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spacedace · 9 months

Text

Had a dc x dp brain worm, feel free to use as a prompt <3

Sidenote, I decided to get fancy with the Ancients titles because of course I did lol

Shifting Where = Space (Danny)

Eternal When = Time (Clockwork)

Ever Onward = Speedforce (Ellie)

---

Bruce watched the footage again.

And again.

Again.

It didn’t make sense.

A week ago every television, radio, computer, phone - even the LED billboards - had been taken over to deliver a message. Across the United States. In every territory it held. Every military base. Down in the depths of the oceans where American submarines tried to creep past Atlantian patrols. In the endless cold white of Antarctica. Even far above in the International Space Station. Any place the United States Government had control over, any place one of its citizens found themselves. There was the message.

The face of an entity, human in shape but not in form. Hair as gleaming white as starlight, eyes bright as the twisting dance of the Aurora Borealis, skin as cold and blue as the tail of a comet. The entity wore armor as black as the depths of space with a crown to match, the later glinting and shifting with the twisting birth and death of galaxies. A cloak of nebulae danced down his shoulders, eclipsing the world beyond the entity entirely.

He named himself, jaw tight, expression serious.

High King Phantom of the Infinite Realms.

The Shifting Where. Son of the Eternal When. Father of the Ever Onward. His Epitaphs many and ever growing. The True Balance. The Bridge Between. The Devourer of Dark. The Last Child of Between. The Great One.

King of the Dead. King of the Infinite Worlds. King of so much more than Bruce had ever even known was possible.

King who had declared war. Who marshaled his endless armies. Who spoke of warnings, of efforts to reach a peace, of trying again and again and again to find a way to not plunge into violence and bloodshed. All things living come to call him King in time, he had no want or need to go out and hurry that along. But there were no options left to him now. He had tried for peace. He had been denied.

He would not see his people suffer any longer. Would not see those he’d sworn to lead and protect imprisoned by fools who had sworn themselves enemies to all the afterlives. Would no longer permit the vicious cruelty to continue.

The message was a final warning.

A final offer.

Three days, Phantom said. The United States government would have three days to release their prisoners, to begin the process of dismantling the laws that made death itself an illegal act.

If they refused, he would lead his endless armies personally in the war to come.

It had not been an idle threat.

Three days after the message, after Bruce and the rest of the Justice League scrambled to try and figure out just what it was it was all about, after Justice League Dark’s members shakily took turns explaining just how powerful the being that had gave that message was and how much danger the world was in should he and his armies march upon their world, war came.

Of all places, it began in a town in Illinois.

The sky shattered like broken glass above, Lazarus Green beyond, and the Dead poured out.

It started in Illinois.

It did not end there.

Bruce watched the footage of it all, eyes burning as he watched every second of CCTV footage, every shaky phone camera video, every news broadcast.

Most of them looked human enough. Changed in death, but recognizably human once. A pair of glowing teenagers on a motorcycle, a writhing shadow twisting about at their command sweeping chaos upon the battlefield. A young woman dressed to perform with hair a literal flame, burning bright blue and snapping furiously as she played devastation upon her enemies with her guitar. A child with corpse gray skin and luminescent green hair, flickering in and out of Bruce’s ability to see as if fighting against a law of existence to be visible, screaming orders to a skeleton crew from his place on deck of a 1700s ship that sailed through the sky, disappearing into clouds before raining down attacks from above.

There was more. Glowing skeletons dressed in the fashions of war spanning every culture going back millennia. Robots with weapons far beyond the technology they had even in the League. Creatures of myth and legend. Things of nightmares.

Leading them all, as he had promised, was Phantom.

He looked younger, smaller. Just a boy, really, a gangly teenager that hadn’t quite finished growing into himself. One holding power beyond anything Bruce could ever imagine, but still just a child as far as he could see, no older than Tim who’d just graduated high school. Frantic research found Phantom appearing as far back as human history, but those sightings had to have been after his death. Bruce can’t help but wonder how young the boy had been when he died, how much of that youth still clung to him through all these eons.

It wasn’t something he’d let him self consider normally, not with something like this.

A dangerous unknown appearing without warning and attacking with unimaginable power and seemingly endless forces. It was something that would normally eclipse everything else. Something that would make Bruce put aside the ache at seeing a face so young twisted in rage.

But.

He watched all the footage.

Civilians were put in the crossfire. Were shot at and endangered. Were left terrified and scrambling for safety in buildings that were rapidly being torn away by stray artillery.

But never by Phantom or his armies.

The dead, in fact, went very far out of their way to ensure civilians weren’t harmed. Sweeping people up out of the way of falling debris. Shielding them from attacks that would have most certainly killed a normal human. Some dead even helped evacuate, ushering a frightened and panicked populous to safety as gently as they were capable of. Some of the less human creatures - giant bear-like beings with horns and fangs and ice edging their burly frames - even rushed forward to offer medical aid.

When the sky shattered open and the armies of the dead swept in, they ignored the town below. They focused instead on what was discovered later to be the base of a secretive government agency. The dead’s fight focused on those individuals in sharp white suits, bearing weapons capable of actually injuring King Phantom’s people.

It was these agents that brought the fight to the streets to Amity Park. That fired recklessly and without thought or care to the casualties they could inflict. That didn’t seem to care if they killed a hundred civilians if it meant hurting just one of Phantom’s soldiers.

Bruce watched all the footage.

And again.

Again.

Phantom had declared war.

Phantom spoke in his message of being out of options, of attempting peace. Phantom gave three days time for the release of captives. Phantom lead armies who fought viciously but never once willingly harmed civilians.

Phantom declared war, but he didn’t want it.

“Amanda Waller has reached out.”

Bruce didn’t turn his attention from the screens before him, eyes burning as he followed Phantom as the King dove away from the middle of locked combat to shield a child from a pulse of green energy from something like a grenade another agent in white had carelessly thrown. The child was crying but unharmed. The left pauldron of Phantom’s armor cracked and shattered from a direct shot from the enemy he’d just been fighting that he’d turned his back on, a glowing green liquid uncomfortably like Lazarus Water dripped down from a smoldering wound.

Clark stepped up to stand beside him as he watched, face worn and tired. The League had missed the first battle, but they’d been quick to appear at the rest. Phantom and his army ignored them unless they put themselves purposefully in the way of the fight. They were, as Justice League Dark had warned, vastly out powered by the entities fighting. A hulking giant knight made of shadow riding a nightmarish steed had driven Clark six feet down into the dirt when he’d attempted to make his way to Phantom directly to try and talk to the king.

The depth Clark had ended up felt like a warning of what would happen if he tried to get close to the king again.

It probably was.

“She said they have intel for us.” A faint twitch of fingers, jaw clenching, voice flat in that way that told Bruce his old friend was fighting back anger with everything he had. “That she has options for how to deal with the insurgence.”

Bruce shut off the monitors.

He’d seen enough.

Now was time to get answers to just what, exactly, Amanda Waller and the US government had done to cause the Dead to rise and rage.

---

Part Two Part Three Part Four

#dc x dp #dp x dc #dpxdc #bruce wayne #clark kent #danny fenton #amanda waller #ghost king danny #ghost zone goes to war #space core danny #ancient of space danny #i'm gonna make ancient of the speedforce Elle a thing if it kills me lol #it just fits so well #Bruce's dad senses are tingling #Fright Knight might have been able to bat Clark away but if Bruce gets within a 100ft of Danny it's game over #Bat-Adoption Papers deployed #BatFam up a new member (or three or six)#Amanda Waller is not going to be as persuasive as she thinks she's going to be when it comes to getting the JL onboard with her plans

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chiseler · 3 years

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Ophelia By the Yard

Cobwebbed passages and wax-encrusted candelabra, dungeons festooned with wrist manacles, an iron maiden in every niche, carpets of dry ice fog, dead twig forests, painted hilltop castles, secret doorways through fireplaces or behind beds (both portals of hot passion), crypts, gloomy servants, cracking thunder and flashes of lightning, inexplicably tinted light sources, candles impossibly casting their own shadows, rubber bats on wires, grand staircases, long dining tables, huge doors with prodigiously pendulous knockers to rival anything in Hollywood.

Here was the precise moment — and it was nothing if not inevitable — when the darkness of horror film, both visible and inherent, leapt from the gothic toy box now joined by a no less disconcerting array of color. The best, brightest, sweetest, and most dazzling red-blooded palette that journeyman Italian cinematographers could coax from those tired cameras. Color, both its commercial necessity as well as all it promised the eye, would hereafter re-imagine the genre’s possibilities, in Italy and, gradually, everywhere else.

When color hit the Italian Gothic cycle, a truly new vision was born. In Hammer films and other UK horror productions, the cheapness of Eastmancolor made it possible for blood to be red. Indeed, very red. And, while we shouldn't underestimate the startling impact this had, it was a fairly literal use of the medium. In the Italian movies, and to a large extent in Roger Corman's Poe cycle, color was an unlikely vehicle to further dismantle realism rather than to assert it. Overrun with tinted lights and filters, none of which added to the film’s realistic qualities, the movies became delirious. In Corman's Masque of the Red Death, we learn of an experiment that uses color to drive a man insane; it seems that filmmakers like Corman and Mario Bava were attempting the very same trick on their audiences.

The application of candy-wrapper hues to a haunted castle flick like The Whip and the Body adds a pop art vibe at odds with the genre, and when you get to something like Kill, Baby...Kill! the Gothic trappings are barely able to mask a distinctly modern sensibility, so much so that Fellini could plunder its phantasmal elements for Toby Dammit, fitting them perfectly into his sixties Roman nightmare.

Blood and Black Lace brings the saturated lighting and Gothic fillips into the twentieth century -- a sign creaking in a gale is the first image, translated from Frankensteinland to the exterior of a contemporary fashion house. A literal faceless killer disposes of six women in diabolical ways. The sour-faced detective remains several deaths back on the killer’s trail because the movie knows its audience, knows that it has zero interest in detection, character, motivation — though it’s all inertly there as a pretext for sadism, set-pieces of partially-clad women being hacked up, dot the film like musical numbers or action sequences might appear in a different genre.

Since the 19th-century audience for literary Gothic Horror was comprised of far fewer men than women, would it be fair to ask whether Giallo’s advent might be an instrument of brutal violence, even revenge against “feminine” preoccupations? Consider 1964’s Danza Macabra, the film’s amorous vibes finding their ultimate source in that deathless screen goddess named Barbara Steele, whose marble white flesh photographs like some monument to classicism startled into unwanted Keatsian fever. Her presence practically demands that we ask ourselves: “Who is this wraith howling at a paper moon?” In other words, is it a coincidence that Steele’s “Elizabeth Blackwood” — a revenant temptress and undead sex symbol — hits screens the very same year as Giallo, which would transform Italian cinema into a decades-long death mill for women?

The name “giallo”, meaning yellow, derives from the crime paperbacks issued by Italian publisher Mondadori. The eye-catching covers, featuring a circular illustration of some act of infamy embedded in a yellow panel, became utterly associated with the genre of literature. These books were likely to be by Edgar Wallace, the most popular author in the western world, or Agatha Christie: cardboard characters sliding through the most mechanical of plots; or classier local equivalents, like Francesco Mastriani or Carolina Invernizio. The founding principles laid down concerned the elaborate deceptions concealed by their authors, traps for the unwary reader, and the use of a distinctive design motif. The tendency of the characterisation to lapse into sub-comic-book cliché, the figures incapable of expressing or inspiring real sympathy, was, perhaps, an unintended side-effect of the focus on narrative sleight-of-hand.

When Italian filmmakers sought to translate sensational literature to the screen, they looked to other filmic influences: American film noir, influenced by German expressionism and often made by German emigrés (Lang, Siodmak, Dieterle, Ulmer); and the popular krimi cycle being produced in West Germany, mostly based on Edgar Wallace's leaden "shockers." These deployed stock characters, bizarre methods of murder, deceptive plotting, and exuberant use of chiaroscuro, the stylistic palette of noir intensified by more fog, more shafts of light, more inky shadows. A certain amount of fun, but different from the coming bloodbath because Wallace, despite somewhat fascistic tendencies, is anodyne and anaemic by comparison. No open misogyny, a sadism sublimated in story, a touching faith in Scotland Yard and the class system. In the Giallo, Wallace's more sensational aspects are adopted but made to serve a sensibility quite alien to the stodgy Englander: people are generally rotten, the system stinks, and crime becomes a lurid spectator sport served up to a viewer both thrilled and appalled.

The Giallo fetishizes murder. But then, it fetishizes everything in sight. Every object, every half-filled wine glass and pastel-colored telephone, is photographed with obsessive, product-shot enthusiasm. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring — each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. And yet, for the directors who rode most dexterously the Giallo wave, homicide was something one did to women. Indulging in equal-opportunity lechery was merely an excuse to find other, more violent outlets for their misogyny. Please enter into evidence the demented enthusiasm for woman-killing evinced by Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, et al. — whatever trifling token massacres of men one might exhume from their respective oeuvres are inconsequential. Argento’s defense, “I love women, so I would rather see a beautiful woman killed than an ugly man,” should not satisfy us, and hardly seems designed to (also bear in mind Poe’s assertion that the death of a beautiful young woman was the most poetic of all subjects).

Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, but terror and death are key, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as Giallo-maestros habitually apply to their interior design. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring – each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. That’s one important subtlety often lost amid Giallo’s vast antisocial hemorrhage.

Like a river of blood, homophobia, in the literal meaning of fear rather than hatred, runs through the genre. Lesbians are sinister and gay men barely exist. As we try to work out what in hell the Giallo is really up to, little dabs of dime-store Freudianism seem sufficient.

The filmmakers’ misogyny could be suspect, a sign of compromised masculinity, so they need fictional avatars to cloak their own feverish woman-hating. The subterfuge is clumsy at best, the desultory deceit embarrassingly macho. Giallo’s visual force, powerful enough to divorce eye from mind, is another matter, leaving us demoralized and ethically destitute; our hearts beating with all the righteous indignation of three dead shrubs (and maybe a half-eaten sandwich).

The Giallo is founded on an unstated assumption: the modern world brings forth monsters. Jack the Ripper was an aberration in his day, but now there's a Jack around every corner, behind every piece of modular furniture, every diving helmet lamp. Previously, disturbing events arose from what Ambrose Bierce called The Suitable Surroundings, or what the mad architect in Fritz Lang's The Secret Beyond the Door termed, with sly and sinister euphemism, "propitious rooms." There's the glorious line in Withnail and I: "That's the sort of window faces appear at." But now, in the modern world, evil occurs in the nicest of places, and tonal consistency died in a welter of cheerful stage blood. One needn’t enter an especially Bad Place to meet one’s worst nightmare, or perhaps better to say: the whole bright world qualified as a properly bad place. Imagine the pages of an interior design magazine invaded by anonymous psychopaths intent on painting the gleaming walls red.

Though the victims are overwhelmingly female and their killers male (Argento typically photographed his own leather-gloved hands to stand in for his assassin’s), when the violence becomes over-the-top in its sexualized woman-hating (like the crotch-stabbing in What Have You Done to Solange?), it’s usually a clue that the movie’s murderer will turn out to be female: a simple case of projection. Only Lucio Fulci, the most twisted of the bunch, trained as a doctor and experienced as an art critic, not only assigns misogyny to a straight male killer (The New York Ripper) but plays the killer himself in A Cat in the Brain. Though, in another self-protecting twist of narrative, all psychological explanations in Gialli are bullshit, always. Criminology and clinical psychology are largely ignored, and Argento has a clear preference for outdated theories like the extra chromosome signaling psychopathy (Cat O’Nine Tails). Did anybody use phrenology, or Lombroso’s crackpot physiognomic theories, as plot device?

A tradition of the Giallo is that the characters all tend to be dislikable, something Argento at least resisted in Cat O’ Nine Tails and Deep Red. With disposable characters, each of whom might be the killer and each of whose violent demise is served up as a set-piece, this distancing and contempt might just be a byproduct of the form rather than a principle or ethos, but it’s of some interest, perhaps mitigating the misogyny with a wash of misanthropy. A Unified Field Theory of Gialli would find a more deep-seated reason for the obnoxious characters as well as the stylized snuff and the glamorous presentation. What urge is being satisfied, and why here, now, like this?

Class war? Though prostitute-ripping is encouraged in the Giallo, most victims are wealthy, slashed to ribbons amid opulent interiors. Urbane characters who might previously have graced the sleek “white telephone” films of forties Italian cinema were briefly edged out by neo-realism’s concentration on the working class. Now these exquisite mannequins are trundled back onscreen to be ritually slaughtered for our viewing pleasure.

Victims must always be enviable: either beautiful and sexy or rich and swellegant, or all of the above, so the average moviegoer can rejoice in their dismemberment with a clear conscience. Mario Bava bloodily birthed the genre in Blood and Black Lace (1964), brutally offing fashion models in a variety of Sade-approved ways, the killer a literally faceless assassin into whom the (presumed male) audience could pour their own animosities without ever admitting it, with the female killer finally unmasked to provide exculpatory relief.

If narrative formulas absolve the straight male viewer, compositions have a way of ensnaring him. Beyond that omnivorous indulgence of sensation for its own lurid sake one finds in Giallo, there is a more gilded emphasis placed on Beauty (in the Catholic sense), and it is only the women who are mounted upon its pedestal. That these avatars of beauty are to be savored, ravaged, and brutalized — in that order — is what concerns us. But the sex and the suffering that captivates most sadists is never what registers; no, it is the instance of death, the terror that afflicts the dying woman’s face that resonates. Once again, physical interiors become a negative form of emotional interiority, rooms amplified for the sole purpose of grisly annihilations; a kind of heretical, strictly anti-Catholic transcendence through amoral delight in what otherwise falls under trivial headings, either “the visuals” or “color palette” – neither of which touch the essential nerve endings of Giallo.

Swaddled inside an otherwise hyper-masculine castle lies a windowless chamber with feminine, if not psychotic, decor. Before he tortures and stabs her to death, “Lord Alan Cunningham” (fresh from his sojourn in the asylum) brings his first victim to this pageant of off-gassing plastic furniture, the single most obnoxious vision ever imposed on gothic environs. Risibly overblown ’70s chic rules The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave with nods to Edgar Allan Poe, as the modish Lord juggles sports cars and medieval persecution. Laughs escape the viewer’s throat in dry heaves when each new MacGuffin devours itself without warning. Take “Aunt Agatha” (easily two decades younger than her middle-aged nephews) suddenly rising from her motorized wheelchair, clobbered from behind seconds later, her body dragged into a cage where foxes promptly munch her entrails. Nothing comes of this. The phony paralysis, the aunt’s role in a half-dozen mysteries, which include a battalion of sexy maids in miniskirts and blonde Harpo Marx wigs – all gulped, swallowed.

About the only thing we know for certain is that “Aunt Agatha” is gorgeous. Though, in the end, she’s another casualty of the same nihilism that crashes Giallo aesthetics headlong into Poe country. That is into “Lord Alan” and his gaudy room crowded with designer goods to be catalogued in a horror vacui of visual intrusiveness – a trashy shrine to his late wife, the titular Evelyn. If lapses of good taste define The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, they also reflect Giallo’s abiding obsession with real estate. After all, this Mod hypnagogia has to fill the eye somewhere. Why not bang in the middle of a castle? Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher features a wealthy aristocrat burying his twin sister alive, thereby entombing his own femininity.

Evelyn represents both Usher’s primary theme of the divided self and the obdurate refusal to learn from it. “Alan,” who emerges a moral hero in the end (after his shrink aids and abets his murder spree), remains just as ornery, alienated, and vainglorious as Giallo itself. We’re never told precisely what the film’s fetish objects are supposed to mean. And since the camera seizes upon each one with existential grimness, we’re left with a visual style that begs its own questions.

Function follows form into the abyss. One Ophelia after another dies to satisfy our cruel delectation, even as will-o’-the-wisp light, taken from the bogs and neglected cemeteries of Gothic Horror, finds itself transformed into a crimson-dripping stiletto. Evelyn stands in for all Gialli, a genre which redefines film itself on the narrow front of visual impact: stainless steel cutlery and candy-colored light enact a sentient agenda as color becomes an instrument of hyperbolic misogyny that fills the eye and then some.

As with certain other Italian genres, notably the peplum, smart characterization, solid performances and decent dialogue seem not only unnecessary to the Giallo but unwelcome (the spaghetti western, conversely, in which many of the same directors dabbled, seemed to demand a steady stream of good, cold-blooded wise-cracks). Argento, in pursuit of that “non-Cartesian” quality he admired in Poe, took this to extremes, stringing non-sequiturs together to form absurdist cut-ups, torching his stars’ credibility merely by forcing them to utter such nonsense. And this wasn’t enough: from Suspiria (1977) on, the psychological thriller (which the Giallo is a sub-genre of, only the psychology has to be deliberately nonsensical) was increasingly replaced by the supernatural. So that the laws of nature could be suspended along with the laws of coherent motivation.

In Suspiria and its 1980 quasi-sequel Inferno, the traditional knifings are interspersed with more uncanny events, as when a stone eagle comes to life and somehow makes a seeing-eye dog kill his owner, and there are also grotesque incidents with no relation to story whatever: a shower of maggots, or an attack by voracious rats in Central Park. The Giallo’s quest for a solution, inspired as it was by the old-school whodunits, is all but abandoned, replaced by the search for the next sensational set-piece.

Argento’s villains are now witches, but, abandoning centuries of tradition, these witches show more interest in stabbing their fellow women with kitchen knives than with worshipping Satan or riding broomsticks. Regardless of who they’re meant to be, Argento’s characters must express his desires, enact the atrocities he dreams of. And inhabit places built for his aesthetic pleasure rather than their own. Following Bava’s cue, he saturates his rooms in light blasted through colored gels, making every scene a stained-glass icon, no naturalistic explanation offered for the lurid tinted hues. Just as no explanation is offered for the presence of a room full of coiled razor-wire in a ballet school, or for the behavior of the young woman who throws herself into its midst without looking.

Dario Argento’s true significance, at least with respect to Giallo, was perceiving in the nick of time the almost incandescent obviousness of its limitations; that Italian commercial cinema’s garish, polychromatic spin on the garden-variety psychological thriller – departing from its forebears mainly in the rampant senselessness of its “psychology” – had Dead End written all over it. It could never last. On the other hand, Giallo does take a fresh turn with Argento’s Inferno, thanks in no small measure to a woman screenwriter who sadly remains uncredited. Daria Nicolodi explains that “having fought so hard to see my humble but excellent work in Suspiria recognized (up until a few days before the première I didn’t know if I would see my name in the film credits), I didn’t want to live through that again, so I said, ‘Do as you please, in any case, the story will talk for me because I wrote it.’”

Daria Nicolodi

Nicolodi’s conception humanizes (it would be tempting to say “feminizes”) Argento’s usual sanguinary exercises du style, while at the same time summoning legitimate psychology. This has nothing to do with strong characterization – indeed, the characters barely speak – and everything to do with the elemental power of water, fire, wind.… Inferno rescues Giallo by plunging it into seemingly endless visual interludes, a cinema that draws its strength from absence.

by The Chiselers

Daniel Riccuito, David Cairns, Tom Sutpen, and Richard Chetwynd

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weekinethereum · 6 years

Text

January 18, 2018

Ethereum News and Links

Protocol

David Knott: Construction of a Plasma Chain 0x1. Here's the OMG Plasma repo

Truebit's plasma repo

Last Friday's core devs call. Agenda.

Latest Casper standup

Danny Ryan on the Casper testnet's networking issues

Vitalik compares FFG to PBFT

State-minimised executions

ZkSTARK paper published

Yellow paper is being updated

Stuff for developers

Ethereum Alarm Clock v0.9.0

Ganache v1.1

solidity highlighting coming with next github/linguist release

Dapphub's Seth can now deploy code from your Ledger and broadcast to Infura

Token standard proposals

ERC820. Esteban Ordano on why we need an improved non-fungible standard

Avsa: everything you need to know about ERC777, but were afraid to ask

Tutorials

CryptoZombies lesson 3 is out

Eth development walkthrough part 1 and part 2

Three part tutorial using a notary service

Zeppelin's gentle intro to Eth programming, part 3

Jon Evans in TechCrunch: Eth programming for web devs

Ecosystem

New York Times: Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble examines whether Ethereum can fix what ails the web.

Etherprise Ethereum Alliance hires its first executive director: Ron Resnick

How miners could be messing with transactions

Simon de la Rouviere: Memetic Singularity Economics Using Curation Markets & Meme Futures

Token curated registries as peer review systems

Eth Community Conference in Paris on March 8 through 10.

Vitalik: Collateralized debt obligations for issuer-backed tokens. Interesting idea to slice up the counterparty risk for issuer-backed stable coins, thus avoiding the systemic risk of a widely adopted on-chain stable coin

Project Updates

Brave growth statistics and BAT 2018 goals

Brave is also giving away more tokens from the user growth pool

Digix update -- aiming at q1 launch

Aragon Q4 dev update and transparency

Iconomi Dec update

Mercury Protocol 2018 roadmap

VariabL Q4 update

uPort year in review and 2018 look ahead

Token Sales

Building the Interactive Token Sale protocol

Economics of the Dether token

Interviews, Videos and Talks

EthLondon: Jaak, Alice.si, Oraclize.it

I talk to Aragon's Luis Cuende and Maria Gomez

Joe Lubin print interview with Factor Daily

Taylor Gerring on Chicago Tonight

General

"Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You're Not" NYTimes on crypto bros in SF. Maybe a bit of a hit piece, but not a good look.

The antidote to crypto bros: Jeremiah Nichol tells the true story of Joe, who uses crypto gains to help natural disaster victims.

More NYT: Will the art market's next big thing be crypto?

Cornell paper on decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum. tl;dr is Ethereum is more decentralized.

Linda Xie: tips for newcomers

Vitalik: "2018 . . . will be the year of action. Everyone in the Ethereum space recognizes that the world is watching, and we are ready to deliver."

Dallas Mavs will accept Bitcoin, Ether, and maybe some tokens

Dates of note

From Token Sale Calendar.

Upcoming dates:

February 1 – Winding Tree

February 7 – Dether

February 16-18 -- EthDenver

Mar 8-10 -- Ethereum Community Conference in Paris

Ongoing token sales:

Nous Platform

Relest

Dopameme

Hirematch

ScriptDrop

WARNING: list may include or even likely includes scams and quasi-scams. Do your own research and due diligence before putting value at risk.

[I aim for a relatively comprehensive list of Ethereum sales, but make no warranty as to even whether they are legit; as such, I thus likewise warrant nothing about whether any will produce a satisfactory return. I have passed the CFA exams, but this is not investment advice.]

If you appreciate this newsletter, thank ConsenSys

I'm thankful that ConsenSys has brought me on as an employee and given me time to do this newsletter.

Editorial control is 100% me. If you're unhappy with editorial decisions, blame me first and last.

Sharing

Here's the link: http://www.weekinethereum.com/post/169847267578/january-18-2018 Follow me on Twitter? @evan_van_ness

This newsletter is supported by ConsenSys (surely you have seen that we're hiring?) and Status.im. Many thanks to both.

#ethereum

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cryptnus-blog · 5 years

Text

Bitcoin Bounces above $4,000 as Santa Rally Brings Relief to Markets: BTCManager’s Week in Review

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/12/bitcoin-bounces-above-4000-as-santa-rally-brings-relief-to-markets-btcmanagers-week-in-review/

Bitcoin Bounces above $4,000 as Santa Rally Brings Relief to Markets: BTCManager’s Week in Review

The price of bitcoin rallied by over 20 percent to close the week above the $4,000 thanks to a “Santa Rally ahead of Christmas.

After weeks of red markets, this rally provided some relief to crypto investors as the market seems undecided on whether it wants to find a new bottom or rally into the new year. As usual, opinions about where bitcoin is heading next mixed. Andrey Alekhin, CEO of blockchain art laboratory Snark.art, said:

“I don’t think that this is the end of a bear trend. At least not yet. As a result of a steady decline in the crypto markets, many blockchain startups have been cutting down their activity or even leaving the market entirely. We’ve seen that many blockchain developers are looking for jobs now — this was not the case a few months ago. Startups liquidating their positions in crypto to survive will continue for some time, as will the bear market.”

Outspoke Bitcoin advocate, John McAfee, on the other hand, is standing by his prediction that bitcoin will continue to gain value and hit one million dollars by 2020. He tweeted:

“Bitcoin now over $4,000. It’s looking more and more like the market has turned. If it has turned, this is only the beginning. Perhaps 2019 will be the year future generations will look back on and name: ‘the year of emergence.’”

Interestingly, one of the most vocal Bitcoin price predictors, Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, announced he would no longer make price predictions after having to adjust his 2018-year-end target price downwards several times throughout the year from his initial $25,000 forecast.

The big winner in the altcoin market was Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which rallied by over 130 percent week-on-week to reach almost double the value of its new rival Bitcoin SV. With the new brand of Bitcoin SV complete, there is no longer any doubt which Bitcoin Cash is “the real Bitcoin Cash” as the market decided that the Bitcoin ABC upgraded version of Bitcoin Cash gets to keep the name.

This week’s contributions were provided by Aisshwarya Tiwari, Ogwu Osaemezu Emmanuel, and Shaurya Malwa.

Cryptocurrency’s first killer application may be well on its way from the rosters of Facebook, a company ironically known for practices contrary to the ethos of decentralized currencies and blockchains, reported South China Morning Post on December 21, 2018.

The San Francisco-headquartered social media giant is leveraging India’s mammoth $69 billion remittance market, which also forms the world’s largest. As per sources close to the matter, Facebook will deploy a stablecoin offering on its widely-popular WhatsApp service mobile application that initially began as a messaging platform but has since grown to offer an umbrella of products including micro-payments.

Facebook’s stablecoin endeavor aims to lower the costs of remittances while eliminating the notorious price volatility with which digital tokens are infamously associated.

At the time of writing, necessary details of the development remain unknown. However, it is confirmed that Facebook is working on a robust strategy to avoid untoward occurrences once the stablecoin releases, including a plan to develop a custodial fund that holds various currencies and protects the value of the token.

These are not the best of times indeed for Bitmain, the world’s largest manufacturer of Bitcoin mining equipment. Hong Kong’s stock market regulator, HKEX has made it clear that it would not approve the initial public offering (IPO) applications of DLT-linked firms until the region formulates a robust regulatory framework to govern its blockchain technology and cryptocurrency space, reported local news source, the South China Morning Post on December 19, 2018.

Per sources close to the development, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX), which is the country’s stock market regulator, has reportedly hinted it would not give Bitmain the go-ahead to launch an initial public offering, citing the premature and unregulated nature of the blockchain industry.

“It is premature for any cryptocurrency-linked business to conduct an IPO in Hong Kong before a solid regulatory framework is put in place by the authorities,” two anonymous sources reportedly told the South China Morning Post.

As reported by BTCManager in July 2018, Bitmain raised $1 billion in its pre-IPO funding round led by Tencent and SoftBank, after previously securing about $400 million from its funding round led by Sequoia Capital, as part of its target to raise at least $3 million before the commencement of its IPO. Having succeeded in securing vast amounts of funds, in September Bitmain officially filed a draft application to earn a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao stated that despite the ongoing bear market, he’s confident about the future of cryptocurrencies. On December 19, 2018, CZ gave a live interview to Bloomberg and opined that digital currencies are “here to stay.”

The monumental 2017 crypto bull run is still fresh in the minds of crypto proponents. While many argue that the exorbitant crypto rally was mostly due to market speculation, one cannot deny its impact on the crypto verse.

During his interview, CZ admitted that Bitcoin’s price fluctuation in 2017 was extreme, and the industry is now going through a steady correction phase. He remained positive about the future of the crypto industry, however, stating that cryptocurrency projects will continue to develop and drive towards mainstream adoption.

He added that development of dApps on various blockchains could prove to be a critical factor for the rapid adoption of DLT and digital currencies.

CZ answered questions related to real-world use cases of blockchain technology, the scope for dApps in the future, and the recent blockchain conference hosted by Binance in Singapore.

Speaking on the fluctuations in the price of cryptocurrencies, CZ explained that it is mostly the speculators and short-term traders who are concerned with crypto prices and that “the industry is going to grow by the builders, by the guys who actually build applications.”

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), a non-ministerial department of the British government in charge of the collection of taxes, has published a paper highlighting the various types of fees applicable to blockchain-based virtual currencies and how cryptocurrency traders should handle their cryptos, according to a report released December 20, 2018, by the agency.

The HMRC has said that the small-scale buying and selling of cryptoassets by individuals can be categorized as an investment activity, and as such, it attracts a Capital Gains Tax.

However, it further stated that if the transaction is considered to be trading, then the trader will be required to pay income tax on his profit and losses, instead of a Capital Gains Tax.

In essence, individuals residing in the UK who are paid in bitcoin and other digital assets by their employers, carry out cryptocurrency mining operations, or receive airdrops for services rendered to blockchain projects, are liable to pay income tax and national insurance contributions.

The agency also advised that cryptoassets holders need to accurately calculate their gain or loss when they dispose of their digital assets by way of selling them for money, swapping them for other cryptoassets, using them to make payments or sending them to another person, to find out whether they need to remit Capital Gains Tax.

Although the agency has made it clear that this revised guidance only applies to individual crypto traders, it has however reportedly hinted it would formulate new guidelines for bitcoin and altcoin-linked businesses and companies in the near-term.

A recent Coinbase Medium post, published on December 18, 2018, suggests that the cryptocurrency exchange platform will now support DAI (DAI), Golem (GNT), Maker (MKR), and Zilliqa (ZIL) crypto tokens. Support for these four cryptocurrencies will initially be available on Coinbase Pro.

Coinbase continues to roll out support for new cryptocurrencies. The exchange announced on December 18, 2018, that its Coinbase Pro platform would allow users to trade DAI, GNT, MKR, and ZIL digital currencies. Support for the aforementioned four cryptocurrencies will be available in the UK, Canada, EU, Singapore, and Australia.

The post highlighted that support for GNT and DAI would also be available in the US, except for the city of New York. Notably, MKR and ZIL cryptocurrencies will not be available to customers in the U.S., presumably due to ambiguity regarding regulations. Also, the newly listed crypto assets are not yet available on Coinbase.com or their mobile app. The exchange stated that a separate announcement would be made to that effect.

Coinbase has been on a cryptocurrency enlisting spree lately. On October 24, 2018, the exchange platform listed Circle’s dollar-pegged USDC, making it the first instance of a stablecoin’s listing. Similarly, the exchange-listed Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) on November 3, 2018, which soon sparked a mini-rally for the web browser’s cryptocurrency.

Interestingly, Coinbase had hinted in July 2018, that it is “exploring” the addition of several other crypto assets, including Cardano (ADA), Stellar Lumens (XML), Zcash (ZEC), and 0x (ZRX).

Category: Adoption, Altcoins, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Development, Exchange, News

Tags: adoption, bitcoin news, blockchain technology, Coinbase, cryptocurrencies, exchange, Regulations

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Two US-Audited Stablecoins Debut, Experts See Massive Impact on Crypto Market

As Cointelegraph reported on Sept. 10, with the approval of the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), Paxos and Gemini officially announced the introduction of two stablecoins called the “Gemini dollar (GUSD)” and the “Paxos Standard (PAX).” Both stablecoins are backed by the U.S. dollar on a 1:1 basis, with every unit of GUST and PAX representing the value of one U.S. dollar.

Experts believe that the emergence of fully audited, legitimate and licensed stablecoins will have a profound impact on the crypto market, especially in the long-term, as it provides investors a way to retain value without being exposed to the volatility of the market.

Significance of GUSD and PAX deploying on Ethereum

Cameron Winklevoss, the co-founder and president of United States-based regulated cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, said in an official statement that it has launched GUSD on the Ethereum blockchain network utilizing the ERC-20 token standard.

Prior to the launch of GUSD and PAX, only two stablecoins — Tether (USDT) and TrueUSD (TUSD) — existed in the market, both of which have been integrated by major cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Bitfinex, OKEx, Huobi and HitBTC.

Tether and TrueUSD deployed USDT and TUSD on the Omni and TrustToken blockchain networks rather than relying on the reputable ERC-20 token contract of Ethereum.

Brandon Arvanaghi, the core developer of GUSD, stated that the Gemini dollar is the first stablecoin, alongside PAX, to be deployed on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token, with the entire system being integrated into the smart contracts of Ethereum.

The compatibility of GUSD and PAX with the Ethereum blockchain allows for the transfer of the two stablecoins through the Ethereum network with the existing infrastructure designed for tokens. For instance, the Gemini dollar can be transferred on the Ethereum network through wallets like MetaMask and systems such as MyCrypto and MyEtherWallet, without relying on third-party service providers and exchanges.

Tether and TrueUSD have their own wallets on their respective blockchain networks. But, for usability and accessibility, it is advantageous to have stablecoins that can be seamlessly sent and received on an infrastructure that the vast majority of cryptocurrency users are already familiar with.

The white paper of GUSD reads:

“Gemini dollars are created at the time of withdrawal from the Gemini platform. Gemini customers may exchange U.S. dollars for Gemini dollars at a 1:1 exchange rate by initiating a withdrawal of Gemini dollars from their Gemini account to any Ethereum address they specify. The U.S. dollar amount of Gemini dollars is debited from a customer’s Gemini account balance at the time of withdrawal.”

Charles Cascarilla, the co-founder and CEO of Paxos, emphasized that immutability and transparency in the structure of stablecoins is crucial for decentralized accounting. As PAX operates as a token on the Ethereum network, anyone on the Ethereum blockchain can verify and evaluate the smart contract of GUSD and PAX.

“In the current marketplace, the biggest hindrances to digital asset adoption are trust and volatility. As a regulated trust with a 1:1 dollar-collateralized stablecoin, we believe we are offering an asset that improves on the utility of money,” Cascarilla said.

Integration of Global Finance to Crypto Finance

In the early days of Bitcoin, many investors in the cryptocurrency market called for an autonomous economy that operates independently from the broader financial market and government-controlled markets.

As the market started to grow and regulated financial institutions began to take interest in the market, the cryptocurrency market has become more intertwined with the global finance sector.

In terms of value, cryptocurrencies generally make up a practical store of value due to their lack of correlation to the broader financial markets, as Bitwise Asset Management vice president of R&D Matt Hougan explained:

“Non-correlation is not the same as inverse correlation, so there’s no guarantee that when the market goes down crypto will go up. Over the long term, we think the fundamental drivers of crypto are different from the fundamental driver of equities and other assets, and we would expect the low correlation to persist.”

The lack of correlation between cryptocurrencies and the global market has been considered to be one of the strongest points of the asset class that may enable major cryptocurrencies to potentially find competition in the offshore banking market, given the increasing crackdown on overseas savings accounts by governments like China and the ability of cryptocurrencies to hold value in a secure and efficient manner.

But, the integration of global finance into crypto finance through the adoption of fiat currency-backed cryptocurrencies, custodian solutions offered by banks and strict financial regulations will not lead to an increase in correlation of the value between cryptocurrencies and conventional assets.

Rather, it will ease the process for institutional investors to commit to the cryptocurrency market and individual users, like merchants and casual users, to escape extreme volatility in the market to utilize decentralized financial networks.

Erik Voorhees, the CEO of ShapeShift, noted that the integration of global finance into crypto finance is monumental and that it needs to continue for the asset class to survive and eventually compete against reserve currencies and traditional stores of value.

“It’s a big deal and an important step. Global finance is becoming further integrated with crypto finance. All that crypto needs in order to win is for this to continue.”

The role of Gemini in the institutionalization of crypto

Throughout 2018, Gemini and the Winklevoss twins have directed their efforts toward institutionalizing the cryptocurrency sector, enabling digital assets to be more favorable toward institutions and large-scale investors.

The Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) proposal by the Winklevoss twins filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is well documented. To increase the probability of its approval, Gemini secured various partnerships with regulated financial institutions, including Nasdaq, to better monitor and oversee the cryptocurrency market.

In July, the SEC ultimately rejected the Bitcoin ETF proposal of the Winklevoss twins filed by Bats BZX Exchange, Inc. (BZX), citing issues in its pricing model, saying that it will not allow ETFs to base the value of Bitcoin on a cryptocurrency exchange, which is vulnerable to manipulation:

“Rather, the Commission is disapproving this proposed rule change because […] BZX has not met its burden under the Exchange Act and the Commission’s Rules of Practice to demonstrate that its proposal is consistent with the requirements of the Exchange Act […] in particular the requirement that its rules be designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices.”

Still, despite the rejection of the ETF, the partnership between Gemini and Nasdaq stands, and the disapproval of the ETF allowed other companies that have filed Bitcoin ETFs with the SEC to revise their filings accordingly, further increasing chances of approval.

Since April of this year, Gemini has been working closely with Nasdaq to integrate market compliance and surveillance programs to appeal to regulators and to legitimize the cryptocurrency exchange market.

The first step toward the institutionalization of a market is to create trusted custody solutions and appropriately regulate the spot market of the asset class to ensure stability and transparency.

The efforts of Gemini and other financial institutions like ICE — the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — and Nasdaq to evolve cryptocurrencies into a well-regulated, structured and transparent asset class are expected to have a large impact on the long-term growth of the industry. Tyler Winklevoss, the CEO of Gemini, said:

“Since launch, Gemini has aggressively pursued comprehensive compliance and surveillance programs, which we believe betters our exchange and the cryptocurrency industry as a whole. Our deployment of Nasdaq’s SMARTS Market Surveillance will help ensure that Gemini is a rules-based marketplace for all market participants.”

Controversy around Tether, investors happy to see alternative stablecoins

For nearly four years, since its launch in 2014, Tether has been the dominant force in the cryptocurrency exchange market as the most widely utilized stablecoin.

However, many analysts and investors in the cryptocurrency space have heavily criticized Tether since its inception due to the lack of transparency and clarity on its origin, audit reports and structure.

The controversy around Tether began in 2017, when a set of 13.4 million confidential electronic documents relating to offshore investments called the “Paradise Papers” were released by German reporters Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer.

The Paradise Papers disclosed a connection between Tether and Bitfinex officials Philip Potter and Giancarlo Devasini, who established Tether Holdings Limited in 2014.

Tether was brought into the cryptocurrency market by the integration of Bitfinex, one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges in the global market. As the volume of Tether continued to increase and more investors started to rely on USDT to hedge the value of their holdings to U.S. dollars, major exchanges like OKEx, Huobi and Binance adopted USDT as the primary stablecoin.

For many years, investors have publicly expressed their dissatisfaction in the opaque structure of Tether, as it became one of the core components of the cryptocurrency exchange market. Throughout this year, Tether consistently demonstrated a daily trading volume of over $3 billion, which is twice larger than that of Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency in the world.

Hence, in a hypothetical situation in which Tether Holdings files for bankruptcy and the stablecoin does not represent several billion dollars — contrary to its balance sheet — then the entire global cryptocurrency market could suffer greatly.

In response to criticisms, Tether Holdings released audit results in June through law firm Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan LLP, demonstrating that it has more than enough funds to cover the billions of dollars its balance sheet portrays. At the time, Tether CEO J.L. van der Velde said:

“Despite speculation, we have consistently stated that Tether is backed by USD reserves at or exceeding the Tethers in circulation at a given moment, and we’re glad to have independent verification of this to answer some of the questions posed by the public.”

However, the fact that the audit result was not published by a widely recognized accounting firm and that Tether canceled the audit from Friedman LLP led the controversy around the stablecoin to intensify.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, American accountant and auditor Abhishek Shah said in March:

“The reason given by Tether was certainly not clear and precise, neither acceptable. An audit is to be allowed as much time as required, albeit the audit needs to be concluded before the due date. It is not a reasonable ground, and I’ve personally not heard of such a reason in my auditing career.”

For over four years, Tether has always been at the center of controversy and has struggled to definitively prove its legitimacy through trusted third-party audits. As such, investors such as Multicoin Capital partner Tushar Jain said that GUSD and PAX can be considered as improvements over Tether:

“This is such a huge improvement over Tether. It reduces systemic risk in the whole crypto ecosystem. Tether is a systemic risk in that, if it explodes, billions of dollars could effectively disappear and cause exchange insolvencies. An alternative to Tether hugely reduces that risk.”

Professor at the University of California is not convinced

In an op-ed published in The Guardian, Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, firmly stated that he believes stablecoins do not solve the stability issue in the cryptocurrency sector.

As an example, Eichengreen offered the dilemma of cryptocurrency-accepting merchants. He stated that merchants are not able to price goods based on Bitcoin, given the extreme volatility rate of the currency. But, stablecoins can be accepted by merchants as a primary currency because their value is backed by fiat currencies.

“Stablecoins purport to solve these problems. Because their value is stable in terms of dollars or their equivalent, they are attractive as units of account and stores of value. They are not mere vehicles for financial speculation. But this doesn’t mean that they are viable.”

Still, regardless of the stability in the value of stablecoins, Eichengreen said that stablecoins are still not viable for various reasons, with the main factor being the vulnerability of the market to tax evaders and criminals.

“This exchange may be attractive to money launderers and tax evaders, but not to others. In other words, it is not obvious that the model will scale, or that governments will let it.”

The approval of GUSD and PAX by NYDFS directly refutes the two arguments of Eichengreen. A distinguished government body — in this case, the state of New York — regulated and licensed the launch of the two stablecoins.

Moreover, due to their compatibility with Ethereum as ERC-20 tokens, GUSD and PAX do not need to depend on an exchange. Even if they did, cryptocurrency exchanges are so heavily regulated in most major markets that it is highly impractical for criminals to attempt to utilize cryptocurrencies to launder money with stablecoins.