Ep. 95 Glory Holes and Soft Forks

On this episode of the Unhashed Podcast: Paypal may integrate buying and selling Bitcoin soon, The Canadian Government wants you to use glory holes to social distance while having sex, and soft forks, soft forks, SOFT FORKS GALORE!

Weekly News Wrap Up:

  1. In a twitter thread that got a large amount of interest, there was a challenge laid down on twitter to trace a shielded transaction on Zcash.  A user quickly identified the source transaction and then chaos ensued.  How is this possible?  Have ZK-Snarks been broken?  

  2. In a CoinDesk Article earlier this month, the CENTRE consortium, run by Circle, the Poloniex exchange parent company and USDC creator, announced that it was going to freeze $100,000 worth of USDC at the behest of US law enforcement.  Are we going to see more of this happening going forward?  Could this happen on Liquid? 

  3. The dumpster fire that is Etherium turns 5 years old this week.  Happy birthday ETH!  

  4. It looks like the rumors from a month ago that PayPal was getting into crypto have some merit to them. Coindesk is reporting that PayPal will be using Paxos as its brokerage for crypto buys.  This begs real questions though: What will PayPals crypto experience be like?  What will the impact be on the broader bitcoin ecosystem?  Will this change PayPals strict stance on where you can and cannot send money?  

  5. As we talked about a few weeks ago, according to theBlock, Coinbase was hawking its analytic wears to the DEA.  But this past week, the Block found that there was an active 4 year contract with the Secret Service.  While this is not surprising the price tag is… $250,000 over 4 years, or $62,500 per year.  So, what is Coinbase’s street cred worth to Brian Armstrong?  Not much apparently.

  6. Aaron van Wirdum of Bitcoin Magazine summarized a number of soft fork activation proposals. Taproot, a proposed protocol upgrade that would improve Bitcoin’s privacy and flexibility, is in its late stages of development. Bitcoin Core contributors agree that the upgrade would benefit Bitcoin, and so far it generally appears to be welcomed by the wider Bitcoin ecosystem as well. It’s therefore likely that Taproot will make its way into a Bitcoin Core release, with other Bitcoin implementations possibly to follow. But one question remains: how should the Bitcoin network itself upgrade? Taproot is a consensus protocol change, which means that Bitcoin nodes must somehow switch from the old rules to the new rules without splitting the network into factions enforcing different rules. For various reasons, this has in the past sometimes proven to be a challenge. Improved strategies to activate protocol upgrades are now being contemplated.

Price Analysis:

Number go up (barely)

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Producers of the Show:

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A big thank you to our VIP patrons:

  • Scott Offord from Crypto Mining Tools

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Colin aulds