Fiat stock markets in China opened the new year by crashing. The CSI300 index of major Chinese stocks fell 7 percent before trading was suspended.
Year 8 Begins
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Militia Liberates Oregon Land From Federal Occupation
Lead Top Performing Metal of 2015
Out of all the metals traded on open markets in 2015, lead was the top performer posting only a 5% loss closing the year at 0.80 United States Dollars per pound and 1623.27 Euros per ton. Humble lead's 5% loss was enough to outperform all of the precious metals, the rare earth metals, and the other base metals. Price information on metals with less established markets in 2015 is unavailable.
7 Month Investigation Catches Alleged Refund Fraudsters
In another incident highlighting weaknesses underlying the fiat system, it took the Volusia County Sheriff's Department in Florida 7 months to investigate an operation they allege used gift cards to launder value derived from stolen retail merchandise (archived). The Sheriff's Department alleges that Cash for Gift Card stores operated by a father and his adult son knowingly sent thieves to steal from retail stores and return the merchandise in exchange for gift cards. The Cash for Gift Card stores were alleged to buy these gift cards at half their face value and then resell them in bulk on the Internet. How the Sheriff's department supposes the thieves were enlisted by Cash for Gift Card as opposed to self motivated is unknown at this time. There is however no ambiguity that there exists an extraordinary number of places where the fiat system leaks value big and small, online and offline.
Bitcoin Foundation Address Recap
The Bitcoin Foundation opened the year with a State of Bitcoin Address sharing a few developments as the Foundation continues in its second year of work. The address is highlighted by the Foundation's impending move to tag their reference client version 0.5.4 with the release label. Other developments include: Continue reading
Qntra (S.QNTR) December 2015 Report
2015 In Bitcoin
Difficulty Rises 11.16% Adding A New Digit At 103,880,340,815
Just in time for the 2016th (incidentally, the number of blocks in Bitcoin's shorter metric of elapsed time) year of the fiat calendar, Bitcoin added a new digit to its difficulty decimal, now equal to 103,880,340,815 (an increase of 11.16% over the previous value, placing hashrate estimates over 690 PH/s.). While such increases used to be noteworthy, they pale in the shadow of the last leap (December 18th's 18.14% increase, to 93,448,670,796), leaving thin-margined miners nervously wondering whether they'll ever make good on the forecasts of yesteryear. Continue reading
Ian Murdock Dead After Police Encounter
Debian founder Ian Murdock reportedly died after an altercation with police. Murdock reported on social media having been beaten by police. Some of his tweets suggested that he may have been sodomized by a female officer of the San Francisco County Sheriff's Department (archived). His last public communication was the assertion he would not be committing suicide until he could recount the police brutality incident in a blog post. Murdock's authorship of the tweets cannot however be authenticated. Murdock's current employer Docker is handling his remaining worldly affairs. Reliable information on the end of Murdock's life is unlikely to ever become available.