The Crypto Beat - May 23
Here are all the latest stories related to cryptocurrencies Friday May 21, 2021.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin prices tumble 50% from peak and Mark Cuban calls the crypto crash the ‘great unwind’
Bitcoin prices on Sunday afternoon were in free fall anew, with the world’s No.1 crypto spiraling down more than 50% from a peak in around the middle of April, amid another bout of turbulence in the digital-asset sector.
The weekend carnage in crypto was drawing the attention of bulls and market participants, including billionaire Mark Cuban, who appeared to partly pin the slump on excess leverage and speculation on alternatives to bitcoin.
Bitcoin SV
FYX Gaming’s David Case: Large transaction sizes, dedication toward scaling are reasons Bitcoin SV is where we need to be
Case happened on the idea of CryptoFights as a blockchain-powered game making use of NFTs and other features.
Alongside co-founder and CEO Adam Kling, Case began developing the game on blockchain—initially for Ethereum. However, it didn’t take long for the pair to realize Ethereum simply wasn’t up to the challenge, and an alternative option was required to achieve their technical aims.
“We fairly quickly realised Ethereum layer one wasn’t going to work at all for us. So, we spent that whole year researching Ethereum second-layer solutions, payment channels, and all that esoteric stuff.”
“Then in 2018 when the BCH-BSV fork happened, something got me looking into Bitcoin as a development platform, and from there the answer was very, very clear.”
Noting the specific benefits of Bitcoin SV over other platforms, Case said it became clear Bitcoin SV was the blockchain they needed for the project.
“The large transaction sizes and the dedication toward scaling and a stable protocol are the reasons that Bitcoin SV is where we need to be.”
Dogecoin
‘I Won’t Sell’ Dogecoin—Tesla Billionaire Elon Musk Reveals Where He Stands In ‘The True Battle’ Between The Dollar And Crypto
Elon Musk' promotion of the digital currency dogecoin has helped its price soar many thousands of percent to a mind-blowing $42 billion market capitalization. And now he sees a "battle" coming between government-backed fiat currencies and protocol-based cryptocurrencies.
"The true battle is between fiat and crypto," Musk, who also runs the rocket company SpaceX, said this weekend via his preferred platform, Twitter. "On balance, I support the latter."
"I haven’t and won’t sell any [dogecoin]," Musk tweeted this week in response to an investing influencer's claim Musk "has a large doge holding."
Musk and others fear that fiat currencies have been exposed as dangerously inflation-prone and unstable in light of what Forbes describes as a spending spree over the last year in an attempt to offset the economic damage wrought by lockdowns and the pandemic.
Ethereum
Ethereum Says It 'Dodged A Bullet' After Fixing Bug Discovered In 2019
A bug in the code that the Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) blockchain runs on first discovered in 2019 could have brought down the entire Ethereum network.
According to a Tuesday Ethereum Foundation announcement titled "Dodging a bullet: Ethereum State Problems," the network's software contained a critical vulnerability that was finally fixed on April 15.
Back in 2019, Ethereum security researchers Hubert Ritzdorf, Matthias Egli and Daniel Perez discovered that the vulnerability made it possible to increase the block times by several minutes from the current average of just about 13 seconds.
As a consequence, such a dramatic increase in block times would result in transaction throughput being so drastically reduced that the network could become nearly unusable and paralyzed.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
