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| Caribbean-Latin America | ||
| Venezuela to launch new cryptocurrency 'petro' | ||
| 2017-12-04 | ||
[PRESSTV] Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has announced that his country will be introducing a new cryptocurrency to battle the US financial "blockade."
He added that it will be backed by natural resources reserves without providing further details.
The country's own currency, the bolivar, has lost around 57 percent in the last month alone. Maduro's move comes at a time that the cryptocurrency known as bitcoin has soared to an all-time high of well above $11,000 on major exchanges and digital currency indexes. Created in 2009, bitcoin uses encryption and a blockchain database that enables the fast and anonymous transfer of funds outside of a traditional centralized payment system. It has increased more than 10-fold in value so far this year, posting the largest gain of all asset classes, amid increased institutional demand for crypto-currencies as financial and mainstream use has expanded. Meanwhile, ...back at the bunker, his Excellency called a hurried meeting of his closest advisors. It was to be his last. They discussed the officers's efficiency rating system... Representatives of the Venezuelan government and opposition have made "significant advances" in negotiations aimed at resolving the country’s political and economic crisis. | ||
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 Cryptocurrency Fraud (Wikipedia) (This is right up a corrupt governments ally). On August 6, 2013, Magistrate Judge Amos Mazzant of the Eastern District of Texas federal court ruled that because cryptocurrency (expressly bitcoin) can be used as money (it can be used to purchase goods and services, pay for individual living expenses, and exchanged for conventional currencies), it is a currency or form of money. This ruling allowed for the SEC to have jurisdiction over cases of securities fraud involving cryptocurrency.[42] GBL, a Chinese bitcoin trading platform, suddenly shut down on October 26, 2013. Subscribers, unable to log in, lost up to $5 million worth of bitcoin.[43][44] In February 2014, cryptocurrency made national headlines due to the world's largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, declaring bankruptcy. The company stated that it had lost nearly $473 million of their customer's bitcoins likely due to theft. This was equivalent to approximately 750,000 bitcoins, or about 7% of all the bitcoins in existence. Due to this crisis, among other news, the price of a bitcoin fell from a high of about $1,160 in December to under $400 in February.[45] On March 31, 2015, two now-former agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Secret Service were charged with wire fraud, money laundering and other offenses for allegedly stealing bitcoin during the federal investigation of Silk Road, an underground illicit black market federal prosecutors shut down in 2013.[46] On December 1, 2015, the owner of the now-defunct GAW Miners website was accused of securities fraud following his development of the cryptocurrency known as Paycoin. He is accused of masterminding an elaborate ponzi scheme under the guise of "cloud mining" with mining equipment hosted in a data center. He purported the cloud miners known as "hashlets" to be mining cryptocurrency within the Zenportal "cloud" when in fact there were no miners actively mining cryptocurrency. Zenportal had over 10,000 users that had purchased hashlets for a total of over 19 million U.S. dollars.[47][48] On August 24, 2016, a federal judge in Florida certified a class action lawsuit[49] against defunct cryptocurrency exchange Cryptsy and Cryptsy's owner. He is accused of misappropriating millions of dollars of user deposits, destroying evidence, and is believed to have fled to China.[50] On November 21, 2017, an online company (Tether) which backs bitcoin cryptocurrency with fiat currency claims they were hacked, losing $31 million in USTD from their primary wallet.[51] The company has 'tagged' the stolen currency, hoping to 'lock' them in the hacker's wallet (making them unspendable). Tether indicates that it is building a new core for its primary wallet in response to the attack in order to prevent the stolen coins from being used. |
| Posted by: Hupeting Sforza8196 2017-12-04 05:48 |