For blockchain gaming to really take off, the industry needs common standards and cooperation, not competition, says Blockchain Game Alliance President Manon Burgel.

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Insights into the biggest events shaping the crypto industry.

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Business

china

cryptocurrency

Ethereum

Gaming

gods unchained

Hong Kong

Technology

Ethereum is a cryptocurrency that allows smart contracts and Dapps to operate on its network. It was created by Vitalik Buterin, a Russian/Canadian software developer and is regarded as an evolution of Bitcoin.

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chinese censorship

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gamers

gods

hearthstone

Jeff Benson

If the gods were already unchained before, what are they now? 

Gods Unchained, the blockchain-based trading card game in the style of “Magic: The Gathering,” has seen a surge in its popularity among gamers since trolling rival Hearthstone for apparently bowing to Chinese censorship. 

Gods Unchained is now the fourth-most popular Ethereum application over the past seven days, with 1,700 users, according to DappRadar. Those users have done over $207,000 in transaction volume in that span, more than for all other Ethereum games combined. 

While those user numbers may not seem awe-inspiring, it represents a steep increase from where Gods Unchained was several weeks ago.

 Gods Unchained hit by cyberattacks after stance against Chinese censorship

The uptick in usage comes after some clever public relations work by the company behind the game, Immutable. On October 8, Blizzard, the American company behind Hearthstone, one of the most popular online games in the world with over 100 million users, levied a year ban (later reduced to six months) on gamer Chung Ng Wai (aka Blitzchung) for supporting Hong Kong liberation in a post-game interview.

Hong Kong has been the scene of pro-democracy protests for months, pitting it against mainland China, which has been working to rein in the semi-autonomous city as well as China critics. Blizzard’s decision, which also stripped Blitzchung of $10,000 in winnings, was perceived as a move to placate Chinese gamers and powerful sponsors. Blizzard Entertainment president J. Allen Brack, disputes that view. He said in a statement, “Our relationships in China had no influence on our decision.” 

Nonetheless, that same day, Gods Unchained tweeted that Blizzard valued “money more than freedom.” It said it would pay for Chung's lost winnings and provide him a ticket to upcoming tournaments. Though it’s unclear whether Chung has taken the gamemakers up on the offer, others clearly have. 

In September, the game never saw more than 251 users a day. In the last 10 days, however, it has surpassed its previous high of 440 users four times, setting a new record of 656 yesterday, October 17.

 Gods Unchained levels up, hires former Magic: The Gathering executive

Overtaking Hearthstone and gaining mainstream adoption won’t come easily, however. For one thing, Immutable reported cyberattacks following its decision. When asked for comment by _Decrypt_ about the nature of the attacks and whether the Gods Unchained team had been able to determine their origin, Immutable VP of Marketing Tyler Perkins declined to comment, saying only, “We’ve been pretty focused on hardening our infrastructure.”

For another, a huge part of the multibillion-dollar global gaming economy is viewers, not just players. In a bid to continue its PR play, Gods Unchained announced last week it would donate $1 for each viewer of the game on the Twitch streaming platform to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect online speech. 

While the game regularly hit over 100 viewers per hour on October 10, it has since levelled off to under 40 views per hour. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation has not yet confirmed the donation amount.) Hearthstone, meanwhile, remains the 12th-most watched game on Twitch with over 22,000 viewers at any time.

Yet as Hearthstone continues to police its own gamers for their Hong Kong views, banning three college players who held up a sign reading “Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blitz” during a streamed competition on October 8, Gods Unchained is trying to siphon off users and viewers looking for an uncensored alternative. 

The strategy may be working. Casey Chambers, one of the banned American University players, tweeted on October 13 that he had played his first Gods Unchained game. When asked how it compared to Hearthstone and whether he saw himself continuing to use it, he told _Decrypt_, “It’s incredibly comparable to Hearthstone. I think I’ll stick with it.”


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Ethereum-based game Gods Unchained wants to convince Hearthstone gamers to switch over by taking a stand on Hong Kong protests. It appears to be working.

How Hong Kong’s unrest is fueling Ethereum-based Gods Unchained

The people and companies shaping the crypto industry.

Coins

bitcoin

bitcoin history

bitcoin mining

bitcoin price

Bitcoin is the world's first peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. It was invented by a mysterious inventor Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and is regarded as the first digital currency to fix the double spend problem.

Bitcoin

base metal

believers

bitcoin supply

bitcoin's price

bitcoins

coins

generated

halvening

intrinsic

Ben Munster

On Friday, the 18 millionth bitcoin will be mined. There will only be another three million left to dig up. It’s an arbitrary number to celebrate, but Bitcoin diehards are celebrating nonetheless—like Anthony Pompliano, who’s trying to get #3MillionLeft trending on Twitter. 

There are a host of reasons why increasing scarcity gives Bitcoin believers happy tingles. Central to this is the thesis of Bitcoin itself—the notion of “artificial scarcity.” 

Unlike state-backed, “fiat” currencies, Bitcoin was hardwired by its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, to be immune to inflation. Free printing to make up for falling interest rates is impossible. The limit is hard-capped at 21 million. Barring an update to the algorithm, which would have to be agreed upon by people with powerful interests against doing so, that will never happen. 

THE HALVENING APPROACHES

The first million bitcoins, by some estimations, were mostly mined by Satoshi, who would now be worth around $7.2 billion. Bitcoins were worth pennies at the time, and mining generated a full 50 bitcoins each “block,” the batches of transactions validated in bulk by miners. Now fewer are generated each time, because of the routine halving of new Bitcoin supply, due to happen again in May 2020—dubbed “the halvening” by true believers. The first 18 million coins took roughly ten years: the next three million are expected to be fully mined by 2140.

 Bitcoin's price is most volatile at night says study

Satoshi’s coins are locked away, and careless hodlers have further diminished Bitcoin’s circulation. Cryptocurrency analytics firm Chainalysis reckons that some four million bitcoins are inaccessible, thanks to forgetfulness, theft, hardware malfunction, and death. That leaves only 14 million usable coins. 

The most immediate tangible effect of the Bitcoin supply dropping is that, once supply hits zero, miners will go out of business. That’s unless they can live off transaction fees, which generate a pittance because very few use the network for transactions. 

Nevertheless, the 21 million cap fuels two powerful narratives: the first is that Bitcoin is “hard money,” a deflationary alternative to fecklessly printed national currencies. Coupled with the halving feature, this produces a high “stock to flow” ratio, the currency in circulation (stock) divided by number of new coins generated (flow). A high ratio, believers say, marks a “hard” currency whose price will tend up, not down. 

The second narrative is more simplistic: the scarcer Bitcoin is, the more people will want to buy it. Think old National Lampoon issues, Beanie Babies, dot com domains, Rembrandts. Scarcer assets command higher prices. When only a few million bitcoins remain on the shelves, believers say, it will trigger a frenzied, shop-till-you-drop buying spree on Wall St. 

Indeed, a reading of early comments by Satoshi suggests that Bitcoin’s “scarcity” was a way to counter the cryptocurrency’s lack of “intrinsic value,” and compel people to take it up as a peer-to-peer cash.

FROM BASE METAL TO DIGITAL GOLD?

In a 2011 thought experiment, Satoshi posited a “base metal as scarce as gold” but “boring grey in colour,” “not a good conductor of electricity,” “not particularly strong,” “not ductile or easily malleable either,” and “not useful for any practical or ornamental purpose.” The metal _would _have “one special, magical property,” however—it can be “transported over a communications channel.”

  

“If it somehow acquired any value at all for whatever reason,” he said, people would use it as cash. But that wouldn’t be possible without any market value, which he believed—in lieu of the “automatic bootstrap of intrinsic value—could be forced through scarcity. “If there were nothing in the world with intrinsic value that could be used as money,” he said, “only scarce but no intrinsic value, I think people would still take up something.”

But, critics wonder, why should scarcity have any effect? Old glass electrical insulators are extraordinarily hard to come by, but nobody cares. The clay bowl you baked as a pre-schooler? Worthless. Unless you become President. As one CNBC pundit said to Pompliano, “there are a lot of things that are scarce that nobody cares about.” 

Neither is it necessarily true that a bump to the stock-flow ratio in the wake of the “halvening” will do anything. Litecoin experienced a similar halvening and flatlined: it may be that these changes, known by the markets in advance, are already factored into Bitcoin’s price, or “priced in.”

Whatever the truth is, we’ll find out for sure in 2140.


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On Friday, the 18 millionth Bitcoin will be mined, leaving only three million to dig up. So why are Bitcoin diehards celebrating this arbitrary milestone?

There are 3 million Bitcoins left. Why does that matter?

The projects, currencies, and events shaping crypto today.

Texas Securities Board announced it has brought 25 enforcement actions as part of its second “crypto sweep”—up from 10 actions in December 2017.

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actions by the texas securities

agency

board

cease-and-desist orders

crypto

enforcement

enforcement actions

Rakesh Sharma

Prices for cryptocurrencies are nowhere near their historic highs, but the crypto ecosystem continues to draw fraudsters into its fold—as evidenced by the latest round of enforcement actions by the Texas Securities Board.

The Board’s first sweep against crypto fraudsters in December 2017 occurred in the aftermath of the cryptocurrency bull run and resulted in 10 enforcement actions. Its second sweep occurred in June 2019 this year, and the number of injunctive actions rose to 22 with 61 involved parties. 

Earlier this week, the state agency announced that it has brought 25 enforcement actions against 79 parties involved in illegal and fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes.

 Report: crypto scammers made off with more than $1.2 billion in Q1 2019 alone

Those figures were released as part of an announcement for two cease-and-desist orders entered by the Board. In the first case, a Bitcoin mining service, which claimed to be U.K.–based but was not, solicited investments from the general public, promising quick profits. But it withheld and falsified important information related to the sale of securities. 

The second case had similar charges and involved PK Crypto, an investment company that claimed to be based in Waco, Texas. In its charges, the agency stated that PK Crypto was not a registered investment advisor and had made several false claims, including advertising affiliations with accounting firms.  

“These two actions highlight and support our conclusions: promoters of fraudulent cryptocurrency investments continue to tout the profitability of cryptocurrencies, disregard the critical risks associated with the products and use various ploys to create a sense of legitimacy,” said Joseph Rotunda, director of the Enforcement Division at the Board, in a statement. 

He said the schemes have evolved in sophistication and danger from earlier cases in that criminals had become adept at creating “fictional online personas without relation to reality.” For example, PK Crypto’s site has an extensive social-media presence across multiple platforms.

The enforcement actions by the Texas Securities Board occurred on the heels of news of high-profile crypto projects settling with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the alleged sale of unregistered securities. But the two Texas cases differ in their denouements. 

While the state agency issued stern cease-and-desist orders, its federal counterpart let Block.one and EOS, the biggest ICO of all time, get away with a relatively minor penalty.


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In a down market, crypto scams are up in Texas

U.S. and South Korean authorities used Bitcoin forensics software to track down users of the illicit porn site and arrest 337 individuals across the globe.

crime

according to the indictment

authorities

chainalysis

crypto exchanges

crypto forensics

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Even as it has gained mainstream traction, Bitcoin remains popular among crime syndicates and nefarious multinational operations. The cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous nature, coupled with its transnational reach, appeals to criminals conducting illicit businesses across borders.

Bitcoin was, in fact, the main transaction mechanism at Welcome to Video (WTV), a child pornography site that authorities in the United States and South Korea busted earlier this week. But it was Bitcoin’s blockchain that also provided a trail of digital crumbs that enabled authorities to take down the website. Aided by software from crypto forensics startup Chainalysis, law enforcement officials were able to identify the mastermind and users of the site. 

The site, which operated on the Darknet, was run by 23-year-old South Korean Joong Woo Son and distributed more than 1 million sexually explicit videos of minors. Son is currently serving an 18-month sentence in prison in his native country.

 U.S. Treasury: crypto could be “next frontier” in the war on terror

Three hundred and thirty-seven individuals from multiple countries across the globe, including Brazil, United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia, have been arrested for being users of the site and downloading material from it. Within the United States, 92 individuals have been arrested in connection with the crackdown and 23 minor victims have been identified. 

A civil forfeiture claim to recover money from crypto exchanges which facilitated transactions for the site has been filed by prosecutors. They intend to distribute the claims back to the victims.

HOW DID BITCOIN GREASE OPERATIONS AT WTV? 

Bitcoin was among the payment modes available to users at WTV’s site. According to the indictment, customers could create VIP accounts, offering unlimited downloads for six months, by paying 0.3 bitcoin. They could also download videos incrementally by paying 0.02 bitcoin for each video.

Welcome to Video directed customers to particular cryptocurrency exchanges to make payments. Interestingly, the list of exchanges which facilitated the site’s payment transactions includes some prominent names, including Hong Kong-based Bitflyer and U.S.–based exchanges Kraken and Poloniex, according to Chainalysis's data.

WTV registered each user with a separate Bitcoin address. The indictment states that the site was responsible for creating 1.3 million Bitcoin addresses. The volume of address activity is also testament to WTV’s income. According to the indictment, the site received, at least, 420 bitcoin through 7,700 transactions between June 2015 and March 2018. Cumulatively, the transactions were worth $370,000 at the time they were conducted.   

HOW DID AUTHORITIES TRACK DOWN WTV USERS?

Crypto forensics firm Chainalysis played an important role in nabbing users of the site. The New York-based startup’s software Chainalysis Reactor was used by the authorities to investigate the flow of funds from WTV to numerous exchanges spread throughout the world. 

Crypto exchanges, which generally onboard users with know-your-customer (KYC) processes, provided relevant identification information to the authorities. Chainalysis software was also used to identify and drill down to region-specific users. 

“Through the sophisticated tracing of bitcoin transactions, IRS-CI special agents were able to determine the location of the Darknet server, identify the administrator of the website and ultimately track down the website server’s physical location in South Korea,” said IRS-CI Chief Don Fort. 

This is not the first time that Bitcoin has been implicated in a transnational crime. The cryptocurrency became infamous earlier this year for its use by Chinese drug lords to sell drugs that have fueled America’s opioid crisis. Chainalysis itself had come out with a report in June estimating that $1 billion worth of Bitcoin would be spent in Darknet transactions.

The latest news of criminal elements’ involvement with crypto comes at a particularly inopportune time for Bitcoin, or cryptoassets on the whole, as the industry struggles for regulatory approval.


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united states

users of the site

video

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Bitcoin trail helps authorities bust child porn site

The new tools, protocols and infrastructure shaping crypto today.

cryptocurrency adoption

economy

eLearning

electroneum

turkey

Electroneum is a cryptocurrency designed to run on your smartphone and is designed to help people without bank accounts to access financial services.

Electroneum

africa and brazil

digital

digital skills

ells

Adriana Hamacher

Electroneum, the startup which enables users to “mine" its cryptocurrency on their smartphones, is launching new services in Turkey—the inflation-strapped country is currently number one in crypto adoption, worldwide, with 20 percent of the population claiming to own cryptocurrencies.  

The UK-based platform has has inked deals with all three of the country’s telecom operators, to enable users to pay for airtime with its cryptocurrency, ETN, its CEO Richard Ells told _Decrypt_ today.

"The whole concept of the airtime thing was to give people an understanding that cryptocurrency has value. In Turkey, you have 20 percent ownership of crypto, but that’s still the richest 20 percent,” he said. “It isn’t the poorest people who are using cryptocurrency.”

The service launched in Turkey last month and is also available in South Africa and Brazil. Ells said that Electroneum is using mobile top ups to combat the negative attitude that prevails to cryptocurrencies. 

Its research indicates that there are over 25 million unbanked people in Turkey, which makes it fertile territory for its top up service. 

And, in the next few weeks, it also plans to launch a new platform that will allow users to learn, share and monetize their digital skills using ETN as payment, with zero fees attached.

Ells explained that people are paid by traditional methods, such as credit cards, “and then the remittance takes place in ETN, so the person can be unbanked yet still able to sell their digital skills.” He added that they are also looking to target Turkey’s 3.6 million refugees.

“There’s a great need for something of value that’s easily transferable, and easy to store and carry, especially for refugees,” he added. “It’s a really interesting place for us to be.” 

Together with NGOs, the startup is setting up a complementary platform, called Task School, containing digital skills tutorials—anything that can be done on a mobile phone, from stop-frame animations within social media content for businesses to animated videos such as “Singing Happy Birthday in Zulu,” said Ells. 

Electroneum has strong links to NGOs who have become validators of the definition slug="proof-of-stake"]proof-of-stake[/definition]network it launched in July.

 Electroneum’s radical new upgrade ushers in nonprofit miners

Ells believes that using cryptocurrency to provide people with a means to monetize digital skills is a game changer, particularly as it can be done remotely. 

And it’s not just refugees who could benefit from the new service. Cryptocurrency use in Turkey is increasing, and sentiment towards it is at an all time high. 

Data suggests a strong correlation between cryptocurrency use and countries where people are facing economic difficulties such as inflation and steep devaluation. Venezuela is an extreme example.

This year, inflation in Turkey hit 20 percent and the Turkish lira has lost as much as 40 percent of its value against the US dollar. Turkey froze 4 million bank accounts without warning. Today, the _Financial Times_ reported that Turkey has moved to curb selling pressure in its financial markets, as investors have recoiled at the country’s offensive in Syria and a decision by US prosecutors to file criminal charges against Halkbank, one of the country’s biggest banks.

Andy Cheung, head of operations at the global crypto exchange OKEx, told _Decrypt _that Turkey contributed significantly to trading volume in its Europe market. “We do see a significantly increase in registration from Turkey. The demand is no doubt very high there and the community has been very enthusiastic and open to the new technology,” he said. 

Electroneum is pushing hard for digital inclusion and mainstream cryptocurrency adoption, and already has 3.2 million end users, the majority of whom are in the developing world, with a large presence in South Africa and Brazil. 

Asian expansion is in the works and Ells promised that details of some very innovative tools to help users in challenging environments keep their cryptocurrency safe will be announced before the end of the year.

 


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The blockchain platform’s new initiatives could provide a lifeline in Turkey, where inflation, geopolitics and government policies have fuelled interest in cryptocurrencies. 

Electroneum targets crypto hungry Turkey

ltbcoin

tokenization

tokenize it

The world is built on a giant $256 trillion pile of assets. Everything from property to art, to stocks to oil. Blockchain wants to change all that. This collection explores the industries being disrupted, by whom, and what that means for both consumers and enterprises.

We've delved deep into the tokenized world to uncover the people, the projects and the potential of this technology to change capital forever.

Blockchain’s promise of a more liquid world

Tokenize all the Things

built

members

modern-day

network

tokens

Bailey Reutzel

LTBCoin is a crypto token that doesn’t get much mention these days. But it was one of the first
built on top of Bitcoin.

Launched in 2014, it was built using a system called Counterparty, that allowed tokens to sit atop Bitcoin. LTBCoin then provided members with network-wide rewards and discounts, to be used for tipping and other transactions between users inside and outside the community marketplace. It wasn't a million miles away from the modern-day Lightning Network.

While it didn't perform mining operations in the way a lot of modern-day tokens do, it distributed tokens to members of the network according to a fixed schedule.

Its creator, Adam B Levine, spoke to us in the latest episode of our podcast about the struggles of building on early technology and what entrepreneurs can learn from the experience.


How LTBCoin kickstarted the token revolution - Decrypt

Adam B Levine talks the struggles of building on early technology and what entrepreneurs should learn from his project.

How LTBCoin kickstarted the token revolution (and why you've never heard of it)

How LTBCoin kickstarted the token revolution (and why you've never heard of it)

Adam B Levine talks the struggles of building on early technology and what entrepreneurs should learn from his project.

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