Ethereum, by way of its hypeman ConsenSys, has been railing on EOS lately. Tensions, as the journalists say, have flared. But can an EOS blockchain and an Ethereum blockchain ever be friends?
Decentralized exchange Bancor thinks it can help. BancorX, its newly launched trading platform, lets traders convert Ethereum tokens to EOS tokens, and vice versa, using Bancor’s native BNT token as an intermediary. This is like a hacked version of two blockchains interacting, so big news all round.
Here’s how an ETH to EOS transaction would work: BancorX converts ETH to BNT on the Ethereum network. This transaction is reported to the EOS network via a distributed network of miners—i.e. an oracle. The BNT on the Ethereum network then goes out of circulation. BNT on the EOS network, simultaneously, is issued. That BNT can be changed to EOS. Vice versa if you want to convert EOS to ETH.
Once you've done all that? Well done! You’ve just engineered the first artificial, inter-blockchain transaction. Nate Hindman, Bancor’s communications director, thinks blockchains the world over will be able to now “cooperate with each other, instead of competing.” Maybe ConsenSys will cool it on those scathing in-depth studies.
Tethered to reality
Remember that letter Tether released? The one purporting to prove its new partnership with Bahamian bank Deltec Ltd? The one with a credulous squiggle in lieu of a signature? The one in which the esteemed bank made it very clear that it would not bear responsibility for the inevitable Tether-based catastrophe that would befall it? The one Coindesk got three whole lawyers to parse in an effort to make sense of it? The one Deltec only half-corroborated in a cryptic press statement? The one which, most importantly, spawned a marmot-based parody?
It’s “authentic,” says Deltec.
Phew.
More Elon Musk Scambots
Sockpuppet accounts, yet again, are disseminating fake “Send Bitcoin” scams disguised as Elon Musk’s approved Twitter account. Musk is so frequently targeted that it’s getting to the point where the real Elon Musk may well be a scambot, which would explain a lot, given Tesla’s recent performance.
Ho ho ho.
But why, we wonder, do all these Twitter scammers focus their efforts so intensely on Elon Musk specifically? His reputation for spontaneous largesse? Probably not.
More likely is that Musk’s own weird Twitter presence provides a useful cover for the scammers’ disinformation.
To illustrate, here’s the most recent scambot’s post: “I left the post of director of Tesla, thank you for all your suppoot! [sic, obviously]. I decided to make the biggest crypto-giveaway in the world, for all my readers who use bitcoin.”
And here’s one real Musk posted last week: “Deleted my Tesla titles last week to see what would happen. I’m now the Nothing of Tesla. Seems fine so far.”
Both, really, come across as vintage Musk. Indeed, to the hapless scam victim, it likely only seems natural that after declaring himself “the Nothing of Tesla,” Musk would proceed to dole out free bitcoin to randoms. It’s just a shame that when he inevitably does, we won’t believe him. The boy who cried Bitcoin.
But we at Decrypt will keep sending fake Musk ETH day in, day out, just in case. We live and hope.
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