At least 60 people fall for Koinz Trading, that claimed to buy and run a BTC miner for you for the price of EUR 6100 + EUR 23 per month. Payments stopped in September. Rumor has it that the founder Barry van Mourik was selling the computers to pay for his debts.

Zeker zestig gedupeerden van Koinz Trading, het Nederlandse bedrijf dat klanten zogenoemde Miners S9-machines had beloofd, zijn hun geld zo goed als zeker kwijt. Het bedrijf is woensdag door de rechtbank in Amsterdam failliet verklaard. Bij de politie zijn tientallen aangiften binnengekomen.

Source: Bitcoinfabriek Koinz Trading failliet – Emerce

A cryptocurrency startup named LoopX has pulled an exit scam after collecting around $4.5 million from users during an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) held for the past weeks.

The LoopX team disappeared out of the blue at the start of the week when it took down its website and deleted its Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube channels without any explanation.

The company’s former Twitter profile now lists only one tweet, a link to a TheNextWeb article detailing the exit scam, but it is unclear if the LoopX team posted this link themselves, or if somebody else claimed the account name after it was vacated.
Victims tracking funds as they dissipate

People who invested in the startup are now tracking funds move from account to account in a BitcoinTalk forum thread, and banding together in the hopes of filing a class action lawsuit.

Before the site went down, LoopX claimed to have gathered $4.5 million of the $12 million they wanted to raise for creating a new cryptocurrency trading mobile app based on a proprietary trading algorithm.

In an email sent to customers last week, LoopX owners made an ironic statement of “We will have some more surprises for you throughout the week. Stay tuned!”

This was probably not the surprise many users were expecting, but some users did see red flags with the entire LoopX operation and tried to warn would-be investors last month, via LoopX’s official Reddit channel.

Source: LoopX Startup Pulls ICO Exit Scam and Disappears with $4.5 Million

Specifically, the study stated, drivers who make runs for Uber more frequently are more likely to know where and when to operate in order to get the highest-paying fares.

Thus, because women, on average, spend less time driving for Uber than their male counterparts, they are less likely to be around to grab the highest-paying fares.

“Men’s willingness to supply more hours per week (enabling them to earn more) and to target the most profitable locations shows that women continue to pay a cost for working reduced hours each week, even with no convexity in the hours-earning schedule,” the research team stated.

The study, which was based on data collected from 1,877,252 drivers operating in America from January 2015 to March 2017, examined factors including average hours worked per week, money earned over the whole week, and money earned per hour.
[…]
Overall, the gang concluded that those who drove an Uber car more often were able to make more per trip, and because on average the men surveyed drove 50 per cent more often, they were able to get on average $21.28 (£15.23) per hour compared to $20.04 (£14.35) logged by their female counterparts.

With more time driving, we’re told, comes a better idea of when and where the best fares are to be expected.
[…]
“A driver with more than 2,500 lifetime trips completed earns 14 per cent more per hour than a driver who has completed fewer than 100 trips in her time on the platform, in part because she learns where to drive, when to drive, and how to strategically cancel and accept trips.”

At least one other factor was cited in the gap: speed.

The study found that while driving for Uber, men tended to drive around 2.2 per cent faster than women. This meant that, over the long haul, they were able to rack up a few extra trips and make a bit more money.

“Increasing speed increases expected driver earnings in almost all Uber settings,” the research team concluded.

Source: Uber: Ah yeah, we pay women drivers less than men. We can explain!

Coincheck said that around 523 million of the exchange’s NEM coins were sent to another account around 3 a.m. local time (1 p.m. ET Thursday), according to a Google translation of a Japanese transcript of the Friday press conference from Logmi. The exchange has about 6 percent of yen-bitcoin trading, ranking fourth by market share on CryptoCompare.

The stolen NEM coins were worth about 58 billion yen at the time of detection, or roughly $534.8 million, according to the exchange. Coincheck subsequently restricted withdrawals of all currencies, including yen, and trading of cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin.

Bloomberg first reported the hack. A CNBC email sent to Coincheck’s listed address bounced back.

Cryptocurrency NEM, which intends to help businesses handle data digitally, briefly fell more than 20 percent Friday before recovering to trade about 10 percent lower near 85 cents, according to CoinMarketCap. Most other major digital currencies, including bitcoin, traded little changed on the day.

Source: Japanese cryptocurrency exchange loses more than $500 million to hackers

As Ars Technica first reported on Friday, users on social media started complaining earlier this week that YouTube ads were triggering their anti-virus software. Specifically, the software was recognizing a script from a service called CoinHive. The script was originally released as a sort of altruistic idea that would allow sites to make a little extra income by putting a visitor’s CPU processing power to use by mining a cryptocurrency called Monero. This could be used ethically as long as a site notifies its visitors of what’s happening and doesn’t get so greedy with the CPU usage that it crashes a visitor’s computer. In the case of YouTube’s ads running the script, they were reportedly using up to 80 percent of the CPU and neither YouTube nor the user were told what was happening.

Source: Hackers Hijacking CPUs to Mine Cryptocurrency Have Now Invaded YouTube Ads

Amid a cryptocurrency price correction that has seen the price of Bitcoin drop by half from its mid-December peak, UK-based cyber-cash lending and exchange biz BitConnect said it is shutting down.

The firm, dogged by accusations that it is a Ponzi scheme, cited bad press, regulatory orders, and cyber attacks for its market exit this week.

BitConnect said it has received two cease-and-desist letters from US financial watchdogs: one from the Texas State Securities Board, and one from the Securities Division of North Carolina’s Secretary of State.

The letter from Texas authorities, an emergency cease-and-desist order sent January 3, 2018, charges the company with fraud and misleading investors.

The letter from North Carolina authorities observes that BitConnect’s purported rate of return amounts to about 3,000 per cent annually.

Noting that such rates “are extremely unusual in financial markets,” the North Carolina letter stated: “Guaranteed annual compounded investment returns of over 3,000 per cent are a known ‘red-flag’ for fraud, specifically for the risk that the investment may be a ‘Ponzi scheme.'”

Source: Crypto-cash exchange BitConnect pulls plug amid Bitcoin bloodbath • The Register

The researchers looked at a database of long-term growth forecasts made for all domestic companies listed on a major stock exchange. The forecasts are made in December each year, and predict how well a company’s stocks will do over the next three to five years. From 1981 to 2016, they found that the top 10 percent of stocks analysts were most hopeful about generally had poorer growth than the 10 percent of stocks they were most pessimistic about.

The paper found that investing in the stocks that analysts were most pessimistic in a given year about would have yielded an average 15 percent in extra returns (in stock terms, a profit) the following year, compared to a 3 percent return that would have been made from investing in the predicted champs.

The study, though it hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, is in fact merely an update of a classic study published in 1996; it too found a similarly stark contrast. Nor is this the only kind of study to find a clear gap between the professed stock expectations of analysts and actual reality. So the results aren’t exactly surprising.

Source: Wall Street Analysts Are Embarrassingly Bad At Predicting The Future, Study Finds

CoinMarketCap, arguably the most prominent global index of cryptocurrency prices, triggered a wave of anxiety and anger this morning when it removed a group of Korean cryptocurency exchanges from its price calculations.Though the change was apparently made at midnight Sunday U.S. EST, CoinMarketCap did not publicize it until midday on Monday, saying that the Korean exchanges showed “extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity.” This morning we excluded some Korean exchanges in price calculations due to the extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity. We are working on better tools to provide users with the averages that are most relevant to them. — CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) January 8, 2018The move resulted in a sharp drop in CoinMarketCap’s measurement of nearly all cryptocurrencies. That gave the impression that a broad market decline, already in progress, had become even more dramatic overnight. As news of the cause for the sharp drop spread Monday, most cryptocurrency prices began recovering losses.

Source: Major Cryptocurrency Index Excludes Korean Prices Without Warning | Fortune

“[W]henever I tweet about Litecoin price or even just good or bads news, I get accused of doing it for personal benefit. Some people even think I short LTC! So in a sense, it is conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence,” Lee, who was also an early engineering hire for crypto trading platform Coinbase, wrote on r/litecoin. “For this reason, in the past days, I have sold and donated all my LTC.”
[…]
While an unencumbered founder may generate trust and goodwill in the short term, the question remains if Lee knows something Litecoin speculators don’t. Even the person (or people) who operated under the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto did not sell, donate, or delete their stake in Bitcoin before disappearing. Nor would it be an easy task to find a startup founder (an imperfect analogy to be sure) that did not have some level of investment in their own product. Lee notes in the same Reddit post that, “when Litecoin succeeds, I will still be rewarded in lots of different ways, just not directly via ownership of coins.”

Source: The Founder of Litecoin Says He No Longer Owns Any Litecoin

Coinbase, one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency apps, surprised its users by adding Bitcoin Cash to its offerings on Tuesday. But it appears that not everyone trading in the altcoin was blindsided by the move. Before the announcement, prices for Bitcoin Cash began climbing in other markets, and now a self-investigation of possible insider trading has been initiated.

Source: Coinbase Freezes Bitcoin Cash Trades, Launches Insider Trading Probe

The wild west of unregulated currencies! It’s nice to see these guys jumping through hoops to show that they have responsible policies in the hopes that they won’t get heavily regulated by local governments in an international setting, giving them a huge disadvantage to other companies in the same – but unregulated – space.

A crypto-currency exchange in South Korea is shutting down after it was hacked for the second time in less than eight months.

Youbit, which lets people buy and sell bitcoins and other virtual currencies, has filed for bankruptcy after losing 17% of its assets in the cyber-attack.

It did not disclose how much the assets were worth at the time of the attack.

In April, Youbit, formerly called Yapizon, lost 4,000 bitcoins now worth $73m (£55m) to cyberthieves.

Source: Bitcoin exchange Youbit shuts after second hack attack – BBC News

Yup, it’s the wild west out there with those Bitcoins!

Over the course of this year we have invested significant resources to increase trading capacity on our platform and maintain availability of our service. We have increased the size of our support team by 640% and launched phone support in September. We have also invested heavily in our infrastructure and have increased the number of transactions we are processing during peak hours by over 40x.There may be downtime which can impact your ability to tradeDespite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase services may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant volatility or volume. This could result in the inability to buy or sell for periods of time. Despite ongoing increases in our support capacity, our customer support response times may be delayed, especially for requests that do not involve immediate risks to customer account security.

Source: Please invest responsibly — an important message from the Coinbase team

“Bots come in and buy up all the toys and then charge ludicrous prices​ a​midst the holiday shopping bustle​,” the New York Democrat said on Sunday. “​Cyber bots ​— ​we call them ‘Grinch bots’ — ​are expanding their reach and​ ​unfairly scooping up the hottest toys your parents can’t even click buy.​”​​For example, Schumer said, the popular Fingerlings — a set of interactive baby monkey figurines that ​usually sell for around $15 — are being snagged by the scalping software and resold on secondary websites for as much as $1,000 a pop.“Grinch bots cannot be allowed to steal Christmas, or dollars, from the wallets of New Yorkers,​” he said. ​The senator said as soon as a retailer puts a hard-to-get toy — like Barbie’s Dreamhouse or Nintendo game systems — for sale on a website, a bot can snatch it up even before a kid’s parents finish entering their credit card information.The toys then end up for sale on other sites like Amazon and eBay for hundreds or even thousands of dollars more.

Source: Schumer says ‘Grinch bots’ are stealing Christmas | New York Post

Confido is a startup that pitched itself as a blockchain-based app for making payments and tracking shipments. It sold digital tokens to investors over the Ethereum blockchain in an ICO that ran from November 6 to 8. During the token sale, Confido sold people bespoke digital tokens that represent their investment in exchange for ether, Ethereum’s digital currency.

But on Sunday, the company unceremoniously deleted its Twitter account and took down its website. A company representative posted a brief comment to the company’s now-private subforum on Reddit, citing legal problems that prevent the Confido team from continuing their work. The same message was also posted to Medium but quickly deleted.

“Right now, we are in a tight spot, as we are having legal trouble caused by a contract we signed,” the message stated (a cached version of the Medium post is viewable). “It is likely that we will be able to find a solution to rectify the situation. However, we cannot assure you with 100% certainty that we will get through this.” The message was apparently written by Confido’s founder, one Joost van Doorn, who seems to have no internet presence besides a now-removed LinkedIn profile.

Even the Confido representative on Reddit doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, though, posting hours after the initial message, “Look I have absolutely no idea what has happened here. The removal of all of our social media platforms and website has come as a complete surprise to me.” Motherboard reached out to this representative over Reddit, but hasn’t received a response.

Confido tokens had a market cap of $10 million last week, before the company disappeared, but now the tokens are worthless. And investors are crying foul.

Motherboard

Yup, the wild wild west!

Shaun Bridges, 35, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco after pleading guilty in August to money laundering in the second criminal case to be brought against the former agent, prosecutors said.Bridges, who served in the Secret Service’s Baltimore field office, was sentenced in 2015 to 71 months in prison for diverting to his personal account over $800,000 worth of bitcoins during the Silk Road probe.Before serving that sentence, though, Bridges was arrested again on new charges related to his theft of bitcoins that were at the time worth $359,005 but today are valued at $11.3 million, according to the industry publication CoinDesk.

Source: Ex-agent in Silk Road probe gets more prison time for bitcoin theft | Reuters

More than $300m of cryptocurrency has been lost after a series of bugs in a popular digital wallet service led one curious developer to accidentally take control of and then lock up the funds, according to reports.Unlike most cryptocurrency hacks, however, the money wasn’t deliberately taken: it was effectively destroyed by accident.
[…]
On Tuesday Parity revealed that, while fixing a bug that let hackers steal $32m out of few multi-signature wallets, it had inadvertently left a second flaw in its systems that allowed one user to become the sole owner of every single multi-signature wallet.

The user, “devops199”, triggered the flaw apparently by accident. When they realised what they had done, they attempted to undo the damage by deleting the code which had transferred ownership of the funds. Rather than returning the money, however, that simply locked all the funds in those multisignature wallets permanently, with no way to access them.

“This means that currently no funds can be moved out of the multi-sig wallets,” Parity says in a security advisory.

Effectively, a user accidentally stole hundreds of wallets simultaneously, and then set them on fire in a panic while trying to give them back.

Source: ‘$300m in cryptocurrency’ accidentally lost forever due to bug | Technology | The Guardian

The mobility means that if one blockchain dies out as the result of infighting among developers or slackened use, metronome owners can move their holdings elsewhere. That should help the coins retain value, and ensure their longevity, Garzik, co-founder of startup Bloq that created metronome, said in a phone interview. It will be unveiled Tuesday at the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas.”Institutional investors should be very excited to see something like this,” Matthew Roszak, the other co-founder of Bloq and chairman of industry advocate Chamber of Digital Commerce, said in a phone interview. “We’ve built a thousand-year cryptocurrency, something that’s built to last.”That’s a concern for many digital currencies. Infighting among developers and various supporters, and the slow pace of enhancements on the bitcoin blockchain have helped to limit use. Both bitcoin and its main rival, ethereum, have split into several versions.More splits could be coming — partly, thanks to Garzik, who is a proponent of and a developer for an upgrade to the bitcoin network called SegWit2x, which offers one way to speed up transactions. That split could happen in November.

Source: Bitcoin Pioneer Says New Coin to Work on Many Blockchains – Bloomberg

A useful feature for a coin.

Personal TechAMD sales soar, actually makes a profit, beats expectations, share price… decimatedIntel’s antitrust shield even loses when it winsBy Shaun Nichols in San Francisco 25 Oct 2017 at 00:0816 Reg comments SHARE ▼guitar player on shuttertsock photo of (sisyphus) man rolling a rock up a hill. photo by SHutterstock/PHOTOCREO Michal BednarekAMD revenues were up, an actual proper profit was banked, and its future looking brighter than ever in the past financial quarter… meanwhile investors are selling off shares fearing a downturn looming for the chip designer.Strong sales from its Ryzen and Epyc Zen-based processor lines helped the world’s second-favorite x86 PC and server chip slinger grow revenues by more than 25 per cent in its third quarter of 2017, the three months to September 30. Here’s a summary of the figures, announced on Tuesday: Revenues of $1.64bn were up 26 per cent from $1.31bn in Q3 2016, and topped analyst estimates of $1.51bn. Net income of $71m topped the admittedly low bar set by last year’s $406m quarterly loss, in large part caused by a $340m payment to Global Foundries. For a different angle, non-GAAP operating income this year was $110m compared to $27m this time last year. Earnings per share were $0.10 non-GAAP, topping analyst estimates of $0.08. Computing and graphics processors (PC CPUs and GPUs) accounted for much of the jump, as the Ryzen launch and Radeon revamp bumped revenues to $819m, compared to $472m on the year-ago quarter. CEO Lisa Su claimed AMD’s Ryzen desktop processors made up 40 to 50 per cent of CPU sales at certain online retailers. Enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom (everything from servers to games console chips) logged revenues of $824m, down slightly from $835m this time last year.
[…]
Investors, meanwhile, seemed to be less interested in 7nm than in what lies immediately ahead for AMD. For the upcoming quarter, the chip designer is expecting a sequential revenue decline of 15 per cent, with year-over-year Q4 revenues up by 26 per cent. Additionally, AMD said that it sees sales for hardware specializing in blockchain calculations – GPUs for Bitcoin and other alt-coin mining, which has fueled sales – “leveling off” as demand slows.

Those figures spooked shareholders after hours, sending AMD stock down by 10.5 per cent to around $12.75 per share at the time of writing.

Source: AMD sales soar, actually makes a profit, beats expectations, share price… decimated • The Register

Signs the market we use is outdated!

n-line Plc jumped as much as 394 percent on Friday after announcing plans to change its name to On-line Blockchain Plc, following an initial climb of 19 percent on Thursday when it first announced the news. It’s the biggest one-day gain for the small-cap company since its December 1996 listing. The trading volume that reached 2.9 million shares by early afternoon in London is equal to more than 16 times the entire year’s trading before the last two days.
[…]
This isn’t the first time that investors have gotten excited about a name. Shares in Colorado-based Bioptix Inc. nearly doubled in value in the days leading up to its name change to Riot Blockchain Inc. earlier this month. In what seems to be a case of mistaken identity, a New York-based startup called SNAP Interactive Inc. jumped more than 150 percent in the days after Snap Inc. filed for a $3 billion initial public offering in February. Little-known SNAP Interactive makes mobile dating apps, while Snap Inc. is the parent of the popular Snapchat photo-sharing app.

Source: This Company Added the Word ‘Blockchain’ to Its Name and Saw Its Shares Surge 394% – Bloomberg

Shortly before Amazon Prime Day in July, the owner of the Brushes4Less store on Amazon’s marketplace received a suspension notice for his best-selling product, a toothbrush head replacement.

The email that landed in his inbox said the product was being delisted from the site because of an intellectual property violation. In order to resolve the matter and get the product reinstated, the owner would have to contact the law firm that filed the complaint.

But there was one problem: the firm didn’t exist.
[…]
“Just five minutes of detective work would have found this website is a fraud, but Amazon doesn’t seem to want to do any of that,” the owner said. “This is like the Wild Wild West of intellectual property complaints.”
[…]
the issue with Amazon was finally resolved on Tuesday after two months of waiting.

Source: Amazon was tricked by a fake law firm into removing a hot product, costing this seller $200,000

Further on my preachings on making money from open source (see video), it turns out that there is a Fair Source license already available on Github

Not open source. Not closed source. The Fair Source License allows everyone to see the source code and makes the software free to use for a limited number of users in your organization. It offers some of the benefits of open source while preserving the ability to charge for the software.

re:Work is organized around some of the biggest ways you can make an impact in your workplace. Each subject contains guides, with tools and insights, for addressing specific challenges.

Source: re:Work

They look at Hiring, managers, people analytics and unbiasing. A treasure trove of business data.