Bitcoin Is Coinbases’ CEO First Love

The CEO of Coinbase has recently called Bitcoin as his first love in a series of tweets commemorating the coin’s 10th birthday on January 3, 2019.

In the tweets he reveals how he entered the industry and built one of the crypto ecosystem’s successful firms.

He said that Bitcoin is one of the most important inventions of all time and has launched a global movement.

It is still the most popular digital asset for both new and long-time holders in their platform.

He also believes that this is still the beginning of this new burgeoning new asset type and the full potential of bitcoin in the space is still yet to be realized.

He recounted the time when he first read Bitcoin’s whitepaper back in 2010 and was so intrigued by it that it was in his mind for half a year.

The Bitcoin whitepaper was released on October 31, 2008 by an anonymous group or individual who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

January 3, 2019 marked the 10th year since the first creation of the block known as the genesis block on the bitcoin blockchain..

Bitcoin May Benefit From Other Countries Losing Confidence On The USD

The USD has been the de facto medium of international trade for quite some time now.

However, many countries has seen the US politically weaponized the said currency to serve American interest and now are betting on taking back control of their economies by phasing out the dollar.

Countries that are predominantly on the receiving end of U.S. Economic sanctions and trade conflict like China, Russia, India, Iran and Turkey have started to de-dollarize their trade relationships.

That being said it seems that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is well positioned to take the place of the USD as the primary currency for global trade.

However cryptocurrencies have not yet been tabled as alternatives.

China has begun to pivot towards the Yuan for international trade to lessen its dependents on the US greenback.

Other countries like India, while not particularly the target of any American trade sanction, tries to move away from the currency to avoid being affected by any sanctions aimed at its trading partners.

Virtual currencies have in the past emerged as a solution to situations where other actors are victims of traditional financial instruments and the complicity of payment processors with powerful state interest.

Replacement of the dollar with another fiat currency might see the same problems in the future thus making bitcoin a prime choice since it is censorship-resistant that is immune to the meddling of any sovereign state.

Anti-Monopoly Court Keeps Banks Open For Crypto-Related Businesses In Chile

According to news reports the Anti-Monopoly court has granted crypto-related businesses in Chile protection from banks that unilaterally stop offering banking services to those dealing in digital assets.

The court, Tribunal de Defensa de la Libre Compentecia (TDLC) gave refuge to the embattled cryptocurrency trading desks which have been stopped being serviced by local banks.

It conducted a survey asking its members whether crypto firms should be allowed to access bank accounts in which the majority voted in favor of allowing crypto firms access to banking services.

However, local banks are not taking the decision lightly and have taken the matter to the supreme court saying that cryptocurrency activities poses a lot of risk for investors as they were not yet regulated in the Latin American country.

The state-owned Banco del Estado and Itau Corpbanca, the fourth largest commercial bank in the country appealed the anti-monopoly court asking it to cancel its protection measures.

Chile’s Finance Minister reveals that the regulatory body in the country is still in the process of preparing a regulatory framework for digital assets adding that this type of endeavor takes time to implement.

He said that they are aware how important it is to move forward regarding digital assets but, like so many other countries, they need more time to explore the best solutions on how to regulate the new phenomenon.

AMD And Crypto Firm ConsenSys To Develop Blockchain-based Cloud Computing Infra

A tripartite between semiconductor giant AMD, Blockchain software company Consensys and Investment management firm Halo holdings was created to jointly develop a blockchain-based cloud computing infrastructure.

This was revealed by ConsenSys in a press released on January 4, 2019.

The initiative is dubbed as W3BClOUD aimed at the development of AMD hardware-based datacenter products for emerging blockchain workloads.

According to the director of product management and blockchain technology at AMD, Joerge Roskowetz the product will be used to tackle challenges ranging from smart identity, enterprise data centers, health ID tracking, to licensing to supply chain management. ConsenSys will provide the expertise in the field of computing in blockchain transactions, security issues and use cases for the technology.

The collaborations marks AMD’s foray into blockchain-related activities.

Back in November, the company has partnered with seven major technology companies to produce eight new cryptocurrency mining rigs.

The company said the partnerships will bring new blockchain compute solutions to the market.

Major Crypto Exchanges Supporting the Constantinople Hard Fork

It has been reported that leading cryptocurrency exchanges OKEx and Huobi Global will support the Ethereum (ETH) Constantinople hard fork

The latest fork is said to fundamentally change the Ethereum blockchain, with the synchronous nodes update the entire system.

The fork comprises separate Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) in order to soften the impact of the transition of the said protocol from Proof-of-work (POW) to Proof-of-Stake (POS) consensus algorithm, which is a more power efficient consensus algorithm.

OKEx urges traders to deposit their ETH Tokens into the exchange which it intends to take the snapshot of all the OKEx accounts at the block height of 70,080,000 the number at which Ethereum core developers agreed to launch the hard fork.

Similarly Huobi ask its customers to deposit their Ethereum into their platform in order to better deal with any technical issues related to the hard fork.

The exchanges is also expecting the hardfork at block height 70,080,000.

The ultimate goal of the Fork is to address mining and scalability related problems to the Ethereum Blockchain.

This is in line with Vitalik Buterin’s vision and move from POW to POS protocol.

Ethereum was designed as a platform for decentralized applications and soon to be implemented fork will make the network better suited for this purpose.

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