Two big pieces of news today are that the world’s #1 exchange Binance got a warning from Japanese regulators that they do not have a license to operate as an exchange in Japan. This sent bitcoin spiraling down about $500. I don’t think this will be a big deal in the long run because Binance can just probably get a license from Japanese authorities and continue operating. I actually think this is a good thing that countries are requiring exchanges that transact billions of dollars to register and have some kind of financial responsibility to their users. If you are not into money laundering or tax evasion, this should be welcome news to you also as consumer and customer protections should a top priority for anyone trading crypto currencies.
The second thing is that a German research team has analyzed bitcoin’s blockchain and found references to potential child pornography sites within the data that is stored in the blockchain. This is an old story from quite a while back but does bring up the question of the immutability of the blockchain and the inability to remove potentially dangerous or illegal content from it. I don’t think this will really lead to anything right now but I do think we should re-think the complete immutability of the blockchain. After all, Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, gave up this principle and used a hard fork to refund money that was stolen(this is what caused Ethereum and Ethereum classic to split). If these images or references are indeed illegal, Bitcoin might have to do the same thing just to be legal for anyone to download the blockchain. Now, this “data” wasn’t images since 80 bytes isn’t enough to store pornographic images but it is enough to hide references and links to pornographic content so blockchain may have to be proactive in the future to combat these things if they want to remain legal.
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Cryptocurrency Vlog 