Welcome to The Blockchain Report, your daily rundown for the latest in crypto, with your host Taylor Nikolai. Would you live in a Blockchain City?
A tech millionaire wants to build a blockchain city. According to InMan, a tech millionaire by the name of Jeffrey Berns had his company recently purchase 68,000 acres near Reno, Nevada. The plan? To create a Blockchain city. He stated, “We are building the world’s first smart city based on technology, from infrastructure all the way up. It’s not so much a city as much as a series of different projects to highlight the power of a public blockchain.”
Reports are that Jeffrey Berns has spent over $300 million of his own money on the project, and these images show what his plans are for the area. Among the ideas to be included are an eSports arena, and bunkers to store digital assets.
Next, British Bitcoin Profit reports that the Winklevoss Twins claim that Charlie Shrem stole 5,000 Bitcoins. According to Engadget, the Winklevoss twins (of Facebook and now cryptocurrrency fame) have decided to sue cryptocurrency investor and ex convict Charlie Shrem for stealing 5,000 bitcoins in 2012. Although it might’ve been a (relatively) small amount back then, it’s not now. Today, 5,000 bitcoins is worth approximately $32 million.
Back in 2012, the Winklevoss Capital Fund sent Shrem $250,000 to buy bitcoins, but Shrem allegedly only sent the Winklevoss $189,000 worth based on the price at the time. Now, the twins are deciding to sue. Cameron Winklevoss said that the lawsuit was spurred as a result of learning of Shrem’s spending sprees. In the past year, Shrem has gone on to buy a $2 million Florida house, two powerboats, and two Maseratis. He’s supposed to be broke.
Next up, MetaMask has reached 1.3 million users. According to NewsBTC, the Ethereum wallet MetaMask has just recently announced that it has reached a whopping 1.3 million downloads. MetaMask is a chrome extension that offers a variety of digital wallet features, including a secure identity vault. MetaMask also allows its users to run any decentralized application (dApp) directly in their browser, without the need of running a full Ethereum node.
In a way, this allows MetaMask to act as a bridge between the internet browser and the blockchain. In the announcement of how many users MetaMask has, they have also announced new features that MetaMask will have. One new feature is compatibility with the digital asset hardware wallets Ledger and Trezor. MetaMask also has a new feature called “privacy mode”, which allows users to prevent their Ethereum address from getting revealed to websites.
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Next, a research firm argues EOS isn’t a blockchain and is highly centralized. According to Toshi Times, the blockchain testing firm Whiteblock has argued that the cryptocurrency EOS isn’t actually a blockchain but a cloud service for computation. EOS is a cryptocurrency that aims to provide millions of transactions per second, eliminate transaction fees, and allow for quick deployment of dApps. There’s only one problem. Some firms don’t think EOS is a blockchain.
Whiteblock has done two months of testing of EOS and concluded based on the results that EOS is neither a blockchain nor a decentralized technology. Whiteblock states: “EOS block producers are highly centralized, and users can only access the network using block producers as intermediaries. Block producers are a single point of failure for the entire system.”
They also said that EOS highly susceptible to a Sybil attack, as well as their claims about transactions to be false. “During tests with real-world conditions of 50 [milliseconds] of round-trip latency and 0.01 percent packet loss, performance dropped below 50 TPS, putting the system near the performance that exists in Ethereum,” Whiteblock claims.
And finally on today’s show, Taiwan has amended a law so they can track anonymous crypto transactions.
According to CCN, Taiwan’s legislative body has made made amendments to laws that already exist, in order to make it so the government can fight against anonymity in cryptocurrency transactions. The amendments were made to what are called the Money Laundering Control Act and the Terrorism Financing Prevention Act.
These allow Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission, which is their financial regulating body, to gather info on people who are on trading platforms and exchanges.
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