Author: The Guardian
In the offices of AltCoin, a cryptocurrency hub tucked away in a sidestreet in Istanbul’s bustling Kadıköy neighborhood, two wall-mounted TV sets showed the live value of currencies bitcoin and Ethereum, both graphs sloping downwards. AltCoin’s all-male inhabitants were not worried – in the chaotic world of cryptocurrency, their fortunes could soon change. “A lot of people come here, some are rich, some are poor. But the target is always getting rich – although a lot of people think that if they invest a hundred dollars, they will get a million,” said one founder of AltCoin known only as Shark,…
Eric Adams will find it difficult to spend his cryptocurrency paycheck to pay for the daily costs of living in the Big Apple. New York’s new mayor gets his first paycheck on Friday – and as part of his bid to keep the city “on the forefront of innovation”, he’ll be receiving his wages in cryptocurrency. “New York is the center of the world and we want it to be the center of cryptocurrency and other financial innovations,” Eric Adams said in a press release. But even in the center of the world, trying to live on Ethereum or bitcoin might be…
League has ‘utterly immoral form’ on ‘chipping away at the integrity of the sport’, gambling reform campaigner says. The AFL has “immoral form” and is “corrupting and compromising the sport” with deals such as its $25m sponsorship deal with cryptocurrency firm Crypto.com, Reverend Tim Costello of the Alliance for Gambling Reform has said. The AFL announced the five-year partnership on Tuesday, saying Crypto.com would be the official cryptocurrency exchange and trading platform for the AFL and the AFLW. Crypto.com is a trading platform for cryptocurrencies, digital encrypted currencies that allow payments to be made without banks. It also offers pre-paid debit cards. The company…
Plans by crypto-evangelists for the lavish hideaway have courted mockery and controversy, and now the island is back on the market. Widely mocked plans to establish a tropical haven for cryptocurrency enthusiasts have run into trouble after a contract to buy an island in Fiji for US$12m fell through. A group of crypto-evangelists, led by Max Olivier and Helena Lopez, outlined plans for the island, Nananu-i-cake, in a lavishly animated YouTube video, featuring a wide-eyed crypto bro named Christopher landing by helicopter and being given a guided tour by a talking coin called Connie. The full YouTube clip has been taken down,…
Raised on the remote Shetland archipelago, he left school at 13 to become a trawlerman before moving into construction, eventually earning £85,000 a year digging tunnels for Crossrail. Despite his self-made success, compulsive cryptocurrency trading, alcohol and drug use took over his life. In the fog of multiple addictions, he lost the “addresses” of between five and 10 bitcoins, rendering his digital buried treasure – worth up to £300,000 today – impossible to retrieve. Steven spotted the potential of bitcoin early and he had a talent for trading. But even if he had that money now, his addiction means it…
Cryptocurrency firms bombarded Londoners with a record number of adverts on public transport during 2021, fueling calls for a ban to prevent people being lured into risky investments. The surge in adverts for crypto assets, which are unregulated in the UK, has prompted concerns about the risk of addiction and financial harm, particularly given the wild volatility in the price of digital currencies such as bitcoin, which reached record highs last year before crashing again. It also emerged that Transport for London (TfL) has not implemented a ban on gambling adverts promised by the mayor, Sadiq Khan, allowing the industry to step up its marketing activity…
As the legitimate use of digital currencies grows, there has been a comparable rise in abuse, cybercrime experts say. When the cops arrested scammer Evan Leslie McMahon in March 2019 they found a lot more than just the bootleg Netflix logins that enabled his clients to watch The Witcher on the cheap. Also in the possession of the early-20s hacker were nine electronic wallets containing an alphabet soup of cryptocurrencies – bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, digibyte, XRP, stratis, bitcoin gold and litecoin – that he bought with the proceeds of his crimes. McMahon escaped jail when he was sentenced in April last…
Critics attacked Don’t Look Up for being over the top. But the mania for NFTs shows how on-the-money the movie is On 24 December, the movie Don’t Look Up began streaming on Netflix following a limited release in cinemas. It’s a satirical story, directed by Adam McKay, about what happens when a lowly PhD student (played by Jennifer Lawrence) and her supervisor (Leonardo DiCaprio) discover that an Everest-size asteroid is heading for Earth. What happens is that they try to warn their fellow Earthlings about this existential threat only to find that their intended audience isn’t interested in hearing such bad news.…
There’s no rest for the wicked, eh? While a lot of people have spent the past few weeks trying to do as little as possible, it has been go-go-go for the Trump family. Donald, Ivanka and Donald Jr have been issued with subpoenas as part of a fraud inquiry into the family’s businesses. Melania, meanwhile, has been busy building a business of her own. The former first lady, turned crypto queen, has jumped on the non-fungible token (NFT) trend: last month she was flogging a digital painting of her eyes titled Melania’s Vision (and promising an unspecified portion of the proceeds from her digital…
Bored Ape #79 looks almost as bored as I feel when I think about NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and their supposedly seismic impact on art. My jaw slides, my eyelids hang down and I want to pick lice from my fur. Even though I can identify with Bored Ape #79, I won’t be buying it, unlike Eminem who has bought another in this highly fashionable NFT “art” brand that looks slightly like him. It’s called EminApe and sports a military-urban peaked cap above its enervated face. He reportedly paid around $450,000 (£334,000) for it. Just in case, like me, you have spent the last year…