Bitcoin This Week: A $170 Million Nano Hack, And a New Fork of Bitcoin?

Bitcoin This Week: A $170 Million Nano Hack, And a New Fork of Bitcoin?

This week in the world of Bitcoin: Bitcoin finds a bottom at $8000, UK and US government sites are infected with a mining bug, $17m worth of Nano is involved in a Bitgrail exchange hack, A new Bitcoin fork seeks to bring privacy to transactions, Bitstrade in Jersey is hit with a stop and desist order, and Chechen leader Kadyrov enters Bitcoin debate.

Chechen leader Kadyrov enters Bitcoin debate

Recently, the Bitcoin community found a new champion in J.Christopher Giancarlo who spoke at the US Senate committee on banking in favor of cryptocurrencies, however this week the spotlight fell on the Chechen hard-line leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov has decided that his country, as well as the whole world, needed his wisdom on the subject.

Through the medium of Telegram, Kadyrov issued a lengthy statement saying that he had bought some Bitcoin in order to get a grasp of how it works and the various uses for the virtual currency. His final consensus on the matter was that in general, cryptocurrencies could potentially be a very dangerous thing akin to gambling.

Bitstrade in Jersey hit with a cease and desist order

The regulators in New Jersey have served a cease and desist order on Bitstrade, the cryptocurrency investment platform, with their reasons being due to the fraudulent nature of the business. Bitstrade is not even properly registered to deal in securities and the regulatory services in the state of New Jersey said that one of their main concerns and problems with Bitstrade was the fact that the businesses address did not even exist.  

New Bitcoin fork to bring privacy to transactions

It seems Bitcoin forks are becoming more and more frequent as on the 28th of February, there will be the arrival of a new Bitcoin fork dubbed “Bitcoin Private” (BCP). The introduction of this new currency will release 20 million coins for Zclassic and Bitcoin holders into the market. Zcash, a previous fork of Bitcoin, will have a few of its security features implemented into the use of Bitcoin Private. The security features of Zcash are seen by many as reactional attempts by agencies such as the IRS in order for them to obtain transactional data.

$170M of Nano is involved in Bitgrail exchange hack
Railblocks, an upcoming new coin, has been in the headlines lately. It was first in the media due to the rumors of its merger deals with other ICOs such as Dadi, now rebranded to Nano. The coin was launched in December and started off at a meager 50c before picking up and reaching over $30, an impressive growth for sure. However, it is now caught up in a scandal which involves the Italian exchange Bitgrail. The exchange has been reported to have suffered a hack of $170 Million worth of Nano.

UK and US government sites are infected with mining bug

The British Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently had to take their public website offline after they discovered that they had been infected Monero’s Coinhive software. This is a program that secretly uses a computer’s processing power for the use of cryptocurrency mining. All across both the UK and the US, up to 4000 public sites were compromised after a browser plugin called ReadAloud became affected by the virus.

Bitcoin finds a bottom at $8000
Bitcoin recently hit its lowest point in quite some time, striking the $6000 mark. There has been a couple of market rallies that were accompanied by small fluctuation and drops, and at the moment it would appear that Bitcoin has found a safe level around the $8000 mark.

There is always talk surrounding Bitcoin, and at the moment it is in the hopes that the King of Crypto will find its feet soon and dominate the market once again. However many still feel that the current bear market will be staying for quite a few more weeks until Bitcoin experiences major growth again.

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