Cryptocurrency & Mining News - Page 1

Well, we're seeing some interesting use of the PlayStation 5 APU... in the form of the AMD BC-250 crypto mining card that has just hit eBay. Check them out:

ASRock has a crazy mining system that cost $15,000 when it was released, packing 12 x AMD BC-250 crypto mining cards in a kitted-out mining chassis. Each of the BC-250 crypto mining cards features the Ariel/Oberon processors that have Zen 2 CPUs and RDNA 2 GPUs, which make up the APU or SoC inside of Sony's current-gen PlayStation 5 console.

However, these BC-250 chips are not fully functioning, as they have partially disabled graphics that were also retro-fitted into the AMD 4700S desktop kit. At the time, the ASRock 12 x GPU mining system was pumping away at 610MH/s on both ETHASH and ETC. That wasn't bad at the time, with $2 per day per GPU.

Binance is in a world of trouble right now, with Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pleading guilty to money laundering and agreeing to resign from the company.

Not only that, but Zhao will pay a $50 million fine and will be barred from any involvement in the Binance business. As for Binance, the company pleaded guilty, accenting the appointment of a monitor and a criminal fine of close to $1.81 billion, and a $2.51 billion order of forfeiture to settle not one but three criminal charges.

The US Justice Department charged Binance, which is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, with conducting an unlicensed money transmitting business, a conspiracy charge, and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The IT maintenance staff working in the Supreme Administrative Court of Warsaw, Poland, were busted with a hidden cryptocurrency mining operation underneath the Supreme Court.

Crypto mining hardware was found inside of the ventilation duct, and the technical floor was discovered in the last couple of months, with the investigation being conducted by the prosecutor's office, while the Internal Security Agency has been notified of the crypto mining operation being busted.

Investigators found computers and components placed inside of the technical floor near the devices supplying power to the building, so the crypto mining operators were sucking down power from the court while making moola on the side. The cryptocurrency mining operation under the Supreme Court in Poland might have been using their power. Still, they had their own networking hardware and modem, meaning they had their own internet connection to the mining rigs, too.

A blockchain and cryptocurrency YouTuber was livestreaming when he accidentally revealed vital information for several of his crypto wallets.

That YouTuber is Ivan Bianco, who runs the channel Fraternidade Crypto, a cryptocurrency-gaming focussed channel based out of Brazil. Bianco was livestreaming when he accidentally revealed some of his seed phrases for his wallets. If you aren't familiar with the crypto nomenclature, seed phrases are basically complex passwords that grant access to wallets containing coins.

Bianco opened a document during his livestream that revealed several seed phrases, which viewers then recorded down and then later accessed, stealing $60,000 worth of coins and NFTs. The theft reportedly occurred within minutes of the seed phrases being revealed, and the YouTuber was seen during a later livestream crying and explaining to his viewers what had happened.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has settled its first-ever enforcement action against a company that was selling unregistered Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

That company is Impact Theory, and according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has been ordered to pay more than $6.1 million in penalties. Impact Theory, the Los Angeles-based media company, raised approximately $30 million from hundreds of investors for its NFT project "Founder's Key".

According to the SEC, Impact Theory wrongfully encouraged investors to purchase the NFTs as a way to invest in the business, and since the company offered investors digital assets through a form of "investment contracts", the NFTs are considered to be "securities". Additionally, the SEC order instructed the company to create a "Fair Fund", which is meant to be a way investors can recover their losses.

The once-popular Non-Fungible Token (NFT) collection Bored Apes has dramatically decreased in value since the collapse of the price of Bitcoin, resulting in fear-uncertainty, and doubt to plague the cryptocurrency space.

Following the dramatic price dip of Bored Apes, which were only highly sought-after NFTs, a group of Bored Ape investors have filed a lawsuit against Sotheby's auction house for a 2021 promotion of a Bored Ape collection. According to the four plaintiffs, the auction house "misleadingly promoted" the NFT collection and colluded with Bored Ape Yacht House creators Yuga Labs in an effort to artificially increase the price of the NFTs.

Sotheby's isn't the only one named in the lawsuit, as the group of investors has also named celebrities such as Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton, which are both accused of promoting the NFT collection without disclosing financial ties to Yuga Labs. For context on how much the price of Bored Apes has dropped, the cheapest of the colorful NFTs was sold back in May 2022 for $400,000, and now the cheapest Bored Ape can be bought for just $52,445.

The price of Bitcoin is an a freefall and according to reports more than $800 million in cryptocurrency positions were liquidated within just 30 minutes.

The mass sell off caused the price of Bitcoin to plummet down to $25,300, the lowest its been since January this year. The liquidations coincide with a recent article published by The Wall Street Journal that revealed rare details about Elon Musk's private space flight company SpaceX.

The report from Wall Street Journal revealed details about Elon Musk's finances and claimed that SpaceX's Bitcoin holdings were $373 million for last year and the year before, but the company has now "sold the cryptocurrency".

Reports indicate that a federal judge has revoked Sam Bankman-Fried's bail after new information surfaced that alleges Bankman-Fried attempted to intimidate witnesses.

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of the now collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been thrown behind bars, according to individuals present at his August 11 hearing in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered that SBF's $250 million bail be revoked, with reports indicating that Kaplan cited SBF's interviews with New York Times reporters where he revealed some information with the likely intention "to hurt or frighten" former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, SBF's former colleague, and girlfriend.

On-chain data indicates the U.S. government is moving its massive stockpile of Bitcoin it seized from James Zhong, the hacker who infiltrated the Silk Road marketplace.

A Bitcoin address named "The U.S. Department of Justice" moved a total of 9,825 BTC to various addresses, which equates to a staggering $302 million dollars. Notably, the U.S. government announced back in March that the 51,351 BTC that it seized from James Zhong, following his infiltration into the notorious online black market. Authorities seized the Bitcoin from Zhong at his home in Georgia in November 2021, and at the time, the stack of BTC was worth $3.6 billion. Reports indicate that Zhong pleaded guilty to wire fraud.

Furthermore, while the U.S. government was moving its multi-million stack of BTC, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that Roger Thomas Clark, a senior adviser to the Silk Road marketplace, was being sentenced to 20 years in prison. These events, funnily enough, occurred on the same day. According to the Department of Justice website, Clark was sentenced for "conspiring to distribute massive quantities of narcotics, arising out of his role as the top adviser to Ross Ulbricht, a/k/a "Dread Pirate Roberts," the owner and operator of the "Silk Road".

Russian security agencies have been targeted by a mysterious hacker that has used Bitcoin technologies to erase and send funds to Ukraine.

Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm that has worked with the US government, has reported that a rogue hacker has targeted cryptocurrency wallets that appear to be owned by Russian security agencies such as the Foreign Military Intelligence Agency (GRU), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and the Federal Security Service (FSB). Notably, the hacker even took the time to write in Russian that these identified wallets were involved in hacking activity.

Chainalysis was able to confirm at least three of the alleged Russian wallet addresses are linked to Russia, with two of them being used in the SolarWinds cyberattack in 2020 and one of them being used to pay for servers that were used in Russia's 2016 election disinformation campaign. Furthermore, the hacker appeared to both erase funds and send funds to Ukraine. The hacker destroyed more than $300,000 worth using the OP_RETURN function in the Bitcoin blockchain, which nulifies previous transactions of Bitcoin.