Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 103
August 4, 2017
Coinbase says it will support Bitcoin Cash after all — but it isn’t committed to trading yet
Coinbase, one of the world’s largest (if not the) largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has reversed its stance on Bitcoin Cash and said it will introduce support for the fork next year.
Coinbase was among numerous exchanges to opt out of trading Bitcoin Cash after it came into existence on August 1 on the grounds that it wasn’t proven or safe. Beyond refusing to facilitate trading, Coinbase also said it wouldn’t allow customers storing original Bitcoin on its platform to claim their Bitcoin Cash entitlement. Those who wanted it were told to remove their coins and go elsewhere to do that.
But now the company — which was started by former Airbnb engineer Brian Armstrong (pictured above) and is reportedly raising funding at a $1 billion valuation — has changed its stance slightly. It told customers via email that it will introduce “support” for Bitcoin Cash by January 1.
“Once supported, customers will be able to withdraw Bitcoin Cash. We’ll make a determination at a later date about adding trading support,” Coinbase said.
In other words, let’s see what happens before we commit to trading
That’s almost certainly a response to anger from Coinbase customers, who threatened to move their coins elsewhere and, in some cases, take legal action over their Bitcoin Cash entitlement. (Tl;dr people like free stuff, especially people who are into crypto.) It is unclear exactly what impact this had on the Coinbase business, but signs aren’t great. One analytics firm estimated that its cold storage reserves dropped to half of their previous level following customer withdraws.
Yet, despite that, a number of Coinbase investors told Business Insider that they aren’t overly concerned about the pushback, while the overall future of Bitcoin Cash itself is unclear. Principally that’s because the fork has the same mining difficulty as Bitcoin, but a smaller fraction of its hashrate.
Right now, Bitcoin Cash became the third largest cryptocurrency based on total coins in the market on day one, but it’s $7 billion market cap trails Bitcoin ($44 billion) and Ethereum ($21 billion) by some way. Its situation may have changed by January, too, while also Coinbase has tended to take a conservative approach to bringing new currencies on.
Right now it offers trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin — the latter of which was only added this past May despite gaining significant attention in 2013. Indeed, Litecoin’s founder had been director of engineering at Coinbase for nearly four years before leaving this summer — that gives some insight into how stringent its policy is.
Source:
Coinbase says it will support Bitcoin Cash after all — but it isn’t committed to trading yet
How to start a drone business: Plans and Opportunities
Some trends have the capacity of turning into mega trends and bringing about a dramatic shift in the economy as we know it. UAVs have managed to do that in a rather short period of time.
From being considered as mere “toys of the hobbyists”, “flying cameras of the rich,” or the “clandestine military operative machines”, drones have further penetrated vast areas of our economy and are starting to become a major part of our everyday lives. Unimaginable uses of drones are coming to life every single day and their evolution is only going to surge with time.
Business tech buffs globally are trying to get a slice of this rapidly growing trend’s pie. The drone business opportunity market is posed to grow 190% from 2014 to 2024, according to The Drone Co.
For a budding entrepreneur, owning a drone in this day and age is a latent business opportunity just waiting to be explored and exploited. For opportunistic businesspeople, drones have multiple uses and can be explored and utilized in a variety of ways.
Before getting started with a drone-related business, it is fundamental to check local regulations on the commercial use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Some countries already have introduced strict regulations that limit the use of drones.
How to Get Started with a Drone Business
Before you decide to take the plunge into the intriguing world of drones and the business opportunities ascribed with them, the very first steps are to enroll in an FAA-approved aeronautical training program to get a Remote Pilot Certificate, which is a pre-requisite to be able to commercially conduct a full-fledged drone business. You can enroll in the Drone Pilot Ground School, which helps fledgling drone pilots get the appropriate test prep for the FAA Aeronautical Knowledge Test.
UAV Coach also offers a step-by-step guide to FAA Part 107 for U.S. Commercial Drone Pilots to score a drone certification process that covers all the new regulations implemented by the FAA.
Drone Business Opportunities
Considered the best business to start in 2017, some of the upcoming potential business opportunities with drones are listed below:
One-man Aerial Film Unit (Filmmaking)
With basic knowledge of operating video cameras and piloting drones, people can produce in-house documentaries, short films, video snippets and montages that would otherwise require helicopters to shoot. Moreover, drones are cheaper, more maneuverable, and safer than helicopters.
Individuals and large enterprise consumers can also pursue a wedding and special events photography business with drones. Owning a drone can be the ultimate start to a freelance business of commercial photography and videography, which could prove to be a secondary or even a primary source of income.
Source:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-start-a-drone-business-2017-8
August 3, 2017
Movie Studios Are Trying to Trick You Into Seeing Bad Movies
It’s been a bad summer to be a bad movie, and a good summer to be a good one. Studio heads have spent the past few months grousing about the effect that review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes is having on the grosses of their would-be blockbusters. Baywatch (19 percent positive reviews), The Mummy (16 percent positive reviews), and Transformers: The Last Knight (15 percent positive reviews) all underperformed the expectations of box-office analysts. Meanwhile, many of the summer’s biggest over-performers have had the Rotten Tomatoes scores to match: Wonder Woman (92 percent), Spider-Man: Homecoming (92 percent), and Baby Driver (95 percent).
Until last week. The Emoji Movie, which—at a dismal 6 percent—is easily the worst-reviewed movie of the summer, debuted. Audiences didn’t like it much better than critics did, giving it a B ranking on Cinemascore. (Cars 3, by contrast, got an A.) And yet The Emoji Movieopened to a solid $24.5 million, staving off an almost universal lack of enthusiasm for the material.
How did they pull it off? Part of it is that children’s animated movies are uniquely resistant to poor reviews—especially in the summer, when parents and babysitters are just looking for the chance to burn off a couple of hours in an air-conditioned room. The Emoji Movie also opened nearly a month after the last children’s animated movie, Despicable Me 3. If your young kids had already seen that, The Emoji Movie was pretty much your only option.
But that’s only half of the story. Sony’s creative scheduling didn’t just extend to the release date of The Emoji Movie; it extended to the way it rolled the movie out. Press screenings are generally extended to critics around a week before a movie’s release, in order to give time for critics to actually write the review—and, if the movie is good, generate an early, buzzy groundswell of support. And when movies do screen early, it’s generally on the condition of an embargo date: the earliest moment you’re permitted to post a review. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the first reviews for The Emoji Movierolled in at 3:00 p.m. EST on June 27—less than a day before the movie’s actual release date. And many Friday releases now open on Thursday evenings. It’s a clever tactic to goose a box-office score and serve the fans who are desperate to see a new release as early as possible—but it also narrows the window in which a critic can write a review even further.\
Studios can make it difficult for critics to see a movie—and, of course, to file their reviews. When those reviews get published, Rotten Tomatoes will dutifully assemble them into an aggregate score, but not before some audience members have already bought tickets to see it.
The film business relies on buzz. Sometimes, that buzz is essentially self-generating. (Just try to keep the internet from poring over even the tiniest little nuggets about a Batman movie.) But more often, it’s a complicated aggregate that relies on trailers, posters, junket interviews, magazine profiles, promotional appearances on late-night shows by the film’s stars—and, at the end of the line, reviews. If those reviews are good, studios tout them on posters and trailers. Last year, trailers started cutting out the middleman and putting positive Rotten Tomatoes scores right into the commercials. If the studio is deliberately circumventing that route—as they did with The Emoji Movie—there’s probably a good reason for it.
You might be thinking: Who cares? Even if Rotten Tomatoes didn’t exist, does anyone really go to The Emoji Movie expecting it to be great? Probably not. But if the strategy worked for The Emoji Movie, it’s likely to be replicated by a bunch of movies down the line. I am disheartened to report that Sony is employing the same strategy this week with the long-awaited Stephen King adaptation The Dark Tower.
The Dark Tower has long been plagued by rumblings of production and post-production problems. Just this week, Variety reported that an early cut screened for audiences last year ended up testing disastrously—so much so that the studios considered bringing in a new director to recut the whole film. Were those problems corrected in time to salvage the movie? I wish I could tell you! But for a high-profile blockbuster just days away from release, Sony is making it abnormally difficult for critics to see the movie—and, of course, to file their reviews. When those reviews get published, of course, Rotten Tomatoes will dutifully assemble them into an aggregate score—but crucially, not before some audience members have already bought tickets to see it.
Click over to Rotten Tomatoes right now and you’ll see scores for a bunch of movies that come out next week: Annabelle: Creation, Ingrid Goes West, and Good Time. Logan Lucky, which doesn’t open until August 18, already has 19 positive reviews (and, for now, a rare 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes). But as of Wednesday evening, The Dark Tower, which opens on Friday, had zero reviews, because Sony hadn’t even screened it for critics yet—let alone given critics the go-ahead to write about it.
That changed this morning, as critics rushed to file their Dark Tower reviews overnight. As of this writing, the movie sits at a dismal 18 percent, with 28 reviews filed—albeit without the “critical consensus” that Rotten Tomatoes can only compile when a larger number of reviews have been published.
Critics don’t like reading tea leaves. They’d rather see a movie and judge for themselves. But when a studio is intentionally withholding a movie right up to the last minute… well, it’s usually not because that movie is great.
Source:
http://www.gq.com/story/movie-studios-are-trying-to-trick-you-into-seeing-bad-movies
Bitcoin cash is already the third most valuable cryptocurrency
Bitcoin cash, the offshoot of cryptocurrency bitcoin that was created yesterday, is now worth $7.6 billion, according to data provider Coin Marketcap. That pegs the value of all the bitcoin cash in circulation at 17% of bitcoin’s total market value of $44.4 billion. This makes bitcoin cash the third most valuable cryptocurrency, behind bitcoin and ethereum. It trades under the BCH symbol on most exchanges, while bitcoin retains BTC.
Cryptocurrency
Market value
Bitcoin
$44.4 billion
Ethereum
$21 billion
Bitcoin cash
$7.6 billion
Ripple
$6.7 billion
Litecoin
$2.2 billion
Bitcoin cash’s vault up the valuation charts can be explained by its provenance as a fork of bitcoin—think of it like the splitting of an amoeba in two. The market value of all the coins in circulation—usually referred to as the “market cap” in cryptocurrency jargon—is calculated by multiplying a coin’s price by the total supply of coins in circulation. When bitcoin cash splintered off from bitcoin, it also inherited the supply of coins in circulation. In other words, there is roughly the same amount of bitcoin cash in circulation as bitcoin, and both cryptocurrencies each currently have 16.5 million units in circulation.
There are slightly more bitcoins in circulation than bitcoin cash—a difference of 474 coins—because when bitcoin cash forked, there was a period of several hours when no new bitcoin cash blocks were mined. In the meantime, bitcoin miners continued to find blocks, introducing new coins to the circulating supply.
What exactly happened on Aug. 1?
A chain split is a slow and confusing event, even with a deadline. Bitcoin cash had a much publicized deadline of Aug 1, 12:20 UTC (or 8:20am US Eastern time) for the split to occur. Yet it wasn’t until hours later that the split actually took place.
The reason for this confusing state of affairs is as much about semantics as technicalities. Firstly, the bitcoin cash software uses a particular calculation for time called “median time past” that’s based not on clock time but on the number of blocks mined after the 12:20 deadline. Since there is an element of chance that determines when exactly a block is mined, experts could only estimate when the bitcoin cash software would kick in. In practice, this meant that the bitcoin cash software would only activate about an hour after 12:20 UTC, which was the case.
Once bitcoin cash was activated, the bitcoin cash blockchain stopped growing for several hours, while the bitcoin blockchain continued to add new blocks as normal. This activation happened at 12:37 UTC when both blockchains had just mined block number 478,558—this would be the last common block shared between bitcoin and bitcoin cash. All future blocks would send the coins on their independent trajectories.
There was confusion as the bitcoin cash blockchain stalled at block 478,558. What would normally happen is that a new block would have been mined—478,559—in about 10 minutes. But as hours went by, it became clear that not enough miners were committing processing power to the new blockchain to discover a new block. This was because the new chain also inherited the difficulty threshold for finding a new block from the bitcoin blockchain, meaning a massive amount of processing power would be required.
At this stage, although the chains have split, the new chain didn’t yet have any new blocks, so was technically simply a stalled version of the bitcoin blockchain. Most observers in the bitcoin world thought it would take hours, or even days, for miners to devote enough processing power to the bitcoin cash blockchain to discover a block.
But around six hours later, ViaBTC, a Chinese mining pool based in Shenzhen that has vocally supported bitcoin cash, added block number 478,559 to the bitcoin cash blockchain. This block was 1.9 megabytes in size—nearly double the maximum size allowed on the bitcoin blockchain. Compare this to the same block on the bitcoin blockchain, which coincidentally was also mined by ViaBTC, but was only 272 kilobytes in size. Subsequent blocks, however, have been well below 1 MB, reflecting the small number of transactions on the new blockchain.
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Stock split or dividend?
Two metaphors from the traditional equity markets have been used to describe the creation of bitcoin cash: a stock split or a dividend. But there are good reasons to think that bitcoin’s split is not like a stock split at all, as this CoinDesk piece suggests. For starters, a stock split doesn’t change the assets’ value; it simply adjusts the quantity and therefore price of the stock on the market. An increase in the number of stocks leads to a commensurate drop in price, without changing the fundamentals of the company in question.
Bitcoin’s fork doesn’t split existing units of bitcoin—in fact, the bitcoin price has remained more or less the same throughout (which could be seen as a bullish vote of confidence in the cryptocurrency’s continued supremacy). Neither have any new units of bitcoin been created by the fork.
Instead, what happened is more like cloning. That’s because anyone who held bitcoin before the split would now also hold the equivalent amount of bitcoin cash. This makes the bitcoin fork more like a dividend: investors who held on to bitcoin and weren’t scared off by the fork were now credited with an equal amount of bitcoin cash.
The ethereum example
A major cryptocurrency forking, and the market supporting both resulting coins, isn’t as weird as it sounds. This already happened with ethereum in July 2016, when a philosophical disagreement among ethereum holders led to a hard fork, creating ethereum and “ethereum classic.”
Getting bitcoin cash
One way to get bitcoin cash is to buy it. It’s now trading on several major exchanges (here’s a list), with the bulk of trading volume taking place on Kraken and Bittrex, according to Crypto Compare.
The other way to get bitcoin cash is to claim it from any bitcoin holdings you owned before the fork. In theory, it’s simple: All private keys—basically the password to unlocking bitcoin holdings—are identical on both the bitcoin and bitcoin cash blockchains. This means you use the same private key to access funds on both chains. But in practice, this can be tricky.
The most reliable, though fiddly, method is to run a bitcoin cash “full node.” This is software that downloads the entire bitcoin cash blockchain , which is around 126 gigabytes, and also checks the validity of live transactions on the bitcoin cash network. Import the private keys from your existing bitcoin wallet to the wallet linked to the bitcoin cash full-node. You should then be able to access the new bitcoin cash funds. Check out the detailed instructions, and several other methods, including hardware wallets and paper wallets, in this Bitcoin Magazine piece.
Some exchanges also automatically credit pre-fork bitcoin holders with bitcoin cash. These include Kraken, Bittrex, and Bitfinex. This seems simple, but there can be several drawbacks. You must rely on the exchange to credit the new coins, which can be a slow process, and you may be unable to withdraw the new funds immediately, as Kraken users are currently experiencing.
Some exchanges also apply a discount to the amount of bitcoin cash that’s credited, like Bitfinex, which offers 0.85 bitcoin cash for every bitcoin. The discount was applied because the exchange claimed customers were manipulating its peer-to-peer margin financing system to inflate the amount of bitcoin cash they would receive.
What happens next?
Bitcoin cash is now, for all intents and purposes, an asset independent of bitcoin. It must develop its own ecosystem of developers, exchanges, and startups in order to flourish.
Bitcoin cash’s price will be an important indicator of its future potential. If it is indeed what bitcoin ought to be—a payment system with a large transaction capacity, as its advocates argue—the market should value it above bitcoin at some point in the future.
Another important indicator will be the amount of hash rate or processing power that miners commit to bitcoin cash. There isn’t a data source for the hashrate on the bitcoin cash network yet, but we know that miners are crunching 6.4 million terahashes per second on the bitcoin network. That consumes an estimated 15 terawatt hours of electricity a year, putting the bitcoin network’s consumption between Turkmenistan and North Korea, if it were ranked with countries.
If miners abandon bitcoin cash because mining it turns out not to be profitable, then bitcoin cash could wither away. As one expert observer of the fork, Andrew Chow, who developed the widely watched BTC Fork Monitor, told me, if that happened, the new chain would simply be “dead.”
Source:
Bitcoin cash is already the third most valuable cryptocurrency
The Bitcoin Cash vs Bitcoin Battle Is Heating Up—And That’s a Good Thing
I am utterly fascinated by the recent, furious emergence of “Bitcoin Cash.”
For the unfamiliar, it’s a so-called fork of the original Bitcoin cryptocurrency that launched earlier this week and sent crypto-investors into a tizzy, trading the virtual coins up to hundreds of dollars each. At the time of this writing, one unit of Bitcoin Cash is valued at about $425—an impressive sum for something that’s existed for all of two and a half days.
Like a world religion, Bitcoin Cash was created from conflict—a rift in the original Bitcoin community over technical details pertaining to the structure of the digital currency’s underlying technology, the blockchain. And like a religion, the Bitcoin Cash splinter faction was immediately rejected by the establishment—in this case by Coinbase, the largest Bitcoin exchange on the planet.
You can almost picture a Bitcoin Cash enthusiast—call him Martin Luther—posting his 95-point screed to a cryptocurrency message board. “Out of love for the truth and from desire to profit from it!” he writes with zeal, punctuating the sentiment with a GIF of Aziz Ansari as the Parks and Recreation character Tom Haverford making it rain.
Bitcoin Cash’s emergence hasn’t eroded support for the original Bitcoin. Indeed, one Bitcoin is worth about $2,760 at the moment, more than its value a week and a month ago. Investors and technologists alike sense opportunity in the schism. (Look no further than the Chicago Board Options Exchange, which plans to launch its own bitcoin derivatives trading products next year, and the rabid interest in initial coin offerings, or ICOs.) Cryptocurrency, long the domain of hustlers and dealers, is growing into a legitimate enterprise. The original Bitcoin, launched in 2009, was merely the first chapter.
To which digital currency denomination will you be faithful? For me, it’s still far too early to tell—but I’ve never been an early adopter of technology. A reformation is clearly underway in the crypto-community. Which doctrine(s) win out, well, that’s up to you to decide.
Source:
http://fortune.com/2017/08/03/bitcoin-cash-cryptocurrency-schism/
Facebook begins testing Stories on the desktop
Great news, folks. Facebook Stories, the shameless Snapchat clone that sits above the News Feed on Facebook’s mobile app, is now rolling out to Facebook’s desktop site. Here, the Stories feature is no longer at the top of the page, but is instead off to the right side, where it’s at least a bit less intrusive. A small question mark icon appears in the Stories module, as well, which will explain the feature’s purpose, when hovered over with your cursor.
The explanation simply states that Stories consist of photos and video that are visible for 24 hours before they disappear.
Facebook has confirmed to TechCrunch the Stories launch on desktop is still considered a test, but notes that a wider rollout is expected soon.
The company chose to bring Stories to Facebook, after seeing its success on Instagram, where Stories had debuted in summer 2016.
With the first five months, Instagram Stories soared to 150 million daily users. It now has 250 million daily users, compared with Snapchat’s 166 million. Half of the businesses on Instagram created a story in the past month, Facebook also announced this week, and Instagram’s average usage has climbed to 32 minutes per day for those under 25, and 24 minutes per day for those 25 and up, it said.
The feature arrived on Facebook at the beginning of 2017, initially in Ireland before expanding to other countries, including the U.S.
The company has credited Snapchat with pioneering the visual communication format, but believes the pivot into Stories goes beyond simply copying a competitor’s popular app. Like Facebook’s News Feed – a format that went on to become the standard across social apps – Stories are a new way to share. That’s led to the format being broadly adopted across the industry.
Facebook itself has added Stories to Instagram, Messenger, and its flagship app. It even tried a Stories-like feature in WhatsApp. Elsewhere, Stories is inspiring redesigns of other top apps, including most recently, Tinder, Match, and Skype.
However, on Facebook, the feature hasn’t seen as much traction.
In fact, there were so few people using Stories on Facebook’s mobile app, that the company in April began to display grayed-out icons of your most frequently contacted friends instead of blank spaces in the Stories feature that no one much was using.
Source:
Facebook begins testing Stories on the desktop
