Coke’s on the blockchain now

A hardware hacker from Brazil has developed an automated vending machine that delivers Coca-Cola in exchange for Bitcoin. But don’t get your hopes up, it’ll probably be a while before we see these in the wild.

The dev used a handful of off-the-shelf materials like a Raspberry Pi, water pump, touch screen, some wood, and of course some programming know-how, to build the machine.

Here’s how the Bitcoin-vending machine works:

From the video, it appears that the customer scans a QR code which requests a BTC payment, the customer then issues the payment using their wallet, and once the payment is received by the machine, it dispenses the Coca-Cola.

The developer used the Lightning Network to process the Bitcoin payments in a fast and inexpensive way.

But sadly, right now the vending machine is just a proof-of-concept, and of course has no affiliation to the actual Coca-Cola company. Even so, I would certainly have one of these rigged up – next to my Bitcoin-powered candy dispenser of course.

If you were unaware, the Lightning Network sits on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain and is often touted as a solution to its blockchain’s scalability problems. While still in its early days, the Lightning Network makes sending small amounts of Bitcoin much faster.

Developers are taking advantage of this network to demonstrate its potential, one web app sold off pixels on a digital graffiti board for one satoshi a piece, allowing users to draw whatever they wanted… Penises.

Other developers have also made use of the Lightning Network’s high speed to bring roulette to the blockchain masses.

Whoever thought that blockchain would become responsible for inadvertently rotting our teeth.

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Only 2% of Japan’s 340,000 money laundering cases involve cryptocurrency

Japan’s efforts to regulate the cryptocurrency industry might have come a little later than needed, as the country has seen nearly 6,000 cases of money laundering involving cryptocurrency so far in 2018.

According to an official police document, there have been nearly 6,000 cases of cryptocurrency-based money laundering reported to the Japanese police between January and October of this year, the Japan Times reports .

This is a dramatic increase over the 669 cases that were reported in the last nine months of 2017.

All that said, it’s important to recognize that Japan has been leading the way when it comes to regulating cryptocurrency . So it seems the country’s plan to set up frameworks to report money laundering cases are actually working.

Indeed, a National Police Agency (NPA) spokesperson stated that the rise in reported cases has come as a result of cryptocurrency exchanges actually reporting suspicious trading behavior.

“We have seen some large-scale cryptocurrency thefts, and operators are believed to be scrutinizing transactions more rigorously,” the official said.

One of the many challenges Japan appears to be facing in these money laundering cases are people with Japanese addresses but login to their accounts from overseas. It makes policing the cases very difficult. How Japan will deal with these remains to be seen.

While 6,000 might seem like a huge number, the report disclosed that there were over 340,000 suspected cases of money laundering and abuse across all reported financial transactions, during the same time period.

Cryptocurrency money laundering then, makes up less than 2 percent of this figure, making it seem somewhat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Not that it will stop Japan going after the crooks. The country recently announced it would be systematically hunting cryptocurrency tax evaders who have earn more than $1,700 a year from trading digital assets.

Using cryptocurrency to fight spam is a terrible idea

Email spam have been increasingly becoming a menace, as more and more data breaches happen and end up leaking people’s email IDs. The trend has inspired many companies to build up solutions to fight the problem — one such popular solution has been to bounce emails that do not come from known email IDs.

The way these services usually work is that the user whitelists the contacts they want to receive emails from. Other senders, who are not on the whitelist, receive an automated email, which allows them to choose from two options, ‘get whitelisted’ or ‘pay’.

Most of these services pay the users in fiat currencies, however there are some that pay them in cryptocurrencies.

For example, Earnom , allows the users to get paid in Bitcoins in order to receive the email from non-whitelisted contacts, or the email gets bounced.

BitBounce , a blockchain startup, has put the existing concept of users getting paid to receive unwarranted emails in their inbox on blockchain. What’s different about BitBounce from Earnom and the rest of the competitors is that it allows payments in its own native cryptocurrency, Credo token, apart from Bitcoin. The default fee for one email is $0.05, of which 70% goes to the user, but users can set it lower or higher if they desire.

Their app has definitely managed to get a lot of traction with over 50,000 downloads and 4.5 rating on Google Play Store . But the question remains, are transactions made in CREDO token more efficient than in fiat or Bitcoin?

With cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the transaction costs are huge, and the transaction happens much slower if the arbitrage cost paid is small. These cryptocurrencies are not exactly viable for frequent minor transactions. Even though, BitBounce has its own tokens, it is still based on Ethereum’s blockchain.

The transaction fee on Ethereum’s blockchain still applies to CREDO tokens. The problem was also admitted by BitBounce on their blog when it had to halt distributing further CREDO tokens for a while because Ethereum’s transaction fee spiked up to about $1 per transaction or more.

Recently there has been a trend of putting everything on blockchain and raise an ICO. But, can blockchain really make everything better? It doesn’t seem to be helping in the fight against spam at least — not the way it’s currently being used.