🚀 Ethereum Istanbul Hardfork - Hello ProgPoW! ⚙️ ~ CEOM Coin

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🙌🏻 Hong Kong & Thailand to release digital currency report by Q2 2020

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and Bank of Thailand (BoT) collaborated in May 2019 to study the benefits and risks of launching a central bank digital currency (CBDC), and will release their joint research on digital currency by Q2 2020.

Specifically, both HKMA & BoT are researching on ways to facilitate payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement among banks in Hong Kong & Thailand using a wholesale CBDC.

HKMA and BoT have been separately researching wholesale CDBC via LionRock (since 2017) and Inthanon (since Aug 2018), respectively.

TheBlockCrypto

⚙️ Ethereum's Istanbul hardfork to introduce ProgPoW 🔮

Team lead at Ethereum (ETH) Foundation, Péter Szilágyi has confirmed Dec. 4 as the expected date (block 9069000) for the network's forthcoming Istanbul hard fork in a tweet on 7th November.

The Istanbul upgrade will bring forth the implementation of a new programmatic proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm dubbed "ProgPoW,". ProgPoW is designed to close the efficiency gap available to specialized ASICs by utilizing almost all parts of the graphics processing unit (GPU).

Following the Constantinople upgrade which was completed earlier in February 2019, Istanbul is the latest hard fork of the Ethereum network's planned transition to Ethereum 2.0 (Proof-of-Stake), set to take place in 2020.

CoinTelegraph

🔎 Stealing $5M worth of computing power through forged identity

A Singaporean man, Matthew Ho has allegedly used illegally obtained credit card information of Riot Game's (famous for League of Legends) co-founder, Marc Merrill to steal over $5M worth of computing power from Amazon and Google, amongst others.

Investigators claim that Ho used the stolen computing power to mine Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) among several other cryptocurrencies.

Ho managed to trick Amazon, and even forged a fake Californian driving license bearing Riot Games co-chairman's name. Ho is currently being charged with eight counts of wire fraud, four counts of access device fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft.

CoinTelegraph