Argentina and Brazil with Bitcoin?
At the end of last week, the two South American countries announced that they are starting to prepare for the creation of a common currency that would work in parallel with the Argentine peso and the Brazilian real.
On this message he responded immediately The CEO of the American exchange Coinbase Brian Armstrong on his Twitter account by declaring that a good way would be to use bitcoin, which logically started a wave of comments for and against. Realistically, we have to admit that this option is quite unlikely and it was probably just a smart marketing move on the part of Coinbase’s boss to make himself and the exchange more visible.
However, both Brazil and Argentina are no newcomers to cryptocurrency. Last November, the Brazilian parliament passed a law legalizing cryptocurrencies as a payment method. Brazilian president law signed in December and is expected to enter into force this June. But the law does not yet make any cryptocurrency legal tender.
In one Argentine province again in December passed the law about issuing a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. The token will be available to people over 18 years of age and will be 100% secured by the assets of the province. So it is not completely out of the question that both countries will pleasantly surprise Bitcoin fans.
S bitcoin flirts and arizona
They don’t need advice from exchange operators in Arizona. Indeed, Senator Wendy Rogers has introduced bills aimed at make Bitcoin legal tender in Arizona.
With the proposed legislation, he also wants to allow bitcoin to be used to pay debts, taxes and other financial obligations. This would mean that all transactions that are now done in US dollars could also be paid in Bitcoin, and individuals and businesses would be able to use Bitcoin as they see fit.
The bill, which only specifically mentions bitcoin, defines it as “a decentralized peer-to-peer digital currency in which a record of transactions is kept on the bitcoin blockchain and new currency units are generated by computationally solving mathematical problems, and which operates independently of a central bank”.
Senator Rogers is trying this for the second time, last January she presented the same proposal, but it did not pass the second reading.
Bitcoin has overtaken Visa and Mastercard
And thirdly, bitcoin. Despite the fact that we definitely cannot consider last year to be very successful for him, according to analytics firm CoinMetrics the bitcoin network processed more than 8.2 trillion dollars (180 trillion crowns) of transactions, which makes a respectable 260 thousand dollars (5.7 billion crowns) every second.
Despite all the obstacles that bitcoin faced last year, it managed to overcome the two largest payment processing networks – Visa and Mastercard. During 2022, Visa processed transactions for less than six trillion dollars (131 billion CZK) and Mastercard “only” for 2.5 trillion dollars (55 billion CZK).
This volume of transactions in the bear market shows a significant jump in the adoption of Bitcoin and its increasingly important role in the global financial system. But the euphoria needs to be tamed, because the data also shows that in the second half of last year, the total number of transactions fell significantly. This corresponds to how the entire industry was experiencing one giant trouble after another at that time.
Will ethereum have hidden addresses?
In an effort to improve the state of privacy on the ethereum network its co-founder Vitalik Buterin commented on the system of hidden addresses. Their concept using elliptic curve cryptography was first introduced in connection with Bitcoin by developer Peter Todd back in 2014.
In the latest blog post, Buterin acknowledged that privacy is “one of the biggest remaining challenges in the ethereum ecosystem,” while also stressing the need for privacy solutions because “anything that gets on the public blockchain is public.” The previous sentence sounds quite clear, but a lot of people, especially newbies, don’t realize this.
They can help in this regard stealth adresy. Buterin noted that the implementation of this mechanism would allow the wallet to generate hidden addresses for private receipt of funds and access to them using a special code called a “spend key”.
Buterin also compared the stealth address concept to mixers like Tornado Cash, which was sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) last year, explaining that the proposed stealth address concept provides a different kind of privacy than the popular mixer: “Tornado Cash can hide transfers of mainstream assets , such as ETH or major ERC20 tokens (although it is the easiest to use for sending privately to yourself), but is very weak at adding privacy to obscure ERC20 token transfers, and cannot add privacy to NFT transfers at all.”
Binance mixed its money with client money
The largest crypto exchange Binance admitted that saved by mistake some customer funds into the same wallet as collateral for its tokens.
On Monday, the exchange published a “proof of collateral” securing B-Tokens tokens, and according to this material, Binance’s reserves for almost 50% of all B-Tokens are stored in a single wallet called “Binance 8”. It is in this wallet that there are significantly more tokens stored in the reserve than are necessary for the amount of B-Tokens issued by Binance. This allegedly suggests that Binance has mixed collateral with client coins, instead of storing these assets separately.
This time, no one lost anything, and the whole mini-case rather draws attention to non-compliance with Binance’s internal regulations. The news probably wouldn’t have caught anyone’s attention a year ago, but in light of the events of recent months, any such mention is uncomfortable for the industry.
Fast forward to the end: At the largest European Bitcoin conference, which will take place in June in Prague, Michael Saylor arrivesCEO of MicroStrategy and popular Bitcoin evangelist.