An employee at a nuclear research center in the closed town of Sarov in Russia was fined for illegally mining Bitcoin (BTC). Convicted to pay $7,000 fine According to a Sept. 27 article by Russian news outlet Meduza, a man was fined 450,000 rubles ($7,000) for trying to mine Bitcoin by using a petaflop-capable supercomputer at his workplace, the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute in Sarov, Russia. Sarov, about 230 miles east of Moscow is a closed town as it is the Russian center for nuclear weapons research. The court delivered the verdict on Sept. 17. The nuclear research employee was …
After climbing to a price of more than $41,000 on Monday, Bitcoin’s market capitalization has surpassed that of the Russian ruble. According to data from CoinMarketCap, the market cap of Bitcoin (BTC) surged to roughly $780 billion on Monday amid the price rising to $41,391, a 5.7% increase over the last 24 hours. BTC’s market capitalization exceeds the money supply of the Russian ruble, which according to the Central Bank of Russia was 65.3 trillion rubles as of Feb. 1 — roughly $629 billion at the time of publication. The flippening likely occurred as the Russian ruble is undergoing inflation …
Whose side are you on? The Ukraine-Russia war is forcing people to answer that question. For some in the crypto community, this can be uncomfortable because if an individual or project stands with the West against Russia, it also means it abides by sanctions. This can be tough to square with crypto/blockchain’s supposed decentralized system and its claims on being borderless, censorship-free and distributed. Take OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, which really isn’t a decentralized project but is often described as such. “OpenSea is a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace for buying, selling and trading rare digital goods,” according to CoinMarketCap, for instance. …
A Russian independent news company has raised more than $250,000 in cryptocurrency donations from supporters in order to continue reporting independent news under a barrage of Russian government propaganda and censorship. Meduza, a Latvian-based Russian-language news site that claims to report on “the real Russia, today,” has been asking for donations since April 2021 in the form of United States dollar, euro and cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), BNB, Tether (USDT), Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC). Since publishing their donations plea, the news company has received around $250,000 in crypto donations through 146,000 individual transactions. Around 93% of the …
Cointelegraph introduces “Crypto Street,” a series of spontaneous conversations with strangers on the street to educate, entertain and take a temperature check on the world’s relationship with crypto. The first episode comes from the gates of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Cointelegraph reporter Joseph Hall attempted to speak with the world’s elite where he was rejected, ridiculed, and ignored before stumbling across crypto believers among the WEF attendees. Sporting a Cointelegraph sweatshirt with the loudest Bitcoin (BTC) logo, Hall asked passersby to guess what was print represented. Some WEF-goers refused to talk on camera while others claimed …