Australia based Bitcoin Group, a Bitcoin mining firm based on fiat principles, raised substantially less money than their goal in an initial public offering. The firm raised $5.9 million Australian dollars out of a $20 million Australian dollar goal. Their plan if they raised the goal amount was to spend $18 million Australian dollars on Bitcoin mining equipment and facilities with the remaining $2 million to be spend on "general corporate" expenses. The firm claims to have existing mining equipment in China and Iceland. Bitcoin Group's attempts to IPO were held up several times by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. As with many other ventures which have made the transition from Bitcoin to fiat there are outstanding concerns and rumors around the firm soliciting investment directly from Chinese Bitcoin users before initially registering as an Australian company.
Falling Aluminum Prices And Unforgiving Electricity Prices Force Noranda Aluminum Bankruptcy
Today Noranda Aluminum, a wholly owned subsidiary of Apollo Global Management, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Contributing to the Noranda Aluminum's dire position is an inability to buy electricity for its New Madrid, Missouri smelter that justifies continued smelting at current aluminum prices. Aluminum is at present trading pennies above its 52 week low of 0.65 United States dollar per pound. Aluminum last traded consistently above 1 United States dollar per pound in 2011, then briefly traded around 1 dollar per pound around February to March of 2012, and since then aluminum prices have been locked into a clear, if fitful, downward trend.
Tribulations Of Nordic System Affecting Universities
The declining economic fortunes of economies subscribing to the Nordic System is trickling down institutions of higher education in those countries (archived). At the end of January the University of Helsinki announced it was preparing to purge nearly 1000 positions from its payroll (archived) and now the University of Copenhagen is preparing to remove more than 500 positions from its payroll (archived). In its English language press release the University of Copenhagen notes that annual funding decreases are its normal expectation and that among other measures they plan to "makeover" their medical science programs as the equipment and laboratories they demand at present is too expensive for a proper Nordic System university to maintain.
DPRK Launches Satellite Into Space
Numerous sources are reporting that the Democratic People's Republic of Best Korea has launched a rocket into space, and that the government of Best Korea is declaring its effort to launch a satellite into space a success. Almost exactly one month ago the Democratic People's Republic of Best Korea claimed success in testing a hydrogen bomb. During the 20th century Cold War between the USSR and United Soviet Socialist America the capability to launch satellites into space was used as a proxy that demonstrated the ability to deploy nuclear weapons at any range. Continued space launches on the part of the Democratic People's Republic of Best Korea would indicate an aerospace industry significant enough to sustain the production and maintenance of intercontinental ballistic missiles and add further credibility to the nation's growing nuclear deterrent.
Foundation Co-Chair Publishes Introduction To V Provenance System
Today ben_vulpes of the Bitcoin Foundation published an introduction to the V code provenance management system. This introduction includes links to writing by others on the V system while itself covering what V is, what V does, and what underlies a functioning implementation of V.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Crosses 144 Billion With 20.06% Rise
Mining difficulty is now 144,116,447,847.34866333, 20.06% above the previous value. This is the largest increase since August 19th, 2014, and is thus the largest increase covered by Qntra to date. Transaction fees totalled 530.03566591 Bitcoins, comprising 1.04% of total miner rewards, a similar rate to the previous period; for context, this rate was 0.77% in the antepenultimate, and 0.83% at the close of yesteryear. Stay tuned as Bitcoin's supply inflexibility keeps increasing usage costs to compensate for impending disinflation.
Oracle Employee Wrecked Socat Security
Kaspersky's Threatpost reports that Oracle employee Zhiang Wang introduced a patch to the Open Source socat utility which broke its security by changing a hard coded Diffie-Hellman prime number to a 1024 bit number that is not prime (archived). While substantial discussion is occurring around whether the change was introduced to create backdoor, the change as a point of fact broke the security promised by socat.
Intel: Chips To Get Slower
William Holt, General Manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing group, has now gone on the public record declaring their future chips will be getting slower in the name of energy efficiency as Moore's law comes to an end (archived). Continue reading
Last Actual Mozilla Feature Removed
Mozilla is removing fine grained control of cookies from their Firefox web browser in version 44 after declaring the feature and the ~100 lines of code supporting it a bug (archived). Mozilla persisted in having a userbase on its largely fictitious reputation of being a venture that supports the needs of its users while actually cultivating memory leaks, remote access vulnerabilities, and other abuses of their users. The removal of fine grained cookie control in Mozilla Firefox represents the end of any pretense that Mozilla has any concern about the desires of actual users. While all of the "major" browsers including Google's Chromium family, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers, Apple's Safari, and Mozilla's Firefox are irredeemable turds some saner browsers1 do in fact exist. There's even a GUI web browser that doesn't look too bad.
But do exercise caution because they are unfortunately still web browsers ↩
Popescu Opens Block Cipher Competition: 10 BTC Bounty + Peerage
Today Mircea Popescu opened a competition to find a block cipher suitable for advancing the causes of The Most Serence Republic.1 The rewards for the winner include a 10 Bitcoin payment and membership honoris causa in the peerage of The Most Serene Republic. Submissions with an implementation are preferred, but theoretical proposals will be considered.
This Republic, Most Serene is nothing other than Bitcoin. ↩