Processing A Cloud Mining

Cloud mining is a process of mining cryptocurrencies using remote data centers and hardware that are owned and maintained by third-party service providers. This allows individuals to mine cryptocurrencies without having to invest in and manage their own mining hardware, as they can simply rent hash power from the cloud mining provider.

To use a cloud mining service, a user typically needs to sign up for an account, select a mining plan, and pay the provider for the hash power they wish to rent. The provider will then allocate the hash power to the user, who can then start mining cryptocurrencies remotely. The provider typically charges a fee for the service, which can vary based on factors such as the amount of hash power rented, the duration of the contract, and the market conditions for the cryptocurrency being mined.

Cloud mining has become a popular option for individuals who want to participate in cryptocurrency mining without the need for specialized equipment or technical knowledge. However, it is important to note that cloud mining services can come with risks such as fraudulent providers, hidden fees, and fluctuating mining returns due to market conditions.

Before using a cloud mining service, it is important to research the provider thoroughly and understand the terms and fees involved. Some popular cloud mining providers include Genesis Mining, Hashflare, and NiceHash.

Global Stablecoin Saga Launch

Saga has launched its long-awaited SGA stablecoin, a token imbued with a unique monetary model that can expand and contract to meet demand, reducing its volatility. Cryptocurrency platform Liquid.com is the first exchange to list the ERC20 token, which will initially be traded against USD, bitcoin and Ethereum.

How SGA Differs From Libra

Like Facebook’s Libra, SGA is intended as a global currency that allows citizens to store and move value without friction. Backed by an advisory board that includes Nobel Laureate Myron Scholes and J.P. Morgan’s Jacob Frenkel, the company has been busily refining its monetary and governance models over the past two years – and its debut is sure to turn a few heads.

The basket-backed stablecoin is the first of its kind, a token governed exclusively by its holders and operating beyond the remit of national governments, while still maintaining full regulatory compliance. Stakeholders can have their say via a range of voting mechanisms, making it a democratic alternative to Libra, which is overseen by a consortium of 21 companies including several conglomerates.

Incidentally, Saga does not intend to create an ecosystem replete with disparate revenue streams like the social media giant: it is merely the issuer of the token as opposed to the payments layer operator and custodian.

Breaking Away From The Basket

Saga is backed by a variable reserve of major fiat currencies, emulating the International Monetary Fund's SDR basket, complemented by an algorithmically controlled system utilizing smart contracts. The reserve backing ratio, which will start at 100%, will be public at all times, so that users understand how much of SGA’s value is accompanied by a corresponding amount of fiat currency. Transparency and banking-grade compliance provide firm foundations for the ambitious enterprise.

The Saga team unites economists, governors, blockchain engineers and policy professionals, all of whom want users to utilize SGA to make cross-border payments. Indeed, doing so may mitigate the effect of fluctuations in one’s own national currency.

Smart contracts will be deployed to stabilize SGA’s value over time, issuing new tokens to fulfil orders and burning excess tokens as holders sell them back. Ultimately, the plan is to gradually move away from the IMF’s reserve asset based on SGA’s market movements, with the value of outstanding tokens depending on the quantity in circulation. Saga believes that this evolving issuance model will temper price volatility while enabling SGA to progress beyond a simple fiat-backed/pegged stablecoin.

Wary of being mired in the same regulatory morass as Libra, Saga will not enter the North American market – at least not yet. Instead, it has adhered to the European Union’s know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, as well as the Financial Action Task Force’s crypto asset guidelines.

Real-World Applicability

Saga’s founder and chairman, Ido Sadeh Man, believes SGA is more than ready to see the light of day. “I have the privilege of working with leading minds in the fields of economics, politics, and technology, each of whom has interrogated and examined the Saga project,” he wrote on the eve of the launch. “Each of their challenges has tempered our offering and ultimately prepared it for real-world applicability, which is what is happening today.”

The real-world applicability, as Man puts it, will be put to the test in the months ahead as traders weigh up SGA’s potential.

Ethereum Price: Why It Crashed?

KEY POINTS Ethereum is down 10% on Monday following reports of a Chinese Ponzi scheme
The whole crypto market is in red after ETH sell-off
BTC falls below $7,000 again

The bellwether for the recent drop in digital assets on Monday wasn't its usual culprit in Bitcoin (BTC ), Ethereum (ETH) was largely the suspect as it led the rest of its crypto counterparts in a 10% price dive.

Cryptocurrencies are red all across the board thanks to an ETH sell-off that happened in minutes. From $140.70, Ethereum fell to under $130, and the rest of the crypto market followed suit. Bitcoin finally broke below $7,000 after lingering for more than three weeks above it.

As of the time of writing, most cryptos are still in the red with Coindesk prices showing Litecoin (LTC) with a 24-hour change of -7.88%, Ripple (XRP) with -8.02%, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) changing -5.12%, and Bitcoin SV (BS) with 6.13%.

The cause of the price drop was attributed to a report from Bloomberg that cited a Chinese crypto scam, according to NEWSBTC. The scam's perpetrator was a certain PlusToken that allegedly dumped an estimated $2 billion worth of tokens to exchanges so that the scammers can cash out.

PlusToken used the classic Ponzi scheme to dupe all its investors in giving up those billion dollars worth of cryptos. What attracted investors was a ludicrous return of 600% and guaranteed rewards to those who would recruit new members. And, to make their offer more believable, PlusToken even had a listing on Chinese exchanges and presented itself as a legitimate company.

Chainalysis, the publisher of the report cited by Bloomberg, noted that they were able to track 800,000 ETH and 45,000 BTC that the scammers transferred to their addresses to launder. And of those 800,000 ETHs, only 10,000 has been cashed out, and the remaining 790,000 remained "untouched in a single Ethereum wallet for months." Also, 20,000 Bitcoins -- which roughly converts to $137 million -- are remaining from the 45,000 tracked from the criminals.

Knowledge of these dormant ETH and the fact that criminals had still been cashing out the stolen digital assets, particularly BTC, led to the market shorting the second most popular crypto.

As of press time, at $6,855, BTC is nearing the support line drawn from July that held through the end of September up to October and had been revisited again in November. Ethereum, on the other hand, is trading at $130.

UK’s Oldest Crypto Exchange to Delist Ethereum

Coinfloor, the U.K.’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchange, plans to delist ethereum next month, citing an unclear future of hard forks and the need for onerous technical support for the second-biggest coin by market capitalization.

The company will also delist bitcoin cash, the splinter currency founded two years ago in the aftermath of bitcoin’s heated scaling debate. Starting Jan. 3, Coinfloor will support only bitcoin, whose eleventh anniversary happens to fall on that day.

The plan comes ahead of the launch of ethereum 2.0, tentatively planned for early 2020, which will begin the process of shifting the network away from the energy-consuming proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS).

Coinfloor’s decision suggests that nurturing a team with the specific expertise to follow the technical trials and tribulations of coins like ethereum may be too expensive for smaller crypto players, particularly if this constitutes only a small part of their trading volume.

From the point at which it starts next year, ethereum’s platform upgrade “could take years to complete,” said Obi Nwosu, founder and CEO of Coinfloor. The complexity of the operation “means for a period of time there could be two versions of ethereum running.”

According to some ethereum developers, it’s likely to be years before the old ethereum PoW chain is fully merged into the new PoS network, leading to current discussions around ways to create a secure bridge between the two chains.

Founded in 2013, Coinfloor is a small exchange, with 24-hour volume of trading between bitcoin and GBP at just $450,000, according to CoinMarketCap, compared to $1.5 million of BTC/GBP at Coinbase Pro.

In Nwosu’s opinion, the headache of accommodating ethereum's planned upgrades was not worth a diminutive increase in overall trading volumes.

“You have to maintain that currency, every time they make an update or a change, and ethereum has got a long way to go with updates and changes to the platform,” Nwosu said.

Coinfloor, which is licensed by the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and has access to the country’s Faster Payments Service for instant fiat deposits and withdrawals, waited for regulatory certainty around ethereum before finally listing the token around the end of last year. Trading in ethereum comprises a tiny fraction of the exchange’s volume which is predominantly bitcoin, Nwosu said.

Vitalik Buterin discusses Ethereum on ‘The Portal’

American mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein recently interviewed Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on his popular YouTube show The Portal.

While I personally think Weinstein did not fully understand what Ethereum is about and how it works, Vitalik was smart enough to shift the conversation to more interesting topics.

In this article, I’ll take a look at the good and the bad of the interview, available below, and discuss how I see Ethereum evolving.

Ethereum is a sleeping giant

Even though some people might think I’m a Bitcoin maximalist due to my harsh stance on some of Ethereum’s promises and the foundation’s inability to keep them, my core belief is that Ethereum is a sleeping giant waiting to be woken up.

Ethereum is an incredible network. Not only because of its Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Solidity compiler or its easy-to-use developer interfaces (Mist, MyEtherWallet, and MetaMask), but also because of the quantity of projects being developed on top of its protocol.

That is Ethereum’s killer application.

Still, I am a firm believer that for Ethereum to become a fully decentralised world computer, its main focus should be on decentralisation.

I’m personally looking forward to both of the platform’s upcoming Proof-of-Stake (PoS) implementations, Casper FFG and Casper CBC, in the hope that one of them increases scalability and decentralisation – even though the trade-off is less long-term security.

Nevertheless, I argue Bitcoin’s purpose is to be a store of value (perhaps one day P2P cash), meaning Ethereum shouldn’t be worrying about that (even though ETH could potentially overtake BTC one day if its network upgrades are strong enough).

With the development of a scalable PoS system and the implementation of sharding and ZK-snarks, we could really see Ethereum making an attempt to rule decentralised computing.

Not only that, but the Ethereum Foundation is forming new partnerships with major players like Microsoft and Google in order to increase corporate adoption. The truth is that corporations are the ones capable of financing large-scale developments and training large quantities of people.

The Ethereum ecosystem is also making strides to enhance Ethereum’s censorship resistance and privacy. Two examples of projects getting traction in these areas are ChainLink and Enigma.

My stance is that Ethereum ticks all of the boxes to win most of the smart contract market share. Bitcoin is clearly not interested in that (a pity in my opinion), since the only “altcoins” being built over Bitcoin apparently exist solely on Liquid – a centralised Bitcoin sidechain.

Because Ethereum promotes open-source development and is capable of funding and assisting ERC projects, I see a great deal of developers looking to build DeFi dApps on the platform.

Was Ethereum’s growth ethical? One of the most interesting and controversial points of the interview above is the fact Vitalik openly admits to selling ETH tokens to cover the cost of operations during the platform’s early days.

During the bull run of late 2017, Vitalik was apparently able to convince the Ethereum Foundation to sell a lump sum of about 70,000 ETH, over $80,000,000 at the time.

Even though some people might not see a problem with that – I know I don’t – the truth is open-source projects like Ethereum should be straightforward with investors, especially when the message from the founding team at the time was “we’ll decentralise everything”.

I believe the correct approach to be Litecoin founder Charlie Lee’s – one of openly stating how much LTC he sold during that time. If projects want to captivate investors, they should maintain high standards of openness.

To conclude, I don’t think dumping coins on investors at the top to finance the project long term was a bad move, especially since the market was seriously overbought. However, since the project is open source, the amounts should have been disclosed much sooner.