SegWit

The Atlanta Blockchain 2018 Conference – January 27, 2018 / 8AM-4:30PM

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Make sure you get your tickets for The Atlanta Blockchain 2018 Conference. This is a full day event with workshops, vendors, free swag, giveaways, cryptocurrency education and meeting people in the industry.

ProtectingCoin is an event sponsor and we will have a booth and some giveaways throughout the day. Tickets are only $10, so get them now!

Date and Time
Sat, January 27, 2018
8:00 AM – 4:30 PM EST

Location
General Assembly at Ponce City Market
675 Ponce De Leon Avenue Northeast
Atlanta, GA 30308

TAB2018

SatoshiLabs releases Trezor One Firmware 1.6.0 and adds support for new coins.

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SatoshiLabs continues to make the Trezor One even better as they released Firmware 1.6.0. this week. It is great to see the team at SL is very busy with development and adding new features with each release.

A quick look at the new features:

  • Improved “Show on Trezor” view – displays additional information about your transaction directly on your Trezor.
  • Added support for Bitcoin Gold (BTG)
  • Added support for Expanse (EXP)
  • Added support for Ubiq (UBQ)
  • Additional UI improvements
  • Added support for native SegWit addresses (Bech32) (feature not active yet)
  • Added support for NEM

 

The full release notes can be found at https://blog.trezor.io/expanded-cryptos-cryptocurrency-support-firmware-1-6-0-3825b5853470

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Those were the Dips you were looking for…Bitcoin re-enters $7,000 territory

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It took less than 1 week for the Bitcoin price to go from a high of more than $7,5000, a tumble to $5,500 and a bounce back to over $7,000.  This represented an excellent opportunity to “buy the dip”.  The fire sale price was caused by the recent canceling of the Segwit2x Fork that would have created a 2x coin with larger block sizes for holding transactions.  The 2x fork was canceled due to lack of community support at this time.  The end result for the Bitcoin network is we really no change from where it was a month ago.  Is this the beginning of the climb to $8,000?  We think it just might be time to break the seal on 8k.

Where do you think Bitcoin will be by the end of 2017?

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Will that be cash, card or Litecoin?

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LTC_silverLitecoin has been making a splash in the cryptocurrency market this week, increasing value by nearly 45% in one week.  LTC (Litecoin) hit over $90 per coin on September 1, 2017, before pulling back to land around $77 on September 2, 2017.  A big contributor to the increase is around a new payment system called the Lightning Network and the successful testing of using Litecoin on the Lightning Network .  The Lightning Network will allow for even faster, lower cost micro-transactions (think a cup of coffee) using existing cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Litecoin).

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Litecoin was released in 2011 by Charlie Lee; previously an Engineer at Google and then the Director of Engineering at Coinbase.  Mr. Lee announced in 2017 that he would be leaving his role at Coinbase to focus fully on the development of Litecoin.

LTC shares many features with Bitcoin but also includes some additional features such as faster transaction processing and has been faster to release new features.  LTC adopted SegWit (a streamlined method of processing transaction data) several months ahead of Bitcoin.

LTC is often referred to as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold.  This may prove to be a very good analogue as Litecoin is developed and could be the currency of choice for day to day spending and Bitcoin remains the choice for large purchases or as a store of value.  You can move value between Bitcoin and Litecoin using exchanges with just a few clicks.  Even though they are separate from one another they are deploying many of the same features and this will only work to move them closer together as a compliment to one another VS a competitor.  Both have adopted SegWit transactions and are compatible with the Lightning network.  Another way to think of the difference for how both may be utilized, think of the difference between a $100 bill and a $20 bill.  These bills are separate bills with the $20 being used for more day to day purchases and you can easily exchange 5x$20’s for $100 or vice versa.

There are currently 52,751,282 Litecoin in circulation with a max amount of 84 million Litecoin.  The current market cap (value of all LTC in circulation) is over $4 Billion as of Sept 2, 2017.  Litecoin can be purchased on nearly all exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitstamp, and Kraken.

What are your thoughts on the adoption of Litecoin as a day to day currency?

btc_ltc_neon

 

 

Trezor releases Bitcoin SegWit support

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Trezor releases SegWit (Segregated Witness) support.  Segwit will decrease the amount of data needed to complete transaction, increase the speed of transfer, decrease the cost/fee to complete a transaction, allow faster deployment of new features and improve security.

Full story can be found here:

https://blog.trezor.io/rolling-out-trezor-wallet-segwit-segregated-witness-5700269debc5

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Bitcoin headed North

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Bitcoin has been down since it hit a high on 08/17/17 but has once again turned north and is setting new all time highs.

ProtectingCoin.com had asked this on 08/14/17
“Do we break $4,500 this week or is it time for a pull back under $4,000?”

The pull back to under $4,000 came just 1 week later, on 08/21/17. Now that the pull back has passed, is $5,000 coming by early September?

The gains today are most likely aided by the go-live of SegWit (Segregated Witness) that went active this week on Bitcoin. What is SegWit, you ask? I won’t go into the technical details of SegWit but will sum it up to say it is a more efficient way to process/store transactions on the Bitcoin network. This can increase the speed of transactions over time which will be needed as the popularity of Bitcoin continues to increase. Just how popular is Bitcoin becoming, you ask? Well, recent Google search reports show Bitcoin searches have become more popular than Beyoncé! Pretty sure that is the be all, end all yardstick for measuring popularity.

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BIP91, What is it and why you should care.

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Bitcoin Improvement Plan 91 has locked in this week.  That is great news, right?!?

You are probably asking what the heck is BIP91 and why should we care…

There has been a struggle over many months as the companies, miners and engineers that work to make improvements to the Bitcoin network and technology have been “negotiating” the next code upgrade for the Bitcoin network.  BIP91 is the set of code/rules proposed by engineer,  James Hilliard, of Bitmain Warranty.

 

How does BIP91 become locked in across a decentralized network?

The threshold to lock in this set of rules/code was that 80% of miners had to place a “signal bit” in their software to show they support BIP91 and in the future would reject anything that is not compatible with the BIP91 standard.

BIP91 met that 80% threshold on 07/20 and this happened as the people rejoiced!

BTC_BIP91_CHART

 

Well that does sound great…why is that important again?

The BTC network has grown over the last few years and the number of transactions per day have increased significantly.  This has caused slower processing and verification of transfers at a higher cost per transaction (still much lower than what your average financial institution will charge).  BIP91 is the first step of future improvements (Segregated Witness or SegWit) that will increase the size of the blockchain, will increase the speed of transactions and make way for the Lightning Payment Network.  SegWit is already activated on LiteCoin (another digital currency).

BTC_transactions_chart

 

What would have happened if the miners and engineers could not come to an agreement and the 80% threshold could not be met for signaling of the code upgrade?

Let’s say that only 50% of the Bitcoin Miners signaled support for BIP91 by August 1, 2017.  This would cause what is known as a hard fork of the BTC blockchain as 50% used the old (non BIP91 blockchain) and the 50% used the new code and ignored any transaction that did not support BIP91.  This would create 2 blockchains that would not share information and miners could continue to process transactions on both blockchains (think of the US Civil war when there was a US currency and a Confederate currency) and this would split the network into 2 different types of currency.  It does not appear this will be an issue though as the Miners and Engineers were able to come to a compromise and have met the 80% threshold for BIP91.  This will allow the BTC network to continue to grow and increase features to prepare for mainstream use and rapid development.

Comments or questions, post in the comments sections.