“Bitcoin City” set to recieve 21 million visitors a year

Launched in Ljubljana, Slovenia “Bitcoin City” is a entertainment and shopping center of over 4,000 businesses unified with a common crypto-payment platform

06 June 2018 1700

Sadly, real-world usecases for cryptocurrency have been lacking, or at least far behind the online implementations. The new pilot site called “Bitcoin City” aims to prove once and for all, that cryptocurrencies can be used in a large-scale business and entertainment applications.

The site is located in Ljubljana, Slovenia and is a commerce complex with a waterpark, a cineplex, a casino, hotels, more than 70 bars and restaurants and shopping for over 10,000 brands of clothes and goods. All this business and entertainment opportunities crammed into one big complex is a perfect place to test mainstream crypto adoption. It's estimated, that annual visitor count will exceed 21 million with more than 4,000 businesses gathered under one roof.

The whole project is powered by an AI- and blockchain-based cognitive commerce platform Eligma. The Slovenian AI developers has created a blockchain payment solution EliPay and now are testing it at the “Bitcoin City”. As part of the whole process, vendors will be equipped with EliPay cryptocurrency transaction terminals, and customers will be able to use a mobile app, for now for iOS, with a release on Android in near future. Right now the app supports Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, with more cryptocurrencies coming along. Also, the app will be part of a unified loyalty program for the whole “Bitcoin City”.

Ethereum Blockchain

Potentional Vulnerabilities Found in ETH 2.0

Least Authority have found potentional security issues in the network P2P interaction and block proposal system

26 March 2020 1018

Technology security firm Least Authority, at the request of the Ethereum Foundation, conducted an audit of the Ethereum 2.0 specifications and identified several potential vulnerabilities at once.

Least Authority said that developers need to solve problems with vulnerabilities in the network layer of peer-to-peer (P2P) interaction, as well as in the block proposal system. At the same time, the auditor noted that the specifications are "very well thought out and competent."

However, at the moment there is no large ecosystem based on PoS and using sharding in the world, so it is impossible to accurately assess the prospects for system stability.
Also, information security experts emphasized that the specifications did not pay enough attention to the description of the P2P network level and the system of records about Ethereum nodes. Vulnerability risks are also observed in the block proposal system and the messaging system between nodes.

Experts said that in the blockchains running on PoS, the choice of a new block is simple and no one can predict who will get the new block. In PoS systems, it is the block proposal system that decides whose block will fall into the blockchain, and this leads to the risk of data leakage. To solve the problem, auditors suggested using the mechanism of "Single Secret Leader Election" (SSLE).

As for the peer-to-peer exchange system, there is a danger of spam. There is no centralized node in the system that would evaluate the actions of other nodes, so a “malicious" node can spam the entire network with various messages without any special punishment. The solution to this problem may be to use special protocols for exchanging messages between nodes.