Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Market seems to be on the rise again, BTC holding above $8.5K

Crypto markets inch up slowly; Litecoin and Tezos on a charge, BSV falling further back.  Market Wrap As we end another week in crypto land markets are starting to pick up a little. There has been no major breakout for Bitcoin yet but some of the altcoins are doing well and green is back in the tables. As a result total market capitalization is back over $250 billion again.

Yet again Bitcoin pushed just above $7,900 for an intraday high before pulling back. It subsequently dropped below $7,500 again hitting support for a double bottom. At the time of writing BTC is back to $7,900 trading flat on the day.

Ethereum has done virtually nothing over the past 24 hours and is still lulling just below $250. ETH is very unlikely to move until its big brother does, and it will definitely be in the same direction.

There is a little more activity in the top ten during today’s Asian trading action. Green dominates over red and Litecoin is the clear leader with a push of 10 percent to $113. Less than 60 days to the halving is driving momentum for LTC which is likely to climb higher in the coming weeks. Market cap has now surpassed $7 billion and it is very close to flipping BCH for fourth. XRP is the other mover today as it gains 5 percent as rumors of a MoneyGram buyout circulate. BSV continues to get dumped.

The top twenty cryptos have seen a lot of movement from Tezos which has surged 14 percent to $1.36. There does not appear to be a lot fundamentally feeding the fomo aside from rumors that Coinbase Custody is loading up on XTZ. The rest in this section are a percent or two in either direction today.

FOMO: Metaverse ETP Pumps ETP is getting another spike today as it rises 16 percent following a recent Finwise event in Hong Kong. Aside from Tezos, HyperCash is also doing well gaining 13 percent on the day and Decentraland is up 11 percent.

Getting dumped at the messy end of the crypto top one hundred is Maximine Coin sliding 18 percent. Yesterday’s pump, SOLVE, is today’s dump as it drops 14 percent and the crypto stalwart MaidSafeCoin is losing out on the day sliding 11 percent.

Total market cap 24 hours. Coinmarketcap.com Total crypto market capitalization has picked up marginally, adding $3 billion to reach $253 billion. Volume is at $70 billion and the minor move not been enough to signal a wider break out yet. All eyes are still on Bitcoin which has dropped back in dominance slightly at the expense of Litecoin.

Market Wrap is a section that takes a daily look at the top cryptocurrencies during the current trading session and analyses the best-performing ones, looking for trends and possible fundamentals.

Crypto markets falling back on Monday; BSV, XRP, and Tron dropping back, Litecoin and NEO stay afloat.  Market Wrap Crypto markets are seeing red as we begin another trading week. Most of the majors are in decline following Bitcoin’s failure to hold gains and break $8,000. Total market capitalization has dropped below $250 billion and is poised to fall further as the selloff accelerates.

Bitcoin has dumped 2.5 percent on the day falling from just under $8k down to support at $7,500. BTC recovered a little during early Asian trading but is still down on the day trading at around $7,700. A big bearish signal was given by the weekly candle which was biggest drop since December at almost 11 percent.

As expected Ethereum is faring no better with a slide of over 3 percent down to $235. There is strong support around the $210 area and it could soon be there if analysts are correct.

The rest of the top ten is in the red as crypto declines increase. Bitcoin SV has dropped the most at over 6 percent falling back to $183. XRP is not far behind with over 4 percent lost as the Ripple token falls below $0.40 again. Bitcoin Cash, Binance Coin and Stellar are not doing much better. Litecoin has remained steady as halving fomo continues to drive LTC higher.

Top twenty losses are marginally greater with Tron dumping the most at over 5 percent. IOTA, Cosmos and Ethereum Classic are all losing around 3 percent and NEO is the only altcoin in the green adding 2 percent to remain over $12.

FOMO: Nebulas Skyrockets A massive dose of fomo has hit NAS today as it shoots up 45 percent. The autonomous smart asset platform does not appear to have anything fundamentally driving it aside from yesterday’s Nebulas Council Election Assistance Campaign launch;

https://twitter.com/nebulasio/status/1137429314264346629

Also getting a pump today is GXChain which has surged 36 percent and NULS up almost 20 percent. At the messy end of the crypto top one hundred is HyperCash dumping 13 percent while Ravencoin gets hit 9 percent on the day.

Total market cap 24 hours. Coinmarketcap.com Total crypto market capitalization has declined $5 billion since this time yesterday. It is now at $247 billion with a daily volume of $62 billion. Over the week markets are down 8.5 percent as over $20 billion has left the space. With Bitcoin poised to fall further the pain is likely to continue this week.

Market Wrap is a section that takes a daily look at the top cryptocurrencies during the current trading session and analyses the best-performing ones, looking for trends and possible fundamentals.

Chainlink, VeChain Soar: is Alt Season Here?

BTC eyeing $14K, Ethereum above $350, much of market in the green

Bitcoin slips below $12K as altcoins move upward

Want to steal some Bitcoin? All you need to do is find your victim’s 16-character public key and calculate their private key by solving something called an “elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem.” No sweat! With a regular computer, that’ll take you around 50 million times the amount of time the universe itself has left—around 0.65 billion billion years. 

Ah, but with the right quantum computer, able to process information at speeds exponentially faster than today’s supercomputers? Suddenly, what seems uncrackable becomes child’s play, able to be broken in under 10 minutes. 

The quantum-computing problem is nothing new to crypto, and many experts believe we have at least a decade or more to come up with quantum-resistant cryptography. However, some observers say that recent and unexpectedly fast advances are causing the time horizon to dramatically shrink. The most aggressive estimate says that bitcoin will be hackable by 2027, according to Fact Based Insights.

“We moved the state of the art more in the last two years than it has progressed in the last 15 or 20,” says Stewart Allen, Chief Operating Officer at IonQ, a company that claims to make some of the most powerful quantum computers in the world, in an interview with Decrypt. 

On Thursday, top cryptographers will meet in Santa Barbara at the University of California for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Post Quantum Cryptography semi finals. The finalists of the NIST competition will be announced in the months after the conference, though it might take years before the winner is annointed. Cryptographers say the standards that result represent blockchain’s best hope for resisting the rapidly encroaching power of quantum computers.

”If someone cracked your key, they could do anything they wanted,” Rob Campbell, President at Baltimore,Maryland-based Med Cybersecurity, told Decrypt. Anyone with sensitive information on the blockchain—cash, personal data, medical records—is at risk. With that sort of information, quantum hackers could “forge your name, take your assets,” and, if there’s medical data to be found, maliciously “triple your dose,” said Campbell. “It’s an open door.”

Take the Bitcoin blockchain: an unencrypted public key is sent along with every bitcoin transaction, and left unencrypted during the time it takes for the network to confirm the block, around ten minutes. That’s theoretically more than enough time for a quantum-equipped hacker to calculate a private key from the public key and replace the recipient’s address with his own. 

Que Quantum?   

Transistors in conventional computers capture data in terms of 1s and 0s. Is the sky blue today? If it is, 1. If not, 0. Computing is essentially combinations of these calculations: have enough transistors, you can compute almost anything. 

With quantum computers, it’s possible for the same input, called a qubit, to represent both 0 and 1 at the same time, a non-binary state known as “quantum superposition”—think Schrödinger's dead-and-alive cat. This makes quantum computers exponentially more powerful; one lone, superpositioned qubit can handle the processing load of at least two full-sized transistors on a regular computer. 

Using modified versions of “Shor’s algorithm,” a quantum algorithm that rapidly turns large numbers into prime factors, hackers could reverse the process that makes private keys so difficult to crack.

But at the moment, the best quantum computer is probably Google's Bristlecone quantum computer, which has 72 qubits. Miruna Rosca, a PhD student in post-quantum cryptography, tells Decrypt you’d probably need around 4000 qubits to break current cryptographic algorithms. 

So how long do we have? 

IonQ’s Allan, who creates quantum computers for a living, speculates it’ll take about a decade for post-quantum cryptography to become an issue. By then, he reckons, someone will probably have developed a quantum-resistant blockchain. Danny Ryan, a core researcher at Ethereum, thinks the same: “This isn't really a meaningful problem in the next 10 years and likely not for 20 to 30. That said, we tend to be bad at estimating things like this so we should be ready to transition sooner rather than later.” 

But others say the problem requires immediate attention, and that—beyond the threat to Bitcoin—quantum computing could pose a major cybersecurity threat. Med Cybersecurity’s Rob Campbell says that a government armed with quantum decryption software could read all the world’s secrets. 

A U.S. Navy signal officer by training, Campbell’s time in the classified research and development world has taught him that secret government technologies often outpace commercially available technology. “We were decades ahead of the commercial world,” he said. “We didn’t want any potential adversaries to know what our capabilities are.” 

Even if Campbell’s claims seem ambitious, he points out that if an enemy security agency scrape all of your encrypted data today—which they certainly could—they’ll be able to decrypt all that data once they’ve built a powerful enough quantum computer. That’s enough to make developing quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques an issue of national security. 

In any case, the arms race for quantum supremacy is well underway: China just spent $10 billion on a research center for quantum computers, and the U.S. has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the field.

Quantum-resistant techniques

Quantum computing can be just as effective for cryptographers as it is for hackers. Unobserved, superpositioned particles exist in multiple states, but when detected, they “collapse” to one point in space-time. Quantum cryptography has the same properties; because the protons that make up an encoded transaction shift upon observation, a successful attacker would have to break the laws of physics to intercept it. 

This makes information encoded at the quantum level resistant to, among other things, so-called “man in the middle attacks,” where attackers intercept the transmission itself without having to decrypt the key. 

A few blockchains claim to apply quantum-resistant techniques to ensure signatures and hashes remain encrypted, including QRL, IOTA, HyperCash, and Starkware. But with quantum computing still in its formative years, it’s difficult to determine the strength of these claims. 

Until a quantum-resistant algorithm is tested and accepted by the wider academic community, there’s no assurance that any of these blockchains will be resilient enough against quantum computers. Scientists like Campbell are waiting on the results of next week’s NIST competition at UCAL-Santa Barbara; the final winners might not be announced for a few years, however. NIST tentatively expects drafts for standardisation will be completed around 2022.

“These winners are considered to be the best candidates on Earth and will likely go on to be standard cryptography and will be used by most of the planet,” says Campbell.

But developing the algorithm might not be the difficult part for large blockchains like Ethereum or Bitcoin. Whereas owners of centralized protocols can update the system as they please, blockchains, democratic by nature, require broad consensus among many thousands of miners to pass an upgrade. 

In the case of an upgrade, all wallets that aren’t quantum-resistant become vulnerable to attack. That includes the 1 million bitcoins mined by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto—if those aren’t migrated to a new, quantum-resistant wallet, they’re treasure for the first person with a powerful enough quantum computer.

“If high powered quantum computers appeared tomorrow,” said Ethereum’s Ryan, “we'd have many more problems than just the security of our blockchains.”

A 2019 National Academy of Sciences report concludes that, even if quantum computing is about a decade off, prioritising research is necessary to minimize “the chance of a potential security and privacy disaster.” Best get cracking, then.

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Xi Blockchain Endorsement Triggered Buying Frenzy in Chinese Cryptocurrencies

Posted: January 19, 2020

It is a common narrative in the digital asset industry that most of the time, Bitcoin is responsible for driving the market on a bullish surge. This is largely due to the fact that presently, Bitcoin dominates the crypto-market cap, with a dominance index of 66.3%, at press time.

However, over the past week, the tables may have turned a little in favor of the altcoins, with these crypto-assets outperforming the world’s largest cryptocurrency in some aspects.

According to Arcane Research, Bitcoin’s market-cap-weighted index has lagged behind mid-caps and small-caps, since the start of the year.

Source: Arcane Research

It can be observed that the Mid-cap crypto-index has led the way since 1 January, recording a collective growth of 47.19 percent. According to Weiss Mid-Cap Crypto Index, the registered growth is above 50 percent, at press time.

Weiss Crypto ratings for the Small-Cap Crypto-Index have been incurring a positive rise as well with a return of over 35% in 2020. The likes of Komodo, Sia, HyperCash, and Bitshares have earned a major bullish advantage over the bullish period.

For Mid-Cap altcoins, Dash has been a significant performer with a registered hike of over 100 percent. In fact, the growth briefly allowed Dash to break into the top 10 of the world’s top crypto-assets, before the altcoin failed to consolidate higher. Dash has registered a significant drop since, and it is down to 16th on the cryptocurrency rankings charts.

Bitcoin, however, has lagged behind all the indexes in 2020 as it registered a spike of only 21 percent in 2020. Moreover, it was also reported that BTC lost over 3 percent of its total market share over the past week, dropping down to 66% from 69% in terms of market dominance.