The founder of Filecoin denies that miners are on strike (www.blockcast.cc)

• Filecoin launched its mainnet last week, but ever since then, its top miners have allegedly been on strike.
• Now, Filecoin’s founder responded to such claims, stating that they are not true.
• He says that miners are simply producing blocks at a slower rate due to the project’s recommendation.

Recently, there have been plenty of rumors regarding a decentralized data storage project, Filecoin. The project launched its mainnet on October 15th, but even before that, it made the news due to its coin being listed on Gemini and Kraken. However, only one day after the mainnet launch, its 5 biggest miners went on strike, as they consider the token’s economic model to be unfair.

Now, the coin’s founder, Juan Benet, responded to such rumors, calling them ‘nonsense.’

Are you looking for fast-news, hot-tips and market analysis? Sign-up for the Invezz newsletter, today.

(7.0) I was asked about a supposed “Miner Strike” — This is nonsense. There is no strike. Miners are proving their storage just fine. There’s been no power loss out of the ordinary in the network. Miners are following the protocol, and making a TON of money doing so. pic.twitter.com/3U9MN0JGm9— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) October 19, 2020

Filecoin miners allegedly protesting against the project’s system

Recent reports have claimed that Filecoin’s five biggest miners are on strike due to the unfair economic model of the platform. The model in question needs them to lock up a certain amount of FIL coins as collateral. However, the miners argue that the amount needed to be locked away is too high.

In protest, they supposedly turned off thousands of mining machines, and are refusing to keep powering the project.

As for the strike allegations, they originally came from Twitter, with a user called Nico Deva being among the first to claim that miners are protesting against the Filecoin system.

@filecoin has transitioned from calibration net to mainnet at block 148,888 after a 200M ICO and 3 years of dev.

Within 24h of launch a majority of miners are already on strike and talk about a failed wedding and forks.

Why? (1/n)— Nico Deva (@NicoDeva_) October 18, 2020

With the system requiring too many coins as collateral, miners can either buy them in order to be able to mine, or wait for rewards that are coming too slow to matter.

Filecoin’s founder responds to the claims

However, Benet responded to the claims on Twitter by saying that this is simply not the case. He claims that miners are simply producing blocks at a slower rate, and that there is nothing more to it.

(7.3.) Fact: What is happening is that miners are growing slower than before launch.

This is in great part because the network is no longer subsidizing their pledge & fee costs — fees cost real money now, and miners need to match growth rate to token flow.— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) October 19, 2020

Not only that, but he also claims that the project itself recommended that miners slow down the growth rate in order to match token flows, or even pause completely, until they can afford a steady growth.

As evidence, he submitted data that claims that blocks are still being created. According to data, Filecoin’s top miner brought in $352,000 in only 24 hours. As for the top 50 miners, they allegedly earned $3.7 million in mining rewards.

(7.1.) Look at 24-hr reward column on miner table

Top miner: 11K FIL * $32 = $352,000 / day
Top 50 sum: 118K FIL * $32 = $3.7M / day

Disclaimer: at current mkt price, & haven’t checked this closely independently — relying on filfox counts https://t.co/gEgsttscwQ— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) October 19, 2020

Lastly, Benet said that there are undoubtedly miners who want to push the community into feeling guilty and giving them more money. However, he also said that this is to be expected, as there are always those who are attracted by money, and would do anything to get more of it.

(7.5.) Now, there are some miners that no doubt want to push things and try to get more, because, hey, why not? If they could guilt the community into giving them a lot more money, it may be worth a shot!— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) October 19, 2020

BitMex denies CFTC and DoJ allegations, says trading will continue (www.blockcast.cc)

In a blog post published Thursday afternoon, Bitmex lashed out at charges that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Department of Justice filed against the exchange and its management earlier today.

Bitmex’s statement claimed that “From our early days as a start-up, we have always sought to comply with applicable U.S. laws, as those laws were understood at the time and based on available guidance.”

What exactly “applicable U.S. laws” are will likely be central to the case. Bitmex has long maintained that it does not serve customers in the U.S., though others before the CFTC and DOJ have argued that this a lie. The CFTC’s case rests on Bitmex’s failure to register with the commission as a derivatives exchange in the U.S. 

The DOJ, on the other hand, argues that Bitmex deliberately failed to implement effective know-your-customer and anti-money laundering programs, in violation of the Bank Secrecy Act. Both agencies assert that Bitmex had years of warning that their operations were illegal.

In its post denying the charges, Bitmex also assured users that trading will continue as usual. This is despite the fact that the DOJ arrested at least one of Bitmex’s founders, Samuel Reed, earlier today. 

Tune in for Cointelegraph’s livestream on the Bitmex case starting tonight at 5:00 PM EST/21:00 UTC.

Go to Source

Image Credit: Refer to Source
Author: Refer to Source Cointelegraph By Kollen Post

Chile-based crypto exchange denies fraud allegations (www.blockcast.cc)

Chilean cryptocurrency exchange, Buda.com has denied allegations that it transferred client funds without authorization, a local news site has said. Per the report Itau bank now known as Itaú Unibanco, a private sector bank based in São Paulo, Brazil filed a lawsuit against the exchange and that both the bank and the exchange were set to appear before the country’s Tribunal for the Defense of Free Competition (TDLC).  

The report further said that the private South American bank had also accused Buda of forgery and for creating a fake profile to allegedly facilitate the fraud. The report detailed the lawsuit that Buda “forged bank details, created a fake email account, and a false digital identity card,” to transfer $26,000 from a client’s current account in Itau Bank to Buda.com, and use it to acquire cryptocurrencies. 

The report added that on detecting the alleged fraud, the unnamed client lodged a complaint with the ‘Public Ministry’ but the bank used this as an opportunity to sue the exchange for ineffective compliance systems.

A Buda spokesperson, Diego Vera, said: 

The reasons why they accuse (Buda) of promoting scams are unknown since the theft of the credentials was from the client’s bank account with Itaú, not from our platform. 

Buda.com is an exchange and wallet from Latin-America, with operations in Argentina, Chile (HQ), Colombia and Peru.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Facebook denies reports it is backing away from Libra cryptocurrency

Will they or won’t they? —

Facebook’s ambitious proposal ran into a wall of opposition from regulators.

Timothy B. Lee
– Mar 3, 2020 11:03 pm UTC

Facebook is poised to shelve its own Libra cryptocurrency proposal, two media reports indicated on Tuesday. But Facebook said it remained committed to the project—and one of the two media outlets has partially walked back its initial report.

A new report from The Information, citing “three people familiar with the matter,” said that Facebook has decided not to support the new virtual currency in its own products. Instead, Facebook will offer users the ability to make payments using conventional currencies like the dollar and the euro. The rollout of Facebook’s expected digital wallet software will also be delayed by “several months,” The Information reported.

Update: In a subsequent tweet, The Information’s Alex Heath wrote that he spoke to Facebook and now believes that the company “will support the original Libra token concept in its wallet. But expect it to emphasize the new digital government currencies it plans to introduce.”

Bloomberg also talked to “three people familiar with the matter” but described the situation differently. According to Bloomberg, Facebook and its partners are “weighing a recast of Libra as mostly a payments network that could operate with multiple coins.”

In a Tuesday email to Ars Technica, a Facebook spokeswoman strongly denied reports that the social media giant was backing away from Libra.

“Reporting that Facebook does not intend to offer the Libra currency in its Calibra wallet is entirely incorrect,” she wrote. “Facebook remains fully committed to the project.”

A spokesperson for the Libra Association also told Ars Technica that nothing had changed.

“The Libra Association has not altered its goal of building a regulatory-compliant global payment network, and the basic design principles that support that goal have not been changed nor has the potential for this network to foster future innovation,” the spokesperson said in an email statement.

Libra has been under fire since its announcement

Enlarge / David Marcus, head of blockchain at Facebook, speaks at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, July 17, 2019.

When Facebook introduced Libra last June, it sparked an immediate backlash from government officials in the United States and around the world.

“I don’t think that the project can go forward… without there being broad satisfaction with the way the company has addressed money laundering, all of those things,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in early July.

Later that month, Facebook seemed to be backing away from its initial early vision for Libra to be a fully open, decentralized network. During congressional testimony last July, David Marcus, the public face of Facebook’s Libra project, assured regulators that Libra would be designed with controls for money laundering, terrorist financing, and other possible abuses.

But those kinds of controls run directly counter to the decentralist philosophy of traditional blockchain-based networks. To stop misuse of the network, Facebook would need to vet everyone building an app or offering a payment service on the network. But adding this kind of red tape wasn’t going to help Facebook’s goal of making the network accessible to users in the developing world.

These promises also seemed likely to put Facebook on the hook for enforcing a wider range of regulations that countries around the world impose on domestic financial networks. Conventional blockchain networks like bitcoin skirt these rules because there’s no one for authorities to punish if the bitcoin network fails to comply. But that approach wasn’t going to work for Facebook—which meant that Facebook could find itself in a regulatory quagmire, trying to simultaneously satisfy hundreds of different regulatory agencies around the world.

Then in October, several of Facebook’s most important Libra partners backed out of the project. Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Mercado Pago all quit in a single day. PayPal had quit a few days earlier. Facebook soldiered on with its remaining 20 partners. But it was hard to ignore that the companies jumping ship were some of the companies with the most experience actually running payment networks.

Facebook says it’s continuing to push forward with the project, but it won’t be easy.

Read More

Telegram denies SEC allegations that its token is a security in new court filing

Messaging app Telegram wants a US court to dismiss the allegations put forward by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about its token being a security.

Telegram outlined its case in a court filing submitted on Tuesday, where it refuted all the allegations made by the SEC.

“Plaintiff’s claims are without merit as Telegram‘s private placement to highly sophisticated, accredited investors was conducted pursuant to valid exemptions to registration under the federal securities laws and Grams will not be securities when they are created at the time of launch on the TON Blockchain,” the filing reads.

“[…] Plaintiff has engaged in improper ‘regulation by enforcement’ in this nascent area of the law, failed to provide clear guidance and fair notice of its views as to what conduct constitutes a violation of the federal securities laws, and has now adopted an ad hoc legal position that is contrary to judicial precedent and the publicly expressed views of its own high-ranking officials,” it adds.

Telegram noted it had “voluntarily engaged” with the SEC, allegedly asking for guidance on how to avoid breaking federal securities laws, but claimed the regulator failed to help before it decided to enact enforcement action.

Additionally, Telegram said its Gram tokens are yet to be created and noted that “if and when they do, they will constitute a currency and/or commodity — not securities under the federal securities laws.”

Telegram agreed to stop selling its Gram tokens in October this year. At the time, a court filing said it had made the decision to do so “to maintain the status quo” until the court could “resolve the legal issues at the heart of the matter.”

Originally, Telegram told investors that it was planning to deliver the “first batches” of Gram by October 31. But, the SEC secured an emergency restraining order against Telegram in mid-October, halting its token sale.

The SEC has certainly been kept busy in recent months. In September, it charged adult content marketplace Fantasy Market with running a fraudulent ICO and sued a cryptocurrency startup for selling $14.6M worth of unregistered tokens.

The process to date certainly hasn’t been straightforward, but who can blame the regulator given the current rhetoric linking cryptocurrency and crime.

 

Read More

Venezuela: Church’s Chicken Accepts Crypto Payments after KFC Denies Rumors

Church’s Chicken, an international fast-food franchise known its hand-battered fried chicken, has reportedly partnered with Dash Venezuela to become the first fast-food franchise to accept cryptocurrencies throughout its locations in Venezuela.

According to a press release, a strategic alliance between Dash Venezuela and Church’s Chicken Venezuela will see 13 establishments start accepting the privacy-centric cryptocurrency as payment, after “extensive and rigorous days of training” to understand cryptocurrencies.

Church’s Chicken is the fourth largest chicken fast-food fain in the world, as it has 1,700 restaurants spread throughout 25 countries. Per the release, the franchise’s representatives in the country are looking to promote the cryptocurrency as part of the move. The press release reads:

“Representatives of the franchise, indicated that soon will develop a series of promotions to encourage the use of Dash in their establishments, which are added to the more than 2,200 establishments in Venezuela that have this fast and easy mode of transactions.”

Orlando Nayas, the director general of Church’s Chicken Venezuela, noted that he worked hard with the cryptocurrency advocacy group to train the franchise’s staff to accept crypto payments. He added the move “goes to show that we trust Dash and that it will become a growth agent in this new financial world.”

Bradley Zastrow, the global director of business development ad Dash Core, commented the community did an “incredible job” encouraging the cryptocurrency’s growth in Venezuela and that the Church’s Chicken integration is “exciting.”

KFC Venezuela Denies Report it Accepts Dash

The announcement notably comes shortly after Antonio Sampaya, the CEO of KFC Venezuela, revealed the fast-food chain isn’t accepting Dash payments in the near future, directly denying claims made by Dash proponents that it would.

Sampayo, speaking to Spanish news outlet Critponotícias, revealed that testing crypto payments was indeed being discussed, but that nothing had been finalized. He added publications about a potential partnership weren’t authorized.

Dash Merchant Venezuela, an organization promoting the crypto’s adoption in the country, later on tweeted out a public apology to KFC Venezuela.

Disculpas públicas de Dash Merchant Venezuela debido a los reportes en medios de nuestra relacion con KFC Venezuela, y nuestros esfuerzos para que acepten Dash como forma de pago. @KFC_VZLA pic.twitter.com/6nl1LONYUQ

— Dash Merchant – Venezuela (@dashmerchant) December 11, 2018

 

Per the tweet, the announcement “was premature and reflected our optimism instead of the actual state of our conversation with KFC Venezuela.” Talks between the cryptocurrency’s representatives in the country and KFC Venezuela are reportedly still ongoing. CCN reached out to Sampayo for comment but hadn’t heard back at press time.

As CCN reported, Alejandro Echeverria, the co-founder of Dash Merchant Venezuela and Dash Text – an SMS-based cryptocurrency transaction service that doesn’t require a smartphone or internet – hopes Dash will have 10,000 merchants accepting it next year.

In Venezuela, fast-food chains that have accepted Dash at least one location include Subway and the Papa John’s pizza chain.

Featured Image from Dash Venezuela

Read More

Venezuela: Church’s Chicken Accepts Crypto Payments after KFC Denies Rumors

Church’s Chicken, an international fast-food franchise known its hand-battered fried chicken, has reportedly partnered with Dash Venezuela to become the first fast-food franchise to accept cryptocurrencies throughout its locations in Venezuela.

According to a press release, a strategic alliance between Dash Venezuela and Church’s Chicken Venezuela will see 13 establishments start accepting the privacy-centric cryptocurrency as payment, after “extensive and rigorous days of training” to understand cryptocurrencies.

Church’s Chicken is the fourth largest chicken fast-food fain in the world, as it has 1,700 restaurants spread throughout 25 countries. Per the release, the franchise’s representatives in the country are looking to promote the cryptocurrency as part of the move. The press release reads:

“Representatives of the franchise, indicated that soon will develop a series of promotions to encourage the use of Dash in their establishments, which are added to the more than 2,200 establishments in Venezuela that have this fast and easy mode of transactions.”

Orlando Nayas, the director general of Church’s Chicken Venezuela, noted that he worked hard with the cryptocurrency advocacy group to train the franchise’s staff to accept crypto payments. He added the move “goes to show that we trust Dash and that it will become a growth agent in this new financial world.”

Bradley Zastrow, the global director of business development ad Dash Core, commented the community did an “incredible job” encouraging the cryptocurrency’s growth in Venezuela and that the Church’s Chicken integration is “exciting.”

KFC Venezuela Denies Report it Accepts Dash

The announcement notably comes shortly after Antonio Sampaya, the CEO of KFC Venezuela, revealed the fast-food chain isn’t accepting Dash payments in the near future, directly denying claims made by Dash proponents that it would.

Sampayo, speaking to Spanish news outlet Critponotícias, revealed that testing crypto payments was indeed being discussed, but that nothing had been finalized. He added publications about a potential partnership weren’t authorized.

Dash Merchant Venezuela, an organization promoting the crypto’s adoption in the country, later on tweeted out a public apology to KFC Venezuela.

Disculpas públicas de Dash Merchant Venezuela debido a los reportes en medios de nuestra relacion con KFC Venezuela, y nuestros esfuerzos para que acepten Dash como forma de pago. @KFC_VZLA pic.twitter.com/6nl1LONYUQ

— Dash Merchant – Venezuela (@dashmerchant) December 11, 2018

Per the tweet, the announcement “was premature and reflected our optimism instead of the actual state of our conversation with KFC Venezuela.” Talks between the cryptocurrency’s representatives in the country and KFC Venezuela are reportedly still ongoing. CCN reached out to Sampayo for comment but hadn’t heard back at press time.

As CCN reported, Alejandro Echeverria, the co-founder of Dash Merchant Venezuela and Dash Text – an SMS-based cryptocurrency transaction service that doesn’t require a smartphone or internet – hopes Dash will have 10,000 merchants accepting it next year.

In Venezuela, fast-food chains that have accepted Dash at least one location include Subway and the Papa John’s pizza chain.

Featured Image from Dash Venezuela

 

Read More