Reddit’s biggest cryptocurrency forum is banning memes and shilling

Reddit has gradually cemented its reputation as the go-to place for all sorts of banter and discussions around the cryptocurrency and blockchain space – and the popular /r/Cryptocurrency forum has played a central role in this trend. But due to its unexpected growth over the past few months, /r/Cryptocurrency is changing its rules .

In a recent post , the community’s moderators announced the updated policy aims to curb a growing number of co-ordinated misinformation campaigns from individuals seeking to benefit from manipulating the market.

“After receiving confirmation from the Reddit Admins, of numerous professional and highly-orchestrated manipulation groups being identified, as well as having the Reddit Admins site-ban more than 800+ manipulator accounts in a single day,” the moderators explained, “We set about to make a series of rule changes that we believe will combat these challenges.”

For starters, the community is moving all comedy and meme posts to the new /r/Cryptocurrencymemes subreddit, which will be precisely dedicated to this sort of content. This means all meme submissions will now be removed from the main subreddit, and moved to the newly founded one.

The moderator team is also upping its criteria for what falls under the “Low Quality/Off-Topic Posts” category. “ Unfortunately, professional shilling and manipulation groups use a frequent flow of low-quality posts about a coin to try and promote their interests,” the announcement read.

“This action is ultimately misguided, while the goal is to promote their coin to adopt more users, their coin just becomes seen as spammy by the larger crypto community and it ends up hurting everyone involved,” it continued. “In order to reduce spam and shilling attacks, we’re going to be prohibiting a number of types of posts from being standalone posts.”

Instead, users are now encouraged to post such content in the “Daily Discussion Thread” pinned at the top of the community.

Lastly, the /r/Cryptocurrency team warns it will unconditionally purge any content designed to target or harass specific individuals, aggressive responses which thwart fruitful discussions, as well as unsubstantiated rumors.

It remains to be seen how effective the new changes to the rules will prove to be, but this is certainly a move in the right direction for the time being.

Indeed, /r/Cryptocurrency has become increasingly more difficult to follow due to a barrage of silly memes and blatant shilling posts. The revised policy should help on both of these counts.

Anyone interested can read the full list of changes on /r/Cryptocurrency here .

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You can buy celebrities with Ethereum now

What do Donald Trump, Vitalik Buterin, and Emma Watson have in common? They’re all being traded as tokens on the CryptoCelebrities blockchain.

CryptoCelebrities is a blockchain “game” that allows users to spend Ethereum (ETH) on virtual famous people. Users add an extension to their wallet, load it up with ETH, and buy any celebrity they can afford.

If another user decides they’d rather have that celebrity – there’s only one of each – they can buy it at a higher cost and the seller cannot refuse.

Credit: CryptoCelebrities

Etherium is currently valued at close to $1,000. This means a celebrity like Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, is worth about $13K after 32 transactions – not bad considering the contracts start off at about 10 cents.

It appears the creators took into account that a constantly doubling price would lead to a pretty short “game,” according to the Crypto Celebrities website :

Perhaps most interesting of all – aside from the fact Phil Collins has been bought 13 times – is that CryptoCelebrities intends to pay royalties on the trades starting March 2018:

Sounds like a great way to solicit a celebrity endorsement.

Perhaps CryptoCelebrities, like CryptoKitties , was inevitable. People love collectibles, cryptocurrency is hot, and what could be more 2018? There are, however, some concerns.

What happens when a celebrity reaches peak value and no one else wants to buy them? It’s easy to imagine a dust-covered wallet laying unused for months until someone decides your 0.05 ETH John Leguizamo belongs in their collection.

It’s also not clear whether users can ever “cash-out,” or if they’re relegated to ownership until someone comes along and relieves that burden. We’ve reached out to the creators for more information.

Are you a crypto-celebrity collector? Tell us about it in the comments.

Analysts: Bitcoin isn’t replacing fiat currency anytime soon

For the past few years, through boom and bust, hype cycles and FUD (and just about anything in between), we’ve heard that Bitcoin is what’s next. Evangelists say it’s the logical successor to fiat currency, a long-overdue replacement to paper cash that’s overstayed its welcome. Detractors point out its inherent volatility and potential for abuse by bad actors, terrorists, and international drug cartels.

But regardless of which side of the spectrum you reside on, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Bitcoin, even if it were to supplant fiat, isn’t going to do it anytime soon.

According to UBS, a Swiss multinational investment bank, Bitcoin must clear one of two hurdles to become a viable option as a true currency: its price would need to hit nearly $213,000, or its networking capabilities would need dramatic improvement.

“Our findings suggest that Bitcoin, in its current form, is too unstable and limited to become a viable means of payment for global transactions or a mainstream asset class,” UBS said in its report, released today.

Aside from volatility, it’s the relatively slow pace at which Bitcoin processes payments that’s leading to the diminished view of its potential. While Visa and MasterCard rely on payment processes that can handle more than 5,000 transactions per second, Bitcoin slogs along, often taking several minutes to process a single transaction. Ehtereum offers more potential here, but still moves at a snail’s pace by comparison (15 seconds per transaction).

Unfortunately for the Bitcoin faithful, it’s not just the slow speeds at which payments are processed, and confirmed. According to Chainalysis Inc., speculative demand has accounted for more than 70 percent of all pricing changes, pointing to a market led by speculative investment, not the underlying value — whatever that means for a digital currency — of the asset class itself.

Worse, we may have already reached peak Bitcoin, at least as a currency. Aside from from a “bear market” that ate up 70 percent of the cryptocurrency‘s value earlier this year, affinity seems to be dwindling. After peaking in September of last year, Bitcoin‘s use in commerce has declined every month since. None of this bodes well for replacing fiat currency, as you’d, presumably, actually have to use it to buy things at some point — which is made more difficult with its high volatility and a decline in interest to use Bitcoin to pay for things.

So what’s left? Not much. It could still be considered a digital asset, like internet gold. Although even that would be a highly volatile asset that’s really only appealing to speculative investors.

Is Bitcoin dead? Of course not. As with any digital currency, things can change in a heartbeat. Improvements to the underlying technology could speed up payments considerably — like we saw when Bitcoin‘s ‘Lightning network’ went live earlier this year. Or, and this might be difficult to believe given its awful start to 2018, Bitcoin may actually reach that magical $213,000 mark, a number that would, again, presumably, smooth some of the friction, leading to a less volatile asset.

But it’s Bitcoin, so ultimately… ¯_(ツ)_/¯