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.

The Bank of England has said that bitcoin could be "worthless" and people investing in the digital currency should be prepared to lose everything. The Guardian reports: In a warning over the potential risks for investors, the central bank questioned whether there was any inherent worth in the most prominent digital currency, which has soared in value this year to close to $50,000 a piece. The deputy governor, Sir Jon Cunliffe, said the Bank had to be ready for risks linked to the rise of the crypto asset following rapid growth in its popularity. "Their price can vary quite considerably and [bitcoins] could theoretically or practically drop to zero," he told the BBC.

The Bank's financial policy committee, set up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to monitor risks, said on Monday there was little direct threat to the stability of the UK financial system from crypto assets. However, it warned that, at the current rapid pace of growth, such assets could become more interconnected with traditional financial services and were likely to pose a number of risks. Publishing its regular health check on the financial system, the Bank said major institutions should take a cautious approach to adopting crypto assets and that it would pay close attention to developments in the market. "Enhanced regulatory and law enforcement frameworks, both domestically and at a global level, are needed to influence developments in these fast-growing markets in order to manage risks, encourage sustainable innovation and maintain broader trust and integrity in the financial system," it said. In a separate blogpost published on its website on Tuesday, a member of the Bank's staff said bitcoin failed to fulfill many of the features required of a currency and that it risked being inherently volatile.

Thomas Belsham, who works in the Bank's stakeholder and media engagement division, wrote: "The problem is that, unlike traditional forms of money, Bitcoin isn't used to price things other than itself. As Bitcoiners themselves are fond of saying, 'one Bitcoin = one Bitcoin'. But a tautology does not a currency make." He said scarcity of the crypto asset -- which is limited to 21m bitcoin -- is among the key reasons for its attraction for investors, but this feature embedded into its design "may even, ultimately, render Bitcoin worthless." About 19m bitcoin is currently in circulation, with new coins added when "miners" validate changes to the blockchain ledger underpinning the cryptocurrency. While the ultimate number of bitcoin in circulation is not expected to be reached until February 2140, it would become harder to sustain this system over time, Belsham said. "Simple game theory tells us that a process of backward induction should, really, at some point, induce the smart money to get out. And were that to happen, investors really should be prepared to lose everything. Eventually."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: The U.S. Postal Service pursued a project to build and secretly test a blockchain-based mobile phone voting system before the 2020 election (Warning: may be paywalled; alternative source), experimenting with a technology that the government's own cybersecurity agency says can't be trusted to securely handle ballots. The system was never deployed in a live election and was abandoned in 2019, Postal Service spokesman David Partenheimer said. That was after cybersecurity researchers at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs conducted a test of the system during a mock election and found numerous ways that it was vulnerable to hacking.

The project appears to have been conducted without the involvement of federal agencies more closely focused on elections, which were then scrambling to make voting more secure in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 contest. Those efforts focused primarily on using paper ballot so the voter could verify their vote was recorded accurately and there would be a paper trail for auditors -- something missing from any mobile phone or Internet-based system. The project appears to have been conducted without the involvement of federal agencies more closely focused on elections, which were then scrambling to make voting more secure in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 contest. Those efforts focused primarily on using paper ballot so the voter could verify their vote was recorded accurately and there would be a paper trail for auditors -- something missing from any mobile phone or Internet-based system.

The Postal Service system allowed people to cast votes on an Internet-connected mobile app similar to how they might add items to an online shopping cart or fill out an online survey. The votes were designed to be anonymous and to be recorded in multiple digital locations simultaneously. The idea is that each of those digital records would act as a check to verify the accuracy of the other records. This is essentially the same method that cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin use to ensure transactions are accurately recorded. But the system didn't protect against the numerous ways hackers might fake or corrupt votes, the University of Colorado researchers said. Those include impersonating voters, attacking the blockchain system itself so votes can't be trusted, flooding the system with information so it becomes too overwhelmed to function, and using techniques that undermine voters' privacy and the secrecy of the ballot. The researchers were able to successfully perform all those hacks during a mock election held on campus. "The Postal Service was awarded a public patent for the concept in August 2020, but had not previously revealed that it built a prototype system or tested it," the report notes.

Gizmodo's David Nield explains what Web3 is, what it will mean for the future, and how exactly the third-generation internet differs from the first two. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from his report: Let's cut to the chase: For Web3 evangelists, it's a revolution; for skeptics, it's an overhyped house of cards that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. [...] As you might remember if you're of a certain age, Web 1.0 was the era of static webpages. Sites displayed news and information, and maybe you had your own little corner of the World Wide Web to show off your personal interests and hobbies. Images were discouraged -- they took up too much bandwidth -- and video was out of the question. With the dawn of the 21st century, Web 1.0 gave way to Web 2.0 -- a more dynamic, editable, user-driven internet. Static was out and webpages became more interactive and app-like (see Gmail, for example). Many of us signed up for social media accounts and blogs that we used to put our own content on the web in vast amounts. Images and video no longer reduced sites to a crawl, and we started sharing them in huge numbers. And now the dawn of Web3 is upon us. People define it in a few different ways, but at its core is the idea of decentralization, which we've seen with cryptocurrencies (key drivers of Web3). Rather than Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook (sorry, Meta) hoarding everything, the internet will supposedly become more democratized.

Key to this decentralization is blockchain technology, which creates publicly visible and verifiable ledgers of record that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. The blockchain already underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as well as a number of fledging technologies, and it's tightly interwoven into the future vision of everything that Web3 promises. The idea is that everything you do, from shopping to social media, is handled through the sane secure processes, with both more privacy and more transparency baked in. In some ways, Web3 is a mix of the two eras that came before it: The advanced, dynamic, app-like tech of the modern web, combined with the decentralized, user-driven philosophy that was around at the start of the internet, before billion- and trillion-dollar corporations owned everything. Web3 shifts the power dynamic from the giant tech entities back to the users -- or at least that's the theory.

In its current form, Web3 rewards users with tokens, which will eventually be used in a variety of ways, including currency or as votes to influence the future of technology. In this brave new world, the value generated by the web will be shared out between many more users and more companies and more services, with much-improved interoperability. NFTs are closely linked to the Web3 vision. [...] For our purposes here, the link between cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Web3 is the foundation: the blockchain. Throw in some artificial intelligence and some machine learning to do everything from filter out unnecessary data to spot security threats, and you've got just about every emerging digital technology covered with Web3. Right now Ethereum is the blockchain attracting the most Web3 interest (it supports both a cryptocurrency and an NFT system, and you can do everything from make a payment through it to build an app on it).

In 2013 a British man accidentally threw away a hard drive that contained 7,500 bitcoin. Today it'd be worth over $350 million, reports CNBC: His name is James Howells. He's an IT worker from Wales... He once told NBC News, "It is soul-destroying, to be honest... Every second of the day I am thinking about what could've been." In a last-ditch effort earlier this year, Howells offered his local town tens of millions of dollars to help him find it.
By "find it," he means "digging through his local dump" (where the hard drive ended up). The New Yorker reported that this spring Howell finally got a meeting with two city officials, one of whom was responsible for the city's waste and sanitation services. But after he'd delivered his home-made PowerPoint presentation over Zoom, he says their response was, "You know, Mr. Howells, there is absolutely zero appetite for this project to go ahead within Newport City Council." When the meeting ended, she said that she would call him if the situation changed. Months of silence followed. (A spokesperson for the city council told me that the official permit for the site does not allow "excavation work....")

"The total area we want to dig is two hundred and fifty metres by two hundred and fifty metres by fifteen metres deep," Howells told me, with excitement. "It's forty thousand tons of waste. It's not impossible, is it?"
The New Yorker also reports that in mid-November Howells got a second response from the local city officials — declining to authorize his landfill digging yet again, calling it "environmentally risky."

The incident raises the question as to whether there should be a better way to recover lost cryptocoins — but Howells himself remains opposed to that. So meanwhile Howells keeps checking a phone app telling him how much his bitcoin would be worth if he hadn't thrown away the hard drive.

One day, he watched its value swing by $20 million.

"Bitcoin mining is a process of competitively wasting electricity to guess a winning number every 10 minutes or so," writes author David Gerard in Foreign Policy magazine.

And he's got an equally negative take on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's experiment in making Bitcoin an official national currency alongside the U.S. dollar. "When a con artist's grift starts to fall apart, he knows to move onto the next one fast..." More than 91 percent of Salvadorans want dollars, not bitcoins. The official Chivo payment system was unreliable at launch in September — the kiss of death for a new system. Users joined for the $30 signup bonus, spent it or cashed it out, then didn't use Chivo again. The system completely failed to check new users' photos, relying solely on their national identity card number and date of birth; massive identity fraud to steal signup bonuses ensued. Bitcoin's ridiculously volatile price was appreciated only by aspiring day traders. Large street protests against compulsory Bitcoin implementation continued through October. The government stopped promoting Chivo on radio, TV, and social media. Chivo buses and vans were seen with plastic taped over the company's logo.

Bukele's financial problems remain. El Salvador can't print its own dollars, so Bukele urgently needs to fund his heavy deficit spending. The International Monetary Fund has not lent the country the $1 billion Bukele asked for, and has indicated its strong concerns about the Bitcoin scheme... At the Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference on Nov. 20, Bukele came onstage to an animation of beaming down from a flying saucer and outlined his plans for Bitcoin City: a new charter city to be built from scratch, centered on bitcoin mining — and powered by a volcano. Bitcoin City would be paid for with the issuance of $1 billion in "volcano bonds," starting in mid-2022.

The 10-year volcano bonds would pay 6.5 percent annual interest. $500 million of the bond revenue would be used to buy bitcoins... Holding $100,000 in volcano bonds for five years would qualify investors for Salvadoran citizenship... Holders of El Salvador's existing sovereign debt were unimpressed. The volcano bonds would be a strictly worse investment than buying the country's existing bonds and hedging them with bitcoins. The existing bonds dropped from 75 cents on the dollar to a record low of 63.4 cents after the volcano bond announcement...

[T]he volcano bonds are Bukele's way to get Bitcoin holders' money into the Salvadoran economy and count it as dollars. Bukele will brazen all of this out as long as he can, periodically throwing new plans on the table as a distraction. If he can maintain power, then the Bitcoin users will discover that he's taken their money. If he can't maintain power, then his successor will have no love for his failed Bitcoin schemes. Either scenario ends with a lot of disappointed Bitcoin users — because a national economy really can't run on a volatile and manipulated speculative commodity that's unusable as a currency.

Both the Bitcoin users and Bukele seem to think the other is a sucker who they'll take for everything they've got. It's possible that both will lose.
The article also points out that with El Salvador's high electricity rates, one of their power plant recently spent $4,672 in electricity to mine $269 in bitcoin.

Visa is launching new consulting and advisory services to help its clients navigate the world of cryptocurrencies. CNBC reports: The payments processor said Wednesday its crypto advisory practice, housed within its consulting and analytics division, will offer advice to financial institutions, retailers and other firms on everything from rolling out crypto features to exploring non-fungible tokens. The move marks Visa's latest attempt to push deeper into the crypto industry. From Oct. 1, 2020 to Sept. 30, 2021, the company processed $3.5 billion in digital currency transactions through its crypto-linked card schemes, according to Nikola Plecas, Visa's European crypto lead.

"Some of these leading exchanges have millions or, in some instances, tens of millions of users," Plecas told CNBC, adding that the company allows users to spend their crypto at over 80 million merchants. The company is also developing products geared toward stablecoins -- virtual tokens tied to the value of sovereign currencies, typically the dollar -- and central bank-issued digital currencies. Visa hopes its crypto consultancy can help further mainstream adoption of bitcoin and other digital currencies. Like rival Mastercard, the credit card giant sees cryptocurrencies as a key growth opportunity as it expands into areas beyond card payments.