Equifax Security Breach / Reasons for the Bitcoin Price Drop / Thoughts on Waltonchain
Equifax Security Breach
Perhaps some of the biggest news this week is in regards to the Equifax security breach. For those of you who aren't aware, Equifax is one of the three largest credit score reporting and monitoring services in the United States. Recently they have been victim to two vulnerabilities one that affects the United States, and another recent one that affects Argentina. This attack is certainly a big deal because 143 million users are potentially affected. You can find out if you're affected on Equifax's official TrustID tool.
Reasons for Bitcoin Price Drop
Another big development was the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency marketcap drop. Here are a list of reasons - along with articles I have compiled that could be the reasons for the drop
- Breaking: Bitcoin Exchange BTCChina will Close by October - The 2nd largest exchange in China BTCChina announced they'll close by October
- Drama and FUD over comments by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon - There is certainly a ton of drama currently in regards to Jamie Dimon and his comments in regards to Bitcoin.
- General market fear, uncertainty and doubt in regards to China, due to circulating articles spreading false news in regards to the Chinese government further manipulating the price.
Will Bitcoin be back up?
I think there is a strong case for Bitcoin eventually rallying back up. By my perspective the number of positives related to the cryptocurrency outweigh the negatives. Some of the positives I see with Bitcoin that are sure to keep it around for a while are:
- Difficulty to be regulated due to it's decentralized nature: Bitcoin is just very hard to stop for any one government, it's a global currency. One can shutdown exchanges but the internet has no borders. People will always find a way around to trade the currency.
- Ease of making global transactions: Global transactions are very easily made with Bitcoin and a ton of fees and taxes are often avoided by making international transactions over Bitcoin.
- Security and convenience: Bitcoin through blockchain technology provides greater security for funds than traditional banks in that the user has access to their funds at anytime and no user information is stored on the blockchain.
If history can be used as a record, I believe Bitcoin will certainly go back to the $5000 level and blow past it.
Thoughts on Waltonchain
Recently I came across a coin called Waltonchain ($WTC) that's based in China and is tradeable on the international exchange Binance. Waltonchain is named after Charlie Walton the founder of RFID. Their goal is to do supply inventory management and Internet of Things (IoT) by combining the RFID technology and blockchain. I've seen considerable gains since entering a position in Waltonchain earlier this month and certainly thing it has a lot potential. I have been keeping up with their:
The community is very welcoming and the marketcap is relatively low ~$40 million for a 25 million coin supply. Waltonchain is also compliant with all Chinese government regulations. I believe it's definitely a coin to look into - but as always do your own research.
I very much think that centralized authority will have to learn the hard way about keeping PII (Personally Identifiable Information). They don't want to lose control of it because it's highly profitable for them (based on the FB business model for instance). The key to minimizing risk is decentralization. If instead of having all that PII on a central server where one hack generates 143 million records, it's better to force hackers to attack 143 million hosts to get one record.
They won't do that though. I just hope that they figure it out before they make the mistake of using biometrics directly which will make the technology unusable and generate an panopticon in the process.
Thanks for the reply! I was actually thinking about ways to introduce blockchain as a step in maximizing the security of traditional systems. For example if there was a blockchain layer of security that would require a valid transaction to be made to a unique address to then enable one to get access to a unique one time key that allows one to access encrypted information regarding credit history or PII it would be a much better system. At the end of the day I think the security did not reflect the confidentiality of the information that was being stored and that's what led to the breach.