As NewsBTC has covered over the past few weeks, a debate has erupted around Bitcoin’s impending block reward reduction. Informally known as the “halving” or the “halvening,” every four years the number of BTC issued per block (every 10 minutes or so) gets cut in half, resulting in a negative supply shock on the market.Analysts are currently divided over whether or not it will affect the underlying BTC price in a positive way — we just published another report on why the halving isn’t priced in from a derivatives perspective.While bulls have a good argument due to the Stock to Flow model popularized by pseudonymous quantitative analyst PlanB, a prominent early Bitcoin adopter recently came out in the side of bears, arguing that the halving will not help BTC investors.Related Reading: Bitcoin Price Likely to Jump After Christmas; Here’s Why“First Bitcoin Startup Investor” Bashes Halving NarrativeRoger Ver, an early Bitcoin evangelist who invested in Blockchain.com, Bitcoin.com, BitPay, amongst other crypto companies, recently remarked that he sees a “very real possibility the price of Bitcoin Core (BTC) does not go up after the halving.” This comment was made echoing a remark made by Melem Demirors of CoinShares, who cited financial derivatives as a potential dampener on the positive effects of the halving.The now Japan-based Ver, trying to build out his own thesis on the matter, remarked that he thinks the price won’t up because ” the blocks are full and there is no room for additional commerce to take place on chain.” With this, he is seemingly referring to the sentiment that the economic activity of a chain will affect the price of the asset that is based on top of it.There is a very real possibility the price of Bitcoin Core does not go up after halving.For the first time, the blocks are full and there is no room for additional commerce to take place on chain.Bitcoin Cash on the other hand, has
an amazing future ahead. https://t.co/z4tC7jij7d— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) December 26, 2019 Related Reading: Why Did Youtube Crack Down on Crypto Channels? Lawyer Weighs InVer Thinks BCH Will Beat BTCVer’s latest comments on the Bitcoin halving come shortly after he remarked in two mainstream media interviews that he expects for BCH to rapidly appreciate against BTC.Per previous reports from NewsBTC, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur and investor told CNBC in an interview that he thinks the market capitalization of Bitcoin Cash is poised to appreciate by over a “thousands of times where it currently is because it’s looking to become peer to peer electronic cash for the entire world.” For some context, BCH would be trading $191,000 apiece if it was trading 1,000 times higher than what it is trading at now.He doubled down on this opinion in an interview with Forbes, saying that he expects for BCH’s market capitalization to supplant that of BTC:“Bitcoin.com is partnering with more household names to bring BCH usage to actual commerce for real people and real businesses. As that adoption of BCH-based commerce grows, so will its market cap.”While Ver has belief in this sentiment, not everyone is convinced that Bitcoin Cash will outperform BTC by that much, if at all.In the wake of his aforementioned interview on CNBC, the crypto community erupted, pledging not to take Ver’s rhetoric lying down. Dan Hedl, a long-time Bitcoiner and industry executive/entrepreneur, wrote on Twitter:“Hey @JoeSquawk whats up with this reporting on bcash by CNBC? Roger is saying factually incorrect information about adoption and identity.”Related Reading: Is the Bitcoin Halving Priced In? No Way, and Here’s WhyFeatured Image from Shutterstock

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Bitcoin may be trading at prices that seem low in comparison to the crypto asset’s all-time high price or $20,000, or even its recent local high of nearly $14,000 but in reality, it’s the best performing investment of the last decade.Let’s see how the number one cryptocurrency by market cap, and even the number two crypto, stack up against other top investments of the last ten years.Bitcoin Beats All Other Investments of the Past DecadeBitcoin was the first-ever cryptocurrency, designed by the mysterious cypherpunk Satoshi Nakamoto. At its inception, it was merely a concept for what would ultimately become the world’s first peer to peer digital cash system, worth just a fraction of pennies at its creation.Related Reading | Spot Versus Tether Exchanges: Can Bitcoin Price Itself Be a Buy or Sell Signal It was mined by computers by early supporters of the emerging technology and then traded for cash on exchanges. One early Bitcoin user who made the first public transaction for physical goods traded 10,000 BTC for two pizzas.Today, the asset is trading at roughly $7200, down nearly 50% from the year’s high and nearly two-thirds down from the all-time high price it set at the peak of crypto fanaticism in 2017.But despite ongoing price decline and downtrend, the first-ever cryptocurrency still beats out all other top performing investments of the last decade.A $100 investment in Bitcoin with an ROI of 62,500% would have resulted in a gain of $62,500. A $1,000 investment, over $625,000, and a $10,000 investment would have netted the investor over $6.25 million.A similar $100 investment in top stocks such as Amazon or Apple would have only amounted to $1,250 or $840 in gains.According to the list below, a single $100 investment in Bitcoin would have outperformed a $100 investment in each of the rest of the list combined.Most profitable investments of the decade:
Bitcoin: +62,500%
Ethereum: +17,900%
Netflix: +4,280%
Domino’s Pizza: +3,000%
Abiomed: +2,000%
Lululemon: +1,300%
Amazon: +1,250%
NVIDIA: +1,180%
Mastercard: +1,100%
Apple: +840%
Visa: +760%
Google: +350%— Decrypt (@decryptmedia) December 26, 2019 Even a $100,000 investment in a cultural phenomenon like Netflix wouldn’t have brought as much return on the initial investment as $10,000 invested into Bitcoin.Even Ethereum Outperforms Most Investments In and Out of CryptoWhile Ethereum has recently had a bit of a negative stigma surrounding it, even being dubbed a double-digit “shitcoin,” it has still outperformed all other assets on the list aside from Bitcoin itself.Ethereum was sold as an ICO at just pennies on the dollar, and at its all-time high reached $1,400. The cryptocurrency is trading at just 90% of that high at roughly $125 currently but has still brought investors gains of over 17,900%.Related Reading | These Five Altcoins Crushed Bitcoin’s 2019 Returns This means that just a $100 invested in Ethereum would have resulted in a $17,900 return. And while this is under just one-third of what the earliest Bitcoin investors were able to churn out of the asset, investors in the number two crypto by market cap also struck it rich compared to most of the world’s biggest stocks.

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Chinese blockchain platform NEO will open an place of work in United States town of Seattle, in step with an legitimate announcement shared with Cointelegraph on Feb. 15. The new place of work shall be headed via ex-Microsoft govt John deVadoss.

The NEO Global Development (NGD) Seattle place of work will open and start recruitment this month, purportedly permitting the corporate to increase into the U.S. marketplace. Per the click liberate, the NGD has been growing partnerships with Microsoft and different corporations.

According to NEO founder Erik Zhang, Seattle’s popularity for tech skill was once one of the most major attracts for finding its new workplaces, announcing, “Seattle has huge developer resources and a strong atmosphere of innovation, and NEO has always placed great importance in technology development.”

daVadoos, who will lead the place of work, up to now labored at Microsoft and co-founded messaging carrier textual content11. At Microsoft, deVadoss evolved .NET in pageant with Java/J2EE.

Purportedly referred to via some because the “Ethereum of China,” NEO “makes use of blockchain generation and virtual identities to digitize belongings and automate the control of virtual belongings the use of smart contracts.”

The community was once based in 2014 and the mainnet was once introduced in October 2016. NEO is lately growing NEO 3.0, an improve to its blockchain that can “convey sooner transaction speeds, larger balance and expanded utility programming interfaces for sensible contracts.“

NEO’s eponymous token lately has a marketplace cap of $530 million, and is buying and selling at $8.19, up over 3 p.c at the day, in step with CoinMarketCap.

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A contributor of major Ethereum browser extension Metamask has reported that the MetaMask team is “totally overwhelmed” and not being prioritized by its parent company ConsenSys.

In a Dec. 25 Reddit post, Reddit user lazaridiscom3 alleges that the MetaMask team is not getting the support it needs from ConsenSys, and, consequently, the whole team of 24 employees is overwhelmed.

Redditor says the Ethereum’s “critical value-moving piece” isn’t decentralized

The post, titled “Help MetaMask out of its Activity-Trap,” goes on to say that the MetaMask team has a number of unsolved issues and its inner workflow structure is neither transparent nor decentralized. The post reads:

“One cannot follow development via the public issue-tracker, simply because the team uses an internal tracker and internal ‘meetings.’ This is not transparent. This is not decentralized. MetaMask is a critical value-moving piece of Ethereum. It is written in JavaScript, nearly completely untyped. The code is of low quality, full of technical debt (both, in terms of code and architecture).”

User Lazardiscom told Cointelegraph that he is participating in the project as a contributor, citing his Lazardiscom account on GitHub. As part of suggested solutions to existing problems, the contributor urged that the MetaMask team needs to fully migrate over TypeScript immediately.

Lazardiscom further suggested that ConsenSys needs to implement “stricter evaluation of its ‘Spokes,’ a strict and binding set of rules for public projects.” The developer also argued that ConsenSys’ software project — referred to as Gitcoin — “needs to be far more uncontrolled, and needs to become attractive.”

MetaMask team allegedly has hierarchical structure despite Lubin’s claims

In the post, Lazardiscom specifically criticized the structural issues in the MetaMask team. According to the post, MetaMask actually maintains team leads despite Joe Lubin, ConsenSys founder and co-founder of Ethereum, trying to “convince everyone” that ConsenSys is a non-hierarchical company.

Specifically, the post mentions MetaMask’s employee Daniel Finlay as one of the leads who is “totally overwhelmed.” According Finlay’s LinkedIn page, he currently serves as lead developer on MetaMask at ConsenSys, with his primary responsibilities focused on the browser extension. Cointelegraph contacted Finlay regarding the issue but had yet to receive a response as of press time.

Additionally, the post also mentions “super-low bounties,” noting that some of those bounties equate to less than $1 per hour, after calculating how much time the tasks take.

In October, Lubin announced a goal to grow the number of developers on the Ethereum blockchain to as many as one million in 2020. Dubbed OneMillionDevs.com, the initiative was announced by Lubin at a major Ethereum-focused conference Devcon in October 2019. According to Lubin, there are 30 million software developers worldwide, while only a few tens of thousands are blockchain developers, the majority of whom are involved in Ethereum.

Meanwhile, another Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has recently triggered a wave of argument over decentralization in crypto on Twitter. Previously, Buterin argued that centralized crypto exchanges are poised to “burn in hell.”

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The so-called “crypto winter” has indubitably been tricky on a majority of this ecosystem’s upstarts, even the ones with supposedly colossal warfare chests and copious quantities of skill. Heck, previous this week, Ripple reduce Bloomberg alumni Cory Johnson, the fintech company’s leader marketplace strategist, because of shifts within the Bitcoin winds.Bitmain, Huobi, and ShapeShift also are amongst business powerhouses that experience mandated team of workers cuts to reinforce their undergo marketplace backside traces. Other corporations, akin to Giga Watt and Liqui, have collapsed fully.But curiously, it kind of feels that the crash within the Bitcoin worth hasn’t deterred alternatives. Even in attempting instances, cash from formidable project capitalists and visionaries alike have endured to hurry into this area, no holds barred.Blockchain Analytics Group Finishes Series BEver because it secured $16 million in its Series A investment spherical all over 2018, Chainalysis has develop into an integral however little-known mainstay on this area. For those that ignored the memo, the corporate, which has headquarters in New York, is a blockchain analysis and instrument supplier that has performed a task within the again places of work of the cryptosphere. While the corporate’s premise would possibly appear dull for many, traders have develop into enamored with what the staff has completed, and what it intends to do.In reality, in a press release issued Tuesday, Chainalysis divulged that it had scored over $30 million in investment for its Series B spherical, led by way of Accel, a Palo Alto-based project workforce that still has investments in Circle.Excited to announce our newest investment spherical of $30m led by way of @Accel to reinforce strategic product building of latest cryptocurrency use circumstances and a brand new place of work in London! Read extra: https://t.co/0Rn2li4wkO— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) February 12, 2019
Accel’s maintain Chainalysis may even see the Bay Area funding workforce’s Philippe Botteri and Amit Kumar sign up for the blockchain upstart’s board. Per Business Insider, the duo will support Chainalysis in bolstering its presence, within the European area, together with its total analysis efforts.With this inflow of investment, the analytics unit has made up our minds to reinforce its staff. The corporate recently has 30 open roles, together with stints starting from the vp of finance to the staff lead for cybercrimes. Although the corporate has its number one places of work in New York, most of the new positions are situated in London and Copenhagen, the previous of which is the place Chainalysis is having a look to double its headcount.This $30 million greenback deal, which additionally noticed participation from different unnamed financiers, isn’t on the subject of obtaining skill although. Chainalysis divulged that it intends to double-down on its raison d’etre to make blockchain information simple to digest, helpful, and out there for governments, establishments, and local cryptocurrency corporations. The corporate wrote:“We are building a team that is focused on attributing more services associated with criminal activity, including darknet markets, scams, ransomware, terrorist financing, and sanctions evasion.”The New York-based company additionally defined that it intends to start out inspecting an array of alternative cryptocurrencies, now not simply property like Bitcoin and Ethereum, whilst additionally bolstering its “compliance and investigation software” to create an even setting for cryptocurrencies.Exact specifics relating to Chainalysis’ plans have been scant, however bearing in mind that the company has garnered the reinforce of Binance, Barclays, amongst a sequence of alternative fintech corporations, its long run stays shiny, whether or not Bitcoin continues decrease or in a different way.Related Reading: Chainalysis: Up to 3.79 Million Bitcoins May Be Lost ForeverCrypto Venture Tap Still Has WaterWhile props to Chainalysis can be so as, this transfer simplest accentuates how the crypto project capital faucet nonetheless has water, even despite the harrowing marketplace stipulations. On Tuesday, Morgan Creek Digital, a crypto-centric project workforce headed by way of fervent decentralist Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano, printed that it had introduced a $40 million fund.The fund, introduced weeks, if now not months in the past, noticed funding from two public pension budget that pertain to Virginia, a personal establishment, a school endowment, and different traders. The fund purportedly already allotted capital against Bakkt, Coinbase, Harbor, and Blockfi, simply to call a couple of notable crypto upstarts.Speaking of Bakkt, the Intercontinental Exchange-backed initiative secured over $182.five million in probably the most greatest crypto-related offers to this point. This spherical noticed Boston Consulting Group, CMT Digital, Horizons Ventures, ICE itself, Microsoft’s project wing, Pantera Capital, and Galaxy Digital make allocations.All this and extra simplest is going to turn that even supposing BTC has endured to industry in a decent vary, with analysts claiming that decrease lows are inbound, the sensible cash is below the impact that at last, this marketplace will go through a resurgence.Featured Image from Shutterstock

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