Amid the ongoing crackdown on cryptocurrency mining in China, prices of graphic cards from major GPU providers like Nvidia and Asus are becoming more affordable. According to a Monday report by South China Morning Post (SCMP), prices of some graphic cards have tumbled as much as two-thirds on Chinese e-commerce platforms after Sichuan province terminated mining operations. Asus’ flagship RTX 3060 card was reportedly down to 4,699 Chinese yuan ($730) on Monday from its peak price of 13,499 yuan ($2,100) in May on JD.com-operated online retail site Tmall. Nvidia's Quadro P1000, a less advanced card, dropped to 2,429 yuan ($380) …

El Salvador recently added Bitcoin as legal tender. In barely over a decade, an open-source, cypherpunk, radically new money system, with no publicly known creator and open to participation in both using and building from anyone in the world, has gone from zero value and branded as a tool for criminals to now being accepted by a government as a legitimate legal tender. To say this has been a wild ride is an intense understatement. Now, for the first time in history, a fully decentralized digital money is recognized by a state as being just as legitimate as said state’s …

The Agricultural Bank of China (AgBank) — the world's third-largest bank by assets — is set to implement Beijing’s firm anti-cryptocurrency measures and rigorously vet its clients to ensure they are not engaged in any form of illegal activities involving crypto transacting, trading or mining. AgBank’s statement today followed the institution’s meeting with the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), which convened major domestic banks and mobile payment service providers and ordered them to ensure that banking and settlement services are denied to clients engaged in crypto-related transactions. An official PBoC statement today reiterated that all banks and payment institutions “must …

With extreme positions on both sides, some would have us believe that decentralized technology and regulation are mutually exclusive. As pervasive as that narrative has become, a more evolved view is that both decentralization and regulation are inevitable, so the best results will flow with regulators and innovators coming together. But what will that cooperation look like? At the Stellar Development Foundation, our view is that regulators and innovators will (and should) influence each other, and that means both sides should be prepared to compromise. Let’s start with some honest self-reflection: There is no inherent quality of blockchain or cryptocurrency …

Smart contracts are an important element of the blockchain revolution, although they predate blockchain. According to most sources, it was Nick Szabo who coined the term “smart contract” in the 1990s. The mechanism of a vending machine has since been frequently given as an example of a basic smart contract based on if-then logic. The payment into a vending machine triggers an irrevocable automated action from when money is retained to when an item is supplied. The emergence of blockchain technology enabled the implementation of such if-then logic on decentralized networks to facilitate autonomous self-executing, self-performing smart contracts, also called …

Maxine Waters, who represents California's 43rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives, said she had organized a group of Democratic lawmakers for a deep dive on cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies. In a Tuesday virtual hearing of the House's Task Force on Financial Technology, Waters said “cryptocurrencies and other digital assets” were an important issue for the House Financial Services Committee, for which she is the chairwoman. The California congressmember added: "As cryptocurrencies grow exponentially, I've organized a working group of Democratic members to engage with regulators and experts to do a deep dive on this …

Rolando Castro, the Minister of Labor and Social Welfare in El Salvador has said that the government is discussing whether companies in the country should pay their employees in Bitcoin. According to local radio station 107.7 Fuego GMV, Castro has discussed the issue of employers paying their workers in Bitcoin (BTC) with officials from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economy. His remarks come a week after the country’s Legislative Assembly approved the use of the cryptocurrency as legal tender. El Salvador’s 2001 Law of Monetary Integration, which provided the legislative framework to eventually replace the Salvadoran colón …

All eyes are on Bitcoin (BTC), with the largest cryptocurrency shooting up past $40,000 on Monday. Unsurprisingly, the price increase happened shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the electric-car company would potentially accept BTC payments once more miners confirm green energy initiatives. Yet, while Musk’s tweet may have driven the price of Bitcoin up, some industry experts believe that Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency that should be leveraged. For example, during an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami, Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Avanti Financial, said that unlike other cryptocurrencies, solvency matters more than …

The United States Space Force, a branch of the armed forces created under the previous administration of Donald Trump, is releasing a series of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. In an announcement on Monday, the U.S. Space Force (USSF) said it had partnered with community-oriented nonfungible token platform Ethernity Chain to release digital versions of patches and coins designed for the launch of its fifth vehicle in the GPS Block III. The NFTs will feature the satellite's launch vehicle, space suits and other iconic imagery. The one being launched is named after Neil Armstrong, a space pioneer and the first person …

Cryptocurrency is becoming increasingly mainstream. Between the entrance en masse of traditional financial institutions — from investment funds, to banks, to insurance companies — to the multitrillion-dollar market capitalization, crypto is truly unignorable. As such, it is also increasingly on the radar of regulators around the world, particularly in the United States. How can this industry balance stability and investor protection on the one hand with the promotion and support of innovation on the other? There are three paths to regulating crypto. The first is to not regulate it as much, but given the incredible growth and increasing overlap with …

The United States Internal Revenue Service classifies crypto as property, meaning you can trigger taxes every time you use crypto to buy something. You might be using it to pay for a Tesla electric vehicle — oh, sorry, that’s not possible anymore — a cup of coffee or even a castle in Europe. You might be paying someone for services, either as an independent contractor or as an employee. But no matter what the transaction, you may have a gain or a loss, something quite apart from the income tax impact on the person you are paying. Not so simple …

While El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as legal tender, one Dutch official blasted the cryptocurrency, calling for an urgent blanket ban. Pieter Hasekamp, director of the Dutch Bureau for Economic Analysis under the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, published an essay entitled “The Netherlands must ban bitcoin.” In line with the essay’s title, Hasekamp lists a wide list of reasons why the Dutch government must enforce an immediate total ban on mining, trading and holding Bitcoin (BTC). According to the official, this could cause the price to plummet because Bitcoin “has no intrinsic value and is only valuable because …