2018-12-14 01:16 |
A new e-mail based cryptocurrency scam discovered
Community of the popular website Reddit found a new cryptocurrency-related scam that is currently being circulated on the internet.
The scammer thought it wasn’t enough to break the average anti-fraud law and instead decided to try his hand at breaking a couple of anti-terrorism laws as well. The full scam involves sending emails written in very bad English to a victim, saying that a certain individual working with the scammer planted a bomb in the victim’s place of work. The victim is then warned that this unknown individual “has the building under control” and will detonate the explosive device if any sign of the victim leaking the bomb information is noticed. Finally, the scammer gives the victim a way out: pay him 20 thousand dollars in Bitcoin and he’ll recall his “mercenary”. The ransom must be paid by the end of the day, the scammer says, or else the bomb will be detonated.
The problem here is that these obviously fake bomb threats are being sent out in bulk, meaning that hundreds of people receive this message each day. This further implies that this Tyler Durden of cryptocurrency scamming either managed to make hundreds of bombs and hire hundreds of individuals to survey hundreds of buildings on the same day, or that some lazy scammer found a bunch of e-mail address online and is hoping to bait some hapless individual to send him money. Don’t be that hapless individual, at least until you see the news reporting on a mysterious crypto bomber blowing up a local grocery store or something.
Basis stablecoin project to shut down, return funds to investorsThe trend of algorithmic stablecoins failing seemingly has no brakes as another one from the bunch is biting the dust.
Basis project, a quite popular and long-awaited stablecoin, will be shutting down and returning the collected ICO capital to the investors. The return of the funds in case of the project failing to deliver a working stablecoin was written down in the contract between the investor and Basis. The funds were tied down in an escrow from which they were to be released once the Basis stablecoin was delivered; this gave investors assurance that the company can’t run away with their money.
Sources now reveal that the project is throwing the towel in due to “regulatory issues” they came across while trying to launch their product. As a reminder, algorithmic stablecoins have no backing, and regulators aren’t really fond of giving someone else the license to print fake money. As a result, the intact ICO money of the Basis project is to be returned completely. As most contributions were made in cash, the entire ICO bag is likely still close to the $133 million that were originally collected.
Bain Capital Ventures, GV, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Ventures and a number of other investors can expect to see their money returned. Basis won’t be the first algorithmic stablecoin to go down this year, as NuBits experienced the same faith a couple of months back.
Stellar Core v10.1.0 releasedStellar, the company behind the cryptocurrency/cross-border payment solution XLM, released the v10.1.0 version of its Stellar Core software. Stellar Core is the backbone of the Stellar network, as it helps maintain a local copy of the ledger by synchronizing and communicating with other Stellar Core instances on the network. It also stores historical records of the ledger and participates in the network consensus, all of which basically means that Stellar Core is the software required to run a node on the Stellar blockchain. Learn more about it here.
The latest v10.1.0 version of the software brings several new stability improvements, including:
This release contains major changes to the way stellar-core communicates with the database. The changes make the code easier to change in the future and the immediate benefits are that the performance is improved for certain ledger types by several orders of magnitude. Replaying buffered ledgers during catchup may sometimes cause stellar-core to get out of sync. In some rare circumstances, some buckets would be deleted on startup, causing the instance to be in a corrupt state.It also comes with some new features:
New command line –disable-bucket-gc that allows to disabled bucket garbage collection (used in recovery and diagnostics scenario). New command line option to flush the publish queue. Updated command line argument parsing to follow a “subcommand” syntax. Making it easier to understand the logical grouping between commands. Reworked all metrics (now documented in metrics.md).The full update can be reviewed here.
Credits partners up with IBM CloudCredits, a public blockchain-based platform is looking to find a solution to the problem of crypto mainstream adoption by partnering with the IBM Cloud.
Credits developed the first completely autonomous blockchain platform that enables creation of services using smart contracts and process scheduling but has struggled to deliver this technology to commercial consumption levels. And now, Credits has signed a 6 year contract to pay IBM for hosting their blockchain which should help them significantly improve said blockchain’s performance.
IBM Cloud’s infrastructure is fast, cost-effective and scalable enough to let Credits perform thousands of transactions per second at a minimal cost, claims the IBM’s case study on this cooperation.
Credits will build a new-generation public blockchain platform running on IBM Cloud bare metal servers, beating competitive offerings on transaction load, processing speed and price, says IBM.
IBM team ran a proof-of-concept exercise to identify the optimal infrastructure for the company, designing an environment based on IBM Cloud bare metal servers located in IBM Cloud data centers in Dallas in the US, Sau Paulo in Brazil, Chennai in India, Singapore, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, London in the UK and Frankfurt in Germany.
“For us, IBM Cloud beats the competition on quality, price and support,” commented Konstantinos Sotiropoulos, CIO and deputy CTO of Credits. “IBM is a leading expert in private blockchain technology, complementing but not competing with our proposition. They have the global resources to support our ambitious growth plans. Plus, they do not charge for internal network traffic, which keeps our costs low.”
The beta version of Credits’ new blockchain solution, containing autonomous smart contracts and a native cryptocurrency, is already available. With IBM on board, Credits hopes to provide faster processing/storing of transactions and better execution of smart contracts.
“We are so confident that IBM will play a central role in our success that we signed a six-year contract. IBM Cloud solutions are supporting us as we launch the Credits public blockchain network in wider markets,” concluded Sotiropoulos.
The post Altcoin faltering continues, even stablecoins are not safe while Stellar (XLM) revamps its Core client appeared first on CaptainAltcoin.
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