Father's blessing. September 26, 2018.

Coinbase is lowering the bar for entry onto its list of tradable cryptocurrencies, which currently sits at five: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether, Ethereum Classic, and Litecoin. A Google form on the Coinbase website ushers would-be Coinbase listees through a whimsical questionnaire about their prospective token. Form-filling rookies will be pleased to know Coinbase has provided examples on how best to proceed. In the “Submitter’s full legal name:” box, for instance, is “Vitalik Buterin.” And for the “Enter the email address of the legal professional that wrote this legal opinion” box? “Example: lawyer@lawfirm.com.” That guy got in early on the email address game.

Reactions to Coinbase’s move were mixed. Some predicted an upsurge in altcoin investing and an overall boon to the ailing market. Detractors predicted that it would only encourage a new volley of “shitcoins.” One Redditor summed up the uncertainty neatly: “B U L L I S H...or desperate as fuck.”

This thread will tickle you:

More good news for shitcoins (and the, like, seven decent ones). Google has lifted a ban, instated in March, on cryptocurrency ads in the United States and Japan. The tech giant will now allow those tokens appropriately “certified” to advertise using its Google AdWords platform, which represents 70.9 percent of the search engine’s revenue. Ads for ICOs, however, remain banned. The question remains: how do you peddle a cryptocurrency, with zero inherent value, to Joe public? Answers in a stamped envelope to the usual address, please. 

Anyway. Even...more good news? Paul Sztorc, director of research at blockchain research firm Tierion, is optimistic about a three-years-in-the-making “sidechain” project—dubbed “Drivechain”—for the Bitcoin network, which would allow developers to build applications without the need for a hard, or soft fork. Much like Ethereum can, the network could then support third-party tokens and decentralized applications, jolting bitcoin from its relative evolutionary stasis. The project, first spearheaded by Bitcoin client developer Blockstream, is now operating on a Bitcoin testnet.

But why taser the infirm greyhound into a brief state of alertness when a fresher, younger pup is bounding up the driveway? The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, a state-backed Australian science agency, has trialled a blockchain-powered network, dubbed the “Red Belly Blockchain,” that can—reportedly—handle over 30,000 transactions a second. Compare that with Bitcoin’s, er, seven transactions a second. The network, which uses Amazon’s global cloud infrastructure, employs a “deterministic Byzantine consensus algorithm” that verifies whichever transactions are submitted the quickest. Bitcoin miners, by contrast, must wait for the slowest nodes to catch up before a block can be closed. So much for “never leave a man [node] behind,” eh?

Deeper in the lobbies of Industry and Congress. Some 80 representatives from the cryptoverse traipsed to Washington DC on Tuesday to advocate for better guidelines on crypto assets. Are they a security, or are they not? JPMorgan, the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, and the Royal Bank of Canada aren’t hanging around for the wheels of Congress to slowly turn, and have extended their “blockchain payments trial,” called the Interbank Information Network, across a further 75 banks, including Santander and Societe Generale. The project, built on the Ethereum-based Quorum network, is designed to quicken transactions. If only it could quicken that arduous Coinbase Google form so I can get my shitcoins approved.