The Australian Craig Wright failed to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and Ethereum project The DAO is breaking records. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 18:
- The week started with Craig Steven Wright’s big reveal that he was the man behind Bitcoin’s mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto. The claim was endorsed by well-known members of the Bitcoin community, including Bitcoin Foundation founder Jon Matonis and Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen. The publicly provided evidence on Wright’s blog did, however, not convince the community, and the proof was quickly debunked as fake on Reddit. Wright followed up with a promise to provide further evidence that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, only to make a U-turn later on stating he no longer “has the courage” to proceed.
- The Bitcoin community has been engaged in a civil war over the currency’s block size for some time now, and Wright’s big reveal did little to distract the community from this. In fact, Bitcoin Core developers quickly took advantage of the moment to strip Gavin Andresen from his commit access on the Bitcoin Core project, claiming it was a precautionary measure as they believed Gavin might have been “hacked”. The developers then started to look for a reason to make the change permanent (despite Gavin’s assurance he wasn’t hacked), with prominent developers like Peter Todd stating on Twitter “If Gavin is wrong, I think his commit access should be revoked for being untrustworthy and/or incompetent”. Wladimir J. van der Laan ended up confirming Gavin wouldn’t be made a maintainer of Bitcoin Core again, arguing that commit access for someone who doesn’t use it is nothing but a liability.
- Coindesk’s big Bitcoin conference “Consensus 2016” was held in Manhattan this week, resulting in numerous announcements such as the state of Delaware announcing that it was intending to use blockchain technology to speed up the registration of new businesses. Enterprise blockchain start-up Chain announced a blockchain built for financial institutions called Open Standard 1, which will be a competitor to R3’s Corda platform, and 21 Inc revealed plans to “make every computer a bitcoin computer” by upgrading the compatibility of its software. Consensus 2016 also featured a two-day ‘Building Blocks’ Hackathon, which was won by a blockchain energy project called Decentralized Energy Utility.
- The Ethereum project “The DAO” broke several records in the first week of its “crowdsale”, raising more money than Pebble Time (20,338,986 USD) and Ethereum itself (18,439,086 USD). As the total amount of money raised by The DAO is now approaching 23 million USD, it will mostly be fortifying its position as one of the most successful crowdfunding projects of all time for the remainder of the sale period. The sale will end on May 28, 2016, although late-investors will be facing a lower conversion rate. During the first two weeks investors will be able to create 100 DAO tokens with 1 Ether, but by the last 4 days the same amount of DAO tokens will require 1.5 Ether.
- The success of The DAO was again visible in the exchange rate Ethereum’s currency, as the price of Ether increased by another three percent to a current exchange rate of $9.37 per ETH. Bitcoin experienced an equally strong week, with its price increasing by more than two percent to a current rate of about $459 per BTC. Bitcoin will thus be testing the 3,000 CNY (roughly $462) resistance level again in the coming days.
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