Most Influential 2019

One of the great things about reporting on the blockchain/crypto industry is the infinite variety of interesting, smart people doing bold, crazy things. From daring entrepreneurs and builders, to inspired thinkers and communicators, this space has no shortage of colorful characters pushing the envelope. It’s in this spirit that we present this year’s Most Influential, a selection of people who did exceptional things in 2019. Whether it was Caitlin Long establishing Wyoming as the “blockchain state,” or Rune Christensen corralling MakerDAO, or David Marcus launching Libra, these people made an impact and shaped the conversation, for better or for worse.

The selection was made in a three-step process. First, staff drew up a longlist. Then, we asked readers to vote for their favorites in a survey. Then, based on all opinions, we made a final choice. Note: People are chosen for having exemplary years, perhaps the most significant year of their careers. This is not an all-time influencer list; some well-known OGs were not included. For instance, Jack Dorsey made the cut this year for not only championing bitcoin in Silicon Valley, but funding a development team to work on its core protocol. Gerald Cotten of Quadriga infamy helped us learn (again) the truth of the old adage: “not your keys, not your coins.”

Whatever your views of this selection may be, we hope you enjoy the discussion it is likely to spark. Debate, bicker, ponder, but most of all, tag #mostinfluential2019 on Twitter. Happy Holidays.

Jack Dorsey

This year, Jack Dorsey emerged as the leading rep of bitcoin culture in Silicon Valley.

The Twitter co-founder and Square CEO is more relatable and trustworthy than Mark Zuckerberg and more rounded than Elon Musk, the weed-smoking mogul with a pop star girlfriend.

When asked if he would consider joining Facebook’s Libra Association, Dorsey replied: “Hell no.” Instead, he is betting on a different approach to mass technology: borderless and permissionless assets.

Caitlin Long

Wyoming residents Caitlin Long and Chris Land drop a bombshell at Consensus Invest, a blockchain industry event in Manhattan on November 12. They do it rather quietly, on a minimally attended panel Long moderates called “Beyond the Vault: The Legal Aspects of Crypto Custody.”

The panelists include general counsel of crypto exchange Kraken Mary Beth Buchanan, former SEC commissioner Annette Nazareth, and Land, general counsel at the Wyoming Division of Banking. They spend most of the panel exchanging legal jargon with digital asset expert Long, who spearheaded the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force’s efforts – where Land was also counsel – until it dissolved this September. The Task Force had realized its goal of making Wyoming the country’s most crypto-friendly state.

“This is untested,” says Land, “but we are feeling confident that the Wyoming Special Purpose Depository Institutions will be able to operate in New York without a BitLicense.”

Andrew Yang

There’s no doubt about it: Andrew Yang has Big Crypto Energy. The 44-year-old appears to be the only current presidential candidate to have an official policy on cryptocurrency. To wit: “Create clear guidelines in the digital asset world so that businesses and individuals can invest and innovate in the area without fear of a regulatory shift.” (Not even Elizabeth Warren, who’s spoken skeptically of crypto, has a plan for that.) Yang advocates for, among other things, clear token definitions and tax rules; he’s vowed to work with sponsors of the Token Taxonomy Act and Wyoming legislators. (He is also a proponent of blockchain voting.) “Other countries, which are ahead of us on [crypto] regulation, are leading in this new marketplace and dictating the rules that we’ll need to follow once we catch up,” Yang wrote in a November blog post.

David Marcus

Can David Marcus convince us to trust Facebook with the future of money? He’s trying, and it might work.

Marcus is the urbane, quick-witted face of the Libra project, the entrepreneur who does not crack under pressure, despite constant haranguing from all quarters. When Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook may not be the “ideal messenger” for Libra, he has Marcus – who is warmer, more cosmopolitan and better spoken than his boss – to take up the mantle.

Friends say he is persistent and resilient. “That type of opposition and that type of resistance, I think it is what fuels him,” says Hill Ferguson, who worked with Marcus at Zong, a mobile payments company, in California.

Sergey Nazarov

Sergey Narazov is the 31-year-old son of Russian immigrants who moved to New York in the early ’90s. Both of his parents were engineers and they weaned him on computers from an early age. He recalls being only around five years old when he first sat in front of a keyboard. He was reading programming manuals in middle school. Growing up, he remembers being obsessed with Legos, taking old cathode-ray televisions apart to see what made them tick, and playing a lot of real-time strategy video games. As a student at New York University, he majored in Philosophy & Management ― but it was clear to him early on that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. In 2010, he served as a teaching assistant to NYU Professor Lawrence Lenihan, the founder of the early-stage investment company Firstmark Capital, and he followed that up with a six-month stint at Firstmark doing technical due diligence on technology startups.

“The reason I took that job over other jobs,” says Nazarov, “was because I wanted to learn how people build technology companies.”

Rune Christensen

In the early days, when MakerDAO was just a loose collective of coders and thinkers, Rune Christensen would hold court and talk for hours about his vision for decentralized finance, or DeFi. So much so that his colleagues came to refer to these long sessions as “Rune Radio.”

As MakerDAO has become the most important project in DeFi, and DeFi has emerged as the most viable corner of the ethereum world, Christensen, who is Danish, 29, and very tall, hasn’t stopped talking. With a mop of distinctive blond hair and a manner that isn’t especially disposed to humor, he is relentless about the project he’s helped create. But then there is a lot to talk about: MakerDAO has a novel and complex structure, which takes time to understand.

Meltem Demirors

When Meltem Demirors was first starting out in the working world, she had two very distinct sides: Corporate Meltem and Fun Meltem. Corporate Meltem was, by her own description, “cutthroat,” highly organized, all about project plans and deliverables. She was working in the oil and gas industry, employed by Deloitte as a strategy consultant, and then for a short time as a corporate treasury analyst at ExxonMobil. The other Meltem was just as intense, but in a different way. “Fun Meltem was like, ‘Let’s explore all of the weirdness in the world and go to music festivals and go live in the desert of Morocco with a goat herder,’” she says.

Muneeb Ali

Muneeb Ali has lived more than a decade in New York City, becoming a feted Web 3.0 entrepreneur in that time and the beneficiary of millions in startup funding. But it hasn’t gone to his head.

Ali set up Blockstack, a “decentralized computing network and app ecosystem,” in 2013. The goal was nothing less than building “the missing link in the internet,” according to Brittany Laughlin, the group’s head of investor relations. Laughlin helped incubate the company during its early phases when she worked at Union Square Ventures, a VC firm known for its early investments in startups like Twitter, Etsy and Coinbase.

Ted Livingston

Ted Livingston is fighting the Securities and Exchange Commission on a point of crypto principle. Call him foolhardy or brave, he hasn’t backed down.

Some background. Livingston is the Canadian founder of Kik Interactive, a messaging app that gained one million users in 15 days when it launched in 2010, well before rivals like Facebook Messenger got off the ground. By the time Tencent, the Chinese internet giant, invested $50 million in the summer of 2015, Kik was valued at $1 billion. Then, in 2017, Livingston made a fateful decision. Rather than raising more VC money, he launched an ICO, selling off kin tokens for more than $100 million

Gerald Cotten

Mystery Man Gerald Cotten died leaving his customers with next-to-nothing. Or did he? Have we learned nothing from the weirdest, most explosive story of the year? “Gerald Cotten, CEO of QuadrigaCx died about a month ago,” said the message, sent to CoinDesk’s news inbox on Jan. 2, 2019, roughly two weeks before the exchange announced Cotten’s exit from this world.

“His death has been kept a secret because there are no funds and the whole company will collapse if a sell off occurs,” said the sender, who claimed to have attended Cotten’s funeral service but did not identify himself.

I sent follow-up questions but got no response back.

Holdlonaut

When Craig Wright tried to intimidate a cat in an astronaut’s mask, bitcoiners changed their avatars to “We are Hodlonaut” in solidarity. We talked to the real Holdlonaut – a man from Norway – about the experience.

The most influential archetype in bitcoin is the pseudonymous man.

In 2019, another mystery man suddenly emerged on Crypto Twitter as a folk hero representing the freedom to speak the truth and maintain one’s own privacy. It was the feline astronaut Hodlonaut.

In April 2019, Hodlonaut took to Twitter to castigate Craig Wright, who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto despite skepticism and inconclusive evidence. The tweet (now deleted) reportedly called Wright “mentally ill” and a “pathetic scammer.” So Wright and his supporters promptly started preparing to sue Hodlonaut, even offering a bounty to anyone who could discover the space-cat’s identity.

Reference: Coindesk

Tags: #Blockchain, #Crypto, #Cryptocurrency, #Mostinfluential2019

Source: https://xeonbit.com/most-influential-2019/

China: Impounded Nearly 7000 Crypto Mining Machines

CCTV reported on Dec 22nd, Chinese authorities have seized nearly 7000 crypto mining machines, illegally consuming electric power.

The cryptocurrency mining confiscation came as part of an inspection of more than 70,000.00 households, 3,061 merchants, 1,470 communities, as well as factories, mines, courtyards and villages in the Kaiping District of Tangshan city. The inspection was carried out by Tangshan police in collaboration with State Electric Power Department and other authorities looking to inspect suspicious electricity use.

During the investigation, which initially started in April last year, the authorities seized 6,890 ASIC miners and 52 high-power transformers. According to the police, crypto miners were stealing electricity from a nearby village. The police also said that Bitcoin (BTC) mining machines were operating 24 hours a day, consuming electricity at rates up to 40 times those of a regular family.

Crackdown on crypto mining

China, whose BTC miners are currently responsible for as much as 66% of global hash rate, has been actively fighting illicit use of energy by crypto miners. In mid-November, regulators in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region tightened their grip on crypto mining companies, as they intend to dispatch inspection units to assure the “clean-up and rectification of crypto token mining companies” in the region.

Some other jurisdictions like Abkhazia have also intensified work on the identification of crypto mining farms. The government brought to notice earlier in December that the significantly increased loads on electric networks were aggravated by the emergence of an ever-growing number of illegal crypto mining farms connected to a local power utility.

Reference: Cointelegraph

Tags: #China, #Cryptocurrency, #Mining

Source: https://xeonbit.com/china-impounded-nearly-7000-crypto-mining-machines/

Misunderstanding about Blockchain From Us

Bloomberg announced a 60% decline in blockchain startup investments this year, down to $1.6 billion. But at the same time, large enterprises such as Microsoft, Walmart, IBM and Samsung have either deployed their own blockchains or joined partnerships to use the technology. Ironically, several banks, such as HSBC and JPMorgan Chase, have also developed their own blockchain arms — the same entities blockchain was supposed to replace. What happened? Why are public chains with the true spirit of decentralization fading away while early adversaries have turned into advocates of the technology?

Slow to adopt — but finally adopting

Governments and politicians were regularly called out for their failing to comprehend blockchain technology. Many initially ignored the crypto boom, which led to the scam-filled craze over initial coin offerings in 2017. Then, they started opposing, regulating and shutting down blockchain projects, which hurt the developing industry. But as time has passed, they are slowly embracing the technology in the right way.

One notable example is China, which had initially banned blockchain projects altogether. In late October 2019, President Xi Jinping took a U-turn by requiring China to make a “greater effort” toward blockchain development in order to gain an “edge over other major countries.” While cryptocurrencies were still banned, this showed that the tides were turning in favor of the still-nascent technology.

Public vs. private

It’s worth noting that enterprises have their own versions of the blockchain: “private” or “enterprise” blockchains. These differ on several fronts from traditional, “public” blockchains.

Contrary to public blockchains such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, not just anyone can join a private blockchain. Each node is specifically selected by the enterprise, which might require Know Your Customer procedures in some cases.

For the same reason, “trust” is established much easier. As the nodes are already identified, there is a much lower risk of bad actors trying to corrupt the chain. Even if they try, they cannot do it anonymously.

This leads to scalability. Since fewer nodes are involved and a different consensus mechanism can be used, the transactions become much faster. Hyperledger can run up to 20,000 transactions per second, whereas Ethereum runs 15.

In private blockchains, there is no need for “rewards.” Typical blockchain projects must pay the nodes for the work they do and the energy they consume. There is no point in doing this in a private chain, as the motivation behind the project is different.

Similarly, private chains are easier to update. Public chains require consensus from a majority of the participating nodes — and if there is a disagreement, it can lead to a split, where a new blockchain is born. There are no such requirements in enterprise chains, which means the code can be updated much easier and faster.

For these reasons, it is much easier to launch a private chain. “In the near term, more projects will probably use private to learn the onboarding process and use that first, adopting public blockchains where appropriate or required,” said Nate D’Amico, the chief technology officer of the Nem Foundation, a provider of blockchain technology capable of taking the form of both a public chain and a private solution.

But public chains are favorable for different reasons: for when you need to connect individuals who have no information about each other but still need to collaborate and transact. That was why Bitcoin (BTC) was born — to enable peer-to-peer transactions without middlemen. This begs the question: Do we need enterprise blockchains at all? When we discard the primary characteristics of blockchain, why can’t we just use a distributed database?

The use case of blockchain

It turns out there are some actual advantages in using blockchain technology, even for enterprises. Among them are commercial concerns. Enterprises strictly control the nodes that join their network, but that does not mean they dictate how the system operates. Where several competitors need to collaborate, blockchain offers the ideal medium to cooperate in a less trust environment without giving too much power to one party. This may sometimes even be a political concern, such as when there is no central location to host the database that would be acceptable to all parties. Decentralisation also prevents one side from overcharging for their middleman services.

Finally, there are security concerns. Blockchain comes with built-in redundancy, encryption, synchronization and tamper resistance. “Blockchain architecture is fundamentally designed differently in that openness, collaboration, and data interactions among many parties actually make the database technology more secure and reliable,” D’Amico said. Thus, blockchain offers one of the best methods to preserve data.

But this benefit also has certain drawbacks. “A grey area for both private and public ledger/blockchain adoption are regulations like GDPR and organizations that choose to persist Personally Identifiable Information and other related data on-chain,” D’Amico explained. “Depending on how the network is run, such as globally distributed network, you don’t control where copies of the data reside, and you don’t have any recourse to ‘the right to be forgotten’ as data is inherently immutable and cannot be removed from history.”

The middlemen

Contrary to popular belief, it seems that blockchain is not going to replace central authorities. Rather, the trend suggests that semi-centralised, government-regulated versions will have the highest chance of survival. Startups are learning the hard way that they need to comply with governmental regulations — not because they are submitting to a higher authority, but simply because of public interest. At the end of the day, blockchain requires you to trust codes and algorithms over human counterparts, and some are not ready to do so. Trusting codes and algorithms may work great for simple cases, but edge cases need oracles and human authorities to dispute.

Still, blockchain’s ability to offer an immutable and tamper-proof ledger can help to prevent the authorities from misusing their power. Just like most other technologies, finding a human–computer balance is the best use of blockchain.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views opinions and referencing from Cointelegraph.

Tags: #Blockchain, #China, #HSBC, #IBM, #JPMorganChase, #Microsoft, #Walmart

Source: https://xeonbit.com/misunderstanding-about-blockchain-from-us/