Square CEO Jack Dorsey says the company is starting a "deep technical investigation" to create an open-source Bitcoin mining system. It comes as the price of Bitcoin passed $62,000 while threatening to pass the all-time high of $65,000. The Independent reports: Mr Dorsey said Bitcoin mining isn't currently accessible to everyone, but it should be as easy as plugging into a power source. "Silicon design is too concentrated into a few companies. This means supply is likely overly constrained. Silicon development is very expensive, requires long term investment, and is best coupled tightly with software and system design," Mr Dorsey said in a tweet. "If we do this, we'd follow our hardware wallet model: build in the open in collaboration with the community," he added.

The company's hardware lead building the wallet, Jesse Dorogusker, is also starting the technical investigation required to take on the mining project, Mr Dorsey said. While announcing Square is considering getting into the mining business, Mr Dorsey said the process needs to be more energy-efficient and more distributed. "The core job of a miner is to securely settle transactions without the need for trusted 3rd parties. This is critical well after the last bitcoin is mined. The more decentralized this is, the more resilient the Bitcoin network becomes," he said. "There isn't enough incentive today for individuals to overcome the complexity of running a miner for themselves," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Tether will pay $41 million to settle allegations it lied in claiming its digital tokens were fully backed by fiat currencies, putting a major compliance headache behind the world's biggest issuer of stablecoins even as regulatory scrutiny intensifies. For years, Tether told customers and the broader cryptocurrency market that it had $1 in reserve to back every token, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said in a Friday statement. That claim was wildly misleading, according to the agency. For instance, from June to September 2017, there was never more than $61.5 million backing Tether, even as roughly 442 million coins were circulating at one point.

"This case highlights the expectation of honesty and transparency in the rapidly growing and developing digital assets marketplace," said acting CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam. In its enforcement action, the CFTC said Tether failed to disclose that it held unsecured receivables and non-fiat assets as part of its reserves, and falsely told investors it would undergo routine, professional audits to demonstrate that it maintained "100% reserves at all times." In fact, Tether reserves weren't audited, the agency said. Until at least 2018, Tether manually kept tabs on its reserve levels, a process that wasn't updated in real time, the CFTC said. Tether didn't admit or deny the CFTC's allegations. "Tether agreed to resolve this matter in order to move forward and focus on the future," the company said in a statement posted on its website. The CFTC also announced that Bitfinex, a crypto exchange affiliated with Tether, was fined $1.5 million for permitting retail transactions by American residents.

Games that use blockchain technology or let users exchange NFTs or cryptocurrencies won't be allowed on Steam, according to a rule added to Valve's "What you shouldn't publish on Steam" list. The Verge reports: The change was pointed out by SpacePirate, a developer working on an NFT-based game, who said that the change was because the company doesn't allow game items that could have real-world value. But Steam could also be avoiding controversy with the move. Steam has a history of making controversial moderation decisions, especially when it comes to games with sexual content. In this case, though, it doesn't seem like people are pressing F to pay respects to NFT games -- a majority of the replies and quote tweets to SpacePirate's tweets are praising Valve for the move (or mocking those that are upset about it).

It's perhaps understandable why Steam would want to avoid having NFTs on its platform. Besides the justification cited by SpacePirate that they could have real-world value (which seems a bit weak, given the massive commercial communities around things like CS:GO skins and Team Fortress 2 hats), NFT and crypto-based games don't have the best reputations. There's the infamous Evolved Apes saga where a developer sold NFTs with the promise that they'd be included in a fighting game but then seemingly took the money and ran. There are some potentially interesting game concepts that use NFTs, but it's hard to say how many of them would've been a good fit for Steam even if they were allowed.

China's drive to root out cryptocurrencies has uncovered hundreds of miners who were using electricity at public institutions, a development that comes as the nation struggles with a power crunch. From a report: Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces recently started targeting miners who were consuming the resources of state-owned enterprises, government agencies, and universities and research institutes, according to a government statement and media reports that did not name the entities. Jiangsu found about one-fifth of some 4,500 internet protocol addresses associated with illegal mining activity belonged to public institutions, according to the media outlet The Paper, which cited provincial communications authorities. Some 260,000 kilowatt hours of electricity were being used per day, the newspaper added. Cryptominers typically link their equipment to cloud services called mining pools to verify transactions on blockchains, allowing their physical locations to be traced. That would lead investigators to accounts with electric companies.

The Zhejiang government published a statement on an official social account that included photos of equipment seized in raids, adding that 184 IP addresses were suspected of involvement in illegal mining exploiting public resources. "The rapid upgrading of mining hardware and fierce competition in computing power have resulted in massive energy usage, which is contrary to the carbon peak and carbon neutralization goals of the whole province as a major energy importer," the statement said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to allow the first U.S. Bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund to begin trading in a watershed moment for the cryptocurrency industry, according to people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg reports: The regulator isn't likely to block the products from starting to trade next week, said the people, who asked not to be named while discussing the decision. Unlike Bitcoin ETF applications that the regulator has previously rejected, the proposals by ProShares and Invesco Ltd. are based on futures contracts and were filed under mutual fund rules that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has said provide "significant investor protections." Barring a last-minute reversal, the fund launch will be the culmination of a nearly decade-long campaign by the $6.7 trillion ETF industry. Advocates have sought approval as a confirmation of mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrencies since Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins best known for their part in the history of Facebook Inc., filed the first application for a Bitcoin ETF in 2013.

Approval has for years been out of the grasp of issuers who, amid myriad false signs of progress and outright rejections, have tried to get a variety of different structures cleared for trading. Over the years, there have been plans for funds that proposed to hold Bitcoin via a digital vault or that could use leverage to juice returns. Others sought to mitigate Bitcoin's famous volatility, a key point of contention for the SEC. [...] Four futures-backed Bitcoin ETFs could begin trading on U.S. exchanges this month, with deadlines for applications from VanEck and Valkyrie also approaching. Meanwhile, dozens of cryptocurrency exchange-traded products have launched in Canada and across Europe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Texas' energy grid has problems. Those issues were laid bare this past winter when a storm put the state in a deep freeze, causing blackouts for millions and killing hundreds of people. Sen. Ted Cruz told a cryptocurrency conference in Austin last week that he believes the state's Bitcoin mining boom could repair its floundering energy grid. In a fireside chat at the Texas Blockchain Summit on Oct. 8, the Republican senator expressed his faith that the mass buildout of crypto mines in the Lone Star State could add additional energy capacity to the state's grid in the event of blackouts or power shortages. "Because of the ability to Bitcoin mining to turn on or off instantaneously, if you have a moment where you have a power shortage or a power crisis, whether it's a freeze or some other natural disaster where power generation capacity goes down, that creates the capacity to instantaneously shift that energy to put it back on the grid," Cruz told conference attendees.

Bitcoin mines, which typically consist of rooms full of specialized computers that churn numbers all day in search of the answer to a puzzle that creates the next block on the blockchain, are notorious for their energy use. Bitcoin mining is well-known to use more energy than many countries and corporations, and it's designed to become more difficult (and thus use more energy) as more miners plug into the network in search of profits as the price of Bitcoin increases. But in the event that the grid is being overburdened, these mines are essentially industrial energy consumers that can shut down instantaneously, freeing up additional grid space for the heating and cooling of homes, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure. Already, some miners in Texas are making a killing by shutting down during such times and selling their contracted power supply back to the grid. Texas is the perfect candidate for this setup, Cruz said, and Bitcoin mining could play "a significant role [in] strengthening and hardening the resilience of the grid." Tim De Chant from Ars Technica says the numbers and potential incentives that Sen. Ted Cruz touts "just don't add up." Here's why he thinks Cruz is wrong: First, large bitcoin-mining operations use hundreds or thousands of powerful computers, which create a demand for power. If power plants can profitably mine bitcoin using the electricity they generate -- and there are examples of that already -- it stands to reason that bitcoin mining could create enough demand that investors would be enticed to build new power plants. Those plants could theoretically be tasked with providing power to the grid in cases of emergency. At first glance, the argument holds up. But if you dig into it, even just a bit, things quickly fall apart.

For one, the blackouts during Texas' February cold snap happened because power companies failed to winterize their generators, whether they were natural gas, coal, nuclear, or wind. Lives were at stake, and yet the companies didn't prepare for the worst. Unlike power plants that serve the grid, bitcoin mining isn't critical infrastructure -- no one dies if a crypto data center shuts down. Plus, bitcoin miners are in the game first and foremost for the money, and they would be loath to spend extra cash to winterize their operations. But let's say the power stays on but demand surges. In that case, bitcoin miners would be unlikely to offer their generating capacity to the grid unless they were sufficiently compensated. Texas already has a system like that in place, offering generators a premium for bringing additional power online during shortages. During the February cold snap, wholesale electricity prices surged to $9,000 per MWh, the maximum allowed by law, leading to electricity bills as high as $10,000 for some people.

One bitcoin currently sells for $57,000, and to crunch the numbers to win that one bitcoin, mining rigs draw just under 0.285 MWh, based on Digiconomist estimates. In other words, for bitcoin miners to be willing to contribute to the grid, wholesale electricity prices would have to hit $206,000 per MWh, or nearly 23 times greater than prices during the February cold snap. Those $10,000 bills would turn into $230,000 bills. [...] At today's prices, the power plants that Ted Cruz is imagining would cost over $50 billion to build. At that price, there are probably more effective ways to stabilize Texas' grid.

Attention institutional investors: Whether you're a bonafide and laser-eyed true believer or a skeptical holdout, the risks from cryptocurrencies could be steadily "creeping" into your portfolio, according to MSCI. From a report: At least 52 companies representing $7.1 trillion in market capitalization have some exposure to cryptocurrencies, according to an analysis by MSCI. They range from all-in players like Coinbase to Bitcoin balance-sheet "hodlers" like Tesla and MicroStrategy to those dipping a toe into crypto-market services such as JPMorgan Chase. The growing importance of the volatile digital asset class brings with it an assortment of challenges for investors and companies alike as they try to assess the environmental, social and governance risks that come along with it, the report says. These include questions about everything from greenhouse gas emissions stemming from mining coins, to a lack of accounting standards for crypto and questions about transparency surrounding how the networks are run, according to MSCI. "Really simple questions start to become really tricky here," Harlan Tufford, who leads MSCI's North American corporate-governance research, said in a podcast discussing the report. "Like, who in the company knows the passkey to access your private anonymous wallet that stores, you know, a billion dollars in Bitcoin? And how do you monitor that?"

Russian President Vladimir Putin signaled tolerance of cryptocurrencies, which are drawing increasing scrutiny from regulators around the world amid fears they can be used for money laundering and criminal activity. From a report: Cryptocurrency "has the right to exist and can be used as a means of payment," Putin said in an interview with CNBC that was posted on the Kremlin's website Thursday. Still, he cautioned it was too soon to talk about using digital currencies for trading oil and other commodities that form the bulk of Russia's exports.

Russia has sought alternatives to trading in dollars since being slapped with sanctions in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea, and Putin accuses the U.S. of using its currency as a weapon. Crypto backers argue decentralized money will eventually replace fiat currencies issued by central banks. The Bank of Russia has repeatedly warned investors that the crypto market is extremely volatile, and digital currencies are not allowed to be used as a method of payment domestically. However, there are no plans for a blanket ban similar to China's, Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev said this week, according to Interfax.

The US overtook China as the world's biggest source of bitcoin mining two months after Beijing banned crypto mining this year, new data have revealed. From a report: China's share of the global hashrate -- the computational power required to create bitcoin -- fell from 44 per cent to zero between May and July, showed figures published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance on Wednesday. The country accounted for three-quarters of the global hashrate in 2019. The US share of the global hashrate increased from 17 per cent in April to 35 per in August, while Kazakhstan rose 10 percentage points to 18 per cent in the same period.

China's State Council, or cabinet, banned cryptocurrency mining and trading in May, citing environmental and financial concerns. The decision prompted an exodus of miners in search of cheap energy and crypto-friendly politicians. China's bitcoin mining ban resulted in the "great mining migration," said Sam Tabar, chief strategy officer at Bit Digital, a New York-based bitcoin miner. The company suspended its operations in China, which it had been winding down since October 2020, after the prohibition. Michel Rauchs, digital assets lead at the closely watched Cambridge tracker, noted that "the effect of the Chinese crackdown is an increased geographic distribution of hashrate across the world," adding that it could be seen as "a positive development for network security and the decentralised principles of bitcoin."

Payments company Stripe has begun assembling a crypto engineering team to chart its future in digital assets. CoinDesk reports: The team -- described in LinkedIn posts and job listings -- will be run by Guillaume Poncin, Stripe's former head of engineering for banking and financial products. He is looking to hire at least four staffers to help plot Stripe's crypto strategy. Those engineers "will design and build the core components that we need to support crypto use cases," the job posts said. "Crypto is a brand new team at Stripe."

The team may be new but Stripe's interest in crypto stretches back years. A payments giant whose API supports millions of digital storefronts, it made headlines in 2014 when it supported bitcoin -- an industry first. Stripe abandoned that service four years later. But a source told CoinDesk that Stripe never left crypto. The company continued to watch the digital assets space develop, weighing if and how to participate again. In recent months it has shown increasing interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the source said. One thing on the company's mind is a need to avoid picking favorites, the source said. Stripe already supports an array of more traditional online payment options. It wants to remain tech-neutral when it comes to crypto, the source said.

Coinbase is getting into NFTs. The cryptocurrency exchange said Tuesday it plans to launch a marketplace that lets users mint, collect and trade NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. From a report: Users can sign up to a waitlist for early access to the feature, the company said. NFTs are one-of-a-kind digital assets designed to represent ownership of online items like rare art or collectible trading cards. They aren't fungible, meaning you can't exchange one NFT for another like you could with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Sales of such tokens have boomed this year. The NFT market topped $10 billion in transaction volume in the third quarter of 2021, according to DappRadar, a company that tracks data on crypto-based applications.

Gizmodo takes a hard look at a "growing sense of excitement" about collaboration between bitcoin-mining operations and nuclear power plants (which are now plagued by high operating costs compared to renewables as well as natural gas): Of the three partnerships between bitcoin companies and nuclear energy that the Wall Street Journal mentioned, two involve bitcoin miners partnering with existing nuclear sources to power their operations... These are not companies investing in the future, but rather companies searching for anything that will help keep the profits flowing using existing power plants. It's pretty safe to say that some cash-strapped owners of nuclear plants will be using mining partnerships not to make any technological strides, but rather to simply keep the old plants operating.

"The plants themselves are pretty well-run, and they know what they're doing," said Alex Gilbert, a project manager at the think tank Nuclear Innovation Alliance. "It really is a matter of the economics. There's a certain point where you're definitely unprofitable, and you're going to be likely to close because you're not getting enough money in power markets. But if a bitcoin operation takes 10 to 15 to 30 percent of your power at a reasonable price, that tips you into profitability." This profitability means the plants can stay open, giving miners a little carbon-free energy as a treat while keeping the U.S.'s biggest source of zero-emissions power operational. This is especially a good idea while we wait for more renewables — and policies that favor them — to come online, in what could be the first real-world proof bitcoin is doing some societal good instead of being a waste of energy and resources....

A few small-to-medium reactors should be ready for licensing in a few years and some over the next decade, he said, helped along by private and federal funding. To actually get to a point where the kinds of smaller reactors could be developed that would be competitive with the (rapidly falling) price of renewables, Gilbert said, would take a significantly larger bump from private capital — as well as more customers. "Providing early demand for advance reactors, especially microreactors, that's how bitcoin can most help the nuclear sector," he said.... I'm not a technofuturist who dreams of a libertarian paradise, but I have to admit that there's kind of a cool idea here. If the bitcoin community really believes cryptocurrencies are the money of the future, let them be the first to invest in a budding technology that could be the energy of the future.

In the interim, however, they shouldn't be allowed to rest on their greenwashing laurels while continuing to churn out emissions as they wait for fast reactor technology to become feasible in 10 years. Government regulations are, of course, anathema to crypto true believers. But a mandate that any new mining facilities source power from nearby nuclear plants could go a long way toward cleaning up bitcoin's act and ensuring the carbon-free energy we desperately need stays on the grid while fancy fast reactors come online.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The Biden administration is weighing an executive order on cryptocurrencies as part of an effort to set up a government-wide approach to the white-hot asset class, according to people familiar with the matter. The proposed directive would charge federal agencies to study and offer recommendations on relevant areas of crypto -- touching on financial regulation, economic innovation and national security. The initiative will also aim to coordinate agencies' work on digital currencies throughout the executive branch. The plan would push departments that have given scant attention to crypto to focus on it. Officials have also considered appointing a White House crypto czar to act as a point person on the issue, one person said.

The draft directive is part of an effort by the White House to craft a sweeping strategy for digital tokens, which have become a growing concern for regulators as they've become wildly popular with average Americans. No decision has been made on whether to release the executive order, two of the people said. Even if President Joe Biden doesn't move forward on it, the administration will still make public its overall strategy for cryptocurrencies, an administration official said. [...] The draft, which has been circulating among senior officials and regulators, would clarify the responsibilities of various agencies and task them with examining relevant topics and reporting back on their findings. The framework would touch a range of bureaucracies, from the Treasury Department and financial regulators to the Commerce Department, the National Science Foundation and national security agencies. Whether it's ultimately done by executive order or another means, the goal of the White House is to take a unified approach to crypto, rather than the more ad hoc approach to financial stability, national security and illicit finance issues during Biden's first nine months in office. The administration also wants relevant agencies to examine crypto in other policy areas, including consumer protection, competition policy, research and innovation, the official said.

A wild search for the U.S. dollars supposedly backing the stablecoin at the center of the global cryptocurrency trade --- and in the crosshairs of U.S. regulators and prosecutors. From a report: In July, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen summoned the chair of the Federal Reserve, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and six other top officials for a meeting to discuss Tether. The absurdity of the situation couldn't have been lost on them: Inflation was spiking, a Covid surge threatened the economic recovery, and Yellen wanted to talk about a digital currency dreamed up by the former child actor who'd missed a penalty shot in The Mighty Ducks. But Tether had gotten so large that it threatened to put the U.S. financial system at risk. It was as if a playground snowball fight had escalated so wildly that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were being called in to avert a nuclear war.

Tether is what's come to be known in financial circles as a stablecoin -- stable because one Tether is supposed to be backed by one dollar. But it's actually more like a bank. The company that issues the currency, Tether Holdings Ltd., takes in dollars from people who want to trade crypto and credits their digital wallets with an equal amount of Tethers in return. Once they have Tethers, people can send them to cryptocurrency exchanges and use them to bet on the price of Bitcoin, Ether, or any of the thousands of other coins. And at least in theory, Tether Holdings holds on to the dollars so it can return them to anyone who wants to send in their tokens and get their money back. The convoluted mechanism became popular because real banks didn't want to do business with crypto companies, especially foreign ones.

Exactly how Tether is backed, or if it's truly backed at all, has always been a mystery. For years a persistent group of critics has argued that, despite the company's assurances, Tether Holdings doesn't have enough assets to maintain the 1-to-1 exchange rate, meaning its coin is essentially a fraud. But in the crypto world, where joke coins with pictures of dogs can be worth billions of dollars and scammers periodically make fortunes with preposterous-sounding schemes, Tether seemed like just another curiosity. Then, this year, Tether Holdings started putting out a huge amount of digital coins. There are now 69 billion Tethers in circulation, 48 billion of them issued this year. That means the company supposedly holds a corresponding $69 billion in real money to back the coins --- an amount that would make it one of the 50 largest banks in the U.S., if it were a U.S. bank and not an unregulated offshore company.

With U.S. financial officials poised to to issue a report on stablecoins, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the cryptocurrencies designed to be pegged to other assets such as the dollar should be regulated and their underlying funds put into banks. From a report: "They shouldn't be like casino chips," Mnuchin said Thursday at the Bloomberg Invest Global virtual conference. "If you are going to issue a stablecoin, the actual money should go be held in a regulated bank, in a trust account and the people who hold the stablecoins should be able to exchange those for real dollars at any time." Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that, by holding reserves, seek to maintain a fixed exchange-rate with a fiat currency. Bloomberg News reported Thursday that reserves of Tether, the largest such coin with a $69 billion market value, include billions of dollars of short-term loans to large Chinese companies, which is something money-market funds typically avoid. "Stablecoins should be invested in U.S. Treasuries or things that look like U.S. Treasuries -- money-markets of highly liquid, backed investments," said Mnuchin.

The Justice Department is creating a new team to investigate and prevent hackers from using cryptocurrency exchanges to remain anonymous while extorting money from victims of their attacks, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Wednesday. From a report: The main goal of the new enforcement team is to take down the infrastructure and "criminal supply chain" that allows hackers to carry out ransomware attacks in which victims' data is frozen until they pay a ransom, Monaco said. "Cryptocurrency exchanges want to be the banks of the future," Monaco told the Aspen Cyber Summit. "We need to make sure that folks can have confidence when they use these systems."

Brazil's Federal Deputy Aureo Ribeiro has revealed that Brazilians could soon be able to buy houses, cars and even McDonald's with Bitcoin. From a report: The South American nation is preparing to vote on a cryptocurrency regulation bill which is expected to be presented to the Plenary of the Chamber of Deputies within the next few days. "We want to separate the wheat from the chaff, create regulations so that you can trade, know where you're buying and know who you're dealing with," Ribeiro said.

"With this asset you will be able to buy a house, a car, go to McDonald's to buy a hamburger -- it will be a currency in the country as it happened in other countries." Bill 2.303/15, which calls for the regulation of virtual currencies, was approved for presentation last week. If it gets the thumbs up from the Chamber of Deputies this week, then Brazil looks set to follow El Salvador's example and make Bitcoin legal tender. Further reading: In Brazil, Bitcoin Acceptance Comes With More Regulation.

We thought the carnage was over for popular decentralized finance, or DeFi, staking protocol Compound, but as it turns out, millions more than we thought are at risk. About $162 million is up for grabs after an upgrade gone very wrong, according to Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Labs. CNBC reports: At first, the Compound chief tweeted Friday that there was a cap to how many comp tokens could be accidentally distributed, noting that âoethe impact is bounded, at worst, 280,000 comp tokens,â or about $92.6 million. But on Sunday morning, Leshner revealed that the pool of cash that had already been emptied once had been replenished â" exposing another 202,472.5 comp tokens to exploit, or roughly $66.9 million at its current price.

On Wednesday, Compound rolled out what should have been a pretty standard upgrade. Soon after implementation, however, it was clear that something had gone seriously wrong, once users started to receive millions of dollars in comp tokens. For example, $30 million worth of comp tokens were claimed in one transaction. The saving grace of the entire debacle, however, was the fact that the pool of cash that was open to exploit -- something called the Comptroller contract -- had a finite amount of tokens. The problem is that this leaky pool got a fresh influx of cash, and 0.5 comp tokens are being added roughly every 15 seconds, according to Gupta. "When the drip() function was called this morning, it sent the backlog (202,472.5, about two months of COMP since the last time the function was called) into the protocol for distribution to users," Leshner wrote in a tweet Sunday morning. Leshner noted that this brought the total comp at risk to 490,000 comp tokens, or about $162 million.

There are a few proposals to fix the bug, but Compound's governance model is such that any changes to the protocol require a multiday voting window, and Gupta said it takes another week for the successful proposal to be executed. In the meantime, this pool of cash is once again up for grabs for users who know how to exploit the bug. Compound made clear that no supplied or borrowed funds were at risk, which is some consolation. "No user funds are or were at risk so it's not that big of a deal," said Gupta. "Everyone kinda got diluted but didn't lose anything directly."

"Cyber criminals using a ransomware-as-a-service scheme have been spotted complaining that the group they rent the malware from could be using a hidden backdoor to grab ransom payments for themselves," reports ZDNet: REvil is one of the most notorious and most common forms of ransomware around and has been responsible for several major incidents. The group behind REvil lease their ransomware out to other crooks in exchange for a cut of the profits these affiliates make by extorting Bitcoin payments in exchange for the ransomware decryption keys that the victims need. But it seems that cut isn't enough for those behind REvil: it was recently disclosed that there's a secret backdoor coded into their product, which allows REvil to restore the encrypted files without the involvement of the affiliate. This could allow REvil to takeover negotiations with victims, hijack the so-called "customer support" chats — and steal the ransom payments for themselves.

Analysis of underground forums by cybersecurity researchers at Flashpoint suggests that the disclosure of the REvil backdoor hasn't gone down well with affiliates. One forum user claimed to have had suspicions of REvil's tactics, and said their own plans to extort $7 million from a victim was abruptly ended. They believe that one of the REvil authors took over the negotiations using the backdoor and made off with the money.

Miami is a city "that unblushingly loves rule-breaking and money," according to a new article in New York magazine, wondering whether Miami could ever really replace Silicon Valley as "a more natural home — and maybe even an accelerant — for the next generation of disruption fiends." On December 4, Delian Asparouhov, a venture capitalist in San Francisco, posted, "ok guys hear me out, what if we move silicon valley to Miami," and Miami mayor Francis Suarez, lying in bed at home in Coconut Grove, replied, "How can I help...?" Ever since, Suarez has been on a mission to rebrand Miami — long a place to spend money, rather than earn it — as a haven for founders who feel underappreciated in more calcified urban climes. He bought (with money from a venture capitalist) billboards in San Francisco featuring his Twitter handle and an invitation to "DM me." As he put it, "I saw the tsunami coming, got out my surfboard, and started paddling."

The flood of new Miamians who have arrived, full or part time, during the pandemic includes tech investors (Peter Thiel, David Sacks), cryptocurrency bulls (Anthony Pompliano, Ari Paul), new-media tycoons (Bryan Goldberg, Dave Portnoy), start-up founders (Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Steven Galanis), and many more who aren't yet billionaires but think the Magic City will give them their best shot... The boom is visible in the city's crane-spiked skyline, too, with deals for Spotify, Microsoft, Apple, and TikTok either signed or in the offing. In greater South Florida, a related incursion by the finance industry — Goldman Sachs, Citadel, Elliott — is in full swing... In July, according to Redfin, Miami was the top migration destination for home buyers in the U.S., while San Francisco had the largest homeowner exodus. Suarez told me about a playful text he recently received from the mayor there, London Breed: "Stop stealing my techies." He says he replied, "Sorry, London, I love you, but no."

Already, Suarez has made gains in turning Miami into the most cryptocurrency-friendly city in the U.S. In the past six months, the world's largest bitcoin conference happened here; a crypto exchange called FTX paid $135 million for the naming rights to the NBA arena (edging out the hometown porn studio BangBros); and a city-sanctioned currency called MiamiCoin debuted, generating millions in fees for municipal coffers. Suarez also accepts campaign contributions in bitcoin. He's running for reelection this November and looks certain to win, thanks in part to hefty donations and cheerleading from Silicon Valley eminences...

The tech case for Miami isn't wholly persuasive. (The most notable local start-up is a company that sells kibble.) But it is infectious.
The article notes, for example, that "For all his enthusiasm, Suarez acknowledges that a robust tech ecosystem needs one thing he can't simply market into existence: a standout university" (with a world-class engineering department to fuel startups). Suarez's solution appears to be offering Miami land parcels to Florida Polytechnic University for a possible satellite campus teaching DeFi/crypto/blockchain/NFT technologies.

The article also points out the possibility of global warming-induced hurricanes and rising sea levels, the city's widening income gap and rising cost of living, and Miami's record number of pediatric-ICU COVID admissions.