By now it is quite clear that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are here to stay. Already, they have both contributed to a number of great developments in the world of finance, a trend that is catching on with more and more businesses embracing the rapidly evolving technology.

Slovenia’s largest shopping mall has caught the attention of the world owing to its unique strategies that are now being implemented and will see it become the world’s first genuine “Bitcoin City.” Aptly named BTC City, the shopping complex stretches 475,000 square meters and boasts of 500 retail stores.

BTC Company was founded in 1954 as a warehouse and logistics enterprise before it gradually added many more warehouses. The complex was repurposed as a commercial shopping destination in 1990 and renamed BTC City. Since then, more commercial ventures including a sports complex, a hotel, a casino, a multiplex cinema and even a water park have been added to the mall. In addition to this, it also happens to host Slovenia’s tallest building.

Introducing Eligma

Powering the new crypto-focused initiative is Elipay, an AI-driven and blockchain-based cognitive commerce platform that is used by the shopping complex’s retailers. Elipay is a crypto-based point-of-sale system that was created by a Fintech startup known as Eligma.

BTC City has proven to be the best testing ground for the startup, particularly because the complex provides a controlled environment in which they can slowly introduce Elipay into each and every business operating in the shopping center.

“The shopping center presents a micro snapshot of global commerce because it encompasses a large number of very different establishments that present an array of challenges for Eligma on a scale, manageable in our first development phase,” commented the Eligma team.

More and more retailers in BTC City are embracing the platform and are implementing Elipay into their stores. With Elipay, the customers who visit the shopping destination now have the option of paying for their purchases with Bitcoin as well as Eligma’s own token.

The Eligma team, of course, has very big plans for their platform – it would be very exciting to see that the transformation of BTC City into a unified online platform is replicated in many other parts of the world so that they too can enjoy the simplified payment systems and business processes that were only previously possible in central warehouses. This will greatly reduce the retailer’s ownership costs by ensuring that they only have the essential items in stock.

Recently, Miro Cerar, the Prime Minister of Slovenia made a visit to BTC City during which he was treated to a cup of “crypto coffee” that was bought by Slovenian State Secretary Tadej Slapnik using the Elipay transaction system.

“The purpose of his visit was to open the Beyond 4.0 international conference, dedicated to digital society and blockchain, as well as to get acquainted with BTC City’s strategy to become Bitcoin City,” explained Eligma.

Way to go!

The biggest challenge for bitcoin this far has been becoming more mainstream in the financial world which in many ways stems from the fact that it has always had issues with scalability. Before bitcoin can reach the heights of mainstream adoption and use, it will certainly need to deal with the very pressing issue of scalability which has always been a core concern of enthusiasts.

This is where the Lightning Network comes in – this new technology, though fairly young, has facilitated thousands of new payment channels which signals a bright future for bitcoin as well as many other digital currencies.

The Lightning Network allows bitcoin users to open direct payment channels for transactions between one another on a global scale. As of January 19 this year, the Lightning Network only had 89 channels but this has since grown immensely – by May 24, the network had grown to over 6,600 direct connections which might seem small in comparison to the mainstream financial sector but represents a huge leap forward.

While there is a significant level of genuine interest in the technology, the fact that the Lightning Network is yet to be fully developed makes the adoption of the revolutionary technology relatively low. Among the issues that need to be addressed by the developers are double-sided funding and no watching for offline transfers. However, a more pressing one lies within the Lightning Network itself and the developers are quite keen on this one.

A Major Upgrade

The platform has just begun its journey towards global adoption but the developers are already considering a significant upgrade that will involve major architectural changes to the technology.

The key issue is that the Lightning Network requires the users to store a significant amount of data which, in turn, makes it very difficult to download and run it. In an effort to provide a viable solution to this problem, the developers have recently published a new proposal that presents an alternative and simplified way of making the off-chain transactions. The proposed alternative, called “eltoo”, was co-authored by several lightning developers including Lightning Labs co-founder ‘Laolu’ Osuntokun and Blockstream’s Christian Decker and Rusty Russell.

Eltoo not only aims to condense the amount of data the users are required to provide but also ensures that their bitcoin is safe. A major setback for the existing Lightning Network is that it depends on “toxic information” which means that in the case that a user broadcasts older data, there is a possibility that they will lose money.

“This actually happened to me,” Decker said. “I had an old lightning node on my laptop. I restored it. I didn’t know I didn’t have the newest state. The guy closed the connection because they knew it was an old state! Because he could steal it. Which he did, by the way.”

With eltoo, only the most recent off-chain transaction data is stored thus solving the “data symmetry” problem. Eltoo is a phonetic spelling of “L2” which stands for layer-two and is used to describe technologies like the Lightning Network which offer off-chain transactions.

Amidst a heated backlash and legal threats, Roger Ver’s Bitcoin.com, a proponent of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), recently updated its block explorer page in an effort to remove any language that suggests that Bitcoin Cash is the real bitcoin (BTC). Roger Ver, a renowned cryptocurrency enthusiast who made millions from investments in bitcoin has been an avid supporter of the BCH, which is a fork of bitcoin.

The Bitcoin.com CEO believes that BCH is the digital currency that remains trues to the original Bitcoin Whitepaper idea of being a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. He also adopted an approach to marketing the digital currency in a way that the entire crypto ecosystem with the exception of other BCH holders would consider to be unethical. For instance, he has worked on renaming some of the cryptocurrencies like BTC to “Bitcoin Core” and BCH to “Bitcoin” on websites, wallets, and apps as well as well as on social media platforms.

The reason why this is such a big deal is that it has seen a number of crypto users to incur monetary losses when they send money from their bitcoin wallets to some BCH wallets believing that it is the original currency they are dealing in. For newbies, this is further aggravated by the fact that Roger Ver’s website is among Google’s top search results for “Bitcoin” – the websites BCH wallet also happens to be the first search results for “how to buy bitcoin.”

Before the company listed BCH as “Bitcoin” on its explorer page, it rolled out a “Bitcoin Wallet” for iOS that misleadingly defaulted to Bitcoin Cash addresses. This marketing approach has been deemed as a fraudulent move that will certainly result in the loss of funds. The backlash has since spawned a website that seeks to gather as much evidence as possible from as many people as possible so as to file a lawsuit against Roger Ver and Bitcoin.com.

As mentioned earlier, Bitcoin Cash forked off the original Bitcoin blockchain but owing to changes that were recently introduced to BTC, proponents of BCH have argued that the fork has more resemblance to Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for Bitcoin. BCH supporters have been using this argument to justify their claim of the “Bitcoin” label for BCH while dubbing BTC “Bitcoin Core.”

Politics aside, it is quite obvious that the concerns raised are relevant and by agreeing to drop the misleading language from its website, Bitcoin.com will definitely help to solve the confusion that cryptocurrencies have to deal with. Better yet, the fight over labels is petty and supporters of both coins need to work towards ways of co-existing.

Bitcoin is no longer the king of cryptocurrencies in India. This was proven by a recent study by Jana, a free internet provider that found that Ethereum has been topping bitcoin as the most searched-for decentralized digital currency in India over the past five months. The margin is also quite significant with Ethereum commanding a whopping 34.4 percent of cryptocurrency searches in the country as bitcoin trails behind at 29.9 percent. Another notable mention was BuyUCoin (NEM) with a 21.2 percent of the share. The remaining digital currencies only managed to register 5 percent or less.

Cryptocurrency searches, as it turns out, were highest in December when bitcoin prices soared to a record $20,000 – this accounted for 30 percent of all the searches made within the five-month period of Jana’s study. Since then, bitcoin prices have taken huge plunges while Ethereum, managed to log its all-time high of $1,261 at the beginning of the year.

It is worth noting that even though Ethereum prices have been relatively steadier than bitcoin’s, it does not mean that Ethereum transactions are anywhere close to surpassing bitcoin. Still Jana CEO, Nathan Eagle believes that “search volume is a leading indicator of what has momentum and is showing signs of growth.” He went on to add that while the search volume may not correspond to more people buying Ethereum, it certainly indicates that there is a lot more interest.

The study also revealed that at the beginning of 2018, there was a noticeable drop-off in interest in cryptocurrencies amidst news that suggested that the Indian government would be cracking down on digital currencies.  This was suggested in November 2017 by a government panel and reiterated by Arun Jaitley, the finance minister, during his budget speech in February.

“The government recommending shutting down exchanges and limiting currencies altogether, coupled with the decline in prices, has led to the feverish pitch waning away dramatically,” said Eagle. “There are still quite a lot of searches but maybe we’re getting closer to what a true steady state should look like.”

Bitcoin is once again in jeopardy after German researchers recently discovered that unknown persons have been using the cryptocurrency’s blockchain to store and link to child abuse imagery. Out if the 1,600 files that the researchers analyzed, 99 percent were text and images that included illicit pornography, child abuse imagery as well as other illegal content.

The blockchain is the underlying technology that powers the existence and operation of any cryptocurrency and though they are separate entities, no cryptocurrency can work without the blockchain. At least not yet. The blockchain is essentially a public ledger of all the transactions ever made in the decentralized digital currencies and keeps records of which users own what and stops the currency from being copied. This framework is locked and cannot be altered.

The Implications of These Findings

Blockchains are not limited to cryptocurrencies alone and thus they can be used to hold other types of non-financial data as well. This non-financial data was the point of focus for researchers from the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. The results of the analysis revealed a number of links to dark web services and attachments containing content that was “considered objectionable in many jurisdictions”.

“Our analysis shows that certain content, e.g., illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal,” the German researchers wrote. “Although court rulings do not yet exist, legislative texts from countries such as Germany, the UK, or the USA suggest that illegal content such as [child abuse imagery] can make the blockchain illegal to possess for all users. This especially endangers the multi-billion dollar markets powering cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.”

This is, however, not the first time that warnings about the possibility and dangers of storing non-financial, and possibly illegal, data within the blockchain have been issued. In 2015, for instance, Interpol set out a warning that stated that “the design of the blockchain means there is the possibility of malware being injected and permanently hosted with no methods currently available to wipe this data”. The definitively confirmed that blockchain technology had flaws that could enable the sharing of illicit content such as child abuse images.

“Since all blockchain data is downloaded and persistently stored by users, they are liable for any objectionable content added to the blockchain by others. Consequently, it would be illegal to participate in a blockchain-based system as soon as it contains illegal content,” the RWTH Aachen University researchers added.

While this might be dismissed easily since spending bitcoin does not necessarily require a copy of the blockchain (this is, after all, the goal), many other core processes such as mining require users to download a full blockchain copy or at least have chunks of it. In addition to the fears that anti-bitcoin ambassadors are propagating, the findings by the researchers put the booming, but fragile, multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency market’s reputation into the gutters. Still, it is definitely not too late to fix this.