Daily: Crypto Dip / Bitcoin Cash Chain Split Bug / Tether prints $50M USDT

Hey everyone, my name is Michael and welcome back to Box Mining. So last week I talked a lot about this overall market sentiment and I didn't cover the news. So for today's episode, I really wanted to focus on the three key news topics of last week and a recap of what's going on in cryptocurrencies. You guys probably noticed we're in the red, quite deep in the red. Even after the start of this week, we still haven't yet fully recovered from the blow of the ETF delay. So I'll talk about the ETF delay first and what that means and what the potential reasons why it's delayed. Because there is some evidence of some manipulation in the market and we'll talk about Tether, the fact that they issue a $30 million and the fact that it was coincided with some Bitcoin shorts being filled or liquidated. So that might be a potential source of manipulation and we'll talk about how to deal with that. And finally, the last topic I want to cover is around Bitcoin cash bug, the SIG hash bug that was all over the news last week. And this has some dramatic and big consequences for not just Bitcoin cash, but for other cryptocurrency out there. Because there might be bugs and vulnerabilities in current blockchain ecosystem, which might lead to a chain split. And we can talk about how to prevent that in this episode as well. So I do want to say that everything covered here is my personal opinion, not financial advice. And if you do find this episode useful, do consider hitting the like button down below. It really helps this channel grow. All right, let's start off with the cryptocurrency markets first of all. So over the past few days, crypto was on a steady decline. In fact, right now, Ethereum is almost at 300 levels. VeChain below a dollar. Bitcoin at 6K levels. It's a lot of blood on the streets. And today, we're recovering a slight bit. And I think a lot of people were expecting much more of recovery, especially going beyond the resistance levels, actually below the resistance levels of $250 billion market cap. Right now, we're still steady sitting here at $219 billion. And one of the primary reasons for this dip was the delay in the ETF approval for the CBOE-led ETF. Well, the reason why this was such a big blow was because a lot of people was expecting a breeze. People thought, well, CBOE already successfully deployed Bitcoin futures. And with that, an ETF should come pretty easily, especially if you attach these big names to it. But in the past, traditionally, of course, Bitcoin ETF was declined multiple times. And there are now multiple attempts to set the ETF forward. Well, the reason why everyone is looking forward to an ETF is because traders are lazy. And I think this is one of the elements that I didn't discuss in the previous videos regarding the ETF. Because in the previous videos, I said, well, we don't really need an ETF because traders can still trade it easily and save it easily on SLA, especially if they understand crypto. The biggest issue here is the lack of knowledge. But on top of that, there's still an element of laziness. It's so much easier for a trader that's trading commodities to have Bitcoin on their dashboard. If they have it on their dashboard, they'll be naturally more inclined to look at it and trade it. And hence, there'll be more buyers for the Bitcoin ETF. On top of that, of course, there is also this talk of big investments coming in that could be potentially allowed if an ETF does go through because it's much easier now there is a custodial services for it. On top of that, we have the parent company of NYSE Intercontinental Exchange setting up a new venture called BACT, which is meant to provide global trading for Bitcoin. So despite the announcement of this exchange earlier last week, the crypto market still declined quite a bit. But it's pretty clear from the reaction of the crypto community and the cryptocurrency prices that the crypto community really values the ETF, especially because this delay means that it's no longer surefire. The delay means that what was very certain is no longer super certain because they're asking for an extension. They want to evaluate this more. And well, usually if that was for a job application, you'll be looking for new jobs by now. And rest assured, we're the whole community as a whole is applying for more ETFs. And it's just a matter of time before it goes through or not. So one of the reasons why the SEC might not be readily approving a Bitcoin ETF just yet is because of market manipulation. Because a lot of the exchanges and the services that we use in cryptocurrencies is much of a black box. It doesn't provide much transparency to what's going on. And no more apparent than this is with USDT. Tether always asserts that they have one USDT issued for every US dollar stored in an account. So that's a one-to-one match. But the issue with Tether is the number of audits that they've gone through and how much exactly USDT do they really have. The issue, of course, is with trust. And in cryptocurrencies and in the crypto space, trust is not there unless it's written on a blockchain. But with a custodial with fiat system, it's really hard to achieve that. So Tether has always gone through waves of FUD. We've pretty much discussed like six Tether FUD waves. And I definitely feel like this is a tool that needs to be improved over time. We already have quite a few stable coins coming in. But they are just not as popular as Tether because Tether has been used for such a long time and used on various exchanges like Binance or Kucoin or Bittrex that are binary, that are crypto-to-crypto only. So moving on that, what the issue here is that they issued $50 million of new USDT even though the crypto markets were tanking. So there was an overall down-road trend. And suddenly they issued this new USDT and caused an increase in the value of Bitcoin. So this has led to a lot of questions regarding how transparent are they and are they really getting more USD into the bank accounts causing them to issue it? How much can we trust them? There has been a lot of accusations here, especially on Twitter. You can read from Norio Rubinini that says, The SEC will be reckless in ever approving a crypto ETF or even a Bitcoin ETF. The price of all cryptocurrencies is massively manipulated. And this is because a lot of exchanges are still not very transparent. If there is a centralized exchange, then while the trading records can be internal and we don't have a good way to audit them. And this is something that can be reproved over time. So over time, for example, big exchanges that are stock exchanges right now, they're heavily regulated. There was a lot of oversight and these records of trading records are overseen by various departments at SEC. So in that sense, I feel like in for crypto, at least there still is quite a way to go before we have a more fair trading environment, be it using a decentralized exchange that we can all publicly view and make sure that there is no foul play or through some form of regulation. And in this case, there needs to be a balance striking regulation that harms development over as a whole, like overregulating and also protection. And I definitely feel like there is a need for protection in the crypto space. So beyond news of ETFs and of market manipulation, all the negative news, there's a lot of tech being discussed and a lot of developments. One of the recent developments I've been reading up is this new proposal by Vitalik Buterin, a new paper by him, that is proposing a 99% fault-tolerant consensus. This is very interesting because current methods are 51% tolerant. So as long as 51% of your network is honest, you won't be under attack. You'll have your funds safe. But what he's proposing here is it's 99% resistance. The fact that even if 99% of the nodes are bad actors, there still could be a consensus that could be reached. And this relies on another third party observer to observe the consensus being formed. So it's kind of like a third party check. And I definitely want to talk about these systems in the future because they allow for further developments in the crypto space. So I'm definitely very excited and excitedly reading up on technologies like this. And I will make sure I'll cover them in future videos as well. The last topic I want to talk about is the SIG hash bug that reflected Bitcoin Cash. So if you guys don't know what this was, it was a bug report done by one of the Bitcoin Core's developers. And you can probably guess there is a lot of conflict between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash. What was important here is that there was a bug in Bitcoin Cash that could have potentially divided the Bitcoin Cash network into two. Splitting it into two separate chains and causing a lot of problems if they want to really settle on one main chain. But it's very interesting to look at exactly what happened. So the easiest way to think about it is like this. Imagine you publish a book with 36 chapters. It's a long, arduous task, writing all those chapters. And you want to update that book. The reason being you figured out a lot has changed in that time. And you probably figured out, yeah, there's stuff to update and there's ways to make it more elegant. And in software, this is a process known as refractoring, going back to code and writing it so it's easier to read and it's more efficient. And we've done this a lot in my gaming company in the past. We would constantly do that every few months to make our code much more elegant and workable in the future. The issue that sprung here was when the update, well, the code was refactored, it was rewritten. For example, just like writing the first chapter of your book, rewriting that. There was bits that were left out. Because you can refactor it in a much more beautiful fashion, there might be little topics that you weren't mentioning. And this always happens when we're writing something or even writing code. The problem is when you're writing a book, that doesn't really matter that much. Well, yeah, people still understand the general gist of it. Queryfield scanned one of the updates to Bitcoin Cash's code and caught that one of the parameters wasn't particularly filled. And that would cause a potential kind of split in the network if someone exploited this. So this is very, very important in the future for all blockchains. Because if there's not enough rigor, even doing simple operations like refactoring can lead to devastating bugs. And this is something that we must be aware of in the blockchain space. Because as we have less and less developers working on a particular project, now that there's a million projects out there, there needs to be more and more rigor into testing that code. Because if someone malicious does come along and they do want to destroy a particular blockchain or cause havoc, then they have a lot of weapons to do so if the code isn't properly written. So definitely in this space, what I see is that there is a huge need for more developers to come in for more peer review. And that's the only way to fix this. Because honestly, you need to keep updating your code. You need to make sure it's free from bugs and you need to have peer review for that process. In terms of upcoming events, I've been invited to the blockchain cruise. And this is going to be one of the most interesting events in crypto, I think. It involves a lot of very strong opinion leaders, thought leaders in crypto. We got John McAfee. We got Charlie Lee, Creative Litecoin. We also got Tone Vase, Jimmy Sung. We got Brock Pierce here, Roger Ver. And all of these people are going to be gathered on one cruise ship. So there was a lot of talk about what happens if the ship gets blown up. You know, we'll lose a lot of people. But I think we're going to destroy each other on the ship before anything does happen. Because there's going to be lots of different people, different opinions, and probably a great place to learn about cryptocurrencies as well. So if you guys want to check out the cruise, check out the link below. And for full disclosure, they have provided tickets for me. But I won't get any proceeds from the ticket sale. So guys, click away, check it out if you guys are interested. And that's it for me today, guys. I thank you guys so much for watching this video. I'd love to hear what you guys think about this whole Bitcoin Cash bug. I mean, were you concerned? Did you hear about it? I'd love to hear your thoughts about that in the comments section below. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. Remember, click the little subscribe button down below to subscribe to this channel. And click the like button if you guys found this video useful. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.