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GOP Data Firm Accidentally Leaks Personal Details of Nearly 200 Million American Voters – Gizmodo

Political data gathered on more than 198 million US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server.

The data leak contains a wealth of personal information on roughly 61 percent of the US population. Along with home addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include advanced sentiment analyses used by political groups to predict where individual voters fall on hot-button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as suspected religious affiliation and ethnicity. The data was amassed from a variety of sourcesfrom the banned subreddit r/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove.

Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, confirmed ownership of the data to Gizmodo on Friday.

UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered Deep Roots data online last week. More than a terabyte was stored on the cloud server without the protection of a password and could be accessed by anyone who found the URL. Many of the files did not originate at Deep Root, but are instead the aggregate of outside data firms and Republican super PACs, shedding light onto the increasingly advanced data ecosystem that helped propel President Donald Trumps slim margins in key swing states.

Although files possessed by Deep Root would be typical in any campaign, Republican or Democratic, experts say its exposure in a single open database raises significant privacy concerns. This is valuable for people who have nefarious purposes, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said of the data.

The RNC paid Deep Root $983,000 last year, according to Federal Election Commission reports, but its server contained records from a variety of other conservative sources paid millions more, including The Data Trust (also known as GOP Data Trust), the Republican partys primary voter file provider. Data Trust received over $6.7 million from the RNC during the 2016 cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, and its president, Johnny DeStefano, now serves as Trumps director of presidential personnel.

The Koch brothers political group Americans for Prosperity, which had a data-swapping agreement with Data Trust during the 2016 election cycle, contributed heavily to the exposed files, as did the market research firm TargetPoint, whose co-founder previously served as director of Mitt Romneys strategy team. (The Koch brothers also subsidized a data company known as i360, which began exchanging voter files with Data Trust in 2014.) Furthermore, the files provided by Roves American Crossroads contain strategic voter data used to target, among others, disaffected Democrats and undecideds in Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and other key battleground states.

Deep Root further obtained hundreds of files (at least) from The Kantar Group, a leading media and market research company with offices in New York, Beijing, Moscow, and more than a hundred other cities on six continents. Each file offers rich details about political adsestimated cost, audience demographics, reach, and moreby and about figures and groups spanning the political spectrum. There are files on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Planned Parenthood, and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as files on every 2016 presidential candidate, Republicans included.

Whats more, the Kantar files each contain video links to related political ads stored on Kantars servers.

Spreadsheets acquired from TargetPoint, which partnered with Deep Root and GOP Data Trust during the 2016 election, include the home addresses, birthdates, and party affiliations of nearly 200 million registered voters in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, as well as some 2016 voters. TargetPoints data seeks to resolve questions about where individual voters stand on dozens of political issues. For example: Is the voter eco-friendly? Do they favor lowering taxes? Do they believe the Democrats should stand up to Trump? Do they agree with Trumps America First economic stance? Pharmaceutical companies do great damage: Agree or Disagree?

The details of voters likely preferences for issues like stem cell research and gun control were likely drawn from a variety of sources according to a Democratic strategist who spoke with Gizmodo.

Data like that would be a combination of polling data, real world data from door-knocking and phone-calling and other canvassing activities, coupled with modeling using the data we already have to extrapolate what the voters we dont know about would think, the strategist said. The campaigns that do it right combine all the available data together to make the most robust model for every single voter in the target universe.

In a statement, Deep Root founder Alex Lundry told Gizmodo, We take full responsibility for this situation. He said the data included proprietary information as well as publicly available voter data provided by state government officials. Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access, Lundry said.

Deep Roots data was exposed after the company updated its security settings on June 1, Lundry said. Deep Root has retained Stroz Friedberg, a cybersecurity and digital forensics firm, to investigate. Based on the information we have gathered thus far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked, Lundry added.

So far, Deep Root doesnt believe its proprietary data was accessed by any malicious third parties during the 12 days that the data was exposed on the open web.

Deep Roots server was discovered by UpGuards Vickery on the night of June 12 as he was searching for data publicly accessible on Amazons cloud service. He used the same process last month to detect sensitive files tied to a US Defense Department project and exposed by an employee of a top defense contractor.

This is not the first leak of voter files uncovered by Vickery, who told Gizmodo that he was alarmed over how the data was apparently being usedsome states, for instance, prohibit the commercial use of voter records. Moreover, it was not immediately clear to whom the data belonged. It was decided that law enforcement should be contacted before attempting any contact with the entity responsible, said Vickery, who reported that the server was secured two days later on June 14.

Deep Roots data sheds light onto the increasingly sophisticated data operation that has fed recent Republican campaigns and lays bare the intricate network of political organizations, PACs, and analysis firms that trade in bulk voter data. In an email to Gizmodo, Deep Root said that its voter models are used to enhance the understanding of TV viewership for political ad buyers. The data accessed was not built for or used by any specific client, Lundry said. It is our proprietary analysis to help inform local television ad buying.

However, the presence of data on the server from several political organizations, including TargetPoint and Data Trust, suggests that it was used for Republican political campaigns. Deep Root also works primarily with GOP customers (although similar vendors, such as NationBuilder, service the Democrats as well).

Deep Root is one of three data firms hired by the Republican National Committee in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Founded by Lundry, a data scientist on the Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney campaigns, the firm was one of three analytics teams that worked on the Trump campaign following the partys national convention in the summer of 2016.

Lundrys work brought him into Trumps campaign war room, according to a post-election AdAge article that charted the GOPs 2016 data efforts. Deep Root was hand-picked by the RNCs then-chief of staff, Katie Walsh, in September of last year and joined two other data shopsTargetPoint Consulting and Causeway Solutionsin the effort to win Trump the presidency.

Walsh, who now works for the nonprofit America First Policies after a brief stint in the White House, oversaw Trumps data operation in partnership with Brad Parscale, Trumps digital director. (Parscale did not respond to a request for comment before press time. Attempts to reach Walsh for comment were also unsuccessful.) Walsh and Parscale focused their efforts on three categories of voters, AdAge reports: voters who might be predisposed to support Trump, Republican voters who were uncertain about Trump, and voters that were leaning toward Hillary Clinton but could be persuaded by Trumps message of changing up government-as-usual.

To appeal to the three crucial categories, it appears that Trumps team relied on voter data provided by Data Trust. Complete voter rolls for 2008 and 2012, as well as partial 2016 voter rolls for Florida and Ohio, apparently compiled by Data Trust are contained in the dataset exposed by Deep Root.

Data Trust acquires voter rolls from state officials and then standardizes the voter data to create a clean, manageable record of all registered US voters, a source familiar with the firms operations told Gizmodo. Voter data itself is public record and therefore not particularly sensitive, the source added, but the tools Data Trust uses to standardize that data are considered proprietary. That data is then provided to political clients, including analytics firms like Deep Root. While Data Trust requires its clients to protect the data, it has to take clients at their word that industry-standard encryption and security protocols are in place.

TargetPoint and Causeway, the two firms employed by the RNC in addition to Deep Root, apparently layered their own analytics atop the information provided by Data Trust. TargetPoint conducted thousands of surveys per week in 22 states, according to AdAge, gauging voter sentiment on a variety of topics. While Causeway helped manage the data, Deep Root used it to perfect its TV advertising targetsproducing voter turnout estimates by county and using that intelligence to target its ad buys.

A source with years of experience working on political campaign data operations told Gizmodo that the data exposed by Deep Root appeared to be customized for the RNC and had apparently been used to create models for turnout and voter preferences. Metadata in the files suggested that the database wasnt Deep Roots working copy, but rather a post-election version of its data, the source said, adding that it was somewhat surprising the files hadnt been discarded.

Because the data from the 2008 and 2012 elections is outdatedthe source compared it to the kind of address and phone data one could find on a lousy internet lookup siteits not very valuable. Even the 2016 data is quickly becoming stale. This is a proprietary dataset based on a mix of public records, data from commercial providers, and a variety of predictive models of uncertain provenance and quality, the source said, adding: Undoubtedly it took millions of dollars to produce.

Although basic voter information is public record, Deep Roots dataset contains a swirl of proprietary information from the RNCs data firms. Many of filenames indicate they potentially contain market research on Democratic candidates and the independent expenditure committees that support them. (Up to two terabytes of data contained on the server was protected by permission settings.)

One exposed folder is labeled Exxon-Mobile [sic] and contains spreadsheets apparently used to predict which voters support the oil and gas industry. Divided by state, the files include the voters names and addresses, along with a unique RNC identification number assigned to every US citizen registered to vote. Each row indicates where voters likely fall on issues of interest to ExxonMobil, the countrys biggest natural gas producer.

The data evaluates, for example, whether or not a specific voter believes drilling for fossil fuels is vital to US security. It also predicts if the voter thinks the US should be moving away from fossil-fuel use. The ExxonMobil national score document alone contains data on 182,746,897 Americans spread across 19 fields.

Some of the data included in Deep Roots dataset veers into downright bizarre territory. A folder titled simply reddit houses 170 GBs of data apparently scraped from several subreddits, including the controversial r/fatpeoplehate that was home to a community of people who posted pictures of people and mocked them for their weight before it was banned from Reddits platform in 2015. Other subreddits that appear to have been scraped by Deep Root or a partner organization focused on more benign topics, like mountain biking and the Spanish language.

The Reddit data couldve been used as training data for an artificial intelligence algorithm focused on natural language processing, or it might have been harvested as part of an effort to match up Reddit users with their voter registration records. During the 2012 election cycle, Barack Obamas campaign data team relied on information gleaned from Facebook profiles and matched profiles to voter records.

During the 2016 election season, Reddit played host to a legion of Trump supporters who gathered in subreddits like r/The_Donald to comb through leaked Democratic National Committee emails and craft pro-Trump memes. Trump himself participated in an Ask Me Anything session on r/The_Donald during his campaign.

Given how active some Trump supporters are on Redditr/The_Donald currently boasts more than 430,000 membersit makes sense that Trumps data team might be interested in analyzing data from the site.

A FiveThirtyEight analysis that looked at where r/The_Donald members spend their time when theyre not talking politics might shed some light onto why Deep Root collected r/fatpeoplehate data. FiveThirtyEight found that, when Redditors werent commenting in political subreddits, they most often frequented r/fatpeoplehate.

Its possible that Deep Root intended to use data from r/fatpeoplehate to build a more comprehensive profile of Trump voters. (Lundry declined to comment beyond his initial statement on any of information included in the Deep Root dataset.)

However, FiveThirtyEights investigation doesnt account for Deep Roots collection of data from mountain-biking and Spanish-speaking subreddits that werent as popular with r/The_Donald membersand data from these subreddits that are not so closely linked to Trumps diehard supporters might be more useful for his campaigns goal of pursuing swing voters.

My guess is that they were scraping Reddit posts to match to the voter file as another input for individual modeling, a source familiar with campaign data operations told Gizmodo. Given the number of random forums, my guess is they started with a list of accounts to scrape from, rather than scraping from all forums then trying to match from there (in which case youd start with the political ones).

Matching voter records with Reddit usernames would be complicated and any large-scale effort would likely result in many inaccuracies, the source said. However, campaigns have attempted to match voter files with social media profiles in the past. Such an effort by Deep Root wouldnt be entirely surprising, and would likely yield rich data on the small portion of users it was able to match with their voter profiles, the source explained.

The Deep Root incident represents the largest known leak of Americans voter records, outstripping past exposures by several million records. Five voter-file leaks over the past 18 months exposed between 350,000 and 191 million files, some of which paired voter dataname, race, gender, birthdate, address, phone number, party affiliation, etc.with email accounts, social media profiles, and records of gun ownership.

Campaigns and the data analysis firms they employ are a particularly weak point for data exposure, security experts say. Corporations that dont properly secure customer data can face significant financial repercussionsjust ask Target or Yahoo. But because campaigns are short-term operations, theres not much incentive for them to take data security seriously, and valuable data is often left out to rust after an election.

Campaigns are very narrowly focused. They are shoestring operations, even presidential campaigns. So they dont think of this as an asset they need to protect, the Center for Democracy and Technologys Hall told Gizmodo.

Even though voter rolls are public record and are easy to accessOhio, for instance, makes its voter rolls available to download onlinetheir exposure can still be harmful.

Voter registration records include ZIP codes, birthdates, and other personal information that have been crucial in research efforts to re-identify anonymous medical data. Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government and technology at Harvard University, famously used voter data to re-identify Massachusetts Governor William Weld from information in anonymous hospital discharge records.

Because of the personal information they contain, voter registration databases can also be useful in identity theft schemes.

Even though exposure of Deep Roots data has the potential to harm voters, its exactly the kind of data that campaigns lust after and will spend millions of dollars to obtain. Campaigns are motivated to accumulate as much deeply personal information about voters as possible, so they can spend their ad dollars in the right swing districts where theyre likely to sway the greatest number of voters. But voter data rapidly goes stale and campaigns close up shop quickly, so data is seen as disposable and often isnt well-protected.

I can think of no avenues for punishing political data breaches or otherwise properly aligning the incentives. I worry that if theres no way to punish campaigns for leaking this stuff, its going to continue to happen until something bad happens, Hall said. The data left behind by campaigns can pose a lingering security issue, he added. None of these motherfuckers were ever Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, they dont pack out what they pack in.

[UpGuard]

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DoD reexamining cloud policies to remove bottleneck for sensitive data – FederalNewsRadio.com

For more than two years, the Defense Department has had procedures in place that, at least on paper, allow its sensitive data be housed in commercial cloud computing facilities. But migrations to the cloud have been relatively few and far between for anything besides public, unclassified data.

Thats partially because for impact levels 4 and above, not only do providers have to earn authorizations that go above-and-beyond the governmentwide FedRAMP process, any data they process also has to make its way through a DoD-provided Cloud Access Point (CAP).

The department is taking a fresh look at that latter point, saying its current CAP policies may be creating an unnecessary roadblock to DoDs cloud ambitions. As of now, there are only two access points in existence one run by the Defense Information Systems Agency and one by the Navy.

Dr. John Zangardi, the departments acting chief information officer said hes asked his office to revisit the policy with an eye toward letting commercial cloud vendors provide a CAP-like capability on their own.

Sponsored Content - Download our Executive Briefing to learn how agency and industry experts are hoping to reduce insider threats.

Its my job to ensure the most effective IT support to the warfighter and to make best use of resources, so the question to my staff is, How can we do CAP better? he said last week at the Defense Cyber Operations Summit in Baltimore, Md. Specifically, can it be provided as a service? Its a significant question, but if it is resolved, it should open opportunities for services and components to move more quickly to commercial cloud providers.

DoDs current policy on access points is laid out in the security requirements guide (SRG) it published in April 2015 and last updated in March of this year. It requires all network traffic thats making its way between DoD systems and a commercial cloud provider to pass through government-operated monitoring systems firewalls and other intrusion prevention systems even when the cloud providers system is operating entirely within a DoD facility.

The overall objectivewill remain the same: giving some reasonable level of assurance that Defense networks cant be penetrated viatheir connections to cloud providers, since most commercial cloud facilities are connected to the public Internet in some fashion, Zangardi said. He said the latest SRG will be updated to reflect any changes in DoDs thinking when we get that far.

Cloud access points are among the issues likely to be raised later this week when DoD hosts an industry day to hash out the issues surrounding a final cybersecurity-focused contracting rule the department issued last October after nearly a year of public comment and revisions.

The final, updated version failed to address industrys concerns, and their representatives have been asking for a face-to-face meeting ever since.

The final version of the update to the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement sweeps in what had been two separate interim rules. One portion requires contractors to report any data breaches involving Defense information within 72 hours and implement the National Institute of Standards and Technologys new guidelines for protecting controlled unclassified information by the end of 2017.

A second makes plain that vendors must comply with the controls in DoDs cloud SRG as a condition of their contracts, but goes a few steps further, including demanding that government personnel be allowed to physically enter cloud hosting facilities to conduct audits or inspections.

Thats because according to a 27-page FAQ the department issued earlier this year its interpretation of the Federal Information Security Management Act dictates that it treat any ITsystem thats operated on DoDs behalf as though it were a government operation.

Both before and after the issuance of the final rule, industry officials have expressed confusion over how the new rule fits in with a host of other provisions the government added to the Federal Acqusition Regulation at about the same time including one by the National Archives and Records Administration that set governmentwide definitions for what constitutes controlled unclassified information, and another new FAR provision that requires all federal contractors to come into compliance with at least some of NISTs guidelines for protecting CUI.

Our objective at this meeting is to clarify some foundational questions, Zangardi said. What are the clauses? What is Covered Defense Information? How is it identified and marked? How does the rule work in the cloud computing environment? It should be a substantive, productive discussion.

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Scientists Make Quantum Leap Toward Secure Quantum Internet – Top Tech News

Scientists have taken a major step towards building a global quantum internet by beaming "entangled" particles of light from a satellite to ground stations more than 700 miles apart.

The feat paves the way for a new kind of internet which draws on the curious ability for subatomic particles to be connected to one another despite being far apart and even on opposite sides of the planet.

Researchers believe that by linking particles together in this way, encrypted information could be sent from place to place across a quantum network with no danger of it being decrypted and read by others, as can be done on the existing internet.

Jian-Wei Pan, who led the research at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei in China, said the demonstration was a moment he had been dreaming of since 2003. "Many people thought it was a crazy idea, because it was very challenging," he said.

The work obliterates the previous world record for sending pairs of photons that are connected to one another by a strange rule of quantum physics first spotted by Einstein. Until now, the farthest researchers had ever sent entangled photons stood at a mere 65 miles, less than one tenth of the distance achieved in the satellite experiment.

"It's a first step, and a major step, toward creating a global quantum network," said Pan. "All the previous methods are limited to about 100km so can only work within a city."

The experiment relied on the world's first quantum-enabled spacecraft: a Chinese satellite called Micius. As it soared over China, the satellite created pairs of photons with properties that were linked through quantum entanglement. It then beamed these simultaneously to ground stations in Delingha, Lijiang and Nanshan. Each pair of particles travelled up to 1,240 miles before they reached their destinations. Details of the study are published in Science.

Pan said that the kind of cryptography used to keep data safe today relies on complex mathematics which can often be defeated by hackers. "If a future quantum network is established, the security is ensured by the laws of physics, which are unconditionally secure," he said. "It will be beneficial for all human beings."

Martin Stevens, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, said he was impressed with the work. "These types of experiments are not easy to do, even within the controlled confines of a laboratory environment. Doing them between two remote ground locations and a satellite flying overhead at a speed of thousands of kilometres per hour is mind-bogglingly difficult."

In 2015, Stevens sent entangled photons down a 65 mile length of optical fibre. That is good enough for quantum communications between neighbouring towns, but it cannot work for much greater distances, because the signal is gradually lost the more optic fibre it travels down. The advantage of using a satellite is that the particles of light travel through space for much of their journey.

Anton Zeilinger at the Vienna Centre for Quantum Science also praised the work. "It's an important step towards a worldwide quantum network. If you envisage a quantum network, the question is how to cover large distances and that cannot be done with glass fibres on the ground. You have to go into space, because in glass fibres you lose the signal. It's very important to show that it works with satellites, so I'm very excited by this."

Zeilinger is working with Pan on an intercontinental quantum network and hopes to have results to report before the end of the year.

2017 Guardian Web syndicated under contract with NewsEdge/Acquire Media. All rights reserved.

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A quantum step to a great wall for encryption – The Hindu


The Hindu
A quantum step to a great wall for encryption
The Hindu
Modern, electronic secrecy works by two parties encrypting the messages they want to exchange and sending each other 'keys' (which are chains of numbers) that can be used to decrypt the information. The trouble is that a third eavesdropper can ...
China set to build a 'completely new internet'Northern Star
China's 'Unhackable' Quantum Satellite Has Sent Its First MessageHuffPost UK
Satellite sends First Quantum Signal to Earthhttp://www.newsgram.com/
The Monitor Daily -Science
all 30 news articles »

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Regulations Are Making it Harder For Security Experts to Use Bitcoin – Fortune

A major U.S. Bitcoin exchange, responding to regulations intended to stop criminals, appears to be suspending the accounts of "white hat" security consultants who use Bitcoin to help law-abiding clients.

As reported by CoinDesk , Night Lion Securitys Vinny Troia was contacted last year by Coinbase, an exchange for buying and selling cryptocurrency. The exchange wanted to know how he was using his Bitcoin. Troia told Coinbase that his security business sometimes involved either paying digital ransom on behalf of clients impacted by attacks like WannaCry , or verifying database breaches by buying data from malicious hackersall with client permission.

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Coinbase, after asking whether Troia had U.S. Department of Justice authorization for those methodsauthorization which Troia couldnt confirm even existsCoinbase suspended his account. When he tried to open new accounts under the names of family members so he could continue conducting business, Coinbase shut those down, too.

The situation illustrates the growing pains of Bitcoin as its ecosystem matures. While there are plenty of good reasons that legitimate businesses might need to conduct Bitcoin transactions with shady charactersincluding, say, unlocking vital systems infected by a clever virusenabling such transactions could put an actor like Coinbase in conflict with regulations intended to prevent money laundering (often referred to by the acronym AML, for "anti-money laundering") and criminal activity (KYC, for "know your customer").

In a related incident in Dec. 2016, prosecutors in New York charged the operator of a Bitcoin exchange with violating anti-money laundering laws specifically because it facilitated ransomware payments. Coin Center, a cryptocurrency policy think tank, came out strongly against that move, pointing out both that everyone from police departments to hospitals have had to pay such ransoms in recent years, and that even the FBI has said that sometimes paying ransom is the sensible choice .

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Bitcoin explained: What is it? Why has its price risen so much? Will it ever take over from traditional currencies? – City A.M.

Bitcoin has rocked headlines this year as its price jumped more than 100 per cent to reach all-time highs of over $3,000 - but what actually is it?

As the cryptocurrency breaks into the mainstream market, we take you back to basics.

Bitcoin is a digital currency, or cryptocurrency, which is created and held electronically. It became the first decentralised digital currency in 2009 thanks to an unknown software developer (or potentially a group of programmers) under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. It runs on blockchain technology, which acts as a public ledger, permanently recording every bitcoin transaction.

Bitcoin can be used to buy things electronically just like pounds or euros, but there are still relatively few merchants who accept bitcoin payment. Accessing bitcoin can be another hurdle as the process is not consumer friendly and banks in the UK are particularly suspicious of serving bitcoin companies. Traditionally, people go to a cryptocurrency exchange to download a bitcoin wallet, however, new services like bitcoin ATMs and bitcoin debit cards are starting to pop up to make the process easier.

Bitcoin is still riding on a high from back in April when Japan made a landmark decision to legalise it as an official method of payment. This was a major step in pushing bitcoin away from the fringes of society and towards the mainstream. Asia is the key driver of the cryptocurrency boom, but Europe is not far behind. Adam Davies, a consultant at Altus, said deep analysis of the blockchain shows a clear up-take of bitcoin as an investment vehicle in Europe, particularly in the UK. More and more countries are getting regulators to look at bitcoin and investing in blockchain, which legitimises the cryptocurrency.

Read more: This analyst thinks bitcoin could hit $10,000

This depends on who you ask. Generally speaking, bitcoin analysts say growth will continue as awareness of the digital currency spreads. However, it is still a highly volatile, high risk asset. Mati Greenspan, senior market analyst at eToro said bitcoin could easily crash to $100 a coin or easily surge to $10,000 a coin or go anywhere in between.

Davies has some solid predictions for the cryptocurrency. He expects a sudden drop of about 20 to 40 per cent in the fourth quarter followed by a quick recovery. He then sees bitcoin reaching between $5,000 and $7,000 in mid-2018 and breaking the $10,000 barrier by 2019. Analysts say the price is a function of the extent to which people think its technology will be useful in the future, but they have mixed opinions about when bitcoins volatility will even out, ranging from the next few years to no time soon.

While the UK is certainly an earlier adopter of bitcoin and interest is rising, cryptocurrencies are yet to catch on like they have in Japan. UK regulators have been quiet on bitcoin, but analysts say thats because the market is still so small here. Recently, bitcoin got some bad press after it was used as a way to collect money in a global ransomware attack.

Ethereums ether is the second most popular cryptocurrency, and it has recently seen huge growth as well. However, where bitcoin uses blockchain technology to take the currency out of one person's control, ethereum is a way to decentralise servers, or internet third parties. Its aim is to be a world computer. Without getting into the nitty gritty, ether tokens are used as a form of money to fuel ethereum.

Davies predicts cryptocurrencies will take over from cash one day, but they might look a little different. He compared digital currencies to other technologies like the internet and email that started out as fringe ideas before becoming widely adopted. Davies said we could be about five years away from bitcoin becoming mainstream enough to be used alongside physical currencies.

Read more: As the bitcoin rally continues, are we witnessing a bubble?

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Bitcoin Mempool is Virtually Empty as Community Anticipates Scaling Resolution – newsBTC

Do keep in mind Bitcoin network congestion can occur at any given time.

Over the past few months, we have seen multiple issues affect the Bitcoin network. More specifically, network congestion has been a massive problem so far. Interestingly enough, it appears the Bitcoin transaction mempool is nearly empty right now. Not too long ago, we had around 200,00 unconfirmed transactions stuck in limbo for several days. With the end of the scaling debate nearing, it seems things are finally returning back to normal.

The Bitcoin mempool has always been an intriguing topic of discussion. On multiple occasions, we have seen the number of unconfirmed transactions spike by quite a margin Not too long ago, this number was hovering around the 200,000 mark. A lot of users had to wait several hours, if not days until their transfer was confirmed by the network. It is not an ideal situation by any means.

Moreover, network congestion causes the transaction fees to rise. Paying several dollars to move Bitcoin on the network is not acceptable. The many potential scaling solutions should help in alleviating those concerns. However, it has taken the community a very long time to come to a decision regarding these scaling proposals. It is curious how the mempool is virtually empty around the time two different scaling solutions are set to activate on the network over the next few weeks.

No one will complain about the Bitcoin mempool being rather empty, though. Less unconfirmed transactions means users pay lower fees to move money around. Right now, these fees are slowly returning back to normal. Once the new scaling solutions activate on the network, these costs will be reduced even more. Seeing this happen prior to Bitcoineffectively scaling is still quite remarkable, to say the least.

Do keep in mind Bitcoin network congestion can occur at any given time. It is even the person or group responsible for spamming the network ceased activity for the time being. Then again, we have seen such attacks pop up out of nowhere at random intervals. It is evident some people want to hurt Bitcoin in every way possible.Creating a transaction backlog is one way of doing so. It is also worth noting the network is now processing 2.44 transactions per second. That is a very low number, although one that will undoubtedly increase over the next few years.

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AvaTrade Launches New Tradable Cryptocurrency Pairs – Finance Magnates

AvaTrade, a forex and CFDs brokerage, has announced the addition of cryptocurrency pairs to its asset list on its website, and noted its intention to add more in the future. As of now, the online trading firm offers Ethereum Classic versus the American dollar (ETH/USD), and the Bitcoin versus the euro (BTC/EUR).

The London Summit 2017 is coming, get involved!

The allure of cryptocurrencies appears to be their high volatility, as well as the ability of their value to soar to new highs even when other markets are not volatile. About two weeks ago, Finance Magnates covered the Bitcoin versus the dollar exchange rate reaching $2877. Being able to trade cryptocurrencies within currency pairs rather than just as individual assets may be a sign of more advanced stages to come.

Dire Ferguson, the CEO of AvaTrade, commented: These are exciting times; the trading world is changing in front of our eyes, and we are glad to play a major role in it. Cryptocurrencies are the future, and AvaTrade stands in the frontline of brokers when it comes to trading them. We work hard to insure we offer our clients the best trading conditions and possibilities.

AvaTrade is a brokerage offering forex and contracts for difference (CFDs) trading. The company was established back in 2006, and is authorized and licensed to offer financial advice and online trading services to clients by several regulatory authorities such as the Central Bank of Ireland (Reference No.: C53877).

Last week, Finance Magnates reported HYCMs having added cryptocurrency pair Bitcoin versus the American dollar to its asset list. The reason behind adding these new currency pairs is the increase in demand for them from traders.

This morning, Finance Magnates covered XTBs having added several cryptocurrency pairs of its own.

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Cryptocurrency Mining at 65W Achieves 22 MH/s Rate Impressive and Silent Mining … – Wccftech

NVIDIAs partners are creating new Pascal graphics cards for cryptocurrency mining and while they do so, Legitreviews has posted a new guide on how to achieve some impressive mining rates on a single GeForce GTX 1060.

In a series of guides posted by Legitreviews, they have detailed some impressive techniques and tricks to get better hash rates on NVIDIA Pascal GPUs. The card tested by the site was a GeForce GTX 1060 FTW+ 6 GB which costs a little bit more compared to the SSC model. The card ships with a custom dual fan cooler and starts at a price of $249.99 US. These prices will vary since GeForce GTX cards are also affected by price inflation like the Radeon counterparts since the recent mining wave hit the market.

Running on stock frequencies, the card delivers a hash rate of 18.88 with a power consumption of 100W at 68C. With the memory overclocked to 10000 MHz, the card achieved 23.61 MH/s and was running at 70C while consuming 112.9W. The results you see below are obtained with the power target set at reference 100%. While the 10 GHz overclock wasnt stable as it started artifacting, the clocks on memory were toned down to 9.5 GHz for a hash rate of 22.77 MH/s at 109.9W.

By lowering the power target we managed to go from ~110 Watts of power at 22.8 MH/s to just ~65 Watts of power at 22.1 MH/s. As you lower the power target the hashrate does take a slight performance hit, but loosing roughly 0.5 MH/s for cutting the power use by 45 Watts is pretty slick. We also managed to drop our temperature from 70C down to 58C and on this 0dB graphics card model that means the fans stop spinning!

So, we are miningEthereumgetting 22 MH/s on a card using 65 Watts of power with no fan noise. That is pretty crazy! Fanless silent Ethrereum mining! If you go down to a power target of 40% the hashrate takes a major performance hit and it isnt worth going below 45%. via Legitreviews

Tuning the card can lead to some very astonishing results. With the memory still overclocked at 9.5 GHz and power target limited down to different ratios, we can see better efficiency results. Mining is all about making the best buck while consuming less power and the GTX 1060 shined here. With the power limit set to 45%, the card delivered 22.11 MH/s rate at 58C and consumed only 65W that makes a hugedifference. Its also worth noting that the fan speed was set to 0% which means that the card performed under 60C without the fan even operating which is impressive.

Compared to the 100% power limit, the 45% limit allows for a 45W power consumption difference to achieve a very similar hash rate. A single card can make a profit of $138 per month. Having six of these cards inside a custom machine like the one we detailed a while ago would yield$10,080 in a year if the current Ethereum prices are taken into account.

How much would it cost to build a Ethereum mining PC that can hold seven of these cards for around 155-160 MH/s of performance? Here is a quick example of the hardware youd need:

MSI Z170A Gaming M5 Motherboard $129.39 shipped

Intel Celeron G3930 Processor $41.00 shipped

PCIe 16x to 1x Adapters $8.99 eachand up to 7 needed

Cable Ties $5.99 shipped(Got to hold those video cards up to something)

EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB SSC Graphics Card $266.11 shippedup to 7 needed

Crucial 4GB Single DDR4 2133MHz Memory Module $29.98 shipped

Seasonic Prime 1000W 80PLUS Platinum Power Supply $239.24 shipped(An 850W 80PLUS Platinum PSU is $128.49)

SATA to 8-pin PCIe power adapters $6 shipped(Most Power Supplies dont have 7 8-pin PCIe power connectors)

DREVO X1 Series 60GB SSD $39.99 shipped

AmazonBasics Wired Keyboard & Mouse $14.99 shipped

Case Wed suggest making your own with milk crates or something creative

OS Linux or Windows Grab an ISO and use what you prefer!

Power Meter To Make Power Adjustments $18.53 shipped

You are looking at around $2,450 to setup a system like this that should be capable of mining just shy of 3 Ether per month at the current difficulty levels. That means youd be making about $966 per month if all goes well. That means youd get your investment back in the hardware in right about 2.5 months. Not bad for 155-160 MH/s. Via Legitreviews

Expect to see mining specific graphics cards based on NVIDIAs Pascal GPUs that include P106-100 and P104-100 in the coming weeks.

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Cryptocurrency Mining at 65W Achieves 22 MH/s Rate Impressive and Silent Mining ... - Wccftech

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