The U.S. arrested an Ethereum Foundation cryptocurrency scientist and charged him with helping North Korea use blockchain technology “to evade sanctions and launder money.”

Virgil Griffith, 36, was arrested Thursday at Los Angeles International Airport and charged with conspiring to evade U.S. sanctions against the regime of dictator Kim Jong-un, according to a statement from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman. Griffith, a U.S. citizen who lives in Singapore, attended a blockchain and cryptocurrency conference in Pyongyang in April, despite specific State Department warnings.

“Griffith provided highly technical information to North Korea, knowing that this information could be used to help North Korea launder money and evade sanctions,” Berman said in a statement Friday. He “jeopardized the sanctions that both Congress and the president have enacted to place maximum pressure on North Korea’s dangerous regime.”

Griffith was the subject of a 2008 New York Times Magazine profile that described him as a “cult hacker” and dubbed him the “Internet Man of Mystery.“ He worked with programmer and activist Aaron Swartz to develop Tor2web, which allows dark-web sites to be viewed on a standard internet browser. On his Linkedin profile, Griffith, a California Institute of Technology Ph.D., says he moved to Singapore in 2015 because he “concluded the best place for new growth” is Asia.

He has tweeted about North Korea a number of times in the past year. On June 29, he opined that emerging multinational standards on cryptocurrency regulations would create “a market opportunity” for the isolated regime to launch an exchange. In August, he tweeted a picture of his visa to visit North Korea.

Though the charges were filed in New York, Griffith is scheduled to first appear in federal court in Los Angeles sometime Friday.

From the analysis of Kprawn on Coinbase cold wallet and its mutisignature, it will be impossible for just one nothing CEO who is felling good to just run away with the private key, since this requires a consensus. I really don't know why people will leave fund in an exchange with sole private key holder. This is dangerous and any stupid CEO with such power can pull the trigger when he feels good.

It's equally very important to have much of our fund on non-custodian wallet so we can be in-charge of our wallets.

That's a pretty big amount of money in equivalent, if that assets were deposited in a bank, it will have an insurance that deposits will get a certain maximum amount in case something happen to the money. I wonder what would be coinbase approach to ensured that big funds, Binance have a SAFU funds, how bout coinbase?

I am just concern about this a lot because of the trends that big exchanges are being hack, we have upbit recently.
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/48578/south-korean-crypto-exchange-upbit-gets-hacked-loses-nearly-50m-worth-of-ether

I am not entirely sure if I want the government to know how much money I have in my bitcoin account.
Now, as adoption it is great because it allows everyone to have a bit of bitcoin in their bank account which would make it very simple to get it, however for the ones that got into bitcoin way before it got this much attention, we got into it because we wanted politics out of finance.

Do you know what "having bitcoin in your bank account" means? That means people would be able to give the banks the right to have bitcoin in their systems, so they could basically once again have 1000 bitcoins as a whole bank but tell people they own 9000 bitcoins all because they think nobody will be cashing it out, there are more money on earth than there is cash all due to this problem.

I am very skeptical when I see traditional institutions entering the crypto field. Bitcoin was born with the aim of freeing itself from the power of central banks and states, not to give them an additional source of power.

According to recent reports, Coinbase has a whopping 966,230 Bitcoin in its cold wallet. The exchange is increasingly becoming like a ‘bank’ which stores a growing number of deposited cryptocurrency assets.

Other exchanges lag behind Coinbase, but still have sizeable cold wallets from its depositors and own funds. BitMEX has around 265,140 BTC ($1.94B) while Bitstamp comes in third with 229,490 BTC ($1.67B). Other top exchanges by assets under its custody are Bitfinex (146,120 BTC), Kraken (136,780 BTC), Bittrex (131,340 BTC), and Coincheck (35,090 BTC)

The Upbit hack is just another clear indication that storing funds in exchanges is a bad idea. These exchanges are prone to hacks. In 2019 alone, over $100M+ was stolen from exchanges... Yes, Binance too. Upbit has promised to reimburse all the lost funds to their customers. What if the exchange is a more smaller exchange?

Recall: Cryptopia Hack.

Not all analysts are experts in price analysis and they will give you the real direction. Some of them are trying to give a stir or make a statement.
Some are pessimistic because the price was at $ 12,000 a few days ago and now we are at $ 7000 and others check the future direction of the price.
If we look more broadly, the price was a few dollars years ago.
So we often see the last 3 months as a reference.

Well, dollar lost its value because of the over printing done by the banks. They did it to stimulate the growth of the economy they said, but it was over done. It has far exceeded the purpose of stimulation which resulted in the global debt of the world reaching an astronomic amount. This was why a lot of analysts have released their ideas that gold/silver is increasing in importance right now, and even banks have ideas of hoarding gold and silver so in case of an economic crash, they could fall back to it.

Imagine a guy that pays a million dollars for a bread roll, while in the same time he can buy it for $1 at other bakeries. Such scenario would be crazy because no one would give million times more money for the same thing. That is why the above scenario is not possible in reality. But... in the crypto world, such scenario is exactly what can be observed.

In the crypto world people are paying million times more for bitcoin than for altcoins, even though these coins essentially have the same features as bitcoin. Functions and features of cryptos are pretty straightforward. Elimination of expensive brokers, lawyers, and other typical “middlemen”. Low transaction costs. Transactions are transparent, quick, permanent, and hard to fake. Cryptos that are priced below $0.001 have all these functions and features. But despite that people are paying thousands of dollars for bitcoin.

Crypto-focused Canadian investment fund manager 3IQ Corp. announced on Thursday that it has filed a preliminary prospectus for the IPO of The Bitcoin Fund. More importantly, the prospectus dated Nov. 27 has been receipted by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) after previously rejecting it. The IPO will offer two classes of units at $10 each.

The Bitcoin Fund is a closed-end investment fund established as a trust under Ontario’s laws, the company explained, adding that “the units will be an eligible qualified investment for registered investment accounts.” The fund’s investment objectives are to provide investors with long-term capital appreciation and exposure to bitcoin and its daily price movement in USD, the announcement details.

hey guys i am trying to lend some btc, i used to lend on casino, but profits are very low and casinos are getting unstable.

i used bitfinex in past too, but since volume is getting low, what are platforms you guys recommend !

What are the trusted platforms recommended by fellow bitcointalk memebers !

From a little bit of googling, it looks like the Idax is located in Finland, since i live in there too i could basically visit on that address but i highly doubt that i find anything from there. Could investigate though.

So I'm gearing up for a bit of a road trip and will be passing through a couple major centers in my country. Now I seem to recall a few years back especially leading into the 2017 FOMO that quite a few retail outlets had started taking BTC, LTC and maybe a few others. There are articles going back a few years where there were some restaurants that had adopted the practice as well. Now I don't know how many of them set up their own wallets, or if they used a gateway service to convert crypto and be paid in FIAT. The problem is this is on the steep decline, and it doesn't seem like retail is interested. I am struggling to find a shop I can show up and pay for something with crypto.

Sometimes it seems that the owners of the exchanges forget that they are dealing with bitcoin. let's look at this:


1 BTC = $7700

there are people who own a lot of bitcoins, are investors who bought when the price was low or are miners... the fact is that 1 bitcoin has a price much higher than $2000. I wonder why $2000 instead of setting values too high? As far as I know criminals do not waste time committing crimes to earn $2000, they always target big money

But having all these Korean exchange being hacked is indeed kinda, odd. Maybe it's because the volume there are quite huge or just simply vuln and can be exploited but I think they need to invest more into security. This is also why when new exchange appear, they should undergo a code review so that it won't be exploited because honestly, some exchanges are lacking their concern in term of security.

German governtment is indecisive with cryptocurrency since most people consider cryptocurrency as an investment asset giving the authority to warm the public about its potentiality to make a negative outcome because of its speculative nature and high volatility. But I guess they were pretty sure this time, it might even boost their economy that may delete their negative interest rates.

Honestly I think there is more into this story than just "a locked down cold wallet" just because the CEO's whereabouts are unknown. It could even be a planned exit scam.

#idax exit scam?  Withdrawals are not processed.  Admins are not replying on telegram. Mails are not replied. This has been going on for days.  #cryptocurrency #bitcoin #ethereum $btc