Gold mining is estimated to use more than 20 times the energy of Bitcoin mining.

MrCoin

Weekly Crypto Recap

Bitcoin is a super commodity, minted from energy, the fundamental commodity of the universe. ~ Dan Hedl

Market State

BTC: €5,360.46 | -1.98% since last week

ETH: €169.01 | 0.77% since last week

BCH: €355.39 | -12.44% since last week

LTC: €44.21 | -5.49% since last week

The size of crypto market slightly went down by 1.55% to €164.84 billion. Bitcoin is down by 2% to €5,360.46. Ether plunged all the way to €145 during the last week, which was 90% fall from its all time high, then quickly gained back its loss. Currently Ether sitting at around €169,01. Bitcoin Cash noticeably went down by 12,5% to €355.39 during the week due to the news of less merchants are accepting Bitcoin Cash and political disagreement among Bitcoin Cash community. There have been many positive news from the institutional investors. Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs all prepare to launch Bitcoin products and services for institutional investors. NASDAQ, the world’s largest stock exchange is acquiring the crypto friendly Swedish exchange Cinnober. Despite the wave of good news the crypto market keeps dropping. It’s difficult to tell whether we reached the bottom of the crypto market and the market will recover soon or it will keep dropping.

Quiz of the week

What is a hash function?

Splitting network
A way of sending information to multiple people at the same time
Takes an input of any length and returns a fixed-length string of numbers and letters

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

Top stories of the week

Gemini Stablecoin

Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by the Winklevoss brothers launched the world’s first regulated stablecoin. Gemini Dollar is US pegged, ERC 20 token built on the Ethereum blockchain. The ticker symbol for Gemini Dollar is GUSD. State Street, one of the oldest US banks is serving as Gemini’s reserve bank. There are currently 100,000 GUSD tokens coins on the market. All of GUSD coins are backed by the equivalent amount of US dollars which are stored in a State Street bank account. A researcher Alex Labed performed a code review of Gemini Dollar and found out that Gemini can freeze your GUSD tokens any time. Users of GUSD tokens are subject to KYC requirements.

Gold Mining Uses a Lot More Energy Than Bitcoin Mining

It turns out that Bitcoin mining is not as wasteful as it was claimed to be. It costs about $4 billion to mine Bitcoin every year, but it costs over $80 billion to mine gold. Gold mining is estimated to use more than 20 times the energy of Bitcoin mining. Let’s not even mention the negative impacts gold mining has on the environment. Also, gold mining takes place only where the gold is, whereas you can mine Bitcoin from any location. Miners will go to places where there is cheap power. This way Bitcoin mining will make renewable energy more profitable as energy producers will be able to convert their excess power to Bitcoin.

PayNym Bots From Samourai Wallet

Samourai is the most private Bitcoin wallet. Its newest product PayNym allows you to accept Bitcoin without publicly showing your Bitcoin address. (Once your Bitcoin address is public your transactions will be available for the public view.) BIP47 supported wallets like Samourai can generate a special code that never changes. When the code is shared publicly and scanned by a compatible wallet it automatically generates a unique unused Bitcoin address without revealing your previous transactions or balance history. Instead of a boring QR code, Samourai wallet hashes your BIP47 code and generates a unique bot that you can share as your public address.

Schedule Your Ethereum Transactions

You can now schedule Ether transactions on MyCrypto wallet. There are several reasons why you may need to send an Ethereum transaction at a later time. You might want to participate in an ICO but you’re not sure if you will be available at the time. Or you might want to pay for a subscription at a certain time. Scheduling Ethereum transactions can save you time and money. With MyCrypto you can not only send Ether in the future but you can also cancel the scheduled transaction and get back your fund. You can earn Ether by executing someone else’s transaction as well. After you set your Ether transaction you can check whether it is executed or not on ChronoLogic decentralized application.

Are ICOs Dead?

This August crypto start-ups raised $326 million on average which is the lowest level since May 2017. During the last year’s crypto price surge ICOs on Ethereum blockchain managed to raise $3 billion on average. ICOs are finding it hard to raise money. Now only good projects will be able to raise funds when the market recovers. Today ICOs are blamed for the crash of Ether price, when in fact this isn’t the case. Here in this chart, you can see how much each ICO has raised. The good news is that ICOs still have funds to continue their projects. Most projects are still holding 36.9% of the Ether they raised. The sum of the Ether holdings of all ICO treasuries is roughly 3.5% of the total Ether supply.

Vault, Ethereum Wallet For dApps

A crypto start up Vault has introduced an Ethereum wallet for dApps (decentralized applications) and digital collectibles. Vault wallet is now available on the iOS App Store for you to try out. It’s a new kind of crypto wallet that allows you to interact with dApps and seamlessly purchase crypto collectibles so you can show off your collection to your friends. Creators of Vault wallet stressed that Vault is not a trading platform it is specifically designed to enjoy what blockchains have to offer. Users of Vault can add their friends as contacts which will eliminate the need to share long complicated Ether addresses.

Tweet of the week

Meme of the week

Crypto word of the week

Stablecoin is cryptocurrency that is pegged to a physical asset, such as US dollar or oil price. Examples of stablecoins are Tether and Petro. Tether is pegged against US dollar, so the value of one Tether is always equal to one US dollar. Whereas Venezuelan Petro is backed by the government’s oil reserve. If the price of oil goes up, the price of Petro goes up and vice versa. Stablecoins must be backed up by the equal amount of the physical asset they are pegged to. This requires users to trust a centralized entity who holds the reserve that backs up the stablecoin. Stablecoins are auditable on their own blockchains but it is difficult to audit the reserve that is backing them up.

Quiz answer

What is a hash function?

The correct answer is : “C”

Hash is a function that converts any given data into a fixed length set of numbers. It is a one-way function which means that just by looking at the hash of a data, it is almost impossible to tell what the original data was. Hashes can’t be decrypted back. Block hash is the mathematical problem the miners’ computer needs to solve. A Bitcoin block hash looks like this: 00000000000000000023c7c38b37a7ff6b8571cd8d9fa54adf985c7defe3b65b

Thank you for reading :)

Have a great day!

MrCoin

MrCoin

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

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