Must-reads for August 17, 2018

With Bitcoin Sinking, Crypto Miners Just Dig Deeper (Bloomberg)
Falling prices aren’t stopping the miners. They may even be more aggressively mining crypto because they’ve already sunk all this money on equipment that has to be paid for somehow.

China’s First Blockchain Social Network Is The Brainchild Of A 24-Year-Old Female Entrepreneur (Forbes)
Xu Ke was a poker player before she was 21. And since trading Bitcoin is much like poker because… Okay, it’s not. That’s just something people say to sound intelligent when they don’t have a thought in their heads. Getting back to Xu, she took some of her Bitcoin, converted it to fiat (when it was around $240), and has now started a social network called Ono.

Coinbase Wins Patent for Secure Bitcoin Payments System (CoinDesk)
Retail crypto exchange Coinbase filed a patent with the USPTO that could give users a safer way to pay for things with crypto. The patent application itself refers to a “key ceremony” a total of 38 times. While that sounds like a the last scene of a reality dating show or something out of the move “The Ice Storm,” a key ceremony in this instance refers to passwords set up and exchanged during a transaction.

110-Year-Old UPS Eyes Blockchain to Streamline Delivery Logistics (CCN)
Speaking of patents, United Parcel Service, the delivery company that leaves all your Amazon Prime orders in front of your neighbor’s door, filed a patent for a blockchain-based process that would track packages. Though the patent application just went public on Thursday, it was initially filed in February 2017.

Larry King Was On Stage at This Bitcoin Conference And It Was Awkward (Breaker)
When you think of “The Future”, the first name that never comes to mind is Larry King. Yet here he was at a conference in Toronto, talking crypto. That doesn’t mean he knew what he was talking about, of course. He was merely reading from a script. Hey, if Russia’s envoy to the United States, Steven Segal, can get behind crypto, so can Larry King.