Just recently, Apple removed HKmap.live, an application that showed a real-time crowdsourced map of protests in Hong Kong, alleging that it facilitated attacks on individual officers and vandalization of public areas where the police were not available. Kuma, the pseudonymous developer of HKmap.live, said in an interview with Laura Shin that Apple had no evidence…
When bitcoin made the world reassess the definition of currency, it presented all a sneak-peek into the future that would run on decentralized applications – or dapps. Educational utopians see dapps as tools to make everything you see on the internet distributed. Say, if a bank is an application governed by a central authority, bitcoin…
The United Nation Children’s Fund (UNICEF) became the latest high-profile organization to sink its feet deep into the bitcoin ecosystem. The global nonprofit this week announced that it would setup a new cryptocurrency wing. The so-called fund would allow them to accept donations in multiple cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and ether. The announcement saw UNICEF openly…
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro openly declared how he plans to circumvent the economic sanctions imposed on them by the US government. Cryptocurrencies, stated Maduro, would back Venezuela’s modern financial system. They would reduce the country’s dependencies on US-backed banking institutions – and, in the process, would integrate a blockchain protocol to do the same job…
Blockchain projects that raised capital via the distribution of digitized private securities yielded 87 percent losses, according to the Block Crypto. The cryptocurrency news and research service found that the so-called initial coin offering projects, or ICOs, raised at least $14 billion to $65 billion between August 2014 and December 2018. But 90.2 percent of…
Researchers at Microsoft are attempting to create a machine learning distribution model atop the Ethereum blockchain. Justin Harris and Bo Waggoner are looking to decentralize an otherwise expensive and burdensome process of accessing machine learning systems. In a paper published at Microsoft Research Blog, the duo explains the underlying issues with the current distribution model…
Despite being one of the most influential blockchain projects out there, Ethereum has been unable to impress investors in 2019. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap is down more than 26 percent in July. And regardless of an impressive YTD return of 60 percent, it remained dwarfed before bitcoin, whose yearly returns are almost triple…
Representatives of the South Korean technology giant Kakao said that their new blockchain, Klaytn, is 15 times faster than Ethereum, reports The Korea Herald. The internet firm’s blockchain-unit, GroundX, claimed during a press conference in Seoul that Klaytn can process up to 300 transactions per second. On the other hand, the Ethereum blockchain can handle up…
