CCN Back in Business, Catholic Crypto, Bitcoin’s Carbon Footprint | Hodler's Digest

It's the end of a new week, but there's never an end to news in the crypto space. As the Wall Street Journal wrote this week, Facebook's coin is inching ever closer to life, with sources now reporting that Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and even Uber are giving $10 million each to the secret Libra project. As one Twitter user said, we just can't wait for a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship, resistance of PayPal and the centralization of Visa all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook. Also this week, since an updated Terms of Use for Binance means that US Customers will not be blocked from using the exchange, perhaps these angry ex Binance users could take solace in the fact that Binance will also be launching a dedicated exchange for US users. Funny how that works out. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Molly Jane and this is your weekly Hodler's Digest. Let's take a look at the latest market updates. Security focused platform Fireblocks recently secured $16 million in a series A funding round. Among the investors are heavyweights such as Fidelity Backed, Eight Roads, Tenaya Capital, Cyberstarts and more. Fireblocks developed a platform allowing for the safe transmission of funds across exchange exchanges, OTC desks and hot and cold wallets. While most security firms have been focusing on the custody side, not enough attention has reportedly been paid to safeguarding funds in transit, says Michael Sholove, CEO at Fireblocks. After analyzing several high profile hacks, he concluded that moving digital assets is still a slow process, highly susceptible to security breaches. Defining itself as the secured highway of cryptocurrencies, Fireblocks purports to remove the hassle of copying and pasting cryptocurrency addresses, thus allowing seamless fund transfers. Fireblocks reportedly implements multi party computation and advanced cryptographic system, which then would prevent private keys from being hijacked by deriving them from multiple sources. Among Fireblocks clients are already a number of big players such as Galaxy Digital and Genesis Global Trading. We reached out to Michael Sholaev, CEO at Fireblocks and asked him to give us more details about their product and on the recent funding round. So Michael, can you explain to us in more detail how Fireblocks works in.

The last two years? As we know most of the use cases are now around trading, so moving the assets to exchanges and as we started to see more and more use cases around payments, lending and use cases, which is the actual use cases that I think everybody was looking for with blockchain and digital assets. As those use cases mature, we need those assets accessible and we need them to be we need to move them very quickly between counterparty to counterparty between different hands and now we need to find a solution how to do it. So we need an infrastructure with hot wallets and we need an infrastructure with connectivity and we need it secure because truth to be told, most of the hacks and most of the breaches and the issues that happen where funds were hacked, stolen or compromised were exactly like, you know, during this chain when people were basically sending them funds or when the funds were online and readily accessible. So this is basically the use case that we are solving and this is why there is such a need for our solution in the market.

So how are you planning to use all of the funds that you just raised?

So we have a very, I would say, aggressive roadmap in terms of technological development. We we're going to heavily invest in R and D, scale up our R and D, which is now 15 engineers, we are going to probably double our engineering team in the next 12 months and in parallel we actually going to increase our go to market team to basically be able to serve more and more clients within the segment and also.

Expand the reach Gram, the much rumored crypto token developed by messaging app Telegram, will allegedly be available for the first time in a public sale on crypto exchange platform Liquid. Or at least that is what Liquid claimed in a press release stating that it entered a partnership with Gram Asia, which is allegedly the largest holder of Grams from Asia, which will make a portion of its tokens available for sale. This sale is set to take place on July 10. However, sources close to Telegram told Cointelegraph that they have never heard of a company called Grams Asia and that there is no relation, official or otherwise, between Telegram and Liquid. Mike Kayamori, CEO at Liquid, also told us though that the public sale is the result of an exclusive agreement between Liquid and Gram Asia without any direct involvement from Telegram. He said Liquid and gramasia always have had a good relationship. We support the TON community and ecosystem. In order to expand the community interest and be truly community driven was to offer a public sale with a limited amount to the global audience who was not able to participate in the private sale in the past. So everything is between Gram Asia and Liquid. However, according to an anonymous Telegram investor, Gram token holders don't have the right to sell tokens. Before the official launch of ton, which is reportedly scheduled for October this year and Even then for 18 months after that, this was all included in a very secure token purchasers agreement that they all signed, leaving it unclear as to how Gram Asia plans to legally carry out this plan with liquid Gram is the token powering ton the Telegram Open Network, which conducted one of the most profitable private sales in the history of cryptocurrency's year, raising a total of $1.7 billion. Since then, several websites have been reportedly faking Gram token sales, taking advantage of the hype surrounding the upcoming product. Bitcoin carbon emissions are equal to 22 megatrons per year. In case this number doesn't tell you much, this is equal to about the emissions of Jordan or Sri Lanka, or in cases more familiar to the metropolitan area of Kansas City. This amount roughly doubles if we take into account other proof of work cryptocurrencies these are all estimates from this report that was published this week by a team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich and mit. The researchers managed to measure the carbon emission of bitcoin mining by tracking the locations of the biggest mining pools and identifying the type of equipment that they are using. This research was based on data published last year by the three Chinese producers of mining equipment during their IPOs. According to the study, efforts should be made to regulate the regions with the highest concentration of carbon intensive mining. However, not everybody agrees with this research. A separate report published by blockchain industry research group Coinshare points out that growing use of renewable energy in bitcoin mining is being underestimated. According to this report, miners are naturally drawn to the regions where there's the cheapest energy, which often happens to be renewable. These areas include nearby dams on the U.S. pacific Northwest, the hydrothermal plants in Iceland or the southern Chinese province of Sichuan. We reached out to Christopher Ben Dixon, head of research at Coinshares, to give us his perspective on the issue. So Christopher, how serious is the impact of bitcoin mining and global carbon emissions?

This is not where we need to direct our attention. If we really want to do something about the climate, we have bigger fish to fry. First of all, we can look at the cases where it's actually wasteful, like giant militaries. I mean, a report came out yesterday that the US military uses something like 1200 million tons of carbon emissions every year.

Do you also believe there should be regulations to limit mining activities in certain regions of the world?

On the contrary, they should do the opposite. If you put limits on miners being able to mine in the regions where the cheapest electricity exists, which is the excess hydro dominated regions. If you limit mining in those regions Then worst case, the miners are going to move to areas where there is fossil fuels.

Can renewable energy make crypto mining a sustainable activity? And if yes, how is that possible?

Our argument here is that bitcoin mining can actually be a net positive to this, because bitcoin mining can come and act as a global electricity buyer of last resort, creating cornerstone demand for the cheapest renewables in the world, wherever they are, because it is such a mobile industry that can move to essentially anywhere. A lot of the best solar is in the middle of the desert. A lot of the best wind is in the middle of nowhere. You know, a lot of the best hydro is up in the mountains. Like nobody lives there, nobody wants to put a factory up there because you can't get your products out, you can't get your workers. Say that you want to build like a solar farm in the middle of nowhere. You know, you have to build it to several gigawatts before it makes sense to make, you know, like a proper long distance grid to connect it to wherever your closest demand center is. But that requires you to front load all that investment cost immediately. And that is a really, really difficult thing to do. What is much easier in terms of financing is to finance it in stages, but then you need off takers all the way as you successfully finance the project. And this is where we think miners can play a really interesting role because miners will come in if you, if you can offer electricity that's cheaper than anywhere else in the world, miners will come to you.

Satoshi is not God because God clearly has some pretty bad taste in crypto. Enter Cathio, a community oriented crypto project. It is designed to address the needs of the Catholic economy by ensuring lower costs, greater transaction visibility and improved security for the community. Security presumably from Satan and sex crime lawsuits. Failed US Presidential candidate and all around relic of the past. Rick Santorum is now a board member of Cathio. Santorum, who is anti gay and strongly opposed to abortion, argued that Cathio will better help engage the youth. Santorum is beloved by the youth as much as he is by the gay community. If you don't believe me, just Google Santorum. Meaning to see their noble work. But why God, Why this and why now? Well, you see, Cathio CEO Matthew Marcoloni believes that payment apps like PayPal and Venmo support one of the greatest threats to national security. No, not isis, but Planned Parenthood, an organization of untold evil that provides reproductive healthcare for women in need and supports these traditional payment systems. Cathio wants to penetrate the market both ethically and consensually in order to give the religious right a way to consume and trade in accordance with scripture. That sounds great. So what's the catch? Ah, well, there's a 2% transaction fee for donations and remittances. Yes, I repeat, donations and remittances. For legal reasons, I'm not calling this a grift, but it gets worse. One media outlet reported that one of the backers of this grift project is Cameron Schell, who is both on the board of Cathio and a co founder. Interestingly, all throughout the 90s, he faced accusations of fraud that were related to the stock market. But, you know, everyone deserves a second chance. By the way, if you liked what you found after Googling Santorum and have a spare $5,000, you may want to take this cruise with good old Rick. So we spoke to David Gerard, author of the 50 Foot Blockchain, to get to the bottom of this holy mess. So, David, in your mind, how sincere are the motivations behind this project?

It's hard to judge how sincere it is. I mean, all we can look at is what they're doing and try to work out whether it makes sense. But whether it's a good idea that makes sense for its customers, that's another matter. I'm hard pressed to see the selling point myself, but they think they've got a market here.

And who is this for?

So cafio's marketing is that they think that this will get young people donating to the church. Again, I'm not convinced by this argument because I don't think that's how religious communities really work, particularly not Catholic ones. So maybe it's the case. But I'm pretty sure there isn't a lack of payment option stopping them. Rick Santorum is. He's a Catholic. He's on the more conservative side of Catholics. And that appears to be the marketing that Catio is doing, which they got Rick Santorum in because he was the CEO's father in law. So he's a family member. So I assume that the guy is sincere, that ex Senator Santorum is sincere. The marketing has been very much the conservative side. So things like, oh, PayPal has some unspecified involvement, allowing donations to Planned Parenthood or whatever, that sort of marketing, like the American Catholic surveyed about abortion rights and so on, they tend to be right in the middle of average American populace. It isn't actually a Mass Catholic thing.

Can you tell us who Cameron Schell is and what ICOX is and why we should care.

So crypto people will know Cameron Schell as being the main guy behind iacox Innovations iCox, who were the company behind Kodak Coin. So The Kodak coin ICO basically failed. It took $5 million out of a planned 73 million. There was a lot of talk of them having trouble paying developers and vendors. I've had vendors and so on, and people who've dealt with them contact me saying, how do I get my money out of these people? You know? Cameron Schell's past has come up in the mainstream press. He used to be a bit of a hotshot trader back in Alberta. In the 90s, he got barred from the Alberta Stock Exchange for five years and fined $25,000. So I'm presuming that now, 20 years later, he's learned his lesson and is all about compliance and being a better actor.

Fellow crypto news outlet CCN has had quite a week following. First it announced that it would shut down, then they did a complete 360 and decided to let all former staff, presumably crying into their cardboard boxes on the street, shaking a fist into the sky, back into the building. CCN is apparently still open for business. Apparently no one was reading their content and it was all Google's fault. More specifically, Google indexing was hindering the publication's online visibility, with CCN claiming that an update to Google's algorithms led to a sharp 70% drop in traffic on mobile, leaving the crypto media outlet with no option but to shut up shop. A turn of events in the form of surprise visibility from their old domain name led executives at CCN to decide to stay open for business, while at least not a total shutdown. CCN Markets director Jonas Borch Grevink gave some updates While we've been working in the dark trying to get to the bottom of our massive visibility drop on Google. A friendly reminder in Google's Forum mentioned that CryptoCoineNews.com, our previous domain, is reappearing in Google searches. Borchgrevink went on to express his surprise as he personally requested a domain Name change in 2017 from crypto coins news.com to ccn.com since that change, CryptoCollinsNews.com was effectively absent on Google. Now it's back and is inexplicably using recent 2019 articles from CCN.com, this is abrupt and confusing. I don't mean to brag, but Cointelegraph's traffic was not actually affected by this debacle. CCN has also claimed to be the victims of an ongoing culture war whereby conservative media and commentators are being censored by Google, who have a perceived left wing bias despite lobbying for lower taxes. There was also a rumor among the crypto media that CCN was targeted because of their clickbaity titles, since the Google update also seemed to take away more than half of the traffic from the Daily Mail, a very clickbaity British tabloid. And another theory is that since CCN was so good at search engine optimization that they were taking away viewers from cn. But CCN of course doesn't just do news on crypto. This year they switched to also include political stories like this one where they call a former refugee, now a Congresswoman, Ilhan Omer, a pirate. Thanks for watching you guys. Please let us know what you would like to see more or even less of in this week's Hodler's Digest in the comments below. And if you've noticed my shirt and you like it, you should know that this came from our cointelegraph merchant store, which you can see in the link below in our description. And as always, remember to like subscribe and toddle. This episode is sponsored by Trade Santa. Trade Santa is a cloud based trading bot. Set it up in less than 2 minutes. Trade multiple pairs, choose between long and short strategies, use tech analysis indicators and see your results in real time. Trade Santa works 247 to get you the profit you set. The platform is already integrated with Binance, Bittrex, Bitfinex and Hedgehog btc. The link is in the description below. Cointelegraph like subscribe and Hodl.