In a press conference Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Facebook's proposed digital currency, Libra, "could be misused by money launderers and terrorist financiers" and that it was a "national security issue." CNBC reports: "Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been exploited to support billions of dollars of illicit activity like cyber crime, tax evasion, extortion, ransomware, illicit drugs and human trafficking," Mnuchin said, adding that he is "not comfortable today" with Facebook's launch. "They have a lot of work to do," he said. The press conference comes days after President Donald Trump said in a tweet that he was "not a fan" of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. He also suggested Facebook, which plans on launching the global cryptocurrency next year, would need a bank charter to do so. Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday following the president's criticism on Twitter. The world's first and most valuable digital currency fell roughly 10% to a low of $9,872 to start the week.

"The president does have concerns as it relates to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies -- those are legitimate concerns that we have been working on for a long period of time," Mnuchin said. In response to the Treasury secretary's comments, Facebook told CNBC that "they anticipated critical feedback from regulators, central banks, lawmakers around the world." The tech giant also said they announced Libra a year before its anticipated launch date, "so that we could have those conversations."

We're reviving an old Slashdot tradition -- the review. Whenever there's something especially geeky -- or relevant to our present moment -- we'll share some thoughts. And I'd like to start with Jonathan Coulton's amazing 2017 album Solid State, and its trippy accompanying graphic novel adaptation by Matt Fraction. I even tracked down Jonathan Coulton on Friday for his thoughts on how it applies to our current moment in internet time...

"When I started work on Solid State, the only thing I could really think of that I wanted to say was something like, 'The internet sucks now'," Coulton said in 2017 in an epilogue to the graphic novel. "It's a little off-brand for me, so it was a scary place to start..."

So what does he think today? And what did we think of his album...?

PolygamousRanchKid quotes Reuters: A proposal to prevent big technology companies from functioning as financial institutions or issuing digital currencies has been circulated for discussion by the Democratic majority that leads the House Financial Services Committee, according to a copy of the draft legislation seen by Reuters. In a sign of widening scrutiny after Facebook Inc's (FB.O) proposed Libra digital coin aroused widespread objection, the bill proposes a fine of $1 million per day for violation of such rules....

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Libra and other cryptocurrencies and demanded that companies seek a banking charter and make themselves subject to U.S. and global regulations if they wanted to "become a bank." His comments came after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told lawmakers that Facebook's plan to build a digital currency called Libra could not move forward unless it addressed concerns over privacy, money laundering, consumer protection and financial stability.
The article concedes this proposal "would likely spark opposition" in the House and Senate, but adds that "Nevertheless, the draft proposal sends a strong message to large tech firms increasingly eyeing the financial services space."

The draft legislation's title? The "Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act."

A ransomware attack in New York City's Monroe College has shut down the college's computer systems at campuses located in Manhattan, New Rochelle and St. Lucia. The attackers are seeking 170 bitcoins or approximately $2 million dollars in order to decrypt the entire college's network. Bleeping Computer reports: According to the Daily News, Monroe College was hacked on Wednesday at 6:45 AM and ransomware was installed throughout the college's network. It is not known at this time what ransomware was installed on the system, but it is likely to be Ryuk, IEncrypt, or Sodinokibi, which are known to target enterprise networks. The college has not indicated at this time whether they will be paying the ransom or restoring from backups while gradually bringing their network back online. "The good news is that the college was founded in 1933, so we know how to teach and educate without these tools," Monroe College spokesperson Jackie Ruegger told the Daily News. "Right now we are finding workarounds for our students taking online classes so they have their assignments."

President Donald Trump on Thursday night warned Facebook over its plan to create digital currency Libra, a move that poses a new obstacle to the company's cryptocurrency ambitions. From a report: "Facebook Libra's 'virtual currency' will have little standing or dependability. If Facebook and other companies want to become a bank, they must seek a new Banking Charter and become subject to all Banking Regulations, just like other Banks," Trump said in a series of posts on Twitter. In the tweets, the president also expressed scepticism of digital currencies in general. "I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air," Trump wrote. "Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity." Trump's entrance into the debate over Bitcoin and Libra could mark a significant development for crypto enthusiasts. The White House has largely remained silent on the subject even as federal regulators like the Securities Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and units of the Treasury Department have grappled with how to regulate virtual coins.

Japan-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitpoint announced it lost 3.5 billion yen (roughly $32 million) worth of cryptocurrency assets after a hack that happened late yesterday, July 11. From a report: The exchange suspended all deposits and withdrawals this morning to investigate the hack, it said in a press release. In a more detailed document released by RemixPoint, the legal entity behind Bitpoint, the company said that hackers stole funds from both of its "hot" and "cold" wallets. This suggests the exchange's network was thoroughly compromised. Hot wallets are used to store funds for current transactions, while the cold wallets are offline devices storing emergency and long-term funds. Bitpoint reported the attackers stole funds in five cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ripple, and Ethereal. The exchange said it detected the hack because of errors related to the remittance of Ripple funds to customers. Twenty-seven minutes after detecting the errors, Bitpoint admins realized they had been hacked, and three hours later, they discovered thefts from other cryptocurrency assets.

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on Wednesday that Facebook's plan to build a digital currency called Libra "cannot go forward" until serious concerns are addressed. Reuters reports: "Libra raises many serious concerns regarding privacy, money laundering, consumer protection and financial stability," Powell said during his semi-annual testimony on monetary policy before the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee. "I don't think the project can go forward" without addressing those concerns, he added later. Powell said any regulatory review of the project should be "patient and careful." He noted that existing rules do not fit digital currencies. "It's something that doesn't fit neatly or easily within our regulatory scheme but it does have potentially systemic scale," he said. "It needs a careful look, so I strongly believe we all need to be taking our time with this." A Facebook spokesperson said in response: "We are very much aligned with the Chairman around the need for public discourse on this. This is why we along with the 27 other Founding Members of the Libra Association made this announcement so far in advance, so that we could engage in constructive discourse on this and get feedback."

Slashdot reader volvox_voxel shares an excerpt from the latest blog post from software engineer Ken Shirriff, who is well known for his work on restoring some of the rarest computing hardware to its working condition: We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer1. Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Trying to mine Bitcoin on this 1960s computer seemed both pointless and anachronistic, so I had to give it a shot. Implementing the Bitcoin hash algorithm in assembly code on this 15-bit computer was challenging, but I got it to work. Unfortunately, the computer is so slow that it would take about a billion times the age of the universe to successfully mine a Bitcoin block. He wasn't kidding about how long it would take to successfully mine a Bitcoin block. "The Apollo Guidance Computer took 5.15 seconds for one SHA-256 hash," writes Shirriff. "Since Bitcoin uses a double-hash, this results in a hash rate of 10.3 seconds per Bitcoin hash. Currently, the Bitcoin network is performing about 65 EH/s (65 quintillion hashes per second). At this difficulty, it would take the AGC 4x10^23 seconds on average to find a block. Since the universe is only 4.3x10^17 seconds old, it would take the AGC about a billion times the age of the universe to successfully mine a block."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Bitcoin uses as much energy as the whole of Switzerland, a new online tool from the University of Cambridge shows. The tool makes it easier to see how the crypto-currency network's energy usage compares with other entities. However, one expert argued that it was the crypto-currency's carbon footprint that really mattered. Currently, the tool estimates that Bitcoin is using around seven gigawatts of electricity, equal to 0.21% of the world's supply. That is as much power as would be generated by seven Dungeness nuclear power plants at once. Over the course of a year, this equates to roughly the same power consumption as Switzerland. "The University of Cambridge tool models the economic lifetime of the world's Bitcoin miners," the report adds. "It uses an average electricity price per kilowatt hour ($0.05) and the energy demands of the Bitcoin network. Finally, the model assumes that all the Bitcoin mining machines worldwide are working with various efficiencies."

A study published last month in the scientific journal Joule found that the electricity used for Bitcoin produces about 22 megatons for CO2 annually. That is as much as Kansas City in the U.S.

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg News: Bitcoin soared as much as 39% this week to $13,852, the highest since January 2018. But it hit a brick wall around 4:30 p.m. New York time Wednesday, plunging more than $1,800 within about 10 minutes. Moments later, prominent cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc. reported a system outage, which was resolved after an hour. Swings continued Thursday, with the coin anywhere from down 7.3% to up 4.8%... Volatility in Bitcoin is near the highest levels since early 2018, when the bubble was bursting. Analysts said this was likely a sign of things to come. It was just last Saturday that the price of bitcoin surged past $11,000 -- less than 24 hours after rising past $10,000. (Right now it's within $50 of $12,000.)

But another Bloomberg article notes that the price of Bitcoin tends to spike on weekends (when the traditional stock exchanges are closed), and that those spikes since just the beginning of May accounted for nearly 40% of Bitcoin's price gains in 2019. One pundit tells them it "takes a lot less to move the needle when everyone's sleeping or it's the weekend."

That rang true to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mike McGlone. "It is more Asia and those more sophisticated traders picking time and paths of least resistance to profit," said McGlone. "I fully expect the leveraged money professional-types are utilizing all tools to spark moves and profit from."

Iranian authorities have seized about 1,000 bitcoin mining machines in two abandoned factories, after warnings that the activity had led to a spike in consumption of government-subsidized electricity. Reuters reports: "Two of these bitcoin farms have been identified, with a consumption of one megawatt,"; Arash Navab, a power official in the central province of Yazd, told the television. The machines, which produce cryptocurrencies that are banned in Iran, were mostly to blame for a 7% increase in power consumption in the month to June 21, according to an Energy Ministry spokesman, quoted by the website of state-run Press TV. In 2018, Iran's central bank banned the country's banks from dealing in cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, over money-laundering concerns.

Less than a week after a first Florida city agreed to pay a whopping $600,000 to get their data back from hackers, now, a second city's administration has taken the same path. On Monday, in an emergency meeting of the city council, the administration of Lake City, a small Florida city with a population of 65,000, voted to pay a ransom demand of 42 bitcoins, worth nearly $500,000. ZDNet reports: The decision to pay the ransom demand was made after the city suffered a catastrophic malware infection earlier this month, on June 10, which the city described as a "triple threat." Despite the city's IT staff disconnecting impacted systems within ten minutes of detecting the attack, a ransomware strain infected almost all its computer systems, with the exception of the police and fire departments, which ran on a separate network.

A ransom demand was made a week after the infection, with hackers reaching out to the city's insurance provider -- the League of Cities, which negotiated a ransom payment of 42 bitcoins last week. City officials agreed to pay the ransom demand on Monday, and the insurer made the payment yesterday, on Tuesday, June 25, local media reported. The payment is estimated to have been worth between $480,000 to $500,000, depending on Bitcoin's price at the time of the payment. The city's IT staff is now working to recover their data after receiving a decryption key.

The price of Bitcoin surged past $11,000 today -- less than 24 hours after surging past $10,000.

Ars Technica points out Bitcoin's price has tripled in less than six months, "after crashing from an all-time high around $19,500 in December 2017." And as the price of Ethereum rose above $300 for the first time in nearly a year, Mashable writes that the total value of all cryptocurrencies is now over $300 billion, and suggests the new price milestones may indicate a broader awareness: The $10,000 and the $300 price levels for Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively, are important psychological barriers, and not only because they're nice and round. Last time, those levels were when the 'cab driver' effect was in full swing: Everyone was talking about Bitcoin; Coinbase was adding hundreds of thousands of users on a weekly basis. People who'd never even considered stocks were suddenly stocking up on Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.
"Details about Facebook's long-awaited cryptocurrency brought significant attention to the industry as a whole," reports the Street, "and created anticipation that markets could move higher." Not only will Facebook's cryptocurrency, Libra, introduce the platform's 2.5 billion users to cryptocurrencies, but the project doesn't take direct aim at bitcoin. Rather than striving to supplant the first and still-most-popular digital currency, Libra caters to the 1.7 billion unbanked around the world by striving to provide a fast, affordable and reliable way to send and receive money...

There is growing evidence that investors view bitcoin has a hedge against global instability, and several factors are creating FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in traditional financial markets.
To that point, Forbes reports that "Bitcoin's growing reputation as a 'digital gold' could mean it becomes treated as a safe-haven asset in times of crisis, and the U.K.'s looming Brexit might demonstrate that." Nigel Green, chief executive of the financial advisory group deVere, tells them that "One such way that many are looking to diversify their portfolios and hedge against legitimate risks posed by Brexit is by investing in crypto assets, such as bitcoin."

lazarus writes: As part of the investigation being done by Ernst & Young into the mismanagement of client's cash and cryptocurrency at Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp they have found that the late founder and CEO Gerald Cotten transferred client's cryptocurrency to personal accounts on rival exchanges and heavily traded on them. "Competitor exchanges received multiple forms of cryptocurrencies from Quadriga wallets from 2016 through 2019 -- 9,450 Bitcoin, 387,738 Ethereum and 239,020 Litecoin," reports the Financial Post. "Quadriga's cryptocurrency reserves were 'adversely affected' by trading losses and incremental fees charged by other exchanges, the report said."

"The late CEO also created accounts under aliases where 'unsupported deposits' were used to trade within the platform, resulting in inflated revenue figures, artificial trades with users and ultimately the withdrawal of cryptocurrency, the report said. And 'substantial funds' were transferred to Cotten personally and other related parties." The report also paints a picture of an organization that was run by a single person from his laptop with no oversight, segregation of duties and responsibilities, and no internal controls.

At a convention on digital currency, rarely does an audience Q&A session include a question as incendiary as, "Why is this fraud allowed to speak at this conference?" But that's how a discussion about Bitcoin ended up last year in Seoul. From a report: The supposed fraud is Craig Wright, an Australian-born technologist who gained notoriety three years ago when he declared himself the inventor of Bitcoin. The provocateur is Vitalik Buterin, a baby-faced Russian-Canadian programmer who helped create another popular digital currency called Ether. No one disputes Buterin's role in Ether; many reject Wright's claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious genius behind Bitcoin.

Wright is a comic-book supervillain for some in the world of cryptocurrency. Buterin's rant was applauded by a handful of people at the conference, including one of the panelists and a man on the sidelines wearing a vest and metallic fiber shirt. It had the feel of an impromptu live performance of a Twitter flame war. The whole thing lasted 90 seconds. Footage recorded from the crowd provided an amusing YouTube video and sparked a fresh round of tweets mocking Wright. That appeared to be that, until a year later when Buterin received a letter from Wright's attorney. The legal notice, dated April 12, said Wright intends to sue Buterin in the U.K. for defamation. Less than a week later, Wright filed suit with similar claims against a podcaster named Peter McCormack, seeking 100,000 pounds ($129,000) in damages. And on May 2, Wright's lawyers served Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin investor, at a cryptocurrency meet-up in London.

The southwestern tip of Iceland is a barren volcanic peninsula called Reykjanesskagi. It's home to the twin towns of Keflavik and Njardvik, around 19,000 people, and the country's main airport. On the edge of the settlement is a complex of metal-clad buildings belonging to the IT company Advania, each structure roughly the size of an Olympic-size swimming pool. Less than three years ago there were three of them. By April 2018, there were eight. Today there are 10, and the foundations have been laid for an 11th.

From a report: This is part of a boom fostered partly by something that Icelanders don't usually rave about: the weather. Life on the North Atlantic island tends to be chilly, foggy, and windy, though hard frosts are not common. The annual average temperature in the capital, Reykjavik, is around 41F (5C), and even when the summer warmth kicks in, the mercury rarely rises above 68. Iceland has realized that even though this climate may not be great for sunning yourself on the beach, it is very favorable to one particular industry: data. Each one of those Advania buildings in Reykjanesskagi is a large data center, home to thousands of computers. They are constantly crunching away, processing instructions, transmitting data, and mining Bitcoin. Data centers like these generate large amounts of heat and need round-the-clock cooling, which would usually require considerable energy.

Holding, selling or dealing in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin could soon land people in India in jail for 10 years. From a report: The "Banning of Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill 2019" draft in the nation has proposed 10-year prison sentence for persons who "mine, generate, hold, sell, transfer, dispose, issue or deal in cryptocurrencies." Besides making it completely illegal, the bill makes holding of cryptos a non-bailable offence, too. Given the high chances of cryptocurrencies being misused for money laundering, various government bodies in the country such as the Income Tax Department and the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) had endorsed banning of cryptocurrencies.

"I am not saying that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto," writes the features editor at Reason. "What I am saying is: Would it really be surprising if he were?"

This prompted a strong rebuke from CCN Markets: The article starts, "Consider the possibility that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin."

Let's not do that. That's like saying let's consider the possibility that anyone at all is Satoshi Nakamoto. In one respect, it doesn't matter. In another, it's exhausting the lengths people will go with this... if someone doesn't advance the idea that they are Satoshi Nakamoto themselves, there's no reason to put that sort of grief upon them. If someone is just brilliant, you can tell them that without insinuating that they invented the blockchain and Bitcoin.... You don't just off-handedly claim someone might be Satoshi Nakamoto. There needs to be a reason.
Reason had written that "For nearly three decades, Stephenson's novels have displayed an obsessive, technically astute fascination with cryptography, digital currency, the social and technological infrastructure of a post-government world, and Asian culture," and that the science fiction author "described the core concepts of cryptocurrency years before Bitcoin became a technical reality."

They also note later that "Satoshi Nakamoto's initials are SN; Neal Stephenson's are NS."

Coin Telegraph writes that the question "has seemingly come to a head over the last couple of months, as a number of people have gone a step further" -- not only publicly claiming to be the creator of bitcoin, but even filing copyright and trademark claims. Their list of "Satoshi posers" includes Craig Wright, Wei Liu, and the brother of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. (And another new theory also suggests "global criminal kingpin" Paul Le Roux, the creator of encryption software E4M and TrueCrypt.

When you type in a URL to your browser and press "enter," your browser sends that name to a network of computers called the Domain Name System (DNS), which converts it into IP addresses. These numbers are what allow your browser to find the right server on the internet and connect to it. When you navigate to a website, you are trusting a handful of organizations that have been charged with keeping the DNS working and secure.

"To people like Steven McKie, a developer for and investor in an open-source project called the Handshake Network, this centralized power over internet naming makes the internet vulnerable to both censorship and cyberattacks," reports MIT technology review. "Handshake wants to decentralize it by creating an alternative naming system that nobody controls. In doing so, it could help protect us from hackers trying to exploit the DNS's security weaknesses, and from governments hoping to use it to block free expression." From the report: The system would be based on blockchain technology, meaning it would be software that runs on a widely distributed network of computers. In theory, it would have no single point of failure and depend on no human-run organization that could be corrupted or co-opted. Handshake's software is a heavily modified version ("fork") of Bitcoin, and just as Bitcoin's network of miners protects the cryptocurrency from manipulation and makes it virtually impossible for authorities to shut down, a similar network could keep a permanent, censorship-resistant record of internet names. The Handshake team is far from the first to try to create a decentralized naming system for the web. But unlike previous efforts, Handshake isn't trying to replace DNS but work with it.

Besides ICANN, there's yet another class of organization whose job Handshake aims to decentralize. See that little padlock icon in your browser bar, to the left of the domain name? That means your computer has verified that your connection to this website is encrypted and that the site is authentic, not a fake one designed by a criminal trying to steal your login credentials. It does that by checking the veracity of a string of numbers called the site's digital certificate, issued by one of a number of so-called certificate authorities. These entities, many of which are for-profit companies, are crucial to internet security. They can also get hacked. And if one gets breached, and an attacker can start issuing fake certificates, it undermines the security of the whole internet. But if website names are managed on a tamper-resistant blockchain, then you don't need certificate authorities; the naming system itself can provide the guarantee that the site you're connected to is real. That's what Handshake aims to do.

Bitcoin has a lingering problem that few people are talking about amid the renewed exuberance of the recent price surge. From a report: Hardly anyone is using the world's largest cryptocurrency for anything beyond speculation. Data from New York-based blockchain researcher Chainalysis show that only 1.3% of economic transactions came from merchants in the first four months of 2019, little changed over the boom and bust cycles of the prior two years. Even though marque companies such as AT&T now let customers pay with cryptocurrencies, the problem is that few speculators want to use the digital coins to pay for wireless services when the digital asset's price might surge another 50% in a matter of weeks. That's become the main dilemma with the cryptocurrency: Bitcoin needs the hype to attract mass appeal to be considered a viable electronic alternative to money but it has developed a culture of "hodlers" who advocate accumulation rather than spending.