The Nordic region once again has become a lucrative place to mine crypto-currencies, thanks to a plunge in electricity prices. From a report: The wettest weather in at least 20 years boosted production from hydro-electric plants, leaving Sweden and Norway with some of the lowest power prices in the world. The resulting glut in the most important raw material for making the virtual coins coincided with a year when the price of Bitcoin almost quadrupled. The currencies are made in giant computer farms that process complex algorithms in halls as big as airport hangars. That makes electricity one of the key inputs, with operations sometimes consuming as much power as that used by 70,000 households. The current market dynamics give big miners alternatives to places where Bitcoin are usually created such as China, Kazakhstan and Canada.

Their luck follows several years of poor margins from higher electricity costs and lower prices for most virtual currencies. Many of the the miners that were attracted to the region during the last rally in 2017 have left. "The ones that stayed through the difficult period, like us, are quite happy now," said Philip Salter, head of operations at Hong Kong-based Genesis Mining, which operates a data center in Boden, Sweden. "There were times we were not making any profit at all, but during the last year our profitability has more than tripled." Unusually wet weather along with mild temperatures boosted hydro reservoirs across Nordic region to the highest level in more than 20 years, leaving the area awash in generation capacity. The result is power prices close to zero for extended periods. Average prices this year are about a third of those in Germany, Europe's biggest power market.

The price of Bitcoin increased 50% — in the last four weeks.

Now priced at $26,579, "Bitcoin is crashing — upward," quips CNN Business: The digital currency has a market value north of $500 billion. Think Bitcoin is just a fad? It's worth more than Visa or Mastercard. Or Walmart...

Its rapid rise has been remarkable — or insane, depending on your appetite for risk. But there's some logic to the run-up: Investors are pouring money into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies during the Covid-19 pandemic as the Federal Reserve sent interest rates near zero (and expects to keep them there for several more years), severely weakening the US dollar. That makes bitcoin, comparatively, an attractive currency. There's a set limit to the number of bitcoins on the planet, and investors believe that once the supply runs out, the digital coin's value can only increase.

Also aiding in bitcoin's soaring valuation: Big, name-brand investors are stockpiling it, and huge consumer companies are embracing it. That's adding a dose of validity and appeal to cryptocurrency for mainstream investors. For example, a top executive at BlackRock [the world's largest asset manager, with $7.81 trillion in assets under management] recently said the cryptocurrency can replace gold, and Square and PayPal have both embraced bitcoin.
The article also includes some advice from Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of the global investment firm Skybridge Capital (who was also, for 10 days, White House Communications Director): Scaramucci said people have begun to accept bitcoin — and since it appears in so few portfolios, it has plenty of room to grow. Still, bitcoin is a volatile asset and will be a risky holding if you invest in it. "This thing has a tendency to crash up," he said. "It is due for a correction, and these corrections can be violent." Scaramucci said bitcoin could suddenly tumble 20% to 50%. "You have to be very cautious," he added.

But he also highlighted bitcoin's staying power over the course of the past decade: If you took $1 and put 99 cents of it in cash and a penny in bitcoin, that investment strategy would have outperformed $1 invested in the S&P 500 over the last 10 years, he noted.

"Bitcoin's best days are ahead of it, but it's going to be volatile and I think people need to be prepared for it," Scaramucci told CNN Business.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from CoinDesk, written by Ryan Zurrer. Zurrer is founder of Dialectic AG, an alternative-assets focused multi-family office. Previously, he was a Director at the Web3 Foundation and led the investment team at Polychain Capital, pioneering the SAFT as a legitimate investment instrument. From the report: Crypto is set to bifurcate and we will begin to see two parallel economic superhighways being built and used. One economic superhighway will be for know your customer (KYC)-compliant "digital currencies" such as central bank digital currencies (CBDC) or corporate-backed digital currencies such as USDC or diem (formerly libra). In parallel, the other economic superhighway will be a detour-filled adventure of crypto-anarchist money Legos being stacked and iterated on by anonymous teams, self-organized via a myriad of DAO-like governance structures. It's all about to get quite strange. Diversification is the only coherent path forward both within crypto ecosystems and beyond during these uncertain times.
[...]
In 2021, we are going to see layer 2 apps for the first time and not only to entertain or as early experiments. We will see entire micro-economies emerge and transform thousands of people's lives. In 2021, we'll see more anonymous teams governed by DAOs popping up and experimenting with exotic derivatives and porting real-world assets on-chain with NFTs. Layer 2 will also usher in crypto's own "SoMo" (social + mobile native) moment, whereby applications will look to be native and seamless on many of the apps that billions of users already have on their home screen: WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, the App Store and so on. This is where corporate-cryptos and CBDCs will have a clear advantage and will foster significant innovation. We'll see the backers of CBDCs and corporate-cryptos spend lavishly to seed ecosystems of layer 2 app development.

We'll continue to see consolidation between crypto projects. DeFi yield strategies will begin to stack on one another combining debt, exchange and derivative strategies under unified liquidity while novel layer 1 experiments, often branded abhorrently as "Eth Killers" will ironically need to combine teams, treasuries and economically rebase to survive against Ethereum's accelerating network effects, community and composability. We'll also see an acceleration in "treasury raids" as protocols with enormous sums of money leftover from the 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) era are pressured by their token holders to pay a dividend, tie the treasury to the token or unwind and distribute the funds back to project funders. For those who got into crypto because of ideals like freedom and self-sovereignty, Zurrer says "we're likely to see a significant portion of the space migrating to FATF-compliant regulations regarding KYC/anti-money laundering and primarily transacting in centralized digital currencies." He encourages everyone to "remain open-minded about the innovation that CBDCs and corporate currencies will bring" as they "will drive adoption beyond what we've achieved thus far."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The value of one of the world's most valuable cryptocurrencies is crashing and a recently filed SEC complaint is at the root of the free fall. According to CoinMarketCap, the XRP token's value has declined more than 42% in the past 24 hours and is down more than 63% from its 30-day high of $0.76. It now sits at just $0.27. XRP's price volatility has rivaled the most capricious of cryptocurrencies. Since reaching an all-time-high of $3.84 back in January of 2018, the coin has spent much of the past two years drifting closer and closer to pennies. In the past month, on the back of major rallies from other cryptocurrencies, XRP has seen its biggest rally in years, but those gains were all erased this week by the Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse's admission that the SEC was planning to file a sweeping lawsuit against the company during the current administration's final days.

The SEC's fundamental argument is that XRP has always been a security and that it should have been registered with the commission from the beginning more than seven years ago. The SEC claims that the defendants in the case -- namely the company Ripple, CEO Bran Garlinghouse and executive chairman Chris Larsen -- generated more than $1.38 billion from sales of the XRP token. The company's line has been that XRP is not a security but is, in fact, a tool for financial institutions, though the coin's volatility has discouraged banks from actually adopting the token. Meanwhile, XRP is present on a number of cryptocurrency exchanges, a fact which could expand the scope of this legal complaint and affect more players in the space.

U.S. securities regulators on Tuesday sued cryptocurrency giant Ripple, and both its CEO and executive chairman, for allegedly selling over $1.3 billion in unregistered securities. Axios reports: Ripple on Monday had publicly disclosed that the lawsuit was to be filed imminently, and said it does not believe its tokens needed to be registered. XRP, the cryptocurrency created by Ripple in 2012, has the crypto industry's third-largest market cap at around $22 billion, behind only Bitcoin and Ether. In a separate article, Axios' Dan Primack writes that this lawsuit "could put a chill on some crypto industry investment, as Ripple has no interest in settling fast and moving on." He adds: "It also could mildly complicate the upcoming IPO for Coinbase, where XRP-to-dollar activity made up 15% of trading volume over the past 30 days (per Nomics)."

"Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money," Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday, and then followed it up with another tweet. "One Word: Doge."

"The tweet sent shares of Dogecoin up nearly 20% and landed it on the list of trending Twitter topics," reports CNN. (Later that day Musk tweeted "i love all u crazy ppl out there.") The tech billionaire even went as far as updating his Twitter bio with the title "Former CEO of Dogecoin..."

This isn't the first time Musk has tweeted about Dogecoin, the bitcoin descendant. The SpaceX CEO mentioned the digital coin in July when he tweeted "It's inevitable" with an image depicting the dogecoin standard engulfing the global financial system. The tweet sent shares up 14% at the time.

Dogecoin was created in 2014 as a parody to a popular internet meme "doge", which involved a picture of a Shiba Inu dog.

Although the virtual coin started off as a joke, it currently has a market value of nearly $570 million.

One day after they were uploaded, RubyGems discovered and removed two malicious packages that had been designed to steal cryptocurrency from unsuspecting users by installing a clipboard hijacker, reports Bleeping Computer, citing research by open-source security firm Sonatype.

Fortunately, while the packages were downloaded a total of 142 times, "At this time, none of the cryptocurrency addresses have received any funds." These packages were masquerading as a bitcoin library and a library for displaying strings with different color effects. A clipboard hijacker monitored the Windows clipboard for cryptocurrency addresses, and if one is detected, replaces it with an address under the attacker's control. Unless a user double-checks the address after they paste it, the sent coins will go to the attacker's cryptocurrency address instead of the intended recipient...

The base64 encoded string is a VBS file that is executed to create another malicious VBS file and configure it to start automatically when a user logs into Windows. This VBS script is the clipboard hijacker and is stored at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft Essentials\Software Essentials.vbs to impersonate the old Microsoft Security Essentials security software. The clipboard hijacking script monitors the Windows clipboard every second and check if it contains a Bitcoin address, an Ethereum address, or a raw Monero address.

The last time the price of bitcoin hit $20,000 was December of 2017. But Matt Luongo, the CEO of a crypto venture builder, points out to NBC News that this time the market is seeing "significant, high-conviction plays from [a few] large funds and even CEOs of publicly traded companies." "Names like Guggenheim Partners, [hedge fund managers] Paul Tudor Jones and Stan Druckenmiller, and the recent support from Michael Saylor at Microstrategies and Jack Dorsey at Square and Twitter are telling," he said. S&P Dow Jones also announced this month that it will launch cryptocurrency indices in 2021, paving the way for cryptocurrencies to become more mainstream investments.

Beyond the swing of high-profile supporters, there isn't a way to tell who is buying bitcoin. However, the number of new bitcoin addresses, the unique identifiers where the assets are sent, recently hit a record of 25,000 per hour for the first time since January 2018, according to data intelligence firm Glassnode.
Luongo ultimately argues to NBC that "This growth represents real adoption, and it won't disappear when the next bubble bursts."

To get a counter-balancing second opinion, NBC also spoke to the creator of the YouTube channel "Crypto Bobby," who also notes that PayPal (as well as the stock-trading app Robinhood) have also added support for bitcoin.

Sometimes NBC refers to the two men as "crypto enthusiasts" — but other times they're just referred to as "experts."

Cryptocurrency brokerage Coinbase said Thursday that it has filed a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, paving the way for plans for an eventual initial public offering. CNN reports: The announcement comes as interest in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has soared during the coronavirus pandemic. Investors have found such currencies attractive as the US dollar weakens. Bitcoin has been smashing its own price records and recently surpassed the symbolic $20,000-a-coin milestone. It has since continued to climb higher, and was last trading just shy of $23,000, according to data provider Refinitiv.

Coinbase was launched in 2012, according to its website, and "more than 35 million people in over 100 countries trust Coinbase to buy, sell, store, use and earn cryptocurrency." The company indicates it has more than $25 billion in assets on the platform and more than $320 billion in total volume traded.

The socialist regime once cracked down on bitcoin miners. Now it's mining the digital asset itself. From a report: At a military base outside Caracas, Venezuela, state video footage shows officers in green fatigues cut a blue ribbon donned with a cluster of glossy balloons. Then, the men pry open the doors of a narrow, dimly-lit bunker. But the balloons weren't inaugurating a new weapons factory or training facility. They marked the opening of a new bitcoin mining farm. Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro needs cash to sustain his grip on power after muddling through one of the worst economic implosions seen in recent modern history in the Western Hemisphere. It appears that Maduro's last ditch effort to buoy Venezuela's shriveling economy is to dig deep for this digital asset and sell it for hard cash.

"In a strategic alliance with private capital, the Bolivarian army inaugurated the first center for the production of digital assets at the Fuerte Tiuna facilities," said a spokesperson in footage published by state television in late November. Venezuelan General Domingo Antonio Hernandez Larez details the project in a cramped conference room, then he and other officers fondle a few S9 AntMiners, a type of specialized computer used to mine bitcoin, the volatile cryptocurrency whose price is scraping all-time-highs of just under $20,000 per coin. "This center of digital asset production will ensure self-financing sufficiency within the military," the Venezuelan state TV official explains. "These mining activities will be key for increasing revenues for the country."

Bitcoin breached the $20,000 level for the first time in history Wednesday, as crypto enthusiasts pointed to increased demand from institutional investors for the red-hot digital currency. From a report: The world's most-valuable virtual currency traded 4% higher to a price of around $20,327, according to market data from Coin Metrics, taking its year-to-date gains to more than 180%. Bitcoin has been on a tear this year. Analysts say it's gotten a boost from big-name investors such as Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller moving their own assets into the cryptocurrency, while tech firms such as Square and MicroStrategy have also sought to flock into bitcoin.

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: For the past year, hackers have been breaking into MySQL databases, downloading tables, deleting the originals, and leaving ransom notes behind, telling server owners to contact the attackers to get their data back. If database owners don't respond and ransom their data back in nine days, the databases are then put up on auction on a dark web portal.
"More than 85,000 MySQL databases are currently on sale on a dark web portal for a price of only $550/database," reports ZDNet: This suggests that both the DB intrusions and the ransom/auction web pages are automated and that attackers don't analyze the hacked databases for data that could contain a higher concentration of personal or financial information. Signs of these ransom attacks have been piling up over the course of 2020, with the number of complaints from server owners finding the ransom note inside their databases popping up on Reddit, the MySQL forums, tech support forums, Medium posts, and private blogs.

Bitcoin is back. Again. From a report: Nearly three years after it went on a hair-bending rise and hit a peak of $19,783, the price of a single Bitcoin rose above that for the first time on Monday, according to the data and news provider CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency has soared since March, after sinking below $4,000 at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. Bitcoin's latest climb is different from its last spike in 2017, which was driven largely by investors in Asia who had just learned about cryptocurrencies. Back then, the digital token soon lost momentum as people questioned what it could do other than allow for easy online speculating and drug and ransom payments.

While those questions remain, Bitcoin is now being fueled by a less speculative fever. Buyers -- led by American investors, including companies and other traditional investors -- are treating Bitcoin as an alternative asset, somewhat like gold, according to an analysis from the data firm Chainalysis. Rather than quickly trading in and out of it, more investors are using Bitcoin as a place to park part of their investment portfolios outside the influence of governments and the traditional financial system, Chainalysis and other industry firms said. "It's a very different set of people who are buying Bitcoin recently," said Philip Gradwell, the chief economist at Chainalysis, which analyzes the movement of cryptocurrencies. "They are doing it in steadier amounts over sustained periods of time, and they are taking it off exchanges and holding it as an investment."

In an eloquent essay, Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson argues that "We are living through a monetary revolution so multifaceted that few of us comprehend its full extent." The technological transformation of the internet is driving this revolution. The pandemic of 2020 has accelerated it...

Covid-19 has been good for Bitcoin and for cryptocurrency generally. First, the pandemic accelerated our advance into a more digital word: What might have taken 10 years has been achieved in 10 months. People who had never before risked an online transaction were forced to try, for the simple reason that banks were closed. Second, and as a result, the pandemic significantly increased our exposure to financial surveillance as well as financial fraud. Both these trends have been good for Bitcoin....

What is happening is that Bitcoin is gradually being adopted not so much as means of payment but as a store of value. Not only high-net-worth individuals but also tech companies are investing. In July, Michael Saylor, the billionaire founder of MicroStrategy, directed his company to hold part of its cash reserves in alternative assets. By September, MicroStrategy's corporate treasury had purchased bitcoins worth $425 million. Square, the San Francisco-based payments company, bought bitcoins worth $50 million last month. PayPal just announced that American users can buy, hold and sell bitcoins in their PayPal wallets. This process of adoption has much further to run...

Some economists, such as my friend Ken Rogoff, welcome the demise of cash because it will make the management of monetary policy easier and organized crime harder. But it will be a fundamentally different world when all our payments are recorded, centrally stored, and scrutinized by artificial intelligence — regardless of whether it is Amazon's Jeff Bezos or China's Xi Jinping who can access our data... Rather than seeking to create a Chinese-style digital dollar, Joe Biden's nascent administration should recognize the benefits of integrating Bitcoin into the U.S. financial system — which, after all, was originally designed to be less centralized and more respectful of individual privacy than the systems of less-free societies.

Bitcoin investors, which include top hedge funds and money managers, are betting the virtual currency could more than quintuple to as high as $100,000 in a year. From a report: It's a wager that has drawn eye-rolls from skeptics who believe the volatile cryptocurrency is a speculative asset rather than a store of value like gold. Since January, bitcoin has gained 160%, bolstered by strong institutional demand as well as scarcity as payment companies such as Square and Paypal buy it on behalf of customers. Bitcoin is within sight of its all-time peak of just under $20,000 hit in December 2017. It debuted in 2011 at zero and was last trading at $18,415. Going from $18,000 to $100,000 in one year is not a stretch, Brian Estes, chief investment officer at hedge fund Off the Chain Capital, said. "I have seen bitcoin go up 10X, 20X, 30X in a year. So going up 5X is not a big deal."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Satoshi didn't leave much behind when he decided to leave the scene for good back in April, 2011. But, he did leave enough for us to conduct a thorough research into his whereabouts when he was working on Bitcoin. To conduct this research, we gathered data from the following:
Satoshi's Bitcointalk account (539 available posts)
His 34 emails on the cryptography and Bitcoin mailing lists
His 169 commits on SourceForge
The metadata from Bitcoin whitepaper versions from 2008 (PDF) and 2009 (PDF)
The Genesis block
Various Wayback Machine archives

The data-driven part of the research focuses on timestamps from Satoshi's Bitcointalk posts, SourceForge commits, and emails, which represent a total of 742 activity instances from 206 days (not consecutive). The timestamp data starts from October 31, 2008, when he first announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, and ends on December 13, 2010, when he sent his last email that is known to be UTC timestamped. Using that data we compiled scatter charts in different suspect time zones to see when he was active and when he was not. We then used other data we gathered to further confirm the most likely location he called home. Common suspect locations are the UK (GMT), US Eastern (EST), US Pacific (PST), Japan (JST), and Australia (AEST). The last two were easy to debunk, but the first three prospects needed further examination.

"Bitcoin is now trading near $18,000, up almost 100% in six months," notes Bloomberg columnist Lionel Laurent, "and it's flirting with an all-time high reached in 2017 (which, given it was followed by an ugly crash, faithful Bitcoiners would rather forget)..." .

But what exacty does that mean? He challenges the notion that Bitcoin is the new wealth-protecting investment like gold, asking "is this really being driven by people seeking protection from a more uncertain world...?"

If anything, Bitcoin looks much more like the stock market on steroids than it does a digital version of gold, which has barely budged since the end of October as confidence about a Covid cure has gradually improved. You can see why hedge fund skeptics like Ray Dalio are dubious of Bitcoin's charms. The cryptocurrency's recent above-average correlation with equities is fine when everything's going up, but not in times of stress: In mid-March, for example, a flight to safety triggered by Covid cut Bitcoin's price in half. A recent Kansas City Fed study comparing bonds, gold and Bitcoin between 1995 and Feb. 2020 found Treasuries behaved "consistently" as a safe haven, gold "occasionally" and Bitcoin "never."

Behind the talk of digital gold is the reality of an erratic, still-speculative asset with the potential for big price swings...

While digital payment firms such as PayPal Holdings Inc. and Square Inc. have launched Bitcoin applications, this price jump is not about people buying cappuccinos. Data from Chainalysis estimates merchants made up only about 1% of crypto activity in North America between mid-2019 and mid-2020, while exchanges accounted for almost 90%... Crypto is still a heady bet on life-changing wealth, not a disruptor of how normal people use money.

Reader shanen shares a report (and offers this commentary): When the open source concept emerged in the '90s, it was conceived as a bold new form of communal labor: digital barn raisings. If you made your code open source, dozens or even hundreds of programmers would chip in to improve it. Many hands would make light work. Everyone would feel ownership. Now, it's true that open source has, overall, been a wild success. Every startup, when creating its own software services or products, relies on open source software from folks like Jacob Thornton: open source web-server code, open source neural-net code. But, with the exception of some big projects -- like Linux -- the labor involved isn't particularly communal. Most are like Bootstrap, where the majority of the work landed on a tiny team of people. Recently, Nadia Eghbal -- the head of writer experience at the email newsletter platform Substack -- published Working in Public, a fascinating book for which she spoke to hundreds of open source coders. She pinpointed the change I'm describing here. No matter how hard the programmers worked, most "still felt underwater in some shape or form," Eghbal told me.

Why didn't the barn-raising model pan out? As Eghbal notes, it's partly that the random folks who pitch in make only very small contributions, like fixing a bug. Making and remaking code requires a lot of high-level synthesis -- which, as it turns out, is hard to break into little pieces. It lives best in the heads of a small number of people. Yet those poor top-level coders still need to respond to the smaller contributions (to say nothing of requests for help or reams of abuse). Their burdens, Eghbal realized, felt like those of YouTubers or Instagram influencers who feel overwhelmed by their ardent fan bases -- but without the huge, ad-based remuneration. Sometimes open source coders simply walk away: Let someone else deal with this crap. Studies suggest that about 9.5 percent of all open source code is abandoned, and a quarter is probably close to being so. This can be dangerous: If code isn't regularly updated, it risks causing havoc if someone later relies on it. Worse, abandoned code can be hijacked for ill use. Two years ago, the pseudonymous coder right9ctrl took over a piece of open source code that was used by bitcoin firms -- and then rewrote it to try to steal cryptocurrency.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son said that he "doesn't understand" bitcoin, and that he spent a good chunk of his time tracking its movement while invested in the cryptocurrency. Son, who made the remarks at The New York Times DealBook conference, said he was told by a friend to invest "1% of his personal assets" into bitcoin, meaning he invested "about 200 million." After investing the money, Son said he would spend about five minutes each day looking at bitcoin prices fluctuate.

While speaking with host Andrew Ross Sorkin, Son said he found the investment to be "distracting [his] own focus on [his] own business." Son quickly grew tired of checking the price of bitcoin every day. This reoccurring distraction from checking prices every day led Son to sell his stake in bitcoin, and he estimates that he lost around $50 million. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Son lost closer to $130 million when he sold his stake in 2018, citing sources who are familiar with the matter. "I feel so much better," Son said of exiting the cryptocurrency. "I think digital currency will be useful," Son added. "But I don't know what digital currency, what structure, and so on."

Three years ago, Bitcoin's historic surge dominated Thanksgiving dinner conversations. This year, the cryptocurrency is in the midst of another notable rally and yet almost no one's talking about it. From a report: How fevered has Bitcoin's latest leg higher been? With the coin trading around $16,300, it's been more expensive in only eight other instances in the past decade, Bloomberg data show. Almost all of those came during the 1,375% surge in 2017 that saw it reach close to $20,000 before a spectacular plunge wiped out 70% over the next year. The world's largest cryptocurrency by market value has been through a boom and bust and a second boom since its frenzied heydays in 2017. A lot has changed in the years since, and crypto enthusiasts argue digital coins have gone through a maturing process. But the mania that surrounded digital currencies back then is largely absent, despite Bitcoin being about 15% shy of its vaunted record highs. "The fascination with it has worn off. You have the hardcore 'I'm a cryptocurrency investor' group but it hasn't really expanded because it's been so volatile, there have been so many questions around security and what regulations might do," said Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist for Schwab Center for Financial Research. "The number of questions I get on it now is a fraction of what I got a couple of years ago when it was really hot."