Draconi writes: The price of Bitcoin dropped from it's March 6th, 2020 high of $9,126 to under $5,800 today as market sell-offs accelerated with the S&P and Dow Jones dropping 7% in early hours trading. Bitcoin, long considered to be a safe-haven during times of economic stress, currently costs at least $4,313 in electricity per coin to generate. The latest drop has wiped out all 2020 gains for Bitcoin and sent a ripple effect across other cryptocurrencies, with Ethereum down nearly 35%. While the bitcoin price has recovered slightly to around $6,000, the 24-hour low was $5,721 per bitcoin from just under $8,000 yesterday. Forbes notes that the bitcoin and cryptocurrency market as a whole "is now down a staggering $100 billion in the last seven days -- and has wiped out its year-to-date gains after starting the year at around $7,000 per bitcoin."

"Previously seen as a possible safe haven in difficult times, investors now seem to be selling out to take back liquidity in case the coronavirus spreads even further," said Simon Peters, analyst and crypto expert at multi-asset investment platform, eToro. Bitcoin's crash was also a result of oil cartel Opec's failure to agree to a supply cut last weekend, sending the oil price to historic lows.

The Verge takes a 5,000-word look at a Kickstarter campaign "that raised more than half a million dollars, only to never ship and leave behind thousands of angry backers."

"The difference in this story, however, is that for only the second time, the Federal Trade Commission is coming for the creator." The agency claims Doug Monahan took his backpack funds and spent them on "personal expenses," including bitcoin purchases, ATM withdrawals, and credit card debt. The agency says he threatened backers who pursued him for their bags. The state of Texas is suing him, too. A lot of people want a piece of Monahan, but he's not going down without a fight. He's serving as his own lawyer to dispute the claims in court, and he invited me down to Texas to clear his name and reputation...

He sold iBackpack as a high-tech wonder that would "revolutionize" backpacks and improve people's lives, whether they're eight or 80. On Indiegogo in 2015 and again on Kickstarter in 2016, Monahan advertised the backpack as the bag of people's dreams: it'd feature more than 50 pockets, include multiple external battery packs, RFID-blocking pouches, a precipitation hood, a USB hub, charging cables, a Bluetooth speaker, and a mobile hotspot for a portable Wi-Fi connection. That's a lot of stuff in one bag that you could seemingly be talked into believing is useful...

He got addicted to pain pills, too. At the same time, the batteries that were supposed to go in the bag represented a liability. The iBackpack drama occurred around the same time that Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries started catching fire, and he didn't feel comfortable shipping lithium-ion batteries. Someone could have died, he says.... Monahan says they just don't understand him or crowdfunding, in general. He's not a bad guy, he says. It's just that businesses fail sometimes, which is what he invited me to Texas to prove.

Poking at Monahan's past, however, suggests this isn't a man with a one-time flub, but rather someone with a trail of failures. Is he a con-artist? An irresponsible businessman? Does the difference even matter?
The Verge also investigates a claim that the whole backpack idea was stolen from another company -- and talks to a former employee who says their manager at Monahan's company was a 14-year-old.

And at one point, Monahan "essentially crank calls the FTC's lawyers with me in the room."

India's Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned central bank's two-year-old ban on cryptocurrency trading in the country in what many said was a "historic" verdict. From a report: The Reserve Bank of India had imposed a ban on cryptocurrency trading in April 2018 that barred banks and other financial institutions from facilitating "any service in relation to virtual currencies." At the time, RBI said the move was necessary to curb "ring-fencing" of the country's financial system. It had also argued that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies cannot be treated as currencies as they are not made of metal or exist in physical form, nor were they stamped by the government. The 2018 notice from the central bank sent a panic to several local startups and companies offering services to trade in cryptocurrency. Nearly all of them have since closed shop.

news.com.au reports: The GitHub Arctic Vault program is part of the now Microsoft-owned code repository GitHub...aimed at preserving the information for generations to come...

"We chose to store GitHub's public repositories in the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard [a Norwegian island] because it is one of the most remote and geopolitically stable places on Earth and is about a mile down the road from the famous Global Seed Vault," said GitHub vice president of special projects Thomas Dohmke. Mr Dohmke said open source code in particular was worth preserving... "Ultimately, it's time to create multiple durable backups of the software our world depends on..." Other treasures include the original source code for MS-DOS (the precursor to Microsoft Windows), the open source code that powers Bitcoin, Facebook's React, and the publishing platform Wordpress...

"The Arctic Code Vault was just the beginning of the GitHub Archive Program's journey to secure the world's open source code," GitHub vice president of special projects Thomas Dohmke told news.com.au. "We've partnered with multiple organisations and advisers to help us maximise the GitHub Archive Program's value and preserve all open-source software for future generations." One of those partners is Norwegian archival experts Piql, who specialise in very-long-term data storage. The company uses around 200 silver halide and polyester film reels designed to last a thousand years to store the information...

A jury on Tuesday convicted a former Microsoft worker of wire fraud and other charges in what prosecutors described as a scheme to steal $10 million in digital currency. From a report: The U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle said 25-year-old Ukrainian citizen Volodymyr Kvashuk helped test Microsoft's online retail sales platform. He was accused of stealing digital currency such as gift cards that could be redeemed for Microsoft products, then reselling them on the internet and using the proceeds to buy a $160,000 Tesla vehicle and a $1.7 million lakefront home. He was fired in June 2018 after the scheme came to light. Prosecutors said that during the seven months of his activity, $2.8 million in bitcoin was transferred into his bank accounts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Between 2011 and 2012, 49-year-old Clifton Collins bought 6,000 Bitcoin using money he earned from growing and selling weed, reports The Irish Times. At the time, the cryptocurrency's price varied between $4 and $6. Today it stands at over $9,700. But Collins isn't enjoying any euphoria for the windfall -- because his landlord threw out his Bitcoin codes. The Irish Times reports that Collins was arrested in 2017 for growing and selling weed, and was subsequently hit with a five-year prison sentence. Following this, his landlord sent many of Collins' possessions to a local dump during the process of clearing out Collins' room. One such item was a fishing rod case, which housed a pice of A4 paper with â53.6 million ($58 million) in Bitcoin codes printed onto it.

Cryptocurrency is bought through so-called cryptowallets. Once you buy Bitcoin, the cryptowallet issues you a code that's needed to access it. Anyone who gets that code can access and potentially steal the cryptocurrency, so buyers are usually encouraged to hide their codes somewhere safe. In 2017, Collins spread his 6,000 Bitcoin across 12 accounts in order to guard against losing his crypto-fortune, according to the Times. He printed out the codes to his Bitcoin stash on a piece of A4 paper, the same paper he stuffed into the aforementioned fishing rod case.

Sweden's Riksbank said on Wednesday it had begun testing an e-krona, taking the country a step closer to the creation of the world's first central bank digital currency (CBDC). From a report: If the e-krona eventually comes into circulation it will be used to simulate everyday banking activities, such as payments, deposits and withdrawals from a digital wallet such as a mobile phone app, the Riksbank said. "The aim of the project is to show how an e-krona could be used by the general public," the Riksbank said in a statement. In January, the central banks of Britain, the euro zone, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland joined forces to assess the case for issuing CBDCs. CBDCs are traditional money, but in digital form, issued and governed by a country's central bank. By contrast, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are produced by solving complex maths puzzles, and governed by disparate online communities instead of a centralized body. The sharp decline in the use of cash and competition from alternative currencies, such as Facebook's Libra, has also prompted central banks around the world to consider issuing their own electronic currencies.

Coinbase has become the only cryptocurrency company with a Visa Principal Member certification. TechCrunch reports: Cryptocurrency company Coinbase has been working with Paysafe to issue the Coinbase Card, a Visa debit card that works with your Coinbase account balance. The company is now a Visa Principal Member, which should help Coinbase rely less on Paysafe and control a bigger chunk of the card payment stack.

The company will offer the Coinbase Card in more markets in the future. The new status could open up more possibilities and features as well. While Coinbase originally launched the Coinbase Card in the U.K., it is now available in 29 European countries. It works with any Visa-compatible payment terminal and ATM. Users can decide in the app which wallet they want to use for upcoming transactions. This way, you can spend money in 10 cryptocurrencies. There are some conversion fees just like on Coinbase. In addition to those fees, there can be some additional fees if you withdraw a lot of money or make a purchase abroad.

Brian Krebs sheds light upon a new email-based extortion scheme targeting website owners serving banner ads through Google's AdSense program. "In this scam, the fraudsters demand bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to flood the publisher's ads with so much bot and junk traffic that Google's automated anti-fraud systems suspend the user's AdSense account for suspicious traffic," writes Krebs. From his report: Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader who maintains several sites that receive a fair amount of traffic. The message this reader shared began by quoting from an automated email Google's systems might send if they detect your site is seeking to benefit from automated clicks. The message goes on to warn that while the targeted site's ad revenue will be briefly increased, "AdSense traffic assessment algorithms will detect very fast such a web traffic pattern as fraudulent."

The message demands $5,000 worth of bitcoin to forestall the attack. In this scam, the extortionists are likely betting that some publishers may see paying up as a cheaper alternative to having their main source of advertising revenue evaporate. The reader who shared this email said while he considered the message likely to be a baseless threat, a review of his recent AdSense traffic statistics showed that detections in his "AdSense invalid traffic report" from the past month had increased substantially. "We hear a lot about the potential for sabotage, it's extremely rare in practice, and we have built some safeguards in place to prevent sabotage from succeeding," Google said in a statement. "For example, we have detection mechanisms in place to proactively detect potential sabotage and take it into account in our enforcement systems."

"We have a help center on our website with tips for AdSense publishers on sabotage," the statement continues. "There's also a form we provide for publishers to contact us if they believe they are the victims of sabotage. We encourage publishers to disengage from any communication or further action with parties that signal that they will drive invalid traffic to their web properties. If there are concerns about invalid traffic, they should communicate that to us, and our Ad Traffic Quality team will monitor and evaluate their accounts as needed."

Ali Raza from InsideBitcoins discusses the expected Bitcoin Halving in May 2020, and the impact it will have on the market valuation. From the report: The next Bitcoin Halving will take place on May 20th 2020. It will be the third time, that the block reward of the most known blockchain will be halved. As a consequence, miners will earn 50 percent less BTC for every generated block. Experts are expecting, that this development could change the value of bitcoin. In the past, each of these events boosted the bitcoins market valuation by more than a thousand percent. Because of this development, the awareness of cryptocurrencies has grown. Still, not a lot of people are talking about BTC and the upcoming halving.

The last halving took place in July 2016, where BTC was worth USD 600. Looking back, we can say that this last halving was the start of the great bull run of 2017. In that bull run BTCs price exploded and marked a new all-time high at USD 19,783,06. So, should investors buy bitcoin in 2020? According to us, the most interesting development regarding the upcoming halving will be the development of the bitcoin price. If the halving will have the same impact as in the past, we may see a new all-time high in 2021. It's even possible that bitcoin could hit a new all-time high at 10 times its current valuation.

The nonprofit organization behind the IOTA cryptocurrency shut down its entire network this week after someone exploited a vulnerability in their wallet app to steal funds.

ZDNet reports: The attack happened this week, Wednesday, on February 12, 2020, according to a message the foundation posted on its official Twitter account. According to a status page detailing the incident, within 25 minutes of receiving reports that hackers were stealing funds from user wallets, the IOTA Foundation shut down "Coordinator," a node in the IOTA network that puts the final seal of approval on any IOTA currency transactions.

The never-before-seen move was meant to prevent hackers from executing new thefts, but also had the side-effect of effectively shut down the entire IOTA cryptocurrency...

IOTA members said hackers used an exploit in "a third-party integration" of Trinity, a mobile and desktop wallet app developed by the IOTA Foundation. Based on current evidence, confirmed by the IOTA team, it is believed that hackers targeted at least 10 high-value IOTA accounts and used the Trinity exploit to steal funds.
Sunday the team released "a safe version" of their Trinity Desktop "to allow users to check their balance and transactions. This version (1.4.0) removes the vulnerability announced on 12th February 2020..."

Their status page advised users to contact a member of the IOTA Foundation if their balance looks incorrect. "Please be aware that there are unfortunately active imposters posing as IOTA Foundation personnel on our Discord. Therefore it is important that you directly initiate contact with the IF or mod team yourself..."

"The Coordinator remains down for now as we finalise our remediation plan. You will not be able to send value transactions."

U.S. authorities have arrested Larry Harmon of Akron, Ohio, for running a "Bitcoin mixer" service on the dark web that helped criminals disguise the origin of Bitcoin transactions. Harmon is "accused in a three-count indictment (PDF) for operating Helix, an online website located on the dark web," reports ZDNet. It is the first case the DOJ has brought against a Bitcoin mixer. From the report: Helix functioned as a Bitcoin mixer (Bitcoin tumbler), a type of service that takes funds from a user, split the sum into small parts, and using thousands of transactions, sends and reassembles the original funds at a new Bitcoin address, in an effort to hide the original funds under a cloud of micro-transactions. "The sole purpose of Harmon's operation was to conceal criminal transactions from law enforcement on the Darknet, and because of our growing expertise in this area, he could not make good on that promise," Don Fort, Chief, IRS Criminal Investigation, said today in a DOJ press release. "Working in tandem with other sites, he sought to be the 'go-to' money launderer on the Darknet, but our investigators once again played the role of criminal disrupters, unraveling the interlinked web from one tentacle to another," Fort said.

According to DOJ documents, Harmon ran Helix as a secondary project attached to his primary service called Grams, a search engine that aggregated listings from multiple dark web drugs-related marketplaces. Grams allowed users to search for drugs and find the cheapest offers in their areas. Helix was provided as a way for potential buyers to hide their identity when buying products. The DOJ says Harmon operated Helix since 2014 and helped launder more than 350,000 bitcoins, valued at around $300 million at the time of their transactions -- valued $3.5 billion today. Investigators say that as the service grew, Harmon also partnered with other dark web services. According to the indictment, Harmon joined forces with AlphaBay, the biggest dark web marketplace for illegal products at the time, with AlphaBay recommending Helix to its users as a safe Bitcoin tumbling option.

Malicious cryptocurrency miners took control of Bitcoin Gold's blockchain recently to double-spend $72,000 worth of BTG. The Next Web reports: Bad actors assumed a majority of the network's processing power (hash rate) to re-organize the blockchain twice between Thursday and Friday last week: the first netted attackers 1,900 BTG ($19,000), and the second roughly 5,267 BTG ($53,000). Cryptocurrency developer James Lovejoy estimates the miners spent just $1,200 to perform each of the attacks, based on prices from hash rate marketplace NiceHash. This marks the second and third times Bitcoin Gold has suffered such incidents in two years.

Any entity that controls more than 51 percent of a blockchain's hash rate can decide what version of the blockchain is accepted (or rejected) by the network. These scenarios also allow for "double-spending," attacks that initiate a transaction with intent to quickly reverse it by "re-organizing" the blockchain, so that they can spend their original cryptocurrency again. What results is a third party accepting the original transaction and the network returns the cryptocurrency spent to the attacker, essentially allowing their funds to be used twice -- hence the name "double-spending." With Bitcoin, a transaction is generally deemed legitimate once found six blocks deep in the blockchain. These particular 51-percent attackers performed re-organizations up to 16 blocks deep, seemingly in a bid to trick exchanges like Binance into paying out BTG destined to be double-spent.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Craig Wright's lawyer confirmed to Decrypt late last week that Wright does not possess -- nor even claim to possess -- the private keys that can be used to spend $8 billion of Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto mined in Bitcoin's early days. Wright filed a statement in the Southern District of Florida late Tuesday asserting that he had received information to unlock an encrypted file of thousands of public Bitcoin addresses that he claims to own. Wright had previously said, under oath, that an "encrypted file" exists, containing both the list of public addresses and private keys. Many took that to mean that when a courier arrived Tuesday with a file, that at last Wright had received the private keys. But his lawyer said today that that was not the case. "The file that he's received did not include private keys," Andres Rivero, partner at Rivero Mestre law firm, told Decrypt. However, Wright still expects that he will receive the keys at a later date. Rivero said the keys may come either whole or split into parts, but declined to discuss further the particulars around who has the keys and when they might arrive.

Bloomberg looks back at what tech industry titans predicted would be happening "by 2020." - Here's what Huawei Technologies Co. said in 2015 predicting a "superphone" by 2020, according to ZDNet: "Inspired by the biological evolution, the mobile phone we currently know will come to life as the superphone," said Shao Yang, a strategy marketing president of Huawei. "Through evolution and adaptation, the superphone will be more intelligent, enhancing and even transforming our perceptions, enabling humans to go further than ever before." It's not entirely clear what that means, but it probably hasn't happened yet. In the interim, Huawei found itself in the middle of a trade war, and the Chinese company is focusing largely on mid-priced phones for its domestic market...

- In 2013, Elon Musk outlined his vision for a new "fifth mode of transportation" that would involve zipping people through tubes at speeds as fast as 800 miles per hour. Several tech entrepreneurs heeded Musk's call and went to work on such systems inspired by the billionaire's specifications. In 2015, one of the leading startups predicted a hyperloop spanning about 60 miles would be ready for human transport by 2020. Rob Lloyd, then the CEO of Hyperloop Technologies, told Popular Science: "I'm very confident that's going to happen." It hasn't. His company, now called Virgin Hyperloop One, has a 1,600-foot test track in California and hopes to build a 22-mile track in Saudi Arabia someday. Musk has since experimented with hyperloops of his own, and even he has had to scale back his ambitions. Musk's Boring Co. is building a so-called Loop system in Las Vegas, starting with a nearly mile-long track that consists of a narrow tunnel and Tesla cars moving at up to 155 miles per hour...

- It was barely two years ago when the maker of blowdryers and vacuum cleaners said it would sell an electric car by 2020. Dyson canceled the project this year, calling it "not commercially viable."
Other predictions include John McAfee's infamous 2017 prediction that one bitcoin would be worth $1 million by the end of 2020, "about three weeks before a crash would erase 83% of value over the next year."

And in 2012 Intel predicted that by 2020 we'd have computer chips that consumed almost no energy

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.