A 34-year-old programmer from Braunschweig is wagering that Michael Saylor’s debt fueled Bitcoin empire cannot withstand a crash, setting up an unlikely duel between a small investor and crypto billionaire.
Tag: cryptocurrency
The initiative led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to create a global identity system through iris scanning has landed in Brazil. But what about privacy, transparency and the ethical implications of such a vast biometric project?
With a pro-crypto agenda and substantial backing from industry investors, Donald Trump’s presidency is poised to reshape the landscape of digital currencies, promising a future where Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies thrive under favorable regulations and government support.
Once crypto-cautious Russia has started experimenting with the digital financial market, prompting new regulations, formal exchange markets, and, as President Vladimir Putin hopes, new means of skirting Western sanctions.
If you are not a billionaire or a fund, the investment rules of yesteryear apply: gold won’t make you rich overnight and volatile assets like the bitcoin may come crashing down for reasons far beyond your grasp.
North Korea has industrialized the theft of cryptocurrency to finance its nuclear weapons program and its state-sponsored hackers are getting better at emptying digital wallets. But global law enforcement agents are in hot pursuit, and cashing in crypto is harder than ever.
Despite turbulence in the crypto market, NFT advocates think the digital objects could revolutionize how films and television series are financed and produced.
Digital currencies may be volatile, but one company in Argentina has found a way to allow farmers to purchase goods and services online using surplus grain.
Hit with Western sanctions, Russian oligarchs are racing against time to relocate their assets to tax havens. They turn to private banks where transactions, opaque as they are in the UAE for instance, make it almost impossible to trace funds.
Faced with a $32 billion drop in their wealth this year, Russian oligarchs are looking for assets to allow them to overcome sanctions that will increase with the invasion of Ukraine. Familiar with crises, they see bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as an escape from the hegemony of the dollar, and a way to diversify their holdings.
In just a few months, NFTs, the digital equivalent of collectables, have generated over $10 billion. Now, luxury champagne and wine brands are moving into the world of digital assets. But as investors and vineyards toast to the future, will the concept pop or fizzle?
Our roving Swedish reporter’s darkish holiday dispatch from Sofia, Bulgaria.
? Mhoroi!* Welcome to Friday, where world leaders meet in Rome for the G20 (before meeting again in Glasgow for the COP26 on Sunday), Facebook rebrands itself as Meta and following Texas’ recent near-total ban on abortion, we also look at the mixed landscape of abortion rights across the globe. Then we unpack the Japanese […]
Welcome to Wednesday, where the Taliban unveil their government, crypto is plummeting after El Salvador embraces bitcoin and one lazy Swedish tax advisor gets busted. In Mexico, we meet the nurse who has become the face of pandemic fatigue.
The products originally of America’s tech industry, Bitcoin and other digital currencies have since been adopted around the world. Nigeria, Vietnam and the Philippines now have some of the highest rates of cryptocurrency use, and many local entrepreneurs and governments are trying to cash in by building their own domestic coins. Not all of these […]
MILAN — There were a few moments of silence when I told my girlfriend what I’d done. I’d kept the information from her for a few days, fearing her reaction and forced to explain: I had chucked a few hundred dollars at shares of the so-called “meme stock” extraordinaire GameStop on the New York Stock […]
In remote — sometimes unmapped — regions of China, thousands of computers are ‘mining’ bitcoin, the queen of virtual currencies. The country may boast all the right conditions to dominate the cryptocurrency market today, but will its mining boom last?
Now that central banks are opening to the idea of digital currencies, there may no turning back. But it comes with real risks, especially with regards to China’s ambitions.
For a number of weeks now, Beijing has been trying to regain control of its internet heroes, who are considered too dominant. E-commerce giants and their standard-bearer, Alibaba and its founder Jack Ma, are directly in the line of fire.
Welcome to Friday, where an Israeli-Hamas ceasefire is holding, we find out what Obama really thinks of Trump and cows help Thailand’s vaccination drive. Also, Les Echos takes an inside visit to the remote “mines’ turning out bitcoin cryptocurrency in China. • Israel-Gaza ceasefire holding: An Egyptian-mediated truce between Israel and Hamas began late Friday […]
Welcome to Monday, where Modi loses a key state after COVID backlash, a different cryptocurrency record is broken and the ancient Colosseum gets a high-tech remodeling. Warsaw-based daily Gazeta Wyborcza also looks at how Poland’s long-time right-wing leader Jarosław Kaczyńsk may be losing his grip on power. • Modi’s ruling party loses key state amid […]
Though seductive as pure financial innovation, Facebook’s crypto currency project risks a concentration of power that must be stopped at all costs.
After being left behind in the Internet revolution, places like France, Malta and Switzerland are making a concerted effort to stay ahead of the crypto-asset curve.
Bitcoin has proved popular in Colombia, especially in small retail operations. But is it being used by criminals?
-Analysis- PARIS — The whole world has been talking about it for over a week, and yet, — admit it — you still don’t quite get what all the Bitcoin fuss is about. You know it’s a virtual currency. But what is the point of having a currency you can barely use to pay for […]
-Analysis- After running into some trouble at the end of last week, the virtual currency bitcoin has hit a new high and is now approaching the $12,000-mark, just days after passing $10,000 for the first time. Countless experts are warning that this bubble, like the dotcom bubble before it, will inevitably burst. But until it […]
NEW YORK — Should central banks embrace cryptocurrencies, or even pioneer their own? In a nutshell, no. Crypto assets are an unusual innovation, still in flux and often poorly understood. Trying to centralize them in a bureaucracy is exactly the wrong way to go. Yet China’s central bank claims it is working toward a blockchain-based digital currency. Singapore has already experimented in this direction. The phrase “Fedcoin” is sometimes bandied about, though I’ve seen no concrete sign of the U.S. Federal Reserve jumping on this bandwagon. In its recent quarterly review, the Bank of International Settlements asked central banks to […]
The Bitcoin rate spike, still alive despite bitter divisions in the community that supports the cryptocurrency, has laid bare the biggest problem with Bitcoin: Compared with fiat currencies, it’s painfully inconvenient and expensive to use as a means of payment. Bitcoin is set up to reward users for verifying transactions. Miners who package transactions into “blocks’ receive two kinds of rewards: The additional Bitcoin they produce by using their hardware to solve mathematical problems (an income stream that will eventually cease since 21 million bitcoins are the maximum that can be mined) and the transaction fees paid by users to […]
Swiss developers turn the business model of online gaming on its head.