Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash preparing for their hard forks while Bitcoin fine tunes Lightning Network
The upcoming Constantinople Hard Fork as well as the Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork are subject to strong tensions in the communities. Firefox will block cryptomining scripts in the future, while Coinbase ships its cold storage in a Faraday cage. The Tech echo.
On the technical side, the past week was dominated by hard forks and log updates: The Ethereum community enthusiastically discussed the upcoming Constantinople Hard Fork. The announced split between Bitcoin Cash/ABC and Bitcoin SV was also the dominant topic in the Bitcoin cash community. Besides these topics, a critical analysis of the mining manufacturer Bitmain is the focus of today’s Tech Echo. We will also look at an incentive program in the Storj network and block-chain-controlled robots in Walmart logistics centres.
Bitcoin: News about Light Clients and ZAP
First, Bitcoin. It is worth mentioning that the BIP158 is now part of the core code. BIP158 is a proposal to implement a new type of Light Client defined in BIP157. Previous light clients were developed on the basis of BIP37, but have some security problems. So they are quite susceptible to DoS attacks. The idea is to minimize the required bandwidth using so-called deterministic filters. BIP 158 defines such filters and is a central building block with which BIP137 can be realised.
There is a new version of the ZAP Wallet for the Lightning Network. The most important innovations are the introduction of automatic updates and preparation of the internal architecture for things like Neutrino, a privacy-focused Bitcoin client.
Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash: Two Hard Forks and the Bitcoin Cash Stress Test
The Constantinople Hard Fork is part of the Metropolis upgrade and is scheduled for October. But not everything is easy: How does the Difficulty Bomb, which is connected with the planned change from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, continue? How should the incentive of the miners be regulated with regard to Casper? An analysis of the debates surrounding the upcoming hard fork shows the difficulty of taking the various stakeholders in the Ethereum network with you.
While the situation at Ethereum is strained, Bitcoin Cash is moving in the direction of a chain split. The Bitcoin ABC Hard Fork scheduled for November is not supported by Craig Wright or nchain. Instead, nchain advocates a new client called “Bitcoin SV” (“Satoshi Vision”). An article tries to explain the different procedures with the different governances.
However, there is also good news from the Bitcoin Cash network: the announced Bitcoin Cash stress test took place on Saturday, September 1. This was important for the Bitcoin cash community because they wanted to show that without Lightning Network or other off-chain solutions they could scale much better than Bitcoin. Two million transactions were processed on this day as part of this stress test. This significantly exceeded the number of on-chain transactions on the bitcoin blockchain and also exceeded the previous maximum of XRP transactions (1.7 million) from January this year.
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More news at Altcoins: Incentive Program for Storj and News at Loom Network
Something has also changed in the technical environment for the smaller coins: Storj, the decentralized cloud network, has launched an incentive program. Storj’s Open Source Partner Program is designed to support cloud data storage projects. In addition, the development team behind Storj has announced that the expected V3 network is now in private alpha status. The goal of this update is to improve the scalability of the Storj network.
Loom Network is a crypto currency known for the digital trading card game Zombie Battleground. The system allows the creation of scalable, blockchain-based games and social networks. Recently the development team announced that the Loom Network now works with three sidechains. PlasmaChain is the place where the collectibles are stored and is based on concepts such as plasma and the ERC721 standard. GamceChain is a sidechain in which all game mechanisms are stored. Finally, social chain is a chain through which the community can interact with a dApp.
New developments in the blockchain sector: Blockchain-powered robots, Bitfis Wallet hackable and once again Bitmain’s IPO
Walmart is building an army of robots. You could get this impression if you read Walmart’s recently accepted patent. This is about the authentication of robots. Walmart is working on automating the logistics market. Such robots are welcome honey pots for hackers, which is why Walmart wants to secure interaction with the robots via a block chain.
Bitfi was often in the news. The claim to have created an unhackable wallet was obviously too risky: within a short time the reports of various successful wallet hacks increased. Meanwhile, the company around cryptoguru John McAfee has also admitted security vulnerabilities and announced the hiring of security experts.
Bitmain’s IPO is on everyone’s lips. Can the IPO keep the company at the forefront of the mining industry? An article by Allen Guo, on samsonmow.com, expresses concerns in this regard. According to the article, the company was unable to show any innovation for several years – fatal for chip manufacturers. Regardless of how you feel about Bitmain, this article is an interesting introduction to the mining industry.
Illegal cryptomining is still a problem. Firefox has recognized this and now wants to block corresponding scripts. Firefox follows the Opera browser and Google’s efforts to block scam software and plug-ins in Google’s App Store. How successful these efforts are remains to be seen, as the hacker scene is not sleeping. First of all, the upcoming Nightly Build of Firefox contains a corresponding script blocker which, if the tests are successful, should be implemented in Firefox version 63.
