Previously Hacked Gatecoin Exchange Receives Liquidation Order Following Banking Problems

Gatecoin, a crypto exchange that was hacked in May 2016, has announced on March 13 that it has received a winding up (compulsory liquidation) order from an unspecified court.

The company wrote that Gatecoin will have to cease operation with immediate effect, noting that the exchange will assist in the liquidation process in order to distribute assets to the creditors.

The Hong Kong-based exchange had suffered a major hack back in May 2016, with around $2 million in cryptocurrencies lost after the firm reported a security breach that gave hackers access to Gatecoin’s hot wallets.

According to the team’s statement at the time, hackers stole 250 Bitcoin (BTC) and 185,000 Ethereum (ETH), which represented 15 percent of Gatecoin’s total crypto assets. At press time, such an amount of BTC and ETH is worth around $25.5 million, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

In the recent announcement, Gatecoin wrote that the firm started working with a Payment Service Provider (PSP) following issues with its banking partners in September 2018. In the post, Gatecoin appeared to blame the PSP for the liquidation process, claiming that it failed to process most of the transfers in a timely manner, which “almost paralyzed our operation for many months and caused substantial loss.”

Gatecoin further elaborated:

“Even after we managed to mitigate our loss by replacing that PSP with more reliable alternatives to process our clients’ transfers in September 2018, the situation did not improve because that PSP retained a large part of our funds.”

The company explained it tried to recover the funds by initiating legal action against the PSP, but was advised that it was unlikely to recover the funds fully, which caused financial difficulties that made Gatecoin no longer able to support its operations.

As Cointelegraph has reported, Gatecoin was also struggling banking issues in 2017, with some banks reportedly shutting down the accounts of the exchange without detailed explanation.

Back in 2015, Gatecoin had launched segregated client bank accounts, enabling two accounts within the same bank under Gatecoin’s name: one account was for collecting fees and operation expenses, while the other was used for storing client deposits, as well as processing withdrawals.

Founded in 2013, Gatecoin reportedly became the first crypto trading platform to list the Ethereum token in August 2015.

Another recently hacked crypto exchange, Cryptopia, has since partly relaunched its website, also announcing that it will be using customers’ balances held from the date of the hack as a basis for further calculating rebates.

Source:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/previously-hacked-gatecoin-exchange-receives-liquidation-order-following-banking-problems

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Five Aspects That ICO Issuers and Investors Should Remember

ICO is a relatively new method of financing startups, which has become for thousands of entrepreneurs an easy and fast way to implement their projects. By 2018, the ICO collected more than $20 billion. However, an ICORating study conducted last year showed that more than half of ICO projects failed in the second quarter of 2018.

According to industry experts, the failure of ICO is often caused by typical mistakes made by tokens issuers. Some of these errors lead to simple inconveniences for ICO participants, others affect the amount of funds raised, and some of them can lead to the failure of the project as a whole. It is important for both ICO issuers and potential investors to be aware of the most popular and significant mistakes that ICO projects make.

Product Development and Blockchain Abuse

In part, the beauty of the ICO concept itself is that it allows entrepreneurs to raise funds for essentially non-existent projects. As a rule, all that the issuer needs is a good website, a decent white paper and smart contracts that will issue a token in exchange for community investments.

Such an approach can really help in financing great ideas that may be too revolutionary for venture capitalists, but in most cases, it simply opens up access to financing for projects that do not have other chances for investment. This may seem obvious, but still — it would be nice for the ICO project to have at least an alpha version of its product before it starts raising funds for its development.

The ICO issuer must prove that its idea is realizable, and the only thing that stands between the current unfinished version and the full deployment is financing. This approach allows the project to stand out from several thousand other ICOs, and thus gain the interest and trust of investors.

Another aspect to which attention should be paid is the token ecosystem that the issuer of the ICO plans to create. Simply put, if the concept works without a blockchain and/or its own cryptocurrency tokens, developers are better off developing their project without them. Only when the issuer is sure that tokenization is obligatory, should he have a clear understanding of the ecosystem he is planning to create. Roles, rights and obligations of future participants, formalized specifications of tokens and all economic relations, as well as their advantages, should be clear for both the team and potential investors.

Objectives, fee, and volatility

Another aspect that should be considered before attempting to launch an ICO is the question of how much the project wants to collect. If it is too small, then the team will not have enough money to develop and reach the break-even point. However, if the bar is too high, the community’s expectations will be proportionate, and the chances of not justifying them will be high.

In this case, the advice for ICO issuers is quite simple — consider the possibility of holding several rounds of financing with smaller amounts instead of a single large distribution of tokens. Thus, the financing schedule will be more flexible, which will allow more intelligent distribution of funds and set the appropriate expectations of investors.

Volatility is also important. Most ICOs offer tokens for an ETH that is less volatile than most altcoins, but its cost is less stable than traditional money. ICO issuers should remember that if they raise funds on the air and its price changes, the maximum and minimum fundraising amount will change accordingly.

ICO location and laws

The cryptocurrency industry is still developing in terms of technology, distribution, and regulatory framework. Relevant laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and sometimes regulators suddenly and drastically change their position. In this regard, the choice of location for registering a company and holding an ICO is crucial. Countries such as Estonia, Switzerland, Japan, Malta, and Gibraltar are considered to be much more cryptocurrency-friendly than the United States, China or Russia.

In some cases, regulators may consider ICO to offer securities, as has been the case in the US more than once. And since an unregistered offer of securities is a crime, regulators will quickly take action against the issuer. If there is a possibility that the token will be recognized as security, before the start of the fundraising company should contact the regulator and receive confirmation from him that he will not regard the fundraising as an offer of securities. In this way, the company will be able to securely finance, and potential investors will not fear persecution by the authorities.

To resolve such legal issues, it makes sense to hire a qualified specialist who is familiar with the relevant laws of the jurisdiction where the ICO will be held. Investors should also pay attention to this issue and give preference to projects that work in compliance with the law.

Project Promotion

Competent presentation of the project is vital for startups who want to receive venture financing. However, for companies that decide on ICO, the presentation materials are even more important. At the same time, a PR campaign should be clear and accessible to people with different levels of technical and economic knowledge. That is why all the materials about the project — the White Paper, the website, and the roadmap should be comprehensive, but understandable to a wide audience of potential investors.

The objectives of the project and the specifications of the tokens should be indicated on the website — important figures should immediately be evident. Many people quickly look through the first page, and often either leave the project site if they are interested in anything or invest by skipping important information and then make a complaint to issuers. Also, developers should record a video message, which will be briefly and clearly outlined the benefits of the project.

If the ICO involves investors from different countries, it makes sense to translate the website and the White Paper into all major languages: English, Chinese, Russian, German, French and Spanish. In addition, one of the signs that the ICO is not a fraud is the availability of detailed information about all the project participants, mentioning their experience and achievements.

Community and Feedback

Finally, one of the main components of a successful ICO is an active community of users who want to support the project and use the product/service launch field. From the very first day of ICO preparation, the issuer needs to communicate with future investors through such forums as Bitcointalk and Reddit, social networks — Facebook, Twitter and Telegram, and such platforms as Medium or Steemit.

In addition, there are projects specifically designed to collect opinions that are very useful for evaluating ICO. Augur, Gnosis, and Wings are forecasting markets, where the issuer of the ICO can receive funding forecasts and constructive feedback on many blockchain projects. At the same time, Augur and Gnosis are common forecasting markets, and Wings focuses solely on ICO evaluation. It is noteworthy that, unlike forums and social networks, forecasting markets give people a real financial incentive to share only the best guesses and estimates: each participant reinforces his assumptions with a bet, be it money or tokens, and the best forecasters receive rewards.

ICO issuers should start presenting their project to potential investors and users as soon as possible. Thus, a startup will be able to collect feedback and find out whether the market really needs the product. To track community feedback, it’s worth hiring the right people, as developers often don’t have time for such processes due to active work on the product.

Having a successful ICO is not as easy as it sounds. From the point of view of both investors and issuers, there are many nuances and aspects that must be taken into account, and well-established communication is crucial. ICO issuers should work with opinion leaders and reviewers, and be honest with investors, both in terms of the advantages and disadvantages of the project.

Summarizing, we can say that the main conclusion is simple: it makes no sense to make ICO just for the sake of money. There have already been enough such projects in the industry and in today’s realities, only those companies that can really offer something useful will survive.

Source:

https://medium.com/altcoin-magazine/five-aspects-that-ico-issuers-and-investors-should-remember-f21b8cd2c24f

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BitcoinSV ‘feature’ exploited to store child abuse imagery on the blockchain

A change to the Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) protocol has inadvertently led to child exploitation material being posted to its blockchain, forcing apps and block explorers into actively monitoring the network for illegal content.

This was made possible after community members increased the amount of data accepted in transactions by 450 times (to 100KB), allowing for images, video, and audio to be stored in BSV’s blockchain.

The abhorrent imagery was first discovered on a site that displays files “hosted” by the BSV network. Later investigations revealed the content was “uploaded” with a transaction processed by Money Button, a payment app specific to the BSV network.

“[The website] contacted us suspecting that Money Button may have been used to write the data, since Money Button is a very convenient/easy tool to write data to the [BSV] blockchain,” a spokesperson told Hard Fork. “Sure enough – we checked our database and this criminal did in fact use Money Button.”

“Almost certainly, whoever posted this was trying to prove a point about inserting something illegal into the blockchain, since that content can never be removed,” they added.

BSV’s immutable nature unfortunately means the illegal content will remain hosted by the blockchain (unless it undergoes a hard fork to roll back the unwanted transactions).

“It is not possible to delete things from the blockchain. Block explorers have stopped showing the data in those transactions,” the spokesperson confirmed, which renders the illegal content invisible to the general public.

What is Bitcoin Satoshi Vision?

BSV is one of the blockchains created during the monstrously wasteful Bitcoin Cash hash wars. The recent raising of BSV’s transactional data limit was heralded by its community as the removal of “another limitation to scale Bitcoin.”

It is a fork (of a fork) of Bitcoin. It purports to be closer to the original intention of Bitcoin‘s pseudonymous creator, which SV proponents say has been bastardized since Satoshi Nakamoto’s disappearance.

Much of the disagreement revolves around Bitcoin‘s 1MB block size limit, which Nakamoto imposed (in part) to reduce the threat of spam transactions.

Bitcoin Cash was created by forking Bitcoin to increase that limit to 8MB, and additionally to 32MB shortly after. Bigger blocks are thought to increase the efficiency of the network as usage ramps up.

Big block advocates took that argument one step further last November, when a small community forked Bitcoin Cash to spawn BSV – a blockchain with the dramatically larger block size limit of 128MB.

Curiously, the most recent change that enabled BSV users to send images and video to its blockchain was made without a hard fork.

In fact, the dev who proposed the increase acknowledged the only requirement was to simply convince BSV miners to agree with the new 100KB limit. They noted at least 99 percent of BSV’s hash rate had adopted the change.

nChain says limiting data capacity is not the answer

Hard Fork reached out to nChain, the software firm behind the BSV protocol, to see how it’s responding to the ongoing situation.

CEO Jimmy Nguyen expressed the BSV blockchain is simply a data ledger. As with any platform that stores and transmits data, there is always the chance someone would use the platform to store and transmit illegal content.

“This is nothing unique to BSV. The same is true for the internet, and is true for the Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrency networks – on which illegal content likely already lives,” alleged Nguyen. “We of course do not encourage nor want illegal content on BSV or any technology platform.”

When asked if nChain had considered possibility of this ugly situation before the transactional data limits were increased, Nguyen responded by stating he was not convinced the problem is solved by reimposing smaller data limits on transactions.

“The answer does not lie in limiting the data capacity of the platform. Instead, responsible service providers operating on the BSV blockchain will take measures to prevent writing to or reading from the blockchain any content that is illegal,” he said, before stating it’s impossible to stop all illegal content from being posted to the internet.

He also described BSV’s ethos to be the encouragement of legally-compliant business action, and urged anyone to “think twice” before trying to add illegal content to its blockchain, as they must digitally sign any data they want to add.

“Those digital signatures are admissible in courts of law to prove possession of illicit material and intent to distribute,” added Nguyen.

The entire BSV ecosystem must be on watch

If the changes to transactional data limits are not rolled back, the burden of censorship and monitoring rests entirely with the services that make up BSV’s network, including miners.

“Since we are a wallet that writes data to the blockchain and reads data from the blockchain, we can moderate our own service,” Money Button’s spokesperson told Hard Fork. “Just because this data was written to an immutable blockchain does not mean we have to host that data, and doesn’t mean we have to allow more data like that to be written to the blockchain through our service.”

Mirroring Nguyen’s comments, Money Button explained if enough businesses make it difficult to write such data to and from the blockchain, it doesn’t exactly matter if the blockchain is immutable. Criminals simply won’t be able to find anybody to write it for them.

“Even miners could refuse to mine this content, although more than likely they will not parse it and will end up pruning it simply for economic reasons, because the miners are not incentivized to store this data,” the spokesperson added.

“If the criminals can’t find anybody to write it to the blockchain for them, then they could mine themselves, but they probably won’t bother.”

While this may sound reassuring, the harsh reality is there now exists a Proof-of-Work blockchain perpetually verifying the existence of child exploitation material, and on a network that prides itself on assuming “Satoshi’s Vision,” no less.

Source:

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/02/04/bitcoinsv-blockchain-child-abuse-imagery/

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Corporation behind Dash lays off senior staff as bear market grip tightens

The firm behind top-20 coin Dash has made a series of layoffs due to fiscal strains, the Block has learned. 

Around 8 percent of the staff will leave the company on March 7, including their Head of Strategy and Head of Business.

“Dash Core Group [DCG] was faced with some tough decisions to maintain financial stability in light of the current market,” the company’s CEO Ryan Taylor said in a blog post at the end of last month. He also emphasised the lay-offs had been concentrated in specific business areas to limit “disruption.”

Aside from cutting top-level managers, Taylor said other staff had voluntarily forgone their entire salaries and employment benefits as an additional budget-control measure.

Having forked from Litecoin in 2014, the Dash company did not raise funds via an ICO. Instead, DCG gets funded by 10 percent of the reward mined by masternodes (miners), subject to approval from the Dash Network Treasury. Its development is therefore funded entirely in Dash, and while they can convert it into fiat, a large bulk of DCG’s funds remains in the privacy coin – even paying staff wages in it. The coin’s price drop this winter has hence had a notable impact, dropping to $66, having risen to a peak of over $1,000 last year when it was the world’s fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

Surviving the crypto price-plunge: the ICO projects weathering the storm

Management argue they have been conservative in their spending, introducing a hiring freeze more than six months ago; prior to the bear market.

Down but not out

The Dash coin is marketed as “digital cash” with particular use-cases for those involved in legal cannabis sales, international remittance payments and for businesses trading in volatile fiat currencies. Der Spiegel also recently reported that the coin was the “most popular” cryptocurrency in Venezuela, where locals can buy goods at 2,400 Dash merchants in “near-instant transactions.”

One purchase channel is via Dash-loaded Kriptomobile phones. Sixty-six thousand units have already been shipped to the LATAM region and an order for 120,000 more is now pending. The phones are said to be part of an “acquire and spend” strategy, although data shows the currency is largely being hodled in the mobile wallets.

Despite the staff cut-backs, the firm behind Dash is said to remain confident about its survival, having previously noted a cash buffer of more than $1 million.

“DCG is not at risk of shutting down anytime soon, or of any significant cuts in staffing levels in the near term,” Taylor said in a December blog post.

Source:

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/03/04/corporation-behind-dash-lays-off-senior-staff-as-bear-market-grip-tightens/

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7 Obat Alami untuk Menyembuhkan Diare

Diare memang membuat kewalahan, terutama jika aktivitas sedang padat. Namun ada berbagau pengobatan rumahan yang bisa membantu Anda mengatasi diare sekaligus menghindari masalah lainnya yang sering mengikuti, seperti dehidrasi. Dikutip dari Mayo Clinic dan WebMD, ada beberapa pengobatan rumahan sederhana dan efektif untuk mengatasi diare yang Anda alami.

1. Minum banyak cairan bening

Sebaiknya Anda minum banyak cairan bening seperti air putih, air kaldu, dan jus, setiap hari, dan hindari dulu minum alkohol dan kafein. Namun meski harus banyak minum cairan bening, sebaiknya ini Anda lakukan secara bertahap.

Anda bisa meningkatkan cairan yang Anda minum setidaknya 1 liter per jam selama 1-2 jam, atau lebih lama lagi jika Anda memiliki diare dengan jumlah besar. Jika Anda memiliki penyakit ginjal, jantung, atau hati dan harus membatasi cairan, bicarakan dengan dokter Anda sebelum Anda meningkatkan jumlah cairan yang Anda minum.

2. Coba makan makanan semipadat dan rendah serat secara bertahap

Seiring pergerakan usus yang kembali normal, Anda sebaiknya memakan makanan semipadat dan rendah serat seperti roti bakar, telur, nasi, atau ayam. Namun, menambah porsi dan asupannya sebaiknya dilakukan secara bertahap dan perlahan-lahan.

3. Hindari makanan tertentu

Karena usus Anda belum bisa mengolah makanan yang mungkin biasa Anda makan, sebaiknya Anda menghindari beberapa produk makanan seperti produk susu olahan, makanan berlemak, makanan berserat tinggi, atau makanan dengan banyak bumbu selama beberapa hari.

Dikutip dari Best Health Mag, sebaiknya Anda juga menghindari makanan yang kayak akan bahan-bahan kasar, yang bisa sulit untuk dicerna. Makanan-makanan ini termasuk kacang-kacangan, kubis, atau kubis bertunas.

Ketika Anda sudah mulai baikan, Anda bisa memakan makanan yang mudah dicerna dulu. Namun, tetap ada beberapa makanan yang harus Anda hindari, seperti:

Makanan pedas, buah-buahan tertentu, alkohol, dan kafein sampai 48 jam setelah semua gejala diare Anda menghilang.

Bila Anda memakan permen karet, hindari yang mengandung sorbitol.

Hindari susu selama 3 hari setelah gejala diare Anda hilang. Namun, Anda bisa memakan keju atau yogurt yang mengandung probiotik.

4. Pilih makanan yang mengandung probiotik

Probiotik mengandung sekumpulan bakteri hidup yang mirip dengan bakteri sehat yang umumnya ditemukan di dalam sistem pencernaan tubuh. Probiotik dapat meningkatkan jumlah bakteri sehat yang ada untuk melawan kuman dalam saluran pencernaan Anda. Suplemen probiotik juga ada dan Anda bisa memilihnya. Bakteri bermanfaat ini juga bisa ditemukan dalam yoghurt dan keju.

5. Makan bubur wortel

Wortel merupakan sumber pektin. Anda bisa membuat bubur atau sup wortel dengan memasaknya sampai halus, lalu memblendernya dengan tambahan sedikit air dan menuangkannya di mangkuk, seperti makanan bayi. Anda bisa makan ¼ – ½ mangkuk setiap jamnya.

6. Minum teh hitam manis

Anda bisa minum teh hitam manis dengan gula. Air panas bisa membantu rehidrasi dan teh mengandung astringen tanin yang membantu mengurangi peradangan usus.

7. Makan blackberry

Sebaiknya Anda juga memakan blackberry kaya tanin yang sudah lama menjadi pengobatan rumahan yang cukup umum. Blackberry tersebut bisa Anda jadikan teh, dengan merebus 1-2 sendok makan blackberry atau daun blackberry kering dalam 1 ½ gelas air selama 10 menit, lalu seduh. Minum beberapa gelas beberapa kali sehari. Teh raspberry juga bisa jadi pilihan, karena ia juga efektif meredakan diare Anda.

Sumber: https://hellosehat.com/pusat-kesehatan/diare/7-pengobatan-rumahan-untuk-mengatasi-diare/

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