Distributed Digest: Friday, February 15, 2019

February 15, 2019 7:24 PM

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Friday, February 15, 2019:

Ethereum Voters Say PPYE

Ether holders have recently expressed their support of or opposition to the ProgPoW mining proposal via Ethereum’s CarbonVote platform. Yesterday, most of the voting pool’s ETH was staked against the proposal, prompting some anti-ProgPoW redditors to rejoice. However, the vote’s outcome has since been reversed, with about 80 percent of the total ETH now staked in support of ProgPoW.

Because of the voting system’s setup, a single voter can stake a massive amount of ETH one way or the other (this person would be called a whale). Indeed, some redditors have speculated that before the vote was swayed to yes, a whale or two must have staked a lot of ETH on no.

The vote is ongoing. Besides ETH holders, miners have been encouraged to vote for or against ProgPoW using the extraData field. PPYE signals yes, whereas PPNO signals no.

Parity Talks More Security

The team at Parity tweeted today that its recent security update, 2.2.10-stable and 2.3.3-beta, should be downloaded by all who run Parity Ethereum nodes. Parity previously believed that only those running Parity Ethereum nodes serving JSON-RPC as a public service needed to update, but “[t]he scope of the fixed vulnerability is wider than originally thought.”

The issue was initially discovered on Sunday, February 3, and quickly addressed thereafter. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to send a specially crafted remote procedure call request to a node, causing it to crash.

ETHDenver Gets Philanthropic

The ETHDenver crew has teamed up with Colorado’s Apprentio (a youth-focused blockchain education nonprofit) to offer students several hours of workshop and mentorship opportunities at this year’s hackathon, according to information shared with ETHNews. As Apprentio is a year-round effort, the organization hopes to raise funds through an auction in partnership with Charity Stars.

The auction is conducted via the Charity Stars website, but ETHDenver attendees can view some of the artwork up for auction at an on-site gallery. In addition to art, there are “celebrity experiences” for individuals to bid on, including a lunch with ConsenSys’ Joseph Lubin and a breakfast with ShapeShift’s Erik Voorhees.

In the spirit of ETHDenver dogfooding, auction winners have the option to pay in crypto.

Dani is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He received his bachelor’s degree in English writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also studied journalism and queer theory. In his free time, he writes poetry, plays the piano, and fangirls over fictional characters. He lives with his partner, three dogs, and two cats in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.

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