Sometimes someone does something that makes you think, 'Why the hell had no one tried this before?' That's the question that crossed my mind when I learned about 'Noah Doe', a (presumably) placeholder name for a man who is trying to get the New York courts to officially recognise him (and the other plantiff companies) as the owner of 39,069 seemingly abandoned Bitcoin wallets worth billions of US dollars.

Doe's complaint, brought to my attention by International Cyber Digest on X, was filed at the start of this month (PDF warning) in the New York Supreme Court. The suit makes the case that Doe should be given legal ownership of the seemingly abandoned wallets because the correct procedures were followed to attempt to "return" the virtual wallets to their owners under the city's law.

In normal circumstances—with, say, a regular physical wallet—if enough time passes without anyone claiming ownership and the correct procedures are followed, including trying to get it back to the original owner, the "finder" can then usually become the new legal owner.

Using an "algorithm" that he cooked up, Doe found 1,544 Bitcoin wallets in December 2024, 546 in March 2025, and 39,911 in April 2025. These were then whittled down a little as some were in fact demonstrated to not be abandoned by their owners. The addresses of all 39,069 remaining seemingly abandoned wallets are listed in the court document under Exhibit 1.

All wallets were "dormant or inactive for at least five years and apparently abandoned", and in each case there was a full year of efforts to identify and notify any owners of the wallets. With each batch of wallet discovery Doe handed over a USB stick containing the addresses to the police department as lost property. Some months later, the police would return the drive.

Doe's efforts to "return" the wallets included having "strategic consultant" Salomon Brothers help come up with a plan to reach out to any owners. A cyber/blockchain expert would also review the wallets and assist with contacting any potential owners.

"The expert confirmed that the Found Wallets validly exist on the blockchain, contain digital assets, and have been dormant or inactive for at least five (5) years."

On the back of this, Doe added a message as a token into the transaction records, directing potential wallet owners to a webpage giving wallet holders 90 days to say they are the owner. And after this, they put out a press release to try to reach any of the wallet holders that way, too.

So it seems due diligence was definitely done, but that doesn't mean it will be a straightforward decision given the uniqueness of the situation here.

What's particularly noteworthy about this case is that one of the 30-odd thousand wallet addresses is the Mt. Gox hack wallet (1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF) containing about 80,000 Bitcoins worth almost $6 billion USD today. This wallet is the destination for Bitcoin that was stolen from the Mt. Gox exchange back in 2011, and has been untouched ever since given it's been watched the world over for any activity. That wallet is listed as the very first one of the thousands in Doe's court doc—perhaps the list is ordered by value.

Some online have already been speculating whether Doe perhaps already had access to some of these wallets and is just trying to make it 'legal' to use them. Or, Doe could be waiting for a time when he will be able to use advanced tech (such as quantum computing) to gain access.

One thing that crossed my mind is what would happen if Doe is granted legal ownership and then somewhere down the line an original owner of one of the wallets finds their private key and uses it. Would this mean Doe is now being stolen from?

It's a ridiculous thing to ponder, and surely something that won't come to pass because one would like to assume the court will throw this case out, not least because it's hard to reason that the Bitcoin wallets are actually located in New York at all. But I'm not a lawyer, so I can't make any definite claims here. It will be interesting to see exactly how the court handles it, as it could set precedents for the future regarding blockchains and digital wallets.

As much as I enjoy a gacha pull as a little treat, I'm not overly jazzed about how inescapable gambling mechanics have become in games—or anywhere else, for that matter. So-called prediction markets are also becoming increasingly popular, and one Google engineer has been arrested for allegedly leveraging insider information to place bets on Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based platform.

Michele Spagnuolo was charged this week on the grounds that he'd used confidential business information to place a number of bets on Polymarket (via Wired). Up until his arrest, Spagnuolo had worked for Google since 2014, most recently as a security engineer at Google Zürich. His Google research page has since been taken down.

FBI agent Brandon Racz wrote in the legal complaint, "Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data."

For those unfamiliar, prediction markets encompass more than sports betting, allowing users to wager on the outcome of a variety of future events—such as whether GTA 6 will get delayed again. More Perfect Union's recent reporting on Polymarket makes for illuminating viewing (and, in my humble opinion, offers plenty of reasons to never go all-in on prediction markets).

Spagnuolo, going by the Polymarket handle 'AlphaRaccoon,' allegedly bet on who Google’s most-searched person of the year would be. He netted $1.2 million in total, after correctly predicting that the winner would be D4vd, the musician charged with first-degree murder in April this year.

How Spagnuolo allegedly sought and leveraged the insider information is somewhat vague at this point in the case. A press release about the case from the Southern District court of New York attempts to explain, "In connection with his role, Spagnuolo had access to Google’s internal data systems, including an internal software tool that provided him with access to confidential, nonpublic data. That software tool bore a banner that stated, in part, 'Google Confidential' in red text. Indeed, Spagnuolo certified his understanding of various Google confidentiality and ethics policies."

Spagnuolo has been charged on multiple counts, including commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. These charges present a potential maximum prison sentence of between 10 and 20 years.

It's important to stress that Michele Spagnuolo has only been charged at this point (and charges do not indicate someone is guilty inherently). Though Spagnuolo was arrested in New York, it's also worth noting he is an Italian citizen working for Google Zürich, which could complicate any future trial that may take place.

"Today’s charges reinforce a decades-old message: corporate insiders cannot use confidential business information to turn a profit in our markets," US Attorney Jay Clayton said, "As alleged, Spagnuolo violated the duties he owed to his employer and used Google’s confidential business information to make more than $1.2 million in trading profits on Polymarket. Insider trading compromises the integrity of our markets, and the American people want this greed-driven conduct investigated and prosecuted."

Founded in 2016, Bitcoin Depot was once North America's largest bitcoin ATM operator. Now, the Georgia-based company has voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This raises many questions, from 'how did we get here?' to 'and what exactly does an ATM for cryptocurrency do?'

Putting it simply, whereas a traditional ATM dispenses physical currency, a bitcoin ATM doesn't dispense anything but can be used to facilitate blockchain transactions. These machines can incur pretty steep fees on top of the actual transaction, though not even these have been able to keep Bitcoin Depot afloat.

Bitcoin Depot announced today that the company's assets are to be sold, and operations wound down via bankruptcy proceedings due to an increase in regulation. CEO Alex Holmes said, "States have imposed increasingly stringent compliance obligations for [Bitcoin Teller Machine operators], including new transaction limits, and in some jurisdictions, outright restrictions or bans on BTM operations, and operators have faced increasing litigation and regulatory enforcement."

As such, the company's ATM network of more than 9,000 machines is already offline. "These developments have materially affected Bitcoin Depot’s business and financial position," Holmes added, "Under these circumstances, the company’s current business model is unsustainable."

The company had recently reported a year-on-year 49.2% decrease in revenue for the first quarter of 2026, going from making a profit of $12.2 million to reporting a loss of $9.5 million (via Coin Desk). You don't need me to tell you that's a rapid decline.

But it's not just fresh regulation creating a challenging landscape—there's a lawsuit too. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird has filed a suit against both Bitcoin Depot and another cryptocurrency ATM operator, CoinFlip. The suit alleges that the companies failed to sufficiently protect Iowans from crypto scams, and that "both Bitcoin Depot and CoinFlip profit directly from Iowa scam victims by imposing excessive, and often hidden, transaction fees."

US victims lost nearly $21 billion to cybercrime last year, with the FBI claiming that crypto and AI complaints are among the costliest. To get a smidge more specific, $333 million of that was the result of bitcoin ATM scams alone. With that in mind, greater regulation makes sense, and I certainly won't be shedding a tear over any Bitcoin teller machine operators going under as a result.

You may think getting locked out of your account because you've forgotten the password is annoying, but have you ever gotten locked out and lost almost half a million dollars in the process? That's what happened to X user @cprkrn, when they stored five bitcoin ($402k at the time of writing) in an account in 2015 and forgot how to get back in.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, cprkrn used Anthropic's AI model, Claude, to get access again. After using 'like 7 trillion passwords ', they found a password that happened to be the one before the current one.

Thinking they had no way back in, they reportedly dumped their college computer into Claude, which found an old wallet file that, once decrypted, got them into their account.

This computer had a mnemonic device that they seemingly didn't spot, and Claude put that together with the rest of their account details to get into the account. The LLM didn't hack into the account, or anything so elaborate, it just found the pieces to get into the account, lost in an old computer.

If you're wondering how and why they lost their password for an account that is so valuable, they were apparently "Locked out 11+ years because I got stoned and changed the password."

There's an ironic silver lining here, in that we don't know if cprkm would have held onto the bitcoin so long if they hadn't lost access. According to the account history, 5 bitcoin were purchased on April Fools' Day in 2015. By this point, the cryptocurrency was worth around $245. Now, one bitcoin fetches $60,000. That's a fair jump in value, though it is down from its peak of $90,000 in October, 2025.

Still, cprkrn would have been aware that they had somewhere close to half a million dollars in a locked account for years now. They report that dumping their computer into Claude was their 'last ditch effort' to get the account back.

You may be wondering what they plan on doing with all that cash now that they finally have it back. Their answer? Asking electronic artist and DJ Deadmau5 to play at their wedding. I suppose there are technically worse ways to spend the money.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous name of the inventor of bitcoin, has never been publicly unveiled. The New York Times believes it may have finally nailed the right guy, but said guy says it's not him.

In a video report from the New York Times, investigative reporter John Carreyrou argues it is British cryptographer Adam Back. A member of the cryptography group Cypherpunks, CEO of blockchain company Block Stream, and inventor of Hashcash, Back is fairly well-known in the crypto scene.

The first bit of evidence is a nitpick of grammar. Carreyrou says both Back and Nakamoto are "pathologically incapable of using hyphens correctly" and that "they tended to hyphenate compound nouns, which you're not supposed to do, and to not hyphenate compound adjectives, which you are supposed to do."

He also notes that, in a Cypherpunks list back in 2004, Back uses the term 'partial pre-image', and Nakamoto appears to have used that same phrase in 2008. Carreyrou reports using AI to analyse a database of over 30,000 users who could be Nakamoto, and it labelled Back's grammar as the closest to the Bitcoin creator.

Carreyrou notes that Adam Back is the first person Nakamoto spoke to, via email. He also argues that Back's own paper lays out principles found in the Bitcoin white paper a decade later, and Back started to talk about Bitcoin when Nakamoto went silent in 2011.

Satoshi Nakamoto also references Adam Back's Hashcash in Bitcoin's foundational white paper. Carreyrou states that Back was patient and polite with him when they first met, but he 'went dark' after Carreyrou asked Back to provide the metadata of his interactions with Nakamoto.

"Looking at all the evidence I've collected over the past 18 months, I became more and more convinced that they were actually emails Adam Back had sent to himself. "

Carreyrou says, "Adam's chalked all of this up to one big series of coincidences"

Adam Back has since taken to X to share his side of the story and to deny the allegation. (Via The Guardian). Back says, "I'm not Satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash [and] privacy tech on Cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas."

Back argues that Carreyrou's findings are an example of confirmation bias, and that one would naturally link comments together when lots of people have a similar interest, He continues to argue that the rest is simply a "combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests - inference Satoshi needed specific skills and experience to discover bitcoin, where myself and others got 'so close yet so far' in design discussions the decade before."

Back claims "I also don't know who Satoshi is, and I think it is good for Bitcoin that this is the case" and that he prefers to look at Bitcoin as something that was "discovered". He seems to prefer the idea of no one really knowing who invented Bitcoin, and it's hard to say if that's something someone who invented Bitcoin would say or not.

As AI continues to make its way into every walk of life, it seems like it has boldened and bolstered bad actors, with the FBI reporting crime complaints almost 20% higher than the previous year. Its latest analysis reports over 1,000,000 complaints in 2025.

The FBI reports that, among the $21 billion lost to cybercrime in 2025, "cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence-related complaints [were] among the costliest."

It tallied the 1,008,597 complaints sent to the Internet Crime Complaint Center during that period (higher than the 859,532 reports in 2024), and the most common of these complaints were phishing, extortion and investment schemes.

Among those hit hardest were holders of cryptocurrency who, with 181,565 complaints, totalled $11 billion in losses. Cryptocurrency holders are often targeted by hacks and scams, partly because one can obfuscate wallets through many transactions, but also partly because it's a newer technology with less regulation, where owners are encouraged to store large amounts of cash at once.

Notably, despite only making up 22,364 complaints in 2025, Americans lost nearly $893 million in scams. AI-led scams have been more and more popular recently. Google published a report in February on all the ways that threat actors are using AI to hack victims, and speed up efficiency in hacking organisations, and last October, it was revealed that people fall for AI phishing attempts 4.5 x more than human ones.

And AI-led scams only threaten to get worse with time. At the start of the year, we saw a complicated 'social engineering scam' where people used deepfaked versions of CEOs to garner trust, with victims being redirected towards a troubleshooting software that would then get into their devices.

This is something noted in the FBI's report: "Scammers rely on pressure techniques to defraud Americans while deploying fake social profiles, voice clones, identification documents, and believable videos depicting public figures or loved ones."

With so many of the most noteworthy AI cybercrimes only being spotted at the start of this year, it's hard to imagine next year's cybercrime stats being any better. One can only hope that, as these scams get smarter, our defences get smarter in turn.

Google published a whitepaper yesterday that dramatically pulled in the horizon on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Google Quantum AI researchers claim that cracking the cryptography protecting many major coins, including bitcoin and ether, could require a quantum computer with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, something in the order of 20 times lower than previous estimates, Forbes reports.

Indeed, one of the paper's co-authors, Justin Drake, has concluded that the timeframe for "Q-Day", the hypothetical moment when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer becomes capable of breaking the public-key encryption algorithms that underpin much of modern digital security including cryptocurrencies, could arrive much sooner than previously thought.

"My confidence in Q-Day by 2032 has shot up significantly. IMO there's at least a 10% chance that by 2032 a quantum computer recovers a secp256k1 ECDSA private key from an exposed public key," Drake said on X.

To put all this into at least some kind of context, Google's current most powerful quantum device, the Willow chip, has 105 qubits, while IBM's Condor processor was the first superconducting qubit processor to surpass 1,000 qubits, notching up 1,121 qubits.

However, the simple qubit count can be a somewhat misleading metric. Google's 105-qubit Willow is in many ways more capable than systems with far more qubits, because it achieves fidelities of 99.97% for single-qubit gates, 99.88% for entangling gates, and 99.5% for readout across its entire 105-qubit array.

According to Google, a computer with 1,000 low-quality, error-prone qubits can easily be outperformed by one with 100 highly reliable ones. As a consequence, the quantum computing industry is shifting to measuring logical qubits or error-corrected groupings of physical qubits as a more meaningful measure.

It's also important to understand that Q-Day doesn't mean that all digital security is immediately toast. Broadly, there are two kinds of cryptography. Public-key cryptography relies on mathematical problems (factoring huge numbers, discrete logarithms and so on) that quantum computers can solve via Shor's algorithm. This is what Q-Day would actually represent.

Then there's symmetric encryption and hashing, including AES and SHA-2. Those are vulnerable to Grover's algorithm, which effectively halves the security strength rather than dismantling it entirely. In that scenario, for instance, AES-256 encryption would be degraded to AES-128 levels of security. What's more, using longer keys in the first place would restore protection.

All of which means that Q-day would be less an instant end to all encryption and more a case of game over for public-key cryptography while everything else gets a little weaker and faces a painful but plausible migration to longer keys.

As Forbes reports, "Google’s whitepaper points out that cryptocurrencies are uniquely exposed among systems that rely on this type of cryptography. Blockchains use elliptic curve keys that are almost an order of magnitude smaller than RSA keys at comparable security levels, meaning a smaller quantum computer can crack them.

"And unlike traditional finance, which layers multiple safeguards, blockchains offer no recourse against fraudulent transactions. One forged signature could mean irreversible theft."

Indeed, Google's new paper, which is titled "Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities," does rather put a different spin on the company's declaration, which we reported on recently, that it is effectively prepping for the "quantum apocalypse" and planning to move over to post-quantum security measures by 2029.

Of course, for now this is just a prediction. Nobody has yet built a quantum machine with anything close to even the substantially reduced qubit count mooted in the new Google paper. But Q-Day does seem to be the opposite of many future technologies like fusion energy and a cure for cancer.

Instead of remaining slightly out of reach, always roughly the same way off into the future, Q-Day and the presumed demise of bitcoin seems to accelerating towards us.

There's a chance, if you don't care about / dislike NFTs (same), Web3 games (same), or cryptocurrency (three for three), you've never heard of Pudgy Penguins. But the NFT brand has somehow made its way onto Walmart shelves and launched a game this month, which has already been hit by a pretty nasty phishing scam.

As pointed out by Malwarebytes, the phishing site abuses the fact that the web browser game Pudgy World connects to users' crypto wallets to verify digital items.

The site is intended to mimic the verification step, which shows the user a fake wallet unlock screen. This then redirects them to hand over all of their information. "To the user, it looks for all the world like the real crypto wallet software they already trust."

Malwarebytes notes that the level of detail on this phishing site is high, not only accurately replicating the site's design but even a pop-up window to resemble Reown WalletConnect, a wallet connection library that Pudgy World uses.

Interestingly, the fake pop-up then renders an overlay, designed to look like the legitimate unlock screen. Where Pudgy World might send users to their own downloaded software, this website instead employs an overlay, tricking them into believing their own applications are being used.

"For every browser extension wallet on the list, the phishing site renders an unlock screen built to match the real extension’s own visual identity, with the correct logo, colour scheme, button layout, and wording."

The cunning tricks don't end there. Malwarebytes notes it's a "page that plays dead for researchers" by testing hardware, checking if it's run in a virtual machine, and looking for automated tools. Effectively, the malicious element of the attack simply doesn't load if it suspects researchers are accessing it.

Crypto owners are among those most targeted by hackers, likely related to the amount of currency they have in their wallets, and how easy it is to obscure transactions through the blockchain. Just last month, we saw a social engineering scam deepfaking CEOs, using fake troubleshooting programs to steal cryptocurrency. Even Cloudflare's recent report on today's threat landscape echoes a focus on cryptobros.

Naturally, to avoid being caught up in any scam, be vigilant of sites you enter, what information you give away, and the people who talk to you. Scams are only getting smarter, so users and cybersecurity experts have to get just as smart in response.

Following a report from an independent analyst, one crypto thief has reportedly been caught by the FBI after $46 million went missing from the US Marshals. The accused is the son of a government contractor, who's company worked for the US Marshals previously.

Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, originally took to X to declare the arrested suspect, John Daghita, to be a US government contractor—though others claim the contractor could actually be Dean Daghita, his father, who has not been accused of any crime (via Tom's Hardware).

Dean Daghita owned Command Services & Support, which reportedly had a contract with the US government to manage seized crypto wallets. There's no confirmation as to whether the son may have used this information, or whether the father was aware of his son's alleged activities.

The $46 million in crypto was said to be the property of the US Marshals, and some of that figure is reported to have been taken from a wallet with over $90 million in it. That's naturally a substantial amount of cryptocurrency for a government to hold, though US President Donald Trump has been infamously pro-cryptocurrency in his second term in office.

John Daghita was reportedly arrested on the island of Saint Martin by the French armed forces, and Patel posted photos of a briefcase filled with money, alongside numerous tech bits and a passport, in the announcement.

This story is currently developing, but seems to have begun thanks to an investigation from crypto analyst ZachBXT earlier this year. ZachBXT claimed that John, otherwise known as Lick, "was caught flexing $23M in a wallet address directly tied to $90M+ in suspected thefts from the US Government in 2024 and multiple other unidentified victims from Nov 2025 to Dec 2025."

In a post clarifying the news, ZachBXT claims that John Daghita taunted the analyst through a series of dust attacks, ie sending multiple transactions of small amounts of money to gather data or simply clog up transactions. Zach claims Daghita "attacked my public wallet address with stolen funds." ZachBXT concludes their post by stating, "Thanks for the last laugh, John."

If you've been having a bad week at work, I'm here to inform you that it could always be worse. South Korea's National Tax Service carried out law enforcement raids resulting in the seizure of cryptocurrency assets worth $5.6 million late last month, gained from 124 tax-evading citizens.

Quite the win, you would have thought (via Ars Technica). However, the agency then proudly released photos of a hardware crypto wallet containing $4.8 million worth of the ill-gotten gains—alongside a handwritten note clearly displaying the wallet's mnemonic recovery phrase.

For those not in the know, this 12-to-24 word sequence allows the recovery of a crypto wallet's contents, acting as a master key that can grant access to the wallet on other devices.

Guess what happened next. The following morning, the authorities were astonished to discover that the wallet had been emptied, and the vast majority of its seized cryptocurrency was therefore back in circulation. Or at the very least, tucked away inside the account of some opportunistic crypto enthusiast.

Professor Cho Jae-woo, director of the Blockchain Research Institute at Hansung University in Seoul and the original observer of the transaction, said: "This is like advertising to open your wallet and take your money."

"Taking a picture of a mnemonic code and storing it in a gallery, messenger, or cloud is something you should never do" he added. "Just like taking a picture of a bank security card in the past and storing it on a computer, taking a picture of [the mnemonic] and posting it on the web is essentially the same as saying, 'Take it all.'"

Which our opportunistic crypto thief seems to have done. The good news, though (and let's face it, the South Korean authorities need some at this point) is that the crypto is tied to an obscure token called Pre-Retogeum (PRTG), which looks to be very difficult to move onwards.

PRTG has a market valuation of around $12 million, and is only listed on a single exchange. The value stolen here would represent 40% of PRTG's entire supply, which means if significant amounts of it were to be sold, the token's value would likely plummet before the transaction was complete.

Officers within the South Korean NTC posted a public apology for the loss over the weekend, saying (via machine translation):

"This incident occurred as a result of carelessly providing the original photo to the media without recognizing that it contained sensitive virtual asset information in order to provide more vivid information to the public, and there is no excuse for it.

"The National Tax Service is taking this incident as an opportunity to conduct an external diagnosis of the entire security system and strengthen internal controls such as prior review to prevent the leak of sensitive information when making public disclosures, while completely revising the manual for the entire process of virtual asset seizure, storage, and sale."

As a final note, a quick bit of back-of-a-receipt maths suggests that roughly $800,000 worth of the seized crypto is still in the hands of the South Korean authorities.

That's a less impressive figure, but at least it means the National Tax Service will be less likely to post images of whatever device it's currently contained within. Next to today's newspaper, their post, and the names and addresses of everyone involved. Naturally.

A hacking group reportedly based out of North Korea has come up with a "new tooling and AI-enabled social engineering" scam, according to Google, and it's pretty complicated.

Effectively, it uses a hacked account to send a Zoom link via a calendar invite to an uncompromised account. That version of Zoom is, in fact, a spoof, and what targets are met with is a deepfaked version of the account owner. Google's report notes that a version of this deepfake takes the form "of a CEO from another cryptocurrency company."

Once in the meeting, the deepfaked user claims to have technical issues and directs the target on how to troubleshoot their PC. The troubleshooting prompt leads them to run an infected string of commands that then unleashes a series of backdoors and data miners on the victim's PC.

Google calls it "AI-enabled social engineering" and notes 7 new malware families used in the attack.

UNC1069 are the actors Google has identified as being behind the scam. They have reportedly been active since 2018 and were found to have been using Gemini last year to "develop code to steal cryptocurrency, as well as to craft fraudulent instructions impersonating a software update to extract user credentials".

Google says UNC1069 is "employing these techniques to target both corporate entities and individuals within the cryptocurrency industry, including software firms and their developers, as well as venture capital firms and their employees or executives."

This hack needs access to an account to start in the first place, so Google notes further attacks have "a dual purpose; enabling cryptocurrency theft and fueling future social engineering campaigns by leveraging victim’s identity and data."

Though Google states that the account linked to the group has been terminated, Gemini was used at some point "to develop tooling, conduct operational research, and assist during the reconnaissance stages."

Gemini is not the only AI tool being used in similar cybercrimes. Antivirus creator and cybersecurity company Kaspersky claims hacking group BlueNoroff is using GPT-4o to enhance images to convince targets.

As AI gets more impressive and complicated, so too will the scams to accompany it. One can only hope that anti-scam measures become equally clever.

A crypto scammer who is accused (alongside his co-conspirators) of stealing at least $73.6 million has been sentenced to "the statutory maximum of 20 years in prison and three years of supervised release for his role in an international cryptocurrency investment conspiracy carried out from scam centers in the Kingdom of Cambodia".

42-year old Daren Li allegedly cut his ankle monitor off and fled in December 2025, and thus has been sentenced in absentia. This means he has been sentenced without being present. General A. Tysen Duva of the US Justice Department’s Criminal Division says it "will work with our law enforcement partners around the world to ensure that Li is returned to the United States to serve his full sentence."

Li pled guilty in November, 2024, and before fleeing gave details on the methods he and his co-conspirators engaged in. According to the U.S Department of Justice:

"Li admitted that unindicted members of the conspiracy would contact victims directly through unsolicited social-media interactions, telephone calls and messages, and online dating services. The unindicted co-conspirators would gain the trust of victims by establishing either professional or romantic relationships with them, often communicating by electronic messages sent via end-to-end encrypted applications.

"These co-conspirators established spoofed domains and websites that resembled legitimate cryptocurrency trading platforms and promote fraudulent cryptocurrency investments to the victims after gaining the victims’ trust."

Some involved in the scam would claim to be from a customer service or tech support team, and would ask for payment in the form of cryptocurrency, which could then be laundered, according to the US DoJ.

Li reportedly admitted to at least $73.6 in stolen assets, at least $59.8 million of which has been allegedly laundered by U.S shell companies. So far, eight co-conspirators have pleaded guilty. Li is said to be the "first defendant to be sentenced who was directly involved in the ultimate receipt of victim funds."

First Assistant U.S Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California says , "While technology has made it possible for people to quickly communicate with others who live oceans away, it also has made it easier for criminals to prey on innocent victims." He urges "the investing public to use caution and to not talk to strangers…especially ones who solicit money online."

I'm writing about cryptocurrency again, which means bitcoin's either gone massively up in value, or it's in the middle of a, err, "significant downturn."

Well whaddaya know, it's the latter. The world's most headline-friendly cryptocurrency dropped in value below $70,000 per coin on Thursday for the first time since 2024, with its losses overall this year totalling more than 20 percent. The reasons why are complicated, but famous hedge fund manager Michael Burry has some ideas.

You know, the guy portrayed by Christian Bale in 2015's The Big Short. Burry took to his paid subscriber Substack page to declare that crypto was experiencing a "collateral death spiral", thanks to "sky high leverage" on crypto exchanges due to rising metal prices, which in turn meant that "as the crypto collateral fell, the tokenized metals had to be sold" (via Coindesk).

To understand what's happening here, I need to explain tokenised metals, so strap in. According to information I learned this morning (I have so little interest in crypto it's physically painful), tokenised metals are essentially blockchain representations of assets like gold, platinum and silver.

They can be full asset-backed tokens, where each one corresponds to a specific amount of valuable metal in a vault, fractional ownership tokens, where investors can own fractions of a large reserve, or commodity-linked digital securities, where the tokens are linked to derivatives, or revenue-sharing agreements tied to metal production or sales.

Apparently, at least. Anyway, tokenized silver futures are said to be particularly volatile at the moment, due to supply constraints and increased demand, and the price of silver had already risen by over 157% over the course of 2025. Traders bet on silver going up and up, and… you can probably guess what happened next.

Silver values plunged (as did gold), positions automatically closed, and bitcoin sank with it. Albeit, with silver outpacing the famous cryptocurrency on its way down. "It was reported that tokenized silver futures liquidations actually exceeded bitcoin liquidations on one crypto market, called, ironically, Hyperliquid", said Murray. Ho ho ho.

As crypto and financial markets are fiendishly difficult to analyse, it's very likely not the only reason why bitcoin took a tumble. However, tumble it has, and where bitcoin goes, the rest of the crypto market has a tendency to follow. As of the time of writing, bitcoin is currently falling below the $68,000 mark, with more than $1 billion worth of crypto positions liquidated over the past 24 hours.

And according to John Blank, chief equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, bitcoin could go a lot lower yet. "Generally speaking, a bitcoin winter is 12 to 18-months long. These are well understood technical features," said Blank, speaking to CNBC. So, at $76,000 [per bitcoin] from $125,000, which was the peak, we can get to $40,000."

"We can get there very quickly, or more likely, we can get there over the next six to eight months."

Long gone are the days when crypto was considered a pure speculative investment for tech nerds, as the cryptocurrency market as a whole is now a big mainstream financial deal, and increasingly linked to real-world assets with real-world effects. And while I'm the complete opposite of an expert on this topic, I can tell you this seems like a bad thing. Or good, depending on your position on crypto. You decide.

Cryptocurrency Terraform Labs co-founder, Do Kwon, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison by a district judge in New York. The cryptocurrency boss oversaw the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna in 2022, which the judge described as "fraud on an epic, generational scale."

"In the history of federal prosecutions," US district judge Paul A. Engelmayer said during the sentencing (via CNBC), "there are few frauds that have caused as much harm as you have, Mr. Kwon."

TerraUSD and Luna collapsed in May 2022. TerraUSD was a so-called stablecoin for its intrinsic tie to the value of the US dollar. Intended to always be valued at $1 per coin, the foundations of the stablecoin were complex and shaky. It relied on protocols, a separate counter-token called Luna, and an exchange for burning/minting tokens to maintain the price of TerraUSD at $1. Failed attempts to prop up the system and mislead investors using secret funds eventually led to the collapse of both TerraUSD and Luna, from $1 and $87 on May 5, to $0.2 and $0.00005 on May 13.

"In fact, core Terraform products did not work as Kwon advertised and were manipulated to create the illusion of a functioning and decentralized financial system in order to lure investors," the US attorney's office, Southern District of New York, said of the case.

"Kwon engaged in this deceptive conduct in order to pump up the value of Terraform’s cryptocurrencies, which Kwon and entities he controlled (a) possessed in large amounts and (b) sold to investors in exchange for billions of dollars’ worth of other assets."

At its peak in 2022, TerraUST and Luna exceeded $50 billion in value. Over $40 billion is said to have been lost during the subsequent crash.

Letters by some of the victims were submitted to the court. I've read a few; tales of life investments down the drain and emotional and mental struggle due to the crash.

Kwon fled from South Korea, the company's base of operations, shortly after the crash. He ended up in Montenegro with various warrants out for his arrest. In 2023, he was arrested trying to leave the country on a fake passport to go to Dubai. After a long extradition process, due to a lack of extradition treaty with either South Korea or the United States, Kwon was extradited to the US to face charges.

Kwon pled guilty to two counds of fraud back in August and agreed to forfeit cash and properties said to have been gained through the fraudulent action. Kwon apologised at the time, saying: "What I did was wrong."

"Do Kwon used the technological promise and investment euphoria around cryptocurrency to commit one of the largest frauds in history," US attorney Jay Clayton said at the time.

Kwon's 15-year sentence is longer than the 12 years sought by the prosecution, with the judge presiding over the case deciding that would've been too lenient considering the "epic, generational scale" of the fraud. Kwon also faces charges in South Korea and may be moved to the country later during his sentence.

Kwon's case wraps up another loose end from 2022, which was altogether a very bad year for cryptocurrencies. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX exchange that later collapsed, was also arrested that same year and found guilty of fraud in 2023.

Nvidia streamed the keynote speech of its latest GPU Technology Conference yesterday—though unfortunately thousands of folks seem to have fallen for a deepfake Jensen Huang extolling the virtues of cryptocurrency instead. Just when you thought the dodgy reuploaders and react channels were bad enough, it turns out you've now got to worry about fully counterfeit event streams too.

For those that missed it, the official Nvidia GTC, originally streamed live from Washington, D.C. on October 28, can be viewed here. Though it's sitting pretty at nearly 200,000 views now, that wasn't the case during the stream; while about 20,000 tuned in for the official event as it went live, nearly 100,000 viewers were said to be watching the deepfake feed broadcast (hosted by a channel calling itself Nvidia Live) at the same time (via Tomshardware).

The counterfeit stream has since been removed, but CRN editor Dylan Martin posted to X about the debacle as it happened, observing that at its peak, the official upload had only about a fifth of the viewership of the deepfake feed. The deepfaked Huang claimed to postpone the main event in favour of promoting "a crypto mass adoption event that ties directly into Nvidia's mission to accelerate human progress."

The AI-generated Huang also encouraged viewers to scan an on-screen QR code, and send in supported cryptocurrencies. It's not yet clear how many (if any) viewers may have scanned this QR code or lost money while believing this fake stream to be legitimate.

This turn of events is in many ways unsurprising. Just earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman volunteered his own likeness into the maw of AI video generator Sora 2, with perhaps predictable results. As for Huang, this is the fourth GTC keynote he's hosted this year alone, likely adding to the wealth of easily accessible video footage for bad actors to use as AI training data. Please excuse me while I go to pick out a cute, brown paper bag to wear on my head for forever more.

As Nvidia already secured a $4 trillion valuation earlier this year, (and is now fast approaching the $5 trillion mark), in no small part thanks to the many moves it's made around AI, there's an irony that isn't lost on me. It's also worth noting that, even as the money going into AI-based investments threatens to outstrip the money coming out, Huang recently downplayed concerns about a bubble.

Nvidia NIM is already being leveraged in deepfake image detection models like Hive's, but I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia itself made a move similar to Meta, and released more deepfake detection tools in the near future. Failing that, it seems we all need to keep our eyes peeled, as our online reality threatens to come apart at the seams.

PayPal's blockchain partner, Paxos, looks to have made something of a maths-related whoopsie earlier this week, as it mistakenly minted $300 trillion worth of its stablecoin, PYUSD.

That figure might look massive in its own right, but it's even more impressive when you take into account that it's more than double the world's GDP—which is currently estimated to be around $111 trillion, based on figures from 2024.

The error was spotted by eagle-eyed market watchers on Etherscan, a block explorer and analytics platform, and was said to be fixed within 20 minutes (via CNBC). The company released a statement on X confirming the erroneous minting of coins, describing it as an internal technical error. "There is no security breach," the post continues. "Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root cause."

What that root cause was, we may never know. I like to imagine it might have been someone dropping a sandwich on their keyboard, because that's often how my mistakes are made. Still, a commenter in the thread below has theorised that it may have been a result of forgetting to account for six decimal places, which is my kinda maths screw up.

Or perhaps a fat-finger error, both in the technical and financial sense? Anyway, what's more interesting still is the fact that PSYUSD is advertised as a dollar-pegged stablecoin, which is said by the company to be "fully backed by US dollar deposits, US treasuries, and similar cash equivalents."

In the case of $300 trillion worth of coins, however, that would be literally impossible. And while said arrangement is guaranteed by Paxos, this error has demonstrated that the generation of new coins does not appear to be tied to those aforementioned reserves under its system—which has led some to suggest that a proof-of-reserve mechanism should be necessary for stablecoin issuance.

Because, well, money is more of an abstract concept than ever these days, and crypto is even more abstract still. In this case, however, the mistake was quickly rectified, the coins were "burned" into non-existence, and PSYD has kept its spot as the sixth-largest stablecoin in the world.

All's well that ends well I guess, but I'd imagine whoever made such an error in the first place is having a particularly bad week. My sympathies. Happens to the best of us, y'know?

One bitcoin could be a life-changing amount of money to someone: valued at around $113,000 a pop, give or take the whims of the market at any one time. And the market just might have something to react to with this story: a woman has been arrested by London's Met Police for stolen bitcoin valued at—gulp—$6.7 billion or thereabouts.

The woman, Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, also allegedly known as "the goddess of wealth" by some, plead guilty to two counts in Southwark Crown Court, related to the acquisition and possession of criminal property (via BBC News). The assets in question: 61,000 bitcoin.

61,000 x 113,000 = 6.893 billion dollars. The value has shifted a little since the Met made its calculations, but that's bitcoin for you. Six months ago a single bitcoin was worth less than $100,000. Six years ago it was around $3,000.

Qian is said to have received the bitcoin from large-scale fraud in China, with over 128,000 victims pouring their cash into Qian's investments. Qian then stored the stolen assets in bitcoin, which has had a pretty good year. Qian is then said to have moved to the UK and attempted to launder the assets by purchasing property with assistance from another, Jian Wen.

You might wonder why Qian moved the money from high-earning bitcoin into measly London property. Well, besides the never-ceasing London property boom, the Met had already tracked the movement of cryptocurrency wallet containing 150 bitcoin (around $16 million today) connected to Jian last year as a part of this same investigation. So, all these wallets might not be the best long-term storage for stolen goods, especially as recent events have shown investigators are getting ever-better at tracking down stolen funds.

Wen was sentenced to six years and eight months imprisonment for their part in the operation back in May, 2024. Qian is awaiting sentencing.

There have also been various thefts of wallets in recent months and years, such as a $1.5 billion bitcoin heist from Dubai-based crypto firm Bybit. So, even if you evade the law, will you evade other nefarious actors? Property is much harder to hack, you know, and Jian had property in both London and Dubai, according to a report from the Crown Prosecution Service earlier in the year.

"This is one of the largest money laundering cases in UK history", said Will Lyne, the Met's head of economic and cybercrime command.

“Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are increasingly being used by organised criminals to disguise and transfer assets, so that fraudsters may enjoy the benefits of their criminal conduct," Robin Weyell, deputy chief crown prosecutor for the CPS, said.

The Met also worked with Chinese law enforcement in both Beijing and Tianjin throughout the investigation.

"Through a meticulous investigation and unprecedented cooperation with Chinese law enforcement, we were able to obtain compelling evidence of the criminal origins of the cryptoassets Qian attempted to launder in the UK."

If there's one thing that seems constant throughout most cryptocurrency heists, hacks, and seizures, it's that the numbers keep going up. A few years ago we'd be surprised by the theft of a few hundred million dollars worth of coins, but as the value of many cryptocurrencies has increased, so have the totals.

The Met is claiming this recent case to be the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the world, though that depends on whether you go by value or number of coins. There was a larger seizure late last year, 120,000 bitcoins stolen from the Bitfinex exchange. Those were seized by the US Department of Justice.

The then-deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco (yes, the now-Microsoft exec that Trump wants to get rid of), claimed it to be the largest in US history at the time. It was worth around $4.5 billion then. So, technically, the Met's seizure is bigger by value, though that 120,000 bitcoin haul would now be worth, er, a little over 13 billion dollars and counting. But who's counting, eh?

Should you wish to emulate the achievements of the great Katy Perry, William Shatner and others by taking a trip on one of Blue Origin's rockets beyond the Kármán line, I have excellent news—you can now pay for the experience with cryptocurrency.

Shift4 Payments, a self-described "leader in integrated payments and commerce technology", has announced it's been working with Blue Origin to use its seamless payments technology to allow would-be space travellers to pay with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, USDT and USDC for a trip on one of the company's New Shepard rockets. The system is said to be up and running as of last week, marking a brave new frontier of crypto and space tourism combined.

“Our mission has always been to revolutionize commerce by simplifying the transaction process, and we’re thrilled to now extend that vision beyond Earth,” said Shift4 CEO Taylor Lauber. "This partnership will enable adventurous travelers to book the adventure of a lifetime, no matter their preferred payment method - all with a simple, frictionless experience."

Blue Origin is currently taking bookings for one of 1,000 places aboard said rocket, promising that you'll "return to Earth, forever changed". The New Shepard spacecraft allows travellers to float about in relative comfort inside one large crew capsule, roughly 62 miles above the planet's surface, before gently descending back down to terra firma with the help of some substantial parachutes.

It's not known exactly how much a single flight costs, but the booking form states that a (refundable) $150,000 deposit is required to begin the order process, so I imagine it's not exactly cheap. Still, if you made out big in the last crypto boom, it might be something on your bucket list—and previous celebrity travellers appear to have enjoyed the experience immensely, so it's probably worth a punt if you've got the spare virtual cash rattling around in your digital wallet.

Of course, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is not the only contender vying for your space tourism cash. Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's spaceplane-based competitor, allows you to join a waiting list for future flights, said to cost $450,000 a seat in boring old regular money. Elon Musk's SpaceX, meanwhile, offers yet another mysterious booking form on its website, although there are no known space tourism flights currently in operation.

Russia's Soyuz programme has previously allowed private individuals to book a seat on one of its spacecraft, although it's not currently offering bookings, instead focusing on professional crew rotation runs to the International Space Station.

So, it looks like Blue Origin might be the fastest way to get yourself above the planet for a good old stare at its dying ecosystems from above, and now you can use internet funny money to pay for the experience. Much of which, it must be said, was likely generated through the very power-sapping mechanisms that helped contribute to its downfall in the process. Lovely.

In some ways, it's never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Beyond the glut of games in almost every genre you can think of, it's never been easier to put together (or buy) a brilliant gaming PC for less—with one notable caveat. While a great CPU, motherboard, RAM loadout and SSD combo can be had for less than $500, modern graphics card pricing means you'll potentially be paying the same again (or much, much more) for a GPU capable of running demanding games at high frame rates and a respectable resolution.

One single component creates a bottleneck, a barrier to entry for those of us not on the megabucks—and it's the sort of thing that makes me wonder about the future of our entire hobby.

As my bio will tell you, I built my first gaming PC when I was 12 years old. Before that, I made do with the family beige box, tucked neatly under the stairs in our modest three bedroom home. I didn't grow up with much money, but my family was lucky enough to be able to scrape together the pennies for a second-hand utilitarian machine.

This PC was good enough for the odd DOS game, but throw it into the world of 3D and it was woefully underequipped. So, for the holidays one year, little 12-year old Andy pulled together the combined resources of his entire extended family with one simple goal in mind. I asked for a modest amount of cash to put together a gaming PC, and it's no overstatement to say it pretty much changed my life.

The years have been unkind to my ailing brain, so I can't quite remember the full specs of my eventual rig. However, I do recall that the graphics card was an Nvidia unit, likely a Riva TNT2, then available for around $200. It was probably the most expensive part of the PC, but at the time it was one of the best graphics cards you could buy, so I budgeted for it accordingly. That little card lasted me for years, and back in 1999 it paid to invest a little extra on a very good GPU and ride the hardware for all it was worth.

GPU prices now, compared to the past

Accounting for inflation, $200 in today's money is equivalent to roughly $390. Should you wish to buy the best graphics card today in terms of performance, you'll be looking at the RTX 5090, costing the best part of $2,500 at current prices.

But, before you go rushing to the comments section, I am aware that the top-spec Nvidia card is something of an outlier—so let's compare the Riva TNT2's inflation-adjusted price to the company's current offerings further down the stack. The RTX 5080, for instance. It's technically a card with a $999 MSRP, but the cheapest one I can find on our graphics card deals page at the moment is a mahoosive $1,300.

Let's go lower, then. How about the excellent RTX 5070 Ti, our current best mid-range graphics card pick? Well, it's got a $749 MSRP, and the cheapest one I can find is $780. The vaguely disappointing RTX 5070? $550. In fact, the closest you'll get to that $390 figure in today's graphics card market is the 8 GB variant of the RTX 5060 Ti, and while it's a decent little card, it's so far away from the top of the stack it needs binoculars to make out the RTX 5090's cooling fins.

And it's not just Nvidia cards that have fallen victim to silly prices, either. AMD has decided to skip over the high-end GPU market this generation, but its excellent RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT cards are still on the market for serious amounts of cash. The former will set you back around $600, while the XT is more like $740. These are mid-range GPUs. Which makes me wonder—how is anyone on a tight budget these days expected to build a powerful, somewhat future-resistant gaming rig like I did back in the mists of time?

How did graphics cards become so expensive?

Powerful is the operative term here, of course. Each of these cards is many, many orders of magnitude faster than an Nvidia GPU from 1999, and manufacturing hardware of this level isn't cheap. But that's merely one small piece of a much larger picture, and we can trace the majority of the great jump in graphics card pricing back to the two Cs of the apocalypse: cryptocurrency and covid.

In the case of the former, the crypto mining boom was devastating for GPU stocks. Repeated surges in Bitcoin, and therefore Ethereum pricing (and the rise of other proof-of-work altcoins riding on their coat-tails) from 2017 onwards drove demand for cryptomining-capable graphics cards sky high. Anything capable of crunching out digital coins was being snapped up in vast numbers by crypto miners around the world, many of which found themselves in vast facilities dedicated to wringing out the great crypto craze for all it was worth.

This, combined with DRAM manufacturing shortages and supply chain issues, began to push GPU pricing into the stratosphere. The GTX 980 Ti launched in 2015, before the crypto boom had reached its stride, for a $649 MSRP. The GTX 1080 Ti was released in 2017, at the beginning of the boom, for $699. The RTX 2080 Ti launched just over a year and a half later, crypto boom in full swing, for $1,200.

Three and a half years, $551 extra on the MSRP of Nvidia's equivalent high-end GPU. Economics is a complicated subject, and I'm far from an expert. But it's not difficult to see how high demand and limited supply drives up GPU pricing, and how us gamers bore the brunt of the increases.

And then, in 2020, the coronavirus hit. The world's financial system and supply chain buckled as we all took to our homes, weathering the storm of a virus that caused unprecedented levels of global uncertainty. The crypto market boomed once more, factories closed and shipping delays became commonplace, which, combined with an already existing silicon supply chain shortage and a massive new demand for home entertainment, compounded our pricing issues no end.

By the time the world righted itself to its more usual state, we were left with an unfortunate fact: high end GPUs can now cost $1,000+, and even budget GPUs cost $300-$400 rather than the $250+ pricing of previous generations. Add greedy retailer markups into the mix, record manufacturer profits, and some tariff tomfoolery, and the situation is nothing short of catastrophic for graphics card pricing in general.

More troubling still, it appears we, as gamers, are somewhat prepared to pay for it.

Where the GPU market currently stands

It's difficult to get exact figures as to exactly how many GPUs Nvidia or AMD sells each generation. What we do know, however, is that in 2025 we're still seeing prices reflective of that crypto-influenced and pandemic-tainted period. That suggests sales are reasonably healthy, and that Nvidia (and to a slightly lesser extent, AMD) sees no reason to drop prices back to pre-boom levels. If customers are prepared to pay the extra, then why not sell a graphics card for as much as you can get away with?

We like video games. We want to play the new ones with the settings turned up. We pay the price, if we can. So where does that leave PC gaming moving forward?

I would argue our beloved hobby is becoming more exclusive. Those without the ability to pay for a modern graphics card seem destined to be left behind, which means that, as time goes on, those of us capable of playing the latest, most demanding games become an ever smaller group. Certainly, we as a species are still in the grip of a global economic slow down, which means all of our day to day expenses gradually become harder and harder to afford over time.

Then, with modern GPUs demanding more and more power, that's putting further strain on your wallet because of how much it costs to run a high-end rig.

Thanks to graphics card pricing, I'd say modern gaming PCs are becoming even more of a luxury—and in an increasingly economically uncertain world, luxuries tend to be the first thing to fall towards the wayside.

What this means for PC gaming

And what does that mean for game development, an industry already racked by ever-increasing layoffs at the triple AAA end of the spectrum? As the hardware to run demanding games becomes increasingly out of the average person's reach, so too does the pool of gamers ready to buy the latest technologically advanced games become ever smaller.

Of course, this is potentially good news for indie devs, and even big studio developers that pay careful attention to the potential hardware requirements when building their creations. I can't be the only one somewhat pleased to see that Battlefield 6 recommends a mere 5-year old RTX 3060 Ti for its recommended specs, which should probably go some way towards its aims of gaining 100 million players post launch.

I mean, I still think that player target is massively unrealistic, but reasonable hardware requirements will likely equal more customers, and aiming for those that have yet to upgrade their hardware over the past five years is probably a smart move.

Yet, for those of us that want to see game technology pushed to its limits, or indeed those of us that would like to bring non-PC gamers into the fold, these are troubling times. You can pick up a very powerful gaming CPU for $300, a high refresh rate 1440p gaming monitor for less than $160, and a speedy-as-you-like 1 TB NVMe drive for $70 or so. Chuck in a cheap motherboard, case, and PSU (not too cheap a PSU, mind) and you can get the majority of an excellent gaming rig up and running for around $600-$700.

But a good graphics card? It can potentially cost the same as most of those components combined, turning a budget gaming setup into a $1000+ expense for many.

That's a lot to pay for any hobby, and a hell of a thing to ask of someone more used to spending $500 on a gaming console. Combine that with the cost of the games themselves going up, and we seem to find ourselves in a tapering market. PC gaming has always been a somewhat pricey affair, but it's graphics card pricing that has really pushed things to previously unseen heights—and I can't help but feel it's bad news for our industry as a whole.

I never bought into the bitcoin boom, at least back in the day. In 2011, many would have told you your trousers were on backwards if you dropped over 50 grand on the then-ailing cryptocurrency, and I listened to said trouser-judgers. Crypto was a flop, bitcoin was dead in the water, and many of us (including this intrepid writer) were openly scoffing at the idea it would ever be worth serious cash.

Well, more fool me, because one mysterious trader appears to have made off with a staggering amount of profit. As spotted by X user @kkashit_yt, one "whale" (as I believe is the common parlance) bought 80,000 bitcoin in 2011 and sold it all this week for $9.6 billion (via Tom's Hardware). Must be nice.

2011 wasn't the best year for bitcoin, as it started out with a valuation of around 29 cents a coin, rose to the dizzying heights of $19.02, and closed out the year at $4.21. You'd have to be truly committed to the idea to spend the equivalent of $77,435 in today's money on an investment that volatile, but our mysterious trader appears to have taken the bet and won.

A $9.6 billion payout equates to roughly a 17,777,677% ROI overall, which simply dwarfs every other investment opportunity you could think of over the same time period. The largest publicly documented stock market ROI is believed to be a 25-year investment in Monster Beverage Corp., which between July 1, 2000 and June 30 of this year is said to have delivered a 145,503.31% return with an annualised growth rate of 33.82%.

The second? Nvidia, somewhat predictably. Given its massive valuation rise in recent years, a 25-year investment in Nvidia stock would have netted you a 59,556.46% price return over the same period.

Still, think of what $9.6 billion could buy you. If you were that lucky trader and you happen to be reading, allow me to present you with a selection of things you could do with your newfound riches:

• Develop between five and nine GTA 6 iterations
• Fund the production of Spiderman 2, 32 times over
• Buy one Big Mac a day for 4,971,897 years
• Commission nineteen versions of Jeff Bezo's superyacht (he'll be so pleased)
• Or you could run OpenAI for a year

So, it's not like your options are limited. Bitcoin has experienced a remarkable boost in value in 2025, rising 27.23% since July 2024 to its current price of $119,096 at the time of writing.

No wait, $119,345. Sorry, that should have been $119,079. Wait, it's more like… you get the idea. It's still a pretty volatile investment even at this mature stage of the market, although the Trump Media and Technology Group recently declared it owns $2 billion of the stuff. What it plans to do with it is anyone's guess. Money making money? I'm lucky if mine makes toast.

There are many things that have kept me from joining the crypto hive-mind up until now: mild scepticism, lack of knowledge, confusion, laziness. I never pegged SSD longevity as being on that list, though. Until now, that is, because one popular crypto wallet extension is apparently writing an inordinate amount of data to and from some users' SSDs.

According to CoinTelegraph, which received comment from Consensys, the company that developed the MetaMask crypto extension, some users have experienced "unusually high disk activity" when using the app:

"While browser extension wallets do regularly write state to disk, which is expected behavior, we’ve taken note of a recent observation shared by a small number of MetaMask users who reported unusually high disk activity."

A fix is apparently in the works and is "being released imminently."

A user report gives an idea of just what "unusually high" might mean. They explain that "after a fresh install of a Chromium-based browser (Opera, Chrome, Edge) and installing MetaMask", there was a continuous 5 MB/s of data writing occurring on the SSD.

"That's about 500 GB per day!"

Apart from presumably slowing down other reads and writes from the disk while these transfers are happening, the main issue with this is drive longevity. Flash cells in SSDs have a pretty limited number of times they can be written to or read from before they go kaput. That's why when an SSD is wiped this doesn't reset all data cells but essentially tells the drive controller to act as if there's nothing in them and can read and write over them at will.

For reference, my Lexar NM790 2 TB SSD has write endurance of 1,500 TBW. It would take about 3,000 days, or just over eight years, for the malfunctioning app to exhaust the drive's endurance at 500 GB per day. But that's just using the app alone, not including other reads and writes (plus TBW is more of an endurance estimate than an accurate measurement).

Writing upwards of 175 TB of data over the course of a year is certainly not nothing, and that's what this app seems to be doing with some users' drives.

I suppose this is just another aspect of entering the world of crypto to take into consideration. And it's a world I'm sure many more people will be looking to step into given Trump's new GENIUS Act that aims to formalise some stablecoin regulations (these are coins that have a stable value because they're pegged against the dollar or other assets). Crypto-linked stocks are seemingly already on the rise.

If you are considering dipping your toes in, just do your due diligence not only with which coin you pick, but also which platforms and apps you use.

"I'd enter the national lottery but the odds are just too good." If this sounds like you, I've got good news: Now you can purchase a new high-tech kind of lottery ticket with even worse odds of mining a bitcoin than you will get for winning your country's lottery. Truly we are living in a future, indeed.

Tom's Hardware explains that the Lucky Miner SOLO-LV02 is a USB stick that's only purpose is to have a chance at mining some crypto. The stick goes for about $24 USD on AliExpress or $34 on Amazon, or a couple of lotto tickets, and once delivered to your door is a dedicated crypto cracker.

The little dongle has a USB Type-C connection that draws a single watt of power to run. Once it's been set up and connected to Wi-Fi, then all you need to do is make sure it has that teeny tiny bit of power and forget about it. The Lucky Miner will continue to tick around in the background attempting to mine a BTC.

In the current state of things, mining bitcoin with even a purpose built rig is a pretty lofty dream. It's to the point now where mining BTC is simply beyond unprofitable, so for $24 you're basically buying a wish, dream, in a little USB stick. Thanks to the sluggish hashrate, you're looking at odds of about 210.7 trillion-to-one of mining a single BTC. That's over the course of a year left running.

The odds of winning most national lotteries are around 300 million to one. This makes your chances about one million times better than having a Lucky Miner produce a single BTC. It's almost convincing me to buy a lotto ticket.

The USB stick does have some charm to it beyond being very bad at mining crypto. It features a 1.9-inch colour TFT display which could be put to use with that basically unused likely ESP32 chip, like what's powering this funky 90s style PDA, to play Doom on, the old one of course. Doom: The Dark Ages probably needs something a bit heftier. It even has two buttons for controls, and that handy Type-C connector.

Forget mining, get the Lucky Miner for a fun gaming project and pick yourself up a lotto ticket on the side, you know, just in case.

I really don't know what to make of EVE Frontier, the blockchain-based survival MMO in development at CCP Games. It landed with a thud in September 2024 over what was perceived as "crypto slop," but it also sounded possibly interesting when we took a closer look in February: As PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield wrote at the time, "The developers at CCP have actually articulated a vision of what they want Frontier to be, and why they think blockchain needs to be a part of it."

But now it feels like things are veering back into the crypto stuff: CCP announced today that it's hired Stefán Þórarinsson, a former economist at the Central Bank of Iceland, as its new Head of Economy, a move that "marks the next step in CCP Games’ commitment to deepening the legitimacy of virtual economies and pioneering research in the games industry."

"Stefán Þórarinsson’s appointment advances our goal toward building a truly open financial system within a virtual world," CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. "Since our inception, we have strived to create worlds where players transcend the constraints of our own design—a story that has played out within EVE Online as it enters its third decade of operation.

"With EVE Frontier, we want to be bolder: Stefán’s experience from the Central Bank of Iceland adds vital rigor as we continue to design our economy and open it up to players. By removing currency controls and fostering emergent value systems, EVE Frontier will redefine virtual nation-building, offering insights into both digital and real-world economies."

As part of that process, CCP has also launched "a series of comprehensive economic updates" in EVE Frontier, which will help it "analyze fundamental aspects of the economy" within the game:

• Monetary Policy & Inflation: Understanding how economic levers influence pricing, currency stability, and market behavior in a fully player-driven world.
• Market Equilibrium & Trade Dynamics: Exploring how supply and demand fluctuate based on player and NPC interactions.
• Assets & Currency Flows: Assessing the integration of digital assets and their impact on in-game economic activity.
• Behavioral Economics in Virtual Worlds: Gathering data on player decision-making, financial speculation, and economic adaptation.

CCP held an economic policy update and Q&A session for EVE Frontier today, offering a deeper dive into how it's approaching that aspect of the game:

I have no doubt that Þórarinsson knows his stuff, and will bring a solid foundation of macroeconomic understanding to CCP Games. My question, though, is... well, why? I struggle to see who this benefits: CCP is apparently aiming to create a fully self-balancing game world that won't require constant developer intervention and I can understand where an economist would have a role to play in that, but it feels like putting the cart before the horse if the real goal here is to make a game that people actually want to play.

I may be off-base on that take—like Peter Molyneux, I'm not much of a crypto-understander—but there's an element of that feeling visible on Reddit, too. There are some cautiously optimistic reactions to be seen in the EVE subreddit but on the whole, enthusiasm seems in short supply; on the actual EVE Frontier subreddit, meanwhile, precisely one response has been posted in the six hours since the announcement of Þórarinsson’s hiring went up, and it's basically an observation that CCP's focus on EVE Frontier risks cannibalizing EVE Online—the game that actually makes money—with no guarantee of return.

Then again, this is not an unprecedented move from CCP Games: In 2007 the studio hired Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson as the lead economist for EVE Online, a role he held until 2014, and whose "foundational contributions to in-depth economic models and monetary policies will now continue with EVE Frontier and its ability to model advanced economic theories within an open environment." It worked for EVE Online, so maybe it's what EVE Frontier really needs, too.

In 2013, a British IT specialist James Howells somehow conspired to throw a hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoin into a municipal dump. Back then it was worth less than $1 million. Now that same bitcoin stash is worth about $750 million and Howells wants to buy the entire landfill site.

Obviously, the idea is to recover the drive. Perhaps equally obviously, Howells himself doesn't have the resources to buy the landfill site from the local government council in Newport, Wales, who currently own it.

Howells says he, "would potentially be interested in purchasing the landfill site ‘as is’ and have discussed this option with investment partners and it is something that is very much on the table.”

It was in November of 2013 that Howells realised his mistake made earlier that summer. Ever since, he's been battling to be given access to the landfill site to search for the drive.

Howells escalated his efforts to recover the drive in 2023, threatening to sue the council for half a billion dollars in damages. That was followed last year by an attempt force a judicial review of council's decision to deny access to the site.

Late last year at a preliminary court hearing, Howells' lawyers argued that the location of the drive had been narrowed down so a small section of the site and recovering it would not require widespread excavation.

However, Newport council lawyers said Howells had no legal claim and that, "anything that goes into the landfill goes into the council’s ownership.” Moreover, the council claims that, "excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area."

In the event, the judge sided with the council and Howells' claim was dismissed. But with so much money potentially at stake, perhaps unsurprisingly Howells isn't giving up.

Notably, Howells' story seems to have drifted over the years. Early media reports including the one linked above quote Howell explaining how he threw the drive away following an office clean up. "You know when you put something in the bin, and in your head, say to yourself 'that's a bad idea'? I really did have that," he's quoted saying in 2013.

More recent reports have shifted the narrative, Howells being said to have "placed" the drive in a black plastic bag in the hall of his house, only for his then partner to have mistaken the bag for trash and disposed of it.

That shift in narrative may have legal ramifications. Perhaps if Howell can show the drive was never meant to have been disposed of, it will help his cause. For now, it clearly hasn't, as the courts won't hear his case in full whatever his original intentions with the drive.

In the meantime, Newport council does not appear to be interested in selling the site to Howell and his purported investors. Where it all goes from here, who knows. But as long as bitcoin's price keeps on soaring, this surely won't be the last we'll hear about this lost digital treasure. There's nearly a billion dollars supposedly sitting in a dump and that's going to be very hard to ignore.

The US Department of Justice has filed charges against an alleged crypto hacker, who it claims stole $65 million in cryptocurrency, starting when he was just 18 years old.

The now 22-year-old Andean Medjedovic faces five charges, linked to an indictment. The focus of these charges is for allegedly "stealing approximately $65 million in cryptocurrency from the KyberSwap and Indexed Finance decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols".

The first hack, in relation to Indexed Finance, involved a systemic vulnerability. Effectively, Indexed Finances managed to cut out many of the middle management fees from trades with built-in regulatory systems, and this reduced overhead partially led to its renown. However, that also appeared to be its fault.

Indexed Finance is monitored with a complex system of checks and balances by adjusting pool prices and liquidity (the cost and size of the digital market that users can purchase) for its crypto funds to incentivise or disincentive users from trading. As pointed out in Bloomberg's investigation of Indexed Finance in 2022, "This model assumed users would interact rationally with the protocol, buying low and selling high".

Medjedovic allegedly exploited this by loaning over $150 million in a 'flash loan' where he borrowed and gave back crypto assets in a single line of programmed transactions. This code would then purchase a vast supply of tokens immediately, artificiality pumping their value, where it would then swap that currency for a different one through an action known as "minting". In this same action, another flash loan would be taken to purchase a different token known as Sushi.

That Sushi token would find its way into the pool of currency, which would navigate around restrictions on the amount of tokens that can be introduced. Sushi would then be traded for the original tokens, which are now undervalued.

This process is claimed by the DoJ to have finished with Medjedovic burning and minting the supply of tokens to trade $4 million worth of Sushi tokens in $21 million worth of others. The loan is repaid, and he is being accused of cashing out $11.9 million for himself. Interestingly, a key part of this process is that the code gifted the Sushi tokens back to the pool, which isn't something a rational buyer would do, thus explaining how this system got around Indexed Finance's protocols.

After being offered 10% of the cryptocurrency by Indexed Finance, in exchange for Medjedovic handing the cryptocurrency back to them, he allegedly turned this down and instead taunted Indexed Finance's owners Laurence Day and Dillon Kellar, according to the above Bloomberg article.

In Laurence Day's reported email to Medjedovic back in 2021, Day implored him to give back the money, ending his email with "You can now choose what difficulty you want to play this game on. Easy mode or Dark Souls".

In a recent tweet recounting the email, Day says:

"It didn't have to be this way, but you wanted Dark Souls

:)"

Medjedovic is alleged to have successfully completed this hack at just 18 years old. And how they were allegedly discovered is a papertrail of various accounts across the web. It starts with Day suspected a someone that had recently collaborated with the Indexed Finance and they had spoken to over Discord, under the username 'UmbralUpsilon'. Indexed Finance then linked the attacker's Ethereum wallet to another wallet filled with winnings earned in a recent hacking contest, also under the username 'UmbralUpsilon'. This connected to an email address, which was associated with a domain for a school board in Canada, which was similar to a Wikipedia account, which was similar to another on Github. A name added to a Wikipedia page for a Canadian quiz by this account gave them the name "Andean Medjedovic, notable mathematician."

It's claimed by Dan that the security work did not play a part in the hack itself.

Despite being on the run from the law since 2021, Medjedovic's alleged hacking of KyberSwap took place in 2023 and accounts for the rest of the $65 million he is accused of stealing.

Though this process is reportedly similar to that of the 2021 hack, the DoJ's press release claims that Medjedovic had figured out a complex system of trades to "glitch" the pool of tokens, making off with close to $50 million. It also alleges that he tried to launder and conceal the cryptocurrency through a sequence of asset swaps between blockchains.

Medjedovic has reportedly argued he had done nothing other than spot a "mispricing opportunity". He further argued via email to Bloomberg that he "did not steal anyone’s private keys" and "interacted with the smart contract according to its very own publicly available rules."

In emails reportedly sent to Bloomberg, Medjedovic argues that he took on risk in his system, and could suffer the results of that risk as other buyers and sellers do. He argues "The people who lost internet tokens in this trade were other people seeking to use the smart contract to their own advantage and taking on risky trading positions that they, apparently, did not fully understand.”

However, these charges are an elevation in proceedings nonetheless. Whether or not those charges will stick is reliant on a subsequent case.

Though there is a sticking point to any case: a second press release confirms "he is currently at large."

What year is it? Because I was reliably informed this was 2025, but it appears I should be expecting a new lockdown at any moment. Bitcoin has surged to its highest all-time price, Donald Trump is about to step into the White House once more, and meme coins are battling it out for market share—except this time, the chief proponents are none other than the incoming president and first lady.

US president-elect (quite possibly actual president by the time you read this story) Donald Trump launched $Trump over the weekend, a meme coin co-ordinated by CIC Digital LLC, a Trump-affiliated organisation that has previously played a part in handling hot-ticket consumer items like Trump-branded shoes and NFTs.

The price of $Trump rocketed to nearly $15 billion in overall market cap, before nosediving off a cliff down to almost eight billion dollars by Sunday evening, and now appears to have evened out to between nine and eleven billion dollars total value overall.

That has also probably changed by the time you read this. Crypto is volatile, you say? No one's more surprised than me.

However, a contributing factor to $Trump coin's recent stumbles seems to have been the launch of $Melania, a meme coin released by first lady to-be Melania Trump on Sunday, the day before Trump's inauguration. Speculation suggests that investors dropped off the Trump-train in favour of hedging their bets with his wife instead, causing a dip in uptake of the gold-toilet-enthusiast's crypto token.

Meanwhile, bitcoin has hit an all-time high of $109,000 per token, thanks to a so-called "god candle" that sent the previously-beleaguered coin soaring to new heights. What with the new president now seemingly a fan of the crypto market (after previously labelling bitcoin a "scam" and expressing distrust of cryptocurrency as a whole), it seems the market is reacting to the idea that the incoming administration may be on the cusp of legitimising crypto in ways previously thought unlikely.

Sorry, I zoned out for a second there and thought about the infinite possibilities of multiverse theory, as we appear to be in the worst one. Anyway, the really important question here is what this means for us PC gamers, or at least I'm making it the most important question for the sake of my sanity.

A new crypto-mining boom affecting GPU prices, perhaps? Well, who knows at this point. Certainly, crypto mining is still very much a current issue, although it comes in many forms, as even a Raspberry Pi can be cattle-prodded into mining crypto (badly).

Many coins are now Proof of Stake but there are enough mineable (Proof of Work) coins on the market that, given the crypto upsurge as a whole, it's not entirely unthinkable that demand for crypto-crunching hardware might put a squeeze on graphics card stocks once more. It's in the realms of possibility at least, although it seems very unlikely at this point.

Energy costs are a massive factor, for one. And bitcoin isn't mined on GPUs anymore (at least at scale, thanks to the rise of ASICs), although that's not ruling out the possibility that a new proof-of-work, GPU-friendly coin may rise, kraken-like, from the depths of our greatest fears.

A lot of things are possible from this point forward. That's the takeaway. It's a brave new day for the world's biggest superpower, and, it seems, a brave new day for cryptocurrency too.

In July 2022 Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled 'Cryptoqueen' behind a pyramid scheme called OneCoin, was placed on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list. Accused of defrauding investors of an amount estimated at between $3.6 to 4.5 billion, the Bulgarian-born Ignatova disappeared in 2017. In June last year came a new development: The FBI increased the existing reward of $250,000 to a whopping $5 million for any information that leads to her arrest.

The question is why and, according to one of those who've spent the time investigating this story, it's all about turning the head of someone in her entourage. "We examined some of her connections to organized crime groups, and many people believe that if Dr Ruja is still in hiding, it will be with their protection," says Jamie Bartlett, the journalist behind the BBC podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen. "$100,000 wouldn't persuade a junior member of a crime syndicate or a personal bodyguard to call the FBI’s hotline—it's far too risky. But $5 million just might.

"So to me, the increased reward is a sign that the FBI are now refocusing their efforts on the people around Dr Ruja, trying to tempt her close associates to get in touch. We will probably know within a few weeks if it’s worked."

Bartlett said the above in July 2024 when the new reward amount was announced. Seven months down the line there's been no major breakthrough, but there have been some developments. Before we get onto those, however, let's briefly go over what the OneCoin fraud was.

OneCoin appeared in 2014 and was essentially a multi-level marketing scam, but with crypto at the heart, and one of those schemes where people earn commissions for getting others to become "investors." A pretty straightforward pyramid scheme, in other words—but Ignatova was the key factor behind its spectacular growth. Highly educated, fabulously dressed, persuasive, charming, and capable of securing huge investments from her targets.

Ignatova and her associates managed to keep the appearance of legitimacy around OneCoin for several years before regulators started getting suspicious. The OneCoin exchange was closed in 2017 and Ignatova disappeared: She hasn't been seen since. The money lost to the scam is estimated at up to $4.5 billion, and Ignatova was subsequently charged with multiple financial crimes and been on the FBI's Most Wanted list since 2022.

Since the FBI bumped up its reward to $5 million last year, there have been some new elements in the story. The first is surprising only inasmuch as it took this long: In August last year Ignatova plus seven other people and four companies were hit with a global asset freeze.

All the individuals and companies are alleged to have some connection to OneCoin, which in some cases are more obvious than others. OneCoin co-founder Sebastian Greenwood is one of the individuals hit, but is also currently enjoying a 20 year stretch in a US prison for his role in the fraud. Others targeted by the freeze include Brits Christopher Hamilton and Robert MacDonald, who have been accused by the US of laundering OneCoin-linked money, though extradition attempts have thus far failed.

It's in the details of hearings like this that the scale of Ignatova's fraud becomes less abstract. Two companies based in Guernsey were subject to the order, both of which had been used by Ignatova to purchase a penthouse in Kensington for a cool £13.5 million, with a £1.9 million apartment thrown-in for the use of her bodyguards.

That freeze may seem like it's taken far too long to happen, which is undoubtedly true, but it's also a function of the OneCoin fraud being so mind-bogglingly vast, and it taking years for the authorities to catch up. The fraud has also become much more well-known about thanks to the dogged work of investigative journalists, and the victims themselves coming forward (one group was especially key to the asset freeze).

That wasn't the only Ignatova news subsequent to the FBI bounty, but it's the most solid. Otherwise we're in the realms of rumours about a missing person, which needless to say need taking with a full shaker of salt. Bellingcat and BBC investigative journalist Yoran Tsalov claimed in late November that Ignatova may be hiding out in Russia, arguing she "has been linked to multiple people and interests connected to the Kremlin."

Tsalov points to an interview in the Missing Cryptoqueen with Frank Schneider, Ignatova's former security adviser, which discusses these links, and adds that some of the companies linked to laundering OneCoin money are connected to the former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich (who has been found guilty of treason in Ukraine and now lives in exile in Russia). Yanukovich's corruption while in office is extensively documented.

But wait: Others say "nyet." German filmmaker Johan von Mirbach has been investigating Ignatova for years and in a recent documentary broadcast on German station WDR claims that she is alive, well, and hiding out in Cape Town in South Africa (thanks, CoinGeek). Mirbach claims that "security agents" in South Africa had come across information about Ignatova while investigating the murder of four Bulgarians linked to the crime ring that, in other versions of the story, killed Ignatova years ago.

Mirbach claims Ignatova has been spotted in Cape Town, albeit not by him, but beyond that the case is largely circumstantial. Ignatova's brother Arthur, for example, has worked in South Africa and regularly travelled there, including one year after her disappearance.

The more lurid theory to end all is that Ignatova is already dead: And has been for a long time. The Bulgarian investigative reporting site BIRD published a report in 2023 based on internal police documents from the country, which say an informant overheard the brother-in-law of a drug lord saying Ignatova was murdered on a yacht off Greece, with her body chopped-up and chucked overboard. This was apparently to conceal the Bulgarian drug lord's involvement in OneCoin.

The FBI reckons Ignatova is still alive, travels with "armed guards," and "may have had plastic surgery," though as you get further into this story and the Bulgarian crime networks and mafia bosses, a fake nose may seem like the least surprising detail. If Ignatova is out there, and wasn't killed long ago, there probably are more terrifying people looking for her than the FBI.

Ignatova remains the only woman on the FBI's most wanted list. Her capture would be worth a life-changing amount of money and, if she is out there, you have to think sooner or later someone's going to forget the OneCoin, and go for the real thing.

Do Kwon, the South Korean crypto baron and fugitive, has been extradited to the United States after going on the run in late 2022. Kwon was the man behind the company Terraform, which ran the cryptocurrencies TerraUSD and Luna, both of which collapsed in 2022. That sparked a contagion in the wider crypto market, and they're estimated to have cost investors $40 billion USD.

Do Kwon fled South Korea shortly after the crash, after an arrest warrant was issued, and eventually pitched up in Montenegro. He was arrested there in March 2023 after attempting to board a flight to Dubai, since when he's been engaged in fighting his extradition: Montenegro does not have an extradition treaty with either South Korea or the United States.

But in December 2024 the Montenegrin Ministry of Justice approved his extradition to the United States, the Supreme Court having ruled all conditions were fulfilled, and claims Do Kwon himself agreed to it. The onetime king of crypto was handed over to the Feds at Podgorica airport, added Montenegro's interior ministry in a statement.

Do Kwon will face charges of having deceived investors about the stability of the TerraUSD cryptocurrency, a so-called stablecoin which is intended to hold its value against a real-world asset (in this case the US dollar), and how an app was using the Terraform blockchain. The US says he Kwon was behind the failure of both assets and is guilty of "orchestrating a multi-billion dollar crypto asset securities fraud." The charges include conspiracy to defraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, and wire fraud.

Kwon has denied any wrongdoing until this point, though his plea could change now that he's in the US justice system.

Do Kwon was both the boss and public face of TerraUSD and the self-described "Lunatic" driving the Luna cryptocurrency. The collapse of both in May 2022 saw their value plunge to near-zero, with Terraform Labs losing more than 99% of its value in 48 hours, sparking a wider panic and a loss of around $40 billion on crypto markets. This is considered the major factor behind that year's wider crypto catastrophe, which got so bad it even dinked the crypto sector's poster boys including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Numerous smaller crypto firms went under, as well as apparent giants like FTX (with that company's founder Sam Bankman-Fried now doing 25 years).

After his escape to Montenegro, Do Kwon had tried to argue he should be extradited to South Korea (he is from Seoul) rather than being sent to the US. But he probably didn't endear himself to the Montenegrin authorities by arriving on a fake passport, and later trying to leave with one.

Terraform Labs unsuccessfully fought the US indictment before filing for bankruptcy in the US in January 2024. Do Kwon agreed in June 2024 to pay an $80 million civil fine and be banned from crypto transactions as part of a $4.55 billion settlement Terraform reached with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Do Kwon will soon appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Lehrburger in Manhattan federal court. It's a far cry from his heyday in 2021, when the king of the "Lunatics" could do no wrong. Always outspoken, Do Kwon even tried to brazen it out when everything started collapsing around him. In his last interview to date, he got philosophical about the prospect of jail: "Life is long." Yes, if you're lucky. But when you carry the can for something like this, the jail time probably will be too.

If you've experienced a crypto-jacking from an online exchange in the past twelve months, there's a decent chance your cyber cash may have been the victim of a North Korean hack. That's according to a report from blockchain analysis company Chainalysis, which says that a massive $1.3 billion worth of stolen internet funny money this year can be attributed to the actions of state-sponsored North Korean hackers.

"In 2023, North Korea-affiliated hackers stole approximately $660.50 million across 20 incidents; in 2024, this number increased to $1.34 billion stolen across 47 incidents—a 102.88% increase in value stolen" says the report (via Bleeping Computer).

A number of large scale hacks are primarily to blame, according to the report, although small scale attacks appear to also be on the rise.

Notable high-profile incidents in 2024 attributed to North Korean-sponsored hackers include a $50 million heist of Radiant Capital, "a cryptocurrency that operates on an omnichain money market, aiming to consolidate fragmented liquidity across various blockchain protocols."

Yep. Anyway, Chainalysis says that while the number of crypto thefts overall is the highest its ever been this year, with 303 major incidents reported, 2022 still remains supreme when it comes to most money stolen, with a staggering $3.7 billion in crypto estimated to have been lost.

Regardless, that $1.3 billion figure accounts for 61% of the $2.2 billion total of funds stolen from crypto platforms in 2024, according to the report.

Most of the incidents were said to occur between January and July, when 72% of the total yearly value was pilfered. The analysts noted that DPRK-associated hackers conducted more frequent attacks than average over the year as a whole, which may indicate more capacity to execute large-scale attacks than years previous.

Earlier this year, it was reported that CoinStats, a cryptocurrency portfolio management app with over 1.5 million users, suffered a security breach that compromised 1,590 crypto wallets. The attack was blamed on North Korean hackers, specifically the Lazarus hacking group, a shadowy organisation said to be made up of an unknown number of individuals allegedly working for the government of North Korea.

The group has previously been blamed for multiple online crimes, including a $12 million cyber heist from the Bandcom Del Austro in Ecuador, and an attack on the Bangladesh Bank in which 35 fraudulent transactions were issued via the SWIFT network to transfer close to $1 billion in funds.

Only five of the transactions were successful, but it still amounted to $101 million being transferred to accounts traced to the Phillipines and Sri Lanka.

Still, it seems that groups like Lazerus are zeroing in on the once-again-booming cryptocurrency market. Is this the point where I remind you that crypto is still the wild west, and your money is better kept in... ah forget it. If the headline hasn't convinced you by now, not much else will. Happy holidays, everyone. Stay safe out there.

Ah yes, Web3 is going just great, in case you were wondering. For a rare few, investing in cryptocurrency has been a swift shot into extreme wealth, but many have been left by the wayside. For the Gen Z Quant Kid—a 13-year-old who pocketed $30,000 from selling a cryptocurrency he created—it's been a straight up nightmare from thereon out.

A while back, the teenager known as Quant Kid created the Memecoin Gen Z Quant in an attempt to get rich, and invested $350 of his own money on 51 million tokens (around 5% of the total in circulation says Wired). 

Just eight minutes later, during his live stream on Pump.Fun, the kid executed a rug-pull, screaming "Holy fuck! Thanks for the twenty bandos" and making off with around $30,000.

After that little display, and the plummeting coin value, needless to say the coin's other early investors weren't happy. His rug-pull attempt was soon met with what's called a revenge pump, in which investors bolstered Quant to the point where its peak market cap hit around $85 million. If the kid hadn't immediately noped out, he'd now be worth more than $4 million, according to Decrypt.

What's more, enraged investors took it upon themselves to target the teen and doxx him and his entire family, publicising his home address and school, which resulted in some pretty nasty comments left on his mom's Instagram account over the incident.

Rumors then emerged that someone allegedly took it upon themselves to dognap their family pet and launch Memecoin BARI around the dog's likeness, demanding an apology from the child (Tribune, Web3isgoinggreat, CryptoTimes).

Gen Z Quant kid then created another Memecoin named I’m Sorry, and one named after another of his dogs, Lucy. He pushed his profits up to $50,000 with them, but who knows where his poor dog has been left in this mess of a Web3 saga.

As the holiday season approaches, I'm sure many of us are looking for the perfect gift, or perhaps just something to wear to the office Christmas party to induce an appropriately aghast reaction.

In which case rejoice, dear readers, for I have been shown the true face of holiday cheer—and it's this vomitorious Christmas jumper.

Or sweater, if you're on the other side of the Atlantic and really insist. It's the perfect gift for the crypto fan in your life, or perhaps someone who's recently become rich/broke off the back of the most recent run on gloriously intangible money that's previously contributed to ruining graphics card pricing forever.

Bitter, moi? Still, this is actually for a good cause, or at least, half of it is. Notjust clothing promises that 50% of proceeds will be donated to mental health causes across the globe, so you can finally feel good about putting money towards something crypto-related.

Notjust describes itself as "a registered social enterprise built up of socially conscious creatives" that creates "ethical and sustainable products that drive positive social impact", and cause an impact this jumper certainly does.

From the repeating bitcoin motif to the catchy crypto-inspired phrases around its mid-section, it's certain to make all those around you very much aware of your internet money fascinations.

Or your desire to sear your colleague's eyeballs with its fantastically ugly colour palette. There's also a somewhat-matching bitcoin cryptocurrency scarf to "complete the look", and even an ethereum version for those whose coin interests lie elsewhere.

Call me old-fashioned if you like (or British, which is virtually the same thing), but if we're going down the ugly Christmas jumper route I prefer this Pot Noodle-inspired little number:

Mmm, tasty. For those unaware, a Pot Noodle is a horrendous-yet-somehow-good instant noodle snack, popular in the UK with students, the lazy, and the too drunk to cook.

All of which I've been at some point in my life, so my allegiance runs deep—as does my desire to take this years Ugly Christmas Jumper award from my hardware overlord Dave James, who's already wearing his gorgeous Intel model, just like now-retired ex-CEO, Pat Gelsinger.

Should your tech-related Christmas jumper needs remain unfulfilled, Microsoft has some form in this regard. It's previously released several Windows-themed ugly sweaters for the holiday season, although this year's entry seems missing from its product page this year.

I'll keep an eye out for any more ugly jumper entries between now and the big day itself, but I think the crypto-themed entry above has to take the crown for tech-related vomitknits of 2024 so far.

James Howells is someone we've reported on a few times in the past. Back in 2013, Howells had a significant collection of 7,500 bitcoin stored on a hard drive. That collection ended up in the trash and subsequently taken to a local landfill. For over 10 years it's sat somewhere in the midst of that pile of waste—now Howells is taking his local authority to court to get it back.

Even at the time of the bitcoin's disposal it was worth a pretty penny—today it's worth around £500 million.

That's a sum of cash that would be undeniably difficult to just let go of. Though the promise of such a booty has also become a powerful tool in earning Howells help from various legal teams and data recovery engineers—reportedly working pro bono for a slice of the bitcoin millions.

The case is currently being fought at Cardiff civil and family court, which is dealing with Newport City Council's bid to ditch the case before it reaches a full trial. Howells wants to take the case to court to retrieve what he believes is still his legal property.

James Goudie KC representing the authority suggests (via The Guardian): "Anything that goes into the landfill goes into the council’s ownership."

Meanwhile, Dean Armstrong KC representing Howells said (via the BBC): "we seek, plainly and candidly, a declaration of rights over the ownership of the bitcoin."

Armstrong also noted the search would be a "precise excavation" of a "small area which we have been able to identify."

There's a lot of, probably fair, references to 'needles in haystacks'. Though Armstrong also argues they've whittled down the haystack to a much smaller haystack and would be able to identify a smaller location where they believed the drive to be.

Ahead of the case, a Newport City Council spokesperson said (via South Wales Argus): "The council has told Mr. Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit, and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area."

Howells, of course, disagrees with this statement, saying he has a team ready to go that could excavate a landfill within environmental guidelines and at no cost to the public, which has been another concern in this case. The council argues even dealing with Howells' claims are costing the taxpayer money, and Goudie adds "Bitcoin enthusiasts are not above the law."

Howells had previously offered to give the council £50 million if he discovered the hard drive and could recover the bitcoin fortune. At that time, it was worth about half of what it is now. Bitcoin's value has surged massively in recent months as investors try to rally the cryptocurrency (if you can even really call it that anymore) over $100,000. They have not succeeded yet and Howells' lost fortune has not yet become a lost billion.

A single bitcoin is currently worth around £75,000 ($96,000). Back in 2013, a single Bitcoin was worth around 1/1000th of that.

The judge has not yet passed a judgement on whether this initial case will go to a full trial—probably wise to weigh up the options.

Though you have to wonder what sort of state a hard drive would be in after 10 years being buried in a dump.

There's surely some argument to be made that, after a time, the trash becomes almost an insulating layer on itself. Layers of layers of trash protecting the bitcoin millions like layers of pasta sheets protecting a lasagna's meaty filling. Though you dread to think of the oozes and gunks in any city's landfill site. Even with the best recycling systems in the world (Wales is pretty good on the ol' recycling front) some perishable goods must've gotten through into that landfill over 10 years.

But doth a goo ruin a hard drive?

While generally seen as more susceptible to complete malfunction in a user's PC compared to a more modern solid state drive, that's largely because the HDD has a spinning platter with moving parts. A solid state drive is, you guessed it, solid. A HDD's spinning bits might break, but you don't need those to work to recover the data remaining on the drive.

The outer casing of a hard drive could be ruined, even the head damaged, and a professional might be able to do a good job of getting some of the stuff of it. Especially a drive that's not been actively wiped. It all depends on the type of hard drive it is, how many platters it uses, and if any or all of the platters have been significantly damaged. Only the bits without damage can be recovered but that's still potentially a whole lot of usable data.

The good news is, a hard drive is a pretty robust design—a big metal box surrounding layers of platters that sort of protect one another—again, like a lasagna—so maybe Howells and his team of pro bono experts are in with a chance. Now to find and prove in law that he still owns it—does one own their trash once the binmen take it away?

Cyber heists have lost some of the romance of the old-fashioned kind, haven't they? Give me a stripey sweater and a swag bag any day of the week.

Still, they appear to be far more lucrative than your old-fashioned Dog Day Afternoon histrionics, as a US hacker has just been sentenced to five years hard time for his role in the theft of 120,000 bitcoin, which would equate to just under $10.8 billion's worth of the cryptocash today.

Ilya Lichtenstein pled guilty to money laundering charges brought against him for the 2016 Bitfinex cryptocurrency hack, in which nearly 120,000 of precious Bitcoin was swiped off the exchange over the course of more than 2,000 fraudulent transactions (via BBC News). Lichtenstein is said to have enlisted the help of his wife, Heather Morgan, to launder the ill-gotten gains using a variety of methods, but both were apprehended in 2022.

The couple utilised a complicated network of fictitious online accounts, automated transactions, and dark web marketplaces to convert the cryptohaul into what they hoped would be untraceable funds, including exchanging a portion of them for gold coins.

Morgan herself seems to have been less than discrete about her ballooning income, as she posted multiple hip hop videos under the alias Razzlekhan, calling herself "the infamous crocodile of Wall Street" who's "more fearless and shameless than ever before."

Morgan is currently out on bail and is scheduled to be sentenced on November 18.

At the time of the theft, 120,000 bitcoin would have been worth around $71 billion, but thanks to the, err, unpredictable nature of the crypto market, it was worth more than $4.5 billion at the time of the couple's arrest. That figure has ballooned since the most recent Bitcoin price surge, and at the time of writing would be worth approximately 10.8 billion dollars.

That may have changed by tomorrow, or indeed in the next five minutes. Crypto be crazy, y'all.

Quite the lucrative haul then, and they would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for that meddling, err, US government. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at the time of the arrests that the financial seizure was the biggest in the history of the US Department of Justice.

It just goes to show, crime doesn't pay. Or rather it might, briefly, before the full weight of the DOJ comes tumbling down on your heads and your wife's hip hop career starts going viral for boasting about your financial prowess. There's probably a lesson to be learned here, but I'll be darned if I can find it.

On Tuesday, November 5, the price of bitcoin hit just shy of $70,000. On Monday, November 11, mere days later, that price now sat under $90,000, the highest figure bitcoin has ever been at. Though you may attribute this to Donald Trump winning the 2024 United States election, and it certainly helps, there's seemingly a much bigger picture.

First, it's worth noting that Donald Trump is seemingly responsible for an initial surge, and surrounding factors made that surge much higher. Donald Trump said in October that he wants to make America the "crypto capital of the planet", even taking crypto donations for his campaign trail.

He spoke positively at a bitcoin conference in June this year, which is in stark contrast to when he told Newsmax cryptocurrencies' value was "highly volatile and based on thin air" just before urging that the United States should highly regulate it back in 2021. His newfound support for cryptocurrency, when paired with the very vocal backing of Elon Musk, who is himself a backer of cryptocurrency, choreographs that his cabinet will be favourable to it.

However, Jesse Myers, the founder of OnrampBitcoin, which offers bitcoin financial services, suggests that this recent growth is related to post-halving, the act of halving the amount of bitcoin generated daily. As this figure goes down, the incentive to mine goes down with it, effectively enforcing a level of scarcity for the coin.

This is intended to be a countermeasure to broader inflation trends and is part of the coin's purpose to be used as an actual currency. There are only 21 million total bitcoins that can be mined, with just shy of 20 million of them already being found, so post-halving stops the world from getting to the collective number quicker.

Speculative trading on this coin specifically is partially responsible for the astronomical figures we tend to see the coin go for, as those who hoard the coin see its value go up and potential entrants to the market are put off doing so.

Importantly, this post-halving happens every four years, and bitcoin has seen a sudden spike a few months after post-halving every single time. Trump's win seems to have led to a surge but that surge has only spiked as high as it has thanks to the ongoing scarcity of the coin.

Post-halving also happened in April 2020, when we saw the sharpest percentage spike in price since the start of the coin. So, regardless of who wins the presidential race in 2028, it is likely to do the same.

The term "heist" brings to mind masked intruders, ticking clocks and a getaway driver that's never there when you need them, leading to a whole lot of kerfuffle and a tense car chase. Turns out the modern version might be a whole lot faster than Hollywood movies have had us believe, as two US brothers have been charged of stealing $25M worth of ethereum in just 12 seconds.

Anton Peraire-Bueno and his brother, James Peraire-Bueno, have been charged with wire fraud and money laundering in relation to an incident in April 2023 in which $25 million in ethereum cryptocurrency was stolen by a method prosecutors refer to as "the Exploit" (via BBC News). 

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan say that the computer science and math skills the two developed while studying at MIT university helped them carry out the attack, which relied on exploiting a vulnerability in MEV-boost software. A program used by many ethereum network validators to check new transactions are legitimate. 

US Attorney Damian Williams said: "As we allege, the defendants' scheme calls the very integrity of the blockchain into question". Officials also say that the brothers refused to return the funds when confronted by a representative for ethereum, and took further steps to launder their ill-gotten gains.

Cryptocurrency markets have been experiencing something of a surge in value since the start of this year, with ethereum maintaining its position as the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap next to bitcoin. 

The news of this heist and the potential blot on the integrity of the ethereum blockchain doesn't seem to have hurt its value, as the currency appears to be holding steady at around $3,000 per coin as of the time of writing, although—crypto being crypto—it could be worth about the same as a bag of chips in the next hour or two. The "future of money", folks. It sure is a rollercoaster!

That being said, while cryptocurrency seems to remain something of a wild west frontier, popular coins like bitcoin and ethereum have previously relied on the perceived stability and security of their networks as a major selling point.

The fact that two individuals were able to defeat the supposedly secure system and transfer such a large sum in such a short amount of time may cause some investors to lose a little sleep, although it doesn't seem to have caused much of a dent in the market as things stand.

Personally, the mere mention of the term ethereum brings back unhappy memories of GPU shortages, the pandemic and endless crypto-boom headlines. Still, the markets continue to rise and fall, and while huge amounts of money remain tied up in crypto networks, they'll always remain a target for those looking to beat the system and make a quick buck. 

It's not every day that you read that a five-year investigation to crack an illegal operation involving billions of pounds worth of bitcoin was solved thanks to the excessive spending habits of an ex-takeaway worker, but that's exactly what's recently happened. The person in question has been found guilty of laundering 150 bitcoins, worth a mere £7.5 million, but the UK's Metropolitan Police ultimately seized a staggering total of 61,000 cryptocoins.

Details of Jian Wen's conviction (via The Guardian) highlight that she originally lived and worked in a Chinese takeaway restaurant in Leeds, UK, before becoming involved in a complex and large scale cryptocurrency scam, which involved using illegally-gained bitcoins to pay for expensive houses and luxury items.

In 2017, Wen was tasked with acting as an employee of an international jewellery business, and initially rented a property in London (apparently worth £17,000 per month) and from there, she travelled the world, using the cryptocurrency to attempt purchasing further properties in London and Dubai, as well as expensive jewellery in Zurich. She even used them to pay for private school tuition fees for her son.

However, in the UK, there are laws that basically go along the lines of if you're moving or spending very large amounts of money, you also need to be able to prove exactly where that cash has come from. In Wen's case, she attempted to pass the money-laundering checks by claiming it was all earned from bitcoin mining.

Her claims weren't believed, the authorities were alerted, and ultimately she was arrested and convicted on a money laundering charge, over 150 bitcoins worth £7.5 million. However, in the investigation, the police seized a total of 61,000 bitcoins, all stored in a multitude of devices, which is worth over £3 billion at today's prices.

While the crypto-scam has been broken, the primary ring leader has yet to be caught, and it's thought that the operation was part of a larger investment fraud scheme, taking place in China. If you are wondering what will ultimately happen to all those bitcoins, the UK's Crown Prosecution Service is working on a so-called civil recovery investigation, with the aim of the cryptocoins being forfeited.

Keen followers of cryptocurrency will know that it's a favoured means of laundering money, in the world of fraudsters and scammers, but this particular story shows that the scale of it all is perhaps beyond most folks' understanding.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved Bitcoin exchange-traded products (ETPs) following years of opposition—though not without stern warnings about the "myriad risks" of investing in cryptocurrency. The news was greeted with enthusiasm by crypto-lovers and has led to a minor spike in Bitcoin's value, with one Bitcoin being worth around $44,000 on 8 January and at the time of writing just over $47,000.

The approval relates specifically to 11 spot Bitcoin ETPs, asset portfolios which can be purchased by anyone from ordinary investors to 401(k)s to pension plans. This is for sure a big push into the investment mainstream, and comes after the SEC resisted various earlier efforts to approve Bitcoin trades because of the potential for fraud and market manipulation. This has led to various court cases between the SEC and crypto firms, most of which have gone against the SEC, a particularly notable example being last year's victory for Grayscale (a Bitcoin trading firm that wanted to offer an ETP) in which the ruling called the SEC's reasoning arbitrary.

The SEC's approval should therefore be seen as something of a begrudging one, and the statement issued alongside it does nothing to dispel that interpretation. "Though we’re merit neutral, I’d note that the underlying assets in the metals ETPs have consumer and industrial uses," said SEC Chair Gary Gensler, "while in contrast bitcoin is primarily a speculative, volatile asset that’s also used for illicit activity including ransomware, money laundering, sanction evasion, and terrorist financing.

"While we approved the listing and trading of certain spot bitcoin ETP shares today, we did not approve or endorse bitcoin. Investors should remain cautious about the myriad risks associated with bitcoin and products whose value is tied to crypto."

ETPs tend to be marketed as high-risk investments with the potential for big rewards, so this won't necessarily surprise anyone. The spot Bitcoin ETPs will be trading in Bitcoin throughout its myriad price fluctuations, but investors are betting on the performance of the overall package (ETPs themselves are traded on the stock exchange) which will include multiple other adjacent assets. 

Perhaps most importantly for the average investor, none of this involves buying Bitcoin directly: So no dealing with the myriad of questionable crypto exchanges and no need for a crypto wallet.

The news was expected to cause a jump in Bitcoin value, though this happened pre-announcement thanks to the SEC mistakenly announcing the news early on X. Before the official announcement on January 10, the SEC's X account published a post announcing the news just after 4pm ET on January 9. Within 15 minutes it had been deleted and chair Gary Gensler issued a retraction claiming the account had been "compromised" and the tweet was "unauthorised" (hmm). Either way the cat was out of the bag.

Bitcoin's current valuation of $47,200 is a way off its historical high in late 2021, when it peaked at one Bitcoin being worth around $65,000, but that high was swiftly followed by a collapse in value in 2022 (as low as $16,400) in what was generally an awful year for crypto. Bitcoin is the first and remains the most famous cryptocurrency, and its performance is intimately linked to fluctuations in the wider industry (not least because many other crypto assets try to link themselves to Bitcoin). 

It is fair to say, however, that we've travelled a long way from the ideals of Satoshi Nakamoto, the nom de plume of Bitcoin's unknown creator. Bitcoin was announced to the world in 2008 alongside a white paper setting out the idea of a decentralised financial system where people dealt with each other directly without the need for middlemen and financial institutions. Companies like Blackrock frenziedly trading Bitcoin bundles on the US stock exchange ain't exactly that.

2022 was the year where cryptocurrencies and the industry around them lost a lot of credibility, thanks to the collapse of enormous exchanges like FTX and the overnight failure of major cryptocurrencies like LunaUSD. 2023 has been the year where we started to see the consequences for some of this stuff, alongside a whole host of more familiar malfeasance. 

The year got started with the announcement of Cryptoblast: Nope, not another shitcoin, but the first crypto-backed energy drink. What does that mean? Who cares but we made Jorge drink that garbage anyway, and he says it tastes "like it was secreted on the blockchain." Nummy!

More consequentially, March saw Nvidia announce it was kicking crypto to the kerb because it "doesn't bring anything useful for society. AI does." And with that, it's the moment you've been waiting for: let's get onto the crooks.

It's the Feds!

It's always nice to start with a smile, so here's one of my favourites: a Turkish crypto baron behind a $2.5B rug-pull declared "I am smart enough to lead any institution on Earth" just before a court sentenced him to 11,196 years in jail.

The year's biggest story in this regard, however, was the trial of the "king of crypto", the former billionaire and founder of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried. Several of his FTX ex-colleagues testified against Bankman-Fried, who pleaded not guilty to seven counts of money laundering and fraud. In November he was found guilty on all counts, and will be sentenced on March 28 next year: He is likely to face decades in prison.

With Bankman-Fried in the slammer, all eyes now turn to fugitive Do Kwon. The self-described "Lunatic" behind Luna and TerraUSD, Do Kwon fled to Montenegro after the more-or-less overnight collapse of both caused a loss of around $40 billion on crypto markets and was the major factor behind the 2022 catastrophe-slash-contagion. He's currently in custody in a court battle to avoid extradition to either South Korea or the US.

The US Department of Justice has been busy elsewhere, targeting dark web crypto-drug traffickers in a May bust that saw 288 arrested. US Attorney General Merrick Garland then channelled his best secret agent voice and warned cyber-criminals: "you can try to hide in the furthest reaches of the internet, but the Justice Department will find you and hold you accountable for your crimes."

The various US enforcement agencies are paying plenty of attention to crypto these days, and in June the huge exchange Coinbase was slammed as it was charged by the Security and Exchange Commission. The SEC made a very stark point in its complaint: 'You simply can’t ignore the rules because you don’t like them.'

Over in the EU, meanwhile, the bureaucrats were busy passing the world's first regulatory framework for the crypto industry: good luck with that.

As ever, various smaller hacks and scams were all around. A bean-obsessed crypto-weeb community got harvested for $2.74m in cryptocurrency & NFTs, the latter including a whole zoo's worth of animal jpegs. Mutant Ape Planet was another $2.9 billion rug pull. Et Tu, Mutant Ape Planet?

Influencer Logan Paul threatened to sue a journalist who called his CryptoZoo project a scam, before backing down, and promising refunds (which ain't gonna happen).

To focus on the games industry for a minute, Sega's infatuation with the blockchain is over, news which arrived with the incredible quote "what's the point if the games are no fun?" CCP announced plans for a blockchain game set in the EVE universe, which had fans in open revolt, while GameStop abandoned its plans for a crypto wallet.

Mined Out

The year overall saw a drop in value for the crypto market, though the scale of this thing is still astonishing: Earlier this year came the news that crypto mining in the US used more electricity than every single computer in the country. The US government estimates such operations used between 30 and 60 billion kWh and, yes, that range of estimate is scary in itself.

And what might these mines be like? Why not ask the residents of Elk County, Pennsylvania, which sounds like a lovely place to live: Or it would be, if it wasn't for that gas well that's been turned into a crypto mine driving the residents crazy with noise. At least that one's easy enough to spot: Massachusetts police were blown-away to find a crypto mining setup squirrelled-away in a school, which had been operating for around six months and used $17,500 of electricity.

Joe Biden's had enough of this malarkey anyway: The president wants to tax crypto miners for "the harms they impose on society."

OpenAI's Sam Altman, when he wasn't getting fired-then-rehired, launched something straight out of dystopian science fiction: the Worldcoin cryptocurrency-adjacent iris scanning project. The goal? To connect (and collect the data of) would-be crypto investors, so that they can be inducted into the totally anonymous crypto-bro ingroup that Worldcoin is offering. All hail the orb, or something.

If you thought things couldn't get dumber, think again. In the year of our Lord 2023, an actual human being held a CO2 reader up to a PC to prove "bitcoin mining has zero carbon emissions".

Finally, some festive cheer. Interpol capped-off the year by arresting over 3500 alleged crypto-scammers, seizing $300 million, and warning nations worldwide to watch out for NFT "rug pulls", which it illustrated with pictures of pixel art cats.

Do Kwon, former crypto darling and now fugitive, was arrested in Montenegro this March while attempting to flee to Dubai. The High Court in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, has now given approval for Do Kwon's extradition, though whether he'll be off to South Korea or the US, both of which have open arrest warrants for him, remains to be decided.

Do Kwon was the main player and public face of the TerraUSD stablecoin and the self-described "Lunatic" driving the Luna cryptocurrency. You can probably tell where this is going. The more-or-less overnight collapse of both caused a loss of around $40 billion on crypto markets and was the major factor behind the 2022 catastrophe-slash-contagion that saw FTX go under, with its founder Sam Bankman-Fried now facing a lengthy jail sentence, and a multitude of other crypto firms go bust.

The one-time crypto baron did what all innocent people do in such a situation, and fled to a country that has no extradition treaty with the US or South Korea, while publicly declaring he wasn't on the run. Sadly for Do Kwon, the High Court has "determined that the legal requirements for the extradition of the accused KDH have been met, at the request of South Korea and the United States of America."

Even now he's trying to angle it. Do Kwon has consented to being extradited to South Korea (he is originally from Seoul) under a shortened process rather than face being sent to the US. The decision on his destination rests with Montenegro's minister of justice Marko Kovač, who has not commented on the current ruling but said on Do Kwon's arrest that "determining which state they will be extradited to will be based on several factors."

Do Kwon had entered Montenegro using a faked passport, after fleeing Singapore in September 2022. He said multiple times he wasn't on the run, which didn't stop South Korea issuing an arrest warrant and shortly thereafter Interpol issuing a Red Notice. The US authorities have filed an indictment against him, saying he orchestrated "a multi-billion-dollar crypto asset securities fraud", with charges including conspiracy to defraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, and wire fraud.

That's a lotta (alleged) fraud. Not to be deterred, Do Kwon's former company Terraform Labs attempted to have the US case dismissed, but this was denied in August 2023.

The collapse of TerraUSD and Luna saw the value of both plunge to near-zero in May 2022, and triggered a huge wave of crypto selling. This got so big it affected the crypto sector's poster boys including Bitcoin and Ethereum, and ever since we've seen one crypto disaster after another: FTX just happens to be the biggest.

The one upside is that this seems to have served as a serious wake up call for regulators, who since 2022's so-called crypto winter have been pursuing the figureheads behind these institutions with a renewed zeal. In his last interview to date, Do Kwon got a little philosophical about the prospect of jail: "Life is long." In some cases yes but, when you're behind something like this, the sentence probably will be too.

The former "king of crypto" Sam Bankman-Fried is currently on trial for fraud in the United States, following the 2022 collapse of his crypto firm FTX. The trial has been running since early October and sees Bankman-Fried facing seven charges total including wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering, all of which he denies. But by all accounts, things are going terribly.

The first two weeks of the trial have seen a slew of Bankman-Fried's former colleagues, friends, and even his ex-girlfriend line up to testify that the crypto king knew exactly what he was doing when transferring money from FTX to the investment firm Alameda Research (i.e. stealing investor money). Several of these people have accepted plea deals for their own roles in the scandal, as part of which they have to give truthful testimony at this trial.

Thus far their evidence has overwhelmingly supported the prosecution's version of events, and Bankman-Fried's defence team have found little joy in the cross-examinations: particularly notable was the testimony of his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, who said "he directed me to commit these crimes."

So the crypto king is getting ready for his greatest, and possibly final, gamble. It was first rumoured that Bankman-Fried would take the stand when his lawyers began arguing for his supply of certain medications in prison, and now his team has confirmed (via the Financial Times) that he will take the stand in his own defence. A court conference on Wednesday saw Bankman-Fried's lawyer Mark Cohen say that, alongside other defence witnesses, "our client is also going to be testifying."

Bankman-Fried is facing life in prison if convicted, so this is as high-stakes as it gets. It's a move that usually indicates the defence has little else to rest on other than personal credibility. The strategy is to be avoided primarily because defendants are not obliged to testify in their own defence in the first place, and it opens them up to cross-examination by the prosecution: so if Bankman-Fried comes off as anything less than totally plausible in front of the jury, it could be a disaster.

"If the jury does not believe him, it's a guaranteed conviction," retired federal prosecutor Jacob Frenkel told the BBC.

But then, this is a man who took the world along with him when building FTX, so it's not like he doesn't have a track record of convincing people. With the trial going the way it has so far, a Hail Mary may be his best hope. Bankman-Fried could take the stand as soon as today, and the defence could rest by the end of the week.

Bankman-Fried founded FTX in 2019 and by early 2022 the crypto exchange was valued at an astonishing $32 billion. But rumours swirled about its balance sheet before a devastating investigation by Coindesk led to a run on FTX and its swift collapse into bankruptcy with an $8 billion black hole in the accounts, leaving millions of small investors out-of-pocket. Bankman-Fried initially hid out in the Bahamas before being arrested and extradited to the US to stand trial.

Three of Bankman-Fried's former friends and colleagues have pled guilty to the charges they face, and testified that among other things he used FTX money to cover debts at Alameda Research, make private investments and political donations, and underwrite the purchase of properties. It is claimed, and prosecutors have tried to show through document trails, that Bankman-Fried hid these transactions and the relationship between the two firms.

Bankman-Fried's defence says that, as the companies grew exponentially, their client was following "reasonable" business practices in uncharted waters. The former king of crypto even gave interviews following the collapse of the companies, in which he admitted to making mistakes but denied committing fraud, telling the BBC "I don't think I tried to do anything wrong." The trial continues.

All hail the orb, crypto-fuelled hoarder of biometric data. Such is the will of OpenAI's Sam Altman, with his Worldcoin cryptocurrency-adjacent iris scanning project. A project that is under scrutiny from government officials.

Yes, Worldcoin is now scanning the irises of humans world over. The purpose? To connect (and collect the data of) would-be crypto investors, so that they can be inducted into the totally anonymous crypto-bro ingroup that Worldcoin is offering. As well as provide a platform for "global proof‑of‑personhood" in a world consumed ever more by AI.

Which doesn't sound anything close to a Torment Nexus moment.

"World ID is a new privacy-first decentralized identity protocol", the site notes. "It enables seamless sign in to websites, mobile apps and crypto dapps, while proving you’re a unique and real person without sharing personal data like names, emails, etc."

Worldcoin is offering $50 in crypto to get your iris scanned at Orb popups appearing in stores all over the world. Along with it, the promise of an anonymized world identity ID. And hundreds of people are lining up to do so, despite immediate reservations one might have over the irony of collecting personal data to keep your personal data safe.

The company is also offering commission to "Orb Operators" for every time they "get people excited about starting their crypto journey", and scan an iris into the totally-forever-secure database.

There are "2,198,745 unique humans on Worldcoin" right now, and growing, which speaks to the popularity of the endeavour. Though, as you might have expected, it's not going unnoticed by the law.

Meanwhile, Germany has been investigating Worldcoin's antics. The country's Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision has been keeping an eye on them since November last year, concerned over the processing of "sensitive data at a very large scale", as the president of said state regulator, Michael Will, told Reuters in a recent email.

"These technologies are at first sight neither established nor well analysed for the specific core purpose of the processing in the field of transferring financial information", Will continues. 

The country's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) is also closely monitoring the company, according to news outlet Handelsblatt's Silicon Valley correspondent, Stephen Scheuer, as "It is not clear if Worldcoin has complied with all laws and rules with the launch" of the Worldcoin cryptocurrency (machine translated). 

Apparently, the company also does not have any kind of licence to support the project. Which bodes well...

And it's not just German officials with their eye on Sam Altman's machinations. Reuters also cites a spokesperson from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, who told them "We note the launch of WorldCoin in the UK and will be making further enquiries".

GameStop chairman Ryan Cohen was big into the crypto hype for a moment there. Now in a totally unseen turn of events, the company looks to be dropping cryptocurrency wallet support. 

But why? As we've seen time and time again, crypto investing is just such a lucrative and stable endeavour. What could Cohen possibly cite as the reason for this dismissal?

"The regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space", that's what. 

According to Bloomberg, GameStop has been keeping pretty quiet about all things crypto in recent calls with investors, and the move away from hosting wallets is likely indicative of a wider withdrawal from it's association altogether.

GameStop launched its digital wallet back in May last year in an attempt to bolster the company in an uncertain tech landscape. 

Months later, CEO Matt Furlong said in face of a bunch of layoffs that "Change will be a constant as we evolve our commerce business and launch new products through our blockchain group."

The company's share price fell 5% soon after half the staff were axed. And it looks like all that change ended up being too much for the company in the end.

Starting November this year, GameStop will remove support for its iOS and Chrome Extension wallets, meaning users will no longer be able to go through GameStop to manage their digital assets, such as NFTs and Ethereum.

The advice from GameStop following the removal of crypto wallet support, is that "all customers ensure that they have access to their Secret Passphrase by October 1, 2023. Any customer with access to their Secret Passphrase has the ability to recover their account in any compatible wallet."

We're not sure what the small print says about any unattended funds in wallets after this time, but I for one can't wait to find out in due course.

Despite being one of the first companies to hop on the blockchain fever of the past couple of years, Sega now wants its major franchises to get off the crypto rollercoaster, as reported by Bloomberg yesterday. Co-Chief Operating Officer of Sega Japan Shuji Utsumi informed Bloomberg that it will keep Sega's blockbuster franchises, such as Yakuza and Sonic the Hedgehog, away from any blockchain plans to avoid "devaluing" them. 

This follows the generally shattered dreams of a blockchain future in the industry at large, as initial experiments with the tech haven't really provided gamers with anything that isn't already there. Even when games have done 'well' they've still managed to stumble, such as Axie Infinity getting hacked to the tune of $600 million last year.

Other titles, such as Square Enix's unpolished-looking NFT thing Symbiogenesis, haven't exactly set the world on fire. NFTs have—mercifully—mostly been bullied out of mainstream gaming, with companies such as Discord quickly turning around on their NFT plans after community backlash. 

Sega do however intend to continue to "let external partners use its lesser-known Three Kingdoms and Virtua Fighter characters for non-fungible tokens", Bloomberg reported. 

Utsumi also took a dim view on the concept of play-to-earn games, which for some reason keep trying to get us to turn our hobby into a day-job: “The action in play-to-earn games is boring. What’s the point if games are no fun?”

He was also lukewarm to the idea of incorporating Web 3.0—a bizarre attempt to decentralise the internet via blockchain mysticism—in upcoming titles: “We’re looking into whether this technology is really going to take off in this industry, after all."

It's relieving to hear a more level-headed approach from a higher-up in a major games company, and hopefully a sign that the non-fungible veil is starting to lift from the industry's eyes, despite Square Enix doubling and tripling down on its plans. The storm hasn't quite passed yet though, as Utsumi is still open to using the tech once it's more developed.

"For the majority of people in the video game industry, what blockchain advocates say may sound a bit extreme, but that’s how the first penguin has always been," referring to the first penguin in a waddle to take an arctic plunge. "We should never underestimate them," said Utsumi, who reckons the technology still "remains useful."

The crypto-trading platform Coinbase is being charged by the SEC in the US for acting as an unregistered securities exchange and broker, which essentially amounts to ruling against a big part of the company's whole schtick.

The SEC accuses the crypto platform of failing to register as a securities exchange, and thus unable to offer significant protections, including inspection by the SEC, recordkeeping, and safeguards. Also that it's been unlawfully running its staking-as-a-service program to allow people to earn profits from proof-of-stake algorithms common to a couple of major cryptocurrencies.

In the 101-page complaint, the SEC alleges that Coinbase, "made calculated business decisions to make crypto assets available for trading in order to increase its own revenues, which are primarily based on trading fees from customers, even where those assets, as offered and sold, had the characteristics of securities."

Whether cryptocurrencies fall under the securities umbrella, meaning they're more akin to shares of a company in some considerations, has been heavily debated over the years. But recently there has been an understanding by the SEC that when a virtual currency is offered as an "investment contract" it falls under the securities category and under the SEC's watchful eye.

A handful of cryptocurrencies are named in the complaint, including AXS tokens, which are a currency in a blockchain game called Axie Infinity, and has digital pets called "Axies". It would seem the SEC has a particular interest in this collection of hairballs.

"Since at least 2016, Coinbase has understood that the Supreme Court’s decision in SEC v. W.J. Howey Co., 328 U.S. 293 (1946) and its progeny set forth the relevant test for determining whether a crypto asset is part of an investment contract that is subject to regulation under the securities laws," the SEC complaint says.

"But while paying lip service to its desire to comply with applicable laws, Coinbase has for years made available for trading crypto assets that are investment contracts under the Howey test and well-established principles of the federal securities laws."

That's what has landed the company in hot water with the SEC, which holds it "defied the regulatory structures and evaded the disclosure requirements that Congress and the SEC have constructed for the protection of the national securities markets and investors."

And that's just the first complaint, the SEC also alleges that Coinbase's Staking Program fell afoul of its rules and regulations.

"Through this staking program, Coinbase allegedly pools each type of customers’ stakeable crypto assets, stakes the pool to perform blockchain transaction validation services, and provides a portion of the rewards generated from this work to its customers whose assets were part of the pool. Coinbase failed to register its offers and sales of this staking program as required by law."

Coinbase was warned of the potential action by the SEC back in March, which it responded to with a blog post titled "We asked the SEC for reasonable crypto rules for Americans. We got legal threats instead."

There's no love lost for Coinbase in the press release for the charge's against it, either.

"You simply can’t ignore the rules because you don’t like them or because you’d prefer different ones: the consequences for the investing public are far too great," Gurbir S. Grewal, direct of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said.

This complaint comes only a day after another was raised by the SEC against major cryptocurrency exchange Binance for similar alleged charges.

Bitcoin and ethereum saw a sharp drop in value today, and Coinbase's share price has plunged 18% at time of writing.

Coinbase's response

Coinbase's CEO, Brian Armstrong, has says the company intends to fight the SEC on the charges to "finally get some clarity around crypto rules."

Armstrong states that the case against it is entirely built around what is and what is not a security, suggesting that Coinbase intends to argue whether what the SEC now classifies as a security stands to scrutiny. The SEC holds that "the Supreme Court’s decision in SEC v. W.J. Howey Co., 328 U.S. 293 (1946) and its progeny set forth the relevant test for determining whether a crypto asset is part of an investment contract that is subject to regulation under the securities laws."

The first regulatory framework in the world for cryptocurrencies has received final approval from the European Union, making the region a pioneer in confronting the collapses, scams and generally skeezy nature of the field. It also marks something of a dividing line for cryptocurrency itself, which as conceived by pioneers like Bitcoin was supposed to exist outside the usual economic structures, as a tool of empowerment for the (anonymous) little guy. It hasn't been that for years, of course, but that was a core idea.

The framework is called the Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) regulation, and with this approval will come into force at some time in 2024 (the European Parliament already gave its own approval in April).  It notably includes a requirement that any organisation established to issue, trade or store crypto assets now has to be licensed in order to operate in the EU.

MiCA also requires firms to collect and make available "certain information about the sender and beneficiary of the transfers of crypto assets", which is an attempt to tackle crypto being used for money laundering which, incidentally, means trades will no longer be anonymous. So there goes another pillar of crypto.

"Recent events have confirmed the urgent need for imposing rules which will better protect Europeans who have invested in these assets, and prevent the misuse of crypto industry for the purposes of money laundering and financing of terrorism," said Swedish finance minister Elisabeth Svantesson.

"Today's decision is bad news for those who have misused crypto-assets for their illegal activities, to circumvent EU sanctions or to finance terrorism and war. Doing so will no longer be possible in Europe without exposure: it is an important step forward in the fight against money laundering."

The final version of MiCA has removed some restrictions that were in earlier drafts, notably pulling back from an outright ban on proof-of-work cryptocurrencies (the ones that are using more electricity than every PC in the US). This was likely dropped because it would have also banned trading in these currencies, though crypto regulation that banned Bitcoin and Ethereum straight out of the gate would have been fun to watch: It's also a reminder just how precarious these assets are, even the established ones, because it easily could have happened.

Lawmakers in the UK continue to work on similar crypto regulations, while the US is studying the EU framework and looking to implement its own version. At the moment, the US authorities have been using existing securities rules to bring legal action in the sector, and last week a commissioner at the U.S. derivatives regulator CFTC admitted "we are wandering in the desert a bit" when it comes to working out new rules. Close alignment is likely because of the global nature of crypto trading and, for their part, crypto firms say this is what they want to see in regulation: a consistent approach across territories (good luck with China).

These plans are being moved forward with urgency after the annus mirabilis of 2022 in crypto, which saw the multi-billion collapse of FTX following on from the contagion that began with the collapse of the so-called stablecoin TerraUSD and the linked cryptocurrency Luna. That really is just the tip of the iceberg: Write a book on the crypto disasters of 2022, and you'd probably need a second volume. And the truth is, no matter how many rules and regulations are layered atop it, crypto is by its nature a speculators' market, and it's hard to see how that will change. Particularly in a world where all of our 'real' money is basically digital now anyway.

Dark web crypto criminals beware. The US Justice Department has issued a warning after arresting 288 dark web ne'er-do-wells over suspected opioid sales on the notorious drug trafficking site, Monopoly Market, which has since been taken down. 

This recent dark web purge, code name SpecTor, targeted the "largest, most violent, and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation in the world: the Sinaloa Cartel." That's according to a powerful speech from US Attorney General Merrick Garland, in which he speaks directly to criminals trying to bypass the law by operating on the dark web (via The Register).

His message?

"You can try to hide in the furthest reaches of the internet, but the Justice Department will find you and hold you accountable for your crimes."

The multi-continental SpecTor operation is the biggest ever of its kind, spanning eight countries aside from the US. It's seen not only the largest number of arrests, but also the US Justice Department's biggest haul of contraband to date. The score includes "117 illegal firearms, 850 kilograms of drugs, and $53.4 million dollars in cash and cryptocurrency", says Garland.

"The drug traffickers are confident that, by operating anonymously on the dark web, they can operate outside the bounds of the law. They are wrong."

Looks like Uncle Sam's coming to shine the proverbial torch of justice on the dark web, then. It's all very dramatic, isn't it? 

Speeches like this make the whole thing feel so much like a stage play; I suspect it's only fuelling the remainder of the fentanyl flogging dark webbers—laughing in their digital web3 halls, believing themselves to be some action movie mastermind who has yet to be caught.

Garland goes on to announce the Justice Department is "cracking down on criminal cryptocurrency transactions and the online criminal marketplaces that enable them." It's clear there is a big focus on cryptocurrency, but as this latest bust goes to show, crypto transactions may not be as spectral as you might think. 

This graph seems so unbelievable it makes the thing a little hard to parse. But basically, cryptocurrency mining in the US sucked down more energy that every computer in the entire country. Every. Single. Computer. 

Yes, even Macs.

Hell, at 50 billion kWh, crypto mining in the US almost used more power than all the televisions. And there are quite a few TVs in the States, in case you'd forgotten.

I've seen all the stories about cryptocurrency mining using more power than [insert country here], and those stats are always pretty astounding. But they always relate to the entirety of the global crypto network, or just the bitcoin mining around the world. And it's quite easy to insulate yourself against such broad terms.

But when it's just about the output of a single country—albeit the single largest contributor to the bitcoin mining industry—to me it seems to hit home much harder.

This all comes from a White House report on the proposed Digital Asset Mining Energy (DAME) excise tax which uses the graph above to highlight just how much power the useless endeavour actually uses. And it's not just the fact it's using a lot of energy and therefore causing a huge amount of carbon emissions, crypto firms can cause the energy prices of the surrounding area to spike for normal citizens, too.

All for the pursuit of "digital assets whose broader social benefits have yet to materialize."

Here's the full image with all the caveats:

The cryptocurrency mining figures in the graph have been estimated using both global crypto energy usage and the United States' share of bitcoin and ethereum mining until 'The Merge' happened. In fairness, as an estimate, the graph shows the potential variation in the overall number, so it could actually be in the low 30 billions kWh used (which still puts it above all those computers) or up to the high 60 billions kWh. 

That upper limit then puts it in the same ballpark as the power drawn in total by every light in the entire country for 2022.

Every other thing on that list has at least some benefit, whether in terms of business or merely societal, but neither bitcoin nor ethereum contribute anything for the harm they cause, even now the latter is not actually mined.

It's surely unsustainable, and hopefully punitive taxes such as the DAME levy will make it so unprofitable to mint useless digital assets that the industry grinds to a halt.  But maybe that's just me on my crypto high-horse. Maybe one day it'll actually be worth all the damage it's wrought. Though I kinda doubt that.

The Biden administration has proposed a new tax intended to make cryptocurrency miners pay society back for the damage they cause. That's actually how the White House puts it, with the so-called DAME tax intended to encourage actually talking specifically about "the harms" such crypto companies can inflict on society as a whole.

"Currently, cryptomining firms do not have to pay for the full cost they impose on others, in the form of local environmental pollution, higher energy prices, and the impacts of increased greenhouse gas emissions on the climate," the White House says of the proposal. 

"The DAME tax encourages firms to start taking better account of the harms they impose on society."

DAME stands for Digital Asset Mining Energy, and the DAME tax would force "firms" to pay a tax equal to 30% of the cost of the electricity they use in cryptocurrency mining. Which would undoubtedly eat away at profits massively, if not entirely, and likely make the whole venture practically pointless. Note the use of the terminology there, however: "firms." 

Currently the tax appears to be more of a drive to impose the levy on large mining operations over at-home prospectors. But then there's hardly any of the latter left.

The reason being that these cryptomining operations not only require massive amounts of electricity, but also increase risks of local authorities over-provisioning for demand that may come and go rapidly, increase prices for others in the area, and suck up what green energy capacity there might be.

"Alongside these known costs and risks, cryptomining does not generate the local and national economic benefits typically associated with businesses using similar amounts of electricity. Instead, the energy is used to generate digital assets whose broader social benefits have yet to materialize."

Ethereum, the largest cryptocurrency responsible for most graphics card-based mining, no longer supports the actual process of mining. Ever since "The Merge" late last year, it has shifted from a proof-of-work algorithm, which used mining to verify transactions and generate fees, to a proof-of-stake algorithm, which doesn't.

Essentially, ethereum took matters into its own hands long before the US government did anything about it.

But there is still cryptocurrency mining today, and that's mostly for non-ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin. The bitcoin mining network is in a bit of a lull right now, due to a wider slump in crypto's value, but bitcoin is still expected to suck up plenty of power. 

The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index expects the entire global bitcoin mining network to use a little more power per year at 133 TWh than the country of Pakistan (132.3 TWh) and just a touch less than Ukraine (134.3 TWh). 

The CBECI's regional power data only goes up to January 2022, but at that point in time the US was the single largest bitcoin mining region globally, following a dramatic dropoff in China due to strict local mining legislation.

The White House offers up an idea of US-based cryptocurrency mining power usage. Using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, some of which are estimates, US crypto power usage was expected to exceed all power usage by computers in 2022. Let that sink in.

The Biden administration expects the DAME tax, which is only a proposal today, would raise $3.5 billion in revenue over 10 years. Though, clearly, that will massively depend on what cryptocurrency mining will be left operating over that time.

Intel has announced that's its Blockscale 1000-series Bitcoin mining chips are toast and won't be replaced with a new generation. The news comes just a year after the first Intel Blockscale processors hit the market.

Speaking to Tom's Hardware, Intel said the move was part of a broader focus on its IDM 2.0 strategy, which has seen Intel tightening its belt and focusing on core operations and products.

Several business units have been closed, wound down or sold off as a consequence, including Optane memory products, its whole SSD division, 5G modems and more. Suffice to say, even before IDM 2.0 Intel had something of a track record for dabbling in new markets only to abruptly exit just as the endeavour seemed to be taking off.

According to the Intel "end of life" notice for its Blockscale products, existing customers have until October to place a final order for Blockscale 1000-series chips. But thereafter, the entire family of mining chips will be goners and the final batch of Blockscale chips will ship in April 2024.

Intel hasn't specifically said that it will never produce a new family of mining chips in future. Instead, nothing new is officially planned and Intel will "monitor the market" for opportunities.

Intel's Blockscale chips were said to be very competitive in performance terms. Designed to accelerate SHA-256 processing for proof-of-work applications, Intel said Blockscale is good for 580 giga-hashes per second. That, apparently, is very much in the same ballpark as existing players in the mining chip market.

Intel also offered relief from the volatile Chinese market for mining chips, which fluctuated dramatically depending on the price of cryptocoin and thus demand for mining chips.

But Intel's exit from the market itself probably reflects the volatile nature of crypto mining. Intel's timing with its initial Blockscale chips a year ago was unfortunate, coming as it did just as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices were crashing.

It's possible PR concerns played a role, too. Intel marketed Blockscale as capable of being run in 256-chip arrays consuming nearly 4,000W of power. At the time, Intel said it was "committed to advancing blockchain technology in a responsible way." But it's arguably not a good look facilitating the huge amount of power being burned mining cryptocurrency.

Of course, Bitcoin pricing has rebounded of late. So it's not impossible that Intel could revise its position. But producing a new family of Bitcoin-specific ASICs would not be the work of a few months. So, any new products are likely years away, should they appear at all.

Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms recently shared a video claiming that its crypto mining operation "has zero carbon emissions," and if you think that's ridiculous, wait until you see how it reached that conclusion.

The astonishing claim was made in a video posted to YouTube and Twitter which begins with a man in a helmet and hi-vis vest walking through thin, patchy Texas scrub as he tests the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. "We've got lots of plants here," he says, which is the first obvious lie, because quite clearly there are not a lot of plants anywhere nearby. "These plants are consuming CO2 and emitting oxygen, which is fantastic. When we measure CO2 out here, we're in the green. There are very low levels of CO2."

At that point, the man in the helmet says that the test is "a great way to establish a baseline," which will be compared to the CO2 readings inside: "If the number does not go up, then the mining rigs are not emitting CO2."

This is where I first started feeling confused. Surely the man in the helmet was not going to take his tester into the mining facility and hold it up to a bank of rigs to see how much carbon dioxide they're kicking out, because that would make no sense. It would barely even qualify as sane. Yet that is exactly what he does.

"Outside, we were at 455 parts per million of CO2," he says, with a completely straight face, after moving indoors. "Inside, we're at 428 parts per million of CO2. So CO2 levels actually decrease a little bit by entering this bitcoin mining facility."

But lo! Perhaps you still have doubts. To reinforce his point, the man in the helmet relocates to an air-cooled mining facility and conducts another test, finding 452 parts per million CO2 in the air. Even more impressively, he conducts yet another test at the exhaust area of the mining rigs, and gets identical results.

"I think the science is conclusive," the man in the helmet says. "The data shows bitcoin mining does not emit any CO2."

The video is way too late to be an April Fool's gag—it was posted on April 10—and there's absolutely nothing to suggest that it's anything but serious. It's possible that I'm falling victim to Poe's Law here, the famed internet adage stating that "without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views." But I can't shake the feeling that the video was posted unironically, not because Riot Platforms believes any of that nonsense, but because it wants to take advantage of viewers who don't know any better.

The video was shared on the same day that Riot Platforms posted a furious reply to a New York Times report entitled "The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin," which dug into the outsized demands that large-scale bitcoin mining puts on the power grid and the negative impacts on the environment that result. Riot Platforms' response characterized the report as "politically driven" and said it was "full of distortions and outright falsehoods," while making the same ridiculous claim as the video.

"To be clear, our bitcoin mining operations do not generate any greenhouse gas emissions, similar to any other data center for Facebook, Amazon or Google—yet we have been singled out," Riot Platforms said. "Our data center uses electricity from the Texas grid, which is the cleanest and most renewable energy-sourced grid in the United States.

"This reporting appears to be driven by fringe political interests, but we will not be deterred from our core mission of helping to build a global, universally accessible network for Bitcoin and supportive, resilient communities where our operations are located."

Believe it or not, this isn't the first time bitcoin miners have played this kind of idiotic linguistic stick-and-move to defend their crappy pseudo-industry. In a letter sent to the US Environmental Protection Agency in May 2022, the heads of numerous crypto-mining companies made the same claim, stating that "bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever." That letter at least conceded that emissions were generated "at the power generation source upstream from the datacenters," but then asserted that somebody was going to use that power anyway, so it might as well be crypto miners.

Nic Carter of venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures, one of the top signatories of that letter, told the New York Times that he was playing a "language game" with the EPA because—much like Riot Platforms—he felt the bitcoin mining industry was being unfairly singled out for its grotesque, rapacious, and utterly pointless abuse of the power grid.

But playing those games in a letter to the head of the EPA, who at least in theory will know better than to fall for it, is a far cry from doing it in a statement meant for public consumption, particularly when you know full well that much of that public doesn't have an understanding of what bitcoin is, how it's generated, or how much power is being used to mine it. It is grossly dishonest at a bare minimum.

Sooner or later, as this ridiculous nonsense gains increased attention, I expect Riot Platforms will release another statement saying the whole thing was just a joke, obviously, and that the press is either too stupid to get it, or too humorless to appreciate it. My preemptive response: It's a joke alright, but not the funny kind.