How To Avoid Risk When Choosing A Cryptocurrency Exchange
A high-profile Canadian cryptocurrency exchange recently made international news for troubling problems. Among the many concerning details that have recently come to light, according to news reports, the founder of the exchange traveled to India and passed away during the trip, leaving behind no one to access the exchange’s private keys to wallets holding its customers’ cryptocurrencies. The exchange filed for bankruptcy reporting almost $200 million in cryptocurrency held on behalf of its customers. There is uncertainty as to how much of that value will be inaccessible or potentially lost forever.
Most of that value rightfully belongs to cryptocurrency traders, who are now in legal and financial limbo, hoping the funds will eventually reappear while waiting for authorities to complete ongoing investigations.
Four Key Tools Every Cryptocurrency Trader Should Use
If you’re an aspiring cryptocurrency trader, learning the basics can be a bit daunting. After all, we’re dealing with new, innovative and exciting technology. Additionally, technological advances are occurring in real time, so traders have their hands full keeping pace with new developments.
Fortunately, there are some key tools you can use to make the process a lot easier.
To help improve your trading experience, let’s take a closer look at four of the most popular trading tools among traders of all skill levels.
Proof Of Work vs. Proof Of Stake: What’s The Difference?
Ethereum is one of the most popular and widely-adopted cryptocurrency projects. Therefore, any significant change to its protocol is interesting news for traders.
This year could prove to be one of the most pivotal in Ethereum’s development, as several key changes are on the horizon. These changes include the upcoming Constantinople hard fork and a planned shift from proof of work to proof of stake. The latter would be the most substantial and important change in Ethereum’s history.
To help you better understand what these concepts mean, let’s take a closer look at the basics of proof of work and proof of stake and how they differ in key respects.
Ethereum Hard Fork Now Complete!
The Ethereum fork, which is called the Constantinople fork is now complete. This network hard fork, which is part of scheduled protocol upgrades, was originally scheduled to be activated on January 16th, 2019. However, it was cancelled 36 hours prior due to a security vulnerability identified in one of the EIP’s (EIP 1283). The upgrade was revisited earlier this month by the Ethereum community and rescheduled to occur today at block 7,280,000.
Constantinople is one of the key milestones in Ethereum’s roadmap. The changes in this upgrade will lay the platform for Ethereum’s protocol shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). These updates are integral to Ethereum’s long-term strategy of increasing network capacity, while decreasing energy consumption from mining.
This hard fork was widely expected to be non-contentious and was not expected to create two different cryptocurrencies.
ETH deposits and withdrawals were disabled during the fork. Now that the fork is complete and the network has reached consensus (~25 blocks generated with the new consensus rules) deposits and withdraws are being re-enabled.
