Welcome to the daily crypto news :
‘Source of Truth’ — Winklevoss Says Bitcoin Is More Than Digital Gold;
Former World Gold Council Exec Develops New Bitcoin ETF;
California Man Sues AT&T Over Loss of $1.8M and Crypto Accounts;
ING Bank Devises Privacy Fix for R3’s Corda Blockchain;
Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Not Launch Libra Without US Approval;
‘Source of Truth’ — Winklevoss Says Bitcoin Is More Than Digital Gold
Cameron Winklevoss — one half of the eponymous family office Winklevoss Capital and co-founder of the Gemini crypto exchange — says Bitcoin’s (BTC) possibilities go beyond digital gold.
In a tweet posted on Oct. 23, Cameron argued that:
“Because Bitcoin is open source software, its possibilities are boundless. I often talk about gold as a target market cap, but that's really just the beginning...it's digital gold, source of truth, etc…”
A shared, single “source of truth”
Cameron’s argument aims at going beyond the commonplace analogy of Bitcoin with gold, whose proponents compare the scarcity of the precious metal with Bitcoin’s finite supply to emphasize the cryptocurrency’s role as a digital store of value.
While accepting this perspective, his accent lies on the revolutionary potential of the cryptocurrency’s open-source software, which establishes a decentralized digital public record of transactions that is immutable, secure and anonymous: a shared, single source of truth.
In information systems, a Source of Truth (SOT) is a term used to denote a trusted data source that gives a complete picture of the data object as a whole.
This robust and trustless model for ensuring data integrity between a massive network of participants is, then — in Cameron’s view — the foundation for the asset’s unique promise.
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Former World Gold Council Exec Develops New Bitcoin ETF
The former managing director of the World Gold Council and the portfolio manager behind SPDR Gold Shares is developing a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) with boutique asset manager Kryptoin Investment Advisors.
The Cayman Islands-based firm has filed an initial registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The fund, in development for two years, would track the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate to reflect bitcoin’s actual market price. While declining to disclose the fund’s management fees, the filing said it will process creations and redemptions, and accrue its management fee solely in bitcoin.
In an exclusive interview with CoinDesk, Kryptoin’s head of exchange-traded products Jason Toussaint said:
“The benefits and challenges, when it comes to bitcoin as an asset class, are similar to what they were when the Gold Council brought SPDR Gold Shares to the market. There was also a lot of learning the SEC had to go through to fully understand and gain a level of comfort with the underlined gold market.”
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California Man Sues AT&T Over Loss of $1.8M and Crypto Accounts
California resident Seth Shapiro has filed a lawsuit against wireless service giant AT&T alleging that its employees helped to perpetrate a SIM-swap which resulted in the theft of over $1.8 million in total, including cryptocurrencies.
The complaint filed on Oct. 17 claims that Shapiro is “a two-time Emmy Award-winning media and technology expert, author, and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.” The lawsuit alleges that between May 16 and May 18 AT&T employees transferred access to Shapiro’s mobile phone to outside hackers:
“AT&T employees obtained unauthorized access to Mr. Shapiro’s AT&T wireless account, viewed his confidential and proprietary personal information, and transferred control [...] to a phone controlled by third-party hackers in exchange for money. [...] The hackers then utilized their control over Mr. Shapiro’s AT&T wireless number [...] to access his personal and digital finance accounts and steal more than $1.8 million.”
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ING Bank Devises Privacy Fix for R3’s Corda Blockchain
ING, the Netherlands megabank blazing a trail with extra privacy measures for enterprise blockchains, has come up with such a solution for the Corda distributed ledger system built by R3.
Announced Tuesday at the annual developer conference CordaCon, ING has helped solve a security/privacy trade-off that currently bedevils Corda users. The bank’s blockchain team did so by applying zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to the Corda notary service, the means by which the network verifies the uniqueness of transactions and prevents double-spending.
Unlike most blockchains that broadcast data among all participating nodes, R3 designed Corda to control data and limit the amount of information that needs to be shared. The Corda notary service offers a choice between using validating notaries, which can view transactions to check they are legit, and non-validating notaries which have no such visibility but instead just keep a record.
The validating notary compromises privacy by looking into the content of transactions, while the non-validating approach presents a security weakness since a malicious actor could knowingly write an invalid transaction.
If all that makes your head spin, think of being frisked and having your bag searched when entering a building compared to just signing in at the front desk. The former is intrusive for you; the latter is riskier for the building.
To thread this needle, ING has applied zero-knowledge proofs, which can prove something is true without revealing any information about it, to Corda’s validating notary function. This allows transactions to be verified without specific knowledge of their contents.
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Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Not Launch Libra Without US Approval
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of social media giant Facebook, plans to tell United States Congress that Libra will not launch anywhere in the world until U.S. regulators approve it.
Libra won’t launch anywhere without congressional approval
According to Zuckerberg’s prepared remarks released on Oct. 22 in advance of planned hearings before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, the Facebook CEO wants to assuage regulatory concerns over the launch of the coming stablecoin. He said:
“Facebook will not be part of launching the Libra payments system anywhere in the world until US regulators approve.”
However, that this phrasing is not the same as an assurance that Libra will not launch at all.
According to the remarks, Libra will be pegged mostly to U.S. dollars. Zuckerberg further leveraged China’s plans to release a project similar to Libra in the coming months, stressing that it could interfere with America's financial and technological leadership in the world.
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