the development of a US dollar digital currency that will rival the soon to be launched Yuan cryptocurrency. According to the lawmakers, the move would help secure the USD’s position on the global market. The general consensus is that a national digital currency should be under the control of the Federal Reserve. This would prevent the exploitation of users by manipulative commercial companies. The American Bankers Association has, however, pushed back against the proposition. It has argued that the Federal Reserve would be transformed into an unstoppable service provider capable of monopolizing its position in the financial sector. China has been working on its Yuan cryptocurrency for a while now. Its digital coin is currently under trial in major cities such as Suzhou, Chengdu, Shenzhen, and the Xiong’an New Area. There are numerous reasons why Beijing is keen to lead the national digital currency trend. Is the US Further Weaponizing the Dollar with a Digital Currency? The US government has slapped crippling embargoes on nations such as North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela. It recently also targeted a collective of Chinese corporations. The Trump administration accused them of aiding the Chinese government in undermining the rights of ethnic Uighurs. 28 Chinese surveillance and related Artificial Intelligence companies, including Hikvision, iFlytek, Megvii, and SenseTime, were blacklisted. The sanctions prohibit US companies, including financial institutions, from dealing with them. In Iran and Venezuela, the US has devastated their economies by effectively weaponizing the dollar and stopping other countries from using it in transactions with them. The beleaguered nations have also been blocked from the SWIFT international money transfer network, turning them into closed economies. The fact that China is still heavily reliant on the dollar for international trade makes it vulnerable. This is one reason why the leadership is keen to promote a frictionless global digital currency that is under the control of the PBOC, China’s central bank. A globally accepted digital Yuan would help undercut the USD dominance in Chinese trades. Although China has signed accords with some nations to secure currency swaps, the agreements cover just over 3.4 trillion Yuan ($4.8 billion) in transactions. Ultimately, the allure of the US dollar supersedes that of the Yuan across the globe. As such, approximately 60 percent of China’s forex reserves are in the USD currency. There is a growing risk in holding the dollar because the US recently raised its fiscal deficit. The move is set to negatively impact the value of the currency in the near future. The rollout of the Yuan cryptocurrency is set to begin on popular Chinese platforms such as WeChat and AliPay.

Google’s smart speakers are recording users when they least expect it, according to temp worker language experts hired by the company to listen to the snippets – which include some of users’ most private moments. Google is able to claim it does not listen to the recordings Google Home devices are constantly generating only because it contracts the job out to temp workers. These “language experts,” as they are called, use a collaborative system built by the company to share and analyze sound snippets, assisting Google’s AI assistant in deciphering the nuances of human speech. While Google emphasizes that it anonymizes the snippets, replacing the user’s name with a serial number, Belgian broadcaster VRT found that matching a voice snippet with its owner was not very difficult, given the ample supply of addresses and sensitive information found on the recordings they were given. They listened to over 1,000 excerpts supplied by a Dutch contractor and discovered that more than 15 percent of them - 153 recordings in all - were recorded without the user’s knowledge.

A proposition to greenlight Secret Network joining the Inter-Block Communication (IBC) protocol is set to pass, with most voters saying yes to the tie-up. According to @JayJaboneta, Proposition 63 will end late Monday, and the current voting results have the yeses overwhelmingly in the lead. Meaning the coming days will see network integration between all relevant parties. This marks a momentous occasion for all IBC members, including Cosmos and Terra. Soon, they will be able to benefit from data privacy by default thanks to the involvement of Secret Network.   What is IBC? Cosmos launched IBC in March this year as a way to transfer crypto-assets quickly and easily between different blockchains. Dubbed the “internet of blockchains,” IBC is said to be the first chain to have permissionless and open-source cross-chain token transfer capabilities. This will enable several new use cases for cross-chain DeFi.   With Secret Network almost certain to join IBC, member chains will soon be able to benefit from privacy by default, programmable privacy, Web3 interoperability, and further decentralization. As well as bringing programmable privacy to the Cosmos ecosystem, the Secret Network is already bridged with Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Monero, Terra, Bitcoin, and Polkadot.   Who is Secret Network? Secret Network protects users, secures applications, and unlocks hundreds of new use cases for Web3. The team intends to tackle the problem of exposed data, allowing protocols and users greater control of how data is used and stored. This they term “programmable privacy.” The project first began in 2015 as a research idea at MIT. But since then, it has evolved to become a working protocol with practical application. “Secret Network improves upon traditional smart contracts by supporting encrypted inputs, encrypted outputs, and encrypted state for smart contracts – data privacy for sensitive information stored on the blockchain.” Although Secret Network bridges many different blockchains, Founder Tor Bair said the Cosmos-Terra-IBC bridge protocol is a new kind of bridge model, different from the other bridges. Bair spoke about the experimentation that has gone on in making bridge models for different blockchains. Adding that, at this point, he still doesn’t know how a sustainable bridge model will turn out. Nonetheless, he reiterated his commitment to Secret Network becoming the leading privacy hub. “It’s exciting to see all the experimentation, honestly, we don’t know yet what the sustainable bridge models are going to look like. We do know, however, that no matter what that trust model looks like we want to be the privacy hub. We want to be where users can rely on having data privacy by default…”

After spending the last few days trading in a tightening range, Bitcoin (BTC) price dropped from its pennant structure and closed below the 20-day moving average ($18,600).  Since topping out at $19,888 a number of analysts cautioned that Bitcoin price was at risk of a strong pullback if it failed to either secure a daily close above $19,500 or at least hold $19,000 as support. During Bitcoin’s most recent bull phases the price has held above the 20-MA so a daily close below this metric could be a signal that a short-term trend change is in order. In this instance, it also appears that bulls are yet to purchase the current dip. As the price dropped and the daily close approached crypto analyst Alex Saunders said, “Unless $18,700 holds, the descending triangle likely takes us lower short term.” On the other hand, Cointelegraph analyst Micheal van de Poppe tweeted that despite the drop Bitcoin price is:   Van de Poppe further explained that the “BTC price level below $20,000 has been accompanied by diminishing volatility and volume, making it increasingly difficult to predict the direction of the next move.” Now that BTC appears to be trading in a descending triangle, traders will watch $18,013 to see if the price can form a double bottom at the triangle support. Below this level, the volume profile visible range and market structure suggest that there is also support at $17,800. The RSI on the 4-hour timeframe is also entering oversold territory, meaning an oversold bounce could occur, but this move will require significant buy volume to push the price back to the 20-MA where there is likely to be resistance. Looking forward A bullish turn of events would involve BTC making the double bottom mentioned above, then flipping the 20-MA and $19,000 level back to support for at least a 4-hour close. On the other hand, if $17,800 fails to hold as support, Bitcoin price could drop to $17,200 then $16,400 which is near the 23.6% Fibonacci retracement. In a previously published analysis, Micheal van de Poppe also pinpointed a large CME gap from $18,275 to $16,995. “Generally, 95% of the CME gaps get filled, which raises the probability of price dropping back to these levels in the short term.” This suggests that failure to hold the aforementioned levels as support heightens the chance that Bitcoin price snatches the liquidity below and re-visits the $17,000 level.   source: cointelegraph.com/news/