Your Crypto News on Steemit February 22, 2018

• Japan: Glitch on Zaif Exchange $20 Trillion in BTC temporarily purchased for 0 Yen!
• Pavo and ICOBox Cooperation - Blockchain, Agriculture and Cannabis!
• SegWit about to break through: Coinbase and Bitfinex want to support SegWit!
• MoneroV a Trojan Horse in Fork Style!
• JPMorgan is changing its Attitude and encouraging Customers to invest in Bitcoin!
• Ripple 5 new Partnerships: 2 Banks, 3 Payment Service Providers!

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In Japan, a technical flaw has given users the opportunity for a short time to buy Bitcoin in trillions of dollars for free.

The Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Zaif has admitted that a "system error" has allowed customers to "buy" trillions of Bitcoin for free over the past year, the newspaper The Asahi Shimbun reported on Wednesday.

Zaif informed users on Tuesday about the error in a post on their web site, explaining that on February 16, users could inadvertently "trade" the yen for virtual currency for 18 minutes at an exchange rate of 0 yen per Bitcoin.

Asahi Shimbun reports that seven users were able to obtain crypto for "free," but the exchange managed to cancel all illegally acquired transactions. However, a "buyer" is said to have tried to sell 2,200 trillion yen (about $ 20 trillion) in bitcoin before the problem was solved. Zaif's Twitter posts further criticize users complaining about poor performance and lack of support.

The latest difficulties comes as Zaif gains increased regulatory scrutiny in the wake of January’s $530mln hack of Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck.

Despite the security gap, Japan's licensing system for crypto exchanges has significantly improved since the legal revision of space in April 2017. The licensed members will even be part of a regulatory group from April of this year.

However, technical errors on the crypto exchanges are not rare. In January 2018, online retailer Overstock reported a bug that caused customers to choose between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as payment options, with prices remaining the same.

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Pavo is a start-up that will be launching an ICO in a few weeks and offering an Internet of Things (IoT) blockchain solution for industrial agriculture. The aim of the project is to increase profitability and efficiency in agriculture.

Pavo recently announced that it has entered into a partnership with ICOBox, one of the world's leading providers of SaaS solutions for ICOs, to conduct its own token sale. Pavo's IoT platform is set to attack the billion dollar market of the US food and agriculture industry.

First, Pavo wants to tackle the legal market for cannabis and aims to help growers operate their manufacturing facilities and manage their supply chain through Blockchain technology. In addition, Pavo plans to release a crypto-currency for business-to-business (B2B) relationships, including breeders, wholesalers, pharmacies and manufacturers. The currency is intended to enable secure and reliable payments between these business partners. ICOBox will provide technical, legal and marketing support to Pavo in the preparation of its ICO.

When governments authorize the use and sale of medical cannabis, they also typically impose stringent regulations that buyers, producers, and law enforcement agencies must follow.

Medical cannabis producers are aware of the strict rules: the law places great importance on ensuring that licensed manufacturers comply with safety, manufacturing, recording and quality standards. Each licensed manufacturer must take appropriate steps to ensure that every aspect of its operation can be tracked for the required compliance reports and inspections. Failure to comply with these standards may result in loss of the license to grow and sell medicinal cannabis.

Pavo is designed to facilitate operations within these comprehensive rules and standards, and to make them more efficient and transparent. From taxation, regulatory compliance, to commodity cost management, inventory control, and reinvestment of growth, cannabis retailers are constantly facing new challenges.

Pavo is said to help merchants by using a blockchain-based system. Blockchain is designed to ensure authentication, confidentiality and accountability, enabling smarter, faster and more sustainable agricultural and business decisions based on real-time data.

PavoCoin

Pavo Ecosystem's cryptocurrency will be called PavoCoin and will be available from 15 March 2018 via public pre-sale. In addition to B2B use, the PavoCoin will also be used for payments from customers.

The company plans to raise $ 65 million through its ICO to further develop the project. Erhan Cakmak, co-founder and CEO of the company says:

Unlike many ICOs, Pavo already has a working product that is currently being used in the pilot phase on San Francisco Bay Area breeders.

Following completion of the ICO, Pavo will be introduced to 500 breeders in the first 12 months and to 1,000 breeders in the first 18 months. Targeting their tokens, the team sees buyers of cryptocurrencies in Switzerland, Germany, the UK, the US, Japan, and China, as well as the worldwide cannabis community, including legal cannabis breeders, processors, and distributors in North America.

Nick Evdokimov, co-founder of ICOBox explains:

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With Coinbase and Bitfinex, two of the largest Bitcoin cryptocurrency trading platforms have announced plans to support Segregated Witness in their exchanges. This seems to be an important step in the mass adaptation of the software update. So far, the acquisition of the protocol by the Bitcoin community has been rather sluggish.

The crypto exchange Bitfinex announced yesterday in a Medium post, in the future on Segregated Witness to want to set. Thus, from now on, payments and withdrawals from Bitcoin with SegWit addresses are supported. According to him, Bitfinex users will benefit in the future from lower BTC withdrawal fees (about 15%) and improved processing times for transactions in the entire Bitcoin network.

Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex said:

Coinbase also wants to implement SegWit

Coinbase also spoke in terms of SegWiT implementation. For example, the exchange tweeted that the Coinbase team of technicians had successfully completed the testing of Segregated Witness for Bitcoin. Over the next few days, SegWit will be phased in, with 100% of its customers using the Bitcoin network update over the next few weeks.

Finally, the Bitcoin Core Wallet should support Segregated Witness in the future.

As a result, two of the largest Bitcoin trading platforms, as well as the Bitcoin client primarily used by Nodes, have decided to take the step into the future and adapt the technology. One of the key features of the SegWit protocol is the ability to use the Lightning Network to scale transactions many times better. The Segway activation in August last year had initially not changed much and made it only piecemeal to the mass market. With this step taken by various big players in the Bitcoin ecosystem, an important milestone has been reached with regard to the nationwide SegWit adoption and thus to the solution of the scaling problem of Bitcoin.

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Through a Monero Hard Fork, a new coin called MoneroV will see the light of day. MoneroV is relying on a coin cap, would like to solve the scaling problems of Monero and as soon as possible publish a Light Wallet. Various warnings about this project, however, advise against participation.

Hard Forks are not beautiful? In the case of Bitcoin, they have almost become accustomed to it, Ethereum has several hard-forked coins and Litecoin moved involuntarily with Litecoin Cash. Is not it about time that Monero has a Hard Fork as well?

Hard Forks are not uncommon in the Monero ecosystem per se: Regular protocol updates ensure that a hard fork takes place twice a year. A hard fork is primarily a significant, non-backward compatible protocol update that requires the nodes to reinstall the client.

Only if a significant part of the ecosystem does not participate in such an update, or if it does so without a general consensus, then a new cryptocurrency arises.

In the case of Monero now a chain split was announced: In 21 days should be generated with Block 1,529,810 MoneroV by a Hard Fork. According to their own statements on the website, this should be "the best private cryptocurrency in the world".

MoneroV - Monero with Coincap, smaller transactions and Light Client

To underpin this daring claim, the team behind MoneroV is waiting with the following points:

• Unlike Monero, MoneroV does not have unlimited coin issuance: a maximum of 256 million coins will be generated.
• There will be a factor of 10 more coins compared to the current Monero blockchain; while Moneros Supply currently stands at just under 16 million XMR, it would be 160 million XMV after Fork for MoneroV.
• The transaction size should be dramatically reduced compared to Monero.
• In 2019, the project plans to integrate MimbleWimble. This should be done in favor of scalability, because thanks to MimbleWimble the blockchain scales with the number of users and not with the number of transactions.
• Finally, as a standard solution, a Light Wallet will be offered.

A first peculiarity that needs to be considered critically is the funding model: Of course, the development team behind this project does not have the money to drive all the changes, create new wallets, and continue to maintain the project.

Scam or legitimate fork?

In addition to an extensive bounty program, just under 6% of the total Coin Supplies should be in the hands of the team behind MoneroV. This represents a significant centralization; Accordingly, it quickly came to the accusation that the project primarily wants to enrich itself. Furthermore, the endorsement by Ryan Hildreth is skeptical, as he was also involved in BitConnect.

First of all, one point became important: the use of Monero-Keys for claiming Hard-Forked currencies is an invasion of privacy. By using the same private key in two different contexts, a lot of information is given to third parties regarding ring signatures. This can endanger not only your own anonymity, but that of the entire Monero network.

As long as the heads behind MoneroV do not recommend generating new private keys on the fork, it is not recommended to participate.

This is not only important for lovers of anonymity, but also for the investor. Free money is always great, but it jeopardizes the primary use case of your investment. The crash of BitConnect a few weeks ago showed how low the price can be in a destroyed use case.

Here you can find the MoneroV Roadmap.

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JPMorgan and its CEO Jamie Dimon always had a clear attitude towards Bitcoin. Dimon called the Bitcoin - for which he is still notorious today - even as and fraud. And now the banker and his bank suddenly change their minds: Surprisingly, JPMorgan has begun to back Bitcoin. Yes, JPMorgan even advises its customers to buy Bitcoin ETFs.

JPMorgan has researched cryptocurrencies and published a report titled "Decrypting Cryptocurrencies: Technology, Applications and Challenges."

Here are some main excerpts from the report:

JPMorgan acknowledges that the Bitcoin has come to stay, and that no regulation can make it disappear again. As mentioned in the report, it would still exist in "various shapes and colors".

JPMorgan recognizes the problems with our current payment systems and states that Bitcoin can be of great use in these situations.

What this means for Bitcoin?

This report gives institutional investors confidence in Bitcoin. At the moment, the majority of Bitcoin investors are still small investors. Now, however, where an institutional bank is supporting Bitcoin, a flood of bigger players is expected in the market - maybe even JPMorgan is one of them.

This is the beginning of a new era for cryptocurrency. The banks are beginning to realize that they do not have to be Bitcoin's enemy, and are beginning to reconsider their attitude towards Bitcoin.

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The Ripple Network has grown five more partners yesterday. RippleNet has joined two banks from Brazil and India, as well as three payment service providers from Singapore, Brazil and Canada. Both will not use the ripple product xRapid, whose technology is based on the XRP token, but the two alternative products XCurrent and xVia.

According to the press release, the two banks and three payment providers will expand the reach of the RippleNet in India, Brazil and China.

The new partner banks are Itaú Unibanco, Brazil's largest private bank and Latin America's largest market by market capitalization, and IndusInd, a leading private bank in India. Like the payment service provider InstaReM, based in Singapore, they will use the ripple product xCurrent. The objective is to handle faster and more transparent cross-border payments with other financial institutions around the world.

Payment service providers, Beetech of Brazil and Zip Remit of Canada, will use xVia to offer global transactions to their customers. Both are also planning to work with China-based LianLian, which has been using xCurrent for a few weeks.

InstaRem handles more than 500,000 transactions per year from more than 60 countries worldwide. a. Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and India. By joining RippleNet, InstaRem aims to provide each customer with faster, cheaper and more transparent transactions.

Patrick Griffin, Ripple's Business Development Manager, emphasizes that the benefits of the RippleNet are particularly important in emerging markets, as members of the RippleNet can save their clients both time and money:

The xRapid and XRP token controversy

In the past, we had already discussed that only a few of Ripple's partners use the product xRapid and thus the XRP token. So far, Ripple can only boast four partners (of over 100 partners) who use xRapid.

Therefore, from the perspective of critics, it seems questionable whether the XRP token has a legitimate justification for existence. In our view, this is a perfectly understandable argument. If RippleNet is mainly used with other products and not the XRP token, then the question of the necessity of the token arises.

However, critics forget an important argument. As Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple recently stated at the Yahoo Finance Summit, xRapid and XRP token transactions are 25 percent cheaper and faster than the other Ripple products.

Garlinghouse sees the current phase as one of transition. Once skepticism has given way to the XRP, banks and payment service providers will, in his opinion, change from the other products to xRapid due to its many advantages.

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Image sources:

• Post header created by myself
• Article headers created by myself
• twitter.com/coinbase
• J.P.Morgan

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