Hello everybody. The LISK project and it's enthusiasts are always busy, and this week past has certainly been no exception.
Seeing is believing, so here is a recap of the highlights and interesting items from the past week on the LISK subreddit and beyond.....
 

Lisk Sidechain Project Presents at a workshop organized by a head of Volksbank.

Christian Junger, CEO of the MADANA project recently delivered a presentation on blockchain technology, its banking use cases, and how decentralization can strengthen privacy. What was extra special about this presentation was the audience; a consortium of heads of banks. Christian was essentially driving home to these leaders the message that the technology we use today isn’t designed for privacy, it is designed for the opposite - to be found and traced!
Volkbank, who organised the workshop are the biggest German bank consortium comprising of 1,099 independent credit unions.
Presentations such as this one are a good way to build bonds that will last long past MADANA's main sale and on into the release of the MADANA product. Who knows, maybe some of these banking leaders might even be interested in the MADANA product for their own uses also!
 

Lisk Sidechain Project Team to Review and Strategise in London this March.

Chief R&D Officer and Co-founder of GNY (bringing Machine Learning to Lisk), Richard Jarritt informed the project's followers on the GNY telegram that there is to be a team meetup in London this March. He said "the GNY team will be flying all members into London during march, which is a planned week of intensive development and strategy meetings, as we open up github later in the month and lay out the rest of 2019". The GNY team members are decentralised currently with work being done in Europe, The US, and Asia. The GNY codebase is operational, and they are currently combining it with the machine learning, which is what the team has been working on daily. Thomas Lorenc, Chief Technology Officer / Lead Data Scientist on the project is this week testing stability of the GNY Machine learning code within Javascript with node.js.
Richard Jarritt, replied to a query from a community member regarding the reason the code migrated from python (common ML coding language) to JavaScript. He said "it was written in python, and we had planned to run a translation inside the chain, but we altered our plans to the more elegant solution of having everything in javascript. This should should in theory add more stability". There are many libraries for ML written in python that modern ML systems used. We have had to also translate the catalog of code we require to run the system. Its been a multi stage task."
 

Lisk in space?

My sources tell me that one of the highlights of the first Lisk Center Utrecht meetup was the quirky presentation delivered by Blockchain030. Titled "Crypto in Space", it proposed a hypothetical situation where there exists a colony on the Moon or Mars, and how that would work moneywise? Blockchain030 founders Susanne Pieterse and Marc Buma speculated that having physical coins or banknotes in space would be way too unwieldy an undertaking, and questioned "would you leave your money on another planet?"
They discussed three different scenarios that illustrated how cryptocurrencies and blockchain can be used by future interplanetery colonists. One of the more offbeat scenarios was a blockchain based on Mars, with miners/validation situated on the red planet, but outworlders could also participate and create accounts. The pros would be that could provide a way for people that live on Mars to generate an income. Mars would become a Tax haven, especially if exchange to/from Earth coins would be possible. Complicating factors of course would be how to power the miners/validation on Mars, the question of and how successful digital currencies would be in a very small population as would be on Mars initially.
A pair of the slides from the presentation can be seen HERE.
On Monday the 28th January 2019, Lisk Center Utrecht (LCU) inked a partnership agreement with these interesting folks from Blockchain030. Blockchain030 is THE hub for blockchain technology within the Utrecht region. Their goal is to exchange knowledge, collaboration and business consultancy through meetings. Lisk center Utrecht's aim similarly is to create awareness for blockchain initiatives and help people through sharing knowledge, networking and collaborations. By Lisk Center Utrecht facilitating a physical location for designers, developers etc. to work together it will help many blockchain initiatives to grow their projects from a central hub. LCU is over 200 square metres of private office space with around 40 places available.... and all 100% free to users. These two partners wiill mesh together really well in my opinion. It is expected that the founders of Blockchain030 (Marc Buma , Eric van Riet Paap and Susanne Pieterse) will regularly be present in the LCU.
You can read more about Blockchain030 HERE on their official website. I would advise using a browser with a translate function when viewing it if you do not speak Dutch.
 

Lisk's Good Month for Exchange Announcements.

You may remember how back in late January I wrote about Lisk getting the green light to move from the main mass market section of the KuCoin exchange to their KuCoin Plus Trading Area. Once tokens are promoted then KuCoin users can assume that these projects are well performing, are solid, and have less risk than the tokens traded in the main market. To be upgraded, projects had to meet three separate criteria.

1. Tokens must be ranked in the top 40 on coinmarketcap.com
   
2. The project needs to rank in the top 10% for trading volume out of all projects listed on KuCoin for two months consecutively
   
3. The project must also be highly rated by KuCoin’s internal review system
   

Now as well as the KuCoin upgrade Lisk has also received an upgrade from the Binance exchange. They have been awarded the V Label badge on the profile of their Binance Info page. This signals to the customer that Binance Info has determined the authenticity of the project team related to the Lisk project. Once a token listing receives the V Label badge, Binance users can assume that this project is legit, and in theory should be less risky than the tokens traded without the label. Great news for Lisk's profile on the exchange I feel.
 
The final piece of good news that I have to pass on is one I am sure you have heard about already, but it bears repeating for those who have not heard the news yet..... Lisk will be available to trade on Bitpanda from March 7th.
In a public twitter poll to select Bitpanda's latest listing Lisk garnered 44% of the vote versus 26% for Dogecoin, 23% for Basic Attention Token, and 7% for Golem. Bitpanda is an Austrian based cryptocurrency exchange catering mostly to Europe with a user base of over 900000. This listing is great news for Lisk; more eyes on us and more liquidity. Great stuff.
 
That's it for the recap of the weeks highlights. I hope it brought you up to speed with all the weeks good news.
These highlight posts also go out daily on the….
LISK Highlights exclusive Telegram group
LISK Highlights Twitter
The highlights are also included in my weekly roundup on the LISK Highlights Medium account and the Bitcoin talk forum's LISK thread, so keep an eye out for them on these outlets also.
 
Keep the faith Liskers! 👍

The following comment was removed in /btcfork - not by any moderator afaics so I guess it was automated spam filtering.
But it is an excellent example of how Bitcoin forks are being promoted to further the "dividends" agenda of diluting the importance of hard forks as methods for upgrading Bitcoin, and making them seem to serve no other purpose except money grabs or scams.
This was posted by user "solracor" in a post titled "Próximas Bitcoin Forks 2017 - 2018 - Dados CryptoCurrency".
It is recommended to be very cautious when dealing with these forks, no doubt some of them are outright scams which will try to get people to enter private details and keys on websites to steal their coins.
I am posting this here only for awareness of possible scams.
Get ready for a wave of Bitcoin forks! Bitcoin forks: 12 until early January! Upcoming Bitcoin Forks 2017 - 2018
Without further details, the following Bitcoin forks are planned for 2017 -2018 (we'll add more forks as they are announced and notes how forks occur):

1. Bitcoin Diamond (BCD) is a fork of Bitcoin that occurs at the predetermined height of block 495866 and therewith a new chain will be generated as the BCD. Bitcoin Diamond miners will begin creating blocks with a new proof-of-work algorithm, and will consecutively develop and enhance the protection for account transfer and privacy based on original features of BTC. This will cause a bifurcation of the Bitcoin blockchain. The original Bitcoin blockchain will continue on unaltered, but a new branch of the blockchain will split off from the original chain. It shares the same transaction history with Bitcoin until it starts branching and coming into a unique block from which it diverges. As a result of this process, a new cryptocurrency was created which we call “Bitcoin Diamond”.
   
2. BitcoinX (BCX): an intelligent contract (like Ethereum) based Bitcoin. Block 498888. https://bcx.org/. NOTE: Snapshot has already occurred; Futures are being traded, no currency has been released.
   
3. Super Bitcoin (SBTC): like BitcoinX, an intelligent contract based on Bitcoin. Block 498888. http://www.supersmartbitcoin.com/index.html. NOTE: Snapshot has already occurred; Futures are being traded, no currency has been released.
   
4. Bitcoin Platinum (BTP): According to the website, "Satoshi's original vision of decentralized electronic money". Around 12 December. Blocks 497757 / 498533. https://bitcoinplatinum.github.io/ko.html TIP: Bitcoin Platinum is rumored to be fake see: Bitcoin Platinum Created by South Korean Teen as a scam, the local market is erupting.
   
5. Lightning Bitcoin (LBTC): A fork that is intended to provide "fast lighting fixtures". It uses smart contracts and can host decentralized applications like Ethereum (and Super Bitcoin). On December 23rd. Block 499,999. http://lightningbitcoin.io/
   
6. Bitcoin Cash Plus (BCP): according to the website, "fulfilling the original promise of Bitcoin". Around January 2, 2018. Block 501407. http://www.bitcoincashplus.org/
   
7. Bitcoin Silver (BTCS): According to a BitcoinTalk forum, the currency aims to "Make Bitcoin Decentralized again". Apparently, it occurs "in December." The site was up, but now it's down. This is not a good omen. https://bitcoinsilver.io/ - then see bitcointalk.org instead - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2311582.0.
   
8. Bitcoin Uranium (BUM): According to a BitcoinTalk forum, the currency aims to "Make Bitcoin Great Again." Apparently, it occurs "in December." Https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2316506
   
9. God of Bitcoin: Without preminar, it is apparently a Christmas gift from Chinese investor Chandler Guo. Occurs on December 25th. Https://cointelegraph.com/news/forgive-me-father-for-i-have-forked-investor-to-release-bitcoin-god.
   
10. Bitcoin Atom (BCA): Bitcoin Atom is a bitcoin fork with segwit enabled with atomic swaps, hybrid consensus and ray network. Exact fork block / date TBA. See: https://bitcoinatom.io/.
    
11. UNITEDBITCOIN: LINKING VALUES AND SERVING THE WORLD! The distribution of phase 2 of the UBTC will occur at the time of block # 501878. UNITEDBITCOIN UPGRADES BITCOIN THROUGH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF INTELLIGENT CONTRACTS. Bitcoin Labor Testing and Emission Model, with new high speed smart contracts. Future Lightning Network support for faster, more cost-effective transactions. UnitedBitcoin (UBTC) will be allocated to active Bitcoin portfolios at a rate of 1 BTC to 1 UBTC at fork time. Without pre-mining, stable system with fixed reserves in fiduciary currency See: https://www.ub.com/
    
12. Bitcoin Interest ("BCI") is a frictionless global payment system that focuses on three main areas of Technology, Community and Savings. Our payment system has a new integrated savings technology that allows our users to park their coins and earn interest. January 22, 2018 at 11:59 PM GMT, or in block 505083. See: https://www.bitcoininterest.io/
    

To summarize the above and connect some points, Super Bitcoin and BitcoinX are Ethereum competitors (as they use smart contracts like the Ethereum network), Bitcoin Platinum and Bitcoin Cash Plus are basically competitors of Bitcoin Cash (Bitcoin's competitors as currency ), Lightening Bitcoin is a blend of Super Bitcoin / BitcoinX and Bitcoin Platinum / Bitcoin Cash Plus (since both are designed to be competitive as currency and uses smart contracts), and Bitcoin Silver and Bitcoin Uranium are competitors of Bitcoin Gold ( competing for Bitcoin as a valuable store that is profitable for mine), and finally Bitcoin God is a Chandler Guo Christmas gift (simply meant to reward people for having Bitcoin).
This may sound crazy, but if you think about these as user-triggered dividends, it starts to make a little more sense.
To ensure you get your coins from the Bitcoin forks up to the Bitcoin, you are holding: Make sure to be in a Bitcoin wallet that supports the forks (Coinomi multiwallet with over 300 different coins has been good on this), an exchange like Binance with a good record of support forks (Binance supported Bitcoin Cash, Gold, Segwit2x, Diamond and Super Bitcoin and offered futures on the snapshot date or around the date of each snapshot, meanwhile as a user pointed out, hitbtc has been good at supporting forks, Super Bitcoin futures have been traded on hitbtc immediately after the fork, for example), or otherwise being in control of their private keys when forks occur (for example, in a portfolio like Bizcoin Core)!
Unknown. Here are some of the other Bitcoin HF / air drops planned for 2018:
Bitcoin Rubies (BTCRUBBY) https://www.bitcoinruby.io/ ERC20?
Bitcoin Dollars?
Bitcoin Stones?
Bitcoin Script BTCS reborn from the ashes?
Bitcoin Steel?
Bitcoin Razor?
Bitcoin Bronze (BTCB). Symbol: BTCB Decimal: 18 Total supply: 50 million ERC20 Distribution Airdrop rounds Round 1 Airdrop https://bitcoinbronze.io/
Bitcoin Iron?
Bitcoin Atomic (ATOM) Atomic Coin New Blockchain is coming out soon. Let's launch a new chain of Atomic Coin blocks with faster features. Then, deposit your atomic currency for exchange in the Web wallet before 1/1/2018. https://www.atomicproject.org/
Bitcoin Elliptic?
Bitcoin Hash?
Bitcoin XOR?