Putin: Russia Should Explore Blockchain to Avoid Finance 'Limitations'

https://www.coindesk.com/putin-russia-explore-blockchain-avoid-finance-limitations/

Cryptomining Applications Suspended in Quebec
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/cryptomining-applications-suspended-quebec/

Canada’s Quebec province has announced that it will be suspending all approvals (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-quebec-halts-cryptocurrency-mining-projects-as-it-considers/) for new digital currency-mining projects so officials can consider deeper restrictions and potential energy price hikes.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency-mining operations in Canada are largely powered by Hydro Quebec. Representatives of the company are asking that the total amount of energy made available to digital currency miners be limited to 500 megawatts. While this is enough energy to run a “single aluminum smelting plant,” it’s a small portion of the 17,000 megawatts miners in Quebec originally asked for.The enterprise is also asking for respective price increases on all energy consumed by cryptocurrency miners. This is to guarantee that Hydro Quebec maximizes its annual revenue while being able to maintain present power rates for residents and standard businesses.In a statement (https://www.fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/canada-quebec-province-halts-crypto-mining-projects-reuters-201806071656), Hydro Quebec Distribution President Eric Filion explained, “We are asking the province’s energy board to quickly determine how much it should charge digital currency miners, and how much energy should be allocated to the industry while addressing the need to maximize revenues and job creation.”Since early January, Canada has been a serious hotspot for cryptocurrency (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-bitcoin-quebec/canadas-hydro-quebec-unable-to-meet-demand-from-digital-currency-miners-idUSKBN1F82QH) mining projects from China, South Korea and neighboring regions looking to take advantage (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/energy-company-hydro-quebec-looks-attract-bitcoin-miners/) of the country’s low energy prices and stable government. According to spokesman Marc-Antoine Pouliot, many of these miners are rewarded with the energy they need to mine digital currencies in exchange for investing in Hydro Quebec’s transmission network, thus boosting the company’s reputation and position in Canada’s power sector.But problems are forming on the horizon. Hydro Quebec now says it doesn’t have the energy sources it needs to power every project that comes its way.“We won’t be able to power all the projects that we’re receiving,” Pouliot explains. “This is evolving very rapidly, so we have to be prudent.”While turning away potential business is a hard decision, Pouliot says Quebec’s energy ministry needs time to examine the situation and set new roles for the industry before things get out of hand. Minister Pierre Moreau states that the province now aims to establish new guidelines that (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-bitcoin-quebec/canadas-quebec-halts-crypto-mining-projects-may-raise-fees-idUSKCN1J31Q5) will bring in the “best among the companies” and push Canada to the head of the cryptomarketing arena.The decision to halt new approvals arrives just one week after Quebec (https://bcfocus.com/news/quebec-govt-to-lift-moratorium-on-energy-sale-to-cryptocurrency-miners/10800/) lifted a moratorium that banned energy companies from supplying electricity to cryptocurrency-mining projects. The ban was first implemented in March, though Canada later expressed concern over “missing the boat” on crypto and decided it would work with mining companies if they could set different energy prices for miners and cut off electricity to their operations once the power grid was stretched to the maximum capacity.Pouliot stated, “Having interruptible customers during these critical periods makes it possible to connect more. [Hydro Quebec’s mandate] is to ensure the implementation of cryptocurrencies in Quebec by maximizing economic benefits and ensuring the stability of our electricity supply.”



This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/).

Bitcoin Miner Aspires to Launch Largest Crypto Mining Facility in the U.S.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-miner-aspires-launch-largest-mining-facility-us/

Coinmint (https://www.coinmint.io/), a cloud mining service provider, has confirmed it will go ahead with its proposed plan to open a cryptocurrency mining plant in an abandoned smelter previously used by Alcoa, in Massena, New York.
In a statement published online (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/worlds-largest-digital-currency-data-center-commences-operations-300659812.html), the company said it will repurpose the 1,300-acre, 435-megawatt site into the biggest cryptocurrency mining plant in the world. The move, which was approved in February (https://www.nypa.gov/-/media/nypa/documents/document-library/notices-and-agendas/trustees013018.pdf), will see the mining service invest up to $700 million and the creation of 150 jobs in the coming months.The company remains unfazed by the slump in bitcoin prices, which has seen a drop of almost 50 percent this year, according to data from Coinmarketcap (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/).In correspondence with Bitcoin Magazine, Coinmint CTO Prieur Leary said, “Current bitcoin prices affect the value proposition. That being said, we are very comfortable with current metrics, given our technology and infrastructure.”Coinmint sees upstate New York as the perfect environment for them to set up shop. Operations have begun at the complex through Coinmint’s wholly owned subsidiary North Country Data Center Corporation, and the facility is expected to be at full capacity within 12 months.The company believes this move will impact the crypto industry in a positive way. Leary went further by saying that “given the current concentration of digital currency data centers in Asia, launching the largest of such facilit[ies] in the U.S. makes a bold statement that the West is active within the industry and is a driver of growth and innovation within the space.”New York is not known for being friendly to crypto companies or to miners, but as Steven O’Shaughnessy, Massena’s town supervisor, remarked in a local interview (http://www.wwnytv.com/story/37398396/bitcoin-miner-plans-to-locate-in-massena-employ-150), “Our main marketing point is that we have cheap, reliable power.”Mining is a power-hungry activity that has been getting a lot of attention lately.In May, an expert panel met at a mining conference to discuss the implications of high energy consumption among miners (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/first-bitcoin-mining-conference-hashes-over-high-cost-energy/) worldwide, where they refuted the notion that energy devoted to proof-of-work operations is a wasteful by-product of cryptocurrency mining.




This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/).

Registration for Dfinity's 'Biggest Airdrop Ever' Is Closing Soon

https://www.coindesk.com/registration-dfinitys-biggest-airdrop-ever-closing-soon/

Blockchain's Once-Feared 51% Attack Is Now Becoming Regular

https://www.coindesk.com/blockchains-feared-51-attack-now-becoming-regular/

Alibaba Affiliate Boosts Blockchain Tech In $14 Billion New Funding

https://www.coindesk.com/alibaba-affiliate-boosts-blockchain-tech-in-14-billion-new-fund/

Quebec Halts Crypto Mining Approvals As New Rules In Progress

https://www.coindesk.com/report-quebec-freezes-crypto-mining-operations-seeks-to-raise-costs/

Search Giant Baidu Is Launching a Blockchain Space Game

https://www.coindesk.com/search-giant-baidu-is-launching-a-blockchain-space-game/

Which Way? Bitcoin's Low Volatility May Force Big Move

https://www.coindesk.com/which-way-now-low-bitcoin-price-volatility-may-force-breakout/

Mizuho Financial's Blockchain Lead Is Leaving the Firm

https://www.coindesk.com/mizuho-financials-blockchain-lead-is-leaving-the-firm/

Mastercard Patent Would Put Credit Cards on a Public Blockchain

https://www.coindesk.com/mastercard-patent-would-put-credit-cards-on-a-public-blockchain/

Crypto Exchange Bithumb Hit With Bill After Tax Investigation Ends

https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-exchange-bithumb-hit-with-bill-after-tax-investigation-ends/

To Better Organize, Decentralize: Matan Field of DAOstack
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/better-organize-decentralize-matan-field-daostack/

It’s time to move past the inefficiency of antiquated organizational structures, and blockchains are the key. So say the creators of DAOstack (https://daostack.io/), a solution that’s designed to intuitively move people into systems of decentralized governance and away from the traditional top-down hierarchies that predominate the planet today.
DAOstack CEO Matan Field was the featured guest on Episode #237 of Epicenter (https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/epicenter-237-matan-field-daostack-an-operating-system-for-collective-intelligence), joining hosts Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture for a deep dive into his personal journey with, and considerable ambitions for, the company he co-founded. It’s the second act in the world of Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) design for this theoretical physicist, who originally set out to combine the blockchain and decentralization with the short-lived company Backfeed (http://backfeed.cc/).Realizing in the midst of Backfeed that both a technological partner and a revised focus were necessary, the company stopped operations. Field hit reset, and the result was DAOstack, a platform for decentralized governance which allows collectives to self-organize, gathering with relative ease and efficiency over their shared goals and values.Unpacking the StackIn conversation with Crain and Couture, Field described how the primary appeal of DAOstack crystallizes around its concept as a “WordPress (https://wordpress.com/) for DAOs.” Evolved from open-source origins, WordPress provides website creators with a set of backend tools that make it relatively simple to design, launch and grow an extremely wide array of websites, from simple blogging to full-blown media portals and e-commerce operations. Thousands of plugins and themes are available to further customize a WordPress site and make it suit an individual organization’s unique needs.“When I say that you establish and operate a DAO easily, like you would a blog in WordPress,” Field says in the interview, “the meaning is that you have a framework of rules for coordination of people. If I want to establish a new DAO with its own rules, its own governance protocol, I don’t have to code that from scratch.”The idea that this WordPress workflow can be applied to enabling DAOs is compelling, to say the least. It makes the massive challenge of taking on ancient systems of hierarchical management seem achievable, even user-friendly. That’s key if Fields’ vision of enabling decentralized infrastructures — for everything from governments to hedge funds, insurance companies, coding collectives and climate change warriors — is going to see significant adoption.From there, users who get drawn in will discover what makes this system a “stack,” built as it is on a modular Ethereum-based smart contract framework (“Arc”); a JavaScript developer environment (“Arc.js”); and an intuitive user interface designed to encourage participation (“Alchemy”) even by the non-technically inclined. In Practice       Need a use case of a deployment where the user-friendly DAOstack can make a positive impact? Field provides one with the Ethereum project itself which, in his estimation, has abundant financial and human capital (in the form of thousands of developers).“So what is the limiting factor in producing solutions? Why haven’t we solved the scalability problem?” he posits. “The actual answer is the decision-making capacity to wisely deploy capital into human capital and produce solutions. That’s exactly the role for Alchemy: decentralizing the decision-making function, so that people can get into the system, and they can make any proposal to use funds. People can vote on a proposal and produce decisions in large numbers, effectively.”GENESIS Is NextThe rollout of DAOstack took another step with the public sale in May of GEN, which is the native crypto token of DAOstack’s ecosystem. Meanwhile, there is a Q3 2018 release scheduled for the GENESIS DAO, which will

be open to public participation as it marks the first DAO created using this stack.How will it fare? Doubtless, Field and his colleagues will patiently be on pins and needles as they watch it unfold, informed as they were by their Backfeed experience which showed them that infrastructures require time to evolve. No matter how it pans out, however, his experiment bears out a truth noted by Crain at the podcast’s conclusion: “Finding new ways of collaborating, organizing and building structures and organizational systems is one of the most exciting aspects of blockchain.”



This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/).

Moscow Stock Exchange to Publish ICO Data

https://www.coindesk.com/moscow-stock-exchange-to-publish-ico-data/

Another Investor Lawsuit Claims XRP Is a Security

https://www.coindesk.com/another-investor-lawsuit-claims-xrp-security/

Inside the Sprawling (Ongoing) Vote That Will Decide When EOS Launches

https://www.coindesk.com/inside-sprawling-ongoing-vote-will-decide-eos-launches/

Bank of Italy Official: Central Banks Not Ready to Issue Digital Currencies

https://www.coindesk.com/bank-italy-official-central-banks-not-ready-issue-digital-currencies/