Daily: Why the DIP / SEC targets ICOs (Again)

Hey everyone and welcome to today's Box Mining Daily where I keep you up to date with what's happening in the cryptocurrency news front and the markets. So I will keep today's episode a little bit short because I do have the flu and I still can't talk properly with my cough going on at all. So let's get the things out of the way first of all. So on the markets we still see blood on the streets today. We have Bitcoin dropping 5%, Ethereum almost touching a 10% dip. You might say maybe that's a battle between Ethereum and EOS but actually EOS is dipping 10% too. So it just seems to be an overall market sort of deal right now. This is just to show how volatile cryptocurrencies are and it might just be because there's some various floods happening in the states, both the states and China. So I'll talk about that in today's episode. So Verge took a little bit of a dip today mostly because of this hacker, new hack that was discovered. That allowed hackers to create almost $1.5 million of Verge out of thin air. So I'll talk about it and look at that in a little bit of detail. So I do want to say that of course everything covered here is my personal opinion, not financial advice. So let's start off with the Verge front. So headline articles today are saying, you know, Verge got hit by a 51% attack. Again, I do want to say that let's just look at the effects of this. So what really happened was the attacker was able to DDoS the network and create or in fact just kind of fast mine basically 335 million Verge coins, which is worth $1.75 million. So this is not really a 51% attack. So this is really a fast mine and the Verge community really quickly pointed out that there's no proof for 51% attack and it's more or less based on timestamp. So the hacker probably managed to hack the timestamp again. It's not the first time it happened. The attacker is probably really desperate for some Pornhub right now because what are you going to do with 55 million Verge coins anyway? So with that respect, so what does this mean for the whole network and what do these attacks mean? Well, this fast mine issue is like this. If you check your Verge balance, if you're a Verge holder, you'll probably realize, well, your balance isn't affected, but someone just created a lot of Verge out of thin air and you're probably a little bit jealous of them. You're like, okay, this person can possibly dump and on me and affect the market price. Well, a 51% attack might be a reorder of the network. This is far more dangerous. That would mean you'll probably wake up to find your Verge account empty. No one has touched it, but you'll realize that the Verge was probably sent to you by Bob and Bob never received that Verge in the first place because the transaction order was reversed and maybe that Verge went to Alice. So that's the difference between a 51% attack and a timestamp attack. A 51% attack is much more deadly because a reordering of the network, a reordering of the transactions can potentially mean that people would just start suddenly missing out on the Verge and it can cause a chain reaction where lots of people suddenly realize that the Verge balance is different and that causes other chaos on the network. So I do want to correct that terminology. It doesn't seem that the evidence doesn't seem to point towards a 51% attack, but I do want to say that the timestamp attack and someone creating Verge out of thin air and just the developers not being able to fix this bug that was already in the first place. That really goes to show that, well, first of all, blockchain is hard to develop. And second of all, are these developers even competent? Are they just checking their code? Are they promising new code is going to be released? But at the same time, you know, is that properly vetted? Is that probably bug proof? Because anything that's deployed on the main net and as live means that, well, if it's vulnerable, it could mean devastation if the vulnerability is exploited. But Verge fans being Verge fans, I'm definitely sure they'll support the coin. But personally, this is not something I would huddle. So now what's with the recent dip in cryptocurrencies? And it might be because of the SEC again and regulatory hurdles. So the chairman Clayton of the SEC, he announced a wide enforcement sweep targeting fraudulent ICOs. So this might be why the smart contract coins or the coins that could launch ICOs are dipping a little bit in value because, well, it seems like the SEC is targeting hard on cryptocurrencies and trying to classify the mass data securities and making statements like this. And sometimes I want to say that the fear hits harder than the actual bite because of this uncertainty, because certain ICOs aren't named directly. Just that, you know, this threat of impending doom, so to speak, that really affects people's investment karma or investment feeling. But I do want to say, of course, that they have to balance between the innovation of technology and not because a lot has changed in this whole space overall. If you think about it, when cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin just started, it was really just one use case. But now we have so many use cases coming through. So now how do you separate them both? And this is what this SEC is struggling with. And also how do you separate this utility token and a security token? This is a topic I really want to discuss in the future. Onto some China news. There does seem to be a little bit of fun coming from China as well. So on national TV, it was reported, well, you know, the cryptocurrency scene is still in chaos. It's not really repeating something new, but it's just a national television, which is really a spokespiece for the Chinese Communist Party. Coming and saying, well, yeah, there's still other chaos in the cryptocurrency realm. There's also air coins, Kongchi B, which is just vaporware, right? Vapor coins that coins that really contains no long term value. And I think this is still something that is definitely possible in this stage, but also very hard to filter out. So that sort of uncertainty and the uncertainty of what the government's going to do now that they're announcing a little bit of negative news regarding cryptocurrencies. Well, this is probably what's setting this kind of overall negative tone. But I do want to say that the big data expo in Guiyang is coming up and it features a lot of major members in China, both government officials and also industry officials. So like I said before, the CEO of Tencent, Pony Ma, also CEO of Alibaba, Jack Ma will be there. Xiaomi CEO, Lei Jing is going to be there as well. So it's a big gathering and it's also going to have a lot of blockchain element. I know for sure that Sunny Liu from VeChain is going to be there, too. So there's going to be a lot of big data and kind of data processing discussion, which blockchain is kind of really good at taking a major foothold in. So this is really where that innovation comes to play. We are in a phase that, well, the market gets tested a little bit yet again. But as with all crypto goals, it's a very volatile market. And as we've seen in the past, Bitcoin and blockchain is pretty much very resilient. And this goes like this all the time. And guys, thank you so much for watching today's episode. Remember to hit that like button and the subscribe button to subscribe to my channel for more videos like this. I've put a lot of interviews that got packed up from ConsenSys that I want to release slowly. And I'm trying to edit them in the same space of time and it just takes a long time to edit things. So I do want to catch up with everyone. I want to show you a lot of interviews and chatting with people in real life. And I feel that's the best way to know a project. So stay tuned to that. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.