Google has decided to remove hundreds of bitcoin and cryptocurrency videos from YouTube in what's being called a "crypto-purge" -- leaving many who make bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related videos feeling unfairly targeted by the search giant. A YouTube spokesperson said the video-sharing platform has since reinstated the purged videos, however some content creators claim their deleted videos remain inaccessible. Forbes reports: The YouTube crypto-purge appears to only be targeting smaller channels and publishers, with crypto-related videos from the likes of bitcoin and crypto news outlet CoinTelegraph and U.S. business news publisher CNBC escaping the cull. One YouTuber Chris Dunn, who has some 210,000 subscribers on the platform, asked YouTube for an explanation via Twitter. "YouTube just removed most of my crypto videos citing 'harmful or dangerous content' and 'sale of regulated goods,'" Dunn wrote, adding he's been making videos on the platform for 10 years and built up 200,000 subs and 7 million views.

Meanwhile, others have been searching for a reason for the purge, finding YouTube's citing of "harmful and dangerous content" unsatisfactory. "So far Alphabet [Google's parent company] has made no attempt to explain the reasons for the culling," Mati Greenspan, the founder of research group Quantum Economics, wrote in a note. "The first instinct that many had was that perhaps they're trying to protect the consumer from scams. However, this wouldn't make much sense given that Google and Facebook have already had a crypto advertising ban last year that has long since been reversed, likely due to regulatory clarity in the U.S. where it was found that bitcoin and ethereum are neither securities nor scams." A YouTube spokesperson told CoinDesk that YouTube made "the wrong call."

"With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it. We also offer uploaders the ability to appeal removals and we will re-review the content," the spokesperson said. The spokesperson further stated that YouTube has not changed any policies related to cryptocurrency videos.

Harper's profiles sys-admin Chris Monteiro, who moonlights as a white-hat hacker monitoring dark web sites claiming to offer murder-for-hire services. For example, he tipped off one local police department to a $5,000 bitcoin payment someone made to try to arrange the murder of a teenaged girl on a site run by someone named "Yura". [U]sers set up an anonymous account, select from a drop-down menu the kind of violence they would like inflicted, upload the photo and address of their intended target, and wait to hear back through the messaging system. Users often have questions for Yura: How do I know you're for real? Can you make it look like an accident? When they are satisfied, the user transfers bitcoin into a special wallet on the site, where it will ostensibly be held until the job is completed. Instead, Yura takes the money immediately, and makes no attempt to complete the job. The user complains; Yura says he needs more money to hire a better hit man; the user either pays again or asks for a refund; and Yura either disappears or attempts to extort the user by threatening to turn information over to the authorities...

Despite the repulsive intent, there's an element of black comedy to some of the logs from Yura's sites. For one thing, the users' eagerness to believe the service is real leads them to ignore obvious signs that they are being scammed. Yura's marketplaces, for example, use stock photos of assassins or photos pulled from Google image searches. His poor English and poorer knowledge of U.S. geography result in glaring slipups, and the language he employs can make him sound like a customer service representative channeling a B-grade Mafia film. During the back-and-forth on one recent order, the user Happynewyear asked Yura if he could send hit men to Hawaii. "Yes," Yura responded, "we have someone in a nearby state. He can drive to the location with a stolen car and do the job with no problems." Overlooking the fact that the nearest state is 2,500 miles and a considerable swath of the Pacific Ocean away, the user paid him around three thousand dollars.

Reading through the kill orders, it's easy to spot the online disinhibition effect -- the psychologist John Suler's theory of why and how human behavior changes when we log on... So far, according to Monteiro, eight people have been arrested for ordering murders through Yura's websites, on the basis of evidence Monteiro passed to law enforcement. One of them, a young Californian named Beau Brigham, had paid less than $5 toward a hit on his stepmother. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of soliciting murder and sentenced to three years in prison.
One attempted murder was arranged by a man described as "an I.T. professional and elder in the United Church of God," raising an adopted teenaged son with his wife Amy. "[H]e'd been arranging affairs through the infidelity website Ashley Madison but could not consider divorce because of his position in the church." In the end he'd simply carried out the murder himself, but "His exchanges with Yura would prove central to the state's investigation into Amy's death: the bitcoin signature of the payment...matched the key that authorities found on Stephen's hard drive at home. Stephen had attempted to make the death look like a suicide, and the bitcoin key was proof it was not. In January 2018, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison."

The article's author, Brian Merchant, writes that it was hard to research. "There is no easy way to say, 'Hello, I found your name on a kill list on the dark net, and while the site is a scam the order is not; someone you likely know wants you dead badly enough to pay thousands of dollars to an impossibly shady website. Give me a ring back anytime'... Of those I was able to contact, about half said they had never been alerted by the police." (Though Monteiro says America's Department of Homeland Services now plans to investigate everyone who's made transactions on Yura's site.)

The article also notes the first known instance of a murder ordered on the dark web and then successfully carried out -- this March, on a different dark web site.

The decade is almost over -- and one incredibly volatile investment stood out from all the rest as the best of the 2010s. Want to guess what it was? Bitcoin. From a report: According to a recent report by Bank of America Securities, if you invested $1 in bitcoin at the start of the decade, it would now be worth more than $90,000. A bitcoin (XBT) is currently valued at about $7,000. While that's still significantly below its peak price of just under $20,000 two years ago, it's substantially higher than the fractions of a penny that one bitcoin cost at the beginning of the Twenty-Teens. Bitcoin remains a highly speculative investment, but it has soared during the past decade as it emerged as the most-popular and widely accepted cryptocurrency. More retailers are accepting bitcoin as a form of payment, and several investment firms and exchanges have launched futures trading for bitcoin, a move that helped legitimize it.

CaptainDork shares a report from NewsBTC: Bitcoin lost billions of dollars worth of valuation within a 30-minutes timeframe as a Chinese cryptocurrency scammer allegedly liquidated its steal via over-the-counter markets. The initial sell-off by PlusToken caused a domino effect, causing mass liquidations. PlusToken, a fraud scheme that duped investors of more than $2 billion, dumped huge bitcoin stockpiles from its anonymous accounts, according to Chainalysis. The New York-based blockchain consultancy cited an internal investigation that showed PlusToken scammers on a systematic crypto liquidation spree. Some of them have been actively selling bitcoin since June -- right after the cryptocurrency established a year-to-date high of circa $14,000. According to Chainalysis, PlusToken had cashed out at least $185 million worth of bitcoin via OTC desks. "We can say that those cashouts increased volatility in Bitcoin's price and that they correlate significantly with Bitcoin price drops," says Chainalysis.

"Chainalysis's study shows that the entity still holds a massive stash of bitcoin that it might liquidate at a later stage," adds NewsBTC. "That raises the prospects of more price crashes unless there is an adequate demand to match the scammer's supply flow."

There has been a massive rise in the number of bilateral agreements between central banks that allow two countries to swap currencies directly, a large number involving China. Meanwhile, a number of countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, have been repatriating their gold reserves from vaults in the US where they had long been stored. From a report: Yet by comparison, major sovereign digital currencies based on blockchain technology would be revolutionary. Blockchains are encrypted ledgers for storing information that are decentralized rather than being under any country's or company's control. When applied to international payments, this offers the prospect of much more transparent and cheaper transactions than SWIFT. It could cut the payments time lag from a couple of days to one second, and the cost from 0.01% to almost nothing. It will have the capacity to handle far higher volumes of payments, partly since they won't require bank accounts or even internet access.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and XRP have been a good experiment in using blockchains for international payments. Yet when countries issue equivalents of their own, these will have even more advantages. They will be backed by states, and completely decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin will not be able to compete with this. While technological change has been incredibly fast in the information era, the system of international payments has lagged behind. But once sovereign digital currencies start taking off, this will suddenly change. Just like smartphones quickly eliminated most old cell phones, no countries will be able to reject blockchain payments for long. So while, for example, the US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin recently said that his country does not see itself launching a digital dollar in the next five years, there will be a moment when the political centre of gravity will shift and everyone will join the revolution. After the 5G network and the Internet of Things really mushroom in the next couple of years, it will be possible to replace the existing system even faster. This will be the beginning of a new international monetary era.

In the NulledCast podcast hackers livestream the harassment of Ring camera owners after accessing their devices. Hundreds of people can listen. From a report: A blaring siren suddenly rips through the Ring camera, startling the Florida family inside their own home. "It's your boy Chance on Nulled," a voice says from the Ring camera, which a hacker has taken over. "How you doing? How you doing?" "Welcome to the NulledCast," the voice says. The NulledCast is a podcast livestreamed to Discord. It's a show in which hackers take over people's Ring and Nest smarthome cameras and use their speakers to talk to and harass their unsuspecting owners. In the example above, Chance blared noises and shouted racist comments at the Florida family. "Sit back and relax to over 45 minutes of entertainment," an advertisement for the podcast posted to a hacking forum called Nulled reads. "Join us as we go on completely random tangents such as; Ring & Nest Trolling, telling shelter owners we killed a kitten, Nulled drama, and more ridiculous topics. Be sure to join our Discord to watch the shows live."

Software to hack Ring cameras has recently become popular on the forum. The software churns through previously compromised email addresses and passwords to break into Ring cameras at scale. This has led to a recent spate of hacks that have occurred both during the podcast and at other times, several of which have been covered by local media outlets. In Brookhaven a hacker shouted at a sleeping woman through her hacked Ring camera to wake-up. In Texas, a hacker demanded a couple pay a bitcoin ransom. Hackers targeted a family in DeSoto County, Mississippi, and spoke through the device to one of the young children.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: He was a former hacker from Alabama who styled himself a "disruptive technologist" and believed that he was using his data-mining expertise as a force for good. But then, in April, Virgil Griffith traveled to North Korea with a visa he had obtained from a diplomatic mission in New York City, going through China to circumvent an American travel ban. He gave a talk at a conference in Pyongyang about how to use cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to launder money, according to federal investigators. Now Mr. Griffith, 36, faces federal charges that he violated international sanctions. He was arrested on Thursday as he landed at Los Angeles International Airport.

Mr. Griffith, an American citizen who lives in Singapore and works for the Ethereum Foundation, is accused of conspiring with North Korea since August 2018. He appeared in federal court in Los Angeles last week and will eventually be brought to New York. He faces up to 20 years in prison. Though the United States government had denied Mr. Griffith permission to go to North Korea, he traveled there anyway in April and spoke at the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday. During his speech and in discussions afterward, he provided information about how North Korea could use cryptocurrency to "achieve independence from the global banking system," the complaint said. He also later made plans "to facilitate the exchange" of a digital currency between North and South Korea. "We cannot allow anyone to evade sanctions, because the consequences of North Korea obtaining funding, technology, and information to further its desire to build nuclear weapons put the world at risk," said William F. Sweeney Jr., an assistant director-in-charge at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "It's even more egregious that a U.S. citizen allegedly chose to aid our adversary."

Hacker magazine, 2600, where Mr. Griffith was a contributing writer, said on Twitter that what Mr. Griffith had done -- explaining the concept of cryptocurrency -- was not a crime. The magazine's editor, Emmanual Goldstein, said Mr. Griffith was incapable of doing what federal investigators have accused him of. "He would not help a murderous dictator," he said. "He's a typical hacker who loves technology and adventure."

Friday Forbes wrote that price of Bitcoin had dropped 10% over the previous 24 hours, dipping below the "psychological" $7,000 level. That's after starting the week at over $8,000, and less than a month after it rose to $10,000. Apparently cryptocurrencies had gotten some very bad news from China. Bitcoin rivals ethereum and bitcoin cash have led the market lower [Friday] morning, each losing over 12% of their value in the last 24 hours. Ripple's XRP, litecoin, EOS, bitcoin SV, and binance coin have all also been heavily sold off, wiping billions of dollars from the value of the combined bitcoin and crypto market. [Friday] morning the People's Bank of China has warned it will be cracking down hard on bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading in the country. "Once [bitcoin or cryptocurrency trading] is discovered, it will be disposed of immediately, and it will be prevented from happening early," read a People's Bank of China statement, translated through Google.

The Shanghai-based central bank also warned against conflating the country's interest in blockchain with bitcoin and crypto...

The bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry has been rocked by reports of Chinese police raids on the offices of major bitcoin and crypto exchanges Binance and Bithumb in the country over the last week -- though both have denied the raids took place.
But now that same Forbes columnist asks: Is this when to buy bitcoin? Among other reasons... As well as the May bitcoin halving, which will see the number of bitcoin rewarded to miners cut by half from 12.5 bitcoin to 6.25 bitcoin, bitcoin investors are hopeful next year will bring an increase in the number of bitcoin retail investors and people using bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for payments. Bakkt, a New York Stock Exchange-owner backed bitcoin and cryptocurrency venture, announced last month it plans to launch a consumer app for cryptocurrency purchases in 2020. U.S. coffee chain Starbucks will be its first launch partner, with the company one of the original backers of the crypto project, along with software giant Microsoft and Boston Consulting Group. Meanwhile, Bakkt's bitcoin futures daily volume hit a new all-time high this week, according to data from Intercontinental Exchange, with some $20.3 million across 2,700 futures contracts on Friday.

Many in the traditional financial industry remain unconvinced by bitcoin and crypto, however. This month, former European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet slammed bitcoin and Facebook's crypto project, warning bitcoin is "not real" and not the future of money.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A Dutch court has ruled that Facebook can be required to use filter technologies to identify and preemptively take down fake ads linked to crypto currency scams that carry the image of a media personality, John de Mol, and other well known celebrities. The Dutch celerity filed a lawsuit against Facebook in April over the misappropriation of his and other celebrities' likeness to shill Bitcoin scams via fake ads run on its platform.

In an immediately enforceable preliminary judgement today the court has ordered Facebook to remove all offending ads within five days, and provide data on the accounts running them within a week. Per the judgement, victims of the crypto scams had reported a total of ~$1.8M in damages to the Dutch government at the time of the court summons. It's not yet clear whether the company will appeal but in the wake of the ruling Facebook has said it will bring the scam ads report button to the Dutch market early next month.

The IRS's criminal division identified "dozens" of potential cryptocurrency tax evaders or cybercriminals after a meeting this week with tax authorities from four other countries. Bloomberg reports: Officials from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and the Netherlands -- known as the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement -- shared data, tools and tax enforcement strategies to find new leads in a quest to mitigate cross-border money-laundering, tax evasion and cybercrime. The IRS's cybercrime unit has developed expertise in "who is moving the money and where it's going," Ryan Korner, a senior special agent in the IRS's Criminal Investigations office in Los Angeles, said in a call with reporters Friday. "We have tools in place that we didn't have six months or a year ago."

The effort is part of the Internal Revenue Service's renewed focus on fighting tax evasion tied to cryptocurrency as digital currency has become more popular and gained in value. The agency has struggled in recent years to enforce tax laws and keep up with criminals as technology has advanced. "Tax fraud is not a new crime, but the sophistication with which criminals commit tax fraud has significantly increased through cyber-related activities in recent years," the joint chiefs said in a statement. "Data breaches, intrusions, takeovers and compromises are the new tools that criminals use to commit tax crimes." The IRS is preparing for a new wave of cryptocurrency audits. The agency sent letters to more than 10,000 people earlier this year, warning that they might be subject to penalties for skirting taxes on their virtual investments. The IRS and its partners are using data from previous enforcement activities to find new criminals, Korner said. Using the data from the five countries gives them a broader view of how accounts, money and people are connected.

The share of cryptocurrency jobs per million has risen 1,457% over the past four years, according to a study by job site Indeed.com. VentureBeat reports: Indeed analyzed millions of job postings on Indeed.com to unpack how Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain trends have affected the job market. Searches for Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency roles are going down -- yet employer demand has skyrocketed. According to Indeed, in the four-year period between September 2015 and September 2019, the share of these jobs per million grew by 1,457%. In that same time period, the share of searches per million increased by 469%.

In the past year, the share of cryptocurrency job postings per million on Indeed.com has increased by 26%, while the share of searches per million for jobs has decreased by 53%. Bitcoin's volatility seems to correlate with job seeker interest, and the change in Bitcoin price this year might be why job searches have declined. Employers, however, are doubling down on the technology, which uses decentralized ledgers to produce secure and transparent transactions. The report says that if you want a better chance at getting a job in this field you should be a programmer familiar with basic cryptography, P2P networks, and a language like C++, Java, Python, or JavaScript (along with certain soft crypto skills). To stand out, you should learn new blockchain development languages, like Hyperledger, Bitcoin Script, Ethereum's Solidity, the Ripple protocol, or even languages currently in development -- like Rholang.

The top hirers are as follows: Deloitte, IBM, Accenture, Cisco, Collins Aerospace, Ernst & Young, Coinbase, Overstock, Ripple, Verizon, Circle, Kraken, ConsenSys, JP Morgan Chase, and Signature Bank.

David Marcus, the head of Facebook's cryptocurrency projects, says that Bitcoin is digital gold, but it's not a good currency for transactions. From a report: "I don't think of Bitcoin as a currency. It's actually not a great medium of exchange because of its volatility," Marcus said speaking at the New York Times DealBook Conference in New York. "I see it as digital gold." Marcus said Bitcoin is like gold because you can hold on to it as an investment just as people do with actual gold, but the drastic upswings and dips that Bitcoin goes through makes it a bad option for people who need a system to send remittances across borders. That is a key market that Facebook is targeting with its Libra cryptocurrency and Calibra digital wallet. Unlike Bitcoin, Libra's value will be tied to currencies like the U.S. dollar and the Euro, which will help it remain stable. Marcus said a key reason that Bitcoin has not been regulated out of existence is because it is not perceived to be a medium of exchange. "It's an investment class that's decorrelated from the rest of the market," Marcus said. "Why feel threatened by that?"

A single Bitcoin holder -- called a "whale" in cryptocurrency parlance -- likely manipulated the market and helped fuel the big rise in Bitcoin's price in 2017, according to researchers. That year, Bitcoin's price jumped from under $1,000 in January to more than $19,000 in December. From a report: Last year, University of Texas professor John Griffin and Amin Shams, an instructor at Ohio State University, published controversial research concluding that in 2017 just a few big players used the stablecoin Tether to prop up the price of Bitcoin following market downturns. Griffin and Shams now tell Bloomberg that just a single whale was likely behind the behavior. They say that one entity on Bitfinex, a popular cryptocurrency headquartered in Hong Kong, appears able to push the price of Bitcoin up when it falls below certain thresholds. Griffin and Shams studied Bitcoin and Tether transactions from March 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018. They found that Bitcoin purchases on Bitfinex increased whenever the price dropped by certain increments. According to Bloomberg, which saw a prepublication version of a paper set to be published in the Journal of Finance, the authors conclude: "This pattern is only present in periods following the printing of Tether, driven by a single large account holder, and not observed by other exchanges."

"The price of Bitcoin skyrocketed overnight, rising by nearly 40 percent from a recent low," reports Newsweek: The sharp turn came as Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke highly of the decentralized technology on which the digital currency is founded, telling members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee that the country should "seize the opportunity" of blockchain... China banned cryptocurrency exchanges in 2017, and Xi's comments are believed to be among his first to embrace blockchain technology so thoroughly.

The price of Bitcoin cracked $10,000 briefly Friday night, a symbolic but notable threshold the digital currency has not reached in over a month, at which point it had been enduring a steep sell-off. Xi's speech may have suggested to investors that a potentially expansive consumer base for cryptocurrency could begin to open, although other reporting has suggested that Bitcoin could instead face China as a competitor, rather than an open market. Mu Changchun, a deputy director at the People's Bank of China, said at an event sponsored by the China Finance 40 Forum in August that the country is "close" to releasing its own cryptocurrency. The bank has apparently been working on such technology since last year.

Bitcoin has had something of a volatile week, owed in large part to testimony delivered Wednesday by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company is seeking to develop its own cryptocurrency: Libra... Democrats on the committee were largely unsatisfied with Facebook's promises, and analysts have suggested that their lack of enthusiasm may have cast a pall over cryptocurrencies more broadly, contributing to a major sell-off of Bitcoin Wednesday. The price sank to its lowest in five months. Increased regulatory scrutiny of Libra was largely credited for the decline. However, recent events, such as Xi's speech and a potential "short squeeze," have reinvigorated interest in Bitcoin, even if the market for cryptocurrencies remains plagued with uncertainty.

A California man is suing AT&T after he says one of its employees allowed a hacker to access his cell phone number that resulted in his data being compromised and more than $1.8 million in cryptocurrency stolen from his accounts. ABC News reports: Seth Shapiro says that an AT&T employee allowed a hacker to swap his phone number from his phone to a separate device, which resulted in "the compromise of highly sensitive personal and financial information and the theft of more than $1.8 million," according to court documents. The process of so-called "SIM swapping" allows hackers a way to gain access to all the information tied to a phone number potentially giving them access to every email, photo, app and more on the phone.

The complaint filed on Oct. 17 claims that while third parties had control over his AT&T wireless number, "they used that control to access and reset the passwords for Mr. Shapiro's accounts on cryptocurrency exchange platforms, including KuCoin, Bittrex, Wax, Coinbase, Huobi, Crytopia, LiveCoin, HitBTC, Coss.io, Liqui, and Bitfinex." The digital currency "was accessed by the hackers utilizing their control over Mr. Shapiro's AT&T wireless number," the court documents added. The lawsuit alleges that hackers were able to access "accounts on various cryptocurrency exchange platforms, including the accounts he controlled on behalf of his business venture. The hackers then transferred Mr. Shapiro's currency from Mr. Shapiro's accounts into accounts that they controlled." "In all, they stole more than $1.8 million from Mr. Shapiro in the two consecutive SIM swap attacks on May 16, 2018," the complaint added. AT&T told ABC News in a statement that they dispute the Shapiro's allegations and shared information on how customers can help keep themselves safe from SIM swaps.

"We dispute these allegations and look forward to presenting our case in court," the statement said. "Customers can learn how to help protect themselves from this scam by going here -- https://about.att.com/sites/cyberaware/ni/blog/sim_swap."

For the past week, a group of criminals has been launching DDoS attacks against companies in the financial sector and demanding ransom payments while posing as "Fancy Bear," the infamous hacking group associated with the Russian government, known for hacking the White House in 2014 and the DNC in 2016. From a report: The attacks, brought to ZDNet's attention by one of our readers, were confirmed today by Link11 and Radware, two companies that provide DDoS mitigation services and have documented similar "ransom denial-of-service" (RDOS) attacks in the past years. In an interview with ZDNet, Daniel Smith, Radware ERT researcher, said the attacks started last week and targeted the financial vertical. Smith said "the group is launching large scale, multi-vector demo DDoS attacks when sending victims the ransom letter."

A Link11 spokesperson said the same thing, adding that the purpose of these demo attacks is to serve as an initial warning and intimidation factor, to convince victims into paying the ransom demand. According to a copy of the ransom letter, the group is sending victims, the fake Fancy Bear group is asking for payments of 2 bitcoin, which is about $15,000 at today's exchange rate.

America's lawmakers and Federal Reserve officials "are so concerned about Facebook's plans to launch a new digital currency," reports Politico's financial services reporter, "that they're contemplating a novel response -- having the central bank create a competitor." Momentum is building for an idea that was once considered outlandish -- a U.S. government-run virtual currency that would replace physical cash, a dramatic move that could discourage major companies like Facebook from creating their own digital coins. Facebook's proposed currency, Libra, has forced the Fed to consider the issue because of a fear that private companies could establish their own currencies and take control over the global payments system. Some Fed officials share the concern about a new balkanized currency system outside government control that Facebook has threatened to unleash. "Libra bust this way out into the open," said Karen Petrou, a managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics who advises executives on coming policy shifts.

But it's not just Facebook. The matter is also taking on urgency as other countries consider creating their own digital currencies -- another potential challenge to the primacy of the U.S. dollar. The head of the Bank of England has floated the idea that central banks could create a network of digital currencies to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency... The Bank for International Settlements, which represents the world's central banks, said early this year that most were conducting research into central bank digital currencies and many were progressing from conceptual work into experimentation and proofs-of-concept...

The details of a possible [U.S.] Fed-developed digital currency are still vague. But advocates and experts say such an instrument could give consumers a new way to make payments without having to rely on banks and without incurring fees when they transfer money. The digital currency would likely take some inspiration from the technology that underpins other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. The discussions are informal at this point. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have written to the central bank asking officials to consider how they might approach a digital currency, and some Fed officials have begun to acknowledge the government might someday play a role. "It is inevitable," Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Patrick Harker said at a recent conference, according to Reuters. "I think it is better for us to start getting our hands around it."
The article argues that America's central bankers "worry that another major company could enter the space. If the Fed doesn't establish a digital currency, who will...?

"The growing pressure on the Fed is evidence of how rapid developments in technology are beginning to shake the foundations of the financial system, raising questions about whether policymakers are prepared."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Federal authorities in the U.S. have unsealed charges against the South Korean operator of a child porn ring that's been billed as the world's "largest dark web child porn marketplace." The child porn site, known as Welcome to Video, charged some users in Bitcoin and authorities say they successfully unmasked those Bitcoin transactions in order to catch the perpetrators. An additional 337 people from around the world have been charged in relation to the Tor-based site. Welcome to Video contained over 200,000 videos of child sexual abuse and had users from countries like the U.S., UK, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil, and Australia, according to the indictment, which was uploaded by NBC News reporter Cyrus Farivar. Users could download videos through a system of credits that could be gained by referring new users or by buying those credits with Bitcoin.

Charges in the U.S. against the site's operator Jong Woo Son were only unveiled today, but the 23-year-old Korean national was arrested in March of 2018 and is already behind bars in South Korea. The operation was a joint investigation by numerous law enforcement agencies around the globe. Between June 2015 and March 2018, Welcome to Video received Bitcoin transactions totaling over $370,000 in U.S currency. Undercover agents in Washington D.C. monitored the site, filled with images of child rape, and were able to deanonymize the Bitcoin transactions, something that average users often believe is impossible. The investigation uncovered at least two former federal law enforcement officials allegedly involved in the child porn site, a 35-year-old U.S. Border Patrol Agent from Texas, and a former HSI special agent, also from Texas.

Andrew L.Goodkind, Benjamin A. Jones, and Robert P. Berrens, writing in a paper: Cryptocurrency mining uses significant amounts of energy as part of the proof-of-work time-stamping scheme to add new blocks to the chain. Expanding upon previously calculated energy use patterns for mining four prominent cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero), we estimate the per coin economic damages of air pollution emissions and associated human mortality and climate impacts of mining these cryptocurrencies in the US and China. Results indicate that in 2018, each $1 of Bitcoin value created was responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in the US and $0.37 in China. The similar value in China relative to the US occurs despite the extremely large disparity between the value of a statistical life estimate for the US relative to that of China. Further, with each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefits, absent perpetual price increases. For example, in December 2018, our results illustrate a case (for Bitcoin) where the health and climate change "cryptodamages" roughly match each $1 of coin value created. We close with discussion of policy implications.

PayPal is withdrawing from the Libra Association, the 28-member nonprofit organization formed in June 2019 to oversee the cryptocurrency's creation and eventual consumer rollout. The Verge reports: The company doesn't cite a specific reason, saying only in a statement to The Verge that it decided "to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations." "We remain supportive of Libra's aspirations and look forward to continued dialogue on ways to work together in the future," the statement continues. "Facebook has been a longstanding and valued strategic partner to PayPal, and we will continue to partner with and support Facebook in various capacities."

However, a report published by the Financial Times yesterday said PayPal had begun distancing itself from the project amid increasing regulatory scrutiny. The company reportedly signaled its intention to skip a meeting in Washington, DC scheduled for today, and the FT reports that at least one primary concern for PayPal has been the lack of attention Facebook executives have paid to Libra's considerable backlash. Another key concern is how the platform will combat money laundering activity.