Bitcoin’s price fell over the weekend—while the price of an offshoot, bitcoin cash, soared. The rally in bitcoin cash was so bullish that it even briefly surpassed another cryptocurrency, ethereum, in total market value, at $29.9 billion.
Cancún, Mexico
Bitcoin hit a high of $7,879 today (Nov. 8), a new record high, minutes after one faction of the community that had been pushing for a hard fork, which would have doubled its transaction capacity, announced that it would abandon its effort.
Lisbon, Portugal
Cancún, Mexico
Cancún, Mexico
It’s a rare positive earnings season for Twitter. The firm reported narrowing losses, an operating profit, and a rise in active users today (Oct. 26). Investors lapped it up, sending the stock up about 13% in early trading.
Making money from a messaging platform is hard—just ask Twitter. It’s even harder with flatlining user numbers, yet Japanese chat app Line may have cracked the code.
The New York University professor known as the “dean of valuations” for his expertise in assigning a value to various assets is stymied by bitcoin. “It cannot be valued,” wrote Aswath Damodaran on his blog yesterday.
North Korea has a cryptocurrency infatuation. Its government has been accused of unleashing a global ransomware attack to raise bitcoin, mining the cryptocurrency within its borders, and hacking South Korean bitcoin exchanges. Now, research firm Recorded Future says there’s a strong chance Kim Jong-un’s regime is experimenting with malware that secretly mines currency using other people’s computers.
Three companies are looking to sell shovels during a crypto-mining gold rush: chip-maker TSMC and the graphics card manufacturers Nvidia and AMD. Collectively, they produce the silicon and circuitry that power the vast data-centers mining bitcoin, ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin recorded a new high today, hitting $5,991 on the benchmark CoinDesk price index. On major exchanges like Bitfinex and Bitstamp, the price briefly crossed $6,000 intraday.
Tezos was one of the biggest initial coin offerings (ICOs) of the last year. It raised $232 million in July with a utopian pitch: to create “a new digital commonwealth.”
Attinghausen, Switzerland
Jamie Dimon just can’t win with bitcoin. After a series of critical comments about the ever-appreciating cryptocurrency, yesterday JPMorgan’s chief executive pledged to stop talking about it. Bitcoin promptly set a new record price of $5,821 in intraday trading today, up some 11% after Dimon’s pronouncement.
Bitcoin is now trading above $5,100, marking a new record high for the digital currency. This beat its previous high of just over $5,000 set on Sept. 1.
A British “neobank” called Revolut is working on letting its customers convert and hold bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies directly in their accounts.
Buying bitcoin is still a cumbersome process, as Quartz’s guide to investing in cryptocurrencies will attest. A new app called Dust aims to change that by automatically investing your spare change in bitcoin, litecoin, or ethereum.
The European Commission slapped Amazon with a €250 million ($294 million) tax penalty today, the latest in a string of high-profile decisions against the behemoths of global technology—which all happen to be American companies. Yet authorities in the US have remained passive in the face of these multi-billion dollar punishments, even as calls are growing domestically to regulate the tech giants. How does Europe do it?
The European Commission today ruled that tech giant Amazon must pay €250 million ($290 million) in back taxes to Luxembourg because of an illegal deal struck between the two in 2003.
Goldman Sachs’ entry into the bitcoin markets is the talk of the fintech world. This week, at a breakfast for industry players in the City of London the discussion—inevitably—turned to bitcoin. One participant argued that reports about the market’s shortcomings are overwrought because big players like Goldman are ready to start trading.
The US Securities Exchange Commission on Sept. 29 charged two companies running “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) with fraud and selling unregistered securities. Both firms were run by Maksim Zaslavskiy, who was also charged with defrauding investors. The regulator said Zaslavskiy claimed his tokens were backed by real estate and diamonds, but that wasn’t the case. The SEC said he had raised $300,00 from investors.
Beijing, China
Bitcoin has risen from an obscure experiment in cryptography to the topic du jour among the masters of the financial universe in a few short years. These days, if you’re a business bigwig, you’d better be prepared with a considered view on bitcoin and the technical idea that animates it, the blockchain, before donning a wireless mic at TED or making small talk on the slopes at Davos.
