Back-slapping. September 3, 2018.

By Ben Munster

Bitcoin Cash stress test sends up prices 

A brief upsurge in trading activity on the Bitcoin Cash network overnight prompted smug back-slapping among the coin’s fans. Their fervor, of course, was unwarranted. The spike was the result of a much-advertised “stress-test,” meaning the boost in trades was wholly artificial. So this excitable tweet by the Roger Ver-owned “Bitcoin” Twitter account is somewhat...disingenuous. What’s more, tallying up the trading data for the previous seven days reveals that EOS, not Bitcoin Cash, is the current trading-volume crown-bearer.

Silk Road cash on the move

Trading activity on the Bitcoin network rose overnight, too. But an in-depth Reddit “investigation” by user “sick_silk” found that an enigmatic Bitcoin address associated with the now-defunct online black market Silk Road was slowly dispersing millions of illicit funds through a series of careful—though traceable—transactions via exchanges BitFinex and Binance. The address is reckoned to belong to an accomplice of now-jailed Silk Road developer Ross Ulbricht, alias “Dread Pirate Roberts.”

North Korea tries, and fails to mine its own Bitcoin

North Korea, meanwhile, is reportedly struggling to consolidate its own crypto-hoards. Citing an official report, South Korean news agency Yonhap News said the regime had “tried” unsuccessfully to mine bitcoin, but failed (it’s unclear why, maybe it was down the country’s patchy electricity supply). For the time being, it seems, the plucky dictatorship will just have to stick to stealing its bitcoin from Japanese exchanges instead.  

IOTA taps itself as best-tech for self-driving cars

Next-gen cryptocurrency IOTA, according to news site ambcrypto, has “emerged as the winner in the vehicular applications feasibility test.” What the hell does that mean? Well first, it means that IOTA, apparently, is the perfect network to accommodate the vast streams of data self-driving cars will generate when they eventually hit the roads. Mazel tov, right? Not so fast. The conclusion that IOTA was the “winner” emerged not from an impartial peer-reviewed study but a report filed by, er, IOTA itself. You can’t crown yourself as the winner in your own competition, can you?

Vitalik Buterin rebukes apocalyptic TechCrunch predictions

Speaking of self-promotion, Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin delivered a quasi-unintelligible rebuke on Reddit in response to a TechCrunch article claiming the network is doomed. Buterin, naturally, doesn't agree with TechCrunch's apocalyptic prediction. What wasn't as clear, however, was Vitalik's explanation on how Dapps could be improved. 

One could also use intermediate solutions, where third parties create 'wrapper transactions' that take the fees for operations from users that are paid in spankchain tokens, and the third parties provide the ETH to the block proposer.

Makes perfect sense, right? Well some, including Redditor “danielkoala” beg to differ. "I understand some of these words. Hmpm," he said in response to the rebuttal.  Hmpm indeed, Mr. Koala.

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