If you believe crypto-currencies are the future this has not been a good week. The value of Ethereum, Bitcoin's main rival and "the future of crypto" not so long ago, has lurched ever lower and is now 80% below its peak.
Meanwhile, US regulators have acted against companies involved in crypto-currencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) - schemes to create new coins.

But hope springs eternal, and in recent days both a London art gallery and a Scottish hotel have contacted me about plans to allow their customers to pay with crypto-currencies.

So on this week's Tech Tent we debate this question: has crypto-currency peaked or do its best days lie ahead?

We invited David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, a very sceptical take on the crypto landscape, to debate with Christopher Shake, the director of that London gallery, The House of Fine Art.

The gallery's press release had boasted that it was about to run "the very first art exhibition only available through crypto-currency".

By the time Mr Shake arrived in our studio that had changed slightly - customers would be encouraged to buy the 500 works in the October exhibition in Bitcoin or a range of other digital currencies but if they wanted to use good old-fashioned dollars or pounds, such payment would be accepted.

"Our main goal is to support and promote our artists," he says. But as a crypto-currency enthusiast, he explains that there is also problem he wants to solve: people sitting on big crypto assets aren't able to spend them.

"If a lot of merchants do jump on and accept crypto-currencies, that will add confidence to the market," he explains.

But David Gerard says things are moving in the opposite direction - fewer merchants are accepting crypto-currencies because they are so volatile and the promise of smooth cost-free transactions has proved illusory.

He says many left during the 2017 Bitcoin bubble. "You couldn't trust it for volatility, you couldn't trust it because transactions were slow and often didn't go through at all. It really destroyed the use-case for the general merchant acceptance of cryptos."

He sums up his view of the whole crypto market: "It's not really very interesting or shiny any more."

But Christopher Shake sees it very differently. He claims that everyone from Goldman Sachs to Amazon and Facebook is now moving into crypto-currencies - something David Gerard says just isn't the case - and he believes it is an idea whose time has come.

"It is sticking around because it has value. It's sticking around because it's a great technology, and that's why institutions are getting into it."

But for all his reservations, David Gerard does not expect Bitcoin in particular to disappear in a hurry. "Bitcoin has spent its entire existence lurching from crisis to crisis, any of which would have killed a sane financial instrument," he says. "But Bitcoin is more of a strong cultist advocate thing for people who are into it."

His forecast is that crypto-currency will slowly become more regulated and normalised - a rather different vision from that of the early Bitcoin advocates, who saw it smashing the system and making central banks and governments irrelevant.

Also on this programme, we look at Apple's new health-focused Watch and ask whether doctors will be flooded with patients worried about what its ECG monitor is telling them. And we get two opposing views on whether the EU's proposed new copyright law is good for artists or will lead to a censored internet.

One of the most popular YouTube channels in the world, which features animated nursery rhymes, has been sold.

Little Baby Bum was founded by a London-based couple in 2011 and has racked up 17.5 billion views in its time.

It was bought by a firm called Moonbug for an undisclosed sum, as first reported by Bloomberg.

Informed industry-watchers think the agency may well have paid several million pounds for the YouTube channel.

Co-founder Derek Holder confirmed to the BBC that the sale had taken place but he declined to comment on the sum offered by the buyer.

"We were looking to take the brand to the next level," he said. "We saw who the team were behind Moonbug and what their plans would be, which would be to keep the core the same, but... make episodes for TV around the world."

He added that it felt like the right time to hand the brand over, after a "fantastic run".

Little Baby Bum usually publishes long videos, often up to an hour, featuring 3D animated characters and performances of nursery rhymes.

In 2015, Mr Holder told the Guardian newspaper that his wife Cannis came up with many of the design concepts for the videos.

He also explained that the videos were intentionally long, so that parents could leave toddlers in front of them for extended periods, without having to repeatedly press "play" on lots of shorter videos.

The YouTube channel has since grown into a children's entertainment empire - with weekly video uploads, a magazine available to buy online and merchandise.
Feeling proud

"It's mind-blowing, it's very surreal to be honest," said Mr Holder, referring to the billions of views his channel has clocked up. "It makes us feel proud."

There are also multiple language versions of the content - in German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese.

The name "Little Baby Bum" came from the Holders' nickname for their youngest child.

Moonbug is reported to have out-bid four other would-be buyers of the Little Baby Bum company.

"This is an example of just one of many brands and channels online that have been very smart in the content they've created for their audience," said Alex Brinnand, co-editor of the news site TenEighty.

"For mainstream media it's been almost a mystery, even laughed about for a while - but the billions of views that they have can't be scoffed at."

Mr Brinnand said he was confident that Little Baby Bum would have been sold for "several million" pounds.

WhatsApp, which is a standout among the most-used instant messaging platforms with more than 200 million users has officially revealed features in 2018, which makes the platform even more engaging to use.

The app has as revealed more user-friendly features including Swipe to Reply, Dark mode, message forwarding and more. Here are three new features in the WhatsApp latest update has been made accessible for beta users - soon to be rolled out for regular users.

WhatsApp is working on a 'Swipe to Reply' feature that will enable users to instantly reply to a message using a swipe gesture on the screen from their finger. While this feature is accessible for iOS users, it is presently all set to make its introduction in Android smartphones. With this feature, you will never again have to tap and hold the message box to get the Reply button. One merely needs to swipe right the message they need to answer to, and the application will give you the option to reply. This feature is not accessible as of now but is being improved continuously before its final release.

WhatsApp is additionally working on Dark Mode feature for both Android and iOS, which will help decrease strain on user's eyes while using the application in dim light, or at night, and will likewise help monitor battery. However, there's no official word from the company on when this feature will become a part of WhatsApp latest update, but we anticipate that this feature will be taken off soon.

The platform continues including new features for groups. WhatsApp as of late included a feature that gives more powers to administrators to manage individuals from the group. With this feature, administrators get the privilege to choose who can send messages to the group.

However, this doesn't imply that they wouldn't have the capacity to read the messages exchanged in the group. To use this feature, head towards group settings and then to the 'send messages' option. With this WhatsApp latest update, administrators of groups get two choices — 'all participants' or 'only admins' can take part in the group. This feature has already been made available for both Android and iOS users.

Also, a month ago, Google said that WhatsApp users will have the capacity to back up their information from chats to Google Drive without fretting over it being included against the drive storage limit. This update will be rolled out beginning November 12, 2018.

Beginning Tuesday, Apple's Safari will update to consequently stop and block certain kinds of cookies that Facebook depends on to track users as they move over the web. While this feature will at first be restricted to the iPad and iPhone, the users who like to have on their Macs won't need to hold up long. The new feature will be available to their Macs in a week.

Firefox too, on the other hand, is all set to offer comparable tracking security very soon.

These new cookie-blocking features won't protect the privacy of Facebook users while they are logged in to the social network. However, once they log out, these features will come into play and Facebook would no longer who what they are up to, which in many ways is quite relieving.

If you are worried about Facebook's ever-expanding grasp and are even cautious of its activities while you are logged in, there's another thing which you can do: delete your Facebook account.

A lot of the websites you visit around the web have Facebook "Like" or "Share" buttons installed in the pages, thanks to Web 2.0 which has expanded the inter-connectedness in websites. The buttons, as per the AP, can contain cookies that enable Facebook to watch you — regardless of whether you're not signed into the social network. Apple's Safari update will allow your web browser to figure out which cookies are required for things like figuring out that you're signed into your email versus only straight up gathering information on you.

If the cookie falls into the latter class, Safari will square it.

These cookies are used to track user's movement across the web so that the information gathered could be used for targetted ads, so if you are reading about juicers on a few blogs, you will be shown advertisements from blender-manufacturing companies the next time you visit Facebook. It's all about targetting - monetizing.

Comparable privacy feature at present come only in the form of third-party plugins and search engines like the DuckDuckGo, but the move by Apple to make it a default for its program will contribute to the dire, societal need of blocking those nosy, tracking cookies by Facebook.

A large number of Google Pixel smartphone owners ended up with something which confused them after they saw that the battery-saver feature on their phones had randomly been turned on — in spite of the phones having full charges.

Whose fault could this be? Perhaps a glitch in the system?

It was Google itself — remotely changing settings on people's phones out of sight with no notification or warning. And if we are to believe, Google didn't intend to do so, at all.

Android Police saw this, reporting that a significant number of Pixel users acknowledged being influenced by what at first appeared like a bug. Imperatively, battery saving mode changes the manner in which your phone works to increase battery life, and store some of that juice. This implies, in addition to other things, that apps wouldn't work except when they are opened — not an ideal circumstance for somebody sitting tight for an important email, for instance.

As indicated by a Google statement on r/GooglePixel, this was caused by a little mistake upon the company's end.

"[Some] of you may have noticed that battery saver turned on automatically today," read the post. "This was an internal experiment to test battery saving features that was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended. We have now rolled battery saver settings back to default. Please configure to your liking. Sorry for the confusion."

The statement should clear most of the queries, but is it really so humble - all this?

While Google having the capacity to push updates to Pixel phones is indispensable for a wide range of security reasons, the way that the company could convey an "internal experiment" to customers' phones without those Pixel owners not even knowing about it raises a couple of grave doubts.

While mistakenly changing a phone's settings to turn on the battery-saving mode at the wrong time, and then remotely settling the issue, isn't that big of a deal, by the day's end, it serves as a more significant indication of precisely how little control we have over our own gadgets.

That said, Google has already found a way of secretly teasing the launch of its flagship device the Google Pixel 3.