Ep. 121 The Best Deadly Sin
On this week's Unhashed Podcast: Bitmex Research released a blog post about the transaction fee gathering capability of Bitcoin miners, the wallstreetbets subreddit nearly bankrupted the Melvin capital hedgefund by pumping shares of popularly shorted stocks, Gemini has launched an interest-earning program called Gemini Earn, a vulnerability affecting earlier versions of Bitcoin Core was disclosed by Core contributor and developer Andrew Chow, and Elon Musk changed his twitter description to #Bitcoin and then cryptically tweeted, “In retrospect, it was inevitable”.
Bitmex Research released a blog post about the transaction fee gathering capability of Bitcoin miners: “In this report we discuss a new proposed mining pool, expected to censor certain transactions. This may result in a detectable diversion from the typical revenue maximisation transaction selection policy, which forms the basis of our analysis. Using the Bitcoin Core command “getblocktemplate”, we generated Bitcoin candidate blocks without doing any hashing, conducting this every 20 seconds for a two week period and recording the results in a database. We used multiple versions of Bitcoin Core and newer releases of Bitcoin Core experienced a 40.3% fee income improvement, when compared to a 2015 version. We also benchmarked our results against the real Bitcoin network and we were able to beat the real Bitcoin miners by generating 0.15% more in hypothetical fee income. This type of analysis may eventually be helpful in detecting miner censorship and determining whether Bitcoin’s censorship resistance property is a universal property of the system or merely a consequence of the transaction fee premium.” – https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoin-miner-transaction-fee-gathering-capability/
Somewhat unrelated to Bitcoin, but seemingly more and more related to Bitcoin: the wallstreetbets subreddit nearly bankrupted the Melvin capital hedgefund by pumping shares of popularly shorted stocks. As of Tuesday, Feb 2, the prices of shares of Gamestop, AMC theaters, Nokia, and others have all dropped significantly after some of the stocks saw share values as high as almost $500. What makes this particular story interesting is that this was not the story of a hedgefund out maneuvering another hedgefund; it was an informal, disorganized, mostly uncouth band of self-labeled ‘degenerates’ and ‘retards’ who managed to act in concert to drain wall street of Billions of dollars. We still don’t know if this is successful, but the important thing here is that more and more of these redditors seem more and more interested in Bitcoin as a lot of the energy behind these trades appear not to be motivated by making money for themselves, but to make hedge funds bleed.
Today, cryptocurrency exchange Gemini has launched an interest-earning program called Gemini Earn for select customers. With it, users can receive up to 7.4 percent annual percentage yield (APY) on the bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies they hold in their Gemini accounts. In a release shared with Bitcoin Magazine, Gemini called the program the first cryptocurrency-based, interest-earning product available in all 50 states. The exchange expects to roll Gemini Earn out to all users in the coming weeks.
A vulnerability affecting earlier versions of Bitcoin Core—the open-source software that powers Bitcoin—was disclosed by Core contributor and developer Andrew Chow on Monday. The issue, that has been fixed, is known to other Bitcoin developers and commonly affects web browsers, but did not cause any disruption. In a tweet, Chow said that the vulnerability was present in Bitcoin Core 0.18 and earlier, but has been fixed since the 0.19 version. For reference, Bitcoin currently runs on the 0.21.0 version. But despite the warning, Chow said the attack was not likely to cause damage. “With the mitigations present in modern browsers and Linux desktop environments, I do not believe that this vulnerability can actually be exploited,” he said. Chow added, “However if it could be exploited, it could lead to an RCE (i.e. malicious code being executed on the victim's computer).” – https://decrypt.co/56289/bitcoin-developers-disclose-vulnerability-that-has-been-fixed
Elon Musk changed his twitter description to #Bitcoin and then cryptically tweeted, “In retrospect, it was inevitable”. Within minutes of the tweet surfacing, the price of bitcoin climbed sharply from about $32,000 at the time of the tweet to about $37,500 just an hour later. The BTC price eventually reached a 14-day high of $38,300. This price gain caused more than $446 million worth of short liquidations across several cryptocurrency exchanges, according to the data aggregator Coinalyze. Commemorating the moment, bitcoin mining pool F2Pool embedded Musk’s message into block 668,197.On a clubhouse call on Sunday night with Mark Andreesen, Musk said “I am a fan of Bitcoin….I think bitcoin is on the verge of widespread acceptance by conservative financial professionals”.