Ethereum Block Chains “Hacked”

The February issue of MIT Technology Review reviews a 51% attack on Ethereum Classic. The article also covers similar attacks on lower value crypto currencies and its progress to now attacking top 20 currencies. Also covered (again) are the current issues with Smart Contracts.
These issues represent the Damocles sword of Crypto Currencies, the openness of its approach is also its biggest weakness.

How safe is NFT?

The latest bit coin (actually Ethereum)  craze to emerge is Non-fungible token or NFT’s, Simply put its’s an digital ledger containing digital assets, mostly art as digital: I.E. a ledger where the “rights” to the content is owned by you as a transferable asset. Several high value transactions are in the news such as Beeple and DJ3LAU recently, NFT’s are not as straight forwards as people think. An interesting article shows the ins and outs of buying and owning (or not) of FCC’s on Motherboard highlights some of the problems with this.

Another Crypto Currency Hard Fork?

Etherum (the most referred to  competitor to Bitcoin currently) has had another “incident”. You may remember the USD 32 million USD hack on Etherum in July and the subsequent (heavily criticized) hard fork to zero out the hack. Now a “mistake” from a developer has locked down wallets worth USD 300 million.  The attack relates to a quirk in Etherum’s multisignature wallets, and will most likely require another hard fork to rectify. Again a warning that crypto currencies are still evolving, in most cases at a slower pace than the money thrown at it.

Bitcoin Hard Fork – What Now?

There has been a serious amount of unrest in the Bitcoin community over how to address the block chain constraints and increase the processing efficiency of Bitcoin. The initial conflict around “Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 91” was initially addressed and closed.  The current argument over Segwit2x has however not been resolved, and the argument has now led to a hard fork of bitcoin and the creation of Bitcoin Cash for those that wanted to changes in the block chains. Turmoil on conversions, who will support what, and how to move forward with Bitcoin. I am sure the other digital currencies are happy about this chaos!