Software Engineering Daily

Cryptocurrency speculation has pulled in a large population of people who do not know what they are investing in. If you hear about an investment of $1000 turning into $1M, it’s tempting to get sucked in yourself.

For most of these everyday people, the game is completely rigged. A large percentage of market activity is driven by “pump and dumps.” A pump and dump is a conspiracy to trick investors into buying a currency.

An insider group commits the pump and dump. This is accomplished by purchasing the currency ahead of time, then promoting it via Twitter, Telegram, and reddit. The outsiders fall victim to the promotion of the currency, and buy it after the fast run-up in value. The currency then crashes, and the outsiders are left “holding the bag.”

Pump and dumps are not a new phenomenon—they have happened with worthless penny stocks. One thing that is new is the ease with which new cryptocurrencies are being created. Launching an ICO is easy. Marketing it is cheap. Pumping and dumping has never been more accessible. And buying them is quite easy as well. This has led to a perfect storm of naive investment capital.

Bruno Skvorc is the CEO and owner of Bitfalls, a site with blog posts, news, and information about cryptocurrencies. He wrote a post called “The Anatomy of a Pump and Dump Group,” which details how cryptocurrency pump and dumps have been used to swindle investors out of millions of dollars.

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Do you think blockchain technology is only used for cryptocurrency? Think again. ConsenSys develops tools and infrastructure to enable a decentralized future built on Ethereum, the most advanced blockchain development platform. ConsenSys has hundreds of web3 developers that are building decentralized applications, focusing on world-changing ideas like creating a system for self-sovereign identity, managing supply chains, developing a more efficient electricity provider and much more. Listeners, why continue to build the internet of today when you can build the internet of the future on the blockchain? ConsenSys is actively hiring talented software developers to help build the decentralized web. Learn more about Consensys projects and open source jobs at consensys.net/sedaily.

I love podcasts–but even with podcasts I can’t get enough audio delivered to my ears. That is why I use Audible.  Audible is a leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment on the Internet. Audible content includes an unmatched selection of audiobooks and other audio products. Go to Audible.com/sedaily and start a 30-day trial and your first audiobook is free. That is what I started on 4 years ago, and since then I have read a ton–I read a lot of business books like The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Lately I have been reading a book by Ryan Holliday called “Conspiracy” which is about the court case between Gawker and Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel. Sometimes I read self-help books–you’ve got the classics like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’ve read that a few times. If you have not tried Audible, check it out–audible.com/sedaily. I’m really glad to have Audible as a sponsor.

There’s a new open source project called Dremio that is designed to simplify analytics. It’s also designed to handle some of the hard work, like scaling performance of analytical jobs. Dremio is the team behind Apache Arrow, a new standard for in-memory columnar data analytics. Arrow has been adopted across dozens of projects – like Pandas – to improve the performance of analytical workloads on CPUs and GPUs. It’s free and open source, designed for everyone, from your laptop, to clusters of over 1,000 nodes. At dremio.com/sedaily you can find all the necessary resources to get started with Dremio for free. If you like it, be sure to tweet @dremiohq and let them know you heard about it from Software Engineering Daily. Thanks again to Dremio, and check out dremio.com/sedaily to learn more.

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