A new book on Bitcoin (BTC) has catapulted into the top three on Amazon’s macroeconomics bestseller list, offering more evidence that digital assets are piquing people's interest. Released on Dec. 2, Bitcoin: Hard Money You Can't F*ck With: Why bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency is currently the third-most-bought title in the Kindle macroeconomics category. In terms of new releases in the category, the book takes the top spot: The book is authored by Bitcoin evangelist Jason Williams, entrepreneur and co-founder of Morgan Creek Digital Assets — the crypto-focused investment arm of Morgan Creek Capital. As Cointelegraph reported, …

Major United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is experiencing “elevated error rates on some backend systems due to an AWS service outage,” according to an official post on Nov. 25 shortly after 7:00 pm PST. In an announcement posted nine hours prior, Coinbase said that trading was not being impacted at the time. The following update removed this statement, stating: “You may encounter intermittent delays or errors while transacting, as well as accessing other parts of our applications. Customer support inquiries are also delayed.” The AWS issue has had a significant impact on the tech sector more broadly, with platforms such …

Decentralized finance and shopping seem like an unusual combination at first. How can liquidity pools help you save money at the till? But scratch a little deeper and some compelling use cases for DeFi emerge. With the retail sector suffering through one of the most challenging times seen in a generation, here are the main issues facing e-commerce right now… and how DeFi could fix them. A match made in heaven? The likes of Amazon, eBay and Shopify have transformed the way we buy everyday items. Now, anyone can become a merchant — and once exotic products can be delivered …

Tech-heavy stock market indices, including the Nasdaq Composite and the S&P 500, have begun to recover. Amazon posted high pandemic sales that led profits to climb threefold and reported a 37% spike in revenue. Facebook also surpassed Wall Street expectations, achieving $21.5 billion in revenue during the third quarter. Although the correlation between Bitcoin and U.S. stocks has declined in recent weeks, the probability that the rising risk-on market sentiment could buoy BTC remains high. As Kevin Svenson, a chartist at Kraken’s Cryptowatch, explained, the market direction between Bitcoin and the S&P 500 is the “same 80% of the time.” …

On Tuesday, a House subcommittee put out a massive report that places Big Tech in the crosshairs of major antitrust reforms. The four firms at the center of the report — Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon — have been in hot water with Congress for some time. But while the tone of the recent conversation is punitive towards those firms, it also seems to envision a broader shift to new rules that would stop tech from this level of centralization again. Obviously, that’s a lofty ambition, and sweeping political ideals don’t make it into market practice without extensive compromise. Nonetheless, …

Frederik Gregaard, the incoming CEO of the Cardano Foundation, shared with Cointelegraph his perspective on fintech's competitive landscape and major technology trends. Discussing competition, Gregaard said that the protocol's biggest opponents do not come from within the blockchain space: “I think the biggest competitor, it's really the largest technology companies today around, the large tech platforms such as Google, Amazon, Tencent, Alibaba, those kind of players”. Gregaard believes that social-media-based big technology providers have morphed from supplying their customers with meaningful tools to essentially owning and manipulating their users. He went so far as to call them “an addictive, mental, …

Smart speakers have become part of our daily lives. With a single word, we are able to command a device to answer our inquiries and shopping desires. The simple act of ordering diapers or asking for a weather report is now banished to the corner of the brain that houses what you had for breakfast that morning; you can recall it, sure, but not without considerable effort. Our devices, though, don’t forget. And neither do the companies that make them and own all the data collected through our interactions. Data — as the analogy goes — is the new oil. …

The Indian IT giant Tech Mahindra is planning to build and deploy an array of blockchain solutions on Amazon Managed Blockchain in the next 12 to 18 months. According to a report by The Economic Times on Sept. 7, the technology giant has collaborated with Amazon Web Services and other organizations to deliver its blockchain solution to its customers worldwide. Tech Mahindra, the subsidiary of the Indian conglomerate, Mahindra Group, will work on blockchain solutions for the aviation, telecom and healthcare sectors while also pursuing projects for its banking and financial services, retail, manufacturing, and oil and gas customers. Their …

Cybersecurity researchers have detected what they believe to be the first ever stealth crypto mining campaign to steal Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials. The mining campaign was described as being relatively unsophisticated by Cado Security in their report on Aug. 17. In total, it seems so far to have only resulted in the attackers — who operate under the name TeamTNT — pocketing a paltry $300 in illicit profits. What struck the researchers’ attention was the crypto-mining worm’s specific functionality for stealing AWS credentials. Cado Security understands this as part of a wider trend, showing that hackers and attackers are …

The much-debated blockchain firm Ripple is now planning to expand its use case far beyond just streamlining cross-border payments in partnership with national and international banks. Ripple had focused its efforts solely on cross-border payments for the past five years when Brad Garlinhouse joined the company as the chief executive officer. Despite their unprecedented success as a software solution provider to financial entities, Ripple has seemingly come to a realization that the company’s core value still lies in the associated cryptocurrency XRP and the Ripple blockchain. While the company had mostly worked with banks and directly funded millions to blockchain …

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor’s note The concept of monopoly will reign in today’s Law Decoded. As a fundamental principle, blockchain technology is about distributing both inputs and outputs of information securely. In its still very young lifecycle, the technology has proven to have boundless applications on the basis of this fairly simple principle. A secondary principle is decentralization, and in this way, blockchain technology seems inherently opposed to monopolies. The big challenge of Bitcoin’s white paper was finding a way to move value across …

Chinese content generation platform TikTok, a video-sharing app that has been called the fastest-growing social networking service in history, has been in the spotlight since early 2019 and now surpasses 800 million users. Despite the fact that the app’s data security breaches are raising controversy worldwide, more and more young people are using it as the go-to social media for the new generation, with a reported 69% of TikTok’s global audience being between the ages of 16 and 24. Despite its overwhelming success and rapidly growing user base, the truth behind the worldwide sensation is that “the new Instagram" is …