Free Republic

Building recent on efforts to strengthen political relationships between Tehran and South American nations, Iran has announced intentions to launch HispanTV to expand their influence in the region, and give their strategic influence a wider audience. A recent planned tour of leftist Latin Amarican states by Iranian leader Ahmadinejad was seen as a demonstration of solidarity by the leaders of those States as a way of uniting against Western powers. According to The Miami Herald, the channel has already begun running anti-Western programming suggesting US plots against Venezuela, and Syria. Ahmadinejad reportedly suggested that the purpose of the channel was...

Summary Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange, has been hit by what's thought to be the biggest hack in history - our correspondent breaks down what to know Cryptocurrency worth $6.3bn (£4.7bn) was stolen, with Binance saying it has now "begun recovering" some funds This theft may have happened quickly, but efforts to recover the cryptocurrency could continue for much longer, our senior technology reporter writes Binance's co-CEO Richard Teng says initial investigations point to a "compromised DevOps engineer's laptop" giving hackers access, with a follow-up statement from Binance saying it's "uncovered additional points of breach" What is Binance, and...

It’s unclear how many users were impacted. The company’s U.S. platform was not compromised. Traders first reported on social media platforms that they were seeing unauthorized withdrawals from their accounts on Thursday afternoon. In response, the company halted trading on its international platform. Polymarket said that it has fixed the issue on its end, and that trading resumed at 3 p.m. ET. It told users later in a chatroom on Discord that users who had less than $10,000 taken from their wallets will have funds restored by Oct. 30, and those with funds greater than that figure withdrawn will have...

Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin launched Wednesday morning, and the first hours of trading followed the script a lot of people expected. However, the sheer size of the move still managed to surprise the crypto market. The token named after the laptop that defined years of political attacks on Biden initially spiked to a fully diluted valuation above $100 billion that looked absurd even by memecoin standards, then shed nearly all of that paper value before lunch. The memecoin launch itself was only announced a few days ago, but after months of podcast appearances and a stretch of crypto-friendly posts on...

Experts have since said that those holding Bitcoin on a Coldcard device should move funds now. Since over $70 million in Bitcoin was stolen yesterday by an attack that exploited a fault in the Coldcard’s system, it has been reported that the thief used a top blockchain services provider for help. Writing on X Friday, engineer at payments company Block, Clay Garrett, said that the provider — who he did not name at the request of the services provider — had been contacted after finding blockchain movements matched the “suspected workflow” of the attacker. “During our investigation of the Coldcard...

"People don't use it to make serious trades, they don't use it to buy their dinner and pay at the supermarket...What it does is allows crooks to move money around..."

The note, received around February 6, was a major shift from the earlier message from the same IP address that had demanded millions in bitcoin for her safe return. The latter note adopted a “new, less confident tone” and included a “sputtering and labored” apology for her “inadvertent death,” sources told Air Mail in a detailed report on the investigation. The person claiming to be the kidnapper reportedly floated returning her body in exchange for payment. After the second note was received, Savannah Guthrie posted a video addressing the alleged kidnapper. "We received your message and we understand," Savannah Guthrie...

On a leafy Connecticut road in the summer of 2024, would-be kidnappers pulled a couple from their Lamborghini SUV, beat them in broad daylight and threw them into a van, only to be arrested shortly thereafter as multiple witnesses, including a passing off-duty FBI agent, called police. The investigation would lead police to some sensational findings. The attack turned out to be linked to a $245 million Bitcoin heist the month before involving the couple’s son. And this week, a California cryptocurrency mogul who authorities say called himself “The Godfather” and had previously hired off-duty sheriff’s deputies to strongarm his...

Bitcoin’s (BTC) price fell below $70,000 on Tuesday morning, wiping out nearly $800 million in leveraged crypto traders in the last 24 hours amid escalating outflows from spot BTC exchange-traded funds. Bitcoin’s price was trading at around $69,400 at the time of writing, down 4.4% in the last 24 hours – the steepest decline among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization – and was among the top trending tickers on Stocktwits.....

Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy sold 32 BTC from its holdings last week for roughly $2.5 million, per an SEC filing. The average sale price was $77,135 per Bitcoin, and brings Strategy's holdings down to 843,706 BTC, worth approximately $61 billion at current prices. Funds from the sale of BTC will be used to fund distributions on preferred stock, the firm said in the filing. The sale sees the Bitcoin treasury firm abandoning its long-held "never sell" stance....

The decentralized nature of cryptocurrency makes it an ideal vehicle for sanctions evasion and an increasingly vital pillar of Iran’s wartime economy. As the risk of renewed U.S.-Iran conflict rises, Tehran has moved quickly to adapt to wartime realities while attempting to limit the impact on border security, domestic stability, and the broader economy. Despite obvious constraints, the Islamic Republic has had a measure of success in maintaining control at home while circumventing U.S. pressure in the Strait of Hormuz through shadow tankers and ship-to-ship transfers to sustain oil exports. This has reignited Western debates over whether sanctions and military...

Every layer of modern life depends on encryption so deeply that most people never even think about it. Until it stops working. For years, “cyber apocalypse” talk sounded like the tech version of a guy on a street corner holding a cardboard sign predicting the end times. Y2K came and went with barely a flicker. The Mayan calendar became a punchline. Even most ransomware attacks, destructive as they’ve been, still operated within recognizable rules. Servers go down. Companies panic. Bitcoin wallets light up. Insurance adjusters start chain-smoking. Q-Day is different. Not because it’s flashy. Because it’s boringly mathematical. And math...

An Australian entrepreneur who launched a prominent vegan chicken nugget startup has been accused of strangling his social media star girlfriend inside a luxe Manhattan hotel — where he was allegedly hiding out from claims he fleeced investors in his crypto company, The Post has learned. Ben Pasternak, 26 — whose plant-based business Simulate was once valued at $250 million — was arrested Tuesday on allegations that he assaulted his ex, influencer Evelyn Ha, on March 31 after she tried to film him on her phone inside the ritzy Baccarat Hotel on West 53rd Street. The millionaire magnate had been...

Ever since the unveiling of Bitcoin on Halloween 2008, the true inventor behind the revolutionary digital currency has been shrouded in mystery. Its creator adopted the mysterious pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, but no individual had so far been decisively identified as Satoshi, now undoubtedly one of the world’s richest people. But after an extensive investigation involving artificial intelligence and forensic linguistics experts, the New York Times has claimed to uncover the anonymous architect of Bitcoin, who has hidden his identity for 17 years. That man is Adam Back, a 55-year-old British computer scientist who the newspaper says pioneered the decentralised digital...

A year-long investigation by journalist John Carreyrou identifies Adam Back, a 55-year-old British computer scientist, as the man who created cryptocurrency under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous figure who introduced Bitcoin in 2008. Back is the CEO of Blockstream, one of the most influential companies in the Bitcoin industry, and the inventor of Hashcash, a computational anti-spam tool that Bitcoin’s mining process directly borrows from. Carreyrou’s investigation began after watching an HBO documentary in late 2024 that tried, and failed, to identify Bitcoin’s founder. Back appeared visibly uncomfortable when his name came up as a suspect. That reaction sparked...

A series of so-called “wrench attacks,” violent robberies targeting wealthy cryptocurrency holders, are making headlines after victims in Los Angeles and the Bay Area were targeted, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. On Nov. 22, a San Francisco man was robbed of $13 million in digital currency after thieves posing as pizza delivery drivers forced their way into his home, bound him with duct tape, beat him with a firearm and threatened to cut off his fingers. The victim told investigators he had been expecting a package when a man carrying a white box arrived on the front porch of his...

After announcing a 2029 target for migration to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), Google issues a new warning that a quantum system could attack a Bitcoin (BTC) transaction in about nine minutes. The tech giant warned it won't happen today but it's a possibility one should be prepared for sooner than later. Understanding quantum threat to cryptocurrency Cryptocurrencies are virtual currencies that rely on cryptography to encrypt or conceal sensitive financial details from those other than transacting parties. Though the most powerful supercomputers active today will take thousands of years to decrypt cryptography, the cryptocurrency community fears quantum computers will be able...

A purported US government contractor accused of stealing more than $46 million in crypto from the US Marshals Service was busted on the island of Saint Martin in a coordinated operation between the FBI and the French Gendarmerie, FBI Director Kash Patel announced. John Daghita’s since-deleted LinkedIn page identifies him as working for Virginia-based Command Services & Support (CMDSS), a technology firm led by his father, Dean Daghita, which held contracts with the Marshals Service for managing seized digital assets. The younger Daghita was reportedly able to access private crypto addresses — and millions of dollars in funds — through...

Iran mines Bitcoin at $1,320 per coin on subsidized electricity and sells it at $68,000. A 50x gross margin. Not a hedge fund return. Not a venture multiple. Fifty times on power costs alone, running on electricity priced at half a cent per kilowatt hour while Iranian civilians suffer rolling blackouts because 700,000 mining rigs are draining 2,000 megawatts from a collapsing grid every single day. 95 percent of those rigs are illegal. The IRGC runs the largest operations, exempt from electricity bills, consuming power from facilities that simultaneously cause blackouts in hospitals and homes. The regime legalized mining in...

Since its peak last fall, Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has lost almost half its value. Nearly $2 trillion of wealth has evaporated from the global crypto market since October. We have one question. What took so long? Outside of crimes and scams, the technology is useless, and its economics are even worse. ....At a time when investors have grown skittish about riskier assets, the value of Bitcoin has fallen nearly 50 percent since October, dropping to below $70,000, proving it was only a matter of time before crypto faced the critical lens it always needed but never truly received....