Cryptocurrency & Mining - Page 11

Russia's central bank has been pushing the government for an outright ban on cryptocurrencies, citing that digital dollars are a threat to Russia's financial system.

Despite the pleads from the Bank of Russia to ban cryptocurrencies, the Kremlin has seen an opportunity to make money by regulating the sector and has provided estimates for the total market value held by Russians. According to a report from Bloomberg, Russians currently hold more than 16.5 trillion rubles or $214 billion worth of cryptocurrencies in various forms, which is about 12% of the total value of global holdings, or around a third of Russia's stock index market capitalization.

The publication reports that two people working on the regulation proposals said that these estimates were conceived through an analysis of IP addresses from people that were visiting the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges. It should be noted that Russia is also the third-highest country for Bitcoin mining, and while the Bank of Russia urges the Kremlin to do a sweeping ban on cryptocurrencies, the Russian government seem to have obeyed the demands of Russia's President Vladamir Putin, who instructed authorities to create a regulatory process for the emerging currency.

An infamous streamer and YouTuber has been exposed for scamming his audience out of $500,000 through a cryptocurrency scheme.

The streamer and YouTuber is Paul "Ice Poseidon" Denino, who previously streamed on Twitch before the platform banned him back in 2017. Since then, Ice Poseidon has been streaming on YouTube, where he used his audience to secure investments into a cryptocurrency that he created called CxCoin, which Poseidon claimed would be a platform that streamers would be able to use to receive donations in cryptocurrencies.

The project received around $500,000 in donations, and according to Coffeezilla, a YouTuber that investigates other content creators for fraud, Ice Poseidon withdrew $300,000 out of the projects liquidity pool after stating that the invested funds were "locked" and that he wasn't able to pull the rug out from under the project "even if he wanted to". Coffeezilla interviewed Poseidon where he expressed little remorse for his actions, saying that he was "looking out" for himself and that it was everyone else's fault for "putting too much emotion into it".

Despite the mainstream hate of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), one of the world's largest festivals is fully adopting them by offering lifetime passes to all of its concerts.

Coachella Valley Music & Arts has partnered with FTX US to release a selection of NFTs that are built on the Solana blockchain. According to the announcement, Coachella will auction off 10 key NFT's that will serve as lifetime passes to all Coachella festivals. The keys also come with perks for the Coachella 2022, such as front row access, dinner made by a celebrity chef, or on-stage access at a Sahara Tent.

Additionally, Coachella is releasing two more collections of NFTs, one will include a 1,000-piece collection that will start at $180 apiece that will allow buyers to redeem a physical photo book from the festival and the other being a 10,000-piece digital collection that starts at $60 apiece. Coachella will be auctioning these NFTs on its own website as well as the FTX NFT marketplace.

The world's biggest Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace has broken its previous record for total monthly trading volume that was set back in August 2021.

The leading NFT marketplace, OpenSea, has reportedly broken its record for highest monthly trading volume as data obtained by Dune Analytics indicates that the NFT marketplace had more than $4.95 billion worth of Ethereum traded on its platform throughout January 2022. Additionally, the data indicates that $79 million in Polygon was also traded throughout the month, breaking its previous record of $76 million.

Back in August, 2021, the NFT space exploded, and with it came an explosion in trading volume on marketplaces. OpenSea's previous monthly trading volume record hit $3.4 billion in August, and recently the platform also had its single best day for Ethereum NFT trading, with a staggering $233 million traded in a 24 hour period. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

Michael Saylor, the CEO of software company MicroStrategy recently interviewed former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey.

During the interview, Saylor asked Dorsey how Bitcoin could assist corporations and everyday people in solving some fundamental problems, to which Dorsey says that the internet having a native currency opens many doors for "internet companies, technology companies, but more importantly for everyday people, activists, people who have questions in the world, curiosity, and recognizing that the currency systems just aren't working for them".

Dorsey, who left Twitter last year to focus on Bitcoin, mentioned Facebook, who recently re-branded to "Meta", shouldn't have been focussing its efforts on creating its own cryptocurrency and instead should have been "making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world."

Scams have been plaguing the NFT space for quite some time now, and with so many new projects coming out it's difficult to determine which ones will hold their value and which ones won't.

An example of a project "not holding its value", or purely being a scam is The Big Daddy Ape Club, an obvious rip-off project of the immensely popular/expensive Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that have been purchased and promoted by a variety of celebrities and athletes. Individuals that invested into The Big Daddy Ape Club were scammed as the NFTs were never minted by the creator, who ended up walking out with approximately $1.13 million.

The individuals behind The Big Daddy Ape Club secured "verification" from the a decentralized-identity-verification company called Civic, based in San Francisco, which may now result in investors coming after Civic for providing "verification" on a project that was a scam. Additionally, new policies are being created by insurers to protect NFTs and digital assets, however, insurers first advise that investors take the necessary steps in doing their own due diligence in researching the project to find out if its legitimate.

The world's largest NFT marketplace has said on Twitter that 80% of the NFTs created with its free tool are scams.

OpenSea took to Twitter to announce that it has decided to roll back the recent decision to add a 50 item limit to the free NFT minting tool after the community voiced its disapproval of the restriction. OpenSea stated that "we hear you and we're sorry", and then continued to offer an explanation for why the decision was made in the first place. In follow-up tweets, the NFT marketplace writes that every decision it makes is with its creators in mind, but it has recently observed the free NFT minting tool exponentially being misused.

"Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam." OpenSea goes on to write that the company "didn't make this decision lightly" and operated on feedback obtained "from the entire community", but admits it "should have previewed this with you before rolling it out." The NFT marketplace finishes up by writing its currently working on new ways to prevent these scam NFTs created by bad actors are deterred away from the platform.

President Joe Biden has recently announced that cryptocurrencies and NFTs are in his metaphorical iron sights as the president moves to implement regulation for digital assets.

Reports are surfacing about the Biden administration currently preparing an executive action that will task federal regulatory agencies with implementing regulation on digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs and other forms of digital assets as a "matter of national security". Barron's reports that a person familiar with the White House's plan said, "This is designed to look holistically at digital assets and develop a set of policies that give coherency to what the government is trying to do in this space."

Federal agencies such as the State Department, Treasury Department, National Economic Council, Council of Economic Advisers, Security and Exchange Commission, White House National Security Council, and more would be involved in the regulatory effort. Additionally, the report states that the White House won't be issuing recommendations to federal agencies as it will act as a policy coordinator. Regulators will be given three to six months to create proposals for the regulation of digital assets, which the White House will then vet.

Your day starts out by preparing for a raid on a dangerous facility where you're about to bust the doors down on an illegal marijuana farm, but then the doors get kicked down and all you can hear is the buzzing of a bunch of computers running instead.

That's what happened when the Spanish National Police discovered massive amounts of electricity being used, but the facility was illegally hooked up to the electricity grid. Once authorities were there, they discovered it wasn't a weed farm but a crypto farm instead.

Spanish National Police explained (through machine translation): "Police investigations began on a possible indoor marijuana plantation that could be located in some stables located in Santiponce. After carrying out the first inquiries, the agents realized that the existing indications did not correspond to the cultivation of marijuana, but rather that these facilities could be hosting a cryptocurrency farm of which there are hardly any records in Spain".

Bitcoin has been in a steady decline since its all-time high of $69,000 back in November, but the digital asset seems to have stopped dropping in value despite the fear-uncertainty-and-doubt (FUD) that plagues global finance markets.

There are many reasons for the continuous decrease in value for Bitcoin since November 2021, and most of them are macro factors that are playing out across global financial markets. One big macro factor is the Federal Reserve considering hiking up interest rates four times over the course of 2022 in a bid to combat inflation. Not only has the cryptocurrency markets taken a hit from this news, but so has the US stock market.

Some analysts believe that the "bottom" for Bitcoin's price has already arrived ($35,000 to $38,000 range), with technical analyst John Bollinger writing on Twitter on January 25, "It's time to start thinking about a bottom in cryptos." Bollinger goes on to say that his personal plan is to wait for this bottom to be apparent and re-enter the market once it's confirmed that the downtrend has stopped.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has suggested via his blog that NFTs should evolve into being "soulbound" like items in World of Warcraft (WoW).

Buterin took to his website on January 26 to discuss the topic of "soulbound" NFTs, and comparing NFTs to items in World of Warcraft. Buterin explains that NFTs in their current form are similar to items in an MMORPG such as WoW as they "social signaling value: people who have them can show them off, and there's more and more tools precisely to help users do that". An example of this would be Twitter recently integrating NFTs and allowing for users to display them as a profile picture.

The Ethereum co-founder goes on to explain that when someone shows off a current NFT that can be purchased or obtained by doing "X" there is no way of knowing that person who is selling the NFT obtained it by doing "X", or just paid someone else for it. Buterin suggests the "proof of attendance protocol (POAP)", which, as he explains, is a protocol that "represents the idea that the recipient personally participated in some event."

China is planning on rolling out blockchain technology across businesses and government organizations - the process is being fast-tracked.

According to a notice published by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), a large in-house effort is being made by the CAC with other government agencies and regulatory authorities to create the infrastructure needed to "form a large-scale production-level cross-chain data exchange support capability, and promote the formation of a multi-party collaborative blockchain industry ecology." The effort will span across 15 zones and 164 entities.

As Cointelegraph reports, China plans on this blockchain infrastructure initiative to effect the following; "manufacturing, energy, government data sharing and services, law enforcement, taxation, criminal trials, inspection, copyright, civil affairs, human society, education, healthcare, trade finance, risk control management, equity market and cross-border finance."

One user has managed to purchase a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT for tens of thousands less than the price it originally listed for (floor price).

According to a report from Decrypt, Twitter user Tballer announced that he had "lost an ape" and that he began to cry when he had realized what had happened. Tballer's ape sold to "jpegdegenlove" for just 0.77 Ethereum (ETH), which is about $1,700. Additionally, the same buyer also purchased two more BAYC NFTs, one for around $14,000 and another for around $50,800. Notably, the floor price or starting price for a BAYC NFT is 86 ETH, or around $200,000 (at the time this was written).

So, how did this happen? After a group of Twitter users got together on a thread to work out how it was possible that these Bored Apes sold for less than the floor price it was discovered that TBaller, and some other users attempting to sell their NFTs didn't pay the correct amount in Ethereum gas fees to completely de-list their NFT from the marketplace. Instead, these users chose to use OpenSea's "transfer" feature.

Some members of the Trump family have been made aware of the existence of cryptocurrency that uses their family name.

Eric Trump took to Twitter to announce a "Fraud alert" for a cryptocurrency called "TrumpCoin" that uses the ticker symbol $TRUMP. Eric Trump goes on to write that this cryptocurrency project has nothing to do with the Trump family, and that they "do not authorize the use and we are in no way affiliated with this group." Eric concludes his tweet by writing that "legal action will be taken".

Notably, the TrumpCoin is a meme cryptocurrency, which means it has been created as a joke, holds no inherent utility or value. In response to the tweet from Eric Trump, the TrumpCoin Twitter account posted a screenshot of its website that states that "TrumpCoin" is in no way owned, operated, endorsed, or affiliated with Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, or any other organization owned and/or operated by Donald J. Trump or any of his affiliates.

A 24-year-old Canberra, Australia-born cryptocurrency fraudster, has explained why he stole $123 million from investors in a tell-all interview before going to prison for 7 years.

Stefan Qin sat down for a tell-all interview with EST Media to discuss his motives behind stealing $123 million from investors and what the money was spent on. Qin explains that after dropping out of the University of New South Wales in 2016 and moving to China, he began getting into cryptocurrency, where he worked at a crypto exchange. Qin created software and formed his own company Virgill Sigma Fund, which then received millions in funding from investors.

Qin goes on to explain his motivation for scamming investors, citing bullying and harassment that started in school and eventuated into "extreme depression and suicidal tendencies" by the time he entered high school, combined with the pressure of the "Asian community to be as successful as possible at all costs", and the pain he felt from his girlfriend cheating on him whom he was in love, led him to the mindset of deliberately misleading investors.

On January 23, a selection of cryptocurrency-based YouTube accounts was hacked, and videos were posted in an attempt to scam audiences.

Cointelegraph has reported that the following YouTube accounts were a victim of a hack; BitBoy Crypto, Altcoin Buzz, Box Mining, Floyd Mayweather, Ivan on Tech. Each of the hacked accounts had a video posted without the creator's permission that instructed viewers to send "USDT/USDC/BNB/ETH" to a wallet address that was in the description of the video in return for a new cryptocurrency called "OWCY".

Michael Gu, the creator behind the YouTube channel "Boxmining" spoke to Cointelegraph and said that it "seems like YouTube might be responsible" as he performed an internal virus sweep on his system that yielded zero results. Additionally, Gu posted on Twitter and said that he has two-factor authentication enabled, leading him to believe YouTube is responsible for the hack.

Since its all-time high of $69,000 in November last year, Bitcoin's price has been on a slow downtrend, with the cryptocurrency now dipping below the $35,000 mark.

The last week in the cryptocurrency market was a bloodbath of red sell candles with only a few select projects managing to make some increases in price. Decrypt reports that at the time of writing its post, Bitcoin was up 1.64% in the last 24 hours, and now as of 12:01 am Monday, January 24, Bitcoin's price is down 0.20% with 30.96% less trading volume. Notably, the cryptocurrency briefly dipped below the $35,000 support on Friday night, with orders being filled at $34,420.

Over a week, Bitcoin and Ethereum have decreased in price by 18.38% and 27.44%, respectively. Compared to all-time highs made back in November of last year, both of the digital assets' prices are significantly down, with some traders and holders pointing towards the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, inflation, and the COVID-19 Omicron variant contributing to the overall downtrend.

Despite the contentious topic of NFTs, Twitter has stepped forward and has announced it will be integrating blockchain technology into its platform.

The social media giant announced that Twitter users that participate in Twitter Blue will now be able to verify ownership of their NFT and use it as a profile picture on their account. At the moment, the new "NFT Profile PIctures" is only available on iOS and locked to individuals who have signed up for the "Labs" feature.

Additionally, Twitter stated that the new feature won't be available to all iOS users using Twitter Blue, only some as the company wants to gather valuable feedback from a select audience before rolling the new feature out to all iOS and eventually Android users. Once an NFT has been verified by a user it will be displayed as a "soft hexagon across all Twitter surfaces where your avatar is visible". On top of that, tapping on the profile picture will display information about the NFT, such as the creator, collection and more.

A new report released by the Bank of Russia indicates that the central bank is advocating for a blanket ban on cryptocurrency trading and mining.

Russia's central bank argues that cryptocurrency investments is a danger to the financial system that millions of Russian's use. Additionally, the report goes on to push that financial institutions and commercial banks should sever themselves from cryptocurrency and be prevented from allowing transfers of fiat into cryptocurrency.

The Bank of Russia didn't stop at cryptocurrency trading and investing, it also took aim at cryptocurrency mining, stating that it should be prohibited. The report cites energy concerns for cryptocurrency mining, and currency Russia is the third-largest country for cryptocurrency mining when it comes to global hash rate distribution. At the moment, cryptocurrency remains legal in Russia, but it seems that the Bank of Russia won't stop pushing until its banned.

Digital assets are making a slow climb into everyday life as more people adopt cryptocurrencies in various forms.

Cryptocurrency platform Voyager Digital published the first annual Crypto Confidence Survey that found 61% of individuals that participated in the survey are likely to purchase some form of cryptocurrency throughout 2022. The results from this most recent survey have increased substantially when compared to 2021's survey that found 27% of Americans planned on investing in cryptocurrency throughout 2021.

The survey also found that individuals would prioritize purchasing cryptocurrencies over traveling on a plane, purchasing a new car, buying a house, or even starting a romantic relationship. Additionally, 66% of survey participants indicated that cryptocurrency should be taught in schools and be a part of the educational system. 33% of participants believe that cryptocurrency educated should begin in middle school.