Featured | Bitcoin's possible protocol upgrade in 2020; cryptocurrency industry issues in 2020

Today's content includes:

1. Bitcoin's possible protocol upgrade in 2020;

2. Chinese and Western Monero coins;

3. Controversial cryptocurrency statements and opinions byLobster;

• "Gemini" Risk Control Interview: How the Traditional Financial Regulatory Framework Maps to the Crypto Industry
• Interview with Vitalik: The community is far more important than the code
• There are three reasons behind the rise of anonymous and altcoin cryptocurrencies in the first week of the new year

4. Problems of the cryptocurrency industry in 2020;

5. Introduction to the Bitcoin Effective Market Hypothesis.

Bitcoin's possible protocol upgrade in 2020

Bitcoin's consensus layer has remained unchanged for more than two years. Since SegWit was launched in August 2017, no hard fork or soft fork protocol upgrades have been deployed.

These could be in the new year … or Bitcoin's protocol upgrade in the new decade.

Schnorr / Taproot / Tapscript

Schnorr signatures have been added to the Bitcoin protocol for some time. But in the past year, developers who are working on Schnorr signature suggestions, such as Blockstream developers Pieter Wuille and Jonas Nick and Xapo's Anthony Towns, have revealed more ambitious plans. The Schnorr signature will be proposed as part of a larger soft fork protocol upgrade (called Taproot), which was proposed by Bitcoin core contributor Gregory Maxwell, which itself was inspired by the older proposal (MAST).

Taproot is based on an interesting realization: No matter how complicated, almost any MAST construct can (or should) include a condition that allows all participants to reach a consensus on the results and jointly sign a settlement transaction. This "cooperative shutdown" will cover all other conditions.

Although developers are still discussing implementation details, Taproot doesn't seem to have caused much controversy.

The Great Consensus Cleanup

It is a soft fork proposed by Square Crypto developer Matt Corallo. In contrast to most protocol upgrades, including other upgrades included in this list, Great Consensus Cleanup is not designed to enrich Bitcoin with new features or features. Instead, as the name suggests, this soft fork will eliminate some edge case vulnerabilities in the Bitcoin protocol.

But there are also some objections. In theory, certain upgrades may make some existing coins (UTXO) unusable. Although such UTXOs are impossible at all, their existence cannot be determined, and some people consider making them non-expendable a risk, and in principle, this should never be done.

"No input category"

Blockstream developers Christian Decker and Xapo's Towns are proposing a new class of Sighash logos. With names like SIGHASH_NOINPUT, SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT, and SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUTANYSCRIPT, they provide similar solutions, so we refer to all of them as "no-input categories".

OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY

OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (CTV), formerly known as OP_SECURETHEBAG, is a new OP code proposed by Bitcoin core contributor Jeremy Rubin. Its main benefits are that it can help alleviate Bitcoin network congestion and expenses during peak hours, and effectively increase network throughput

Drivechain BIPs

Tierion developers Paul Sztorc and CryptAxe proposed two soft forks. The first one, called Hashrate Escrows, is used to lock funds in a contract on the Bitcoin blockchain ("move it to" the sidechain), which can only be unlocked to unlock funds after voting at a sufficient hash rate ( "Move back" tokens). The second soft branch, called Blind Merged Mining, will enable the sidechain to be protected with the same hashing capabilities as the Bitcoin blockchain. But Drivechain is quite controversial.

Full text link: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/2020-and-beyond-bitcoins-potential-protocol-upgrades

Chinese and Western Monero

This is an article written by a domestic Monero fan about his risks and opportunities for how Monero enthusiasts in the West and China can communicate with each other. It is actually a good suggestion for many cryptocurrency projects to be a Glocal community. The content is not deep, and some of the conflicting views between the East and the West are also good.

Each community projects its concerns to another community. Ever since I first translated a Monero article for a Western community, I have been drowned in boundless technical theory and philosophy. In contrast, as a freelance writer for Chinese blockchain media, the articles that the media ask us to write are often about prices and mining. Therefore, Westerners tend to think that the Chinese are largely driven by theory and philosophy, and in China, some people think that Westerners influence the entire mining industry by manipulating prices.

I typed "Monero" on Google and the keyword "Monero" on Baidu. Guess what the search results were?

Among Google's top 10 rankings, technical information accounts for 50%. This includes the recognized Monero website, getmonero.org, as well as Wikipedia and Twitter. Second, 20% is news and investment data. Only 10% are exchanges, and that is coinbase.com. On the other hand, among the top ten Chinese Baidu rankings, mining accounted for the largest proportion, reaching 40%; followed by technology, which accounted for 30%; then investment data, which accounted for 20%. Finally, there is a strange website that states Monero's use on the dark web.

Western Monero fans believe that China's Monero community may be small but there are many. China also has some good Monero journalists and experts. My first recommendation is the Monero project created by First Cloud. He serialized the translation of "Mastering Monero" into a good column: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/cinotLriQuo_EliEybkFyA. But the Monero Chinese community is still not very organized. We are eager to hear from the outside world, there are getmonero.org/zh-cn, monerooutreach.org, as well as other official and semi-official websites, as well as other currency friends dedicated to supporting Monero.

We need to take some measures to strengthen the construction of Monero's Chinese community. My suggestions are: first, strengthen the translation of Monero information; second, accelerate the localization of Monero wallets; third, Monero should be in Establish thematic sections in mainstream Chinese media; Fourth, establish a high-quality Monero social circle in China; Fifth, strengthen Sino-Western exchanges.

Full text link: https://www.monerooutreach.org/monero-china-west.php

Controversial cryptocurrency statements and opinions by Lobster

These are some of the end-year feelings written by the former ICODrops CMO. In fact, his title can already summarize what he wants to say.

• 1. Ethereum killer is good for Ethereum and BTC
• 2. DeFi is currently only BitMex on the chain, excessive mortgages hinder growth and value creation
• 3. Strangely, no one needs a privacy dApp
• 4. Inferior media platforms that add too much cryptocurrency but are useless just to issue coins
• 5. The altcoin bubble season will not return
• 6. Resurrection of fake DAO in 2020
• 7. STO and market driven, just a Meme
• 8. Figure out what your dApp will do, and then its user experience
• 9. Take the shouting list of "World War III" seriously
• 10. Say Airdrop is not a pledge, don't be fooled by others
• 11. Crypto mergers and acquisitions are hot

Full text link: https://medium.com/@ivangbi/controversial-crypto-statements-opinions-end-of-2019-edition-331e01da3044

Cryptocurrency industry issues in 2020

A prediction by Jonathan Joseph, the co-founder of Smart Money, can be regarded as a prediction. Although he wrote this himself to ask a question, I think that when I asked a question, he had unknowingly formed one of his own. prediction.

Ethereum is the biggest competitor … Is Ethereum? There are still questions about the ETH1- & ETH2 migration and whether it will affect composability, which is a key aspect of DeFi. If there are any challenges, ETH1 can continue to exist as a dedicated DeFi blockchain.

What kind of Bitcoin payment work will Bitcoin maximizationists think will Ethereum and Bitcoin be highly complementary, and use DeFi as the best way to promote hyperbitcoinization?

2017 ICO bubble concept will continue to exist? We all think that reason will return, and crypto assets need to have real value in order to maintain real value.

How much progress can DAO make in a year? How many iterations does DAO need to begin to incorporate the best aspects of human leadership in a decentralized structure?

What about "other" competing blockchains? Cosmos and Polkadot's team has made exciting progress in interoperability. Is tBTC or wBTC sufficient to bring SOV use cases to the more comprehensive financial services in the DeFi / ETH stack? Will ecred begin to gain recognition for another store of value? The progress and adoption of the highly competitive “other” smart contract blockchain (NEAR, Algorand, etc.) will determine how and when to achieve interoperability cases. Tezos has some structural advantages that make it particularly suitable for tokenized securities.

What are the breakthroughs in DeFi UX? Smart contract innovation and meta-transactions will actually become the frontier of UX innovation in 2020. This involves both crypto-unique financial products and innovative ways to help facilitate the transition from statutory to crypto. Will there be a killer app?

Full text link: https://medium.com/@jonathanjoseph/2020-crypto-industry-questions-c0543e8df020

Introduction to Bitcoin's efficient market hypothesis

Nic Carter recently did Bitcoin Times and wrote a lot of articles on thinking about the direction of the Bitcoin economy. This article is an introduction to the Bitcoin effective market hypothesis. The extraction is not good. The original author wrote very long and very many. If you are interested in the efficient market hypothesis of Bitcoin, it is really worth a look.):

The efficient market hypothesis is not a mysterious claim, it is just a view that market prices reflect the information available. The market will not wait for the (known) event, which means that if weather forecasts predict that a hurricane will occur next week and destroy sugar cane plantations, speculators will raise the price of sugar as supply is expected to be hit.

What this means for Bitcoin and halving

As we can see, most markets are effective most of the time. This is not what happened in the market. This is their purpose. I have discussed some exceptions: arbitrage, non-free market situations, behavioral biases, and situations where market participants may not have sufficient incentive to disclose relevant information.

The question is, does any of these conditions apply to the Bitcoin market? We are not in a tight liquidity. There are no obvious restrictions on arbitrage. For free markets, Bitcoin is obviously a very free market and one of the freest markets in the world. Unlike most currencies, it is not backed or guaranteed by sovereign states, and no capital controls will weaken sales.

Is Bitcoin large enough now that there are a large number of complex funds dedicated to working together to display significant information? With a market value of 150 billion yuan, I think that's absolutely true. The ultimate test of market efficiency is whether market movement information is included in prices immediately or lagging.

The only necessary condition for bitcoin's efficiency with question marks is related to differences between market participants (ie lack of shared valuation models for price setting entities to converge) and the development of more financial businesses. There are still several types of entities that have difficulty obtaining Bitcoin exposure. Of course, overcoming these challenges will make Bitcoin's prospects more optimistic.

So the "price" to be halved or a catalyst for appreciation?

Will Bitcoin appreciate now? absolute. I don't think the appreciation (if it happens) is due to a completely predictable change in the issuance rate (the imminent halving will reduce our annualized issuance from 3.6% to 1.8%), but of course I think there are other reasons that might affect the price Positive factors, most of which are difficult to predict. Is this consistent with the efficient market hypothesis? very very. The efficient market hypothesis allows for information shocks (for example, suppose we suddenly and suddenly inflate with a major world currency).

There are some informational aspects of Bitcoin that are completely known and transparent, such as the supply schedule. However, as I mentioned above, many basic drivers of Bitcoin price are not easy to quantify or even know. For example, no one knows how many Bitcoin owners are in the world. If you can predict these factors better than others, then you will be able to find an information advantage. In addition, there are many unforeseen shocks, such as the currency crisis, which may have a positive impact on Bitcoin in the future.

Full text link: https://medium.com/@nic__carter/an-introduction-to-the-efficient-market-hypothesis-for-bitcoiners-ed7e90be7c0d

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