Daily: Did a Chinese Exchange crash USDT ? / N.Korean Hackers stole $800 M Crypto (22nd Oct)

Hey everyone, it's Michael and welcome back to Box Mining. Today is Monday 22nd of October and there's so much to go over on the news today. Pretty much built up over the weekend and I want to add a little bit on to the USDT issue that we have with especially because there's a new competitor on the block Huobi is announcing their HUSD and it's quite peculiar. We also have ING Bank. They're announcing a zero-knowledge proof and this really goes to show that blockchain can be applied to more than just accounting but also to KYC, AML and the banks are deploying their own solutions as well. We also have in terms of talking about privacy, zero-knowledge proofs. We also have bullet proofs. Bullet proofs are a new update to Monero. They basically cut down transaction costs by 95%. Wow, the results are pretty astonishing. And finally, we got the Financial Action Task Force. They're basically announcing new crypto policies next year and this directly affects ICOs, exchanges, and also even wallets as well. So all this on today's Box Mining Daily. You've probably noticed this but I'm sporting a new haircut. I got a new haircut over the weekend. Hopefully it's not too short and makes me look like Kim Jong-un or something like that but if it does, I know who I'm going as for Halloween. And moving on, everything covered here is my personal opinion, not financial advice. Let's start off with the markets. We have the market cap at $209 billion. But what's kind of peculiar is that Bitcoin and Ethereum barely move. I mean they're less than 1%. This is beginning to look like the normal financial markets and Bitcoin is the new stable currency. But beyond that, of course, this might not last forever. But what we do have is that the altcoins do have some fluctuations. We have Ravencoin. Ravencoin's been gaining a lot of kind of attention recently after they got listed on Binance. We saw chatter about this coin. I took a look at it personally. It looks like a Bitcoin plus. So it's a currency forked off Bitcoin. But it's got a lot of additional features. For example, it's ASIC resistant. It wants to build additional infrastructure for privacy, token issuing, voting, etc. So it's kind of like Bitcoin plus its friend plus everything else. The reason I think a lot of people are very interested, especially the miners are interested in this coin, is because the circulating supply is so low right now. So there's a lot of this coin that can be mined in the future. And it's one of the most favorable mining coins for Nvidia. So that's what's causing a lot of hype over it. It's got a circulating supply of only 2 million right now. So in terms of accumulation, and in terms of this grandfatherness, it's not that heavy. But also that also means the price is going to fluctuate a lot because there's a lot of unmined coins left to be mined. So let's move on to the first bit of news, which is Huobi and their HUSD. So they announced this new stable currency. But what's peculiar about this is that this new stable currency is an amalgamation of all the current existing cryptocurrencies. So they have PAX, TUSD, USD, and GUSD. So if you deposit any of these stable coins into Huobi, they'll automatically convert it into HUSD, and then they can play with it whatever way they want. And then when you withdraw, you can choose between which stable coin you want. Now this whole design is very interesting. But also what's more interesting is the timing at which this is announced. This was announced last week at the height of the USDT FUD. In fact, what I was hearing from China from my Chinese friends is that in China, people were holding USDT and the USDT FUD there. That momentary FUD, the fake news and the spread of misinformation was so huge there that people were actually frightened, and they were dumping their USDT in fear that Bitfinex will collapse. Over in the Western media, we saw one shitty bit of news, which was the Binance email, the fake email from Binance saying that tether big scam. But in China, the situation was much worse. So one of the conspiracy theories is that in China, the exchanges, perhaps Huobi over here, is purposely spreading FUD against USDT so that people can move over into HUSD. There's a lot of money in these stable coins. And Huobi, when they deposit into and convert it into HUSD for you, they actually have a lot of room for arbitrage. I mean, they convert it into another currency, so you can't track and monitor how much they have in their wallets. So they can technically go about and use that for arbitrage situations and make a lot of money off that. So that might be a monetization point for Huobi. So that's one of the conspiracy theories going forward that this news, fake news that the crash caused on USDT last month or last week was actually caused by Huobi. What can we learn from this situation? Regardless of who caused it, we need to know that in the long term, USDT is not a stable huddle. There's a lot of issues regarding centralized keeping off fiat currencies that needs to be tackled. And that's why when the FUD comes, when the fear comes, it strikes so bad because some of us know deep down inside that this is not a stable huddle. But at the same time, we must know that this kind of fake news is reoccurring. And when it gets to a point where you see fake messages and emails being spread around, that's when you know that someone is manipulating this for their own gain. Now, this report is pretty interesting as well. And this goes to the long term huddle aspect of crypto, where the North Korean group Lazarus managed to hack $882 million with a cryptocurrency last year. So these are related to the exchange hacks. And the group that's been tracking this down is known as Group IB. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to figure out who is responsible for all the exchange hacks last year. We know that the exchange hacks were not devastating unless it's BigRail because it didn't kill any of the exchanges that are affected. So Bithum, your EtherDelta, your UBIT, your Bithum again, CoinRail, they were hacked, but they didn't bring down exchanges because exchanges had enough to cover for the losses. But what we do know is for sure is that exchanges are vulnerable and that there are hacker groups out there purposely targeting crypto exchanges and funds for their wallets. And because cryptocurrency exchanges, I mean, cryptocurrencies transactions cannot be reversed. This is a perfect target and a long-term target as well for hacker groups. And this really goes to show that we need to increase our security and protection. And this is why, you know, recently I visited Hacken because I realized that security is so darn important. If we don't have the good guys penetration testing the exchanges, then hackers will do it for us and take money from these exchanges and potentially causing another future MTGOX. In that sense as well, I'm preparing the video that I made from Hacken where there's a lot of talk about security as well in general. So I hope you guys can stay tuned and subscribe to my channel for that as well. Finally, over here, we got the Financial Action Task Force. This might sound unfamiliar to a lot of people, but what they're responsible for is responsible for compacting money laundering around the world. It's an international government body. And what they're doing is they're seriously looking into crypto. They're saying, you know what, there needs to be some sort of action plan to combat money laundering AML in cryptocurrencies. We know right now that exchanges have their own AML system like Binance, KuCoin, we have Bitfinex. We also have wallets with their AML system as well. This is important to comply to government regulations in individual countries, but having the global AML task force watching over this means that there might be additional policies implemented next year that every exchange must comply to. Well, is this good or bad? It's actually good because some form of recognition that crypto is becoming a very important money transfer tool is really showing that crypto is maturing to just beyond, oh, speculation coin. There are just actual use cases for it. But do I agree with implementing some sort of archaic centralized AML system that every government's been using for the past 30 years? Definitely no. We know that blockchain actually needs a new type of AML. It has, for example, if you look at chain analysis, you can look at clusters and see where these funds are going to and if the funds are sketchy or not, because after all, all cryptocurrency transactions on Bitcoin are visible. So in that sense, we need a new type of AML KYC for blockchain and for crypto exchanges. And hopefully these guys are smart enough to realize that and implement something that's drastically different. And guys, that's it for today's Box Mining Daily. So I'm looking into Ravencoin. If you guys want a full nutshell episode about it, leave a comment down below. Basically, I'm trying to gauge enough interest. I will definitely make an episode and see what they're really up to and their white paper. In terms of this two camera setup as well, I'd love to hear some feedback. I'm trying having two cameras around and filming with another camera on the side to see if that is a little bit more fun. Love it, hate it. Leave a comment down below. Thank you guys so much for watching. And of course, if you guys want to keep more up to date as well, I have my Instagram and Facebook channel. I will put a link down below. The idea of this is to be more updated because the videos are around 30 seconds, so I can make them much quicker and on the go. So it can be a little bit closer when we talk and get the most up to date information. So do remember to follow me there. Thank you so much for watching this episode. See you guys next time.