Crypto News: Bitcoin, Overstock, Ethereum Classic, Brave, IOTA, Monero (beginning of January)

Crypto News: Bitcoin, Overstock, Ethereum Classic, Brave, IOTA, Monero (beginning of January )

Bitcoin birthday

On 3rd of January Bitcoin had its 10 birthday. On 3 January 2009, the bitcoin network was created when Nakamoto mined the first block of the chain, known as the genesis block which officially marks the start of the blockchain.

While Bitcoin has disadvantages and by many might be considered outdated there is no doubt that without Bitcoin we would not be where we are today. 10 years on and we have over 2,000+ cryptocurrencies, 16,000+ markets and a combined market cap of $130bn.

Overstock to pay their Ohio taxes in bitcoin

On 4th of January Leading online retailer Overstock.com, announced today that it will become the first major U.S. company to pay a portion of its Ohio state business taxes in Bitcoin using the state’s new cryptocurrency taxpayer platform, OhioCrypto.com.

Ohio is the first U.S. state to offer a cryptocurrency payment system for state business taxes. Overstock on the other hand became the first major retailer to accept cryptocurrencies for purchases on its website in 2014. That same year, the company also founded Medici Ventures, its wholly-owned blockchain subsidiary focused on applying blockchain technologies to existing industries.

Ohio’s blockchain and cryptocurrency scene have been growing tremendously and Overstock seems to be embracing cryptocurrency for a very long time so the partnership is not surprising.

Ethereum Classic 51% attack

On 8th of January it was revealed that unknown hackers may have successfully hijacked the Ethereum Classic blockchain through a rare so-called “51% attack”.

An analyst from CoinNess.com detected certain abnormality in regard to the mining hash rate of the ETC network. A private pool managed to increase the hashrate significantly on Jan 6 making itself a temporary largest pool. As a result they managed to take over the network.

As a result crypto exchange Coinbase has quickly halted all ETC transactions, withdrawals and deposits due to a series of blockchain history reorganizations on the network. Other echanges like Gate.io also reported that there are issues with ETC.

Brave update

On 5th of January Brave and Basic Attention Token has announced a progress with the project through 2018 highlights:
Userbase grew from 1M to 5.5M
Major redesign of the desktop browser that’s 22% faster,, supports nearly all Chrome extensions, and features the new Brave Rewards.
Android browser passed 10 million downloads in August – 20% of our users on desktop and 80% on mobile
7X growth for Verified Publishers with over 28,000 Verified publishers, including YouTube channels and Twitch streamers
New partnerships: Dow Jones Media Group, search engines Qwant and DuckDuckGo, HTC, Civic and AdLedger blockchain consortium

The future looks good for Brave and BAT. The upcoming Brave ads where users are paid for ads is on the horizon – something that could revolutionize internet advertising and bring BAT to new highs.

IBCS Group and IOTA Tangle

On 8th of January IOTA has annouced a partnership with IBCS Group where Tangle technology and Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) protocol will support IBCS Poland with a solution to track and trace assets in the supply chain.

The IOTA-powered solution aims to support IBCS Group customers in improving their delivery planning and shipment, by ensuring a cross-system managent of assets (e.g. pallets, windows and glasses stands) used to move goods across Central Europe.

Keep in mind this is just a proof of concept but ibcsTracker was built using IOTA’s open source Track and Trace application as a starting point, which is available for companies to use to start building tracking solutions for their markets. It does seem to be a fitting use case for IOTA.

While IOTA already had plenty of partnerships this does seem to be Rreal world adoption of this project which is even more significant.

Monero not accepted in the Fortnite store

On 3rd of January Monero appeared as an payment system in the official Fortnite merch store on merch.fortnite.com. It appeared that the option was provided through a global cryptocurrency payment provider GloBee.

Fortnite is a battle royale online video game first released in 2017 by Epic Games that could currently be considered the most popular game in the world so the usage of cryptocurrency in the official store would be huge.

Sadly it turns out it was a mistake as admitted by CEO of Epic Games meaning the support was added by accident when they were doing work with the store partner. He also added however that ‘Many of us at Epic are big fans of the decentralized computing tech underlying cryptocurrency,’ but also that ‘No, Epic doesn’t have any cryptocurrency partners and aren’t in any crypto partnership discussions with anyone.’

Crypto News: Bitcoin, Overstock, Ethereum Classic, Brave, IOTA, Monero (beginning of January)

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Kane Dane