News and Links
Top [Security!]
- Ethereum.org forums database compromised (to be exact: an April 2016 backup). Attacker got email addresses and salted passwords.
- As always, the access point was through a ported cell phone
- An estimate of how long it would take to crack the salted passwords.
- Laura Shin: Hackers Have Stolen Millions Of Dollars In Bitcoin – Using Only Phone Numbers
- Kraken’s classic post on securing your account by deleting your cell phone from your account
Stuff for Dapp developers
- Truffle & TestRPC with Visual Studio Team Services
- Santander releases a gas tracker “to track transaction costs in USD & EUR for some standard tokens.”
Ecosystem
- Consensys’ Andrew Keys 2017 Blockchain Predictions
- DealMate – escrow based smart contracts (contractor/contractee with intermediary/oracle) from your browser with MetaMask
- Joe Lubin drops a big hint that Overstock’s TØ is using Ethereum
- Ethereum Euro Dev Conference (EDCON), Feb 17-18 in Paris
- Contingency: a decentralized gambling network built on ethereum.
- Whitepaper Just 1% house edge
- Whitepaper Just 1% house edge
- Coindash won the ether.camp hackathon. Rounding out top 5: artchain, Project Oaken, Etherisc, Decentralized Court
- Seems like people’s ether got stranded in the ether.camp wallet. Why didn’t they include a send ether function in the UI?
- Seems like people’s ether got stranded in the ether.camp wallet. Why didn’t they include a send ether function in the UI?
- Project Oaken bills itself as a “machine to machine platform” so … how about a Tesla?
Project Updates
Interesting Vitalik Comments
- “I’ve been in crypto since 2011; low [transaction] fees were always part of the pitch, and they are imo an essential part especially once we start talking about non-financial applications.” Source
- “Sharding is MORE secure with PoS. I expect Raiden to be run off of “high-security” shards that have a much higher than normal number of validators just in case.” Source
- What is the “unique value proposition of Ethereum proper?”:
- Proof of stake in the roadmap
- Total and unequivocal independence from Bitcoin politics, at both a protocol governance and community level
- Full protocol-level decentralization (all sidechains so far are federated, ie. to use the usual lingo, permissioned consortium chains)
General
- Peter Van Valkenburgh: Hey Trump, To ‘Cyber’ Better, Try the Blockchain
- Reuters: Token sales take off amidst uncertain regulatory environment
Dates of note
- Dec 25 – Branche price change
- Dec 28 – Iconomi launches their index fund and platform
- Jan 1 – Branche sale ends
- Jan 15 – Intellisys private equity “Mainstreet fund” sale begins
- Jan 17 – iEx.ec token sale begins
- Jan 27-29 – Thomson Reuters “Hack the Valley” hackathon
- Feb 6 – FundRequest sale begins
- Feb 15 – Chronobank sale ends
- Feb 17-18 – Ethereum Euro Dev Conference in Paris
[I aim for a relatively comprehensive list of Ethereum sales, but make no warranty as to even whether they are legit; as such, I thus likewise warrant nothing about whether any will produce a satisfactory return. This is not investment advice.]
Time to buy?
Ether price looks quite low. I wouldn’t be surprised if it slides a bit lower in the short-term, but we’ve slid quite a bit with no apparent reason. [As always, this is not investment advice. I may have passed the CFA exams, but I am not your financial advisor.]
If you’re as bullish as I am (or Andrew Keys is) on Ethereum or Augur, the fundamentals look strong enough that one would assume mean-reversion ETH and REP trades are in order.
But I won’t be buying right now. I’m locked out of my account while traveling.
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