Newsflash: Tether’s price was artificially dropped by competitor bots, claims Bitfinex employee while Sia Coin is about to split in two project
As we venture forward after another day of relative crypto price stability, the news cycle remains as fertile as ever. New betas, launches, alternatives and scams popped up today showing us the good, the bad and the ugly of the cryptocurrency world once again. Let’s take a look at these stories:
- Siacoin fork will give birth to a new (old) cryptocurrency, but is it useless?
Siacoin has recently confirmed that the project will be performing a hard fork of their chain, one which will reset Sia’s PoW algorithm and make all the ASIC mining devices (except those created by Obelisk, a subsidiary of Sia’s parent company Nebulous) obsolete and unable to mine SC. This decision was definitely a hard one to make as it split the community into those who support the decision and those who purchased competing ASIC miners that will now become expensive paperweights. However, it seems that the second group won’t be forced to throw away their devices as SiaClassic was recently announced. Perhaps focusing too hard to point out that they are a “non-profit, impartial and law-abiding” platform, SiaClassic Foundation intends to continue development on the old Siacoin chain, thus giving the non-Obelisk ASIC miners something to work on.
Some community members feel that SiaClassic is “well intentioned and wants to keep the original Sia vision alive, while also fighting for a free market of ASICs where only performance matters”. Others think that the whole thing is redundant and is simply a scam orchestrated by an ASIC manufacturer who wants to dump his remaining Sia ASIC’s on the market. Only time will tell which one of these is actually going on here.
- BAT’s Brave Rewards program reveals new tip feature
Basic Attention Token’s Brave Rewards (previously Brave Payments) has been in a closed beta for some time now and apparently the developers have been receiving positive feedback and experiences. This has led to new features being released over time and the latest one involves an ability to directly tip Brave verified publishers. The first publisher that Brave Browser users will be able to tip is Reddit.
- Anti-cryptocurrency bank gets caught up in a money laundering scheme
In what was perhaps the most ironic plot of the day, it was revealed that Helsinki-based Nordea Bank was involved in a money laundering scheme alongside two banks in the Baltics. The report was received by Swedish Economic Crime Authority and published by Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT; this document revealed that 365 Nordea individual accounts received over 150 million Euros worth of “shady” payments (some of which had forged invoices) from various shell companies, with most of that money coming from a Danske Bank Estonian Branch and Lithuanian Ukio Bank. The irony of this story lies in the fact that Nordea previously banned its employees from investing in cryptocurrency, citing the lack of regulation/the speculative nature of the market which could lead to financial loss as the main reasons for the ban. As of now, Nordea have responded to the money laundering allegations by offering their full cooperation to the law enforcement agencies.
- Tether’s price was artificially dropped by competitor bots, claims Bitfinex employee
Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange which created the most famous crypto stable coin Tether, conducted their own research into why the mentioned currency recently fell 7% against its supposed 1:1 peg, US Dollar. This has, among other things, created a massive $1000 spread between BTC prices on Bitfinex and on fiat-to-crypto exchanges like Coinbase. According to a Bitfinex employee, his own company wasn’t involved in the peg being dropped; what did happen, according to the internal investigation that Bitfinex conducted, was that a third party set up a network of trading bots which performed massive USDT sell-offs, which caused the price against the USD to tank. An independent analyst who prepared the report for Bitfinex believes that IMMO, a Rothschild-created project, was involved in the attack. Check out the complete scoop here.
- Numerous cryptocurrency news sites promote a phishing scam
A story broke today that Elon Musk’s Boring Company product called Not-a-Flamethrower, a one-time limited edition novelty device that the eccentric Tesla founder sold earlier this year, went on sale once again, this time accepting cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Several cryptocurrency covering websites published the story linking to a fake phishing website called “TheBoringFlamethrower”. This website was never promoted either by Elon or by his media channels and Elon himself said that he won’t be selling any more of these flamethrowers so it’s unclear where the story originated from; still, several notable news outlets like Bitcoinist.com or EthereumWorldNews.com promoted it, without fact-checking the details. And we also fell in the same trap and published the story but it took us 3 minutes to figure out it was fake and iron out our mistake.
