Cryptocurrency & Mining - Page 7

Famed investor Warren Buffet has taken another shot at the world's most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

The 91-year-old investor spoke with Charlie Munger, another famed investor that has openly spoken out about his distaste for Bitcoin, at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting on Saturday. Buffet said that even if all of the Bitcoin on the planet was offered to him at a price of $25 dollars, he wouldn't buy it. The same sentiments were echoed by Munger, who described the cryptocurrency as "stupid", "evil," and something that causes its owners to "look bad".

Buffet explained that he won't get involved in Bitcoin because the cryptocurrency doesn't produce anything, and its value is purely determined by someone willing to purchase the cryptocurrency at a higher price. Furthermore, Buffet said that instead of purchasing Bitcoin, he would prefer to invest in the US's farmland or housing in the form of apartments. Both Buffet and Munger have previously voiced their distaste for Bitcoin, with Munger even describing the cryptocurrency as a "venereal disease".

The price of one of the most popular cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed by 30% since Tesla, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced the purchase of Twitter.

Twitter's board has accepted Elon Musk's offer to purchase Twitter, and according to a press release by Twitter, the company has entered into a "definitive agreement" to be acquired by Musk. As soon as the news of Twitter officially being acquired by Musk, the price of the Tesla CEO's favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, began to increase steadily, and over the course of 24 hours, it rose by 30%.

Dogecoin has been a long favorite of Elon Musk's cryptocurrency coins, with it being one of the three cryptocurrency coins that Musk says he holds. The other two are Bitcoin and Ethereum. On March 14, 2022, Musk wrote on Twitter that he still owns his Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin and that he won't be selling it anytime soon.

A hacker has targeted the Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram account with a phishing attack that many individuals have fallen victim to.

The official Bored Ape Yacht Club Twitter account posted an update on April 25 that stated there wasn't going to be a "mint going today", as it had discovered that the Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram account was hacked. The Twitter account also reminded its followers not to click on any links or "link your wallet to anything".

Reports now indicate that the hacker infiltrated Bored Ape's Instagram account to post a fake update on Bored Ape's upcoming LAND airdrop that requires users to connect their wallet accounts. The website that was included in the post to Bored Ape's Instagram approved users' wallet link requests that likely contained a transaction request to send NFTs from the user's wallet to the website's wallet address.

Former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly has launched a new NFT collection titled "Dreams Out of This World".

The collection has been released exclusively on the OpenSea NFT marketplace, and features artwork commemorating his time spent in space made in collaboration with the Orange Comet content creation studio. The funds raised from the sales of the NFTs will help the people of Ukraine amidst the Russian invasion of the country.

Meta recently revealed information on how it will be enabling its creators to monetize and earn money from using its metaverse.

Meta has taken to the news section of its website and created a video that explains to creators that they will be able to create and sell virtual items, services, and experiences within Horizon Worlds. Meta outlines that these tools to enable monetization for creators are steps toward "our long-term vision for the metaverse". Throughout Meta's announcement, the company failed to mention how much of a cut it would be taking on each transaction.

For context, the world's largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, takes a 2.5% cut on every transaction, and Apple's App Store takes anywhere between 15% and 30%. According to a spokesperson for Meta, who told CNBC, Meta is planning on taking an overall cut of up to 47.5% on each transaction, and that includes a ""hardware platform fee" of 30% for sales made through the Meta Quest Store". The full paragraph from CNBC can be found below.

A Facebook whistleblower has outlined some concerns with Meta's approach towards creating its metaverse and how it could impact consumer safety and privacy for users.

Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower that revealed a plethora of documents to the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Facebook's inadequate response to COVID-19 vaccine misinformation spreading across the social media, recently gave a warning about Meta's coming metaverse. For those that don't know, the metaverse is a combination of the cryptocurrency blockchain and a shared online virtual world that features its own economy with a virtual token. An extreme example of a metaverse is the movie Ready Player One.

Haugen warns that if Meta doesn't commit to transparency, access, and other accountability measures, she can see that the metaverse will feature a "repeat of all the harms you currently see on Facebook." Specifically, the Facebook whistleblower is concerned about the privacy aspect of the metaverse, the impact on users required to put more "microphones and sensors" in their homes, and how that opens up the possibility of Meta "spying on you at home".

Bitcoin's price has taken a tumble as the world's most valuable digital cryptocurrency drops below the $40,000 mark.

After being on an overall steady uptrend since plummeting to $34,000 back in January, Bitcoin has been slowly climbing in price for the majority of 2022 and even managed to slightly end its side-ways momentum by breaking the $37,000 to $45,000 range by hitting $48,000 on March 28. The new milestone in its recovery back to its all-time high of $69,000 seemingly triggered a sell-off on March 30 that has yet to stop.

Since April 5, the price of Bitcoin has been tumbling back down to prices that were seen throughout the last half of February and the majority of March, with the digital currency currently sitting at approximately $39,000 at the time of writing this article. Charlie Silver, CEO & Chairman of Permission.io, was asked by Forbes to comment on the recent price drop and why it has occurred.

The price of Bitcoin is sitting at around $42,300 right now... with billionaire Peter Thiel hopeful that the leading cryptocurrency skyrockets by 100x which would see BTC at an insane $4 million.

Bitcoin going beyond parabolic and super-boosting 100x to the Federal Reserve-crushing $4 million per BTC would shift the entire financial system, not just cryptocurrency. Thiel's comments came from the Bitcoin 2022 summit down in Miami, Florida.

Thiel had some fighting words for the Old Money out there, throwing out fighting words against Warren Buffett -- who has called Bitcoin "rat poison" -- to which Thiel pushed against the "sociopathic grandpa". Thiel said during his address that Bitcoin is being deliberately undervalued, and that BTC is the most honest market in the world. Thiel said: "Bitcoin is the canary in the coal mine; it was telling us that inflation is coming; it is telling us that central banks are bankrupt; it is telling us that we are at the end of the fiat money regime".

OpenSea has announced the release of the official beta that integrates the Solana (SOL) blockchain onto the world's biggest NFT marketplace.

OpenSea announced the news via its official Twitter account and stated that on April 7, NFTs created on the Solana blockchain will be able to be traded on the marketplace. Before Solana's integration, the OpenSea marketplace mostly consisted of Ethereum-based NFTs, along with Polygon and Klatyn blockchains. The integration of Solana gives creators and option to trade on a platform that has notoriously cheap gas fees, efficient energy usage, and fast transactions.

The NFT trading platform has announced that it has already added 165 Solana-based collections to the marketplace and is continuing to add more every day. OpenSea adopting the Solana blockchain is a move to capture more of the NFT market and expand its horizon.

Yet another NFT scam has caused a user to lose over half a million dollars worth of NFTs.

A user going by the name s27 owned the two stolen Bored Ape NFTs originally, the bubble gum ape and the matching mutant version, valued at a combined $567,000. s27 fell victim to a scammer who pasted a small image of a checkmark over copies of otherwise legitimate NFTs and traded them with s27 on SwapKiwi.

Intel has just announced the first details of its new Intel Blockscale ASIC, which is offering energy-effiiency hashing for proof-of-work consensus networks.

The new Intel Blockscale ASIC has its first customers already, with Argo Blockchain, Block Inc., Hive Blockchain Technologies and GRIID Infrastructure all frothing for the 580MH/s of hash rate mining power. Intel is using its many years of research and development (R&D) into the new application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners.

Balaji Kanigicherla, Intel vice president and general manager of Custom Compute in the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group explains: "Momentum around blockchain continues to build. It is the enabler of decentralized and distributed computing, making way for innovative business models".

The number of Bitcoins mined has just passed another milestone on its way to the final one.

Only 21 million Bitcoins can ever be mined, a hard cap that the cryptocurrency was designed with. More than a decade after the first Bitcoin was mined, the milestone of 19 million Bitcoins mined has been reached, just over 90% of all those that will ever exist.

It is expected that the final Bitcoin won't be mined for over a hundred years, as the rate of new Bitcoins being mined becomes slower with time. When it is inevitably mined, miners will no longer be rewarded with Bitcoin. Despite 19 million coins having been mined, it's not clear there are that many in circulation, as analysis has found about 3.7 million Bitcoins that haven't been involved in any transactions for at least five years.

Sotheby's expects it will get anywhere between $330,000 and $551,000 for a receipt that transfers ownership of an imaginary art piece.

The 1959 receipt comes from French artist Yves Klein who conceived the idea of allowing lovers of art to own "zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility" or "zones de sensibilite picturale immaterielle", as translated in French. Sotheby's explains on its website that on April 28, 1958, "The Void" art exhibition was held at the Irs Clert Gallery in Paris, which had all of its contents removed for the opening. The French artist said that despite the gallery being empty, it was "saturated with 'pictorial sensibility in its pure state.'"

Sotheby's explained, "A few months later, the finalization of the receipts and the ritual accompanying the 'transfer' made it possible to inscribe this 'sensibility' in the field of visual arts for good, and for each collector to become the definitive owner of a 'zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility." Sotheby's compared the receipt concept and NFTs/blockchain technology, saying that Klein's receipt could be viewed as a precursor to the emergence of a new multi-billion-dollar market.

The emerging Web 3 space has been prone to hackers, with multiple cryptocurrency blockchains having millions of dollars stolen from them in just the first three months of 2022.

A new report from Atlas VPN reveals that hackers have stolen nearly $700 million in cryptocurrency assets from crypto blockchains such as the Binance Smart Chain, Solana blockchain, and Ethereum. More specifically, the stolen funds were accrued over 72 attacks within the first three months of the year. Furthermore, the Solana network had nearly $400 million stolen over four hacks, with Binance's network having $100 million stolen over 12 hacks.

The network the famous cryptocurrency game Axie Infinity is built on has been hacked for more than $600 million in one of the biggest cryptocurrency hacks ever.

The Ronin Network created by Axie Infinity publisher Sky Mavis has recently been infiltrated by hackers who managed to steal $625 million worth of Ethereum and USDC. According to Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff Zirlin who took to stage at an NFT conference held in Los Angeles, "It is one of the bigger hacks in history" and that the team behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network "believe in a future of the internet that is open and owned by the users."

The Ronin Network elaborated on the hack in a newsletter posted to its Substack, where it explained that on March 23, 173,600 Ethereum and $25.5 million in USDC were stolen after the attacker used "hacked private keys in order to forge fake withdrawals". In response to the hack, the Ronin Network has announced that it's currently working with law enforcement officials as well as forensic cryptographers to recover the stolen funds.

Bitcoin's price has been on an overall downwards trajectory since it reached its all-time high of $69,000 back in November 2021.

Since BTC topped out at $69,000 in November, it has been on a slow decline in price, eventually bottoming out at $33,000 in late January, which was followed by a sharp climb to $45,000 in early February. From February onwards, Bitcoin has traded anywhere between $37,000 and $45,000, failing twice at breaking through the $45,000 resistance.

While BTC's price is seemingly moving sideways on the chart, it is gaining in overall price as there have been continuous higher lows that have now led to a sharp price increase. For six days in a row, Bitcoin has closed higher than the previous day and is now currently sitting at $47,000 at the time of writing this post. The uptick in price marks the first time Bitcoin has broken through the $45,000 mark since January.

A cryptocurrency island is being constructed in the south pacific off the coast of Australia and Papua New Guinea.

The island is being marketed as a paradise for cryptocurrency users. All payments will be made in cryptocurrencies, and citizenship, land ownership, and more come in the form of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT). Satoshi Island is located in Vanuatu, between Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and New Caledonia in the south pacific coast. It is a 32 million-square-foot island that aims to be "a real-world crypto economy and blockchain-based democracy," according to its website.

So far, more than 50,000 people have applied for citizenship and residency on the island, with citizenship to Satoshi Island costing $130,000. The website for the project explains that the idea has been in development for years and has recently been green-lit by the Vanuatu Ministry of Finance. Construction on the futuristic modular homes has already begun, and residents can expect to begin living there sometime in 2023.

Ukraine has launched the Meta History Museum of War, an official NFT collection by the country's Ministry of Digital Transformation.

The Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, took to Twitter to announce the "NFT-Museum," where users can purchase NFTs created to preserve moments from every day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine so far. The funds from sales of any NFTs from the collection will go directly toward supporting the country's army and civilians.

Exxon Mobil has partnered with Crusoe Energy Systems Inc. to create a new cryptocurrency mining project powered by excess natural gas.

A surplus of 18 million cubic feet of natural gas produced by Exxon Mobil per month is being used to power mobile Bitcoin mining servers. Exxon produces too much gas from shale oil to transport through its pipelines, so the company has sought to profit from the has that would otherwise be burned off without serving any purpose.

Cryptocurrency mining currently is relatively unfriendly to the environment, requiring significant amounts of power, mostly generated from fossil fuels, resulting in a large carbon footprint. This pilot project makes cryptocurrency mining slightly more environmentally friendly by not using excess fossil-fuel-derived power while natural gas continues to be wasted.

Pavel Zavalny, the chairman for the Congression energy committee has announced that the Kremlin is open to accepting cryptocurrency as payment for Russia's natural resources.

Zavalny announced at a press conference on Tuesday that Russia is open to accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment for natural resources such as natural gas. The chairman explained that the payment method would depend on the buyers preference and will also depend on the current relations between Russia and that country. The recent comments from the chairman come after Russia's President Vladimir Putin requested all "unfriendly" countries trading Russian natural gas to pay for it rubles.