Category: Cryptocurrency News

What is Intel ’s Pat Gelsinger doing? Who is he talking to while promoting Intel’s new bitcoin mining chips? In a recent Bloomberg interview, Gelsinger uses every ESG buzzword in the book to promote their “energy-efficient ASIC chip.” Is this the right strategy? Who will be Intel’s clients? And why is this man lying about bitcoin’s energy consumption when the real numbers would do just fine? The host, Emily Chang, starts by asking him about 2019, when the Intel CEO said that Bitcoin was badly designed, “extreme, and climate intolerant.” Does Gelsinger still hold that opinion? Of course, he does. And that’s just the beginning.  Intel CEO regurgitates ESG FUD talking points while shilling for his new #Bitcoin mining chip. Feb 14 2022 pic.twitter.com/x7r31FCwp9 — 🐝🇸🇻⚡BITC0IN 🐦🐦🐦 (@BITCOINALLCAPS) February 17, 2022 The Intel CEO Is Here To Fix Bitcoin Gelsinger starts by saying that when he misdiagnosed bitcoin that one time, “most of the uses where illicit.” In 2019? Nothing could be further from the truth, Sir. Bitcoin’s first use case, the unbanked, were discovering the solution to their problem little by little. And the seeds for everything that has happened in the last few years were already planted. Was bitcoin also used for illicit purposes? Of course. Bitcoin is money for your enemies. Everyone can use it.  Another thing the Intel CEO believed about bitcoin is that “it couldn’t be regulated, so it couldn’t become a currency for nations and for people to use broadly.” Well, considering it’s already currency in one nation, El Salvador, we could say that Gelsinger’s predictions are pretty much off the mark. The idea of an American ASIC mining chip, though, that’s a great one. And if it consumes less energy, so be it. Even though people will probably just push the pedal to the metal and mine more. In any case, the Intel CEO informs us that one of the company’s mantras is that they’re “shaping technology as a force for good.” It sounds like Google’s “Don’t be evil,” and we all know how that turned out. In any case, Gelsinger thinks the easily debunkable attack points he exposed make bitcoin a controversial character. However, “that doesn’t mean it’s not a good technology, but we’re not using it good yet.” So, Intel is here to fix it. BTC price chart for 02/19/2022 on Fx | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com What’s Gelsinger Promising, Exactly? One thing’s for sure, Intel is very confident about their product. The CEO said: “Intel is about to bring forward a blockchain chip that’s dramatically better. That is orders of magnitude better in terms of power performance. So, we’re helping solve the climate issue.”  Are they, though? In any case, a “dramatically better” chip is always welcome. When the company announced their first clients, we quoted their press release: “Today, we at Intel are declaring our intent to contribute to the development of blockchain technologies, with a roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators. Intel will engage and promote an open and secure blockchain ecosystem and will help advance this technology in a responsible and sustainable way.” And we, jokingly and earnestly, applauded their efforts: “That’s right, they’re tackling the problem “in a responsible and sustainable way.” And they’re calling the mining chips “accelerators” for some reason.” However, the Intel CEO raises doubts. “We want to work with the industry to find ways that technologies like blockchain can be properly regulated, managed, as well. So they truly can be fully realized,” he said. Forgetting that Intel just arrived to the space and was here to make chips. “This is one of those areas that, yeah, we’re going to work on fixing this one. Because this is a powerful technology. An immutable leveraged digitized entry system can transform currency, transactions, supply chain, so, yeah, this one is exciting.” This man doesn’t have the faintest clue about bitcoin’s real power. And, what’s an “immutable leveraged digitized entry system” anyway? There’s a popular saying in the bitcoin community: “You don’t change bitcoin. Bitcoin changes you.” It seems like Intel is going to find that to be true the hard way. Featured Image: Gelsinger on Bloomberg, screenshot from this video| Charts by TradingView

NFTs are adding complexity and diversity to the blockchain ecosystem, and this new wave of utility is attracting a much wider audience. The blockchain-cryptocurrency sector is a little more than a decade old and still fighting an uphill battle for widespread acceptance. Those who have closely followed the industry’s rise know its potential to solve the biggest problems plaguing legacy financial systems, but before crypto can go truly mainstream, it must first reckon with some of its own inherent shortcomings. For starters, crypto-based transactions are considerably slower than conventional payments, with the exception of some cross-border use cases. Faster transactions are possible, but not without a hefty price tag out of reach for many users. This sluggish speed often means long waits for transactions to settle, resulting in network congestion. As we witnessed with CryptoKitties in 2017, scalability is a serious concern for existing blockchains and protocols running on them. Beyond these technical limitations, myths and misunderstandings abound in the blockchain-cryptocurrency domain, which presents significant obstacles to onboarding. Those skeptical about cryptocurrencies often perceive it as “magic internet money” with little or no value in the real world, or worse, a means for criminals to transact shady business outside of the watchful eye of financial regulators. This is despite the fact that just 0.34% of crypto-based transactions involve criminal activity globally. Cryptocurrency is also frequently criticized for its gluttonous energy consumption, with the average Bitcoin transaction consuming twice as much energy as a typical U.S. home uses in an entire month. Mass-scale Bitcoin mining operations around the world consume enormous amounts of fossil fuels to power their server farms, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere. Some companies have begun to partner with energy plants to use excess energy that might otherwise be wasted. Bitcoin and Ethereum are trying to resolve these issues through innovations like the Lightning Network and Ethereum 2.0. Emerging blockchain platforms are also introducing radical and promising enhancements, but as a whole, mass adoption in the mainstream is still a distant reality. In spite of these and other obstacles, the burgeoning community of crypto enthusiasts have put tremendous effort into spreading awareness and education—which is steadily coming to fruition. Moreover, as innovators build user-friendly solutions to improve the first-time experience of amateurs, we are gradually moving towards broader adoption. Let’s take a look at some of the major catalysts of this change. NFT Collectibles One of the most successful and innovative discoveries to emerge from the blockchain sector in recent memory is non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Although NFTs have multiple applications, the oldest and perhaps the most popular is their role as collectibles. NFTs caught the fancy of crypto enthusiasts beginning in 2017 with CryptoPunks, and have since become cultural artifacts, unfolding one of the most important chapters in blockchain’s history. NFT-based collectibles are not mere JPEG images sitting idle in their owner’s crypto wallet. People are buying these assets to flaunt them on social media as a sort of virtual status symbol. Realizing the enthusiasm, Twitter has been working to offer users the ability to authenticate their ownership of NFTs and show them off in your profile. NFTs also have the potential to be much more than mere collectibles—fractionalization is possible, for instance, and so are DeFi derivatives. Torum is one company focused on growing the NFT and Crypto Community and has recently taken investment from KuCoin Labs. Torum’s NFT marketplace is powered by their token XTM, which helps meet the NFT-centric needs of crypto communities. They will be connecting users in a SocialFi (Social Finance) ecosystem where cryptocurrency users and projects can collaborate and, according to their twitter, already have close to 200,000 users. Another market player lowering the barrier to entry to NFTs among new and existing crypto users is Chronicle, a marketplace creating authenticated digital collectibles for the world’s biggest brands, including for stars of stage, screen, and television. Chronicle makes it easy for users to buy, sell, trade, and gift officially licensed NFT collectibles, even without technical knowledge, with a user-friendly platform that accepts a multitude of payment options including credit and debit cards. Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games Blockchain-powered gaming is rapidly becoming a sensation, with the combined market cap of top gaming tokens having peaked at over $52 billion. Traditional gamers are already familiar with the idea of in-game assets, such as weapons, vehicles, or loot boxes, around which entire in-game economies with corresponding real world value have begun to spring up. By leveraging NFTs and other blockchain-based innovations, decentralized protocols are taking in-game assets (and gaming) to a whole new level. Unlike traditional gaming, where assets are confined to individual games’ worlds, tokenized in-game assets have real monetary value transcending the games’ virtual boundaries, and persist even if the game ceases to exist. This development has given rise to a totally new, user-centric gaming paradigm: Play-to-Earn or P2E. In our pandemic-ravaged economy, people had to get creative to make ends meet, and P2E games shot to fame in this climate. The prospect of earning real money by playing games is indeed exhilarating, however the focus on the economics of these virtual realms usually comes at the expense of compromised gameplay and visuals. The sector is evolving, though, and quite rapidly, with participatory and people-centric titles like what we are seeing from Iron Sail, Whydah’s GameFi hub that has received $25 million funding from major blockchain ventures. Running on KardiaChain, Iron Sail’s Mytheria is an NFT trading card game set to release in the coming months that adds a whole new layer to the Play-to-Earn model: Create-to-Earn. This allows artists to submit artwork to the game community and even create games to generate revenue from their work. Thetan Arena is another game from Iron Sail that, in a span of 2 weeks since launch, accumulated a total of more than 5 million users across all platforms. They reported a number of daily active users has reached a peak of 2 million. User-Oriented Services & Privacy Prioritization Disrupting user-oriented services like Data Management Platforms (DMP) and Creator Economies is another prominent outcome of leveraging blockchain technology. Blockchain-based solutions can improve these services, providing better security, privacy, and transparency, especially concerning personal and sensitive data. This benefits not only enterprises and content creators, but above all, the end-users themselves. We have already moved beyond ordinary cryptographic encryptions in this regard, thanks to companies like ARPA. ARPA CEO Felix Xu, who owns more than 3,000 NFTs, attended Art Basel 2021 in Miami to network with NFT artists. Xu said that ARPA’s Randcast technology uses cryptographic methods to provide a secure, fast, and affordable way for projects to generate onchain verifiable random numbers. Verifiable randomness can improve the transparency of minting NFTs, blockchain gaming, generative art, and more. The Tip Of The Iceberg? Despite its nascency, the crypto sector has already attained a market cap of $2.57 trillion though it has seen a sell-off around the new year. As blockchain innovations continue to evolve, crypto companies will devise new ways to onboard new users to their platforms. With more investments coming into the crypto industry all the time, companies will eventually adopt people-friendly technologies for mass adoption. By any measure this is an exciting time, and we’re still at the very beginning of the blockchain and cryptocurrency story. As that story unfolds, we may be about to witness an exponential and world-moving technology boom, with echoes of the early days of the internet.   Image: Pixabay

Announced live at ETH Denver, the upcoming NFT Passports also feature cross-chain support.

Here you can see more details: https://nftadnetwork.com Username: demo password: demo I created the first NFT based ad network because I believe in the technology and that NFTs could be a really interesting alternative to traditional ads. Get your art seen by millions of collectors and crypto enthusiasts worldwide through a network of crypto currency…
Read more

PRESS RELEASE. Using the latest Developments on the Decentralized Finance Market Alium introduces the Hybrid Liquidity Model, allowing users to trade almost any crypto using the Liquidity available both on Alium and the rest of the DeFi market. Hybrid liquidity allows traders to use both Liquidities available on Alium and on most of the major […]

Ross Nicoll, a Dogecoin core developer, has announced his intention to back away from the meme-based cryptocurrency. His justifications? The coin-making process was too stressful for him, and he has no desire to be associated with a potential conflict of interest in the job. Dogecoin fell nearly 4% to $0.14 shortly after the news. For the uninformed, the Dogecoin Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the growth of the meme coin. The foundation was re-formed in August after being created in 2014 but became inactive over time. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, is a consultant at DF. Goodbye, Dogecoin Core Developer Role Nicoll stated in a blog post Thursday that he is “stepping away” from Dogecoin for a variety of reasons. Most notably, the stress is unbearable and he said he needs “to take a break to focus on myself for a period.” Nicoll stated in a LinkedIn message to CoinDesk that his resignation is “neither definitive or instantaneous.” “I want to be clear that this is a role change, and there will be a transition time. I’m not suddenly gone,” he pointed out. Related Reading | Litecoin Creator Praises Dogecoin, Can The Token Get Its Bark Back? DOGE total market cap at $18.76 billion in the daily chart | Source: TradingView.com Dogecoin Price Sluggish At the time of publication, DOGE was trading lower alongside other major coins, as the global cryptocurrency market cap plunged 5.5% to $1.86 trillion. Just a few weeks ago, Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus pleaded with followers to “be calm” as the cryptocurrency has struggled to gain traction since last month. Markus urged members of the DOGE community in a tweet against being “toxic, crazy, and attacky,” since this may undermine the brand. Friday saw a decline in the value of risk assets as geopolitical tensions resurfaced and investors braced for upcoming interest rate hikes. United States President Joe Biden is likely to announce an executive order next week on the regulation of cryptocurrencies, which impacted mood as well. Related Reading | Tesla To Accept Dogecoin For Merchandise, Token Soars 30% The Musk Factor Dogecoin’s success is inextricably linked to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for it. The billionaire first mentioned Dogecoin on Twitter in early 2021, sharing a Lion King DOGE meme. This sparked a frenzied DOGE rise — punctuated by temporary drops — culminating in Musk’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. DOGE collapsed following Musk’s SNL performance, despite his vows to push its price up. Musk appeared to lose interest in the ensuing months, and the price of DOGE has fallen more than 70% from its all-time high. Musk, though, retains control of Dogecoin, as rare tweets reveal. Protecting DOGE Nicoll has been doing his darnedest to defend Dogecoin against trademark registrations by unaffiliated parties. Dogecoin’s evolution is in the hands of its “co-creators,” he said, “in a way that I do not have the mindset for.” Featured image from , chart from TradingView.com

Blockchain’s interoperability may be the key to both the macroeconomics of metaverse games and what keeps them fun.

submitted by /u/evilninjarobot [link] [comments]

Hey everyone I posted about my project in the ethdev sub and it was well-received so I'm hoping y'all will find it interesting too. I've been working on a synthetic loot spinoff for my latest project, synthetic punks. It generates a unique, fully on-chain cryptopunk based on your wallet address. It's also optionally claimable as…
Read more