Even gold diggers might want to avoid this one.

An estimated 95 pounds of gold rush through Switzerland’s sewage pipes and its waste stations each year, according to a study by scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, also known as Eawag.

That’s about $1.8 million dollars of sewage-covered gold.

They also estimated that about 6,600 pounds of silver flows through those pipes, which is about $1.7 million, according to Bloomberg.

The study, commissioned by the Federal Office for the Environment, tested sewage in 64 wastewater treatment plants across the small country. While officials have long known precious metals get mixed in with sewage, they’ve never known exactly how much.

Eawag described it in a statement as “the first systematic, quantitative assessment.”

The precious metal most likely came from the country’s gold-refining plants and its watchmaking industry, slowly building up over a year. Switzerland is one of the world’s biggest gold-refining centers, with 70 percent of the world’s gold passing through its refineries each year, Bloomberg reported.

Gold prospectors shouldn’t get too excited. Eawag warned that the concentration of gold in most places wasn’t high enough to financially justify mining the toxic sludge.

But Ticino, an Italian-speaking region in the south of Switzerland, contains enough gold refineries releasing trace amounts of the metal into sewage pipes to make recovery there “potentially worthwhile,” according to the statement by Eawag.

Sewers in the United States might contain gold as well.

Researchers from Arizona State University published a similar study in 2015, finding that a U.S. city of 1 million people flushes up to $13 million worth of precious metals into the sewage system each year. Roughly $2.3 million of that is gold and silver.

Some countries work to retrieve the precious metals sloshing around under their streets. One wastewater treatment plant in Japan incinerates its sludge, extracting two pounds of gold from every 1,200 pounds of ash — an amount that Reuters said was “a higher gold yield from sludge than can be found at some of the world’s best mines.”

Canada's Yukon offers free land if you're willing to farm the north

TORONTO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In Canada’s far north, the government of Yukon Territory wants to attract small farmers to the frigid region with a simple pitch: free land.

And as global warming makes Canada’s northern regions more hospitable to agriculture by opening once frozen land to farming, the opportunities are growing.

Bordering on Alaska in northwestern Canada, the Yukon has given away nearly 8,000 acres (3,208 hectares) of farmland in the past decade, a senior government official told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. A dozen new applications are under consideration.

Now is a good time to start farming in the Yukon, say government officials.

“Our territory is expected to get wetter and warmer,” said Rod Jacob, a government official with the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources in the capital Whitehorse.

“We may see opportunity with an increased growing season,” Jacob told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an email.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-farming-landrights/canadas-yukon-offers-free-land-if-youre-willing-to-farm-the-north-idUSKBN1AA27M

The cryptocurrency market size is set to grow ten-fold by 2025 according to a new research booklet published by US Equity Research analysts at Canadian investment bank, Canaccord Genuity.

At a time when other analysts are predicting the demise of bitcoin and its peers, and financial figureheads such as Jamie Dimon believe that bitcoin is a “fraud,” Canaccord’s positive outlook for crypto assets is a welcome relief for supporters.

Cryptocurrency Market Size To Grow To $1Trillion

According to the investment bank's analysis, by 2025, as crypto payment networks mature, and consumers, as well as businesses, gain trust in cryptocurrencies, " the total value of all cryptocurrencies required for payments and store of value will grow from $11.2 billion /$16.6 billion in 2017 to $1,132 billion /$92 billion in 2025," that's a Cryptocurrency market size growth of 9998% or a compound annual growth rate of 78% (see chart below exhibit 30 which seems to indicate Bitcoin going to near $500B compared to current market size of ~$72B and the total market cap).

Investors are throwing money at the industry to try and capitalize on currency market growth, at the early stages, before transaction volumes really take off. Canaccord's data shows that bitcoin venture capital investments have grown from an almost insignificant $2.1 million for 2012, to $601 million for 2017. Cumulative venture capital bitcoin investments have surged from $2.1 million to $1.6 billion.



Bitcoin's biggest opportunity is the payment market, and despite all of the media attention the alternative currency is receiving, as a share of the global payment's market, it's still insignificant. Canaccord's analysts note that the cryptocurrency's recent rise in value has been "at least partially by increased transaction volumes as BTC’s usage increases." The report continues "n BTC’s value was simply a matter of 'catching up' to the transaction volume" also the recent "correction correlates closely with a softening of transaction volume."








If this relationship continues to hold true (which is highly likely) then as bitcoin transaction volumes grow, investors in the asset should be well rewarded. Indeed, bitcoin daily transaction volumes were only $131 billion during 2016. In comparison, Western Union volumes were 461% higher at $735 billion, and Paypal volumes came in at $970 billion. MasterCard processes 202x more transaction volumes with bitcoin and Visa processes 172x. Put simply. bitcoin is still a speck on the global payments landscape.

As cryptocurrencies continue to grow their percentage share of total daily transaction volumes, the value of these assets should continue to expand concludes the report. Rather than placing a price target on bitcoin, Canaccord's analysts instead compute the estimated size of the cryptocurrency Market size by 2025 arriving at the figure of $1,132 billion based on current trends in both the crypto assets and traditional money markets.

Catalan Independence Movement Furious After Spain Jails Two Leaders For Possible Sedition

Political prisoners in Europe used to be a thing of the past; as of Monday afternoon, Spain has two.

Spanish judge Carmen Lamela has ruled that the leaders of the two biggest grassroots pro-independence associations in Catalonia should remain in prison without bail on possible charges of sedition for which, if convicted, they could face prison sentences of up to 10 years.

The legal investigation claims Jordi Sanchez, the leader of Catalan National Assembly (ANC) movement, and Jordi Cuixart, who heads the Omnium Cultural association, were heavily involved in organising the massive protest aimed at hindering a Guardia Civil investigation in Barcelona into the build-up for the 1 October illegal referendum. Specifically, members of the Guardia Civil were trapped in Catalan government offices on 20 September as a result of thousands of protestors encircling the building, in what has been described as a "siege" and during which three police vehicles were destroyed.

Now, in a decision that could further enflame separatist passions, both Cuixart and Sanchez are set to spend the night in a prison near Madrid; the two earlier refused to answer questions from the judge overseeing the investigation. Summoned to court twice on Monday, on entering they gave clenched fists victory salutes to a small group of supporters.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-16/catalan-independence-movement-furious-after-spain-jails-two-leaders-possible-seditio

bitcoin price down about 1,000$ after china ban   this is logic

but less than 2 months back more than old 4,600 now without any new news why  ??

The Curious Case of Bitcoin’s “Moby Dick” Spam and the Miners That Confirmed It

The scaling debate has dominated the Bitcoin space for well over two years now. As a central issue, Bitcoin’s one-megabyte block size limit was often insufficient to include all transactions on the network. This ultimately led to the replacement of this block size limit for a block weight limit through Segregated Witness, allowing for up to four megabytes of transaction data. And a group of Bitcoin companies plans to deploy a hard fork to double this by November.

But there is reason to believe the “crisis” may have been fabricated, at least partly. A recent analysis by “LaurentMT,” the developer of blockchain analytics tool OXT, in cooperation with Antoine Le Calvez, creator of Bitcoin statistics resource p2sh.info, shows that the Bitcoin network has had to deal with a load of spam transactions throughout the past two years. Now, in a three-part blog post series dubbing the spam attacks “Moby Dick,” their findings suggest that several major Bitcoin mining pools may have had a hand in this.

“Six or seven pools have played a major role in stuffing blocks with spam transactions,” LaurentMT said. “And charts display what looks like a coordination between these pools.”

The Spam Situation

The very concept of “spam” in the context of Bitcoin is sometimes disputed. Differentiating between “good” and “bad” transactions can be controversial on a network designed for permissionlessness innovation and censorship-resistant payments.

But there is little doubt that certain transactions serve no other purpose than to stuff the Bitcoin network and blockchain. LaurentMT and Le Calvez more specifically define spam as transactions that send lots of tiny fractions of bitcoins to lots of different outputs (“addresses”). These kinds of transactions can’t feasibly have been used to make actual payments, while they do present a significant burden on the Bitcoin network: all nodes need to receive, validate, transmit and (at least temporarily) store all this data.

The analysts found that the Bitcoin network has seen many transactions that fit this category: almost three gigabytes worth of data within a two-year span, adding up to more than 2 percent of the total size of the blockchain, or the equivalent of about a month’s worth of normal Bitcoin use.

“We found that there were four waves of ‘fan-out transactions’ during summer 2015,” LaurentMT told Bitcoin Magazine, referring to the transactions that create lots of outputs. “We think that the first two waves were spamming users and services. The third and fourth waves instead mostly sent the fractions of bitcoins to addresses controlled by the attackers themselves.”

These four waves of spam have been relatively easy to notice, as sudden bursts of transactions clogged up the Bitcoin network for brief periods of time. In some cases these spam attacks were even announced as “stress tests” or “bitcoin giveaways.”

What’s more interesting about LaurentMT and Le Calvez’s analysis is that the two focused on the second half of the puzzle. Almost all the fractions of bitcoins that were sent to all these different addresses have slowly been re-spent back into circulation since. These “fan-in” transactions were not as obvious as the initial waves of spam — but were similarly burdensome.

And, LaurentMT explained, blockchain analysis suggests that most of this spam can be tracked down to one or two entities:

“We’ve identified two wallets that seem to have played a central role in the attacks. They’ve funded long chains of fan-out transactions during summer 2015, and they later aggregated the dust outputs.”

The analysts also suggest that the perpetrator(s) of the spam may have been customers of the Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX. But that’s where their analysis stops.

The Mining Pools

Perhaps what is more interesting is who used this spam to fill up Bitcoin blocks: Bitcoin mining pools.

The spam outputs, generated by the first four waves of fan-out transactions, had been starting to move since autumn of 2015 — sort of. Whoever controlled these addresses had been broadcasting transactions to spend these outputs over the network. However, for a long time, miners did not include these “spam broadcasts” in their blocks; the transactions were ignored.

Up until the second half of 2016, that is. At a very specific point in time, a group of seven mining pools started to suddenly accept these spam broadcasts and include them in the blocks they mined: 1-Hash, Antpool, BitClub Network, BTC.com, HaoBTC, KanoCKPool and ViaBTC.

“So, either these seven pools had an ‘aha moment,’ and suddenly discovered that Bitcoin is about censorship resistance. Or, they had another motivation to fill up blocks with these transactions — perhaps related to the block size debate,” LaurentMT suggested.

For more clues, LaurentMT and Le Calvez looked for notable events that happened around the time of the mining pools’ sudden change of heart. In their research, they did find some correlation with “strange” occurrences. The first is an open letter from HaoBTC (now rebranded as Bixin) to the Bitcoin Core development team. The second was a rumor about a group of Chinese pools planning to end their cooperation with Bitcoin Core: the Terminator Plan.

Of course, something notable happens in Bitcoin just about every week. These events may well be coincidences and, therefore, there could be a very different explanation for the mining pools’ behavior, LaurentMT acknowledged:

“An alternative explanation could be that the different mining pools adopted new mining policies for completely different reasons. I tend to think political motivations are more likely … but that’s just a personal opinion.”

Bitcoin Magazine reached out to the seven mining pools in question. The only mining pool willing to comment on the issue was KanoCKPool, which denied being involved with any sort of manipulation or coordination, stating it just confirms “any and all transactions available.”

UPDATE: After publication of this article (and on reading the comment from Kano CK Pool), LaurentMT pointed out that Kano CK Pool, along with 1Hash and Bitclub Network, are the only pools that had been confirming some of the spam transactions even before the second half of 2016, indicating that the pool could be telling the truth.

For a full analysis of the “Moby Dick” spam, read LaurentMT and Le Calvez’s three-part blog post series:

Part 1: https://medium.com/@laurentmt/good-whale-hunting-d3cc3861bd6b
Part 2: https://medium.com/@laurentmt/when-moby-dick-meets-the-terminator-d014c315af85
Part 3: https://medium.com/@laurentmt/the-canadian-connection-7f48cafe2369

Or watch Le Calvez’s presentation at Breaking Bitcoin in Paris earlier this month.

Looking only at pricing, UBS said that, “a twenty-fold increase in bitcoin prices in just two years, and an absence of any fundamental economic backing, cryptocurrency prices are almost certainly a bubble.”

I'm looking to purchase a new laptop and I want to know, which brand would be best compatible with #Bitcoin core wallets and upgrades.

What security services should I use?

Judging how no one is letting up in this fork debate I see that in the future bitcoin wallet providers will be speaking out on which chain they will be a part of. I just want to be as close to correct as possible.

Call 2X BTCCorp for all i care im not with corporate espionage

Is there a graph witch shows how much goods are bought withe BTC and Altcoins. Would be interesting how high these values are. Every statistic about those values would be interesting for me.

“Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017.”

Among the bill’s sweeping provisions, the government aims to greatly extend its authority to seize your assets through “Civil Asset Forfeiture”.

Civil Asset Forfeiture rules allow the government to take whatever they want from you, without a trial or any due process.

This new bill adds a laundry list of offenses for which they can legally seize your assets… all of which pertain to money laundering and other financial crimes.

Here’s the thing, though: they’ve also vastly expanded on the definition of such ‘financial crimes’, including failure to fill out a form if you happen to be transporting more than $10,000 worth of ‘monetary instruments’.

Have too much cash? You’d better tell the government.

If not, they’re authorizing themselves in this bill to seize not just the money you didn’t report, but ALL of your assets and bank accounts.

They even go so far as to specifically name “safety deposit boxes” among the various assets that they can seize if you don’t fill out the form.

Cryptographic data, such as hash outputs and elliptic curve points, look completely random and thus do not compress at all. These dominate the blockchain data, leaving only a small amount of compressibility in script bytecodes and counters and such.