China
Avalanche to power Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure services in Asia
Alibaba Cloud, a.k.a Aliyun, a subset of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, announced an integration with Avalanche blockchain to power the company’s Node-as-a-Service initiatives. Avalanche’s partnership with Alibaba Cloud will see the development of tools that enable users to launch validator nodes on Avalanche’s public blockchain platform in Asia. The integration will allow Avalanche developers to use Alibaba Cloud’s plug-and-play infrastructure as a service to launch new validators. Developers expecting high resource demands during peak hours can also tap into additional resources — computing, storage, and distribution — offered by Alibaba Cloud. APAC’s largest cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud, has expanded support for #Avalanche! This integration enables develope...
TikTok a National Security Threat Vulnerable to Chinese Government ‘Manipulation,’ FBI Director Warns
FBI Director Chris Wray is raising national security concerns about TikTok, warning Friday that control of the popular video sharing app is in the hands of a Chinese government “that doesn’t share our values.” Wray said the FBI was concerned that the Chinese had the ability to control the app’s recommendation algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations.” He also asserted that China could use the app to collect data on its users that could be used for traditional espionage operations. “All of these things are in the hands of a government that doesn’t share our values, and that has a mission that’s very much at odds with what’s in the best interests of the United States. That should concern us,” Wray told an audience at the Uni...
Bitcoin shrugs off BlockFi, China protests as BTC price holds $16K
Bitcoin (BTC) held crucial $16,000 support into Nov. 29 as bulls weathered ongoing FTX fallout and macro triggers. BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView Trader teases BTC long as $16,500 reappears Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView confirmed BTC/USD leaving lower levels untouched overnight. The pair had seen a flash downturn after the Nov. 27 weekly close thanks to uncertainty from China over COVID-19 measures. A recovery nonetheless took the market higher, with $16,500 coming into play at the time of writing. As Cointelegraph reported, traders and analysts had warned that it was all but essential to preserve current support, with a violation opening up the road to $14,000 or lower. Popular trader Crypto Tony even felt comfortable going long BTC on th...
Kris Wu Sentenced to 13 Years in Chinese Prison for Sex Crimes
HONG KONG — Chinese-Canadian pop star Kris Wu was sentenced to 13 years in prison for rape and other sexual offenses, a Chinese court said on its official Weibo account on Friday (Nov. 25). The Chaoyang District People’s Court in Beijing said that from November to December 2020, Wu, also known as Wu Yifan, raped three women at his home when they were under the effect of alcohol. Wu was sentenced to 11.5 years for rape and 22 months for “assembling a crowd to engage in promiscuous activities” in July 2018, according to the Weibo post. Wu, who is a Canadian citizen, will serve a 13-year term in China before being deported. “Justice was delayed, but now it’s here,” Du Meizhu, the Chinese influencer who blew the whistle on Wu, wrote on Weibo after the announcement. Born in Chi...
Could Hong Kong really become China’s proxy in crypto?
With its partial autonomy, the island city of Hong Kong has traditionally served as “a gate to China” — the local trade center, backed by transparent English-style common law and an openly pro-business government strategy. Could the harbor, home to seven million inhabitants, inherit this role in relation to the crypto industry, becoming a proxy for mainland China’s experiments with crypto? An impulse to such questioning was given by Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of crypto derivatives giant BitMEX in his Oct. 26 blog post. Hayes believes the Hong Kong government’s announcement about introducing a bill to regulate crypto to be a sign that China is trying to ease its way back into the market. The opinion was immediately replicated in a range of industrial and mainstream media. What happe...
Chinese agents used Bitcoin transactions through Wasabi to allegedly bribe US government employee
The United States Department of Justice has announced charges against two Chinese intelligence officers who allegedly bribed a double agent with Bitcoin. In an Oct. 24 announcement, the Justice Department said Guochun He and Zheng Wang attempted to obstruct the prosecution of an unnamed global telecommunications company based in China, which allegedly involved paying a U.S. government employee roughly $61,000 in bribes using Bitcoin (BTC). However, the individual was a double agent working on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and did not move against authorities in the Eastern District of New York in the case against the China-based company. According to an analysis by cryptocurrency risk management firm Elliptic, He and Wang used Wasabi Wallet to conceal the BTC transactions a...
Kazakhstan among top 3 Bitcoin mining destinations after US and China
For over a year, the oil-rich Central Asian country of Kazakhstan has maintained its position as the third-biggest contributor to Bitcoin (BTC) mining after surpassing Russia back in February 2021. As of January 2022, Kazakhstan contributed to 13.22% of the total Bitcoin hash rate, positioned right after the historical leaders the United States (37.84%) and China (21.11%), as shown below. Along similar timelines, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance data estimated that Kazakhstan’s absolute hash rate contribution (monthly average) was 24.8 exahashes per second (Eh/s). Meanwhile, the US and China contributed 71 Eh/s and 39.6 Eh/s, respectively. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which is co-funded by the European Union, highlighted Kazakhstan’s heavy reliance on non-renewable ...
Not like China: Hong Kong reportedly wants to legalize crypto trading
Hong Kong is taking action to regain its status as a global cryptocurrency hub by launching several legal initiatives related to the crypto industry. A city and special administrative region of China, Hong Kong is willing to distinguish its crypto regulation approach from the blanket crypto ban in mainland China. The government of Hong Kong is considering introducing its own bill to regulate crypto in its own China-free way, according to Elizabeth Wong, head of the fintech unit at the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC). One of the SFC’s initiatives is allowing retail investors to “directly invest into virtual assets,” Wong said during a panel held by InvestHK, the South China Morning Post reported on Oct. 17. Such an initiative would mark a significant shift from the SFC’s stance over...
China Opens Police Station In Nigeria
Tweet Tweet Share Whatsapp reddit The government of China have set up police stations in Nigeria and in over 20 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. This comes in order to tackle the increasing criminal activities of its citizens abroad. The one open in Nigeria is located in Benin City, Edo State. The development was contained in an investigative statement titled, ‘110 Overseas Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild.’ It was widely reported that the police stations are created to bring “down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.” Lesotho and Tanzania are the two other African countries apart from Nigeria that have Chinese police stations. The report by Safeguard Defender revealed, “Rather than cooperating with local authorities in the ...
BIS marks CBDC pilot as ‘successful’ with $22M transacted
A multi-jurisdictional central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot has been marked “successful” by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) after a month-long test phase that facilitated $22 million worth of real-value cross-border transactions. The central banks of Hong Kong, Thailand, China and the United Arab Emirates took part in the pilot program along with 20 commercial banks from those regions. More than $12 million worth of value was issued onto the test platform, which facilitated 164 foreign exchange transactions and cross-border payments between the participating firms totaling over $22 million worth of value, according to a Tuesday LinkedIn post from the BIS. Graphic from the BIS on the CBDC pilot. Source: LinkedIn Daniel Eidan, an adviser and solution architect at the BIS,&...
Don’t look down: the world’s most dangerous hikes
With bandits, molten lava and wild animals posing a threat, blisters are the least of your worries on the world’s most dangerous hikes From trekking across the treacherous windswept mountains of South Georgia to picking your way along the rickety walkways of Mount Hua Shan in China, these hikes are not for the fainthearted. 11 of the world’s most dangerous hikes Dizzying heights may be the least of your worries on the world’s most dangerous hikes. Instead, you have to prepare for extreme weather, erupting volcanoes and ferocious wildlife among other threats on these hair-raising trails. 1. Shackleton’s Route, South Georgia Island Biggest danger: Exposure, crevasses and a very remote location On 20th May 1916, Sir Ernest Shackleton and two others stumbled into the whaling station ...
Nuclear and gas fastest growing energy sources for Bitcoin mining: Data
The electricity mix of Bitcoin (BTC) has drastically changed over the past few years, with nuclear energy and natural gas becoming the fastest growing energy sources powering Bitcoin mining, according to new data. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) on Tuesday released a major update to its Bitcoin mining-dedicated data source, the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI). According to the data from Cambridge, fossil fuels like coal and natural gas made up almost two-thirds of Bitcoin’s total electricity mix as of January 2022, accounting for more than 62%. As such, the share of sustainable energy sources in the BTC energy mix amounted to 38%. The new study suggests that coal alone accounted for nearly 37% of Bitcoin’s total electricity consumption as of earl...
