Welcome to another Flagship Friday, where we discuss the most important happenings in the crypto community weekly!

Today we're talking a lot about what the big ol' giants have been up to, with Google's quantum computer running big ol' data pretty quickly, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg doing a big ol' testimony for like, what, the billionth time? Also, we're taking a look at a... questionable feature of the Lightning Network and talking about something very unfortunate that happened to the CryptoBasic community last week - we got attacked by scammers. 

Dive into the cryptoverse with us on this week's Flagship Friday.

• Rapid Fire
  • [Ripple Adds Four Members to Regulatory Team, Joins Blockchain Association](Ripple Adds Four Members to Regulatory Team, Joins Blockchain Association)
    • Including Treasury Department experience, and CFTC Senior Advisors
• Bakkt Follows Up Record Volume With Another Forecasted All-Time High
  • Yes, maybe in the short term a lot of the volume is shorting BTC but that doesn't really matter. What matters is the institutional money is starting to flow in.
  • Wednesday 640 traded contracts (new ATH). Day before was 85 lol. Previous record was 224.
  • Institutional investors made long positions of over 1k BTC in October, up from 500 BTC the previous month.
• Bakkt To Launch Options Trading in December
  • Dec 9th launch and fully regulated and approved by its backer, The Intercontinental Exchange and the CFTC, the governing agency on derivatives.
  • Hopes to bring trust and utility to digital assets
• Boris Johnson has pledged to deliver Brexit by October 31st. $10k has been put on Brexit not happening by the end of the month on the Augur platform. Only 5% on it actually happening.
  • Augur is a decentralized prediction market that depends on "wisdow of crowds" and has been pretty on point thus far.. Predicted Dems taking the house, price of BTC above 4k October 22nd, Justin Trudeau winning Canada reelection, etc.
• What's an atomic swap?
  • Binance Academy posted an article explaining what an atomic swap is. Basically it allows two different cryptocurrencies to be exchanged quickly. You can trade them directly from your personal wallets.
  • Essentially peer to peer trades across different blockchains.
  • This allows for users more security by not having to put it on a third party exchange and also cuts one step out for most alt coins by not having to convert it into one of the bigger coins like BTC or Eth to then convert it to the coin you wanted initially.

• (Zuckerberg Testifies) -K

  • House Financial services committee
  • Now positioning Libra as a reaction to China's plan to release a similar cryptocurrency
    • Before it was about it being international, here playing to US lawmakers
    • "Libra will be backed mostly by dollars and I believe it will extend America’s financial leadership,”
  • Apparently 4 lawmakers had sent letters to members asking not to participate (maybe why we saw mass exodus)
  • FB also distinguished LIbra from their wallet, and clarified "Facebook’s intention not to sell data about Calibra wallet users to third parties"
    • "if america doesnt lead on this others will"
  • Friday, October 19, three new bills were introduced aimed at undermining Facebook’s efforts
    • Keeping Big Tech Out of Finance Act
    • “Stablecoins are Securities” bill (would affect a ton of exchanges)
    • “To Prohibit The Listing of Certain Securities,”
      • appears to seek to prevent stablecoins like libra from entering the capital markets space

• User Loses 4 BTC in Lightning Network - B

  So this is pretty complicated, but user ZipoTim from reddit posted that he has lost 4 BTC from the lightning network.

  So this is super complicated, but basically here's how this works. If you ever upload an old version of a transaction, the "penalty" is to let the other user keep all of the funds from the lightning channel.

  This is to prevent double spend on the lightning network, since there's no consensus lightning algorithm, there is an exploit where you could send a transaction through the LN, and then send an old version of your LN Node, but with a force close transaction listed before the sent amount gets processed.

  For this reason, LN operators are told not to keep backups, but that's completely counter-intuitive to sys admin as I understand it.

  The user claims there was a power outage so their timestamp was affected?

  So I guess there's still a real possibility he was trying to do something shady and it backfired. He was using the LN to run some sort of online Gambling business. Apparently he sold his apartment for 4 BTC, and lives in Bulgaria.

  Apparently some of the money didn't belong to him.

  This seems like there may have actually been malicious intent here to me - but at the same time it seems really easy to lose a ton accidentally.

  r/Bitcoin labeled the post with reckless flair. Classy.

• Google’s ‘Quantum Supremacy’: A Surprising Potential Application - K

  • So one critique of Googles "quantum supremacy" is that its not very useful yet
    • What is Quantum supremacy?
      • Wikipedia - the potential ability of devices to solve problems that classical computers practically cannot.
      • to perform a single calculation that no conventional computer, even the biggest supercomputer, can perform in a reasonable amount of time.
    • What google achieved again was
      • Calculatin whether the output of an rng algorithm was truly random
      • Googles Quantum computer did this in 3m 20sec
      • According to the paper the IBM Summit-3, most powerful commercially-available computer would take about 10,000 years
        • Peak Speed is 200,000 teraflops
        • Equivalent in human terms = 6.3b people, all make a calculation at the same time, every second, for a year = 1 second of Summit-3
  • Google's research could lead to improvements behind proof-of-stake cyptocurrencies
    • POS entails random selection of nodes to become validators
    • So the obvious question is how to ensure node selection is truly random
    • Even this calculation could add security and piece of mind to tons of clients, like ensuring dice arent loaded
    • They do quote a Mathematician from California Davis saying its overkill
      • but concedes he could be wrong and respects certified randomness as complex

• Bullish or Bullshit - Ex-CFTC Chair Says Trump Admin Popped BTC Bubble in 2017 - A

  • Christian Giancarlo, the former CFTC chair who left in April after a five year term gave CoinDesk an interview earlier this week.
  • Direct quote: “One of the untold stories of the past few years is that the CFTC, the Treasury, the SEC and the [National Economic Council] director at the time, Gary Cohn, believed that the launch of bitcoin futures would have the impact of popping the bitcoin bubble. And it worked.”
  • Futures were announced Dec. 1 2017 on Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the CBOE Futures Exchange and went live on Dec. 18th 2017.
  • Direct quote: “We saw a bubble building and we thought the best way to address it was to allow the market to interact with it,”
  • Direct quote:

  “If you do believe it’s a ridiculous price but you don’t own, there’s no way to express that view,” Giancarlo told CoinDesk, adding:

  “If you don’t have that derivative, then all you’ve got are believers [and] it’s a believers’ market.”

  • Giancarlo believes that permitting bitcoin futures in 2017 helped keep the market free and he believed that it showed the power of markets to bring discipline to prices.

• The average life expectancy for a fiat currency is 27 years.? - K

  • Blog post by John Paul Koning exploring this often referred figure
  • Starts tracing claim back from advertising, some books (particularly from Gold proponents) finally to a guy named Matt Hewitt (since removed)
  • He did do some math
    • counted 176 currencies that are still in circulation, and 599 that aren’t.
    • 27 years is the average lifespan, if you dont count the 176
  • Also out of the 599 they didnt just explode, mostly deliberately replaced
    • For example Dutch gulder, French franc, and Italian lira were swapped for new monetary unit - Euro. Currency holder were fairly compensated
    • When Kenya, Tanzania, & Uganada separated from East African Currency Board they created new currencies, citizens could exchange EA shillings for new currency

THAT'S A SCAM

• Former NBA Player defrauds $825k in Bitcoin scam

  • Isaac Austin, former NBA player, who retired in 2004 was a trustee for his own BTC trading company. Managed to get a Ghanaian firm to hand over $11,000 per BTC. $800k was transferred to his account from the firm and has yet to be touched. Claimed he would pay back investments and then some at close of trading.
  • The victim says Austin gave a whole raft of excuses including; that he’d suffered a heart attack, transferred coins to the wrong wallet, was in queues at banks, and that banks were holding the funds.

• Our Scam - B

  • "Do yo know anyone who is selling ETH or that has it? I left my ledger at the office and am meeting a client, I went on btcpop but they want to charge me 27% to borrow it for an hour till I'm back and that's insane " - Scumbag Scammer .
  • He was able to clone mt 4 digit number on my discord ID and make his name similar, then he cropped my user picture.
  • There were a bunch of red flags that unfortunately didn't end up stopping Tony. The caller ID came up as someone other than me (won't name the name because I suspect it's spoofed).
  • Tony asked for voice verification and the scammer dodged.
  • Said he had 4000 BTC so he didn't need to rob.
  • Said something about using his iPhone
  • After making excuses he dais that Adam would send him a discord message, and made a new account with Adam's name.

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