An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Bitcoin rose nearly 7% on Monday as risk assets rallied after last week’s bond rout cooled, with Citi saying the most popular cryptocurrency was at a “tipping point” and could become the preferred currency for international trade. With the recent embrace of the likes of Tesla and Mastercard, bitcoin could be at the…
Tag: Currency
China Charges Ahead With a National Digital Currency
The electronic Chinese yuan is now being tested in cities such as Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. No other major power is as far along with a homegrown digital currency. From a report: Annabelle Huang recently won a government lottery to try China’s latest economics experiment: a national digital currency. After joining the lottery through the social media app WeChat, Ms. Huang,…
Bill Gates, Elon Musk Both Warn ‘Don’t Go Too Far with Crypto Speculation’
From a report:
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has an interesting take on who should buy Bitcoins. He being the third richest man in the world said that Bitcoins are not for him because he has less money than Tesla CEO Elon Musk. So basically anybody who has less money than Musk should not invest in Bitcoin… Gates during an interview with Bloomberg…
Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized
The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin’s total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC: The UK’s electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the…
Why an Animated Flying Cat With a Pop-Tart Body Sold for Almost $600,000
In the 10 years since Chris Torres created Nyan Cat, an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, the meme has been viewed and shared across the web hundreds of millions of times. On Thursday, he put a one-of-a-kind version of it up for sale on Foundation, a website for buying and selling digital goods. In the…
TikTok Hit With Consumer, Child Safety and Privacy Complaints in Europe
TikTok is facing a fresh round of regulatory complaints in Europe where consumer protection groups have filed a series of coordinated complaints alleging multiple breaches of EU law. From a report: The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) has lodged a complaint against the video sharing site with the European Commission and the bloc’s network of consumer protection authorities, while consumer organisations in…
Cryptocurrency Magnate’s Plan to Turn 67,000 Acres into Blockchain-Based ‘Smart City’
“A cryptocurrency company that owns 67,000 acres in rural northern Nevada wants state government to grant technology companies power to form local governments on land they own,” reports the Associated Press. Jeffrey Berns, CEO of Nevada-based Blockchains LLC, ultimately envisions “a city where people not only purchase goods and services with digital currency but also log their entire online footprint —…
Miami City Council Agrees to At Least Study Mayor’s Bitcoin Proposal
Miami’s mayor Francis Suarez is trying to attract tech talent to his city. (The New York Times recently noted he’s joined by “a few venture capital influencers trying to tweet the city’s startup world into existence.”) So he’s still pushing a proposal to use bitcoin in a few city operations as “part of a larger play if you will to position…
Bitcoin Consumes ‘More Electricity Than Argentina’
Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: Bitcoin uses more electricity annually than the whole of Argentina, analysis by Cambridge University suggests. ‘Mining’ for the cryptocurrency is power-hungry, involving heavy computer calculations to verify transactions. Cambridge researchers say it consumes around 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year — and is unlikely to fall unless the value of the currency slumps. Critics say…
Twitter Has Studied Using Bitcoin, CFO Says
Twitter’s finance chief said the social-media company has thought about how it might pay employees or vendors using the popular cryptocurrency bitcoin. From a report: Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, in speaking Wednesday with Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” said the company continues to review potential uses of the digital currency. “We’ve done a lot of the upfront thinking…