Cryptocurrency & Mining - Page 2

Entering the digital future, I have had the chance to explore BioMatrix's cutting-edge blockchain platform. As a technology enthusiast, the idea of the Proof of You (PoY) token caught my attention at first, especially with its pledge to "distribute wealth in a fair and equitable manner."

The selling point of the PoY token is that it is not just a digital asset, but it is an integral part of the company's Universal Basic Income (UBI) distribution strategy, which is designed to connect the user's biological identity to blockchain technology - an important development that could help bridge financial divides around the world.

At its recent launch in Dubai, the BioMatrix platform showcased its potential to redefine the UBI landscape. Like many other secure platforms, BioMatrix is built with user empowerment in mind, and leverages advanced AI and blockchain technology to facilitate its ecosystem growth and expansion. However, the key difference that sets BioMatrix apart from other UBI platforms is using newer cryptography solutions like Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) to protect user privacy and security.

Uh-oh... it's starting again... AMD's current-gen Ryzen 9 7950X processor has become a super-popular CPU for crypto mining, earning higher profits than some of the fastest GPUs on the market.

Our friends at Wccftech are reporting that because of the rise of Bitcoin pricing, CPUs are being used for crypto mining, whereas Qubic (QBIC), crypto miners are using CPUs that have AVX2 and AVX512 instructions on the Zen 4 architecture, which are great for crypto mining. Intel dropped AVX512 support for its processors, starting with Alder Lake, seeing crypto miners flocking to Ryzen 7000 series processors.

AMD processors were used for Raptoreum mining algorithms, using the huge L3 cache on Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs. 3D V-Cache models featured gigantic pools of cache stacked on the chips, perfect for crypto mining. Qubic (QBIC) coins generate a profit of around $3 per 24 hours, including the electricity cost of running a Ryzen 9 7950X processor, even at 170W of power consumption.

After years of waiting, the price of Bitcoin hit a new all-time high, pushing just above $70,000 before it quickly recorrected by 5%.

It was November 2021 when Bitcoin hit its previous all-time high, capping out at $69,000 before the world's most valuable cryptocurrency entered into a bear market of price recorrection. That bear market has seemingly come to its end as the price of BTC has been on the rise since November 2022, steadily increasing all throughout 2023 and now reaching its new all-time high of $70,184.

CNBC reports the upswing in price began when the US stock market opened, which can be traced back to the introduction of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the US. On Tuesday, BTC pushed to its previous highs, and once it got there, the cryptocurrency quickly tumbled back down by as much as 10%, which resulted in many other cryptocurrency coins coming down with it. However, those losses were then regained the next day, eventually leading to the new all-time high.

Well, we're seeing some interesting use of the PlayStation 5 APU... in the form of the AMD BC-250 crypto mining card that has just hit eBay. Check them out:

ASRock has a crazy mining system that cost $15,000 when it was released, packing 12 x AMD BC-250 crypto mining cards in a kitted-out mining chassis. Each of the BC-250 crypto mining cards features the Ariel/Oberon processors that have Zen 2 CPUs and RDNA 2 GPUs, which make up the APU or SoC inside of Sony's current-gen PlayStation 5 console.

However, these BC-250 chips are not fully functioning, as they have partially disabled graphics that were also retro-fitted into the AMD 4700S desktop kit. At the time, the ASRock 12 x GPU mining system was pumping away at 610MH/s on both ETHASH and ETC. That wasn't bad at the time, with $2 per day per GPU.

Binance is in a world of trouble right now, with Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pleading guilty to money laundering and agreeing to resign from the company.

Not only that, but Zhao will pay a $50 million fine and will be barred from any involvement in the Binance business. As for Binance, the company pleaded guilty, accenting the appointment of a monitor and a criminal fine of close to $1.81 billion, and a $2.51 billion order of forfeiture to settle not one but three criminal charges.

The US Justice Department charged Binance, which is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, with conducting an unlicensed money transmitting business, a conspiracy charge, and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The IT maintenance staff working in the Supreme Administrative Court of Warsaw, Poland, were busted with a hidden cryptocurrency mining operation underneath the Supreme Court.

Crypto mining hardware was found inside of the ventilation duct, and the technical floor was discovered in the last couple of months, with the investigation being conducted by the prosecutor's office, while the Internal Security Agency has been notified of the crypto mining operation being busted.

Investigators found computers and components placed inside of the technical floor near the devices supplying power to the building, so the crypto mining operators were sucking down power from the court while making moola on the side. The cryptocurrency mining operation under the Supreme Court in Poland might have been using their power. Still, they had their own networking hardware and modem, meaning they had their own internet connection to the mining rigs, too.

A blockchain and cryptocurrency YouTuber was livestreaming when he accidentally revealed vital information for several of his crypto wallets.

That YouTuber is Ivan Bianco, who runs the channel Fraternidade Crypto, a cryptocurrency-gaming focussed channel based out of Brazil. Bianco was livestreaming when he accidentally revealed some of his seed phrases for his wallets. If you aren't familiar with the crypto nomenclature, seed phrases are basically complex passwords that grant access to wallets containing coins.

Bianco opened a document during his livestream that revealed several seed phrases, which viewers then recorded down and then later accessed, stealing $60,000 worth of coins and NFTs. The theft reportedly occurred within minutes of the seed phrases being revealed, and the YouTuber was seen during a later livestream crying and explaining to his viewers what had happened.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has settled its first-ever enforcement action against a company that was selling unregistered Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

That company is Impact Theory, and according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has been ordered to pay more than $6.1 million in penalties. Impact Theory, the Los Angeles-based media company, raised approximately $30 million from hundreds of investors for its NFT project "Founder's Key".

According to the SEC, Impact Theory wrongfully encouraged investors to purchase the NFTs as a way to invest in the business, and since the company offered investors digital assets through a form of "investment contracts", the NFTs are considered to be "securities". Additionally, the SEC order instructed the company to create a "Fair Fund", which is meant to be a way investors can recover their losses.

The once-popular Non-Fungible Token (NFT) collection Bored Apes has dramatically decreased in value since the collapse of the price of Bitcoin, resulting in fear-uncertainty, and doubt to plague the cryptocurrency space.

Following the dramatic price dip of Bored Apes, which were only highly sought-after NFTs, a group of Bored Ape investors have filed a lawsuit against Sotheby's auction house for a 2021 promotion of a Bored Ape collection. According to the four plaintiffs, the auction house "misleadingly promoted" the NFT collection and colluded with Bored Ape Yacht House creators Yuga Labs in an effort to artificially increase the price of the NFTs.

Sotheby's isn't the only one named in the lawsuit, as the group of investors has also named celebrities such as Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton, which are both accused of promoting the NFT collection without disclosing financial ties to Yuga Labs. For context on how much the price of Bored Apes has dropped, the cheapest of the colorful NFTs was sold back in May 2022 for $400,000, and now the cheapest Bored Ape can be bought for just $52,445.

The price of Bitcoin is an a freefall and according to reports more than $800 million in cryptocurrency positions were liquidated within just 30 minutes.

The mass sell off caused the price of Bitcoin to plummet down to $25,300, the lowest its been since January this year. The liquidations coincide with a recent article published by The Wall Street Journal that revealed rare details about Elon Musk's private space flight company SpaceX.

The report from Wall Street Journal revealed details about Elon Musk's finances and claimed that SpaceX's Bitcoin holdings were $373 million for last year and the year before, but the company has now "sold the cryptocurrency".

Reports indicate that a federal judge has revoked Sam Bankman-Fried's bail after new information surfaced that alleges Bankman-Fried attempted to intimidate witnesses.

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of the now collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been thrown behind bars, according to individuals present at his August 11 hearing in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered that SBF's $250 million bail be revoked, with reports indicating that Kaplan cited SBF's interviews with New York Times reporters where he revealed some information with the likely intention "to hurt or frighten" former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, SBF's former colleague, and girlfriend.

On-chain data indicates the U.S. government is moving its massive stockpile of Bitcoin it seized from James Zhong, the hacker who infiltrated the Silk Road marketplace.

A Bitcoin address named "The U.S. Department of Justice" moved a total of 9,825 BTC to various addresses, which equates to a staggering $302 million dollars. Notably, the U.S. government announced back in March that the 51,351 BTC that it seized from James Zhong, following his infiltration into the notorious online black market. Authorities seized the Bitcoin from Zhong at his home in Georgia in November 2021, and at the time, the stack of BTC was worth $3.6 billion. Reports indicate that Zhong pleaded guilty to wire fraud.

Furthermore, while the U.S. government was moving its multi-million stack of BTC, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that Roger Thomas Clark, a senior adviser to the Silk Road marketplace, was being sentenced to 20 years in prison. These events, funnily enough, occurred on the same day. According to the Department of Justice website, Clark was sentenced for "conspiring to distribute massive quantities of narcotics, arising out of his role as the top adviser to Ross Ulbricht, a/k/a "Dread Pirate Roberts," the owner and operator of the "Silk Road".

Russian security agencies have been targeted by a mysterious hacker that has used Bitcoin technologies to erase and send funds to Ukraine.

Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm that has worked with the US government, has reported that a rogue hacker has targeted cryptocurrency wallets that appear to be owned by Russian security agencies such as the Foreign Military Intelligence Agency (GRU), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and the Federal Security Service (FSB). Notably, the hacker even took the time to write in Russian that these identified wallets were involved in hacking activity.

Chainalysis was able to confirm at least three of the alleged Russian wallet addresses are linked to Russia, with two of them being used in the SolarWinds cyberattack in 2020 and one of them being used to pay for servers that were used in Russia's 2016 election disinformation campaign. Furthermore, the hacker appeared to both erase funds and send funds to Ukraine. The hacker destroyed more than $300,000 worth using the OP_RETURN function in the Bitcoin blockchain, which nulifies previous transactions of Bitcoin.

Computex 2023 is off to a racing start and while the showroom floor is inundated with PC gaming hardware we have spotted a pretty unique cryptocurrency mining rig.

While cryptocurrency has certainly taken a downward turn since the price of Bitcoin dropped, there are still some interesting products emerging from various companies. One of those companies is Engineered Fluids, which walked us through their custom cooling solution for a Bitmain Antminer S19 90T.

As showcased by the above image, the Antminer has been completely submerged in oil which is then filtered through a cooling unit. The cooled oil keeps the system running at lower temperatures, enabling better performance, and thus, a higher hashrate.

One of the biggest figures in the cryptocurrency space has said that Bitcoin, the world's most popular cryptocurrency, has said that Bitcoin has bottomed out and a new bull run has started.

Michael Saylor, the co-founder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy, has become one of the few Bitcoin maximalists to publicly embrace Ordinals, a protocol that allows for arbitrary and non-financial information to be included on the Bitcoin blockchain. In an interview at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami, Saylor discussed his views on Ordinals, its potential use cases, and the ongoing debates within the Bitcoin community.

Saylor sees Ordinals as a positive development for Bitcoin, although he acknowledges that many of the early use cases are more speculative than serious. He stated, "What if I was using them to tokenize all of the stocks and ETFs trading on NASDAQ so that individuals can take personal custody of their shares of stock instead of leaving them locked up with a centralized custodian? If it was presented that way, then Bitcoiners would love it."

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the creator of the highly popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, is close to securing $100 million in funding for another one of his projects called Worlcoin.

According to a new report by the Financial Times, which spoke to three people familiar with the deal, Sam Altman is on the verge of securing a new round of $100 million in funding from new and existing investors for Worldcoin, a project that aims at creating a global digital currency that is distributed equally and fairly to everyone. The project's foundations lay with Worldcoin's proof-of-personhood protocol that involves users participating in a biometric scan of their irises, which is then verified against a government-issued ID such as a driver's license.

Once the user is verified, Worldcoin is able to distribute the token out to the unique personhood address. Additionally, last week Worldcoin announced World App wallet and World ID, a new protocol that will enable users to sign in to websites, applications, and other cryptocurrency-related applications. The company was only founded in 2019 and has since reached a $3 billion valuation, attracting the attention of many investors around the world that are interested in the utility of iris scans.

Microsoft's Edge browser has been on a run of adding various bits and pieces of functionality of late, and the firm isn't letting up, with another new feature having been spotted: a crypto wallet.

The Edge team might be introducing a built-in way of managing your crypto assets right in the browser, as flagged up in a tweet by well-known leaker Albacore on Twitter (spotted by Bleeping Computer).

This feature consists of a 'non-custodial' crypto wallet (meaning you, not Microsoft, are in complete control of the funds within), supporting multiple Ethereum accounts (and maybe Bitcoin in the future).

According to new court records, the army of professional lawyers and advisors has billed a collective $38 million plus expenses for just the month of January.

FTX, the previous position holder for the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, filed for bankruptcy in November after it was discovered exchange officials were illegitimately managing customer funds. Since then, a widespread effort has been implemented to clean up the financial mess created by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), along with his other top-ranking officials from FTX and its sister company Alameda Research. Notably, some of these officials have turned on SBF and are cooperating with regulators and authorities.

Shortly after the collapse of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO of the company, and John Ray III was brought in as the new CEO. Notably, John Ray III was responsible for assisting in the clean-up process of the energy firm Enron. FTX bankruptcy administrators have Sullivan & Cromwell on retainer as counsel, as well as Quin Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Landis Rath & Cobb. All of the aforementioned firms contain approximately 180 lawyers and more than 50 staffers that are all working on the FTX case.

One of the key members in the downfall of what was the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, will plead guilty to fraud charges.

A new report from Bloomberg has revealed that former FTX executive Nishad Singh is currently working on striking a plea deal with New York prosecutors that have filed charges of fraud against Singh. The report indicates the former FTX executive will plead guilty to the fraud charges and his involvement in the alleged scheme that resulted in the collapse of FTX. The publication cited its source as 'people familiar with the matter'.

Singh was the director of engineering at FTX and if a plea deal is struck, would be the newest member of Sam Bankman Fried's (SBF) inner circle to plead guilty, with FTX co-founder Gary Wang and former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, both entering into plea deals last year near the time of the collapse. If the plea deal is struck between Singh and authorities, it could involve working with prosecutors on their case, which was outlined in both Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang's plea deals.

The former Coinbase employee is Ishan Wahi, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in court on Tuesday, February 7.

The former product manager at Coinbase was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the Southern District of New York. Notably, Wahi pleaded not guilty to wire fraud back in August, which was based on an insider trading scheme that involved the former Coinbase employee informing his brother and his friend Sameer Ramani about coming token listings on the platform. Wahi's brother Nikhil pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in September and received a 10-month sentence.

According to reports, federal prosecutors are describing the Wahi case as the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrencies. Notably, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is also coming after Wahi and charged him back in July last year, deeming 9 out of the 25 tokens involved in the case as "securities". However, lawyers representing Wahi filed to dismiss the SEC charges, claiming that tokens bought and sold on the secondary market aren't securities.