The American Institute specializing on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) complained that they could not purchase the necessary graphics cards for research work, which were bought by the Cryptocurrency Miners. "We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]... and we can't get 'em," said Dan Werthimer, professor at the Berkeley SETI Research Center.

The LoopX cryptocurrency start-up, which, with the help of ICO, attracted investments of several million dollars, disappeared along with all the collected funds in cryptocurrencies. Promising "the most modern algorithm of trading on the cryptocurrency market," the start-up suddenly disappeared, closing the site on the Internet and removing all traces of existence in social networks.

In the European Union, with the help of cryptocurrency, about 4-5.5 billion dollars are illegally laundered annually, the head of the European Police Service (Europol), Rob Wainwright, said in an interview with BBC. The total amount of illegal income in Europe, he said, is 100 billion pounds sterling, of which about 3-4% is laundered using cryptocurrency.

The founder and head of investment company Pantera Capital, Dan Morehead, made a very optimistic statement about the Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market in general. Speaking in the Fast Money program on CNBC, Morehead said that the events taking place on the market should not be considered catastrophic. According to historical data, the drop in the rate of Bitcoin does not contradict an absolutely normal scenario, and in addition, the financier expects a change in the market trend in the near future.

Bitgrail, a cryptocurrency exchange specializing in trading Nano (previously Railblocks), stopped all operations after losing 17 million XRB, at that time costing about 170 million dollars. The Italian exchange suspended the input and output of XRP two weeks earlier, and customers were already afraid of the worst. The other day the operator of the exchange Francesco Firano (Francesco "The Bomber" Firano) confirmed the bad news, which caused a stormy reaction of the Nano community. Many believe that the owner of Bitgrail carried out a fraudulent operation, stealing almost 13% of the funds from the total number of tokens in circulation.

Forbes magazine published a rating of billionaires, which multiplied their capital due to virtual currency. Americans are in the lead on this list. On the first line is co-founder of the third most popular cryptocurrency Ripple, former CEO of Chris Larsen with a fortune of 7.5-8 billion dollars. The volume of Ripple's capitalization reaches $ 29 billion. In the monitoring, Forbes experts analyze Larsen's own cryptocurrency state with a 17% stake in Ripple.

The executive director of the international fast-food chain Starbucks, Howard Schultz, surprised several colleagues when he raised the issue of cryptocurrencies during a conference call, discussing the company's last quarterly profits. The former CEO told the audience that, in his opinion, the publicly received cryptocurrency will come in the next few years, says the CCN edition. Schulz also doubted that Bitcoin would become one of such currencies, saying: "I do not believe that Bitcoin will become a currency today or in the future." Schultz joins a group of well-known Bitcoin skeptics, such as the legendary investor Warren Buffett, Nobel Laureate in Economics Robert Shiller and JP Morgan Chase executive Jamie Dimon, who went so far, calling Bitcoin a "fraud", although later he apologized for such comments.

Financial consultant Sebastien Meunier suggested seven possible (and unlikely) scenarios for the collapse of Bitcoin, which could be realized in the next few years. Before we proceed to the assumptions, let's start with the facts - Bitcoin was declared dead more than 200 times. Despite the fact that the first cryptocurrency in the world for more than 9 years works practically without fail, it is still fashionable to predict its demise. Many experts are known for continuing to predict the death of Bitcoin, despite the fact that every day the network refutes their assumptions. However, if we assume that these people still have a certain level of intelligence, the only explanation for the failed predictions and emotional statements is that they did not devote enough time to studying the work of the network.

Recently it was discovered that hackers trying to take over the computers for cryptocurrency mining now use commercials on YouTube for mining at the expense of viewers. Nowadays, cryptocurrency mining can become a highly profitable enterprise, and hackers try to maximize their profits. According to Ars Technica, many Internet users on social networks complained that their antivirus software detected malicious software for mining cryptocurrency when they visited YouTube. Even after users switched to another browser, the antivirus program again displayed a warning when visiting YouTube.

Last week there was a major hacking of the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck, as a result of which 523 million NEM coins were stolen. This forced the site to stop operations to withdraw all funds except Bitcoin. The total value of the stolen coins was about $ 534 million at the time of the theft. Although the cryptocurrency market stabilized quite quickly, experts believe that this break-in is just the beginning. In an interview with CNBC, analyst Nicholas Colas said that in the near future, we expect more attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges.