Cryptocurrency News – Feb 22 – I’m The Apps Man (Frowning)

Hello everyone, good morning. I’m here at Cryptocurrency News Headquarters and I have the latest.

No regrets

The Bitcoin Regret Club is a thing where you can, say, choose a date, and then it will say how many moneys you’d have had you invested whatever you put in to see how rich you’d be. It’s got a lot of coverage by people saying “boy oh boy, I’m an idiot for not investing in the mysterious online money that has absolutely no backing!” It’s kind of like when people say “I thought about investing in Apple stock decades ago but I didn’t,” except it’s more insufferable.

Experimentation corner

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

So I’ve been having some fun recently with botnet-for-hire Nicehash, which allows you to buy terahert/petahert-level computing power sourced from across the internet. I’ve been using it to mine Litecoin Cash, and one thing I’ll tell you is it definitely is the cheapest way I’ve bought Litecoin Cash yet. Litecoin Cash is also a complete mess right now as they haven’t got it on any exchange other than Yobit, which doesn’t actually have it and is just issuing IOUs, and MeanXTrade, which is uh, person-to-person Litecoin Cash exchanging. Currently the price of LCC is either $1.50, $2 or $5 depending on things I don’t totally understand. Either way, throwing ~5PB of power at a pool does seem to tip the scales in your favor. This is yet another example of really democratic and egalitarian technology, and not something that’s inherently tipped in the scales of those with money!

Hello from 2014

I love articles like these where the person discovers the blockchain and decides it’s time to whirr up the ole blog machine:

Blockchain is secure and safe. Security is a big topic and one everyone should fully understand. Maybe you’ve heard about hacks of centralized exchanges. And you’ve probably heard about a person going ‘dumpster diving’ to find an old hard drive because their private key was stored there. It’s important to know that virtually all the losses were due to hacking of centralized exchanges, losing private key information and gaining control of private keys by bad actors, and not some security vulnerability in bitcoin technology.

Slow news day I guess.

Bitblunder

Remember BitFunder? Me neither, but it was a “stock exchange” for cryptocurrencies, which is apparently different from a cryptocurrency exchange, and also did fraud. Anyway, I put this one in before I fully read the article and it’s super boring so I’m just gonna move on.

Robinhood actually exists

So Robinhood’s exciting new crypto project where you can eventually buy cryptocurrency instantly is now sort of live for some people who were in a list. Once again – and this is one of the few times I’ll say “the media got it wrong” – people can’t seem to coherently write about a company they like. Robinhood literally hasn’t put it live but TechCrunch says it “hits 4 million users” before shortly saying that it’s a waitlist. This is the same garbage that happened when Coinbase promised instant transfers from banks and then never did it. Nice work everyone!  I was contacted by Robinhood to say that I was suggesting that 4 million people are trading crypto on there. Incorrect! I was actually suggesting that 4 million people cannot trade because there’s a waitlist, so I just wanted to put that in big bold letters. I also want to repeat that I think waitlists are only there to benefit the company and not the customer – they get you a bunch of press, they give you a bunch of waitlisted customers who probably will forget they signed up, and so you get the user bump without as much effort. It’s not good!

John McAfee update: TV star

The teaser for my upcoming documentary on Australia's Channel 7. They made me look entirely normal. Amazing what clever editing can do.https://t.co/lJEb8Q2wdA

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) February 22, 2018