Monthly Archives: June 2017

Ethereum's Big Switch: The New Roadmap to Proof-of-Stake

May 5, 2017 at 13:00 | Alyssa Hertig

Ethereum's developers are offering more clarity on how the network is preparing for its biggest change yet.

May 5, 2017 at 10:00 | Corin Faife

A new project is seeking to combine ethereum's smart contract capabilities with the privacy afforded to the zcash blockchain.

May 2, 2017 at 22:55 | Charles Bovaird

Five things you should know about ether, a cryptocurrency that surged in value during the first quarter of 2017.

Apr 28, 2017 at 13:35 | Michael del Castillo

Differences between EEA members at a public debate reveal how the group is growing and progressing.

Apr 27, 2017 at 14:20 | Stan Higgins

The price of ether, ethereum's native token, has hit a new all-time high, exceeding $60 for the first time ever.

Apr 26, 2017 at 21:20 | Stan Higgins

A former software engineer for digital currency startup Coinbase has launched a new search engine for ethereum.

Apr 25, 2017 at 15:07 | Charles Bovaird

Ether classic's price reached an all-time high this week, amid robust transaction volume. We ask the experts why...

Apr 25, 2017 at 00:55 | Alyssa Hertig

Ethereum prediction market project Gnosis sparked broad debate today following an initial coin offering that didn't exactly go as planned.

Apr 24, 2017 at 14:00 | Michael del Castillo

The UN is preparing to kick off an epic ethereum pilot, but the future could also include actually accepting cryptocurrencies.

Apr 23, 2017 at 11:26 | Alyssa Hertig

A look at what's still to do for ethereum developers working on the Metropolis upgrade the platform's third of four planned stages.

Read more:
Cryptocurrency 2.0 and Smart Contracts News - CoinDesk

Dr. Chan currently offers the online course Mean Reversion Strategies to a select number of traders and portfolio managers. This is an online workshop conducted in real-time through Adobe Connect. This workshop focuses on the theories and practical implementation of mean reversion strategies. (Free MATLAB trial licenses and pre-recorded MATLAB programming tutorials are included.) The math requirement assumed is basic college-level statistics.

Course outline can be downloaded here.

___________

We are offering the pre-recorded online course Cryptocurrency Trading with Python. This course was conducted by Nick Kirk, an expert in algorithmic crypto trading and a quantitative developer, and was moderated by Dr. Ernest Chan.Participants will receive Python source code and data for backtesting. Gemini Exchanges Sandbox environment will be used, which offers full exchange functionality using test funds, for testing API connectivity and the execution of strategies.

Course outline can be downloaded here.

About Nick Kirk

Nick is an active algorithmic crypto trader and quantitative developer. He has more than 10 years worth of experience in developing, automating and integrating trading systems for Investment Banks and Asset Management firms. Prior to working in Finance, he worked at IBM Labs and Siemens Research. He has previously taught algorithmic crypto trading at the CQF Institute to wide acclaim.

Praise for this workshop

Excellent class. Particularly liked the technical aspects of building a trading system in python.

-Anonymous participant review

Nick is a very passionate advocate of cryptocurrencies. I was very pleased to have attended one of his cryptocurrency trading workshops in the past. His blunt enthusiasm along with his in-depth knowledge on the field result in a very positive and value added experience on cryptocurrency trading with actual hands-on implementation. In combination with Ernie Chan, the guru of algo trading, the mix is going to be explosive! Cant wait!

Konstantinos Moutsioulis Portfolio Analyst, Dutch Development Bank, The Hague Area

I have been very impressed with Ernies past workshops and have enjoyed discussing cryptocurrency trading ideas with Nick on many occasions. I look forward to their unique partnership in the upcoming Bitcoin workshop.

Stephen Hope Former Head of Fixed Income Quantitative Trading Strategies, BNP Paribas ___________

The pre-recorded online course Backtestingis nowavailable. This consists of recorded Adobe Connect sessions. Thefocus is on discovering and avoiding various pitfalls during the backtesting process that may degrade performance forecasting. Illustrative exercises are drawn from a futures strategy and a stock portfolio trading strategy using MATLAB.Free MATLAB trial licenses will be arranged for extensive in-class exercises. No prior knowledge of MATLAB is needed, but some experience with programming is necessary. The math requirement is basic college-level statistics.

Course outline can be downloadedhere.

___________

Ernie also offers in-person workshops in London, September 11-15, 2017.These workshops may qualify for CFA Institute continuing education credits.

___________

Praise for ourworkshops:

An excellent course by a great teacher. Ernie clearly explained and applied the different areas of Artificial Intelligence, provided invaluable insights as to their relative merits, and gave me the confidence to implement them in my own trading. Dr Nikhil Shenai (Ph.D., Imperial College, BA, Cambridge University), Founder of E K Technologies (Quantitative Trading & Development)

thank you again for the Momentum Strategies training course this week. It was very beneficial. I found your explanations of the concepts very clear and the examples well developed. I like the rigorous approach that you take to strategy evaluation. Andrew B.

Ernies workshop offers particularly helpful insights in implementing profitable trading strategies and thats beyond hisbooks content. And he is one of the most patient and giving instructors I ever metK.W. Fung, CQF, Founder of Quants Investment

These workshops have provided me with enough familiarity and confidence to tackle the latest research. Justthe segment on intermarket sweep orders in the MFT course was worth the price of admission to all three workshops I went to. Cedric Yau

Dr. Chan is a phenomenal instructorAnonymous student evaluation

See the original post here:
Workshops | E.P. Chan & Associates

Mining references generally evoke images of picks and shovels.

For advocates of bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies surging in value, the gold may be in the shares of the companies that produce the computer processors and chips used to create the digital currencies in the process thats become known as mining.

Digital coins can only be created by using computers to solve complex mathematical problems. The difficulty increases as more of the problems get solved, prompting the miners to require even more powerful hardware.With digital coin prices soaring, demand for the components is surging as miners are able to recoup their initial investment quicker.

A complete mining rig, which is made up of graphics cards, a processor, power supply, memory, cabling and a fan, costs between $2,400 to $3,800 on Amazon.com. The Antminer S9, which is estimated to mine 0.29 bitcoin per month, and retails for $2,795, which means you can break even in about four months with bitcoin at $2,700, without taking into account electricity costs. Miners typically buy complete rigs or build them themselves.

The following are some of the companies that make the parts.

Exclusive insights on technology around the world.

Get Fully Charged, from Bloomberg Technology.

The Santa Clara, California-based company manufactures graphic processing units used by gamers and increasingly, by digital-currency miners. GPUs listed in Nvidias website can cost as much as $1,200. The rig-mining market can grow to about $1.3 billion, and with GPUs making up approximately 2/3 of coin mining costs, the demand for GPUs can increase to $875 million, according to a RBC Capital Markets report on June 6. If Nvidia gets half of that, it represents a 10 percent increase on its GPU sales, RBC analyst Mitch Steves said in an interview. The company currently has about 75 percent of the GPU market, according to a Jon Peddie Research report.

The complexity of mining bitcoin has increased to the point that GPUs arent powerful enough, and miners are mostly using application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, which Nvidia and competitor Advanced Micro Devices dont make. Tech news website Digitimes reported Nvidia and AMD are planning to release GPUs specifically designed to mine bitcoin.

Shares of Nvidia have climbed 45 percent this year, and have more then tripled in the past year.

AMD, as the company is known, also makes graphics cards used for mining ethereum and other coins. The Sunyvale, California-based companys shares have rallied the most in the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index in the past week, in part thanks to a PCWorld article that said its almost impossible to get AMDs Radeon graphics cards after a surge in demand from ethereum miners.

The company also builds the processors typically used to build mining rigs, and itsChief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster said at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch conference its product compete with bigger rival Intel Corp.

The shares are up 27 percent in the past month, and have almost tripled over 12 months.

Digital currency mining has the potential to boost demand for Intels processors, said Kevin Cassidy, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. While AMD CPUs are popular among miners, Intel is the traditional leader in the sector and is taking steps to counter its fledgling rival.

The companys shares have lagged rivals, with a gain of 17 percent in the past year.

Boise, Idaho-based Micron is the largest U.S. maker of memory chips, one of the components of a mining rig, so it also stands to benefit, Cassidy said.

Micron shares have surged almost 50 percent this year, and have more then doubled in the past 12 months.

Follow this link:
These Companies Stand to Gain the Most From the Cryptocurrency Rush - Bloomberg

It is always nice to see projects attempting to better the world they live in. This is especially nice because of the low adoption rate of cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technologies on a global scale. A recent CryptoCoinNews interview went over the lack of Blockchain adoption in Africa, while pointing out the massive opportunities that reside on the continent because of that fact. One new project, Bolenum, is looking to start off there.

Though Bolenum has sights on an intercontinental project, the majority of their initial efforts appear to be in Africa. Their Whitepaper outlines the two main issues they feel have caused cryptocurrencies to see lower scale adoption than other parts of the world.

The first obstacle is one known all too well by all cryptocurrencies: lack of public awareness. Many just do not know about cryptocurrency, the Blockchain, or what it can provide. This could be because of a lack of cryptocurrency and blockchain evangelists, but also can be blamed on the lack of readily translated literature into local dialects.

The second problem is one that many in the western world have not really had to deal with: convertibility of funds. While every exchange takes Euros, United States Dollars, and Chinese Yuan, it is way less likely that these exchanges will take the Egyptian Pound, the Nigerian Naira, or the Moroccan Dirham. Without access to fiat exchanges to convert to more readily accepted currencies for crypto, individuals may be out of luck.

They hope to provide solution to these issues at the first ethereum based token and exchange platform that aims to engender more participation in the cryptocurrency on the African continent.

The projects token, BLN, aims to serve as a secure payment method, and also be able to protect wealth. These are Ether based tokens so they benefit from the speed and security of the Ethereum Blockchain.

The main perk that may help the project accomplish its goal is the fact that they will also be opening an exchange that will allow for BLN tokens to be traded for local currencies. This means that someone will be able to not only withdraw the value of their tokens into local currencies, but could give better access to the cryptosphere as a whole. If someone buys BLN with a local currency, they should in theory be able to trade those BLNs on a different exchange for any other digital asset they were interested in. It not only is an asset by itself, but a gateway asset to others previously denied by fiat binding.

They will be holding an ICO for this project starting July 15, and it will span for 30 days. 10,000,000 BLN tokens will be made, with 50% of those being open to the public in an ICO with the other 50% behind held by the Bolenum team as capital to support their future exchange.

Disclaimer: This is a paid press release, the product / service mentioned is not endorsed by The Merkle, always do your own independent research. This is not investment or trading advice.

More:
Bolenum's Project to Widen Cryptocurrency Adoption - The Merkle

Older Raspberry Pi devices, such as this Raspberry Pi 2, may be more vulnerable to the malware if they haven't been updated in a while.

Someone has developed a simple Linux trojan designed to harness the meager power of Raspberry Pi devices to mine cryptocurrency.

Raspberry Pi users may need to consider applying a recent Raspbian OS update to their devices, particularly if they are currently configured to allow external SSH connections.

According to Russian security firm Dr Web, the malware Linux.MulDrop.14 exclusively targets Raspberry Pi devices to use their processing power to mine a cryptocurrency.

Dr Web discovered the Raspberry Pi mining malware after its Linux honeypot machine became infected with it. The malware uses a simple Bash script to attempt to connect to Raspberry Pi devices configured to accept external SSH connections. It targets Raspberry Pi boards with the default login and password, which are 'pi' and 'raspberry', respectively.

It then changes 'pi' to '$6$U1Nu9qCp$FhPuo8s5PsQlH6lwUdTwFcAUPNzmr0pWCdNJj.p6l4Mzi8S867YLmc7BspmEH95POvxPQ3PzP029yT1L3yi6K1'.

From there it installs the internet-scanning tool ZMap and the sshpass utility, and searches the network for other devices with an open port 22 to infect them.

Older Raspberry Pi devices may be more vulnerable to this malware if they haven't been updated in a while. The Raspberry Pi Foundation told ZDNet sister site TechRepublic that a Raspbian OS update released late last year turned off SSH by default and forced users to change the default password.

However, it warned that there could still be millions of Raspberry Pi boards that haven't been updated. Some 12.5 million of the single-board computers have been sold over the past five years, according to the official Raspberry Pi Magazine.

The malware doesn't try to mine for Bitcoin, whose 'difficulty level' is too high to mine cost-effectively, even for a massive network of PCs let alone Raspberry Pi devices.

However, there are numerous other cryptocurrencies that can be mined with less computational power. In 2014, malware writers experimented with Android malware to mine Dogecoins and Litecoins. Dr Web's virus analysts said the Raspberry Pi malware mines Monero, a lesser-known, but increasingly popular cryptocurrency for dark-web drug markets.

Researchers in May discovered that a network of several hundred thousand PCs infected with the Adylkuzz mining malware, which used the same Windows exploit behind the WannaCry ransomware epidemic, had been toiling away on Monero blocks. At the time, Adylkuzz had generated about $43,000 over several months of mining activity.

View original post here:
Linux malware enslaves Raspberry Pi to mine cryptocurrency - ZDNet

News wallets and exchanges

eToro, a social investment and trading network, has announced the launch of its Cryptocurrency CopyFund. This comes shortly after the total market cap of cryptocurrencies surpassed $100 billion.

On June 6, eToro announced the launch of its Cryptocurrency CopyFund, which will allow customers to invest in Ether and bitcoin. Over the last year, the number of eToro users trading cryptocurrencies has grown by a factor of four. Co-founder and CEO of eToro, Yoni Assia, said:

We have been seeing an increasing number of our clients looking for a simpler way to access investments in cryptocurrencies with a view to building a portfolio in the future. They were asking how to allocate their investments between the two largest cryptocurrencies that are traded on eToro, so we have launched an automatically rebalanced investment strategy to simplify their investments into this new exciting asset class.

eToro customers have previously accessed the cryptocurrency markets through CFDs (contracts for difference).

More and more traders and investors are learning about the potential of this market and getting involved. Now they will be able to access a long-term investment strategy that is constantly reviewed and rebalanced, Assia added.

In the Cryptocurrency CopyFund, holdings will be proportional to the market caps of individual cryptocurrencies. Once a month, the fund will automatically be analyzed and rebalanced. Structured as medium-to-long-term investments, CopyFunds require a minimum pay-in of $5,000. While there are no management fees associated with CopyFund investment, eToro does charge transaction fees.

eToro will expand its offerings of cryptocurrencies in the near future to encompass Ripple and Dash among others.

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, eToro has millions of users in more than 170 countries. In December 2014, eToro raised $27 million from Chinas Ping An Insurance Company and Russias state-owned Sberbank. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, eToro recently presented a pilot blockchain wallet in partnership with coloredcoins.org.

Matthew is a writer living in Los Angeles. He studied international economics at Georgetown University. Matthew is a full time staff writer for ETHNews and holds value in Ether.

View original post here:
Cryptocurrency CopyFund Launched By eToro - ETHNews