Umbra, launched for privacy, is a new crypto currency aimed at privacy. With so many ways to use it, it's no wonder so many are using it today- it was built primarily for security and has many secondary features, like opening up a chat lobby or creating a marketplace

that's completely anonymous. Interested? Let's take a look at it.

 

Privacy

Built for privacy, the Umbra project was created open-source and has more security features than most crypto currencies do, on top of having excellent usability. Umbra allows you to stack additional security measures on top of the existing ones built into the client, so attackers have multiple barriers to break to find who you are and more. Plus, the messaging platform is built for Tor and L2P, so you can carry out your transactions with even more security!

 

Encrypted Messaging

Encryption is one thing built into the Umbra platform, and it's one of the most integral features that provide security to it. Many messages do provide good security and good quality, but many of them expose your IP to centralized servers. Umbra allows you to message with decentralized nodes that don't expose your IP, making the platform a much better choice if you plan on doing something with that

level of secrecy. As mentioned before, Umbra features L2P and Tor, so it's possible to further encrypt yourself! Their messaging platform provides most of the normal things in such a service, with private and public channels, and even direct messages!

 

ShadowCash

Umbra's system uses ShadowCash, an anonymous cash system that allows nearly completely anonymous transactions while still allowing seamlessly easy transactions to occur. Similarly to Monero, ShadowCash operates on dual-key stealth addresses and ring signatures for security. It's even possible to stake ShadowCash, at an annual rate of 2%. You an also receive transactions through both a public and secret address; funds can be seamlessly transferred to either wallet in seconds. If you wish to opt in for more secure transfers, it's recommended that you use the private wallet, and everyday transactions are more easy to use through the public wallet.

 

Marketplaces

Online marketplaces require lots of anonymity and security, and Umbra realizes this. While it is still under development and is still constantly being tested, their decentralized marketplace has already received lots of hype and support from various large media outlets, and it's expected that the marketplace will become the first of its kind - an inter-dependent, decentralized marketplace that will forever change the way people look at markets.

 

Conclusion

Umbra has many very secure and easy-to-use features that don't require lots of crypto experience, and the client GUI is especially friendly to new users in the Crypto world as well as the more experienced. With so much potential and so many ways to use their platform, Umbra is looking like it'll become a hit among the crypto community in no time!

 

ShadowCash Specifications

Block time: 60's

Difficulty re-target: every block

Nominal stake interest: 2% (PoSv3 – static inflation annually)

Min. stake age: 8 hours (no max age)

P2P port: 51737

RPC port: 51736

 

Read more about the Shadow project here. Information about Umbra can be found here. 

The recent DDoS attack on some of the major websites on the internet has renewed interests in the decentralized internet. While there are multiple initiatives concerning blockchain technology and decentralized network in development, the DDoS attack is expected to accelerate the process.

The CTO of Golem, Piotr Janiuk has recently explained that by decentralizing the internet using peer to peer technology the chances of such attacks can be minimized. He believes that the attack was a result of an attacker or a group of attackers exploiting one or more single points of failures on the internet.

One such decentralized internet project is known as SAFE Network where safe stands for Secure Access for Everyone. The SAFE Network is powered using the unused hard drive space, processing power and data connection of its users. It uses MaidSafe crypto tokens as a medium of exchange on the network. By distributing data and processing power across the network, decentralized internet platform ensures much higher security and privacy to its users.

MaidSafe's CEO David Irvine was quoted by a tech publication saying,

"DDOS depends on a target, in SAFE the target is everyone's computers. An analogy would be DDOS is like swatting a large fly, in SAFE the large fly is a mass swarm of mossies which makes it hard even with 8 arms filled with fly swatters."

DDoS attacks involve hitting a server with tons to requests with an intention of overloading it and shutting it down. By doing so, the attacker effectively brings down the applications running on that server. However, in the case of MaidSafe, the Opportunistic Caching feature creates copies of requested data. This, in turn, speeds up the websites and other data feeds as the number of requests increases. Such a feature can make conventional DDoS attacks ineffective against decentralized internet protocols.

During the last couple of months, bitcoin has had numerous ups and downs, yet the number of total investors has increased exponentially. Judging by this practice, it seems like there is a clear demand for the digital currency. In fact, the year of 2015 represented the year of venture capitalists, especially on the blockchain, after the number of investments in both bitcoin and its underlying technology has increased. As there is clearly some risk associated with the practice of trading and investing in bitcoin, numerous potential investors are staying away from it.

 

The supply of bitcoin is fixed

Since the currency was first released back in 2009, its value has increased from next to nothing, up to 1,100 and its current value of around $600 at the time of writing. However, not many people are aware of the fact that the digital currency has a strict, limited maximum supply, of 21 million coins. Judging by this aspect, once all of the coins will have been mined, the coin will have the potential to increase in value a lot. While it will surely go through numerous more price fluctuations until the limit is reached, if the number of investors and adopters of the digital currency continues to increase, then this will likely bring the value of one bitcoin to astronomical numbers.

 

A larger number of individuals and businesses are turning to bitcoin

While the digital currency was still fairly new, numerous businesses had started accepting bitcoin as a form of payment. As time passed, however, other companies began paying their salaries in the digital currency, whereas others simply stopped using fiat and just moved to bitcoin altogether.

 

Bitcoin is entering a trend where it’s being adopted for more and more practical reasons

Using the digital currency as a form of payment only is surely beneficial. Yet, adopting it for its practical reasons can yield much better results over the years to come. To put things better into perspective, with each day, bitcoin is getting more ingrained in our society. Thanks to this, it’s also being built within the back bone of numerous products and services. Judging by this trend, companies and individuals will need more of the digital currency to take part in the online and offline markets with ease.

 

When it comes down to moving to a digital currency, most people choose bitcoin

As it is by far the most popular cryptocurrency available on the market, it yields an impressive advantage to new-comers. Based on this, people who are just getting started with the world of digital currencies are much more likely to invest in bitcoin, rather than other altcoins such as Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin etc.

 

Higher prices increase transaction volumes, which in turn boost prices even more

This is an interesting trend in the world of bitcoin, thus creating a circle of benefits for its adopters. With this in mind, as soon as the price increases, trading data has shown that the number of transactions increase as well, which in turn, act as a catalyst for higher prices. In case no event shakes the world of bitcoin, then this could lead to a continuous price increase, which would further be boosted after reaching the limit of coins, as mentioned above.

 

Governments take it lightly

While there have been a couple of government talks on regularizing bitcoin and the use of the blockchain alongside with other digital currencies, no harsh practice has been imposed so far, apart from 2-4 countries. Most governmental agencies are open to the use of the digital currency, whereas others even encourage it (the United Kingdom, for example). Taxes have been imposed on both individuals and businesses in the past, yet many of these regions decided to remove the taxing, and regard bitcoin as a commodity, asset, whereas others talked about it as real money.

 

It’s easy

Chances are that the most pragmatic reason on why you should consider investing in bitcoin, is that doing so, is extremely easy. To put things better into perspective, it could be as easy as simply buying a number of coins, and holding onto them through the price fluctuations. Of course, there are also slightly more difficult practices that you could get into, such as trading, which can turn out to be extremely profitable, especially if you have some experience as a trader. Practices such as margin trading, lending bitcoin, and simply speculating on the price can result in higher profits for those who do this constantly, and have a good judgment of the short and long-term future.

 

Based on everything that has been outlined so far, the 6 reasons mentioned above, should have convinced you about the profit potential that bitcoin offers, and should have encouraged you to consider the idea of investing. There are of course, also a couple of disadvantages, which we will cover in the next articles to come. Based on everything that has been outlined so far, what do you personally think about the reasons mentioned above? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

Conventional thinking about blockchain technology's use in stock markets may be wrong, according to one academic.

The argument was put forward by Professor David Yermack, chairman of the finance department at New York University, this week at Imperial College London's first FinTech-focused academic conference.
There, Yermack presented an unpublished report that argues blockchains will evolve differently in capital markets than widely expected. For example, according to Yermack, functions such as stock settlements will one day be carried out on public blockchains like bitcoin, as opposed to private or premissioned alternatives.

Overall, Yermack, who teaches a cryptocurrency course at NYU’s Stern School of Business, offered a much broader vision for the use of blockchain in finance than what the industry is considering, as well as more critical takes on how incumbents are exploring the tech. Taking a dig at DTCC, for instance, Yermack said its report "Embracing Disruption" did little to show or illustrate how blockchain could change the current state of affairs.

Agents of change
That's not to say that Yermack didn't take a measured view of public blockchains. On the contrary, Yermak acknowledged the limitations of bitcoin's throughput and its proof-of-work consensus system today, but noted that it's something he believes the industry will need to work out better solutions for.

Still, he insisted that the future of finance will be brought about by a real decentralized blockchains that don’t have monopolies that guard access to stocks, bonds and currencies. Speaking of the direction where the disruption will come from, Yermack sees three potential players. These include challengers (complete outsiders looking for disruption); collaborators (like the DTCC and R3); and regulators (countries like the UK, Australia, and Canada).

Overall, he believes that the challengers were the most likely to succeed, but that some regulators (like those in the UK) are better positioned to bring about change than others.

Quick wins
Interestingly, Yermack believes one of the easiest and quickest ways for the industry to move to a blockchain model is by exploring use cases in corporate elections by shareholders, an avenue already being pursued by Nasdaq. Yermack said shareholder voting on corporate elections is currently inefficient when it comes to vote counting, and that the voting results are often plus or minus 5% of what they should be.

Further, in the current model, there are many challenges when it comes to corporate elections, he said. There are various different ledgers of ownership, maintained by the company, the broker, and the market in general, which gives rise to different voting results. Broadridge, which has what he called "a monopoly that is very inefficient" administers corporate elections voting, is also interested in blockchains.

But, Yermack went beyond words, showing that corporate elections are prone to favor management proposals. Such issues, he believes, could be eliminated with the help of blockchain-based voting systems.

NAV's coin swap to set off a chain of game changing improvements
"The goal of the NAV coin swap is to improve the performance of NAV for it's investors and give us the code base to launch NAV into a strong future. Our future will be development heavy; we pride NAV on being a tech strong coin and we like keep on the cutting edge of altcion technology – after all we are nerds."

 Bip 32 is considered one of the key updates in moving crypto currencies forward into a modern user-friendly place. It is the capability to generate wallet addressed from a single private seed, which allows the user to regenerate key pairs from the seed if the wallet is lost. Thus back up frequency is reduced. This wallet generation method is compliant with web & mobile wallet standards. The NAV team has indicated the a mobile and web wallet build is high on their list of priorities.

Bip 38 -passphrase protected private key
Bip 38 is the capability to encrypt and encode a passphrase protected private key; typically intended for use on paper wallets and physical coins. Users will now have the option of passphrase encrypted secure offline storage.

Bip 100 – floating block size hard unit
Bip 100 increase the maximum block size to 20MB, and the maximum size for mined blocks to 10MB.  The Block size will be dynamic and change in response to the volume of transactions. This future proofs the coin to be capable of handling all the perceived future transaction volumes.

 

At this moment in time, Ethereum represents the basis of a popular digital currency, alongside with a decentralized platform meant to support apps that run as they are, without facing censorship, fraud or any form of third part interference.

 

However, during its reign so far, the network was forced to implement a hard fork, to prevent the theft of millions of dollars’ worth of DAO funds, after the systems had been hacked. Whenever a fork is suggested on the digital currency market, its purpose is to divide the supporters of two different ideas, and continue the branch which has the most supporters at the time of the fork.

 

Recent reports indicate that after the recent DDoS attack, Ethereum is planning to carry out another fork, in order to deal with the EIP150 gas cost changes being implemented. With this in mind, last month, on the 22nd of September, Ethereum representatives announced that the network was facing a strong DDoS attack, thus causing an immediate slow0down of the network. As the attacks have been quite crafty when it came down to finding vulnerabilities in the client implementations and protocol specifications, the only way to prevent future attacks like this would be to carry out a reparatory hard fork.

To prepare the network for its second hard fork, Ethereum made a couple of announcements, including:

 

To help minimize the effects of the recent attack, miners are encouraged to lower their gas limit to a total of 500k gas.

Once the fork is launched based on the EIP 150, version 1C, it will be put in effect starting with the block 2463000, thus repricing a couple of operations, and making them better respond to their particular computational complexity.

A second fork will be carried out moments later, right after revering the state-bloat that has been caused by the attacks. This one will also remove all accounts which are empty, lack code and have a balance and storage of 0.

It’s worth keeping in mind the fact that consensus for this hard fork has been reached, and that the Go Ethereum client will be released quite soon. The hard fork code has been kept under development during the last few days, and is currently facing testing and reviews. Once everything is confirmed as working properly, the Ethereum network will begin the hard fork, thus repairing the damage caused by the hackers. Fortunately, consensus is met this time, which means that another Ethereum Classic network won’t be brought back to life.

 

Once the hard fork is issued, the entire network is most likely to upgrade in the next 2-3 days. Although some bugs may be present for a while longer, each of them should be taken care of.

 

Based on everything that has been outlined so far, what do you personally think about the newest Ethereum hard fork? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

The human brain, consisting of roughly 86 billion neurons, rivals the world’s best supercomputers in terms of magnitude, efficiency, and speed, using as little energy as a small 20-watt light bulb. Human evolution took tens of thousands of years to adapt noticeable brain size and architecture changes.

 

Evolution is a slow process that can take eons for changes to occur. Technology, on the other hand, is amazing in terms of how fast it is moving along, blending into the world seamlessly. The technological evolution notably occurs at a faster pace compared to biological evolution.

 

To further understand the situation, imagine a frog in a pot of water that heats up 1/10th of a degree Celsius every ten seconds. Even if the frog remained in that water for, say an hour, it would be unable to feel the minute changes in temperature. However, if the frog is dropped into boiling water, the change is too sudden and the frog jumps away to avoid fate.

 

 

Let's take a gigantic chessboard and a grain of rice, for scale, and place each grain of rice to a corresponding chess square following a sequence: for each passing square, we double the amount. Upon applying this, we get:

 

1) 1

2) 2

3) 4

4) 8

 

And so on. You must be thinking, “What difference does doubling a grain of rice for every box make?” But one must remember that, at some point, the number from which the count started will be totally indistinguishable to the end result. Still on the 41th square, it contains a mountainous 1 trillion grains of rice pile.

 

41) 1,099,511,627,776

 

What started out as a measly amount, barely feeding a single ant, has become massive enough to feed a city of 100,000 people for a year.

 

 

The development of technology over time

In the year 1959, the global output of transistor production of 60 million was huge. It was deemed a manufacturing achievement to produce such an amount. Although looking at the world today, it pales because of how far the transistor development has come. A modern i7 Skylake processor contains around

 

(Skip to 5:15 in the video, to hear the global transistor manufacturing achievement in 1959)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2466CBuOxVg

 

1,750,000,000 transistors. It would take 29 years of 1959’s transistor global production to match one i7 Skylake transistor count.

 

The transistor manufacturing size in an i7 Skylake processor is 14 nm. For reference, a silicon atom is about 0.1176 nm across: 14/0.1176=119 Meaning, a transistor in an i7 Skylake processor is only about 119 atoms across.

 

Therefore, one can conclude that it takes technology to build technology. In the past, civilization was limited to the usage of paper and writing. Calculations done by hand tend to be slow and tedious.

 

 

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