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Bitcoin Price: Cryptocurrency Investors See Red As Market Value Drops:
Crypto investors are waking to sea of red this morning as the entire market took an absolute hammering overnight for the second time in just a few weeks.
The price of bitcoin fell sharply on overnight, approaching a dreaded $US30,000 ($A38,800) threshold it has not crossed since January and dragging other cryptocurrencies in its wake.
At around 2am, bitcoin fell 8.6 per cent to a value of $US31,501 ($A40,715), a level not seen since mid-May, when the volatile cryptocurrency temporarily lost 30 per cent in one session.
The second-largest cryptocurrency, ethereum, lost 11.2 per cent of its value, falling to $US2361 ($A3051).
Bitcoin's value has recovered slightly since the drop, rising to $US33,738 ($A43,606) at around 7am today – but, across the board, almost all of the smaller cryptos have been battered overnight.
[...] No concrete reason appeared to explain the price drop on Tuesday, but some analysts pointed to the seizure of $2.3 million ($A3 million) worth of bitcoin belonging to the Darkside hackers by US authorities as a possible factor.
[...] The US managed to recover almost all the bitcoin ransom paid to the perpetrators of the cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline last month.
[...] It is being seen as a sign that law enforcement is capable of pursuing online criminals even when they operate outside the nation's borders – and, crucially, that crypto isn't beyond government control.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 09 2021, @04:52PM (2 children)
1) The feds can break non-quantum cryptography.
2) The attackers are profoundly stupid and moved the funds into an exchange that responds to court orders, or directly into a wallet compromised by the feds.
3) The feds WERE the attackers and staged this event to intimidate crypto users into using more conventional and easily controlled monetary systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 09 2021, @06:37PM
#3 is probably not the case. There were real-world consequences for the attack. It made major headlines, and cost US citizens millions.
Now it's not impossible that the US government would do a false-flag operation here. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident [wikipedia.org] shows that such things are not impossible... although in that case it seems like confusion and then intentional misrepresentation after the fact, rather than premeditated maliciousness.
It would be quite the gutsy administrator who would sign off on this operation, especially for such a nebulous end-goal like "intimidate potential future attackers."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 09 2021, @06:39PM
4) The funds moved into an account kept by a US-based entity like coinbase or whatever and the feds used their normal "we are seizing these assets" approach to get the private key of the account and put the 'thumbscrews' on that wallet-keeper.
I think this one is the most probable.