2019 will mark the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin.

MrCoin

Weekly Crypto Recap

"Government censorship isn’t possible, as Bitcoin isn’t routed through a bank or third party and instead arrives into your phone wallet in a peer-to-peer way.” ~Alex Gladstein

Market State

We’ve all seen that 2018 hasn’t been a great year for the crypto market. But on the bright side the bear market helped us to get rid of scam projects and shady ICOs. Since most of the coins are 80-90% down from their all time highs (ATH) it’s almost impossible to lose as much money in 2019, as you did in 2018. Also 2018 was a perfect year to build and prepare for mass adoption.

Though Bitcoin dropped throughout the 2018, it has helped local markets. The highest trading volumes were recorded in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. Even after losing 80% of its value Bitcoin was still a better solution to the people in those countries as their national currencies kept losing 95% in value from one day to the next.

The cryptocurrencies are not the only financial assets that have seen continuous price decline in 2018. The traditional stock market has also recorded major losses towards the end of 2018. There have been so many wild Bitcoin price predictions for 2018. Nobody managed to predict it correctly.

2019 will mark the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin, which means Bitcoin has been around for 10 years. More colleges and universities are offering courses on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies which proves that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are not a fad.

Happy New Year everyone and we hope you had a wonderful time with your family and friends. Many blessings for the New Year. Here’s to a great 2019!

Quiz of the week

What is a hardware wallet?

A special device for mining a cryptocurrency
A single purpose device that serves as a cryptocurrency wallet
Same as cold storage

Scroll down to see the answer at the end of the newsletter.

Top stories of the week

Hacking Hardware Wallets Demonstrated by Researchers

A team of researchers called Wallet Fail have managed to hack some of the most popular hardware wallets, namely Trezor and Ledger. On 27th of December at the 35th Annual Chaos Communication Congress (35C3) event that was held in Berlin, the researchers showed how to crack a hardware wallet. They defined several vulnerabilities and demonstrated each of them in an hour long live video. Both Ledger and Trezor responded to their demo and didn’t find these attacks alarming as they are only possible when a hacker physically has access to your wallet. If you can keep your hardware wallets in a safe place these vulnerabilities are no threat to you.

Paxos Standard Withholding Users Money

Paxos Standard (PAX) is a stablecoin which was released on 10th September 2018. PAX was built on Ethereum. 1 PAX token is always equal to 1 US dollar and is fully collateralised 1:1 with USD in reserve bank accounts. Recently Paxos Standard is having trouble with its users. An anonymous user claimed that Paxos had been withholding the user’s fund worth of $2.5 million since 23th of December. Their customer service accused the user of misrepresenting the origin of tokens and closed one of their accounts. Most stablecoins require you to verify yourself and provide a history of trading and funds. But there are decentralized stablecoins such as DAI and A-EUR.

Phishing Attack Against Electrum Wallet Users

Users of a popular Bitcoin desktop wallet Electrum are in the midst of an ongoing hack. Almost 250 BTC which is about $1 million have been stolen by malicious attackers. The hackers created a fake version of the wallet on multiple servers and connected to Electrum wallet and broadcasted an official-looking message to upgrade their accounts which led users to a fake website. An affected user described how the hack happened on a reddit post. Electrum has confirmed the hack and warned its users not to download Electrum from any other site but electrum.org.

40% of Chinese want to invest in Bitcoin

A crypto related Chinese survey conducted by local news outlet PANews, found out that 40% out of 4,200 respondents has shown that they are willing to invest in cryptocurrency. According to the results, 50% of all the respondents had heard of the terms cryptocurrency and bitcoin. 63% of the of the respondents believe that they don’t need crypto as a means of payment, as mobile payment is quite popular in the country. 14% of surveyed individuals had invested in cryptocurrency. 60.5% of those who bought cryptocurrencies were aged between 19-28. Most of them entered the market after 2017 bull run.

Raiden Network is Live On The Ethereum

The Raiden Network (RDN) is the extension of the Ethereum network, which enables fast, cheap and scalable token transactions for Ethereum. The Raiden Network is very similar to Bitcoin’s Lightning network. Raiden Network enables massive scaling abilities. Once the Raiden Network is fully deployed, Ethereum network will handle up to 1 million transactions per second. The first release of Raiden Network is called “Red Eyes” which is not production ready and is designed to test the Raiden Network on mainnet. The developers welcomed everybody to test it by doing token transfers and taking part in their bug bounty.

Crypto Companies Laying Off Workers

Despite the growth of blockchain and cryptocurrency-related jobs in 2018 we have seen significant layoffs at several big crypto companies. Earlier in December 2018 Ethereum-focused start-up Consensys let go off 13% of its staff as the price of Ether plummeted as low as $83. Crypto layoffs continued with Steemit, a decentralized sharing system, which laid off 70% of its staff. Recently Bitmain, the mining hardware giant and Huobi have announced that they are reducing their workforce. Bitmain's Beijing office size will be reduced to about 300 employees from over 1,000. Bitmain also launched a cloud mining service, BitDeer to avoid bankruptcy.

Tweet of the week

Meme of the week

When they ask where I see myself in 5 years

Crypto word of the week

Peer-to-peer is a decentralized communications model in which each participants are equal and have the same capabilities and can interact directly with each other.

Quiz answer

What is a hardware wallet?

The correct answer is : “B”

A hardware wallet is a small device, generally about the size of a flash-drive that can be connected to your computer. The device acts as a cryptocurrency wallet and nothing else. The private keys are created inside the wallet and never leave the hardware wallet. It is considered a safe way to store cryptocurrencies.

Thank you for reading :)

Have a great day!

MrCoin

PS: If you like our newsletter, share it with your friend.

MrCoin

96 Kensington High Street, London, W8 4SG, UK

+36 16 555 333

MrCoin will be more than happy to answer your questions at hello@mrcoin.eu

Privacy