Free Republic

Gold is surging to two-year highs. But does the rally have legs? Gold is surging to two-year highs. But does the rally have legs? 19 Hours Ago | 02:30 Gold soared to two-year highs this week as uncertainty rattled the market. The bull run isn't over yet, says one strategist. "I am a buyer. I really do like it," Boris Schlossberg, managing director of FX strategy at BK Asset Management, told CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Wednesday. It's "retaking its mantle as the key defensive asset against bitcoin, which has certainly suffered a lot over the last couple of months." As...

Bitcoin is having a terrible first quarter, in fact the worst its ever seen. The price of the cryptocurrency has fallen from $13,412.44 on January 1 to $7,266.07 on March 30, marking a more than 45 percent decline, according to data from CoinDesk, a site which tracks the price of different digital coins. The quarter ends on Saturday. So far this quarter, $114.9 billion of market capitalization or value has been wiped off of bitcoin. The price decline this quarter is the biggest first quarter decline in bitcoin's history. The previous biggest decline was a near 38 percent fall in...

The digital currency has slumped roughly 50% since the start of the year, dropping below $7,000 on Friday morning in Asia. Less than four months ago, it was trading close to $20,000. (please see linked article for full text)

Steven Seagal--actor, Zen master, musician, director, martial arts instructor and now crypto ambassador—has reportedly walked away from the Bitcoiin project, along with its anonymous founders, after closing out an ICO that may or may not have raised its targeted $75 million. No one knows, really, and that seems to be a recurring problem with ICOs, highlighting the danger of celebrity-sponsored coins that seem exciting but offer no protection from potential fraud. Seagal may have been the face of the alt coin, but the founders remain masked.

Hackers demanding ransom payable in bitcoin have attacked computers of the Atlanta city government in the southern US state of Georgia, officials say. The ransomware assault shut down multiple internal and external applications for the city, including apps that people use to pay bills and access court-related information, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told a news conference Thursday. "This is a very serious situation," Bottoms said. City officials said they learned of the attack before dawn Thursday when they detected unusual activity on their servers. Some of the city's data had become encrypted. A ransom note sent to the city gave...

Some of Bitcoin's most important features — the immutability and the distributed nature of its blockchain — might spell trouble for the cryptocurrency. A German team of researchers have found some objectionable content within Bitcoin's blockchain, including links to child pornography and, possibly, at least one such image. Since the totality of Bitcoin's blockchain has to be downloaded in order to mine Bitcoin or run a full Bitcoin node — a program that validates transactions on the network — that means anyone who does so is in possession of potentially illegal content. In the vast majority of cases, the data...

Interstellar Trade Is Possible In this post, we will detail a method for developing interstellar trade using near-future technologies and commercially realistic requirements. We will then look at the various outcomes, challenges and development models that will follow the first interstellar operation. There is now a Summary at the end of the post. A tough taskTravel between stars is hard. The distances are measured in trillions of kilometers and the space between destinations is not really empty. Attempting the crossing at interplanetary speeds is ludicrously slow; the only way is to reach velocities measured in percentages of the speed of...

Prices of major cryptocurrencies saw a sharp downward slide Thursday, amid closer regulatory scrutiny on the space and after Google announced plans to ban advertising related to the sector. The market capitalization or value of all the world's digital coins stood at $310.4 billion early on Thursday morning, down from $372.9 billion a day before, according to Coinmarketcap.com, which tracks prices based on different exchanges. Bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency by market cap, traded as low as $7,676.52 on Thursday, the lowest since February 8, according to CoinDesk data. However, by 4.00 a.m ET the price had recovered to $8,219.77,...

The billowing compute and data demands that spurred the oil and gas industry to be the largest commercial users of high-performance computing are now propelling the competitive sector to deploy the latest AI technologies. Beyond the requirement for accurate and speedy seismic and reservoir simulation, oil and gas operations face torrents of sensor, geolocation, weather, drilling and seismic data. Just the sensor data alone from one off-shore rig can accrue to hundreds of terabytes of data annually, but most of this remains unanalyzed, dark data. Why? Because there just isn't enough compute capacity to crunch it all. A collaboration between...

Days after South Korea’s chief proponent of regulating cryptocurrency, Jung Ki-joon, was found mysteriously dead in his home, South Korea apparently has decided not to crack down further on trading in bitcoin and other cybercurrencies. On Tuesday, Choe Heung-ski, chief of South Korea’s Finance Supervisory Service, told reporters that the government would support cryptocurrency trading rather than heavily regulating it or banning it completely.

Article IV, Section 3 of our Constitution provides that "The Congress shall have the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States." A Republican-run state might buy up a few square miles of unoccupied land and sell it and the state sovereignty over it to the federal government. The federal government might then sell it off to a state-authorized private party who promises to create a new republic on it with: 1. limits on taxation/governmental fees/fines/licensing, and 2. no foreign military force, and 3. no governmental...

The time to plow is over for the seeds are bearing fruit for I have gone before you as David in the Valley of Breakthrough . So speak and declare My Words of Righteousness given to all those that believe on Me for "Truly" The Harvest is ready to be brought into the Storehouse That is , "My Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven" for "Truly" You "ARE " My Keepers of My Love and ONE True Light EMMANUEL ( God with us ) JOHN 4:34-38 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will...

A system glitch at a cryptocurrency exchange site run by an Osaka-based firm enabled users to obtain digital money for free, with one apparently “purchasing” Bitcoin valued at 2,200 trillion yen ($20 trillion) and then attempting to cash in on it. Tech Bureau Corp., a registered cryptocurrency exchange operator, is now subject to a Financial Services Agency investigation into the safety of the system and other business practices. The company announced Feb. 20 that the incident on its Zaif exchange website occurred four days earlier, when seven users obtained quantities of cryptocurrencies. Tech Bureau later invalidated the transactions and corrected...

Scientists searching space for intelligent life already have a difficult job, but some are now saying their task is being made even tougher because of digital currencies like Bitcoin. “We’d like to use the latest GPUs (graphics processing units)… and we can’t get ’em,” Dr. Dan Werthimer told the BBC. The chief scientist of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI Project, says the surging demand for GPUs from cryptocurrency miners is leaving the computer chips in short supply. “This is a new problem, it’s only happened on orders we’ve been trying to make in the last couple of months,”...

Cryptocurrencies are a nascent asset class and could fall violently at any time, the founder of blockchain network Ethereum warned on Saturday. "Reminder: cryptocurrencies are still a new and hyper-volatile asset class, and could drop to near-zero at any time," Vitalik Buterin said on Twitter. "Don't put in more money than you can afford to lose."

I am no expert in crypto-currency, and I am brand new on Steemit. Though I’m still in the beginning stages of learning the ropes of a platform based on cryptocurrency, like Steemit, I want to bring the platform to the attention of as many people as possible for a few specific reasons.First, as Disobedient Media previously reported, social media giants including Facebook and Twitter have heavily censored political content and independent media over the course of the last year. Youtube, and its owner, mega-company Google, have likewise strangled the reach of independent news sources and commentary.Youtube has severely demonetized...

Despite its price plunge, some diehard bitcoin aficionados still say the beleaguered cryptocurrency could hit six figures by year’s end. Tone Vays, a New York-based cryptocurrency analyst and blockchain consultant, has been among those arguing that the wild swings in bitcoin value since its debut in 2009 at less than a penny could mean that an even greater upswing may be possible this year. “Right now I think that bitcoin should still go down in price, but it will recover,” says Vays. “$100K this year is possible, but that’s very high. I put the current fair value at $25,000.”

A 24-year-old trader who considered himself "invincible" according to federal investigators has become the first target of a criminal fraud prosecution involving "cryptocurrency," after allegedly siphoning $2 million in Bitcoin and Litecoin from his Chicago employer... Judge Martin asked the Korean-American defendant if he spoke English and understood the proceedings, which he did...As part of his $100,000 bond deal, Kim surrendered his passport...Prosecutors are expected to outline the charge that "from September through November 2017, Kim transferred more than $2 million of the trading firm's Bitcoin and Litecoin to personal accounts to cover his own trading losses, which had been...

First Malibu mansions, next ultra luxurious yachts. The ways in which cryptocurrency enthusiasts can spend their virtual riches is growing, if only for those who are millionaires — at least on paper. As bitcoin and other digital currencies gain a broader following, luxury service providers are starting to take notice. The latest is Florida-based yacht dealer Denison Yachting, which on Friday announced that new, high-end yachts can be purchased with bitcoin and a few other cryptocurrencies at the Miami International Boat Show, which kicked off this week. "It is our job as the dealer or broker to make purchases as...

By Jon Danielsson, Director of the ESRC funded Systemic Risk Centre, London School of Economics. Originally published at VoxEUCryptocurrencies are supposedly a new and superior form of money and investments – the way of the future. The author of this column, however, does not see the point of cryptocurrencies, finding them no better than existing fiat money or good investments.I have been trying to understand what the point of cryptocurrencies is, without success. They may not be an immediate financial stability concern (den Haan et al. 2017), but I just don’t get them.As far as I can tell, they...