Welcome to The Blockchain Report, your daily rundown for the latest in crypto, with your host Taylor Nikolai.
There are some malicious apps on the Google Play store! Four malicious cryptocurrency apps were found on Google Play Store. According to The Next Web, four fraudulent cryptocurrency apps have been found on the Google Play Store this week. The apps were pretending to be digital cryptocurrency wallets for Neo, Tether, and MetaMask. These wallets have gotten several hundred installs since mid-October.
Although these apps have now been reported and removed from the Play Store, it makes some wonder whether people have lost money using these fraudulent apps and what Google will do to prevent these sorts of apps from popping up again.
The apps acted as either phishing apps or as fake wallets. They’d ask for your private key and digital wallet password. This would then allow the creators of the app to steal the users’ funds to their own personal wallet. The fake wallet apps all had the same public key and private key. That essentially means that any cryptocurrency funds deposited into the wallet address would be sent directly to the scammer’s cryptocurrency wallet.
To avoid these scams, make sure a cryptocurrency wallet is offering you your own private key. If it doesn’t, then you don’t own the wallet.
Next up, a Coinbase-backed company released a $799 cryptocurrency miner.
According to Fortune, a device called Coinmine One is being sold for $799 and was built to be a simple cryptocurrency mining system that can be used at home. Although the system’s GPU isn’t powerful enough to mine Bitcoin, it is powerful enough to mine Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Monero, and Zcash.
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Farb Nivi and Justin Lambert worked together to create the Coinmine company and the Coinmine One system. Although you probably don’t recognize Justin Lambert’s name, you might recognize another product he created: Pebble smartwatches.
Users of Coinmine One must place significant trust into the system. Coinmine stores the cryptocurrencies on its own corporate servers and takes a 5% cut of all cryptocurrencies mined. So far Coinbase Ventures, Arrington Ventures, and Coinbase’s CTO have all invested into Coinmine, helping them raise $2 million.
Next up, an Ethereum Co-Founder says blockchain will shift society from a “scarcity to abundance mindset”. According to CCN, Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin said that blockchain technology will create a “monumental shift” in society that will move people from a “scarcity to an abundance mindset”. Lubin made these comments at the Lubin believes that Ethereum will play an important part in changing the internet into a fully decentralized ecosystem.
Lubin did make some other eyebrow raising comments at the summit, such as saying that blockchain technology will fuel innovation at every level of human society by allowing people to have a “self-determined, sovereign identity.” But he said that’s okay, continuing, “We can grow into the radical future we imagine as we take care of adoption, use case exploration, user interface and user experience definition — all of which will keep us busy for years.”
Clip: Quote on screen
And finally on today’s show, Brian Armstrong just became a billionaire!
While the cryptocurrency market may be crashing, the creator of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, just became a billionaire. Forbes reports that in October, Coinbase had a round of financing of $300 million at an $8 billion valuation. Armstrong’s stake in Coinbase is worth $1.3 billion. That’s right, billion, with a B.
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Coinbase now has more than 20 million users on their platform, which will likely generate them $1.3 Billion in revenue this year.
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