a Bitcoin-only company and does not conduct any transaction in any altcoin, including altcoins that are the result of a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain and which can be spent with Bitcoin private keys. This includes, but is not limited to, the coins commonly referred to as BCash, Segwit2X, BGold, Clams and Lumens.We strongly oppose the “New York Agreement” and will under no circumstance ever recognize the Segwit2X blockchain (and BTC1 client) as Bitcoin, regardless of market response or hashing power. In the unlikely event that an overwhelming majority of the Bitcoin ecosystem migrates to the Segwit2X blockchain, Satoshi Portal will continue nevertheless to support the Bitcoin blockchain.
Following the UASF/NO2X “war” in 2017, we devoted a large prortion of ressources to building Cyphernode, an open-source project that makes it very easy for startups to build and deploy Bitcoin applies without any third-parties, using exclusively their own full nodes. We are still developing this project today and plan on actively maintaining it in the future. It is also worth noting that Bylls has never accepted any altcoins and was one of the first company to pledge never to accept altcoins in the future, leading to what became the “Bitcoin-Only” movement. We were also the first Bitcoin exchange and payment processing company, to our knowledge, that has integrated coinjoin as part of its processes.
Unbanking yourself with Bylls
The coolest feature of Bylls is that you can pay pretty much all your expenses with Bitcoin without needing to go through a bank account. In Canada, you can obtain a credit card without having it linked to a bank account. In 2016, the last of my personal bank accounts was closed due to my activities in the Bitcoin industry. I decided not apply at another bank and try the experiment of living completely unbanked. I’m happy to report it was a success, and serves as a powerful testament for the use-cases provided by Bylls. I really like the idea of not owning any fiat. You can pay pretty much all daily expenses with a credit card, and pay back the debt with Bitcoin. Of course you have fiat-denominated debts which conveniently tends to diminish in price over time. You can withdraw cash from a credit card and pay it off instantly with Bylls, so you can get access to cash at any time, in any country across the world, without having a bank account. The only inconvenience is the cash advance fee. When you have to pay larger amounts such as rent or whatever services don’t accept cash or credit card, you can find the biller in the Bylls list or ask the recipient for his banking details, the same as you would for a wire transfer.
The future of Bylls
Many people ask us if we intend to expand outside of Canada. The answer is, unequivocally, no. We will always be a Canada-only, Bitcoin-only company. That doesn’t mean that we stop working hard to improve our services. We will continue to be the first to integrate the cutting-edge Bitcoin technologies that Here is are some of the features you can expect in 2020:
Pay billers via Interac E-Transfer instead of Direct Deposit only
More advanced Coinjoin and privacy features
Bylls merchant services: Bitcoin-payable invoices to clients
My experience getting scammed for $1500 on LocalBitcoins and getting my bank accounts and credit card frozen for it
After having an experience and a half with my bank this week, I thought I would reach out to Reddit with a throwaway account to vent in hopes that this will help someone in a similar position. So, a little background: I am a Canadian studying at university in Toronto, ON. I bank with Bank of Montreal and have for a couple of years. I do freelance development work in the crypto/fin-tech industry and as a result, I’m mostly paid in BTC. This has never been a problem since whenever I need local currency, I just sell off some BTC through desks like Coinsquare and Coinberry, or if I’m in a pinch, through a verified buyer on LocalBitcoins and the CAD is sent via Interac e-transfer. I’ve been doing this for a while and never run into any issues. I have a Mastercard with BMO that I use for regular, reoccurring purchases and occasionally flights/Airbnbs if I travel. Whenever I need to pay off my credit card, I’ll sell off some BTC for CAD and pay off my card with those funds. However, I typically don’t keep a lot of CAD in my bank account just in case BTC spikes - usually less than $500 at a time. Since heading back to school, I decided to sell off some BTC while the market was stable (at ~$10,300 US) so I had some CAD to pay for textbooks and any other expenses. This was last weekend, Saturday, and since I wanted the funds quickly, I opted to sell to a buyer on Localbitcoins. I found a buyer who was looking to buy slightly above market price and had a good series of verifications and reviews. Seemed legit. I opened a trade for $1550 CAD with a user called bittor (https://localbitcoins.com/accounts/profile/bitto) with my Interac email address to receive the funds. I promptly received an email notification from Interac letting me know that I had received an e-transfer for the right amount and that it was automatically deposited to my bank account. I logged into the BMO app and checked, and it had been deposited successfully to my account. Cool. I logged back into LocalBitcoins and released the BTC escrow to the user since I had received the CAD funds, and the trade was now completed. I even left some positive feedback. Now that I had some cash in my account, I took the opportunity to pay a couple bills. Monday rolls around, 48 hours later, and I go to buy a coffee on the way to class; my Mastercard declines at Starbucks. I try my debit card, and that also declines. I tried logging into the BMO app, and see this: https://i.imgur.com/RwpLFMK.png I brush it off and decide I’ll give them a call later and sort out whatever is going on. Later I give BMO a call. After going through some basic account verification questions, they told me that my account had been flagged for fraud and that I would have to come into the branch to deal with it. I remember thinking “Great... I’m sure this will be entertaining”, dug out my passport for extra ID, threw it in my backpack, and headed over to my BMO branch to sort this out. Before we jump into this, I want to note that I have a pretty good credit score and always pay my Mastercard bill in full. I have a solid financial history and a relationship with BMO and even maintain a TFSA investment there. When I got to the branch, the rep notified me the e-transfer I’d received from the Localbitcoins buyer was flagged as fraud by TD (the buyer’s bank) and was clawed back from my account. As a result, once the e-transfers were reversed my bank account fell into overdraft to the tune of ~$1280. I was told I “owed” the bank this amount before they could reinstate my accounts and debit card. Additionally, since I had used funds from that transaction to pay off my Mastercard, they also froze my Mastercard and flagged it for fraud. The bank rep proceeded to ask me a series of questions for a form which she told me would be sent to the fraud department to help sort this out. Most of the questions were straight forward - what was the transaction for, who was the sender, what were the terms of the transaction, etc. However, even after explaining how LocalBitcoins works, in which you don’t fully know the other party participating in the trade, she kept asking me over and over if I knew the sender, almost as though she was convinced I wasn’t telling her something. It was as soon as I mentioned that the transfer crypto-related that her overall approach changed. I suddenly felt as though it was more of an interrogation than her trying to help my situation. I assured her that I do not know the sender personally and that I was the victim of an Interac e-transfer scam. I asked her what measures the bank has in place to prevent against e-transfer fraud, and she told me something along the lines of “Realistically, none. Only accept money from people you know”. Just that. What do I pay bank fees for? I then asked her how I can restore access to my bank cards and credit card, since I need money to survive, like anyone else. mShe responded by telling me that until the ~$1280 was “paid back” to BMO, that I would have no access to any of my money or credit cards. She offered encouragement and advised me to contact the Police and file a report (another user on here pointed out that they usually don’t investigate thefts under $2,500 so I won’t even bother) or to get in touch with the buyers to sort it out with them, but that there was nothing she could do. She also told me that due to this, I would be banned from the Interac system for at least 6 months. Annoyed, I went home and did a little bit of digging. Pretty quickly, I found this thread (https://www.reddit.com/BitcoinCA/comments/d1bc2q/got_scammed_for_460_is_there_anything_i_can_do/) in which someone else was also scammed by the same person in almost the same way. The tl;dr there is that some guy gained access to the user bittor’s LocalBitcoins account, as well as another individual’s TD bank account. He conducted the trade through the stolen LocalBitcoins account and sent the Interac e-transfer from another individual’s bank account at TD. I’m assuming that when the owner of the bank account noticed the e-transfer to me, they reported it to the Fraud department at their bank. This is what led to my bank reversing the transaction and putting me in the situation that I’m in. I opened a support ticket with LocalBitcoins to report the user. After a little while, a support agent gets back to me and told me they’ve suspended the user’s trading account and frozen their wallet. Okay, cool. They told me they’ll need proof of “payment misconduct” to proceed. So, okay. No problem. Makes sense. The next day (today), I contact the same bank rep and come up to update her on the latest: that I’ve contacted the site that managed the trade, and that they need proof of “payment misconduct” to proceed with getting the user banned (and maybe getting back my BTC? I’m not hopeful but you never know). I asked her if she would be able to give me a printout showing where the payment was received, and then where it was reversed. She told me that this was “privileged information” that she couldn’t give me. I asked her how that can be since it pertains directly to a $1550 loss from a scammer that’s left me without access to any of my money or credit cards. She tells me all I need to send is the Interac e-transfer number and that’s enough. On hearing this, I’m reluctant, since a screenshot of the e-transfer confirmation email isn’t going to prove much of anything, apart from the fact that I did initially receive the transfer. I asked her again if there was some sort of document or even just a screenshot of a statement showing what happened so I can try and recover some of my losses, and she bluntly told me that if anyone needs any more information than the e-transfer email, then to call her. I reluctantly left with that information and passed it on to the Localbitcoins support agent. I’m now waiting to hear back from them. So where am I left? With a $1500-sized hole in my pocket. Until I hear back from the LocalBitcoins support agent, I’m not sure if I can recover the BTC either. They did mention that they had frozen the user’s wallet but did not mention whether there were any funds there. I understand that a lot of this could have been avoided if I had kept a higher CAD balance in my account. I would have gotten back access to my account, just minus the $1500 and would at least be able to use my credit card, go out for food and pay for my school expenses. I’d still be in the same boat, losing both the BTC and the CAD. Either way, I get it. Mistakes were made, and you’ve gotta learn from them, right? What annoys me about the situation is I feel as though BMO’s bank reps could have done a better job of helping out a customer who’d been ripped off. Especially since it happened through Interac, which even is dubbed as a “secure transaction” in the footer of the email you receive when someone sends you money. I find it strange that BMO doesn’t have any protectionary measures in place for blocking “fraudulent” e-transfers, or any sort of policy for protecting customers in the event of something like that getting by. If indeed the scammer had gotten access to someone’s account at TD to send me the e-transfer, they shouldn’t have been allowed to get far enough to send me a transfer and have the funds show up in my account, and then let me spend those funds for two days before clawing it back. So here’s what I’ve learned from this experience:
If you’re going to sell BTC on LocalBitcoins (casually), make sure to check the user’s profile for more than just reviews and verifications. Check when those verifications happened and compare that to the dates from some of their positive reviews. Are the reviews from three years ago, and verification says 4 days ago? That will tip you off that something’s up with that buyer, and that they should be avoided.
Another tip is to make sure the name on the e-transfer matches the verified name of the buyer on LocalBitcoins. I didn’t notice that on the e-transfer, the sender’s name was different than the name on the LocalBitcoins account. To be honest, it wasn’t something I was looking for. As I said, I’ve had a history of pretty good experiences with OTC deals online. My new belief is that if they aren’t name verified on LocalBitcoins, don’t buy from them. And even at that, still, be skeptical.
If you want a CAD e-transfer from crypto and can wait a day or two, use Coinberry. Their e-transfer withdrawal processing time is usually 24 hours or less, and it comes in just like any other e-transfer. If you can wait a day for them to send it, I’m pretty sure they do it at a 0% fee.
If you’re looking for a larger amount or don’t use Interac, Coinsquare is a great choice as well. They’ll deposit the CAD straight to your account via direct deposit, and usually process within 3-5 days. I often use Coinsquare, and their support was top-notch when I reached out to them about this situation and asked if they could rush my withdrawal. They were more than happy to help. As a result, I should have some money coming in Monday to bail me out of this mess while I wait on LocalBitcoins.
I’ve come to terms with the fact there’s a good chance my $1500 is gone. It happens. It’s an expensive mistake, but it happens. I’m hoping there may be some luck recovering the Bitcoin from LocalBitcoins, but I’m not holding out. If I do get anywhere, I’ll come back and update this post! How do you think should I proceed? Did my bank handle the situation properly? Did I? Do I have any grounds to get the CAD back from BMO/Interac/TD? Is it worth pursuing with the police for $1500 bitcoin trade? I’ve gotten recommendations to open an account at another bank, and slowly move my money over there. Apparently, BMO is not great with handling anything to do with crypto, and my experience this week proves it. As digital currency becomes more and more prevalent over the next few years, I’m sure further circumstances like this will pop up. I hope this might be able to help someone who finds themselves in a similar situation or will help you avoid ending up where I am.
Weekly Update: $WIB, $VID, $CHZ on ParJar, Pynk crushes Web Summit, XIO swap bridge, Sentivate reorg... – 1 Nov - 7 Nov'19
Hi folks! We are catching up real quick. Here’s your week at Parachute + partners (1 Nov - 7 Nov'19): Three new projects and their awesome communities joined the Parachute fam this week: Wibson, VideoCoin and Chiliz. Welcome! And if you missed, we also added Shuffle Monster, Harmony and CyberFM last week. #cryptoforeveryone is getting bigger by the day. Woot woot! In this week’s TTR trivias, we had Richi’s movie quiz qith a 25k $PAR pot. Charlotte's Rebus trivia in TTR on Tuesday had 25k $PAR in prizes for 10 Qs. Noice! Jason’s creative contest for this week was #artdeadmin: “draw/paint/sketch/whatever you imagine a group of the parachute admins doing together”. Click here to check out some of the entries of the TTR Halloween photo contest from last week. Doc Victor (from Cuba) hosted a Champions League wager round in tip room. And congrats to Victor (Anox) for passing his final Medical exams. We have 2 Doc Vics now. One from Cuba and the other from *redacted*. Some of the top #artdeadmin submissions. Insane talent! Jason’s running medal collection. Say what! Andy shared the latest standings in the Parachute Fantasy Football League (#PFFL). Clinton (7-2) is on top followed by Chris (7-2) in second place and Hang (7-2) in third place. So close! As we rolled into November, Parachute crew signed up for Movember. So now we have 3 teams from the Parachute fold, doing a no-shave November for men’s health issues: Parachute (Tony, Cap, Alexis, Cuban Doc Vic, Richi), TTR (Vali, Ashok, Tavo, Alejandro, Marcos, PeaceLove) and TTR-Ladies (Mery, Martha, AngellyC, Liem, Durby, LeidyElena, Charlotte). Show them some support peeps! This is all for charity. Show them some support folks! This week’s #wholesomewed was about “your most precious possession and give us the story of why it is so precious to you”. A whole lot of $PAR was given out for some real wholesome life stories. Best. Community. Eva! Two-for-Tuesday theme for this week: colors! As always, a melodic Tuesday thanks to Gian! And thank you Borna for writing about Parachute and ParJar on the Blockchain Andy blog. <- This is where Jose creates his magic. Respect / Cuban Doc Vic’s doggo, Symba, could easily be a TTR mascot. Good boi! -> This week at aXpire there were two separate $AXPR burns: 20k of last week and 200k of this week. Last week’s news recap can be seen here. Congratulations to the team for being conferred the honour of being handed a key to Miami-Dade County by Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez at the 2019 Miami-Dade Beacon Council Annual Meeting & Key Ceremony. aXpire's disruptive solutions like Resolvr (expense allocation), Bilr (invoice management) and DigitalShares (deal marketplace) help hedge funds and PE firms scale through better profit margins. How? Read here. Did you know that the 2gether Ambassador Zone lets you customise referral messages with a #PicOfTheDay while you earn some sweet 2GT rewards? Super cool! There was an upgrade to the platform this week that might have led to a temporary deactivation in withdrawals while the update was being deployed. CEO Ramón Ferraz’s interview by BeInCrypto was released. Founder Salvador Algarra travelled to an ABANCA event for a keynote speech on Fintech innovation. Next week he will be at Rankia's Blockchain and Crypto Tech gathering to speak on "Blockchain, from predicting the future to building it". CardRates’ feature article on 2gether came out this week. The BOMBX:XIO token swap bridge went live. The swap will be open till 15th December. Plus, $XIO is now listed on DDEX and Switcheo. There were some disruptions in the bridge from time to time because of heavy traffic. Hence, the team also set up a manual swap page as an alternative solution. And please be wary of scammers posing as admins to help with the swap instructions. For any doubts, always reach out to accounts with admin tags on the official Telegram channel. The first set of incubated startups will be revealed on the 22nd of November. Ever wanted to find out about the people who frequent the BOMB token chat? Well, the BOMB Board is running a "Humans of Bomb" series to feature some of the most active members. This week, say Hello to Gustavo. Key to Miami-Dade County awarded to aXpire. Cool! WednesdayCoin’s founder Mike floated the idea of making WednesdayClub open on all days. The nature of the $WED token will not change on chain. Just that it will be usable inside the DApp everyday. What do you think? Let him know in the Reddit thread. Birdchain’s $BIRD token was listed on Mercatox this week. A new monthly referral contest was launched as well. 50k BIRD tokens to be won. Nice! Want the SMS feature to be released in your country? Start promoting! A featured article on Chainleak capped off the week perfectly for Birdchain. $ETHOS, $AXPR (aXpire), $HYDRO, $BNTY (Bounty0x) and $HST (Horizon State) were added to the eToro Wallet. The airdrops for Switch’s various token holders were distributed this week. As mentioned earlier as well, $ESH and $SDEX are revenue sharing tokens. Winners of the John McAfee contest and trading competition were announced. Congratulations! Tron blockchain support will be added to the Switch-based McAfeeDex next week. The news was covered by Beincrypto, U Today, Crypto Crunch, Altcoin Buzz and Tron’s Justin Sun as well. The Dex was featured in a Forbes article about John McAfee’s views on Libra. The latest community contest at Fantom involves writing educational articles on the platform. If you have been following Fantom developments, then this would be a breeze. Also, USD 100 in FTM tokens to be won. Sweet! Check out the cool $FTM merch on display at Odd Gems fashion. Even though these are not official gear, they have the blessings from the project. CMO Michael Chen sat down for an interview with Crypto Intelligence India to talk about the upcoming mainnet launch. The crew also appeared for an AMA with Atomic Wallet community. The latest technical update covers "Golang implementation of Lachesis consensus" or Go-Lachesis in short. Check out its demo with 7 nodes here. Parachute presentation (WIP). That’s right. 500k transactions and counting. Wow! While the Uptrennd Halloween contest got over last week, AltcoinBuzz made a friggin amazing graphic! Don’t forget to follow the Ann channel to stay up to date with the latest from Uptrennd. Founder Jeff Kirdeikis also announced that he will be working closely with PrefLogic on Security Tokens. Jeff’s interview with MakerDAO Biz Dev Gustav Arentoft came out. After some upgrades on Uptrennd, withdrawals are live again. Instead of the weekly meme contest, there was a flyer contest this week. 5k $1UP prize pool for winners. Wicked! The latest community picked TA report was on ETH. And the crew reached Malta for the AIBC Summit. More pics next week! Did you know that you can get Opacity Gift Codes for various plans at ShopOpacity.com? If not, make sure to read up on the Opacity October update. Catch up on the latest at District0x from the District weekly. The District Registry was live demo’ed. Looks cool! Hydro crew travelled to the Web Summit in Lisbon to spread word on the project. They were also represented at the Chicago fintech science fair this week. For a summary of the last few weeks gone by at Hydrogen, you can read the Project update and Hydro Labs update. We have covered most of these in previous posts. For the latest scoop on Hydro Labs, there’s always the Ann channel. Silent Notary’s Ubikiri wallet is undergoing upgrades. One of which is, wallets will be auto-named after creation. A ton more upgrades to be released. Sentivate announced a reorganisation in the company in order to devote full focus on Sentivate. The parent company will close and all resources will move to Sentivate. Here’s another use-case story to emphasise the potential of Universal Web. In the latest community vote on Blockfolio, folks voted overwhelmingly Yes on whether they would like to see more explainer articles on web tech. Also, the epic shoutout from Scott Melker (The Wolf Of All Streets) has to be the best thing ever! Updated Sentivate roadmap for next 3 months Pynk travelled to the Web Summit in Lisbon (wonder if they crossed paths with Hydro and SelfKey teams) as an official delegate of the Mayor's International Business Programme and were featured by KPMG. How to catch people’s eyes in a Summit where everyone is trying to grab your attention? With LED back packs. Genius! Such a lit idea, that even Web Summit tweeted it. Woohoo! And then they rocked a series of pitches to get to the big stage. Wins in Round 1 and quarter finals ensured an entry into the semi finals on the main stage. Click here to watch their presentation. Great job guys! Business Insider Poland included Pynk in their list of 12 Fintech companies worth following. The latest Pynk Tank episode delves into deep fakes in political advertising. One of the upcoming features on the platform will be the addition of gold to the daily price prediction tool. Pynk has "absolutely no interest in Bitcoin fanatics, ‘bagholders’ or ANYONE who mentions moons or Lamborghini’s. It’s tacky". This vibes perfectly with Parachute. Read more on Pynk's guide to becoming a super-predictor here. Horizon State announced that it will be resuming business under a new management. Welcome back! The original $HST token will not be supported anymore. The team will be looking into how the token holders are included in the new system. DENGfans, don’t forget to check the mini-projects posted by Mathew in the Telegram channel. Look up #getDENG in the channel. If you’re proficient in excel and VB, get in touch. Shuffle Monster’s $SHUF token is now listed on Dex.ag which acts as a decentralised price aggregator. CyberFM distributed the $CYFM payouts for October this week. Total payout as of 1st Nov is USD 266k+ in crypto. Say what! Pynk’s LED back packs are a stroke of genius OST’s Pepo was the 19th most popular dApp on State of the DApps last week. This week it climbed to the 16th position. Upcoming features on Pepo include video replies, threads and debates. Stay tuned! OST crew was at the Web3 UX Unconference in Toronto to talk all things UX. Next week they will be at ETHWaterloo to present and judge the UX award there. SelfKey’s $KEY token got listed on Hong Kong’s Lukki exchange. Like Hydro, the SelfKey team also attended the Web Summit in Lisbon for networking. If you were there, hope you said Hi. Ever wondered how Distributed Identity keeps your information private and safe when blockchains are supposed to be public? Click here to find out how SelfKey does this. More insight was shared into the Chainlink partnership this week by Constellation CEO Ben Jorgensen. The team attended the Air Force Space Pitch Day where it was selected to pitch the platform to attendees. Go get’em! How and why does Constellation do things? Check out the Constellation Principles. The October update for Yazom covers news such as alpha build of the app nearing completion, ongoing deal negotiation with clients etc. And with that, we close for this week in Parachuteverse. See you again soon. Ciao!
I’m pretty sure it’s a scam The first post I read as soon as I clicked on this page is very similar to my experience but imma go ahead and share it. Back story, I’m a 19 year old, broke university student looking for a job. I’ve applied to so many but I live in Toronto and chances of me getting those jobs are slim to none. A month ago, I applied to some data clerk jobs, but I forgot the names of the companies I applied to. A few days past after I applied and someone reached out to me, saying that they liked my resume and want me to work for them. The company itself is legit but all the forms I got from this person are all in Google Docs.They included amounts they would pay per week if you’re FT or PT. The email stated; XXX is glad to welcome you. From petroleum chains to multi-site operators and tunnels to in-bay automatics, XXX helps operators to securely manage their businesses from the internet, adding new memberships easily, managing car wash locations remotely, and using valuable data about users to make better decisions. We are looking for a new teammate. What we can offer you: • Full Benefits (Health, Dental, Vision Insurance, Car Allowance) • Excellent opportunities to work anywhere in Canada • Professional training, mentoring and job coaching • Salary for Full time 40 hours/week (1470 CAD), Part time 20 hours/week (735 CAD) This is an online position and you do not need to change your place of residence. We work your time. About you: • Excellent written and verbal communication skills (English) • Strong interpersonal and computer skills • Exceptional customer service orientation • Ability to pay close attention to detail and accuracy • Strong organizational and Microsoft Office skills • Place of residence Canada If interested, kindly indicate your interest by replying this email. So I’m 100% sure it’s a scam but a friend of mine told me to go through with it thinking it might something else. I did it only because I’m currently moving cities and the address that would be listed on the form would not be registered to my name. The email below states what I’m supposed to do for the job; Dear XoXo, Congratulations! You are accepted to XXX for the trial period. We have chosen you out of a certain number of candidates for this position, and we hope that you will not let us down. You are familiar with our responsibilities and we are ready to get to work. You should check your e-mail constantly and respond to my messages quickly.Just keep your cell phone available to get a call from us always. XXX provides clients’ needs with staffing and human resources services. Our customer service managers perform the full preparation of the client. Your task is to ensure the full sale of services to customers. Your duties will be to accept payments for the company's facilities, which we provide to our customers. Our customers pay for our services using electronic Bitcoin currency. Payments made in this system cannot be canceled. The coins themselves cannot be forged, copied or held twice. Such capabilities ensure the integrity of the entire system. Our company has become one of the first among companies of this scale, who preferred to use the cryptic currency to pay for services. The Bitcoin currency goes the same way as PayPal before, and has already become a part of modern life. The purpose of using Bitcoin is to maximize customers’ satisfaction with minimal financial costs - our customers no longer pay large commissions and fees to a bank, which allows our customers to save our company and earn money. In the trial period, there are several stages. At the first stage, you have to fulfill the task of accepting payment for the services provided by our company (this is the replenishment of the Bitcoin corporate wallet). In the second stage, you will maintain long-term growth and keep the customer in sight. You will have to provide our clients with any kind of our services, selling and informing them about the advantages of our services. You will have access to your online account and all instructions for use. I will train you gradually. For the trial period, you will have 3-4 clients. To get started with Bitcoin, you need to fill out your wallet. Our company will transfer money through the Interac system. There is no fee to receive Bitcoins, and many wallets let you control how large a fee to pay when spending. Most wallets have reasonable default fees, and higher fees can encourage faster confirmation of your transactions. After receiving electronic transfer, you will have to fill up your Bitcoin wallet. We will send you 1-3 transactions through the Interac system. You must ensure all necessary tasks for the client. You should find an individual approach to each customer. You should offer services and products to them. In other words, your position requires you to do everything possible to make client happy. For the future, he will work with us and recommend our company to others. You need to understand your customer, how to do it: Providing a high level customer care often requires you to find out what your customers want. Once you have identified your most valuable customers or best potential customers, You can target your highest levels of customer care towards them. It may sound hard, and sometimes it is not clear to you. Do not worry; I'll be in charge of You throughout the 10 days. I will give the detailed instructions gradually. So, after the trial 10 days, You will learn this profession in case you will work hard. ! You must fill out a form for transfer of payments through the Interac system. After that, I will send Bitcoin wallet to you. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask me. Sorry for the long post. At first, when reading this what I’m supposed to do, it sounds legit and all, but when i think about the little details, something is fishy
Founded in 2014 - Main idea was to use Bitcoin for the payment use case
They are bridging the gap between current infrastructure and a full crypto-to-crypto world by offering products that use the current infrastructure (e.g. VISA) with crypto on the backend
Payment use cases include cross-border, daily commerce, and machine-to-machine
Currently have around 100 employees, 2.5 million customers, and 5,000 corporate customers
Most of their active customers are in Europe
Licensed and regulated in the UK - backed by Softbank/SBI Group
Have offices all over the world, which show where they plan to expand (Tokyo, Singapore, Atlanta, London, Toronto, etc)
Company Products and Features
Their products are split by corporate and consumer
They offer multi-currency accounts that support multiple in/out funds (ACH, SWIFT, debit/credit, etc)
Instant exchange - fiat-to-crypto, crypto-to-crypto, and crypto-to-fiat
OTC rates for customers - Wirex is integrated with multiple exchanges and offers those OTC rates directly to their customers. This keeps fees low and liqudity high
VISA card so funds can be used everywhere
"Cryptoback" - Cashback but for cryptocurrencies
Supports ~26 currencies, including multiple fiat currencies
Freemium pricing volume for corporate accounts - Low volume is free, you can pay a subscription fee if you need higher limits
Fully automated KYB - Much faster onboarding than traditional banks (days vs weeks)
Other Thoughts
Full merchant adoption will take time - Lot of legacy systems that won't disappear anytime soon
P2P payments and the token economy are coming fast, and Wirex is bridging the gap
They see a lot of people that aren't familiar with cryptocurrencies using their card because of the rewards (cashback/cryptoback)
Nano is one of Wirex's top currencies (9:50)
It was very difficult to open cryptocurrency-related accounts in multiple currencies, but now that they've gone through that process they can offer similar accounts to corporate customers
They launched their corporate account product a few months ago and in the first week they had 5,000 crypto business applicants without any marketing
Roadmap
Asia and North America launches are planned for 2019 - cards are actively being tested right now
India, Latin America, and Africa launches planned for 2020
Planning to open offices in Mexico and Brazil
REST API coming soon so businesses can directly integrate to Wirex's infrastructure
Doubling their client-base every year - 5 million planned for 2019, goal is 25 million by 2021
Planning to launch 26 Stellar-based stablecoins + IBM World Wire integration. 2019
A multi-currency card is planned
Q&A
Why was Wirex successful getting debit cards when other companies have failed? Wirex built working products, not just promises. They've got the backing to obtain the necessary licenses
Are there any plans to fix Wirex's Nano implementation (hot-wallet keeps going down)? This shouldn't be happening, Pavel will follow-up with his team.
Where will Nano be incorporated in the future? Possibly in the cryptoback product
What is the average conversion fee between fiat and crypto? There is no flat fee - fees depend on the currency path (more liquid currencies have lower fees).
What do you plan to integrate with machine-to-machine payments? Hard to say since machine-to-machine is still in the vision phase.
Founded in 2014 - Main idea was to use Bitcoin for the payment use case
They are bridging the gap between current infrastructure and a full crypto-to-crypto world by offering products that use the current infrastructure (e.g. VISA) with crypto on the backend
Payment use cases include cross-border, daily commerce, and machine-to-machine
Currently have around 100 employees, 2.5 million customers, and 5,000 corporate customers
Most of their active customers are in Europe
Licensed and regulated in the UK - backed by Softbank/SBI Group
Have offices all over the world, which show where they plan to expand (Tokyo, Singapore, Atlanta, London, Toronto, etc)
Company Products and Features
Their products are split by corporate and consumer
They offer multi-currency accounts that support multiple in/out funds (ACH, SWIFT, debit/credit, etc)
Instant exchange - fiat-to-crypto, crypto-to-crypto, and crypto-to-fiat
OTC rates for customers - Wirex is integrated with multiple exchanges and offers those OTC rates directly to their customers. This keeps fees low and liqudity high
VISA card so funds can be used everywhere
"Cryptoback" - Cashback but for cryptocurrencies
Supports ~26 currencies, including multiple fiat currencies
Freemium pricing volume for corporate accounts - Low volume is free, you can pay a subscription fee if you need higher limits
Fully automated KYB - Much faster onboarding than traditional banks (days vs weeks)
Other Thoughts
Full merchant adoption will take time - Lot of legacy systems that won't disappear anytime soon
P2P payments and the token economy are coming fast, and Wirex is bridging the gap
They see a lot of people that aren't familiar with cryptocurrencies using their card because of the rewards (cashback/cryptoback)
Nano is one of Wirex's top currencies (9:50)
It was very difficult to open cryptocurrency-related accounts in multiple currencies, but now that they've gone through that process they can offer similar accounts to corporate customers
They launched their corporate account product a few months ago and in the first week they had 5,000 crypto business applicants without any marketing
Roadmap
Asia and North America launches are planned for 2019 - cards are actively being tested right now
India, Latin America, and Africa launches planned for 2020
Planning to open offices in Mexico and Brazil
REST API coming soon so businesses can directly integrate to Wirex's infrastructure
Doubling their client-base every year - 5 million planned for 2019, goal is 25 million by 2021
Planning to launch 26 Stellar-based stablecoins + IBM World Wire integration. 2019
A multi-currency card is planned
Q&A
Why was Wirex successful getting debit cards when other companies have failed? Wirex built working products, not just promises. They've got the backing to obtain the necessary licenses
Are there any plans to fix Wirex's Nano implementation (hot-wallet keeps going down)? This shouldn't be happening, Pavel will follow-up with his team.
Where will Nano be incorporated in the future? Possibly in the cryptoback product
What is the average conversion fee between fiat and crypto? There is no flat fee - fees depend on the currency path (more liquid currencies have lower fees).
What do you plan to integrate with machine-to-machine payments? Hard to say since machine-to-machine is still in the vision phase.
The votes are in, and additionally, I am proud to announce a partnership. [Announcement]
We have exciting news for /MillionaireMakers! orboring,dependingonwhatyouknow...
Minor Announcements:
[Redraw #32] will take place this Thursday, July 26, at 16:00 UTC. Of course, there’ll be a post earlier in the day to signify it, so be prepared to crown a new winner (one who hopefully follows the rules)!
The rules have been updated to reflect the prerequisites illustrated in the FAQs. Rule III now say, “Accounts must be 1 week old to post, and 30 days old to participate in drawings, with minimal account activity.”
Please welcome GuacamoleFanatic to the mod team. He moderates /WatchPeopleDieInside, /MurderedByWords, and /Whatcouldgowrong, among many more. He was one of the first people to fill out the form looking to moderate this subreddit, and is no stranger to how moderation is handled, so let me personally thank you for offering your time here.
The votes are in! Results have been edited in the Status here, but I will repeat them once again:
Future winners who are shown to violate the rules will be withdrawn as soon as possible, and the fifth block following it will be used to determine the next winner. The same index will be used. This came to be thanks to a demand of 487 votes, dominating 56.3% of the poll.
Drawings will continue to be monthly, thanks to 494 votes, dominating 78.54% of the poll.
Blocks will be associated with a date and time when selecting a drawer, as voted by 151 people, with 60.4% dominance. This’ll be performed in [Redraw #32], and will continue starting in [Drawing Thread #33] this August.
Finally, future drawings will now use the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. This came in by a whopping 1,737 votes, dominating 52.07% of the poll out of a total 3,336 participants, more than the other four polls combined! The amount of participants is the equivalent of 3% of the entire subreddit!
(Programming experience may be necessary to properly see the results; this is for validation purposes only.)
Let me remind everyone that these results are only to dictate protocols of this subreddit, and are subject to change, given if there is a need to change them by the mod team or if public demand warrants it.
These announcements are to inform everyone of what’s going on at /MillionaireMakers. These announcements are made for the purpose of making the selection process much smoother, and to show as much transparency as possible. The subreddit will continue its best efforts to spread generosity, and perhaps one day, make someone a millionaire. In addition, I’d like to personally make one major announcement. This partnership will help /MillionaireMakers prosper, so without further ado, let me be the one to introduce you to...
In exchange for spreading awareness of Bitcoin Cash by adding information on the sidebar and featuring it as a prominent cryptocurrency alongside Bitcoin and Litecoin, the BCF will help advertise subsequent drawings, offer programming work to make running this subreddit a lot smoother, and provide future winners with additional Bitcoin Cash.
How are you benefitting from this partnership?
The partnership allows this subreddit to be capable of doing things that I can’t do alone, including promoting this subreddit beyond its 100,000 subscribers. Also, I can work with other much more informed and talented individuals more closely on enforcing rules and making processes much more automated, thanks to programmers offering their time to make running /MillionaireMakers smoother. I am not being funded for promoting the Bitcoin Cash Fund, be it directly nor indirectly. This collaboration is directly for the benefit of the winners, this subreddit and to spread awareness of Bitcoin Cash.
What does this mean for the winners?
The BCF vows to donate $200 to the winner, and encourages the low fees incentivized by Bitcoin Cash. In addition, their marketing will bring in more people, which correlates to more donors for the winner.
Wait, does this mean that Bitcoin Cash will now replace Bitcoin in choosing a winning hash?
Bitcoin will continue to be the providing blockchain used for selecting the winning hash, and the address will continue to be listed as another method of sending donations to the winner. However, more information will be provided on Bitcoin Cash, including its tipping bots (tippr, chaintip, and BCHTips). As always, the type of donations sent are all determined by the donors. Of course, people are welcome to use tipping bots listed and any others that I have not been made aware of, but other cryptocurrency addresses for donors will continue to be present (at the choice of the winner), such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Litecoin, among more. Additionally, cash transfers will continue to be in use, including Google Wallet, PayPal, and now, Square Cash. The winner is welcome to exclude certain forms of payment themselves in what they accept, should they be chosen. Hopefully, this partnership will please people on both sides of the Bitcoin community, and is met with content from the subscribers of /MillionaireMakers. This collaboration will help make this subreddit bigger than what it already is thanks to the efforts of many people. The Bitcoin Cash Fund have made a respective post on yours.org detailing what this partnership signifies and their goals. The link is provided below, so check it out. Yours.org Post:https://www.yours.org/content/the-bcf-and-lottery-style-subreddit-r-millionairemakers-have-made-a-pa-2aee0a5b047e
Thank you for your time here, and once again, on this Thursday at 16:00 UTC, this subreddit will be performing [Redraw #32]!
Chin up boys and girls – the DApps (Decentralized Apps) are finally coming. Utility, not speculation/manipulation/shilling etc., is what, in the end, will give/justify the value of blockchains.
Of the top 100 tokens, 91 of them are on the Ethereum blockchain (ERC-20). The most valuable non-Ethereum tokens by market cap are USDT (4) and GAS (25). Eventually, ICX (6), VeChain (3) and EOS (1) and several others will be migrating to their own blockchains. Still, this leaves Ethereum with an overwhelming market dominance for tokens (aka DApps) and Ethereum has been clearly recognized as the blockchain to launch ICOs/DApps.
For the rest of March + Q2 (April - June) we are going see the biggest implementation of DApps on the Ethereum mainnet to date. Below I’ve laid out, in alphabetical order and in varying detail, what’s happening between now and the end of Q2 of this year. (I’ve also added some info, where especially relevant, of big stuff coming after Q2). I hope any biases I may have do not come through too much in the writing.
To hammer home on utility once more: One year ago today, the daily transaction count was at 57,000. Yesterday, the network confirmed over 752,000 transactions (a 13x increase) (And remember, ATH in January was 1.349 million txns!) [Source]
AirSwap is a decentralized exchange for trading Ethereum based tokens. It allows its users to trade tokens in a peer-to-peer fashion across the Ethereum blockchain. The token trader is currently live, in a limited capacity, trading AST and (W)ETH.
More token pairs will be added before the end of the Q1, as part of the upcoming release, Token Marketplace. A mobile app is also in development and will be entering beta soon.
Aragon is a project that aims to disintermediate the creation and maintenance of decentralized organizational structures by using blockchain technology. "We provide the tools for anyone to become an entrepreneur and run their own organization, to take control of their own lives." Originally slated for a February release, Aragon Core v0.5 (which is a fully functioning version of the DApp on mainnet) should be released any day now.
Augur is a fully-decentralized, open-source prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain for any and all predictive markets. Augur Beta is currently live on Kovan testnet and launch is “months away.”
In order to mitigate bugs and problems, the first market on mainnet will be something along the lines of 'Will there be a critical vulnerability discovered in Augur by a certain date?” Given Augur’s development history, this could be launching a little after Q2, but the progress looks promising.
UPDATE (3/7/18): Contract audits are complete and the full audit report of augur-core will be released next week. "Some work still being down on UI, Augur Node, and additional screens." Next step is the bug bounty (first prediction market on Augur).
UPDATE (3/12/18): Core security audit report is released following a four-month long audit by Zeppelin. Augur's contracts are ready to ship and "over the coming weeks we plan to release more details around a bug bounty program and market."
BlockCAT lets anyone create, manage, and deploy smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain with just a few clicks. No programming required. BlockCAT will be releasing their first visual smart contract on the mainnet on March 14 (the full details of exactly what this contract does, will also be released when it goes live.)
UPDATE (3/14/18): BlockCAT's first visual smart contract, Tabby Pay, has been released on mainnet. Tabby Pay is a smart contract that’s built to prevent user error - if you send Ether to the wrong wallet, you can cancel the payment and your Ether will be returned.
Digix is a DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization) and is composed of two main parts: DGD and DGX, both of which are ERC-20 tokens.
DGD is a governance token that allows holders to vote on proposals that are submitted for the growth of the Digix ecosystem and offers rewards to holders on the basis of their successful contribution to the Digix Ecosystem.
DGX is a gold-backed token and is slated for a public market release by end of Q1 2018. DGX is backed by physical gold on a basis of 1 token to 1 gram of gold. "DGX represents value on the blockchain that can be retained over time with relatively little volatility; giving it greater utility than Ether for a wide range of use-cases. Retail, Rentals, Salaries, Commerce, Lending, Wealth Management."
UPDATE (3/13/18): DGX will be launching on mainnet this week and Digix will be partnering with Kyber Network to be the first decentralized exchange to offer their asset tokens (like DGX) against ETH at launch.
UPDATE (3/23/18): The first couple thousand DGX have been created on mainnet and the marketplace opens on April 8. Prior to that, the KYC Whitelist will open on March 26
Ethorse is a DApp for betting on the price of Cryptocurrencies and winning ETH from everyone who bets against you. Users bet with ETH on one of the listed coins or tokens to have the highest price gain in a fixed period. Currently live on the Kovan testnet, with mainnet launch before end of Q2.
UPDATE (3/22/18): Ethorse has launched a bug bounty to stress test the security of its smart contracts and they are estimating the DApp to go live on mainnet no later than mid-April
FunFair is a decentralised gaming technology platform which uses the Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts and their own Fate (State) Channels to deliver casino solutions with games that are “fun, fast and fair.” FunFair has been on testnet for many months now and the Showcase has been live for even longer. Currently on-boarding casino operators, FunFair is on schedule to launch with its first operator in early Q2.
FundRequest is a decentralized marketplace for open source collaboration. It introduces an easy and secure way to reward bugfixes and feature builds on any project. The FundRequest platform will be going live on mainnet in Q1-Q2 and will allow users to fund and crowdfund open source issues on GitHub using the FND token. Developers can claim the FND token after they’ve successfully resolved the GitHub issue. Q2 will also bring the ability to use any ERC-20 token to fund Open Source Issues on GitHub.
Giveth is an Open-Source Platform for Building Decentralized Altruistic Communities. The first working prototype of their “Minimum Loveable Product,” the Giveth Donation Application, is live on testnet and they “expect to fully open the platform for the public in March 2018.”
Golem has branded itself as “the worldwide supercomputer.” Golem Brass beta will be releasing on the mainnet before end of Q2, allowing users to sell their computing power and earn real GNT for the first time.
iExec is a decentralized cloud computing platform that is blockchain-based. Using a decentralized cloud that connects users to one another it aims to tackle the current limitations of centralized cloud computing that are holding business and innovation back.
Launching in Q2, iExec 2.0 — Cloud Marketplace will include the full marketplace platform network, with the PoCo algorithm (Proof-of-Contribution) enabling the first decentralized cloud.
Kyber network is an on-chain protocol which allows instant exchange and conversion of digital assets and cryptocurrencies with high liquidity. Launched on mainnet in February and was at first only available to people on the ICO whitelist but has since slowly started allowing new user on the platform. Currently only has a few tokens listed but that list will continue to grow and will hopefully bring along with it a surge in daily users/volume.
MakerDao is a decentralized stable coin project that is currently live on mainnet. It is composed of two main parts: MKR and dai (both are ERC-20 tokens).
MKR is a governance token: "MKR holders are the highest authority in the Maker system - they govern the system and benefit financially when they govern it well, but they also have to foot the bill if things are mismanaged - as a group they need strong social cooperation and a vigilant attitude towards governance."
Dai is a decentralized stable coin that is price stabilized against the value of the U.S. Dollar. Dai is used in conjunction with their Oasisdex decentralized exchange, and their CDP (collaterized debt position) margin trading platform to offer "a full solution for global decentralized finance where everyone gets to benefit from the massive economies of scale that become available when global finance is done right."
Currently, dai is only collateralized by Ether but multi-collateral dai will be released in Q2. This means dai will begin to be backed by gold (through DGX) and other ERC-20 tokens. Maker is also looking into collateralizing more traditional investments, like real estate, in the future.
This project can take a little time to understand, so here's a thorough ELIM5 walkthrough.
The Melon protocol is a portal to digital asset management on the blockchain. The frontend operates on top of IPFS, while the backend leverages off a set of Ethereum smart contracts. Melonport just launched on mainnet and they currently have a bug bounty with 500 MLN in it. In a few weeks, the current version will be shut down for fixes and a new version will roll out. Melonport: "Disrupting the US$84.9 trillion asset management industry, one block at a time."
OmiseGo is the Plasma decentralized exchange, hosting an open-source digital wallet platform created by parent company, Omise, connecting mainstream payments, cross-border remittances, and much more. They just had their White Label Wallet SDK public release.
In Q2, OmiseGO will deliver the OmiseGO network and lay the foundations in preparation for Plasma. In Q2 we will see the OmiseGO Proof of Stake public blockchain release, meaning staking will be possible.
(OMG’s cash in/out interface and the Plasma mainnet launch are scheduled for the tail end of 2018/early 2019. Learn more about Plasma from the most cheerful person I know, Karl Floersch, here
Request is a decentralized network that allows anyone to request a payment for which the recipient can pay in a secure way. The first iteration of Request working with Ethereum on mainnet is still on track to launch before March 31. The code for mainnet is currently being audited and when the audits are done, a bug bounty program will follow.
UPDATE (3/16/18): Request is currently undergoing its second smart contract audit, which will be followed by a bug bounty program. Request is still on track to be released on mainnet on/before March 31, 2018.
A cryptoeconomic powered adult entertainment ecosystem built on the Ethereum network. Basically, a decentralized cam site (plus a lot more!) Launching on mainnet in Q2 is SpankChain Camsite v1 which will allow for ETH + ERC20 payments and public and private shows all while implementing a low 5% fee for performers (According to their whitepaper, most adult camsites take between a 30-50% cut of performer earnings on top of payment processing fees).
UPDATE (3/23/18): According to community manager Chase Cole, they are aiming to launch the camsite on April 2.
UPDATE (3/27/18): It's official - beginning April 2, the cam site beta program will give token holders and community members access to the initial closed beta shows.
Streamr tokenises streaming data to enable a new way for machines and people to trade it on a decentralised p2p network. The data marketplace will be coming to mainnet by March 31.
0x is a protocol that facilitates trustless peer-to-peer exchange of ERC20 tokens. 0x protocol is free to use and allows anyone to create a decentralized exchange; we call these relayers. This isn’t a DApp, but allows for the creation of DApps.
A list of some of the DEXs, in varying states of development, that will be utilizing 0x:
Also, an informative article about some of the differences between the various decentralized exchange protocols here. Some general Ethereum news to be excited about:
Vitalik recently hinted, in a since deleted tweet, that the sharding testnet will be coming online in the near future (I think Q2 isn’t too early a guess).
What is sharding? Sharding is where the entire state of the network is split into a bunch of partitions called shards that contain their own independent piece of state and transaction history. In this system, certain nodes would process transactions only for certain shards, allowing the throughput of transactions processed in total across all shards to be much higher than having a single shard do all the work as the mainchain does now. [Source]
What is Casper? Casper FFG aka Vitalik’s Casper is a hybrid POW/POS consensus mechanism. This is the version of Casper that is going to be implemented first. In a Proof of Stake system, validators stake a portion of their Ethers and start validating blocks. Meaning, when they discover a block which they think can be added to the chain, they will validate it by placing a bet on it. [Source]
(To stay up-to-date on Ethereum research development, check out Ethresear.ch)
The Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) is March 8-10 in Paris. Talks will focus around “scalability, anonymity, development tools, governance compliance” among other topics.
Speakers include representatives from the Ethereum Foundation, Ledger, Metamask, Shapeshift, Oraclize, Uport, Web3Foundation, Melonport, ConsenSys, JP Morgan, Coinbase – Toshi, Parity, SpankChain, FunFair, Aragon, AirSwap, EEA, IExec, Cosmos, OmiseGO, Circle, Gnosis, among others.
UPDATE: EthCC was a resounding success! If you missed it or want to re-watch any of the talks, check out this handy thread of videos, painstakingly culled and timestamped by u/alsomahler.
The Ethereum Developer Conference (EDCON) is May 3-5 in Toronto. This will be the biggest ETH dev conference since DEVCON 3 last November. The agenda is still being worked out, but speakers include representatives from the Ethereum Foundation, Polkadot, Parity, Plasma, OmiseGO, Cosmos, Tendermint, Giveth, Maker, Gnosis, and many others.
5.6 billion requests per day for Infura.io (Decentralized web3 infrastructure)
280,000 downloads of TruffleSuit (ETH development framework) [Source]
ConsenSys has grown to over 600 employees in six major offices located around the world. I personally think ConsenSys is important (and awesome) because they are huge Ethereum evangelists and provide (in)valuable resources to help bring DApps come to life!
From their website: “The ConsenSys “hub” coordinates, incubates, accelerates and spawns “spoke” ventures through development, resource sharing, acquisitions, investments and the formation of joint ventures. These spokes benefit from foundational components built by ConsenSys that enable new services and business models to be built on the blockchain.”
Several of the projects I listed above are ConSensys formations including AirSwap and MetaMask.
Thanks for reading this far! Hopefully it wasn’t too exhausting of a read.
I am certain I have forgotten some DApps, so please feel free to comment/PM any and all suggestions/corrections to make this list more informative/inclusive/accurate and I will update it. TL;DR
By popular demand, I've taken the automatically-generated transcript of the AMA video and broken it down to bullet points. Of course, this is not a word-for-word transcription and I've paraphrased a few things, so it's highly recommended you watch it for yourself: https://youtu.be/FGOSDZbETr4 Team Goals/Priorities – seen in current and future job postings
Improve network security through Unity Consensus
Developer evangelism: why developers outside of the crypto industry should care about blockchain technology
focus on dev education, tutorials, and events (hackathons, developer conferences, etc.) to directly speak to this community of developers
More coinholder engagement and governance
Coin accessibility
This is a top priority for Aion: leads to improved security, more developer adoption, and an overall better ecosystem that people feel like they're participating in and getting value from
Each accessibility partner Aion is working with (top listing partners, staking partners, custody partners, and wallets) has its own process, timeline, and engineering requirements which Aion doesn't control, but a number of them should come to fruition in short order.
Can't give any hints, but Aion will announce when integrations are complete.
Adoption
Not thinking about network adoption solely in terms of how many dApps are on the network because across the crypto industry the vast majority of dApps have very low user and transaction volume.
Aion's focus is on quality businesses building quality applications that have the potential for huge user bases.
Aion plans to increase overall network usage through developer onboarding, tooling, documentation, evangelism, and investor relations.
AVM opens the door into a community of developers who build mission-critical software that can benefit from the advantages of blockchain tech.
Project Apollo
Under NDA, stay tuned
In the final stages of getting ready for release on main net
huge potential addressable market
Awareness about Aion (video choppy here)
Java developer community focus given popularity of the language in enterprise software
Attending conferences
Unity Economics
the mechanics of the tech and how the proof of stake and proof of work are going to interact together is essentially solved
POCs for different models are already built
Working with world-renowned economists and game theorists externally to get the economics right, in research phase right now
variables that lead to the economic distribution of the rewards are still being finalized
will have ways for users to test and give feedback on the Unity design between now and launch date
Building the next “Killer App”
impossible to predict
Aion created an environment where it's easy for people to experiment and innovate and try new ideas through developer documentation and evangelism
messaging about problems Aion wants to solve for the world and why people should build their next solution on top of infrastructures like Aion
not necessarily messaging that to Ethereum developers, focus is on web2/traditional software companies and talking to them about how blockchain/decentralized networks give them a new set of tools to address challenges of trust, centralization, asset distribution and tokenization
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
Aion has been actively talking about what the AVM means to an enterprise audience because it opens the door to Java on a public blockchain
There have been a lot of limitations and hesitations around Solidity and the Ethereum Virtual Machine
Aion is in the process of introducing the AVM as a potential new standard
Other public blockchain projects outside of the EEA (e.g. RSK) are looking at integrating the AVM because they see a better design for executing transactions and applications on top of a public network
WinMiner
Not in the loop on every project building on Aion
if you have questions about any specific companies or projects, reach out to them directly to get the best info
Hackathons
did 3 leading up to AVM release
none on the calendar yet but developing a more thorough hackathon strategy focused on growing attendance for non-crypto developer audience to introduce them to the AVM and its toolsets
will likely have an online hackathon that spans over the course of a couple of weeks
Awareness in developer communities
more focused on establishing Aion's voice beyond the existing blockchain industry
AVM and Unity are big, necessary milestones that differentiate its network design and infrastructure
focus is on the millions of developers in the Java community over next 6-12 months
Marketing
Aion's not trying to do copycat marketing to the crypto industry
AVM and Unity are milestones directly tied to how different and distinct building on Aion is compared to other projects
A lot of the marketing strategy to date has been research driven: talking to, surveying, and interviewing developers and companies to understand what problems developers face and the barriers to adoption
we need to differentiate and communicate the problems Aion solves and aim to start doing more aggressive marketing directed to traditional software companies around those problem statements
this research is also informing what we're doing on our documentation
Java developer interest
pretty good since AVM launch announcement, people reaching out to us asking us for more information, Java developers taking a spin of the code base.
One of the largest Java-based companies in the world is now very clued in to what we're doing and has an internal team diving into the design of the the AVM and how it interacts with the Java Virtual Machine
this is leading us into Java community groups, Java conferences, talking to traditional software companies and we're starting to see a lot of interest
culminating into a more deliberate marketing strategy that targets these people
Integrations
Portis wallet integration and Aion custodian services are ongoing
we're going to be constantly working towards adding to the ecosystem of supporting tools
As we go towards Unity, need to talk to staking and custody companies to allow people to manage their coins efficiently and securely
Market position
We understand the concerns coming from the community
We're confident that if we have a differentiated marketing strategy and if we're the only project effectively addressing the concerns of the mainstream Java developer community this will be reflected in our market position over time.
Not ignoring the community but have to address these things in their appropriate sequence. We can't say everything that you'd like us to say publicly.
MavenNet
Managed and operated by friend and co-founder Kesem
No, I do not have any legal ties or legal attachments to MavenNet
No, the foundation is not an investor in MavenNet
Yes, they are an important member of our ecosystem and we have done some projects with them, including the MavenBridge, which was an implementation of the bridge that we had built last year with our bridging teams
TRS
Not something Aion controls. TRS is an automated distribution mechanism that was completely open and inclusive to anybody in the community who wanted to participate. There are monthly distributions and most of those distributions do not come into the Foundation's coffers.
It is part of the economic design of Aion.
We hear you that there are concerns. A big part of our economic design is going through a revamp with the Unity release.
TRS is not something that can be changed or will be changed.
A lot of these economic/supply concerns are being addressed in the design of Unity, and it would be great to have more feedback from the community on that.
Interoperability
Our conclusions after spending a year focusing on interoperability is that as we prioritize what needs to be built to make mainstream adoption more likely, interoperability does not seem as imminent as we originally thought.
We're not saying this is not an important piece of infrastructure, or that we are completely deprioritizing it. We're reprioritizing it to later in our roadmap.
In the meantime, we have a lot of respect for the teams at Cosmos and Polkadot. We're very curious about what they're building and excited to see what they come up with. Our research team is constantly paying attention to new releases and updates, and we have a relationship with both of these projects that gives us a good window into their development. The great part about this industry is that we're all developing publicly and open source, and we'll be able to piggyback off of each other's innovations as the market weighs in on what's important and useful.
Our focus has been readjusted to address what we think are the most significant and imminent obstacles.
AVM, tooling, and Unity economic and security design continue to be the focus of our engineering and research teams
Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano interview
Thank you everyone who helped get his (and others') attention on social media.
We're working on timing
(Video skipped)
We still constantly hear from companies that they don't understand why they should use a blockchain, and I think this is an existential problem for our whole industry, what problem are you solving, why is this important to business.
There's some really interesting innovation happening on top of blockchain, novel web3 crypto applications, but when we think about why this infrastructure is important to the rest of the world, there's still a gap in articulating the problem statement. Our focus is to get better at conveying why companies should care about this tech and then giving them the tools to see it for themselves.
In the short term, I think this is going bear a lot of fruit because we're now having more impactful conversations with companies that two years ago we never would have been open to building something on top of the public network. Now we're seeing the comfort level of larger companies shift to where many are open to public blockchain applications and infrastructure, but we still need to articulate why they should build parts of their business on a public blockchain and what type of software is best suited for a decentralized network.
We think there's going to be a trend towards large companies shifting their perspective towards public blockchains, which is where Aion comes in.
Big Enterprises
We're often restricted from talking about non-public POCs
I think our software is gaining the attention of the companies that we were hoping it would
We already have an integration with Microsoft Azure available on their cloud marketplace, and we've also been talking quite a bit with that team other the big tech infrastructure companies around integrating support for Java development on the AVM into their developer tools.
This piggybacks off the work that we've already done with tools like IntelliJ, Maven, Gradle—we're trying to go through the short list of high profile dev tools that are already very well established and well used by big software developers around the world
Singularity University
A big part of my motivation in this industry is understanding why blockchain matters in the bigger picture, not just crypto for crypto's sake, but its potential global impact.
Singularity University is a great vehicle to have those conversations. This is a group of people that are futurists and really creative thinkers that talk about the problem and the world in a way that most people don't, and I think it's going to continue to be a really good stage and great association for me to maintain.
I have a good relationship with Salim Ismail, who continues to be an adviser of Aion and is involved with Velocia, who is in the process of launching its application on top of Aion with their pilot program rolling out in Miami.
Charles Hoskinson/IOHK/Cardano
We have a great relationship, we've had a number of conversations with Cardano about the design of our VM and I think there continues to be interest
We do not have a formalized partnership to publicly discuss today, but this is going to continue to be a team that we look up to and that we're going to discussing the AVM design with.
I think we've got interest from them. It's a pretty productive conversation about possible future collaboration but nothing concrete at this stage.
Challenges as FoundeCEO
The balance between making sure the community has the information that it needs and deserves while also balancing our focus and priorities. Not every one of our priorities can be measured in weeks and months, and some of our priorities are much more macro than that, and we have to constantly fight that balance.
I think one of our biggest challenges has been making sure that we are shining a light on our successes. We have an incredible, solid, world-class team. I think people that get familiar with Aion are convinced that we are in a very very small class of leading projects in terms of technical substance. I think we still have a long way to go in terms of learning how to appropriately cast a spotlight on that talent. You're going to see constant adjustments from us to do better at highlighting the talent we have and finding new talent. This is not a people problem—I think we have all the right people—and it's a matter of messaging and articulating to the world what problems are we trying to solve. I feel like I'm motivated and surrounded by people that that keep me enthusiastic about the problems we're solving.
We keep reminding ourselves that we're not only in a new industry, but we're in a new industry that can have a fundamental and important change on the world, and that drives us every day.
The support we get from the community is a big part of that, and we're not blind or ignoring any of the concerns or questions that you bring up. We're going to do a better job of giving you a voice in our decision-making process. We're constantly balancing internal priorities with external communication.
Sometimes we're not prioritizing exactly what the community would like, but we're not doing that in a vacuum. We're very specifically evaluating the pros and cons of one priority over another because we have to balance resources while keeping our eye on the long-term goals for what we're building.
European presence
No plans to open an office there.
We have a great partnership with a company out of Romania that we've been doing work with for the last year and a half—Centrys—that has been responsible for the THEO Project, Syna wallet, and a distributed marketplace project.
We continue to maintain our offices in Toronto, Shanghai, and Barbados.
ConsenSys
We have a good, long-standing relationship with ConsenSys. We have lots of friends who work and worked inside that company. I continue to serve on the board of directors at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance alongside ConsenSys, Joe Lubin, and others. But ConsenSys's business model is very specifically focused on supporting the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem.
We have interest from certain members of the ConsenSys teams that are working more within the enterprise space around what we've built with the AVM because it addresses a lot of their concerns around Solidity/EVM.
People like what we've done with Java and the AVM, and I think we're going to have a lot of traction around building out a community of users, which will validate our tech stack and start to build out a larger set of templates for smart contracts and tools that are supported on top of the same VM, and turn that into more of an industry standard. I would not be surprised if that ends up having some involvement from certain members or teams within ConsenSys
Value to Aion
This is a massively dynamic market, and there are a lot of factors that feed into this. Many of these factors are short term and many of these factors are long term. We're trying to balance between how much focus should be on the long term while maintaining a view on the short term, but I think everybody who's followed us for long enough knows that we're a long-term, substance-first project. We adjust and we learn along the way, but we're going to continue to stay true to that.
That's not to say that we cannot optimize our messaging and communication strategy. We're in constant discussions with partners that impact coin accessibility and what that means for the security and distribution of our network. We are in the middle of integrations, partnership conversations, listing conversations, and all of those have their own timelines. All of those are independently complicated depending on which company's we're talking to, so this is not something that's universally or only in our control. We have to rely on third parties to support us.
Interoperability (part 2)
I don't want to phrase this as de-emphasizing interoperability. I think we have always been trying to solve how to build a useful infrastructure for developers and what components are part of that. Our thesis has changed over time as we learn and research.
Interoperability is a critical thing to solve, but may not be the first thing that needs to be solved in terms of the barriers to adoption. We are constantly asked, “what's the point of connecting to networks that have no usage?” Interoperability is maybe not the right answer to getting more usage. Our focus has been on how to increase adoption.
Interoperability will probably be part of the long-term infrastructure challenges that we face, but we think there are more imminent problems to solve. I think there are a lot of ways for us to be collaborating with other projects. The way we define what we're building, the language we use, has a big part to play in how we convince people to build on top of us.
People that don't view themselves as blockchain developers are potentially less keen to build out “a blockchain” but maybe more keen to build on a decentralized infrastructure that solves data ownership problems. We're testing different messages and different narratives.
Interoperability will become part of the long term design, but it's a matter of when is it the right time to be investing in that research.
Runway
As many of you know, we're very public about our finances.
The next release of our finances will come out for the June 30th date. We release finances every three months. It usually takes us three to four weeks to prepare them and publish them, so March 31st got released sometime in April, June 30th will get released sometime in July.
Our financial stability and our funds are not our top concern right now. We feel very confident about where we're at with our runway and the amount of money we have. I'm very confident that we have more than sufficient funds to prove our thesis.
We can probably set up an opportunity for the community to ask questions after the June 30th statements have been published.
Months of runway changes all the time depending on factors like the price of Bitcoin, but generally speaking, we've continued to maintain a runway north of two years, even when we decide to spend more. Wait until our June 30th numbers are published you'll have a lot more specific information at that point because we are prioritizing new hires that are going to change the amount that we're spending on a monthly basis.
Thank you so much for being patient with us. Stay tuned for our weekly AMAs from different members of the team, community surveys, and these quarterly video AMAs. There's going to be a lot more information coming out of the project especially as we wrap up Unity.
Building a Future on Ethereum at Canadian Hackathon
https://preview.redd.it/fty5r0hg37y31.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d1ecf9875f3500237ddbe9697f6de14cfa46eaa A hackathon may sound like something conducted in a disused warehouse by a bunch of computer nerds trying to break into government websites. In reality it is the complete opposite; a gathering of whitehats and industry professionals sharing knowledge and innovating on current networks. A weekend Ethereum hackathon in Toronto, Canada produced some interesting developments as the ETH community continues to grow.
Ethereum Innovation Continues
Ethereum has no shortage of detractors and it gets more than its fair share of FUD. But the bottom line is that there are more developers working on the Ethereum network than any rival blockchain project and this has made it the global standard platform for dApps and smart contracts. The leading minds in the cryptocurrency space joined over white hat 500 hackers from around the world over the weekend to collaborate on Ethereum based dApps. The Toronto based ETHWaterloo event is organized by the core ETHGlobal team and has been running since 2017. Prizes were awarded for innovation and 65 projects were submitted over the weekend which brought total hackathon projects to more than 1,000. The most famous dApp ever to emerge from the hackathon was ‘CryptoKitties’ which overwhelmed the network in late 2017. A recent post by Camila Russo’s ‘The Defiant’ has taken a deeper look into some of the developments and cool things that were built on Ethereum at the event. Previous collaborations have focused on DeFi which is seeing monumental growth this year however this event’s attention was geared towards smart wallets, messaging and gaming. There were five winners at the event and the first was a concept which turned Google Sheets into an Ethereum wallet. Dubbed ‘Sheetcoin’ (which could have other connotations), the platform allows users to send ERC-20 tokens to a Gmail account. Essentially a Google Sheets sidechain has been strapped on to Ethereum making it ridiculously easy to use. Another project used Ethereum to prevent spam voice calls, SIM swapping and telecoms providers selling personal data. Eth P2P VOIP uses a token based system that enables users to allow or block calls by placing a price on them that the caller has to pay if not on a whitelist. A DeFi custody wallet was also developed which, using Metamask, can interact with any dApp. This one if developed further could help simplify DeFi and accelerate its adoption. Another MetaMask based dApp called Connexion allows users to instant message using their ENS names (Ethereum based domain names). Messages can be sent and received directly on the blockchain without needing third party apps that eat your data such as Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Skype or Apple’s Facetime. A similar system for notifications was also showcased. Wallet Notify sends push notifications to Ethereum addresses for things such as smart contract expiry, loan liquidations, governance votes etc. As the Ethereum community grows, more of these hackathons will be scheduled. ETHGlobal already has plans for an online DeFi event early next year. https://preview.redd.it/zoriwcs647y31.png?width=770&format=png&auto=webp&s=10389eccddf32f7ebe137fe74005d66571758552
This is a compilation of everything suspicious I found with Quadriga. Please let me know if there’s anything incorrect or missing Early History (2013-2017)
QuadrigaCX started in 2013 and made history by being the first crypto exchange to register with FINTRAC and accept gold bullion deposits. By 2015, Quadriga became Canada’s largest crypto exchange. So far, so good.
In March 2015, Quadriga attempted to go public and a month later, announced its intention to install Bitcoin ATMs across Canada. Both these plans were eventually aborted.
Even though Quadriga never listed, it started selling its shares over-the-counter. In Sep 2015, Quadriga stopped publishing audits. In March 2016, Quadriga was banned from selling shares after the BCSC issued a cease trade order (CTO) for not submitting an audit.
Around the same time, 3 of Quadriga’s 5 directors (Anthony Milewski, Lovie Horner, Bill Filtness) and CFO (Natasha Tsai) all resigned. Sometime in 2016, Director and Co-founder Michael Patryn resigned. This left Gerald Cotten ("Gerry") as the only remaining director.
Evidence shows that Michael Patryn has used several aliases (including Omar Dhanani) and is a convicted identity thief
In June of 2017, QuadrigaCX announced it lost over 67,000 ETH (about $14M USD at the time) due to a technical glitch. This didn't stop Gerry from registering a 50ft yacht less than 2 months later!
Quadriga has changed its business address several times. It started as a Vancouver-based exchange, with its addresses changing from Commercial Dr, Nelson St, and Homer St. Eventually, the address moved to Toronto. None of these were physical office addresses, but instead a mail forwarding address.
The Terms of Service on Quadriga’s website have always suspiciously stated that:
All account fundings are considered to be purchases of QuadrigaCX Bucks. These are units that are used for the purposes of purchasing Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. QuadrigaCX Bucks are NOT Canadian Dollars. Any notation of $, CAD, or USD refers to an equivalent unit in QuadrigaCX Bucks, which exist for the sole purpose of buying and selling Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. QuadrigaCX is NOT a financial institution, bank, credit union, trust, or deposit business. We DO NOT take Deposits. We exist solely for the purposes of buying and selling cryptocurrencies.
Banking troubles throughout 2018
In late Dec 2017, Jose Reyes (CEO of Billerfy and Costodian Inc, Quadriga’s payment processor) moved over a million dollars from Quadriga’s account and into his own personal CIBC account
Shortly after, CIBC froze these funds and tried reaching out to Gerry, who refused to speak with them
All throughout 2018, Quadriga’s fiat withdrawal times took 2-3 months to complete. Quadriga kept citing the CIBC freeze as the reason. What’s very suspicious is how Quadriga constantly lied to customers with promises such as “the withdrawal backlog will be cleared in 1 week” or “your funds have been processed” when in fact they were months away from doing so.
Period leading up to Gerry’s death
On Nov 27, Gerry filed his will just 12 days before his death. He left a plane, two houses, and $100,000 for the care of his two Chihuahuas.
Gerry had a plan for all his personal affairs in the event of his death but he had no contingency plan for $180M CAD of crypto in cold storage that only he had the private keys to?
India is a suspicious place to travel, considering Gerry had a medical condition and considering how easy it is to get a death certificate there
After a severe bear market, most crypto businesses have been struggling and laying off staff. It’s odd that Gerry, who has no history of philanthropy, chooses to donate money. Especially when his exchange is having so many banking troubles.
The organization that built the orphanage states on their website that they take care of all construction. There was zero need for Gerry to go to India
A reddit post shows that the orphanage exists, although it’s a mystery where the image came from
Bitcoin fell 50% in Nov – the worst monthly decline in 7 years. Gerry’s death occurred shortly after
Gerry’s death and announcement
On Dec 9, Gerry died in India “due to complications of Crohn’s disease.” However, there is a low probability that Crohn’s disease is fatal, especially at the young age of 30
Just a couple days later, a reddit post indicated someone bought 300 BTC on Quadriga at a 25% premium and moved the funds out of the exchange
It took Quadriga over a month to announce Gerry’s death on Jan 14th.
Over the following 2 weeks, Quadriga continued to assure customers that “our hot wallets are being filled and withdrawals are going slower but will complete.”
On Jan 28th, Quadriga takes down their website. Initially they said “an upgrade is being performed,” then the message changed to “site maintenance” before being changed to “Quadriga has filed for creditor protection” on Jan 31st.
The death certificate misspells his surname, as well as his parents’ surnames. The hospital that issued the certificate has a history of fraud.
The funeral home in Nova Scotia where Gerry’s funeral was held has no record/obituary of Gerry’s death. There is no picture showing Gerry’s deceased body.
Chain analysis of the crypto trapped in cold storage
Quadriga’s crypto wallets have substantially less than the reported $180M CAD
There were no cold wallets. Quadriga moved everything onto other exchanges (Poloniex, Kraken, Binance, Bitfinex, And Huobi)
There has possibly been movement from Quadriga Litecoin addresses since Gerry’s death
In the media, Gerry stated several times that Quadriga uses multi-sig cold storage. This is where 2/3 or 3/5 people can be used to authorize a transaction. Clearly no multisig was used if only Gerry had the private keys.
Formal Active Investigations
A preliminary court hearing was held on Feb 5, 2019 where the Canadian Apex Court appointed Ernst and Young (EY) as Monitor to further investigate into the matter. EY has stated that its an extraordinary challenge to decipher Quadriga's finances, as the company has no accounting records (and did not systematically track incoming and outgoing payments) nor a bank account in its name.
Toronto-West RCMP (with the assistance of Nova Scotia RCMP) are leading an investigation into QuadrigaCX
The Better Business Bureau (BBB), which gives Quadriga an F-rating, launched an investigation in Dec 2018
Quadriga has substantial personal information on its customers, including SIN, driver's license, and banking details. Given Quadriga's murky history, customers may have their identity at risk and should setup up credit report and identity theft alerts with either Equifax or TransUnion.
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