From the Hindustan Times: BitConnect founder Satish Kumbhani was indicted by a U.S. grand jury on charges he orchestrated a global Ponzi scheme that raised $2.4 billion from investors in a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment platform, according to a Justice Department statement. Kumbhani, 36, was charged in San Diego with misleading investors about BitConnect's purported propriety technology... BitConnect used money from new investors to pay earlier ones and also operated as an unlicensed money transmitting business, the U.S. said.
More details from the San Diego Union-Tribune: Investors around the world, including those in San Diego, were encouraged to buy BitConnect's open-source, decentralized cryptocurrency, called BCC, using Bitcoin for the purchase. Investors would then "lend" their BCC tokens to Bitconnect, which would purportedly invest the proceeds using proprietary technology known as the Trading Bot and Volatility Software. The technology was supposedly designed to trade automatically, and profitably, by buying and selling on the volatility of Bitcoin, according to the indictment.

But much of the technology remained a mystery to investors. When someone asked for a demonstration at an event in 2017, Kumbhani was evasive: "So you ask me very hard question," he told one interviewer. He added later, "For privacy reasons we are not disclosing anything..."

Prosecutors say the investments weren't being traded as promised but were instead used to pay out earlier investors, typical of a pyramid scheme. The funds would also be used to pay BitConnect's army of promoters, who would market the investment opportunity on social media and at live events. Glenn Arcaro, described by prosecutors as "one of the most prolific and successful" of the bunch overseeing the United States, also formed his own cryptocurrency education course called Future Money. But the course was really a way to funnel potential investors to BitConnect, prosecutors said.

Arcaro, a Los Angeles resident, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in September for his role in the scheme.
After shutting down abruptly, Kumbhani then "directed his network of promoters to fraudulently manipulate and prop up the price" of BCC, "to create the false appearance of legitimate market demand..." according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice: Kumbhani is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodity price manipulation, operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business, and conspiracy to commit international money laundering. If convicted of all counts, he faces a maximum total penalty of 70 years in prison.

Financial sanctions are easier than ever for Russians to evade. Thank Bitcoin CNN: 'Financial sanctions are easier than ever for Russians to evade. Thank Bitcoin' The senior editor of CNN Business writes: The West's initial salvo of financial sanctions against Russia failed to deter President Vladimir Putin from launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now the United States is taking a punitive approach, announcing another round of sanctions meant to tighten the screws on Russian banks and "corrupt billionaires." But some experts say those measures, which so far do not target Putin himself, are becoming increasingly easy to evade, thanks in part to a surge of cryptocurrency adoption in Russia.

The U.S. and EU sanctions rely heavily on banks to enforce the rules. If a sanctioned business or individual wants to make a transaction denominated in traditional currencies such as dollars or euros, it's the bank's responsibility to flag and block those transactions. But digital currencies operate outside the realm of standard global banking, with transactions recorded on a public ledger known as the blockchain. "If the Russians decide — and they're already doing this, I'm sure — to avoid using any currency other than cryptocurrency, they can effectively avoid virtually all of the sanctions," said Ross S. Delston, an expert on anti-money laundering compliance.

The U.S. Treasury is well aware of this problem. In an October report, officials warned that digital currencies "potentially reduce the efficacy of American sanctions" by allowing bad actors to hold and transfer funds outside the traditional financial system. "We are mindful of the risk that, if left unchecked, these digital assets and payments systems could harm the efficacy of our sanctions."
Meanwhile, the BBC reports Ukraine has received at least $11 million in anonymous bitcoin donations to support its war effort — with Forbes noting that includes $1.9 million from a wallet also associated with an auction of NFTs raising funds for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

On Friday the Washington Post's live updates on the Russia-Ukraine situation included the story of a tech firm trying to get its employees out of Kyiv: John Sung Kim, chief executive of the software outsourcing company JetBridge, has been communicating with his 24 employees in Kyiv, all software developers, through Slack. Half of them are trying to leave Ukraine, but Kim says he is struggling to help them and has been unable to get them train tickets, a rental car or gasoline.

"The other half of my team wants to stay and fight," said Kim. "I got on an all-hands with them this morning and told them it's not their responsibility to be soldiers and there's other ways they can contribute since they're software engineers, but there's nothing I can say to dissuade them." Kim said JetBridge's clients are almost exclusively Silicon Valley tech companies that are publicly traded or have raised venture capital financing. "The universal issue other than transportation logistics seems to be grandparents. 'My babushka' is the common theme of why they're torn from actually leaving," he said. The fallout from Russia's invasion has also impacted JetBridge's employees in Belarus. "The males in Belarus are scared that there's going to be military conscription, and unlike the Ukrainians, my Belarusian engineers have zero desire to pick up a rifle. Zero," he said.

In anticipation of European Union sanctions on Belarus, Kim said JetBridge has started paying employees in bitcoin.

MattSparkes writes: Bitstamp, Europe's largest cryptocurrency exchange, says it has handed over information on some of its customers to the UK's intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6. The news suggests that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are being used in serious organised crime and terrorism, as well as domestic crime.

The Security Service, also known as MI5, is responsible for preventing terrorism and espionage within the UK, while the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6, is tasked with foreign intelligence. Neither organisation tackles ordinary crime, unless there is a threat to national security, and until now no cryptocurrency investigations have been confirmed.

The hottest spot in crypto right now is coins with prices that don't move. From a report: Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies which peg their value to assets such as the U.S. dollar, have ballooned in size over the past few months as Bitcoin and other coins whipsaw. The total market capitalization of stablecoins currently stands around $180 billion, up from roughly $38 billion a year ago, Coin Metrics data compiled by The Block show. By comparison, the total crypto universe is largely stagnant over the past year. The surge in market value shows that crypto traders are effectively moving their holdings to cash, according to James Malcolm of UBS. Bitcoin prices have collapsed by about 50% since mid-November, with many smaller coins posting even bigger declines. Rather than moving money off crypto-trading exchanges by converting back into fiat currencies -- a cumbersome and potentially costly process -- it's easier for investors to simply wait out the volatility in stablecoins, Malcolm said.

New submitter LZ_Mordan writes: David Heinemeier Hansson, the Ruby on Rails web development framework creator, took to Twitter on Monday to tell his followers that he was no longer a Bitcoin skeptic. "I still can't believe that this is the protest that would prove every Bitcoin crank a prophet. And for me to have to slice a piece of humble pie, and admit that I was wrong on crypto's fundamental necessity in Western democracies," Hansson wrote. In a blog post titled "I was wrong, we need crypto," the Danish programmer mentioned that he's been skeptical about Bitcoin and the crypto industry in general since the early 2010s.

He noted that some of his biggest arguments against Bitcoin were the cryptocurrency's energy consumption, transaction fees, the lack of real decentralization, supposed fraud involving Tether (USDT) stablecoin and many others. But all these arguments do not provide enough reasons to disregard cryptocurrencies as a tool to support freedom and democracy in situations where countries like Canada impose martial law in response to peaceful protest movements, Hansson argued, stating: "It's clear to me now that I was too hasty to completely dismiss crypto on the basis of all the things wrong with it at the moment. Instead of appreciating the fundamental freedom to transact that it's currently our best shot at protecting."

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has said many crypto developers wouldn't be unhappy to see a continued slide in the price of digital currencies, as the slump could clear out less-viable projects. From a report: Cryptocurrencies have fallen in recent weeks alongside stocks, as investors grow more cautious about taking risks given persistent rises in inflation, expected interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, and geopolitical tensions. But the prospect of more losses and a bear market -- generally, where prices fall 20% from a recent high -- won't deter some in the crypto world, Buterin told Bloomberg. "The people who are deep into crypto, and especially building things, a lot of them welcome a bear market," he said in an interview published Saturday. [...] On the other hand, falling prices separate the curious from the serious, he argued. That is why a "crypto winter" -- when prices keep crashing and fail to recover for a long time -- could be seen as a positive. "The winters are the time when a lot of those applications fall away, and you can see which projects are actually long-term sustainable, like both in their models and in their teams and their people," the ethereum cofounder said.

"Vice examines the toll on mental health experienced by people who invest a large portion of their net worth into volatile cryptocurrencies," writes long-time Slashdot reader leathered.

Vice argues that "The stress and anxiety that goes with funneling your life savings into a volatile market is no joke." Countless people have watched thousands of pounds disappear before their eyes.... Many crypto-investors are ordinary people taking a risk with their life savings rather than elite traders who can swallow sudden losses. A recent CNBC survey of 750 crypto investors found that a third actually knew very little about what they were investing in. The question is: What happens to these people when they lose big...? It seems like this fast-growing investor community is generating its own fast-growing mental health crisis....

Contrary to the frequent declarations that investing is an everyman route to wealth and happiness, interviewees told me that crypto had nearly ruined their lives.... Despite the intense stress shared by some crypto investors, finding a space to discuss these experiences isn't easy. Across Reddit and Twitter conversations around crypto, there's usually one reaction to downturns: "Don't be an anxiety bitch, HODL [Hold on for Dear Life]" — in other words, don't you dare pull out. Memes regularly circulate that joke about the intense stress and torment that come with investing.

The need to put on this brave face could be down to the fact that voicing your anxiety has a direct impact on the markets, which are essentially a reflection of confidence. Coins go higher the more people invest and drop the more people pull out. Crypto might be anxiety-inducing, but people don't make money from acknowledging this and actively lose out if they do.... HODL has become a joke in the crypto space, but that's exactly what so many investors are trying and failing to do with their psychological wellbeing.

Experts say crypto will eventually bounce back — as it often seems to do — but you have to wonder just how much damage will be done to the lives of its investors before it does.

Federal investigators spent years hunting for clues in the 2016 hacking of the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, when thieves stole bitcoin now worth $4.5 billion. In the end, what helped lead them to two suspects was something much more quotidian: a $500 Walmart gift card. From a report: That card and more than a dozen others like it, including for Uber, Hotels.com and PlayStation, were linked to emails and cloud service providers belonging to a young Manhattan couple, Ilya "Dutch" Lichtenstein and Heather R. Morgan, according to a criminal complaint. Authorities arrested the couple after seizing $3.6 billion worth of bitcoin allegedly in their control -- the Justice Department's largest financial seizure ever. New details have since emerged about the investigation, in particular how it took advantage of not only advanced forensic tools but also the growing push to rein in crypto crime, including by the industry itself. The discoveries would have been less likely to happen around the time of the hack, when bitcoin was far outside the mainstream of the financial world.

Senators Jim Risch, Bob Menendez, and Bill Cassidy's Accountability for Cryptocurrency in El Salvador (ACES) Act would require a State Department report on mitigating risks to the U.S. financial system from El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender. CoinDesk reports: "El Salvador recognizing Bitcoin (BTC) as official currency opens the door for money laundering cartels and undermines U.S. interests," said Bill Cassidy (R-La.). "If the United States wishes to combat money laundering and preserve the role of the dollar as a reserve currency of the world, we must tackle this issue head on." If passed, the bill would require the State Department to report on a laundry list of subjects with respect to El Salvador and Bitcoin, including the flow of remittances from the U.S. to El Salvador, bilateral and international efforts to combat transnational illicit activities, and the potential for reduced use by El Salvador of the greenback.

The move quickly drew a partly comic, partly angry response from El Salvador President Nayib Bukele: "OK boomers ... You have zero jurisdiction on a sovereign and independent nation. We are not your colony, your back yard or your front yard. Stay out of our internal affairs. Don't try to control something you can't control."

A top official of India's central bank has compared cryptocurrency to a "Ponzi scheme" and suggested an outright ban in its sharpest criticism just weeks after the government proposed taxation of the virtual digital asset and paved way to recognize it as legal tender in the world's second-largest internet market. From a report: T. Rabi Sankar, deputy governor of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), told an audience at a banking conference that cryptocurrencies have been "specifically developed to bypass the regulated financial system," and are not backed by any underlying cash flow. "We have also seen that cryptocurrencies are not amenable to definition as a currency, asset or commodity; they have no underlying cash flows, they have no intrinsic value; that they are akin to Ponzi schemes, and may even be worse," he said. "As a store of value, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have given impressive returns so far, but so did tulips in 17th century Netherlands."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The most insufferable part of every Super Bowl Sunday has historically, without fail, been the ads. This year was no exception, with an unrelenting barrage of ads trying to manifest the metaverse, convince viewers they're missing out on crypto, and lure new blood to online and physical casinos. Results were mixed. Coinbase, in one ad named WAGMI ("we're all going to make it"), crafted an advertisement that bounced a QR code around the screen, changing colors each time it hit the edge like an old-school DVD menu. Scanning the QR codewhich immediately forfeits your right to enter heaventakes the user to this page, where Coinbase offers $15 in Bitcoin for signing up as well as a chance to enter a contest to win one of three prizes for $1 million worth of Bitcoin. The linked webpage went down almost immediately thanks to the increased traffic from the ad, and ridicule at the idea of paying millions of dollars to send millions of viewers to a down site poured in from around the web.

To Coinbase, though, the ad was a success. In a blog post congratulating itself on the advertisement and interviewing Coinbase Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch about why the ad was so good, the company revealed it saw "20M+ hits on our landing page in one minute" which "led to us temporarily throttling our systems." Chief executive Brian Armstrong took to Twitter to gloat about the ad: ranked #1 by AdWeek and peaking at #2 in the Apple App Store, just ahead of apps for the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show and the NFL. As it turns out, putting up nothing but a QR code in the middle of a widely-watched sports event and offering free money as well as a chance to win $3 million is a good way to build interest in your app. When Motherboard reached out to Coinbase about the ad, the company directed Motherboard to Rouch's blog post and reiterated its main points.

While taking a victory lap for the apparent success of its ad, Coinbase took the time to explain why this is definitely not at all like the dotcom bubble, which many critics have said is an apt comparison for Sunday's ads. "There have been a lot of comparisons to the dot.com era and speculation that many of the crypto companies advertising in this year's Super Bowl will inevitably fail," said Rouch in Coinbase's blog post. "We don't think about it that way and judging from the early response we've seen, Super Bowl viewers don't either." Rouch insisted that the sheer number of crypto ads in the Super Bowl was "yet another signal that crypto is bursting into the mainstream, and at the center of the cultural zeitgeist." Further reading: This Year's Super Bowl Broadcast May Seem 'Crypto-Happy'. But the NFL Isn't

As cryptocurrencies gain wider acceptance, the division of the family stash has turned into a major source of contention, with estranged couples trading accusations of deception and financial mismanagement. From a report: An ugly divorce tends to generate arguments about virtually everything. But the difficulty of tracking and valuing cryptocurrency, a digital asset traded on a decentralized network, is creating new headaches. In many cases, divorce lawyers said, spouses underreport their holdings, or try to hide funds in online wallets that can be difficult to get into. "Originally, it was under the mattress, and then it was the bank account in the Caymans," said Jacqueline Newman, a divorce lawyer in New York who works with high-net-worth clients. "Now it's crypto." The rise of cryptocurrencies has provided a useful medium of exchange for criminals, creating new opportunities for fraud. But digital assets are not untraceable. Transactions are recorded on public ledgers called blockchains, enabling savvy analysts to follow the money.

Some divorce lawyers have come to rely on a growing industry of forensic investigators, who charge tens of thousands of dollars to track the movement of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether from online exchanges to digital wallets. The investigative firm CipherBlade has worked on about 100 crypto-related divorces over the last few years, said Paul Sibenik, a forensic analyst for the company. In multiple cases, he said, he has traced more than $10 million in cryptocurrency that a husband hid from his wife. "We're trying to make it a cleaner space," Mr. Sibenik said. "There needs to be some degree of accountability." In interviews, nearly a dozen lawyers and forensic investigators described divorce cases in which a spouse -- usually the husband -- was accused of lying about cryptocurrency transactions or hiding digital assets. None of the couples agreed to be interviewed. But some of the divorces have created paper trails that shed light on how these disputes unfold.

During today's telecast of the Super Bowl, 100 million Americans will see at least three commercials promoting cryptocurrency, reports the Washington Post, "and though Tom Brady may be gone from the game, he hovers over it, hawking crypto exchange FTX."

"Yet the hype belies a more complicated relationship. Unlike the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, the country's most popular sports league, has essentially prohibited its teams from using crypto." It's a microcosm of the broader cultural battle between those touting the currency as the shiny future and others warning of its dangers.... [T]he headlines often come with a negative tint. New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman warned last month about crypto's parallels to the subprime mortgage crisis. This week, the FBI arrested a New York couple for allegedly conspiring to launder billions in crypto. That can scare the large corporate entities of professional sports, particularly the NFL, whose love of fresh revenue sources is matched only by its fear of public relations disasters.... In September, a memo revealed by the Athletic showed the league's restrictive attitude toward crypto... "Clubs are prohibited from selling, or otherwise allowing within club controlled media, advertisements for specific cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings, other cryptocurrency sales or any other media category as it relates to blockchain, digital asset or as blockchain company, except as outlined in this policy," it said.

The NFL has made some forays into NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, the digitally watermarked tools that are crypto's less controversial cousin, signing up for a partnership with Ticketmaster for NFTs of Super Bowl tickets and an NFT video highlight program with Dapper Labs, one of the leaders in the space. And of course the Super Bowl is taking place at SoFi Stadium, named for the digitally minded financial firm. But sponsorships from crypto exchanges remain off-limits, and the idea of the NFL creating a cryptocurrency, which some enthusiasts have advocated, is the stuff of fantasy. Even the Super Bowl commercials going for as much as $7 million for 30 seconds — which the league authorizes — include only exchanges such as FTX and not currencies themselves....

The NFL has formed an internal working group to study the regulatory, brand and other consequences of partnering with crypto companies but has set no timetable for when its rules could be revised. Renie Anderson, the NFL's chief revenue officer, said the league is moving slowly by design. "We don't want to put everything and the kitchen sink into this," she said by phone from the site of Super Bowl events in Los Angeles. "We don't know where a lot of this is going, so what we're trying to do is testing and learning so we can understand." She cited regulatory and market forces that are still coming into focus. (The Treasury Department and other federal agencies have been ramping up their efforts to create a regulatory framework for crypto, but there remains a degree of murkiness around what the future limits might be.) The NFL, Anderson said, would rather act after there's clarity. "It's hard to unwind something like a naming rights deal," she said, "and I'd rather not have to undo opportunities two years later because there are rules against advertising or marketing certain things."

National Basketball Association executives, however, say they see a major opportunity right now.
The article also points out that one football star even says he converted his $750,000 salary to Bitcoin. Though one sports analyst calculates that if the purchase was made on November 12th, after federal and state taxes it's now worth about $35,000.

What's the lesson after $3.6 billion in stolen bitcoin was seized by America's Justice Department from the couple who laundering it?

Wired argues it all just shows how hard it is to launder cryptocurrency: In the 24 hours since, the cybersecurity world has ruthlessly mocked their operational security screwups: Lichtenstein allegedly stored many of the private keys controlling those funds in a cloud-storage wallet that made them easy to seize, and Morgan flaunted her "self-made" wealth in a series of cringe-inducing rap videos on YouTube and Forbes columns. But those gaffes have obscured the remarkable number of multi-layered technical measures that prosecutors say the couple did use to try to dead-end the trail for anyone following their money.

Even more remarkable, perhaps, is that federal agents, led by IRS Criminal Investigations, managed to defeat those alleged attempts at financial anonymity on the way to recouping $3.6 billion of stolen cryptocurrency. In doing so, they demonstrated just how advanced cryptocurrency tracing has become — potentially even for coins once believed to be practically untraceable.

Ari Redbord, the head of legal and government affairs for TRM Labs, a cryptocurrency tracing and forensics firm...points to the couple's alleged use of "chain-hopping" — transferring funds from one cryptocurrency to another to make them more difficult to follow — including exchanging bitcoins for "privacy coins" like monero and dash, both designed to foil blockchain analysis. Court documents say the couple also allegedly moved their money through the Alphabay dark web market — the biggest of its kind at the time — in an attempt to stymie detectives....Lichtenstein and Morgan appear to have intended to use Alphabay as a "mixer" or "tumbler," a cryptocurrency service that takes in a user's coins and returns different ones to prevent blockchain tracing....

In July 2017, however — six months after the IRS says Lichtenstein moved a portion of the Bitfinex coins into AlphaBay wallets — the FBI, DEA, and Thai police arrested AlphaBay's administrator and seized its server in a data center in Lithuania. That server seizure isn't mentioned in the IRS's statement of facts. But the data on that server likely would have allowed investigators to reconstruct the movement of funds through AlphaBay's wallets and identify Lichtenstein's withdrawals to pick up their trail again, says Tom Robinson, a cofounder of the cryptocurrency tracing firm Elliptic.
The arrests and "largest financial seizure ever show that cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals..." Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said in a press release. "Thanks to the meticulous work of law enforcement, the department once again showed how it can and will follow the money, no matter what form it takes."

Or, as Wired puts it, "Even if your rap videos and sloppy cloud storage accounts don't get you caught, your clever laundering tricks may still not save you from the ever-evolving sophistication of law enforcement's crypto-tracers."

"When Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh were sophomores at Texas A&M University, they decided to get into the business of mining bitcoin on the oil fields of East Texas," reports CNBC: Whitehead, an engineer hailing from a family with a long history in oil and gas production, and Lohstroh, a finance major with a bitcoin obsession, ignored the skeptics, and sunk all the cash they had earned from their high school side gigs in lawn care and landscaping into Giga Energy Solutions, a company that mints bitcoin from stranded natural gas.

For years, oil and gas companies have struggled with the problem of what to do when they accidentally hit a natural gas formation while drilling for oil. Whereas oil can easily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery requires a pipeline. If a drilling site is right next door to a pipeline, they chuck the gas in and take whatever cash the buyer on the other end is willing to pay that day. But if it's 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers often burn it off, or flare it. That is why you will typically see flames rising from oil fields. Beyond the environmental implications of flare gas, drillers are also, in effect, burning cash. To these two 23-year-old Aggie alums, it was a big problem with an obvious solution.

Giga places a shipping container full of thousands of bitcoin miners on an oil well, then diverts the natural gas into generators, which convert the gas into electricity that is then used to power the miners. The process reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to continued flaring, according to research from Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems. "Growing up, I always saw flares, just being in the oil and gas industry. I knew how wasteful it was," Whitehead told CNBC on the sidelines of the North American Prospect Expo summit in Houston, a flagship event for the industry. "It's a new way to not only lower emissions but to monetize gas." Whitehead tells CNBC they have signed deals with more than 20 oil and gas companies, four of which are publicly traded. Giga also says they're also in talks with sovereign wealth funds, and they are expanding, fast.

Giga's 11-person team is adding another six employees this month.... Giga tells CNBC that its revenue was more than $4 million in 2021, and it's on track to earn more than $20 million by the end of 2022. Whitehead says that some of their mining sites have helped to revitalize the local economy by creating jobs, such as field technicians and bitcoin pumpers, who go out to check the sites. In the small communities where they've set up a bitcoin mine, they are sometimes the largest source of revenue. "An area that was just a ghost town has now found ways to take their stranded energy that they were wasting and monetize it, and that's what gets me excited, because like that's what is helping the community overall," said Whitehead.

Intel is entering the blockchain mining market with an upcoming GPU capable of mining Bitcoin. From a report: Intel insists the effort won't put a strain energy supplies or deprive consumers of chips. The goal is to create the most energy-efficient blockchain mining equipment on the planet, it says. "We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1,000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining," Intel's General Manager for Graphics, Raja Koduri, said in the announcement. (SHA-256 is a reference to the mining algorithm used to create Bitcoins.)

News of Intel's blockchain-mining effort first emerged last month after the ISSCC technology conference posted details about an upcoming Intel presentation titled: "Bonanza Mine: An Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC." ASICs are chips designed for a specific purpose, and also refer to dedicated hardware to mine Bitcoin. Friday's announcement from Koduri added that Intel is establishing a new "Custom Compute Group" to create chip platforms optimized for customers' workloads, including for blockchains.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bitcoin Magazine: Users of Block's mobile payments platform Cash App can now make instant and free bitcoin payments through the Lightning Network, the company tweeted on Monday. The integration of Bitcoin's second-layer protocol for faster and cheaper transactions was made possible by the Lightning Development Kit, an open-source project developed by another company owned by Block, Spiral. The Lightning Development Kit (LDK) is a flexible Lightning implementation geared towards developers who want to integrate Bitcoin's Lightning Network into their applications frictionlessly. It abstracts away complexities of Lightning, enabling developers to integrate the network easier and faster into their apps.

Jack Dorsey said in a fireside chat last week with Michael Saylor, the CEO of software intelligence company MicroStrategy, that having Cash App integrate Lightning through the Spiral's work was one of the proudest moments of his career. [...] Despite critics saying that Bitcoin cannot be used as a means of exchange due to its base layer's slow settlements, Lightning empowers Bitcoin to handle the smallest of payments for little to no cost. Now, all Cash App users can also leverage Lightning to send small payments instantly and for free. However, it seems that Cash App cannot yet receive Lightning transactions itself -- only send them.

Americans tuning in to the Super Bowl on Sunday will be inundated with ads from cryptocurrency companies, including the trading platform FTX, which plans to give away millions of dollars in bitcoin. From a report: FTX has spent heavily on sports partnerships to try to make itself a brand name in crypto, including an ad with NFL star Tom Brady, a sponsorship with Major League Baseball and a $135 million deal to rename the Miami Heat's stadium the FTX Arena. Co-founder and chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who recently moved FTX's headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, says the ads are as much about courting U.S. regulators as getting customers to download its trading app.

"We want to make sure that we're painting, hopefully, a healthy image of ourselves and the industry," said Bankman-Fried, 29, who has a net worth of more than $24 billion, according to Forbes. "We're optimistic that we're going to be able to grow our U.S. business -- a lot of that is working with U.S. regulators on bringing new products to market." The crypto industry includes virtual currencies such as bitcoin and Ether, as well as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, that can provide proof of ownership for assets such as digital images or weapons within video games. Both cryptocurrencies and NFTs are built using an information-storing technology called blockchain.

The Justice Department announced Tuesday morning it seized more than $3.6 billion in allegedly stolen cryptocurrency linked to the 2016 hack of Bitfinex. As part of the operation, authorities detained a New York couple on allegations they planned to launder the digital goods. From a report: It marks the agency's largest financial seizure ever, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement. Officials said they arrested Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31 and who also goes by the alias "razzlekhan". The couple is scheduled to make their initial appearances in federal court later in the day. Authorities accuse the pair of trying to launder the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoin that were stolen from Bitfinex's platform after a hacker breached Bitfinex's systems and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions. Prosecutors allege that the transactions sent the stolen bitcoin to Lichtenstein's digital wallet. Officials said they were able to seize more than 94,000 bitcoin, which was valued around $3.6 billion at the time of seizure. In all, the total stolen bitcoin is presently valued at approximately $4.5 billion, according to the agency. A 2019 rap video by Morgan.