[Roundup] $4 Billion in BTC, Binance launches Lending, and EthHub

09/01/2019

Binance Lending

Binance introduced lending this week. The idea is that users will be able to lend to margin traders on the platform. Lending opened on the 28th and almost immediately filled up. Given how busy I was this week, I wasn’t able to participate. However, I’m looking forward to seeing how this progresses in the future and will look to take part when it presumably opens up indefinitely.

Craig Wright Court Ruling

A court recommended that Craig Wright must surrender over $4 billion in Bitcoin to the Kleiman estate. If you’re not familiar with crypto news, then you may not know that Craig Wright has been claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto for awhile now, and suing anyone who says he’s lying.

One important aspect of public key cryptography is if someone was Satoshi Nakamoto they could prove this fact mathematically. So far, no one has done this. Anyone claiming to be Satoshi who doesn’t prove it cryptographically will be branded a fraud by the crypto community regardless of the evidence they bring in support of their claim.

I think what’s happened is both Craig and Kleiman were early adopters of Bitcoin. They both purchased and mined Bitcoin early. They formed some kind of business relationship and, since the Bitcoin wasn’t worth much back then, were exchanging keys or using multi-sigs. After Kleiman passed away Craig took all of the Bitcoin they held jointly and now the Kleiman family wants Kleiman’s Bitcoin back. If Craig and Kleiman used a multi-sig and Kleiman held part of the private key (he’s since passed away), then there is a chance that Craig is telling the truth in that he cannot access the Bitcoin. Also, if my conjecture is correct, the court case has nothing to do with Satoshi Nakamoto. Although, it makes the headline more appealing if Craig’s Satoshi claims are included in it.

This is interesting from a legal perspective though, because when it comes to crypto one could always claim to have “lost”, “forgotten”, or never to have owned the private keys to an address. How does the court prove that someone does in fact control the private keys to an address? Presumably you could use chain analysis, but for addresses who mined a lot at the beginning and haven’t done anything with the coins since then, these tactics are rendered useless. At any rate, that is what must be proven here in order for the Kleiman estate to get the $4 billion in Bitcoin that would be lawfully theirs if this recommendation is held up in appeals courts.

EthHub

I heard about EthHub on last week’s episode of Epicenter. Both Eric and Anthony seem like good guys. Whether or not I agree with someone’s viewpoints, I respect them taking action to build things in order to support their viewpoints.

EthHub is a central place where Eric and Anthony put documentation such that it can be linked to when people are spreading misinformation about Ethereum. This way they don’t have to continue repeating themselves in responses. They also have a podcast and weekly newsletter which are linked to on EthHub. I’m not as active in the Ethereum community as I used to be, but I’d definitely recommend checking their content out if you’re interested in keeping up to date on the nitty-gritty of Ethereum development.

Quantopian

Quantopian appears to be a Kaggle for stock market prediction. Quantopian provides Python libraries you can use to analyze stock market datasets and backtest trading strategies. I heard about Quantopian on a Blind thread about passive income where a Facebook data scientist claimed they were making $1K monthly in royalties from an algorithm a hedge fund was leasing from them on Quantopian. I’ve only had time to dabble in Quantopian this week due to my hectic schedule, but this looks like something I’d like to continue to investigate and write about going forward.

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