Bitcoin in Brief: Plagiary, Numerology, and Nano Does a No-No

From the serious to the ridiculous, today’s edition of Bitcoin in Brief has got it all, and by “all” read “a varied selection of crypto-related topics numbering no less than four and no more than six.” That doesn’t sound nearly as alluring though, does it? All it is then. Take a deep breath and let’s dive right in.

Also read: Craig Wright Referenced as Satoshi in Chinese University Textbook

Oh No Nano!

Yesterday was a big day for free transactions altcoin Nano: its Android wallet was released. Shortly after being unveiled, however, a small problem was detected. Okay, make that a pretty big problem:

For the record, Nano is the coin synonymous with the collapse of Bitgrail exchange and that was trading for $33 late last year, versus under $3 today. Nano holders have been hurting enough, in other words, without this latest debacle to deal with.

Everything Is a Copy of a Copy

With the launch of Tron’s mainnet in progress, it seems a good time to revisit claims of plagiary surrounding Justin Sun’s much hyped altcoin. Technically these claims aren’t being revisited in fact, since they’re fresh ones, not to be confused with the original claims of Tron having plagiarized large chunks of its whitepaper. Digital Asset Research have been poking around in Tron’s codebase and what they’ve found looks very familiar. They write:

While copying code without attribution opens the project up to some legal risks, they pale in comparison to the technical risks that the project faces. EthereumJ [which Tron is based on] is known to be unreliable and has issues like memory leakage.

As a parting salvo, they add: “The TRX token is one of the most centrally owned large cap ERC20 tokens”.

A Quick Look at Crypto Funds

ICOrating has released a detailed report on crypto funds. Its findings? 17% of all funds are tokenized (i.e. deploy a native token for profit sharing), 42% of all funds are based in the US, and the number of funds being founded has declined since 2017, which mirrors their declining returns as the crypto markets have went south. Most crypto funds don’t publish their ROI, but of the 8% ICOrating could find numbers for, the median ROI this year is just 14% versus 600% in 2017. It’s true what they say: any idiot can make money in a bull market. Most of the funds studied were under $100m, but ICOrating also found 15 funds of between $100-500m and nine whale-sized funds of over $500m.

Another One in the Basket

As we reported earlier this month, cryptocurrency baskets are growing in popularity. Two more noteworthy baskets that never made that list have since emerged. The first is Iconomi, whose digital asset management platform allows for “one-click diversification.” And the other is a newcomer to the scene, Bitdiem. It’s an ethereum-based payments and savings protocol for setting up recurring and conditional payments. One of the tools it provides is the means to create customizable token baskets that “enables users to build an inflation-resistant basket of goods, minimizing volatility and serving as a lasting store of value. Essentially, the basket can serve as the token equivalent of a mutual fund or 401k.”

Everyone’s Raising Money

The bear market doesn’t seem to have dented the ability of crypto projects to raise vast amounts of money – and then rapidly start redistributing it. Over in Santa Monica, STO incubator Start Engine, responsible for nurturing the likes of free speech network Gab.ai, has closed a $5m funding round and is preparing a $10m sale of tokenized common stock. It’s also revealed plans to build a decentralized application on the Ethereum blockchain called LDGR to increase liquidity in the secondary marketplace for trading securities. Meanwhile, over in Europe, Essentia, fresh from raising $21m in its pre-sale, has announced a $1m hackathon to fuel projects built on its open source protocol.

Fun with Numbers

Finally, following on from yesterday’s post about an unusual block header starting with 18 zeros, all sorts of crypto figures have been weighing in with their 10 sats on the matter. Nic Carter decided to spend the evening calculating how many bitcoin blocks reference their own block height in the corresponding hash. There are apparently seven five-digit blocks in which this occurs. He also investigated whether supposed Satoshis “CSW” or “Hal” appeared in any block hashes in hexadecimal form. Hal does but the initials of Craig Wright do not, confirming absolutely nothing. The point is, people will see anything they want to in numbers, including evidence of divine creation and giant quantum leaps. Still, though, those 18 zeros…it’s got to be aliens, right?

Do you think there’s something funny with all those zeros in that block header, or is it much ado about nothing? Let us know in the comments section below.

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