keyword: Bitcoin

robinhood-restricts-crypto-trading-as-dogecoin-soars-300-percent

Robinhood restricts crypto trading as Dogecoin soars 300 percent

Robinhood has started restricting trading in cryptocurrencies this morning, just as the price of joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin has soared more than 300 percent in 24 hours. CNBC reports that Robinhood users started noticing instant deposits for cryptocurrencies were no longer working on Friday morning, and the company has confirmed it has put restrictions in place.

“Due to extraordinary market conditions, we’ve temporarily turned off Instant buying power for crypto,” says a Robinhood spokesperson in a statement to CNBC. “Customers can still use settled funds to buy crypto. We’ll keep monitoring market conditions and communicating with our customers.”

Dogecoin price on Friday morning.
Image: Coindesk

Dogecoin came to life in 2013 off the back of a Twitter joke — a play on bitcoin and the doge meme. Its price started soaring yesterday, and Dogecoin currently stands at a more than $7 billion market cap thanks to a huge volume of transactions over the past 24 hours.

The market activity and restrictions over the past 24 hours have now made Dogecoin a popular meme among the r/WallStreetBets investors. Dogecoin has been consistently spammed in the WallStreetBets Discord server over the past couple of days.

Bitcoin is also on the move, up nearly 20 percent over the past 24 hours. Tesla CEO Elon Musk also changed his Twitter profile to include #bitcoin and tweeted “in retrospect, it was inevitable.”

Elon Musk’s Twitter profile now mentions bitcoin.

Robinhood’s latest crypto restrictions come less than a day after the company moved to restrict its users from buying or trading any of the popular Reddit r/WallStreetBets stocks, including GameStop ($GME), AMC ($AMC), BlackBerry ($BB), Bed Bath & Beyond ($BBBY), Nokia ($NOK), and more.

It’s a move that has been met with widespread criticism, and Google was forced to salvage Robinhood’s one-star rating on the Google Play Store by deleting nearly 100,000 negative reviews after unhappy users review-bombed the app. Robinhood says it will now allow “limited buys” of stocks like GameStop starting Friday.

bitcoin-miner-dovecat-is-targeting-network-storage-devices-from-qnap-and-synology

Bitcoin miner Dovecat is targeting network storage devices from Qnap and Synology

The Dovecat malware is currently nesting on NAS devices from Qnap and Synology and mining cryptocurrency at the expense of the victims’ computing power. Qnap has now published information about security. Synology has not yet issued a statement on this.

NAS owners have been reporting such attacks in the official forums of Qnap and Synology for months. The malware requires so much computing power that the devices can hardly be used.

Important security tips In a security warning, Qnap provides tips on how owners can secure their NAS against and other threats. It is particularly important that the current version with security updates of the QTS operating system is always installed. In addition, owners should ensure that they use strong admin passwords and no default ports (80, 443, 8080 and 8081).

In the support area you will find more detailed information including instructions on how to effectively secure network storage. For example, there is how to remove suspicious user accounts. These notes do not only apply to devices from Qnap.

At a point in time that has not yet been known, the developers want to provide a tool to remove Dovecat.

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document-trading-in-the-darknet:-police-dig-out-forger-workshop

Document trading in the Darknet: Police dig out forger workshop

In Magdeburg, investigators have discovered an alleged forgery workshop for ID cards. On Wednesday, about 220 officials searched three apartments and the workshop disguised as an office, as the Federal Police Department for Combating Crime announced on Thursday. They secured data carriers and counterfeit items such as printers, printing plates, seals, chemicals and foil elements. It was an action by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Frankfurt am Main, Central Office for Combating Internet Crime, and the Federal Police.

Three accused aged 23 to 24 years should be since June 2018 have offered falsified documents under the pseudonym “FakeID-Dobby” in the Darknet on marketplaces such as the 2019 excavated Wallstreet Market and the crimenetwork.co. The range therefore included recipes, temporary German ID cards and ID documents from Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. The three men are said to have made a profit of around 45. 000 euros . Most of the payments were made in the crypto currency Bitcoin.

Forgery of documents in 140 cases The two 24 year old main accused were brought to Hesse, where the arrest warrants issued against them by the Giessen District Court were announced to them on Thursday. According to the information, you are accused of forging a commercial document in 140 cases. The third accused, aged 23, is at large. According to the Federal Police, all three suspects with no previous conviction face several years’ imprisonment if convicted.

The arrests were preceded by ongoing investigations since 2019. The police did not explain how it was possible to uncover the identity of the suspects who were allegedly operating via the Darknet. Police chief Romy Töwe stated, according to the police report: “The alleged protection of identity through anonymity is being exploited by those involved to make prosecution more difficult. In the past, the police and judiciary authorities increased their digital skills in terms of personnel and technology. This procedure showed that these efforts pay off. ”

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msi-registers-rtx-3060-ti-miner-cards

MSI Registers RTX 3060 Ti Miner Cards

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

As if it weren’t hard enough for consumers to buy RTX 3060, RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 cards already, MSI’s now registered Ampere “Miner” cards with the Eurasian Economic Commision. This isn’t the first news we’ve seen of MSI graphics cards built specifically for cryptocurrency mining — the company also registered Turing mining cards with the EEC last September (likely as a fallback in case Ampere stock runs out). But with Etherium hitting its highest prices that it’s seen since 2018 this January, concerns over cryptominers pushing GPU prices higher and buying up already rare stock are becoming more valid than ever.

To be fair, an EEC registration doesn’t mean that a product is coming. It’s not uncommon for manufacturers to register products just to hold the name. Still, MSI has released mining cards before, back when Pascal was the top of the line and Bitcoin was starting to draw mainstream attention. These models, the P106-100 and P104-100, weren’t exclusive to MSI and were part of a larger push from Nvidia and AIBs to create GPUs specifically for mining, which reduced cooling power and stripped away cosmetic features like RGB.

But neither is this an idle threat. At last week’s 19th Annual J.P. Morgan Tech/Auto Forum Conference, Nvidia CFO Collete Kress said the company would consider restarting its mining line of GPUs, “if crypto demand begins or if we see a meaningful amount.”

Given that Etherium is experiencing a price spike, there’s certainly “meaningful amounts” to be made right now. And while AMD GPUs have traditionally been the mining cards of choice, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 has been found to have a hashrate of 3x to 4x that of the RTX 2080 while RDNA2’s mining performance is only marginally higher than RDNA1’s. MSI’s current registration is only for the 3060 Ti, but who knows what might come down the line?

Ampere cards are also more power efficient than their predecessors, with the RTX 3060 Ti in particular using 50W less power than the 2080 Ti while delivering similar hash rates. That’s important for miners, since too much power consumption can drastically lower profits or even put them in the red.

We’ll have to wait to see whether MSI’s Ampere mining cards come to market, or if this is just the first sign of a larger mining push from other AIBs and even Nvidia itself. But if so, be prepared for the current Ampere shortage to continue into the foreseeable future.