Comment of the Day @CryptoCobain:

EY ICO Report

More than 10 percent of funds raised through “initial coin offerings” are lost or stolen in hacker attacks, according to new research by Ernst & Young that delves into the risks of investing in cryptocurrency projects online.

The professional services firm analyzed more than 372 ICOs, in which new digital currencies are distributed to buyers, and found that roughly $400 million of the total $3.7 billion funds raised to date had been stolen, according to research published on Monday.

Phishing was the most widely used hacking technique for ICOs, with hackers stealing up to $1.5 million in ICO proceeds per month, according to the report.

The research also noted that the volume of ICOs has been slowing since late 2017. Less than 25 percent of ICOs reached their target in November, compared with 90 percent in June.

@annairrea summed it up concisely:

Coinbase Records $1 Billion Revenue

Coinbase, the bitcoin trading broker that has exploded in popularity as cryptocurrencies surge and nose dive, has encountered an unusual problem for a Silicon Valley startup: Too many investors are trying to get in.

The six-year-old company crossed $1 billion in revenue last year, Recode has learned from industry sources, a tremendous rise fueled by layman interest in both bitcoin and competing virtual currencies that users can buy and sell through the app.

During the early days of Bitcoin speculation, the question of whether to invest in Bitcoin or Bitcoin companies was hotly debated. Erik Voorhees himself decided to do both, as did many of the top cryptoasset experts. However, in hindsight, Erik Voorhees has said he was wrong and it has almost always been best to invest in Bitcoin itself.

However, with such impressive revenues, shareholders of Coinbase will likely be exceeding the RoI from a pure Bitcoin investment. This signifies a more mature and stable ecosytem that is allowing companies to build upon this exciting new space.

According to @teddyschleifer VC investors are so desperate to buy Coinbase shares they are doing it illegally:

Bitcoin’s first 2MB block 

@BitGo has adopted SegWit and, due to the huge size of BitGo’s daily transaction volumes, this has had a significant impact on the Bitcoin network. For the first time ever, a Bitcoin block had 2.2MB of transaction data. This has managed to slowly reduce transaction fees and the mempool backlog.

@officialtaras also believes, as do many others, that spam attacks on the Bitcoin network have gone down. As well as the effects of SegWit when it is actually used. 

With the use of lightning taking place on the mainnet – despite bugs – scaling for Bitcoin is looking more optimistic after what has been a very heated scaling debate for the last 3 years.