Considering how mind-numbingly stagnant the markets have remained over the last few weeks the ever-present hum of a busy newsroom prevails – and never fails – to provide plenty of discussion.

In fact, it’s been quite a surprise to see just how many massive stories we have broken this week.

No conversation over the last few days can be complete without first mentioning the remarkable announcement that Stellar was teaming up with blockchain.com to bring about what may well be the biggest consumer giveaway in history.

We broke the news on Tuesday lunchtime and the story went around the world like wildfire. $125m (a little over £95m) to be deposited into the Stellar wallets of bitcoin.com users…

Before Tuesday’s announcement, the newsroom was still buzzing after the return of the Coin Rivet team from the Malta Blockchain Summit where our reporters had managed to land some time with John McAfee as he held court, drink in hand.

Meeting McAfee

The meeting with McAfee and Coin Rivet delivered some magnificent tales, including Monday’s story encouraging everyone in this space to ‘experiment with cryptocurrency’…

His recommendation was that people veer away from viewing cryptocurrency as an investment and instead see it as a tool and “a way to transact business”.

It’s pretty sound advice – some might say obvious. But, the reason this was a good news story, which is kind of the salient point here, is that many people in this space often don’t sit up and take notice of the obvious things until someone like John McAfee actually endorses the thought.

Taking aim

Next up is another story to have almost set our servers on fire, and it’s a brilliant interview with Charles Hoskinson – co-founder of Ethereum…

Hoskinson spent a long time talking with one of our journalists as they discussed everything from camel herders owning crypto to his recent spat with self-appointed ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ Dr Craig S Wright. It’s a fascinating piece.

Staying within the realm of Ethereum, but boldly going where very few have gone before, Star Trek legend William Shatner switched his phaser to stun as he took to Twitter to defend another Ethereum co-founder Vitalek Buterin…

I’m not sure the value in this story is in any way about Buterin being trolled and abused on Twitter, but rather the fact that Captain Kirk – who will turn 88 years old in March – was schooling the trolls by quoting ERC standards at them.

Boldly going

I’ve been a journalist for the best part of 30 years, and an editor for most of that time, so I reckon I know what makes a good tale. However, you don’t need me to tell you that Star Trek, trolls, cryptocurrency and an octogenarian quoting code like a Bitcoin OG are the ingredients of a superb story.

Meanwhile, with one foot in next week, we brought some insight into what might be about to happen with Bitcoin Cash on November 15.

In fact, it also takes up the second half of our discussion on the latest edition of CRTV – https://coinrivet.com/stellar-air-drop-and-bitcoin-cash-war/

There’s a minor war shaping up, and battle lines are being drawn between the main protagonists in a conflict we’ll be keeping a very close eye on.

More to come

But if you want a preview of what’s to come, it’s all here in this article…

That’s it for my editorial picks this week, but, indulge me for a moment as I break the great journalistic rule of avoiding repetition and refer you to my opening statement – it’s incredible to see how many big stories we’ve broken in such a stagnant market.

And I think that’s a real doff of the cap towards the sort of newsroom we have here at Coin Rivet. It’s full of real, fully trained, experienced journalists doing actual journalism.

It counts for a lot.

Hey, stay tuned over the weekend and into next week – we’ve got a hell of a lot more news for you.