Good morning and welcome to another Inspiration Friday! This week I have a few articles all surrounding...you guess it, crypto. Eventually I will be reading about something else, but for now, this is what I’ve been learning about. It’s all very fascinating and figured I should share some with y’all!
10 Most Important Blockchain Projects For Making Money
https://link.medium.com/uayQfcPesib
This article was a good one to cover 10 of the most popular blockchain projects out there currently. I have been following and excited about several of the projects on the list. Bitcoin for sure, Ethereum and Cardano are up there, Ripple is one I’ve been following for a while, and I got to learn about some new ones like Polkadot which I’m really excited about now too!
In similar news, Cardano has now released smart contracts!
https://u.today/cardano-launches-first-fully-public-testnet-that-supports-smart-contracts
Smart contracts is the innovative technology that Ethereum introduced; they were the first to do it. However, until recently Ethereum was a proof of work model. They have officially transitioned into a proof of stake model.
Without getting into the details, basically Ethereum can (hopefully) now scale to bigger sizes, run faster, run more efficiently, and use a lot less energy.
Cardano, on the other hand, has always been this way. The piece Cardano has been missing is smart contracts. That’s why this news is so big!
A lot of people have been comparing Ethereum and Cardano to the Google and Yahoo of today. Will one beat out the other? Or will they co-exist? Only time will tell.
AMC to Accept Bitcoin?
Woa woa woa! Tay and I are very excited about this. AMC did not give us any details or a timeline, but this is pretty neat. We just got our credit card that gives us Bitcoin cashback, so this will be great timing, haha! I do wonder, though, how they will do it. I’m hoping that movie tickets will be cheaper if you use Bitcoin as an incentive, but we’ll see.
PolyNetwork Hacked!
https://www.coindesk.com/cross-chain-defi-site-poly-network-hacked
This is some new and breaking news! All the details of the hack are yet to be revealed, but this is the largest crypto hack to date. The person stole $600 million! I can’t even imagine.
From the little research I’ve done, it seems like the person didn’t hack into any particular blockchain. Again, the world loves blockchain because of how unhackable it is. Bitcoin has never had a successful hack, by the way. However, as more people build ontop of blockchain and add new features, etc, this can open doors for vulnerabilities. This is what I believe happened here.
PolyNetwrok is a chinese company that according to their website: “is built to implement interoperability between multiple chains in order to build the next generation internet infrastructure.” This basically means if you have something stored on the Ethereum blockchain, you can transfer it to another blockchain or vice versa.
The hacker supposedly found a vulnerability in the way PolyNetwork does their transfers.
The good news is that the hacker has now started to give the money back!
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/114189/poly-hack-attacker-return-funds-id-slowmist
https://www.coindesk.com/poly-network-prepares-for-hacker-to-return-millions-in-stolen-crypto
Another company, Slowmist, was able to track down the ip address and email used to steal the $600 million apparently. Remember that blockchain is all public, so when the guy stole the money everyone in the world could see what blockchain address it was sent to. That doesn’t mean we know who the person is in real life, but it means the whole world can watch that blockchain address and if it tries to liquidate the money or not, the guy would be caught.
The address was shared around and multiple blockchain exchanges blocked him from being able to do any kind of exchange.
In the end, he was defeated, and he reached out to Polynetwork to return all the money.
Well, that about does it for this week! Hope you all enjoyed and have a great weekend!