Ever since China ordered bitcoin farms to "exit in an orderly fashion", Canada has shown signs of becoming the next global mining capital. As more activities move westward, traditional energy companies are surprisingly eager to adopt the trend.
"By burning the gas to power a bitcoin mining facility, Iron Bridge could earn up to $49 per mcf for its gas – more than 30 times the price it currently receives, according to estimates sent to clients by GMP FirstEnergy vice-chairman and co-head of energy sales and trading Trent Boehm."
"Hong Kong’s SFC said on Friday it has taken action against some platforms after receiving complaints from investors and that it would closely monitor them for any signs of fraud in cryptocurrency trading."
IMF chief: Cryptocurrency regulation is 'inevitable'
(CNN Money, by Zahraa Alkhalisi)
"Lagarde said that the IMF is actively trying to prevent digital currencies from being used to launder money or finance terrorism. But she argued that regulators need to focus less on entities, and more on activities -- who is doing what, and whether they're properly licensed and supervised."
The Equifax hack exposed more data than previously reported
(Fortune, by David Morris)
"As with the original disclosures, the additional hacked data is particularly disturbing because victims did not choose to entrust it to Equifax in the first place. Credit-reporting agencies like Equifax gather data on most adult Americans from a variety of sources, including retailers, employers and even social media, while aggressively marketing their ability to keep it all safe."
Honest, open letter to regulators: How to deal with crypto assets
(Hackernoon, by Dr. Kontegna)
"Platform creation feels like a premature activity. I suppose good apps will eventually leave their current platforms. Partly because they will need to optimize to the bordering conditions of the app, and partly because they will not want to remain neighbours to thousands of generic projects."
"Why have these myths persisted? We can blame a few authors and the fact they were bestsellers. In 1637, after the crash, the Dutch tradition of satirical songs kicked in, and pamphlets were sold making fun of traders. These were picked up by writers later in the 17th century, and then by a late 18th-century German writer of a history of inventions."
PoW Change and Key Reuse
(Monero Blog)
"Therefore, we will perform an emergency hard fork to curb any potential threat from ASICs if needed. Furthermore, in order to maintain its goal of decentralization and to provide a deterrent for ASIC development and to protect against unknown or undetectable ASIC development, the Monero team proposes modifying the Cryptonight PoW hash every scheduled fork, twice a year."
Cryptomining malware spread via US, UK and Australian government sites
(Techrepublic, by Nick Heath)
"More than 4,000 websites have been infected with cryptomining malware via a compromised third-party JavaScript library. Sites can ensure third-party libraries haven't been tampered by using the Sub Resource Integrity attribute in the HTML script tag"
Let's talk about usernames
(James Bennett)
In case you think building robust tech is easy, read this piece about how many ways there are for users to pick dangerous usernames and how hard that is to prevent. https://t.co/fm0B8UGhzJ And don't even get me started on dates and times.
— Ed Felten (@EdFelten) February 12, 2018
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