Ethereum is under attack, and Bitcoin investor Roger Ver sues exchange OKCoin. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 38:
- Accenture debuted the prototype of its “Editable” Blockchain for Enterprise and Permissioned Systems. When necessary, designated administrators acting on agreed rules of governance can edit, rewrite or remove blocks of information without breaking the chain. Accenture could have saved itself the trouble though, as it could have booted up any classic relational database to get the same results.
- Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, is fighting off a DDoS attack. Attackers are abusing the EXTCODESIZE opcode, which has a fairly low gasprice but which requires nodes to read state information from disk; the attack transactions are calling this opcode roughly 50,000 times per block. On Thursday morning, Ethereum co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke officially reported on the attack, urging Ethereum miners to switch to a new mining method to circumvent the effects.
- The debate over how Bitcoin is legally defined in the US continues to rage on after a district court judge ruled the cryptocurrency is considered “real” money. The decision was made during a case closely linked to the cyberattacks that targeted JP Morgan in 2014. Judge Alison Nathan rejected a claim from defendant Anthony Murgio, 65, that bitcoin should not qualify as money under federal law that prohibits the running of unlicensed money transmitting businesses, a term used to define Coin.mx, a bitcoin exchange he used to manage.
- In the latest round of a long-standing feud, Bitcoin investor Roger Ver has reportedly sued digital currency exchange OKCoin for $570,000. According to the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong High Court document filed Wednesday shows that Ver alleges that OKCoin violated the terms of a contract for work the website Bitcoin.com. “The short version is that they forged my signature onto a fake contract and the digital signatures prove it beyond any doubt,” Ver said in an emailed statement.
- The price of Bitcoin was pretty stable this week losing only half a percent, resulting in a current price of about $603 per BTC. The price of Ethereum increased more than two percent over the same period, to a current rate of $12.87 per ETH. Ethereum Classic on the other hand lost more than five percent, taking the price $1.24 per ETC. Monero had a strong week and gained more than 10 percent, taking the price up to $10.79 per XMR.
