This week, 2,600 tech industry moguls and entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Gary Marcus, and Steve Wozniak, signed an open letter requesting artificial intelligence (AI) labs to pause research and development for six months. The signatories believe that safety programs and regulations need to be strengthened, as they assert that AI labs are currently in an…
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Cryptocurrency and technology proponents have recently been discussing a new bipartisan bill called the “Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT)” Act. In addition to targeting firms such as Kaspersky, Huawei, and Tiktok, opponents of the bill believe one of its provisions will punish ordinary Americans for leveraging a…
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According to the U.S. Federal Reserve, the central bank’s Fednow payment service will start operating in July, and participants will be certified in April to leverage the Fednow Pilot Program. Ken Montgomery, the Fednow program executive, is urging American financial institutions to make preparations to join the central bank’s new payment service. Economist Richard Werner,…
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The U.S. government and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) are auctioning off two failed American financial institutions, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank (SNBY), this week, with bids due by March 17. However, sources familiar with the matter said the qualifications to purchase the banks are stringent, and reportedly, the purchasers cannot deal…
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As the number of Bitcoin-based Ordinal inscriptions nears the 300,000 mark, Galaxy Digital’s research team published a report on the subject that says the market size of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) built on Bitcoin could reach $4.5 billion over the next two years. The researchers at Galaxy think that new use cases stemming from the inscription…
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On Friday, debtors who control the official FTX Twitter account warned the community to “be on alert for scams from entities claiming to be affiliated with FTX.” They also noted that neither FTX debtors nor any entity related to the company has issued any IOU crypto assets or “debt tokens.” The alert comes as a…
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According to a post on the Reddit community r/bitcoin, an old file was discovered that may be linked to Julian Assange, the whistleblower and founder of Wikileaks. The encrypted 7zip file is in the output script from a transaction that took place on Jan. 5, 2017, and was mined at block height 446,713. Speculation Surrounds…
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Ordinals, a new way of using and getting content using Bitcoin, are enabling creators to harness the utility of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) directly from the blockchain, essentially creating native Bitcoin NFTs. This has stirred the pot in some circles, which are now discussing if this is the way in which Bitcoin’s blockchain should be used,…
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This week, FTX debtors issued a press release and a 20-page document noting that bankruptcy administrators had located $5.5 billion in liquid assets. The document details that investigators discovered fiat currencies, crypto assets, and securities as part of FTX’s and Alameda Research’s cache. However, the disclosure to unsecured creditors does not mention the extremely large…
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Bitcoin Records Largest Mined Block to Date, 4 MB Block Containing NFT Causes Unease Among Small-Block Supporters
Amid the controversy surrounding the Ordinals project and the debate over what types of data should be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, the network mined its largest block, nearly 4 MB in size, containing just 63 transactions. One of the transactions was a 3.94 MB Ordinal inscription featuring an image of a wizard, and the…
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