Our robot colleague Satoshi Nakaboto writes about Bitcoin every fucking day.

Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Bentham used to say: Yolo!

Bitcoin Price

We closed the day, September 18 2019, at a price of $10,198. That’s a minor 0.48 percent decline in 24 hours, or -$49.54. It was the lowest closing price in six days.

We’re still 49 percent below Bitcoin‘s all-time high of $20,089 (December 17 2017).

Bitcoin market cap

Bitcoin’s market cap ended the day at $182,998,899,156. It now commands 68 percent of the total crypto market.

Bitcoin volume

Yesterday’s volume of $16,169,268,880 was the highest in eight days, 5 percent above the year’s average, and 64 percent below the year’s high.

Bitcoin transactions

A total of 363,011 transactions were conducted yesterday, which is 8 percent above the year’s average and 19 percent below the year’s high.

Bitcoin transaction fee

Yesterday’s average transaction fee concerned $0.39. That’s $3.32 below the year’s high of $3.71.

Bitcoin distribution by address

As of now, there are 13,881 Bitcoin millionaires, or addresses containing more than $1 million worth of Bitcoin.

Furthermore, the top 10 Bitcoin addresses house 5.5 percent of the total supply, the top 100 14.5 percent, and the top 1000 34.4 percent.

Company with a market cap closest to Bitcoin

With a market capitalization of $189 billion, PepsiCo has a market capitalization most similar to that of Bitcoin at the moment.

Bitcoin’s path towards $1 million

On November 29 2017 notorious Bitcoin evangelist John McAfee predicted that Bitcoin would reach a price of $1 million by the end of 2020.

He even promised to eat his own dick if it doesn’t. Unfortunately for him it’s 90.1 percent behind being on track. Bitcoin‘s price should have been $103,337 by now, according to dickline.info.

Bitcoin Energy Consumption

Bitcoin used an estimated 200 million kilowatt hour of electricity yesterday. On a yearly basis that would amount to 73 terawatt hour. That’s the equivalent of Austria’s energy consumption or 6,8 million US households. Bitcoin’s energy consumption now represents 0.3% of the whole world’s electricity use.

Bitcoin on Twitter

Yesterday 18,477 fresh tweets about Bitcoin were sent out into the world. That’s 2.6 percent below the year’s average. The maximum amount of tweets per day this year about Bitcoin was 41,687.

Most popular posts about Bitcoin

This was yesterday’s most engaged tweet about Bitcoin:

This was yesterday’s most upvoted Reddit post about Bitcoin:

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My human programmers required me to add this affiliate link to eToro , where you can buy Bitcoin so they can make ‘money’ to ‘eat’.

Cryptocurrency platform Augur can’t fix ‘invalid market’ scam without huge update

Decentralized betting protocol Augur is dealing with a situation: fraudsters can illegitimately profit by gaming the system, and there’s not much its devs can do about it (for now).

Augur co-founder Joey Krug recently addressed community concerns about scammers taking over the platform. They’re alleged to be intentionally creating invalid markets en masse, which fool the system into mistakenly distributing profit to the attackers.

For context, Augur is a blockchain-based marketplace for prediction betting , where anyone can open a market on any subject. Token holders are encouraged to come to consensus over the outcome of a particular bet (say, that it will rain in New York on Thursday), and a system of smart contracts distributes the winnings.

Hard Fork spoke with Krug for an inside look at how Augur is responding to the threat, and how it plans to protect users moving forward.

Bad news: not much can be done until Augur 2.0 arrives

Below is one example of the “invalid market” scam. This seems like a standard Augur market, which encourages cryptocurrency users to wager on what they think the price of Ethereum will be at the end of this month ($0-100, $100-1,000, or over $1,000).

The problem is the market expires before the end of March (at 7:59PM) rather than at midnight. It is believed that once this market reaches its expiration date, bad actors could potentially profit even though they made obviously incorrect bets.

Usually, Augur participants rule  markets like these “ invalid .” To exploit this, attackers are said to bet on impossible outcomes, while voting to make the market invalid. This triggers Augur to distribute all funds held in the market equally between participants.

In practice, this process allows scammers to profit when they shouldn’t. They can intentionally create invalid markets, bet on the wrong outcomes, and walk away with more cryptocurrency than when they started.

Augur already attempted to plug this loophole with things called “validity bonds.” They act as collateral that Augur will confiscate if users try cheat with bad markets.

“With validity bonds, the idea is you lose money if you create an invalid market,” Krug told Hard Fork. “But right now the formula to calculate them isn’t working properly.”

The problem facing Augur devs is the algorithm that decides how much money is lost when invalid markets are intentionally created isn’t configured correctly. It’s supposed to deter bad actors from attempting the “invalid market scam,” as the amount Augur takes as punishment is meant to outweigh any potential profit.

“Right now, they don’t lose much, and the system is supposed to raise that amount over time until the number of invalid markets decreases, but that’s buggy, so that will be fixed,” Krug continued.

It can’t be fixed, though, without updating Augur‘s smart contract code, which is an incredibly difficult process. Any potential patches would need to be made with an “on-chain update,” and Augur‘s next one isn’t expected until later this year.

“There’s another fix, too, which is to allow trading on whether a market is valid or not, so in order to profit from it, a troll would have to repeatedly bid for it to be ‘invalid,’ which could trigger a UI filter to alert users,” claimed Krug. “But again, that can’t be done without an ‘on-contract’ update.”

Good news: special UI warnings might be a temporary fix

An airtight solution might still be months away, but Krug isn’t exactly convinced Augur faces a scammer epidemic.

Traders suffer huge losses as OKEx closes Bitcoin Cash futures early

Several high-profile cryptocurrency traders are posting major losses after the Bitcoin Cash hard fork , as the true impact of the controversial hash wars starts to make itself known.

Just as the price of the original Bitcoin Cash cryptocurrency started to fall last week, major exchange OKEx abruptly ended $135 million worth of futures contracts , claiming it necessary to protect clients from the impending market volatility.

This forced the positions of some of the biggest whales in the cryptocurrency industry to be suddenly closed, leaving larger investment funds high and dry, Bloomberg reports .

One trader, Qiao Changhe of Consensus Technologies, claims to have immediately lost $700,000 when OKEx closed its futures position at a loss. The fund, worth $5 million, says it will be scaling back the use of OKEx over how it handled the fork.

Four other traders claimed to be following suit, with one filing an official complaint with the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.

Curiously, in the days preceding the sudden closing of the contracts, OKEx issued an ominous warning to investors:

The move, while not illegal or unprecedented, has served as a stark reminder of the unregulated nature of the digital asset market. OKEx is also noted to be the only cryptocurrency exchange offering futures contracts to take these measures.

OKEx is currently the second largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, with almost $850,000 in cryptocurrency being traded on its platform daily.