Crypto && Coffee 006
- 2 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- According to Luke Dashjr, Bitcoin Core Developer, he estimates the number of unreachable/non-listening node counts, the total number of Bitcoin nodes fell 22% from 65,000 to 50,500 during 2019. Full historical graph here.
- Overnight on January 1st, 2000 Bitcoin Core onion nodes appeared - when there are normally 200. The jump was later attributed to faulty code via BitNodes.
Litecoin:
- Litecoin shared a post regarding strange network activity that has been taking place since August 20th, 2019. On average the network sees around 40K active addresses per day. However, every 7 days this value spikes to 70K - which was reported by bitinfocharts. Full post here.
BitcoinCash:
- Bitcoin ABC 0.20.10 has been released. This release cleans up the output of mempool related RPC commands.
Ethereum:
- The Muir Glacier fork which activated on January 2nd was a success! With this block times have been reduced by 25%.
Other Chains:
- Ariel Gabizon, who was previously a cryptographer and engineer at Zcash, became Chief Scientist recently at AZTEC Protocol. His main focus will be bringing privacy to web3 using universal SNARKs.
- Beam, a privacy focused cryptocurrency which uses MimbleWimble, celebrated its first anniversary and halving on January 3rd.
- Loopring posted a thread regarding the Loopring v3 settling zkRollup DEX transactions on Ethereum mainnet for the last 10 days of December 2019. In the thread, they shared that 393,518 trades were completed.
- During 2019, the amount of BTC pegged to the Liquid sidechain increased from 42 BTC to 96 BTC. Full detail here.
- Monero devs shared Triptych - a logarithmic-sized ring signature scheme that would allow for larger ring sizes while retaining efficient transactions. This is in relation to both transaction size and verification performance. Full paper here.
Mainstream Recap:
- StarkWare, the project from Eli Ben-Sasson and Alessandro Chiesa, which is focused on bringing privacy and scalability to blockchains - shared stats on their DEX that break Ethereum’s scalability record post-Istanbul fork, with a 2000X improvement over Ethereum Layer-1. 9K trades per second at 75gas per trade. Full thread here.
- Tornado.cash posted about how to stay anonymous in Bitcoin.
- Wasabi Wallet’s_ Wasabi Research Club_ conducted its first meeting diving into great detail regarding coinjoins and mixing frameworks. The main topic of choice was Knapsack Mixing and its use of anonymous coinjoin transaction with arbitrary values.
- IBM is launching a new app that uses blockchain to allow consumers to trace the coffee they buy along the supply chain. Full article here.
- Nakamoto, a crypto-focused journal, posted its thoughts on 2020.
- Exchange, Hodl Hodl, launched a new loyalty program called Strong Hodler.
- Winklevoss Capital joins $5M seed round for crypto tax reporting platform TaxBit.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are grabbing a cup from Chromatic Coffee Co. in San Jose, California. José Maria’s Dark Roast from Brazil is a warm roast with notes of cocoa and brown sugar. Out of all the different coffees I’ve had, Chromatic always gets the “tastes like” on their bags perfectly. Enjoy!
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