Daily Crypto NewsEDITION #275, 03 August 2021

Tor won't forget you!

Hey Moni Maker

Today, in 1492, Christopher Columbus began his first voyage to the New World. That year, Christopher discovered America. Modern travelers are flying into space. Where will people lead our society in 500 years?

Probably to parallel universes. We don't know. But we do know that the people of the future will pay for travel with cryptocurrency.

Digest? Oh, yeah! Let's go!

Riccardo Spagni, the former maintainer of the Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency, was arrested last month in Nashville, Tennessee on fraud charges tied to alleged offenses in South Africa between 2009 and 2011.

Spagni was on board a private jet scheduled to fly to Los Cabos, Mexico when he was apprehended in Nashville during a scheduled refueling stop, according to court documents. His journey originally began just outside of New York City. He is currently in the custody of the U.S. Attorney General, according to court documents.

The arrest was made at the request of the South African government, which is seeking Spagni’s extradition on fraud charges. The charges, which are unrelated to Spagni’s role at Monero, are tied to his previous employment as an information technology manager at a company called Cape Cookies.

So what?

A new movie! The dude is accused of forging invoices. Allegedly, he listed his own accounts instead of company accounts. Hmmm... could one of the Monero developers get caught up in such seemingly bullshit?

As practice shows, yes! World hackers are caught on the human factor: forgot to connect VPN (roughly speaking), spoke too much, took a photo with geolocation...

Bro, we hope you really messed up there and you'll answer. And it's not all a show to get down Monero through you.

Payments giant Paypal is hiring more than 100 crypto-related positions as demand for cryptocurrencies grows. Paypal’s CEO recently revealed the company’s expansion plans, stating, “We continue to be really pleased with the momentum we’re seeing on crypto and we’re obviously adding incremental functionality into that.”

So what?

Crypto is HODL all the time! One day you're a crypto expert, you're a hobbyist, you read Moni Talks... and in a couple of years, you'll get a job at Google for example. Savvy?

Jack Dorsey's Square will buy back all issued shares in Afterpay for ≈$29bn. The deal is scheduled for the first quarter of 2022.

Afterpay is a leading "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) platform that operates in Australia, the UK, Canada, the US, and New Zealand. After the acquisition, Square will integrate Afterpay into its Seller and Cash App platforms.

This will allow even the smallest merchants to offer BNPL to checkout and Afterpay users to make installment payments directly from the Cash App.

As part of the integration, more than seven million customers using Afterpay will access the benefits of Cash App features such as money transfers, bitcoin transactions, stock purchases, and more.

So what?

Dorsey loves bitcoin. Does bitcoin love Dorsey?

Marathon Digital Holdings, one of the largest enterprise Bitcoin mining companies in North America, has entered into a contract with Bitmain to purchase an additional 30,000 Antminer S19j Pro (100 TH/s) miners for $120.7 million.

Based on current delivery schedules, Marathon anticipates all 30,000 newly purchased miners to ship from Bitmain between January 2022 and June 2022. As a result, the Company’s mining operations are expected to consist of more than 133,000 Bitcoin miners, producing approximately 13.3 EH/s once all miners are fully deployed and operational. If all of Marathon’s miners were deployed today, the Company’s hash rate would represent approximately 12% of the Bitcoin network’s total hash rate, which was approximately 109 EH/s as of August 1, 2021.

“Increasing our percentage of the total network’s hash rate increases our probability of earning bitcoin, and given the uniquely favorable conditions in the current mining environment, we believe it is an opportune time to add new miners to our operations,” said Fred Thiel, Marathon’s CEO. “With this new order, we are growing our operations by 30% to approximately 133,000 miners, producing 13.3 EH/s. As a result, once all miners are fully deployed, our mining operations will be among the largest, not just in North America, but globally. We’d like to thank the team at Bitmain for expediting this order as we work to further scale our operations and establish Marathon as one of the leading Bitcoin miners in North America.”

The east-west migration of hash rates could have a positive impact on the environmental aspect of the industry. Marathon is on the list of US miners who are committed to 'green mining.'

Altcoin — all cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin. Also, bitcoin maximalists often call altcoins shitcoins.

And more you can find in our Glossary!

And you...buy Bitcoin! (it's a good time!)