Musiccosmos

An effort to keep the $200 billion siacoin blockchain free from corporate interests is devolving into chaos amid accusations against the companies at the center of the effort. At issue is the conduct of the protocol’s coders, and the motivations behind their push to alter the rules of the blockchain they maintain. With a proposal, introduced last week, developers including siacoin creator David Vorick have floated changes that would keep some mining equipment operators from earning value by securing the distributed storage protocol. Simply put, the code would fork siacoin so that products offered by Bitmain, the China-based firm on the verge of an initial public offering , and its competitor Innosilicon, would be disabled. But while such efforts have been met with enthusiasm on other blockchains, satisfying concerns about how such changes could impact the balance of power on their networks, there’s just one problem – in the case of siacoin, the equipment that would still work is ...

Ethereum has a gambling problem. Since July, products resembling Ponzi schemes , a fraudulent form of investment promising high returns for little cost, have  topped the charts  among decentralized applications ( dapps ) running on the world’s second-largest blockchain, outpacing even the popular CryptoKitties . But if user counts and transaction volumes observed on these applications are high, so too is the level of concern over the risks consumers face when using them. Already mounting are warning cries from technologists who aren’t exactly known for their risk reticence, a group that includes gambling dapp developers themselves. Such was the case for Team JUST, the group of anonymous developers behind the infamous gambling dapp FOMO 3D, who warned last week that what looked to be a near identical copy of its game was eating up one-third of the network’s total computational power, raising over $7 million in ETH within the span of seven days. Team JUST has g...

Yet another dire security flaw was unveiled Tuesday with potential ripple effects across the tech world, including for cryptocurrency projects seeking to leverage certain hardware devices. Following a pair of bugs unveiled earlier this year , the Foreshadow vulnerability impacts all Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclaves, a special, supposedly extra-secure region of chip often used for storing sensitive data. In short, while the enclave is supposed to be tamper-proof, a group of researchers found a way for an attacker to steal the information it stores. For many, Meltdown and Spectre were spooky enough. The bugs impacted every single Intel chip, the hardware powering most of the world’s computers. But, since it wasn’t so easy to execute, there weren’t many real-world attacks. Foreshadow might not sound as bad because it impacts a more specific type of Intel hardware: SGX. However, since many cryptocurrency projects plan to use this technology, Foreshadow could have eve...

A metal frame with four small and two large propellers – carrying a container the size of a refrigerator – rises into the air with a roar, hovering above an empty road amidst snowy fields. The video was shot on the airfield near the Russian city of Kazan, which is located to the south-east of Moscow, and the machine is a SKYF drone, designed by a team of Russian aviation engineers. According to its makers, the drone can carry up to 880 pounds, travel as far as 220 miles and work up to 8 hours. And everything that happens to these drones is going to be recorded on the project’s own blockchain, SKYFchain. The SKYF team is trying to crack into a rapidly growing ecosystem, with PwC valuing the emerging global market for drones at over $127 billion in 2016. As of today, drones can only carry small objects, but the SKYF team aims to open a totally new market for heavy-duty cargo drones. The idea is that they’ll serve multiple purposes, such as delivering large amounts of cargo, f...