Wait a minute, when has there ever been a currency bubble?
If you've scanned the crypto news in recent weeks, you will have noticed a smattering of stories suggesting that the whole cryptocurrency market, is a bubble. Such news is not exactly new. Since the spring, the crypto market has multiplied in value by a factor of six and the word "bubble" has thus inveigled its way into commentators conversations.
A few days ago, the Wolf of Wall St, Jordan Belfort, joined JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon in declaring Bitcoin to be both a fraud and a bubble. Jordan can, at least, legitimately claim expertise in fraud having pleaded guilty to that very crime and served 22 months in prison for it. However, he’s wrong on both points.
Bitcoin breaks over $5,200: You expected that, right?
Since the beginning of the year, Bitcoin has taken numerous hits from so-called "experts" and gone through a couple of major crashes. And, despite all that, the price of the most-valuable cryptocurrency has set a new record, going over $5,200 for the first time today. Bitcoin is up over 500 percent since January 1.
Bitcoin's influence in the cryptocurrency market still looms large. Its market cap, $86 billion, represents over 50 percent of the whole market, which is currently valued at around $162 billion. Bitcoin's daily value is around $2 billion, far more than any of the other players.
The Pirate Bay is back running a cryptocurrency miner, with no way of opting out
Last month, we revealed how popular torrent site The Pirate Bay was secretly running a Javascript cryptocurrency miner from Coinhive in the background, increasing the CPU usage of visitors.
The miner uses processing power from users’ systems to generate Monero coins for the site it’s on, and The Pirate Bay said it was testing it as a way of generating alterative revenue. Despite the inevitable outcry the initial test produced, The Pirate Bay has once again begun using cryptocurrency miners, although this time around it has throttled the mining slightly, presumably to make it less obvious to users.
Hackers using websites to mine cryptocurrencies
Cyber-security experts are warning that criminals are hacking into other people's machines to mine cryptocurrencies for them.
According to a Trend Micro report, school, charity and file-sharing websites have been found infected with a particular code that makes the visitor's machine mine cryptocurrency.
Cloudflare ditches sites that use Coinhive mining code after classing it as malware
Bitcoin has been in the news for some time now as its value climbs and drops, but most recently interest turned to mining code embedded in websites. The Pirate Bay was one of the first sites to be seen using Coinhive code to secretly mine using visitors' CPU time, and then we saw similar activity from the SafeBrowse extension for Chrome.
The discovery of the code was a little distressing for visitors to the affected sites, and internet security and content delivery network (CDN) firm Cloudflare is taking action to clamp down on what it is describing as malware.
The beginning of the end: Is the Ethereum bubble about to burst?
Ethereum (or more specifically the unit of currency associated with it -- Ether), has seen immense growth so far in 2017. Of course, with any meteoric gains in crypto, it’s never long before the term "bubble" starts getting thrown around. Many within the industry have raised concerns about the rapidly escalating value of the digital currency hot on the heels of Bitcoin in terms of dominance within the space, thinking its decline is inevitable. The ETH/USD rate has shot up, and it is now traded at $294.
To correctly assess whether the Ethereum bubble is about to burst, we must first look at what a bubble is, and decide if the rapid increase in price experienced by Ether thus far in 2017 falls into the category of bubble at all.
China's ICO ban will not derail the cryptocurrency movement
There is a boom in initial coin offerings (ICOs) in 2017, where firms are mainly offering in-app tokens for investors. These arrangements only work in a given ecosystem and represent companies that are trying hard to not offer "securities" due to the SEC, regulations, etc.
Many firms have taken in funds through ICOs that are far more than their true value and with such a supply of offerings, the quality of the typical ICO event has dropped precipitously. ICOs work as a crowdfunding tool where a percentage of the newly issued currency is provided to new investors in exchange for traditional money or a different cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. In response to this unregulated and seemingly out of control market, the Chinese authorities recently banned ICOs to slow down the market while regulations can be enacted.
Adblock Plus releases cryptocurrency miner hijack protection filter
Cryptocurrencies have been in the news a lot recently as the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum bounces up and down. But cryptocurrency miners have also been in the headlines after it was discovered that the Pirate Bay had secretly embedded a miner in its code, and then that the SafeBrowse extension for Chrome was also mining in the background.
To help protect users who do not want their computers to be used for such things without their permission and who don't want to give up CPU cycles to generate profit for others, Adblock Plus has released a filter that will block hijacks by cryptocurrency miners. It works with Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Android.
SafeBrowse Chrome extension found to be secretly mining for cryptocurrency
Recently it was discovered that the Pirate Bay had embedded a JavaScript cryptocurrency miner into the footer of its homepage, and now a popular Chrome extension has been found engaging in similar activity.
The SafeBrowse extension purports to block popup ads and skip ad pages that appear before downloads, but in fact it was secretly running a Coin Hive mining tool in the background. With over 140,000 users, SafeBrowse -- which has now been removed from the Chrome Web Store -- was quietly making an income for its developers through clandestine use of CPU time.
Cryptocurrency market recovers: Bitcoin back over $4,000, Ethereum rebounds to $290
The cryptocurrency market is recovering well after shedding over $75 billion last week in what was a major post-rally correction. News that China banned ICOs and a rumored ban on Bitcoin exchanges in the country have not brought the market to its knees, as its capitalization is now up by around $40 billion since the low reached only a few days ago.
Many "experts" have linked the correction to the bad news from China, claiming that it will be very hard for the major coins to recover. Ethereum was expected to be hit the most, as the ICO ban means its appeal in China would be severely limited, but it posts the second-largest growth post-correction of the top 10 coins.
How to tackle ICOs to avoid regulatory issues
In an alarming but long-feared move, Chinese authorities announced on September 4, 2017, that from then on fundraising Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) will not be allowed to take place on the domestic market. ICO technology can be used as a tool to collect funds from backers to launch new blockchain projects.
The Chinese regulators instructed companies that have already completed their fundraising ICOs to refund the payments to their backers, and the public and financial institutions are asked to report to the authorities all suspicious fundraising activities involving ICOs and cryptocurrencies. Naturally, this development threw the Chinese blockchain community into disarray.
Bitcoin drops below $3,000, Ethereum falls under $200
The correction in the cryptocurrency market continues. All of the major coins are in the red once again today, pushing the market cap under the $100 billion mark. Since the beginning of September, more than $75 billion has been wiped out, partly due to China, which was-recently rumored to be seeking a Bitcoin ban.
The most valuable cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, just dipped under $3,000 on September 15 for the first time since early-August. Yesterday, it was trading for around $3,500. That is a drop of 40 percent since its $5,000 peak. Its market cap has taken a beating as well, falling under $50 billion.
Bitcoin drops to $3,500 after China ban rumors
The cryptocurrency market is now in a massive correction which has wiped out over $50 billion from its market cap high reached at the beginning of the month. The downward pressure seems to center on rumors that China wants to ban Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency.
I say rumors because there seems to be no official information from China that a ban is, indeed, in the cards. That has not stopped various websites from giving them too much credence, which adds to the instability that we have seen recently.
Criminals hijack browsers to mine cryptocurrency
Cyber criminals supplementing their income by mining cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is nothing new. Usually this has been done by installing malware or PUPs on the machines of unsuspecting users.
But now researchers at ESET have discovered a new method of mining cryptocurrencies, which can be done directly within your web browser, using JavaScript. This gives attackers the potential to reach a greater number of victims, by infecting websites, rather than by targeting individual machines.
JPMorgan chief dismisses Bitcoin as 'a fraud' currency, ideal for drug dealers and murderers
Speaking at a banking conference in New York, Jamie Dimon -- chief executive of JPMorgan -- has dismissed the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as a fraud that will blow up. He said that if he found employees at his investment bank using the digital currency, he "would fire them in a second."
Dimon likened Bitcoin to tulip bulbs and said: "The currency isn't going to work. You can't have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart."
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