Joshua Wong

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.

Stealing computing resources for cryptocurrency mining can be profitable—to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a month. Security software vendor ESET found that a hacker has infected hundreds of Windows servers with a secret cryptocurrency mining program, generating $63,000 over three months.

Update (5:32pm BST): Altea says the issue is now resolved.

Google competitors are already screaming about the search giant’s proposed solution to breaking Europe’s antitrust laws.

Last month, North Korea was banned from exporting coal to China, its biggest buyer. The rogue regime may have found a new use for these idle coal supplies: powering bitcoin mines.

There’s a first time for everything, as the saying goes. It might feel like we’ve been sending email attachments forever, but actually the first one happened less than 20 years ago. AOL instant messaging, the beloved and one-time ubiquitous chat interface, only got started in 1993 when a future AOL executive messaged his wife: “Don’t be scared … it is me.”

Your computer could be secretly mining cryptocurrency—piggybacking on your computer’s processing power to confirm transactions and generate new and potentially lucrative coins—and you wouldn’t even be profiting from it. Incidents of malware containing crypto-mining tools have surged six-fold this year, according to IBM Managed Security Services. Here’s how to find out if you’ve been unwittingly committing your computing power to enrich someone else.

London’s transport authority has rejected Uber’s application to renew its license to operate private-hire vehicles in the British capital, it announced today. The ride-sharing firm has 40,000 drivers in the city, whose licenses will expire on Sept. 30. They will, however, be allowed to operate until all appeal processes have been exhausted. Uber has until Oct. 13 to appeal the decision.

Central banks are pretty bullish on blockchain technology, according to a new study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. One in five central banks surveyed say they will deploy some form of blockchain tech within the next two years. Nearly 40% say the tech will be in use within a decade.

Remember when Jamie Dimon called bitcoin “a fraud” a week ago? Well, it turns out that the JPMorgan chief executive could have been flouting European market abuse laws by shooting his mouth off. At least, that’s what one complaint to the Swedish financial regulator alleges.

China’s bitcoin exchanges are closed to local customers, and a “comprehensive ban” is reportedly in the works. In the meantime, China’s bitcoin traders are heading for the peer-to-peer marketplace LocalBitcoins to exchange fiat and crypto. The trade volume on LocalBitcoins has surged in recent days.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) isn’t given to analyzing financial fads. Based in Basel, Switzerland, it’s a “bank for central banks,” so it’s usually concerned about things like the stability of the global financial system.

China’s two largest remaining bitcoin exchanges, Huobi and OKCoin, announced today they would halt trading services for local customers by Oct 31. This followed a similar notice yesterday from BTCC, another major exchange, about a halt in local trading by the end of this month. The latest service closures will effectively put an end to the yuan-bitcoin exchange markets, once the world’s largest driver of bitcoin trading volume.

Shanghai-based BTCC said it would halt trading on its domestic cryptocurrency exchange by Sept. 30, in response to tighter control over trading crypto tokens by China’s central bank. This followed a report from local media (in Chinese) saying that the exchange had received a verbal notice to halt trading from Shanghai’s financial regulator.

This interview is an extended version of a piece featured in Quartz’s new book The Objects that Power the Global Economy. You may not have seen these objects before, but they’ve already changed the way you live. Each chapter examines an object that is driving radical change in the global economy. This is from the chapter on Satoshi’s paper, which explores the decentralization of power.

Yesterday, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, told a conference that he thinks the cryptocurrency bitcoin is a “fraud” and “not a real thing.” He declared that the open-source protocol would eventually “close.” He even went so far as to warn his employees that if they were caught trading bitcoin, they would be fired “in a second” for their “stupidity.”

Fresh reports have emerged about an imminent shutdown of cryptocurrency exchanges by Chinese authorities. The Wall Street Journal reports (paywall) that the Chinese central bank has prepared a set of “draft instructions” that would ban the trading of digital currencies such as bitcoin and ether, citing unnamed sources. The price of bitcoin has fallen about 9% since business publication Caixin first reported on a ban on Sept. 8. The price of ether has fallen 12% in the same period.

China’s authorities are planning to shut down the country’s cryptocurrency exchanges, a sweeping move that will effectively close the market for trading of all digital currencies, including bitcoin and ether, in addition to the digital tokens issued by the red-hot “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) that investors have flocked to recently. That’s according to a report (in Chinese) by the business publication Caixin, citing unnamed officials familiar with the matter.

Correction: An earlier version of this article, including the headline, misstated the amount that GMO announced it would spend to start mining bitcoin. It is more than $3 million, and not more than $300 million as originally stated.

“Initial coin offerings” (ICOs), a new funding mechanism based on cryptocurrencies, have raised hundreds of millions in minutes this year, outpacing traditional funding mechanisms like venture capital for new technology projects. According to a new report from trade publication CoinDesk, ICOs raised $797 million in the second quarter of this year for blockchain businesses, compared to the $235 million that blockchain projects have raised from venture funding.

Some financial experts may think cryptocurrencies are just a big bubble, but top athletes, musicians, and socialites say otherwise. They’re backing the red-hot “initial coin offerings” that claim to revolutionize both finance and technology. Here are some noteworthy recent endorsements from unexpected crypto-enthusiasts:

The sale of cryptographic tokens, a market that has boomed this year, has been deemed an “illegal fundraising practice” by China’s central bank. In a notice published today (in Chinese), the regulator ordered all such offerings to be halted, for exchanges to stop trading in the tokens, and for funds already raised to be returned to investors.