An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: For as long as cryptocurrencies have existed, libertarians have dreamed of using them to create communities, seasteads, and cities free from the prying eyes of the state and its tax collectors. We've seen crypto-inspired attempts to claim disputed lands as tax havens, use UFOs and fireworks to christen a new tax-free Bitcoin town, build cities with DAOs, and establish communities inside of U.S. colonies to avoid taxes. But there's now a wave of attempts to buy entire islands and build the next crypto "paradise."

The first one to look at is "Cryptoland," founded by Max Oliver and Helena Lopez, who reportedly have a checkered history with the Spanish YouTuber community mired in allegations of doxxing and the resulting boycott of an awards show linked to the pair. Cryptoland burrowed into the public's mind when its unlisted 18-minute animated sales pitch was found on YouTube in December. It features three sections littered with bombastic rhetoric about what is to come, a manifesto of sorts, a memorial to Bitconnect -- arguably the most infamous scam in Bitcoin history -- and promises to "make crypto enrich a harmonious co-existence with the world energy of its surroundings." Since going viral, Cryptoland has taken down its unlisted sales pitch but a shorter public version is still available to behold. [...]

Cryptoland isn't alone. Satoshi Island is another crypto utopia supposedly in the works, featuring a 32 million square foot island (approx 1.1 square miles) in Vanuatu -- an archipelago of islands between Australia and Fiji. It's slightly larger than Cryptoland, but has substantially less information available on it. Its website states that the island is owned by Satoshi Island Limited, but there's no information on who runs the company or how beyond a Team section listing some individuals involved. It also claims to have "a green light from the Vanuatu Ministry Of Finance and all approvals in place." Motherboard reached out to various Vanuatu offices to confirm this, but has not heard back. Satoshi Island told Motherboard they have owned the island for some years, but when asked about the company's ownership said "Some of the public team and advisors have legal control of the company" and pointed at the Team section. "It's important to note that, for both islands, almost none of this exists yet," adds Motherboard's Edward Ongweso Jr. "It's not clear if any of it will ever exist, as the details offered are not only relatively scant and nebulous, but it's not clear if it's possible even if tens of millions are not raised through NFTs and other means. And, given that Cryptoland and Satoshi Island are just two examples of a growing trend, it's starting to look like bespoke crypto-utopias are another bubble within a bubble."

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts who piled into meme coins such as Dogecoin and Shiba Inu amid the long-time industry rallying call of "to the moon" are finding this year's journey back to earth pretty painful. From a report: Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and other tokens associated more with online jokes rather than actual software products have been hit harder than sector originals Bitcoin or Ethereum during the recent retreat from the record price levels reached late last year. Doge is off nearly 80% from its all-time high of 74 cents in May, and Shiba has declined more than 65% since hitting its peak of fractions of a penny in late October, according to data compiled by Messari.

Trading volumes have fallen off, now measured in millions instead of billions. And the jokes that once swayed a legion of mostly retail day traders to buy up coins on a whim come with a hint of sadness. The frenzy started with Doge. A digital token created in 2013 by a pair of software engineers took off as interest in crypto trading spiked and a new crop of retail traders took to social media platforms, using jokes, sarcasm and trolling to gin up their popularity. Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk's embrace of the token helped to send it soaring. Doge's popularity inspired the creation of new tokens based on the breed of dog, including Shiba Inu, Baby Shiba Inu and Floki, which is named after Musk's pet.

The Mozilla Foundation is pausing accepting donations in cryptocurrency following a backlash from scores of people including a founder of the Mozilla Project. From a report: The foundation, which oversees the development of Firefox browser, on Thursday acknowledged conversations around the environment impact that cryptocurrency potentially pose and said it is reviewing whether its current policy on crypto donations "fits with our climate goals."

The foundation started to face backlash following a tweet late last year that invited people to donate via using a variety of crypto tokens including Bitcoin. In response to it, Jamie Zawinski expressed dismay at the foundation's move. "Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters," he said, adding an expletive.

A beta "payments" feature now lets users of the popular encrypted messaging app send MobileCoin around the globe. From a report: In the spring of 2021, the encrypted communications app Signal announced that it would add a payments feature in beta for its users in the UK, testing out an integration with a relatively new, privacy-focused cryptocurrency called MobileCoin. But a much broader phase of that experiment has quietly been underway since mid-November. That's when Signal made the same feature accessible to all of its users without fanfare, offering the ability to send digital payments far more private than a credit card transaction -- or a Bitcoin transfer -- to many millions of phones. MobileCoin founder Josh Goldbard confirmed the timing of the rollout, and says that it spurred massive adoption of the cryptocurrency, which now sees thousands of daily transactions versus just dozens before the global beta release. "There are over a hundred million devices on planet Earth right now that have the ability to turn on MobileCoin and send an end-to-end encrypted payment in five seconds or less," Goldbard says, referencing reports of Signal's total download numbers.

In fact, getting started using Signal's payments feature still isn't quite that simple. Anyone outside of sanctioned companies like North Korea and Syria can access their MobileCoin wallet within a message by tapping the "+" icon and then "payment." But the challenge for many will be loading that wallet in the first place; the cryptocurrency is listed for sale on only a few smaller cryptocurrency exchanges -- such as BitFinex and FTX -- none of which yet offer it to US consumers. Signal itself didn't respond to WIRED's requests for comment on the global rollout of the payments feature. But last April, Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike explained to WIRED that he wanted to add payments to the encrypted video-calling and texting app to match features from rivals like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger -- while also bringing Signal's lauded privacy protections to monetary transactions. "I would like to get to a world where not only can you feel [a sense of privacy] when you talk to your therapist over Signal, but also when you pay your therapist for the session over Signal," Marlinspike said at the time.

The global computing power of the bitcoin network has dropped sharply as the shutdown this week of Kazakhstan's internet during a deadly uprising hit the country's fast-growing cryptocurrency mining industry. From a report: Kazakhstan became last year the world's second-largest centre for bitcoin mining after the United States, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, after China clamped down on crypto mining activity. Russia sent paratroopers into Kazakhstan on Thursday to help put down the countrywide uprising after violence spread across the tightly controlled former Soviet state. Police said they had killed dozens of rioters in the main city, Almaty, while state television said 13 members of the security forces had died. The internet was on Wednesday shut down across the country in what monitoring site Netblocks called "a nation-scale internet blackout." The move would have probably prevented Kazakhstan-based miners from accessing the bitcoin network.

CoinDesk: Garry Kasparov knows math. He knows logic, strategy and decision-making. Widely regarded as the greatest chess player in the history of mankind, the Russian grandmaster -- ranked No. 1 from 1984 to 2005 -- sees the world with a certain clarity. So it will delight many in the blockchain industry to learn that Kasparov, easily one of the smartest people alive, is now a champion of cryptocurrency. And it's partly because of math. Kasparov has spent his "retirement" opposing Russian President Vladimir Putin (a defiance that once got him tossed in jail), fighting for humanitarian causes and serving as chairman of the Human Rights Foundation (a nonprofit that strongly supports bitcoin as a freedom-giving tool). Now he views crypto as a way to check government power. Bitcoin offers protection against rampant government spending, says Kasparov, "because you're protected by math" -- by the logic of the code itself. Kasparov also sees merit in non-fungible tokens. [...]

CoinDesk: How'd you get into the crypto space?
Kasparov: If you followed my career and read about my early interest in computers and technology, you should not be surprised that I was very excited when I recognized the value of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. This goes all the way back to the '80s; I always tried to be at the cutting edge. It started with chess. But I also saw an opportunity to use computers and new tools to advance individual freedoms. It's my belief that technology should help people fight back against the power of the state.

How do cryptocurrencies fit into that?

Cryptocurrencies become an inseparable part of or progress, because the whole world is moving digital. And if the economy becomes more digital, so does the money. Another philosophical reason is that ... governments [have] unlimited opportunities to print money. And printing money is the most exquisite form of borrowing from us and from future generations. And I believe that cryptocurrencies -- with bitcoin as a standard -- offer a protection against this onslaught of the government, because you're protected by math. You're protected by the limited number of any code behind the respective currency. Cryptocurrencies, and all the products related to cryptocurrencies, are absolutely vital for the future development of our world.

MattSparkes writes: UK police forces have seized more than 300 million pound ($405 million) worth Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, reveals a New Scientist story based on Freedom of Information requests. The individual police forces seized the funds in various investigations and sold them: they're required to give half to the central government via the Home Office -- but they can keep the other half to plough back into investigations.

A user writes: Jamie "jwz" Zawinski, famous for being one of the original Netscape developers, being a founder of the Mozilla project, and for this axiom, has laid into Mozilla after the Firefox developers announced they was accepting Dogecoin, Bitcoin, and Ethereum cryptocurrency payments, via Bitpay, for Mozilla's services and donations. Quote jwz: "I'm here to say fuck you and fuck this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters."
UPDATE (1/6/2021): Days later the Mozilla Foundation announced they were instead pausing cryptocurrency donations to review whether the idea "fits with our climate goals."

Hungarian-born billionaire Thomas Peterffy, chairman of Interactive Brokers Group, says the online brokerage is now expanding the cryptocurrencies it offers its customers after sensing "urgency" from their clients to get in.

He still hasn't decided whether cryptocurrencies are a good investment — "I think it can go to zero, and I think it can go to a million dollars," he tells Bloomberg. "I have no idea." But he's invested a small amount just as a hedge against possible problems with fiat currency. His approach highlights the shifting attitude toward crypto by investors who once scorned or were wary of digital tokens but realized, especially in 2021, that they can't bear to miss out on the potential for big gains....

[American billionaire] Ray Dalio recently revealed he was holding at least some Bitcoin and Ethereum in his portfolio only months after questioning crypto's utility as a store of wealth. The Bridgewater Associates founder views the investments as an alternative money in a world where "cash is trash'' and inflation erodes buying power. [American billionaire hedge fund manager] Paul Tudor Jones disclosed he's invested as a hedge against inflation, and almost half the family offices Goldman Sachs Group Inc. does business with were interested in adding digital currencies to their portfolios, according to a recent bank survey.

Crypto moved increasingly into the mainstream of finance, albeit with mixed success. ProShares launched the first U.S. Bitcoin futures ETF, which attracted more than $1 billion in two days, before inflows sputtered and the price slumped since its October debut. Crypto enthusiasts are still hoping U.S. regulators approve an ETF that actually holds Bitcoin in 2022. Faring better, Coinbase Global Inc. went public and now has a $54 billion market valuation. It's founder, Brian Armstrong, is worth $9.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index...

There's still plenty of skepticism from Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy, but also pragmatism. [Multinational hedge fund] Citadel's Ken Griffin recently described the rush to embrace cryptocurrencies as a "jihadist call" against the U.S. dollar. But Griffin said his own firm would trade crypto if there were more regulation. JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin "worthless" in October, but that came even as the New York-based banking giant was bulking up hiring to help its clients trade digital currencies.

The bank's clients are "adults," Dimon has said.

Another 12 months gone by, and with it nearly 8,000 new Slashdot headlines — so which ones drew the most views?

Click here for lists of Slashdot's top 10 most-visited and most-commented stories of the year — and also the all-time top 10 lists since Slashdot's creation in 1997.

Here's some of 2021's highlights:

• Two of this year's most-visited stories involved Linus Torvalds. (Although one just reported Torvalds "Tells Anti-Vaxxer To Shut Up On Linux Mailing List.") Another story in April found Torvalds saying Rust was at least closer to use in Linux kernel development — while also calling C++ "a crap language."

• One of the biggest stories of the year was Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation. The third most-visited story of the year covered the pushback against his return from the EFF, the Tor Project, Mozilla, and the creator of Rust.

• Remember that big electrical outage that left millions of Texans without power in the middle of a winter storm? As the crisis was still raging, CNN asked the million-dollar question: who's actually to blame? This became Slashdot's 9th most-visited story of the year — and also the 7th most-commented.

• Two of the 10 most-visited stories of the year were "Ask Slashdot" technical questions: In April RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) asked whether a software RAID is better than a hardware RAID? And in January of 2020 Slashdot reader lsllll asked for suggestions on a a battery-powered wi-fi security camera supporting FTP/SMB
  
  Interestingly, one of the year's most-commented poll topics had asked whether bitcoin would break $100,000 before the end of 2021. 4,951 voters — a full 25% — had said "Yes" — and were off by more than half, with bitcoin actually tumbling 8% in the last week of 2021 to wind up somewhere near $46,371 as of late Friday afternoon.
  
  At the time of the poll — October 8th — the price of Bitcoin was already up to $53,963. One month later it had reached it's highest price of 2021 — $67,582 — before dropping 31.7% over the next 53 days.
  
  In the October poll asking whether bitcoin would reach $100,000 in the final 84 days of 2021 — another 14,687 Slashdot readers voted "No."

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission vetoed two proposals to offer bitcoin exchange-traded funds, dealing a blow to market participants who had hoped the agency would green light the effort after approving futures-backed bitcoin funds in October. From a report: In a notice dated Wednesday, the markets regulator said both of the proposals to list and trade shares of Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund and the Kryptoin Bitcoin ETF Trust failed to be approved because they did not meet its standard. "(These proposals) do not meet the standard of being designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices and to protect investors and the public interest," the SEC said.

An anonymous reader shares a report : Ms. Carter is part of a wave of executives and engineers leaving cushy jobs at Google, Amazon, Apple and other large tech companies -- some of which pay millions of dollars in annual compensation -- to chase what they see as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. That next big thing is crypto, they said, a catchall designation that includes digital currencies like Bitcoin and products like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, that rely on the blockchain. Silicon Valley is now awash with stories of people riding seemingly ridiculous crypto investments like Dogecoin, a digital coin based on a dog meme, to life-changing wealth. Bitcoin has soared around 60 percent this year, while Ether, the cryptocurrency tied to the Ethereum blockchain, has increased more than fivefold in value.

But beyond that speculative mania, a growing contingent of the tech industry's best and brightest sees a transformational moment that comes along once every few decades and rewards those who spot the seismic shift before the rest of the world. With crypto, they see historical parallels to how the personal computer and the internet were once ridiculed, only to upend the status quo and mint a new generation of billionaires. Investors, too, have flooded in. They have poured more than $28 billion into global crypto and blockchain start-ups this year, four times the total in 2020, according to PitchBook, a firm that tracks private investments. More than $3 billion has gone into NFT companies alone. "There is a giant sucking sound coming from crypto," said Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive of search engine start-up Neeva and a former Google executive, who competes with crypto companies for talent. "It feels a bit like the 1990s and the birth of the internet all over again. It's that early, that chaotic and that much full of opportunity."

[...] The growing ranks of true believers say crypto can change the world by creating a more decentralized internet that is not controlled by a handful of companies. While such possibilities have existed since Bitcoin emerged in 2009, crypto products such as NFTs broke through to the mainstream only this year. That has accelerated the exodus from Big Tech companies into the crypto world. This month, Brian Roberts, the chief financial officer of Lyft, left the ride-hailing company to join OpenSea, a popular crypto start-up."I've seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be cognizant when something this big is just emerging," he said in an email. "We are Day 1 in terms of NFTs and their impact."

The United States has taken legal action to seize and return over $154 million purportedly stolen from Sony Life Insurance Company Ltd, a SONY subsidiary, by an employee in a textbook business email compromise (BEC) attack. BleepingComputer reports: "According to the government's complaint, Rei Ishii, an employee of Sony Life Insurance Company Ltd. ("Sony Life") in Tokyo, allegedly diverted the $154 million when the company attempted to transfer funds between its financial accounts," the Justice Dept said today. "Ishii allegedly did this by falsifying transaction instructions, which caused the funds to be transferred to an account that Ishii controlled at a bank in La Jolla, California."

According to court documents, Ishii switched the transfer address for a Sony Life transaction to use a Silvergate Bank account under his control. Ishii later converted the stolen funds into more than 3879 bitcoins via A Coinbase set up to automatically transfer all added funds to an offline cryptocurrency cold wallet [...]. After converting the money to cryptocurrency, Ishii also tried persuading his supervisor and several Sony Life executives not to help investigators by emailing them a ransom note typed in English and Japanese. "If you accept the settlement, we will return the funds back. If you are going to file criminal charges, it will be impossible to recover the funds," the note read. "We might go down behind all of this, but one thing is for sure, you are going to be right there next to us. We strongly recommend to stop communicate (sic) with any third parties including law enforcement."

However, on December 1, following an investigation in collaboration with Japanese law enforcement authorities, the FBI seized the 3879.16242937 BTC in Ishii's wallet after obtaining the private key, which made it possible to transfer all the bitcoins to the FBI's bitcoin wallet. [...] Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department arrested the 32-year-old Ishii the same day and criminally charged him on suspicion of obtaining $154 million dollars following fraudulent money transfers from mid-May.

Fresh off relinquishing the chief executive reins of Twitter, Bitcoin enthusiast Jack Dorsey has taken to the service he co-founded to voice his displeasure with so-called Web3 technology and the involvement of venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz. From a report: Web3, the still hazy term for blockchain-based, decentralized systems and tech that are meant to replace the internet as we know it, has garnered much attention and funding this year, with Andreessen Horowitz being among its loudest cheerleaders. Trading of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains has been the most visible manifestation, with many companies now investing in the development of decentralized apps as well as games for those platforms.

"You don't own 'web3'," tweeted Dorsey. "The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives." The post drew more than 16,000 likes and thousands of retweets. Many pushed back with comments like "highly disagree" and "dead wrong," though many others chimed in with support. Tesla chief Elon Musk got in on the discussion by asking if anyone has seen Web3, to which Dorsey replied "it's somewhere between a and z," hinting that it's held under the control of the VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, commonly contracted to a16z.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cointelegraph: Less than 1% of the biggest Bitcoin (BTC) hodlers allegedly control more than a quarter of all BTC in circulation, according to a new study. The National Bureau of Economic Research, an American private nonprofit research organization, released a study claiming that 10,000 Bitcoin investors, or 0.01% of all BTC holders, own 5 million BTC, or 27% of all 18.9 million coins in circulation. The amount of BTC held by the "one percent" is equivalent to approximately $232 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The study, which was conducted by finance professors Antoinette Schoar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Igor Makarov at the London School of Economics, aims to demonstrate that Bitcoin is not as decentralized as one might think. "Despite having been around for 14 years and the hype it has ratcheted up, it's still the case that it's a very concentrated ecosystem," Schoar said. According to the WSJ report, the top hodlers control a bigger share of BTC than the richest American households control in dollars. Citing data from the United States Federal Reserve, the report notes that the top 1% of U.S. households hold about a third of all wealth. The new report may sound alarming for the crypto community, as major Bitcoin advocates have been promoting decentralization as one of the Bitcoin network's biggest principles.

According to Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan, much of the circulating BTC supply is controlled by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. "Satoshi's coins alone make up for more than 5%," Greenspan told Cointelegraph, adding: "Over time, the ownership of Bitcoin is designed to get more distributed. For fiat, the opposite tends to happen." It's worth noting that much of BTC's circulating supply is also apparently not controlled by anyone and is likely to be lost forever. According to crypto-insurance firm Coincover, around 4 million BTC is out of circulation due to lost access.

More than 20 different times in the last 12 months, at least $10 million was stolen from a cryptocurrency exchange or project, reports NBC News.

"In at least six cases, hackers stole more than $100 million..." By comparison, bank robberies netted perpetrators an average of less than $5,000 per heist last year, according to the FBI's annual crime statistics... "If you hack a Fortune 500 company today, you might steal some usernames and passwords," said Esteban Castaño, the CEO and co-founder of TRM Labs, a company that builds tools for companies to track digital assets. "If you hack a cryptocurrency exchange, you may have millions of dollars in cryptocurrency...."

[W]hile a handful of countries have strict regulations in place, it's relatively easy for tech entrepreneurs to set up an exchange nearly anywhere in the world and run it however they like. Cryptocurrencies generally offer a certain amount of security — taking their name, in part, from "encryption." But the exchanges that manage them, especially new ones building their businesses from scratch, often start with a tiny staff, which means few if any full-time cybersecurity professionals. Their developers may work frantically to make the code work, sometimes accidentally leaving flaws that give hackers a foothold. Combined with the fact that a volatile market often leaves them suddenly holding a fortune, exchanges are a particularly ripe target for criminal hackers....

The problem is exacerbated because many cryptocurrency projects, intent on avoiding government regulations, set up in countries whose law enforcement agencies don't have much power to go after transnational hackers. Or if they are hacked, they tend to be less likely to call for government help on ideological grounds, said Beth Bisbee, head of U.S. investigations at Chainalysis, a company that tracks cryptocurrency transactions for both private companies and government agencies. Some developers "want to be anti-bank and anti-oversight," Bisbee said. "So when something like that happens, they're not necessarily wanting to work with law enforcement, even though they'd be considered to be a victim and it'd be valuable for them to."
Ultimately the article points out that "Most exchange hackers are not caught." (Although in at least one case part of the stolen money was voluntarily returned.)

But what happens after the breach, NBC News asked Dave Jevans, the founder of CipherTrace, a company that tracks theft and fraud in cryptocurrencies. If an exchange is wealthy enough and plans ahead to have an emergency fund, it can compensate its customers if its operation is hacked, Jevans said. If not, they often goes out of business. "Not every exchange is so wealthy or has so much foresight. It just goes, pop, 'We're out of business. Sorry, you're all screwed,'" he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Climate change, the rapid growth of "stablecoins" and financial innovations that led to frenzied trading of GameStop shares early this year are threats to the U.S. financial system that merit closer scrutiny, a Treasury Department-led regulatory panel said on Friday. In its annual report, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) added that while the U.S. economy has improved since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, risks to the financial system are higher than prior to the health crisis, with the outlook for global growth still uncertain.

The report marked the first time the body, which was created in the wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis to spot looming threats, has flagged climate change as a major risk, reflecting President Joe Biden's push to address rising global temperatures. The FSOC, which comprises the Treasury and other financial regulators, said the physical risks posed by more frequent severe weather events and government policies transitioning away from carbon-heavy industry could dent asset values and weaken institutions, it wrote, echoing an October FSOC paper. "If these changes occur in a disorderly way owing to substantial delays in action or abrupt changes in policy, their impact is likely to be more sudden and disruptive," the FSOC said.

Similarly, the body reiterated concerns flagged in November that stablecoins, a fast-growing type of digital asset pegged to traditional currencies, could become a threat if widely adopted. While that market is currently only worth about $127 billion, its market value has ballooned more than 500% over the past 12 months and may be vulnerable to runs if investors lose confidence in the asset class's reliability, the FSOC said. The body also noted a surge of volatility earlier this year sparked by retail investors, who coordinated on social media and used zero-commission trading apps to fuel sharp rises in a handful of stocks, including videogame maker GameStop. The episode suggested financial innovations and social media are changing market participation, raising the risk of sudden asset price movements unrelated to fundamental news. That "could represent a vulnerability if they lead to cascading impacts by causing asset liquidations or putting stress on financial institutions," the FSOC wrote.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday that he doesn't view cryptocurrencies as a "financial stability concern." From a report: Cryptocurrencies "are really speculative assets," Powell said in a press conference Wednesday after the Fed said it would accelerate the pace of its tapering of bond purchases and penciled in three hikes of its benchmark interest rate next year. However, "I don't see them [cryptocurrencies] as a financial stability concern at the moment," Powell said. "I do think they are risky, they're not backed by anything. And I think there's a big consumer issue for consumers who may or may not understand what they're getting."

Powell also highlighted the role of stablecoins, and said he supported the views expressed in the President's Working Group's report, which called on Congress to quickly pass new legislation that would require stablecoins to be issued by insured banks. "Stablecoins can certainly be a useful, efficient consumer serving part of the financial system if they're properly regulated," Powell said. "And right now they aren't. And they have the potential to scale particularly if they were to be associated with one of the very large tech networks that exist," Powell added.

An underwater hockey league connected the founders of the Solana blockchain to investors who bought the Solana token. The 4,300-fold increase in the price of the blockchain's tokens explains why more VC funds want to hold these assets. The Information: When Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko tried to raise money in 2018 to develop his idea for a faster blockchain for financial transactions, bitcoin prices were diving and investors were leery of blockchain startups. Then the former Qualcomm engineer convinced a friend he met playing underwater hockey to become an early investor. And that swim buddy went on to introduce Yakovenko, 41, to two other backers. Later that year, the five co-founders of Solana Labs sold 79.25 million tokens for pennies each to help the startup develop the Solana blockchain. Some of the early token buyers, including Multicoin Capital, 500 Startups and a founder of Race Capital, have reaped huge gains from these first sales, in some cases generating $1 billion in returns. The spike in tokens like Solana, which are worth about 4,300 times their initial sales price, explain why traditional venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are shaking up their legal structures to hold more digital assets. This is how Solana's first backers got in on one of the biggests scores in crypto investments.

The Solana token, which confers ownership rights to the Solana blockchain, is now the world's fifth most valuable, with a market capitalization of about $50 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. Altogether, Solana Labs has sold 307 million SOL tokens, which have helped power the 78-employee startup's growth and the blockchain's development in lieu of equity financing. Solana token prices have jumped as the blockchain proved it can handle transactions faster than standard financial institutions. It also outperforms Ethereum, an older blockchain technology underpinning decentralized finance, or DeFi, a peer-to-peer system where financial transactions are completed without an intermediary. The Solana blockchain can already complete 65,000 transactions per second compared to 1,700 for credit card processor Visa and just 15 for Ethereum. An Ethereum upgrade expected for next year aims to bump that rate to 100,000 transactions, but that transition has been delayed for almost two years.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google doesn't accept cryptocurrencies for ad buying, its payments service or its app store. Until recently, Google had banned several categories of crypto ads. Google hasn't touched NFTs. In a recent interview with Bloomberg Television, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai copped that he "dabbled" in crypto, but didn't own any. Some staffers at Google have also dabbled with the technology, according to multiple current and former employees at the company. Still, Google hasn't laid out a plan for inserting itself into web3. A Google spokesperson said its mobile payments service is "working with several companies" such as Coinbase, Bitpay and Gemini "to support crypto cards, which transact in fiat currencies."

There are a few reasons Google might not want to dive into the new arena -- one is defensive. Web3 evangelists see the technology as "decentralized," controlled by its many participants. They draw stark contrasts to the business models of Google, Facebook and Amazon. These boosters see the blockchain as inherently trustworthy, unlike the current web titans. "Can't do evil > don't be evil," tweeted Chris Dixon, an Andreessen Horowitz partner, in a clear dig at Google. And many Silicon Valley visions for web3 activity, search engines and media decidedly don't involve advertising, Google's main business. But the company isn't completely averse to cryptocurrency. Google has been willing to take crypto money for its cloud business. In September, the division signed a deal with Dapper Labs, a Canadian blockchain company. It also has agreements with Hadera, Block.one and others. Given web3's escalating computing demands, Google will certainly look to ink more of these. (Google will have to weigh crypto's energy needs versus the company's zero-emissions targets.) In some ways, the wait-and-see strategy is typical of Pichai, who has a more deliberate management style than his predecessors. And that doesn't mean the company isn't quietly exploring the technology.