Your Crypto News on Steemit February 21, 2018

• Switzerland publishes Guidelines on ICO Regulation!
• RMIT University launches first Blockchain Course in Australia!
• Israel announces Taxation of Cryptocurrencies!
• Ethereum: Geth 1.8 improves Client Performance significantly!
• Bitfinex opens Account at Dutch Bank ING!
• The LISK rebranding Event - A brief Summary!

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The Swiss Federal Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA has published guidelines on the ICO regulation (Initial Coin Offering). Elsewhere, the word "regulation" drives investors and crypto-entrepreneurs on their foreheads, as it can often be accompanied by restrictions or even prohibitions - not so in Switzerland.

The guidelines are intended to regulate the booming market. The focus is on the prevention of money laundering activities. In addition, the mutual trust of investors and organizers should be increased. The guidelines should rate each ICO separately. For this purpose, tokens have been divided into three categories:

Payment tokens

• Payment tokens are defined as exclusively transactional purposes. These tokens must comply with the applicable Anti-Money Laundering Act and are not considered securities.

Utility tokens

• Utility tokens are used to access products and services. Therefore, they are not securities as long as they are used in this way.

Asset Token

• When tokens generate dividends, they are considered asset tokens. Such tokens are considered securities and are also regulated. If the token serves as a corporate asset, it will be subject to civil law.

Most tokens are still hybrids of the above categories. Thus, it is very difficult to regulate them as a single type. Jörg Gasser, secretary of the Swiss Ministry of Finance, told the Financial Times:

Switzerland has repeatedly presented itself as a crypto friendly country. Both the Swiss legal situation and the favorable tax situation for young entrepreneurs attract many companies that want to start ICOs to the Alpine region. At the Crypto Conference in St. Moritz in January, the Swiss entrepreneur and economics minister Johann Schneider-Ammann declared that he wanted to see Switzerland as a crypto-nation. The first steps of this path have already been taken.

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RMIT, an Australian state research university, has launched the first Blockchain University course, according to Business Insider Australia.

First Blockchain course in Australia

Entitled "Developing Blockchain Strategy," the 8-week course was developed by RMIT's Blockchain Innovation Hub and works with Accenture consulting firm and Stone & Chalk fintech center. The online course description promises a practical program that goes beyond the conceptual aspect of blockchain: "Not only will you get a theoretical understanding of the blockchain: you will learn to use it."

Jason Potts, director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub, tells Business Australia Insider that:

The managing director of Stone & Chalk, Alan Tsen, sees the strong links between fintech, banks and blockchain, and that this kind of course is needed:

The RMIT course is not the first time that blockchain and colleges have found an interface. UC Berkeley offers an interdisciplinary course on blockchain. In December 2017, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) announced that it would be the world's first stock exchange to use blockchain to replace its current stock processing system.

In January this year, Brisbane Airport announced its plans to make the entire airport terminal cryptocurrency friendly. The shops and restaurants in the terminal could accept Bitcoin, Ether and Dash.

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ITA, the tax authority of Israel, announced yesterday in a circular how profits from trading in cryptocurrencies should be taxed. Bitcoin & Co. should in future not be taxed as currencies, but as assets. Thus, for individuals, a maximum of 25% of income tax is payable in Israel and 47% in income for companies.

In an updated circular yesterday, the Israeli Tax Authority (ITA) announced yesterday that the sale of cryptocurrencies is subject to income tax. In recent months, there have been several announcements from various authorities, which have tended in the same direction. Investors are also instructed to report to the tax authorities within 30 days their holdings on the online trading platforms and to initiate the resulting tax prepayments. In the first version of the circular, the assessment was the other way around, and so it was planned to treat Bitcoin & Co. as a foreign trade tax treaty. So far it is unclear why this decision has been revised. In any case, this will lead to significant additional revenue, because in Israel profits from foreign exchange trading are exempt from income tax.

Taxation of cryptocurrencies is considered critical

The tax treatment of cryptocurrencies was judged in some circles very critically. As the news portal Haaretz reports, Shahar Strauss, a tax lawyer from Tel Aviv, the decision can not understand. It would "ignored economic realities". According to the ITA, esoteric currencies of some Pacific islands, which can not be used in Israel, are considered foreign currencies, thus freeing trade from income tax. Investing in digital currencies, on the other hand, is made much more difficult to impossible by the decision. Some of his clients at the law firm Ziv Sharon & Co. invested smaller amounts in the Bitcoin last year, which has been worth a lot in the meantime. Yesterday's circular means tax arrears at a high level for its clients, said Strauss.

To enter the draft circular please click here

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The "Iceberg" release 1.8 of Ethereum's most important client, Geth, comes with a lot of upgrades. Most notable is the stabilization of the light mode as well as the improvement of the performance.

With 1.8 there is a new big release for Geth, which continues to be the most important node software for Ethereum. The work of numerous developers and about 170 changes has been completed, many of which significantly improve performance.

The Light Node

One of the most important changes concerns the light node. Geth has several ways to sync a node: Full, Fast, and Light. As the name implies, the light mode takes up the least amount of hard disk space. With Geth 1.7.3, the developers have integrated a new version of the Light mode, which should be a big improvement, as it allows certain important filter operations - but it had an error and therefore did not work.

With 1.8 this error is now eliminated. Light nodes can connect to other nodes in seconds and synchronize within minutes. For the medium-term scalability of Ethereum, the light mode could be extremely important.

Synchronize

One of Geth's biggest issues is the synchronization. If you are not in light mode, this can take a long time. For version 1.8, the developers have made several bugs and errors in the synchronization that have emerged with the growth of the network more frequently. They were able to stabilize the synchronization for most cases and significantly reduce the consumption of memory.

The above chart plots the memory usage during mainnet fast sync of two m4.2xlarge Amazon instance types (purple = Geth 1.8, blue = Geth 1.7). At the time of writing, fast sync completes in around 3 hours on these instance types. The exponential growth of Ethereum however resulted in a state trie of around 85 million nodes, the import of which can take even half a day on end-user laptops (with an SSD). Hopefully 1.9 will tackle this issue.

State pruning in fast mode

Ethereum saves the status in a gigantic tree structure. If you want to know an old balance of an address, you have to save every historical version of this Merkle tree, which currently requires almost a terabyte of data. But since only the current state of the network is important, the synchronization in fast mode skips the historical trees and gets directly to the current state.

However, when the Fast mode has arrived in the present, it does the same thing as the Full mode: it saves every new version of the tree, which sooner or later consumes a huge amount of hard disk space. The challenge for the developers is now to find a way to save stupid new copies of the tree, but to elegantly shake off old, dead leaves and add new ones. Geth 1.8 takes a step in this direction by initially keeping new leaves or nodes of the tree in memory, writing them directly onto the disk.

This is only part of the solution, but it already shows a significant effect: hard drive hunger in fast mode is reduced by about a third, and the read and write load on the hard drive drops even more. Geth tackles one of the issues that has become increasingly pressing for Ethereum users in recent months.

Geth v1.8.0 by default will use 25% of the user’s cache allowance (--cache) for trie caching and will flush to disk either if the memory allowance is exceeded, or if block processing time since the last flush exceeds 5 minutes. This doesn’t completely solve database growth just yet, but looking at the disk stats between v1.8 (purple) and v1.7 (blue) in the course of a single week, pruning makes a huge difference.

Further upgrades

Since version 1.5, Geth has been running an internal Javascript that tracks user transactions in the blockchain. With version 1.8, this script has been extensively rebuilt, which speeds the execution speed five-fold. This relieves, at least at this point, the CPU significantly. At the same time, Geth has introduced new API target points that allow transactions to be parallelized to multiple CPU cores, increasing speed when needed.

There are also many other small and medium sized updates in this release. Who uses Geth, has probably already downloaded the latest version. Anyone who stopped using Geth because the synchronization took endless or the disk was full can now try again.

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The cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex stood at the end of last and beginning of this yearly often with negative headlines in the spotlight. In December of last year, the crypto exchange was examined by the Commoditiy Futures Trading Commision, after it had come to suspect that the financial deposits could not be covered by fiat money in a bank account. The collaboration with Wells Fargo & Co. ended in March 2017, so Bitfinex needed to find a new partner.

As Bloomberg reported yesterday, the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex has opened an account with the Dutch bank ING. After Bank Wells Fargo ended its collaboration with Bitfinex last year, the Exchange was looking for a new partner to hedge its assets on the crypto exchange with fiat money.

Harold Reusken, spokesman for ING in Amsterdam, said that Bitfinex is a client of the bank. Nevertheless, he denied further statements and referred to the banking secrecy to protect its customers. In an e-mail he continues:

To date, Bitfinex has been unwilling to disclose with which banks there is cooperation and which financial institutions have been spending money last year.

This news clearly shows that one of the largest international banks is willing to cooperate with the Bitfinex exchange, even though there is sharp public criticism of Bitfinex.

I have already reported in the past about the close involvement of the crypto exchange Bitfinex with the stable cryptocurrency Tether. Allegedly, Tether is covered in the ratio 1: 1 by a dollar, which are deposited on various bank accounts. This means, for example, that 100 Tether units would need to be hedged on the Bitfinex exchange by a corresponding $ 100 value in a bank account.

After the market capitalization of Tether on January 1, 2017 was still 8 million euros, it has grown to 1.8 billion euros today. Thus, the company would have behind Tether currently in possession of 1.8 billion euros. To what extent it was possible for Tether to create this increase in corporate reserves within a year is at least questionable.

Tether has sought transparency from the summons to the CFTC and set up a page to show current assets and tether prices. This should be given to all investors an overview that proves the alleged hedge Tethers by real fiat money. To what extent the figures shown there actually correspond to the truth, but has not been verified by any public body.

Bitfinex and Tether are led by the same management team, which would allow targeted market direction in the desired direction. More than 2.2 billion tether units and thus also 2.2 billion dollars are currently in circulation in the cryptomarket.

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Yesterday, Tuesday evening, the Lisk Rebranding Event took place in Berlin, Westhafen Event & Convention Center. The rebranding not only included a change in brand design, but also provided plenty of news and innovations regarding the Lisk Blochchain and the entire project.

In front of 500 spectators on site, Max Kordek gave an introduction and rough overview of the Lisk project and its new goals, which are also shown in the following promo video:

After the introductory words of Max Kordek, Thomas Schouten, Marketing Lead of Lisk, presented the new design, the new website and the new Lisk app with a new user interface, including Explorer and Wallet. He demonstrated the new look and the accompanying new user experience of the revised website.

As befits a rebranding, the new and revised applications have been given new names and icons. Lisk JS becomes Lisk Elements, Lisk Lisky becomes Lisk Commander and Lisk Apps is replaced by Lisk Hub.

Lisk Hub is an application with the u. a. your own Lisk ID (an address) including a Lisk Avatar can be created. Lisk Hub also serves as a wallet, which now has a very clear and simple user interface.

A major theme of the new website and project was education to further disseminate Lisk and blockchain technology in society. Initially, Max Kordek stated that access to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology is currently too complicated to achieve widespread adoption in society as well as in industry.

One of the most groundbreaking announcements in this context was the Lisk SDK, the new Lisk Sidechain Development Kit. In the midst of the Lisk SDK it is Javascript developers who had previously had no contact with the topic Blockchain, an easy introduction to the topic will be made possible. Without much effort you should be able to create your own white label sidechain.

In addition, Lisk Hub will include an ICO suite that will allow developers to create their own token and launch an ICO with their application.

Lisk Academy

Another announcement of the evening was the Lisk Academy. This should contain information about blockchain, ICOs and cryptocurrencies for both beginners and advanced users and is divided into "Blockchain Basics" and "Blockchain Business".

The Blockchain Basics should u. a. Information on the topics of peer-to-peer connections, anonymity and areas of application of the blockchain include. Blockchain Business should u. a. Topics include: implementing enterprise blockchain solutions, supply chain management, cryptocurrency regulation, crypto-trading and ICOs.

New Fee System for Lisk

Lisk's cryptography specialist Iker Alustizer said Lisk will introduce a new dynamic rather than the old static charging system. As a result of the price increase of Lisk, the fees for a transaction have become too high, according to Alustizer.

Due to the increased fees, users with limited resources are excluded from using and participating in the network. According to Alusizer, the new charges should therefore be "orders of magnitude cheaper". Details about the new algorithm that calculates the new fee level will be announced soon.

The release of Lisk Core 1.0 is scheduled to take place within the next four to six weeks, according to CTO and co-founder Oliver Beddows. The development took longer than expected, according to Beddows, because his team had obsessively tested and given the quality of the project priority over on-time delivery.

The entire event can be found here:

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Image sources:

• Post header created by myself
• Article headers created by myself
• blog.ethereum.org
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuqpGfg_bOQ8Ja4pj811PWg

Video sources:

• youtube.com/LISK
• youtube.com/LISK

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I wish you all a great Wednesday!
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@danyelk