Raúl Marcos' Crypto News #3: Kik's ICO, Bitcoin, harmful blockchains, Turing completeness, W-ETH

Kik is a billion dollar chat app used by +300M users, and they plan to create a token, KIN, to be used in all the transactions inside the app. Obviously, this ICO is long awaited: it’s the first time a company with millions of users does an ICO, and a successful ICO and token implementation will bring a lot of companies trying to replicate it.

The date of the ICO hasn’t been announced yet, but the mandatory registration is already open. The ICO will be capped to $75M, and they will sell 10% of the tokens, which is very low.

Following Bitcoin news is always entertaining, the drama never ends. Now people are taking sides in the next war: the activation, or not, of the second part of Segwit2x (2mb blocks). Obviously, both sides accuse the other of being greedy, and of trying to destroy Bitcoin. I liked this article because of his point of view: miners and startups have more incentives than developers for Bitcoin’s success because they have millions at stake.

This article draws a comparison of Bitcoin and Ethereum with other past decentralized projects like TCP/IP, Wikipedia or Unix that I find very interesting. All of these projects follow the Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of users, but only crypto projects have been able to capture part of that value. Worth reading.

Vlad Zamfir is one of the smartest guys working in blockchains. Right now, he is leading the development of Casper, the protocol that will enable PoS (Proof of Stake) in Ethereum, so it’s always great to listen to him. In this article, he starts a discussion about the problems that blockchains present: tax evasion, terrorism financing, right to be forgotten, etc. There are a lot of harmful use cases, and it’s not clear how they can be fought, especially when blockchain’s properties foster them.

You have probably heard that Ethereum is Turing complete, and Bitcoin is not. What does that mean? It means that in Ethereum you can write programs (the famous smart contracts) that can solve any computational problem. But then Vitalik comes and says that what is really important is having rich statefulness. This article is the best explanation I found when I was looking for answers.

This page would have saved me a few hours the first time I used a decentralized exchange, oasisdex.com, and I saw that all the tradings were done with W-ETH, not ETH, and I didn’t know what was a W-ETH, and how I could get one.

TL;DR: in decentralized exchanges only tokens that comply with a specific standard (ERC20) can be traded. ETH doesn’t, so you have to trade it for an ERC20 complaint token, W-ETH.