Disappointing news this week when Samsung discovered that the new hardware wallet built into the smartphone S10 will only support the Etherium and ERC20 coins and four dApps. It seems that Samsung will upgrade its wallet to support Bitcoin and other Altcoins in the future.

Chinese ASIC manufacturer, Canaan Creative, has raised several hundred million dollars. The company's valuation is now in excess of $ 1 billion. Despite the rare news, it is assumed that most of the investment goes to new ASIC production.

Calgary police are seeking to identify 4 suspects who stole over $200,000 Canadian Dollars’ worth of BTC from Bitcoin ATMs. The suspects used double spend attacks to defraud BTMs across 7 Canadian cities

CEO of Mt. Former Gox, Mark Karpeles, received a suspended sentence of two and a half years. Karpeles was convicted of cheating financial records, but was acquitted of embezzlement.
Karpels will remain outside the prison as long as he does not violate his probation.

Finally, an update to the popular dollar-linked currency Tether, which updated its terms and conditions, again raised the question of whether it is backed by the dollar. Users across the network noticed that Tether removed previous claims that the currency was fully backed up in dollars. Instead, the company's website records that the reserves may include additional assets and lenders to whom Tether has provided a loan.
macrobit.co.il

Following the "DeleteCoinbase" campaign that we reported last week, the exchange announced that it would fire all the hacking staff hired at the beginning.
These employees were involved in selling malware to governments before they started working on the stock exchange.

In what contributes to the rise of the BNB currency, the BINAS Stock Exchange announced that the Argentine government will adjust investments to the Blockchine accelerator program run by Binance Labs. This is a sign of a positive attitude of the state to crypto.

The brain behind the OneCoin Ponzi coin, Konstantin Ignatov, was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport. Ignatov ran the OneCoin Ponzi along with his sister, Ruja. Vanquin was ostensibly launched in 2014 as a cryptographic currency but has never been released code or Lockcaine into currency. This fraud has managed to steal over $ 3.5 billion, of which $ 1.2 billion will probably be returned to the plaintiffs.

The United Nations has issued a report accusing North Korea's cyber forces of stealing some $ 670 million in Crypto by hacking and ransom demands. The report covers the period between 2015 and 2018 and reveals five hacks on Asian crypto stock exchanges and cyber attacks on banks.

Finally, Fidelity Investments, one of the world's largest financial services providers, has unveiled the launch of its digital asset service. The company owns and facilitates the trading of digital assets. So far, the service is available only to a limited group of institutional investors, but the company plans to give access to additional institutional customers.
Courtesy: https://macrobit.co.il

A critical bug was exposed for the Coinomi desktop wallet. The bug states that if you’ve imported a seed phrase into the wallet, that seed was actually sent to Google for spelling check. A seed phrase should NEVER leave the wallet and this issue may put Coinomi desktop users at risk.

Bitfinex announced that the US government has returned 27.6 bitcoins which were part of the nearly 120,000 bitcoins stolen from the exchange in August of 2016. The action heralds a new degree of international cooperation between governments and exchanges. The value of the returned coins will be divided among certain Bitfinex clients affected by the hack.

Following reports last week that Coinbase acquired a company run by the former Hacking Team CEO, who sold spyware to governments, a protest campaign is growing across social media. The hashtag “Delete Coinbase” campaign urges users to leave the exchange due to its anti-privacy policies.

It was reported that Russia’s State Duma is expected to pass business-friendly crypto regulations this March. The new laws would also law the groundwork for a state-controlled crypto backed by oil reserves. Such a coin may assist Russia to trade energy internationally despite economic sanctions.

Thailand’s market regulator, recently approved the following 4 cryptos for investment, trading, and ICO purposes: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Stellar. However, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum Classic were also banned for such purposes.
 99Bitcoins

Alon Mask, the entrepreneur and chief technology officer, said he sees Bitcoin's design as "quite brilliant" and sees it as "a much better way to transfer value than a piece of paper." Musk denies any intention of involving Tesla in the crypto field.

Last week, it was reported that the online food retailer Rakuten, considered equivalent to Amazon in Japan, may support digital currencies in the new payment application. Launch of the app is scheduled for March.

Quinavis announced the acquisition of Neutrino, an Italian currency start-up. The CEO of Neutrino is notorious for having previously sold spyware to governments, governments, and corporations.

China's mining giant Bitmain has revealed that it lost half a billion dollars in the third quarter of 2018. Bittamin unveils economic data in an attempt to raise capital on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Samsung Electronics unveiled new smartphone models this week. Among the products exposed was also introduced the Samsung Knox phone, according to the network publications on this device integrated wallet hardware. Although Samsung did not mention it in launch.

In conclusion, Bitcoin's blockchain currently processes 3.8 deals per second or around 315,000 per day. This is the highest level since peak levels in 2017, when the limited capacity created high transaction fees. However, the fees are currently low, due to the additional capacity afforded by SegWit
Courtesy: macrobit.co.il

Billionaire investor and known Bitcoin (BTC) bull Tim Draper argued that in five years, only criminals will use fiat as crypto becomes universally widespread. Draper made his claims in an interview with American financial news tv channel Fox Business released on Feb. 18.

Reiterating his previous statements predicting that fiat money will become laughable and obsolete in five years, Draper has elaborated on his forecast, stating that nobody but criminals will keep using cash, since criminals who use crypto can be tracked via blockchain. He said:

“The criminals will still want to operate with cash, because they catch everybody who is trying to use Bitcoin.”

In August 2018, an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) noted that she prefers people to keep using cryptocurrencies, as the blockchain provides tool to identify criminals.

In the interview, Draper also said that he believes his money in the bank to be less secure than his money in Bitcoin. “My bank is constantly under a hack attack,” Draper has stated, adding that to date, nobody has managed to hack Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Claiming that his Bitcoin is more secure than a dollar is, the Bitcoin billionaire has compared cashing out from Bitcoin with exchanging gold into shells, arguing that there is no sense to go back in time as the future is about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

When asked how much crypto he holds, Draper provided a short response: “a lot.”

Draper’s recent statement has echoed the stance of young Bitcoin millionaire Jeremy Gardner, who said that the existing financial system is much more culpable for things like terrorism and crimes than blockchain technology perhaps will ever be.

In November last year, Tim Draper reaffirmed his April 2018 Bitcoin prediction that the biggest cryptocurrency will trade as high as $250,000 per coin by 2022. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has seen significant growth recently, having jumped around 7.6 percent over the day and trading at $3,907 at press time, according to CoinMarketCap. Courtesy:https://cointelegraph.com

Morgan Creek's new venture capital fund received an investment from Virginia's pension plans. The fund raised $ 40 million, mostly for investment in promising crypto companies, although part of the investment will also be allocated to Bitcoin.

A series of Wikileaks tweets condemned Craig Wright as a serial propeller. Wikileaks also presented documents that Craig claimed to have forged to support his claim that it was Satoshi Nakamoto.

US bank JPMorgan officially confirms that it is developing a digital currency close to the dollar. The bank will launch JPM Coin in the coming months, and through it will transfer value to its customers. Last year, JPMorgan forbade the purchase of Bitcoin by credit card and the bank's chief executive even called Bitcoin a fraud.

New details are revealed about the Argentine-Paraguay trade deal that took place in Bitcoin. Argentina exported pesticides worth $ 7,100 to Paraguay, which were paid in the Bitcoin currency. Although the amount is low, the deal sets an interesting precedent for international trade.

Finally, the Israeli Crypto Stock Exchange announced a data leak. Funds were not stolen and no user was directly affected. A list of encrypted e-mail and passwords of approximately 450,000 Kinamama customers is offered for sale at darknet. Kinamama is one of 24 companies from which information flowed. The recommendation for stock exchange users is to exchange passwords.
Courtesy: macrobit.co.il

Social media network Facebook has reportedly acquired Chainspace in its first apparent blockchain-related acquisition, Cheddar reportson Feb. 4.

Sources purportedly told Cheddar that Facebook acquired Chainspace, a small blockchain startup, in an ‘acquihire,’ or an acquisition of a company made primarily for the skills or expertise of its staff, rather than the service or products the company provides.

Per Cheddar, four of the five researchers that worked on Chainspace’s academic whitepaper will be joining Facebook. A Facebook spokesperson told Cheddar that, while the social media giant had hired on the new researchers, it had not acquired any of Chainspace’s technology.

The startup, which was founded by researchers from University College London, was reportedly working on blockchain scalability problems, notably by applying sharding to smart contracts, according to the Chainspace website.

While many blockchain advocates laud the technology for its security and trustless capabilities in processing transactions, it is currently not scalable to the level of traditional payments systems like Visa or Paypal.The current number of transactions per second (tps) on the Bitcoin network fluctuates between two and 18, Visa is capable of 2,000 tps, while PayPal can process 115 tps.

Sharding runs on the parallel processing power of multiple networked machines that split up the workload of verifying transactions. It automatically divides networks into smaller sections, or “shards,” each of which runs a smaller-scale consensus protocol.

While processing in parallel, such a network is capable of processing hundreds of transactions per second per shard, which would dramatically increase the scalability of blockchain-based processes.

In late 2018, Facebook listed five new blockchain-related jobs on its careers page: two software engineer roles, a data scientist post and a data engineer, all at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

In early May 2018, the head Facebook Messenger, David Marcus, announced that the company had formed a group “to explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.” Marcus was a former board member of major United States crypto exchange and wallet service Coinbase.
Courtesy Cointelegraph