Bitcoin Exchange Coinbase Reportedly Valued At $1 Billion (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Bitcoin exchange Coinbase Inc. is in talks with potential investors on a new round of funding at a valuation of more than $1 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. It is not clear which investors are committing to the round, which was described as targeting around $100 million or more, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter... Demand for crypto-assets has soared with the creation of new tokens to raise funding for start-ups using blockchain technology. Coinbase said in January it raised $75 million from several major financial institutions including the New York Stock Exchange, USAA Bank and Spanish banking group BBVA.
Though Bitcoins were selling for $892 in January, they've nearly tripled in value over the last five months. Despite the fact that Coinbase "suffered outages" last week, the price of Bitcoin still rose 13.6% over the next nine days to $2561.

Comments

The criminal activity bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a bubble built on criminal activity. Once law enforcement starts cracking down on ransomware authors and terror organizations get disrupted again, the bubble will collapse and there will be a rapid decline in Bitcoin valuation. Caveat emptor.

Re: The criminal activity bubble

[clovis]

Actually, moderation is, by definition, censorship. Here's the definition from Wikipedia:

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

Moderation suppresses posts by reducing their score below the visibility threshold for some people. By definition, moderation is censorship. The original post in this thread was, indeed, censored to -1, and very rapidly so.

I disagree.
First of all "By definition, moderation is censorship" is incorrect.
Yes, moderation can be used to perform censorship, but moderation can also be used in a way that does not suppress speech. And suppress is a strong word, it has a meaning closer to absolutely prevent or stop.

Moderation at Slashdot does not prevent anyone from seeing a post unless the reader chooses to not see the post. Moderation in no way prevents anyone from making a post. So the speech of the poster not suppressed by the moderator; the post it remains where literally everyone who can access Slashdot in the world can see it. It does not even add a level of difficulty in seeing the post. Moderation at Slashdot simply allows the reader to choose what they want to read.

The concept of censorship does not apply to people choosing to not hear what you have to say.

I choose to not read the "Twilight" novels. Am I censoring the author? No. Censorship does not apply in that case.
I choose to sometimes read Slashdot modded -1 posts, and sometimes I choose not to read at that level.
All moderation at Slashdot is allow the reader to organize what he is going to read.

Slashdot does in fact do censorship. It's the "lameness filter" that prevents posting gibberish, ascii art, and apparently when posting as AC, such things the word often referred to as the "n-word". I'm not sure what else. That's censorship because the speech is suppressed and no one can choose to see it.