Tech

Bitcoin bubble bursts overnight, dragging down stocks

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Overnight, a broad selloff of prominent cryptocurrencies has vaporized billions of dollars in value. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency affected, is off more than 18 percent in the last 24 hours. Currently, it’s worth just over half what it was in mid-April. Over the past week, more than $600 […]

Tech

GameStop FOMO inspires a new wave of crypto pump-and-dumps

Enlarge (credit: peng song / Getty) After the California Gold Rush, in 1870, two Kentucky swindlers whipped up a scheme to prey on thirsty financiers’ FOMO. They invented a diamond field out West. Investors sunk millions in today’s money into the scheme. All of it, of course, was for naught—a cautionary tale about believing anyone […]

Tech

Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange, reportedly under investigation

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images News) Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, is under investigation by a laundry list of US government agencies, including the US Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to a report by Bloomberg. The agencies are probing Binance for potential criminal violations, the […]

Tech

Musk: Bitcoin is bad for climate (and you can’t buy Teslas with it anymore)

Enlarge / Elon Musk in 2020. (credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / Getty) Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Wednesday that Tesla would stop taking bitcoin as payment for the company’s electric vehicles. The change comes less than two months after the automaker began accepting the cryptocurrency. Why the about-face? Musk now says he has concerns over bitcoin’s […]