The new Zcash Sapling update is here and it is being touted as the next major protocol upgrade. It will bring a slew of improvements to the performance, security and usability of Zcash’s shielded transactions. In this update, BLS12-381 curve is being implemented which will be an upgrade to the Zcash’s elliptic curve. This curve targets 128-bit security using more conservative recommendations suggested by several recent papers.
Popular crypto exchange Bittrex has issued statement about Bitcoin Cash. The company says that Bittrex will be monitoring this situation closely on whether to include Bitcoin Cash trading on their network on not. It will be closing deposits and withdrawals of bitcoin 24 hours prior to BCC UAHF time on August 1st 12:20pm UTC. That being said, trading will remain active during this time.
Bytecoin users have been quite unhappy with Poloniex from past one month. The popular crypto currency exchange froze the withdrawals and deposits functionality, making the Bytecoin wallets crippled. Users who went to Poloniex’s Bytecoin page were greeted with a yellow warning banner stating “BCN is currently under maintenance or experiencing wallet/network issues. Deposits and withdrawals will remain disabled until a solution is found, which may require an update from the BCN team. Any updates must be tested and audited before enabling.”
Alexander Vinnik, Administrator of BTC-E has been arrested by Greek police for laundering four billion dollars using Bitcoin. Vinnik is a Russian national and was running very popular crypto currency exchange, BTC-e. The arrest warrant was issued by US Ministry of Justice and according to various reports, USA is looking to extradite Vinnik. The site in question has tweeted in Russian that it will remain offline for coming 5-10 days.
People Coin is an interesting ICO. It is about an experiment that models the population growth of the planet. At first, there are around 7.5 billion people and their DNA which represents a block, are to be generated by making use of gene engineering. After that, there will be an annual increase in population by 2.5 percent.
Torguard is an anonymous VPN service which lets you project your privacy online with VPN and proxy service. The site is now offering 10 percent to all users that checkout using litecoin. Litecoin has been getting excellent publicity with its low transaction fees and faster transaction time.
Crypto mining is now no longer profitable. Back when the price of Zcash and Ethereum price increased, a lot of people went on a shopping spree to hoard as many Nvidia and Zcash graphics cards as they could. This all started back in month of June and the demand went through the roof – so much that there was an acute GPU shortage worldwide.
Mike Cagney, SoFi’s CEO backed Ethereum over bitcoin as it offers better infrastructure applications. He said that if the dollar did not exist then bitcoin would have been fine but since the value of bitcoin fluctuates so much, it makes it nearly impossible to be used as a currency. While bitcoin is the original blockchain and has the maximum share of attention, it is not a very practical one, Mike added.
