Luxury rehabs treat ‘crypto addiction’ for thousands of dollars

 Around 1% of cryptocurrency traders will eventually acquire an “extreme” addiction to trading cryptocurrencies. Due to this, rehabs in Switzerland, Spain, and other countries recently began offering treatment for an ‘addiction to crypto trading.’

What is crypto addiction?

Even if not everyone succumbs to the lure of cryptocurrency trading, it’s easy to understand how the combination of rapid price swings, a 24-hour market, more than 21,000 different tokens to gamble on, and a vibrant online community may be enticing.

A16z Exerts Control Over Uniswap by Downvoting BNB Chain Deployment

 The VC giant has used its overwhelming voting power in an attempt to quash a proposal by Uniswap governance.

Crypto venture firm a16z has used its 15 million UNI token voting block to vote against a proposal that would use the Wormhole bridge for Uniswap V3 deployment on BNB Chain.

According to the ongoing results of the proposal vote, a16z’s overwhelming token stash enabled it to control around half of the votes so far, pushing the decision its way.

The proposal to deploy the latest Uniswap iteration on the BNB Chain was submitted on Feb. 2. It was made by 0xPlasma Labs on behalf of the Uniswap Community, following a temperature check with 80% in favor of the proposal.

The voting period will conclude on Feb. 10, and only 3% or 30.5 million votes had been cast at the time of writing. For a vote to pass, it must achieve a quorum of 4% or 40 million UNI tokens. A16z has made every effort to make sure this doesn’t happen.

The Moons bridge to Arbitrum Nova has been deprecated

 The Moons bridge to Arbitrum Nova has been deprecated. Accordingly, admins are reportedly planning to burn 4.77m Moons next week.

Admins’ stand following the deprecation of Arbitrum bridge

The Moons’ admins plan to burn 4.77m moons next week.

This list represents the share of Moons that wasn’t bridged to Nova and lay in previous networks. 

About 4.1m Moons, which accounts for 90%, are locked on Rinkeby Ethereum. 

Texas BTC Miners Face More Problems After Another Storm Hit the State: Report

 The ice blizzard that passed through Texas caused domestic BTC miners to halt activities for a while.

Bitcoin miners located in Texas reportedly suffered severe disruption of their operations due to a blizzard that battered the region.

The extreme weather conditions prompted them to switch off their machines to preserve the local power grid. 

The Cold Winter in Texas Surprised Crypto Miners

As reported by Bloomberg, the ice storm that hit “the Lone Star State” damaged some of the equipment of the domestic bitcoin miners. Electricity consumption surged significantly due to the low temperatures, and those firms had to temporarily shut their businesses to protect the energy network. 

Bitcoin developer says network is not resistant to censorship, questions mining decentralization

 In a recent Twitter thread, a developer questioned the entire idea of Bitcoin’s censorship resistance.

Bitcoin’s censorship-resistance

Bitcoin was built on the idea of offering complete censorship resistance for transactions. However, according to a Bitcoin developer, this coin is far from censorship-resistant.

The developer Luke Dashjr posted a Twitter thread raising doubts about Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, saying the network’s ” hypothetical censorship-resistance is not based on some mere hope miners won’t censor.” 

As he laid down his case, Luke highlighted his problem with the Bitcoin network noting that miners can do whatever they want. For instance, he said, they (miners) cannot be expected to mine the assets or complete validations of transactions they don’t want to. Instead, miners can choose what to or not work on. Based on the developer, decentralization comes in where another miner can choose to work on what one has turned down. 

The developer highlighted that a party interested in a transaction could mine it for themselves in the worst-case scenario. He added that this can change and a transaction failed to be mined in the event of a spam attack.

Phishing attacker moves funds to a laundering address

 According to CertiK Alerts, crypto security tracker, a hacker account, “Fake_phishing7064”, recently sent funds to an Externally Owned Account(EOA) per Etherscan data. The EOA has moved over 100 ethereum (ETH) valued at $165k to Tornado Cash, a crypto mixer. 

Etherscan phishing attack

In a tweet on early Feb.4, 2023, CertiK Alert, the account appears to be moving funds, proceeds from various phishing attacks. As per the crypto security firm, the address moved 981 ETH in the last 97 days.

Lebanon Devalues its Currency by 90%, Snowden Believes Bitcoin Fixes This

 Lebanon’s paralyzing financial crisis highlights the need for a better and more reliable solution such as Bitcoin.

Lebanon is adopting a new official exchange rate, devaluing its local currency by nearly 90%. The new rate is set at 15,000 Lebanese pounds against the U.S. dollar, according to a January 31 report, which cited a statement from the country’s central bank governor, Riad Salameh.

This marks a significant shift from the old rate of 1,507 Lebanese pounds per dollar. The official Lebanese currency has been pegged to the dollar at that rate since 1997.