The U.S. has seized nearly 200k BTC to date | Average length of ICO white paper is 4x length of Bitcoin's
Bitcoin $6,529
▲
Ethereum $217.54
▲
Crypto Mkt Cap $220B
▲
BTC Dominance 51.60%
“My goal is to establish Colorado as a national hub for blockchain innovation in business and government. I believe strong leadership will put Colorado at the forefront of innovation in this sector—encouraging companies to flock to the state and establishing government applications that save taxpayers money and create value for Colorado residents” — Jared Polis, Colorado governor-elect
The Big Block
Bitcoin’s most important value proposition is arguably censorship resistance. Put simply, if the best practices are followed, nobody can freeze or seize your bitcoin holdings. Anyone who owns the private key is the holder of the bitcoins. If the private key is either encrypted or simply memorized, no authority can get to the associated bitcoin. And yet it happens and has happened quite often; usually because criminals don’t use best practices. According to The Block’s findings, the total amount of seized bitcoins is now 1 out of every 40 — 2.6% of the circulating supply.
Last week, there was a widely circulated quote on social media from a recent News Journal article that said that “many bitcoin analysts believe the U.S. government today controls more bitcoins than anyone else in the world.” It turns out that the source of that claim was a Wired article from December 2013.
Read More on The Block (3 Minutes)
Around The Block
The average length of an ICO white paper in 2018 was four times longer than Bitcoin’s
Using data from CoinDesk and The Block’s research, we found that the average white paper for a successful initial coin offering in 2018 was 38 pages long. (The median length was similar at 36 pages.) We define successful ICOs as projects that raised funding. This average is four times longer than Bitcoin’s now legendary nine-page white paper. — More
Results: Auguring the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections
Last night The Block ran an experiment comparing the prediction markets results of PredictIt and Augur alongside the opinion poll analyses of FiveThirtyEight during the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections. We updated the results on an hourly basis from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. EST. The following is what we observed.
FiveThirtyEight, one of the most popular poll-analytics sites, did not release election results until 6 p.m. EST when the first polling places began to close. Prior to FiveThirtyEight’s updated models with actual results, forecasts on Augur and PredictIt for U.S. House control were relatively flat — reflecting the consensus of the Democrats taking control. However, after FiveThirtyEight started reporting polling results, both Augur and PredictIt became widely volatile — appearing to track FiveThirtyEight’s data in real-time. — More
Singapore puts renewable-energy trading on the blockchain, eyes cross-border opportunities — More
Hackers breach popular web analytics platform to attack crypto exchange — More
Pro-blockchain supporter is elected Governor of Colorado — More
Bitstamp is getting a brand new matching engine to speed up trades on the venue — More
The Block wants to understand who our readers are. Please take a few minutes to respond to our short survey. Your participation will give us a better understanding of our readers and what interests them! Please note that the survey results will be anonymized and aggregated. Please take the survey here.