Australia’s financial services and markets regulator has issued another glaring warning towards issuers of crypto-based financial products, particularly those inappropriately marketing high-risk products. Joe Longo, chair of the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) in an opening speech at the ASIC annual forum on Nov. 3 local time said it will use current laws to police “risky and complex products” to protect consumers. He added, “crypto and the crypto ecosystem continue to pose challenges and opportunities for regulators and policymakers alike” saying the risks with crypto investing are “often opaque” with the assets being “highly volatile, inherently risky, and complex.” …

Crypto influencers may need to practice what they preach and “do their own research” when it comes to sharing their crypto tips. According to several digital asset lawyers, the popular disclaimer “this is not financial advice” — may not actually protect them in the eyes of the law. United-States-based securities lawyer Matthew Nielsen from Bracewell LLP told Cointelegraph that while its “best practice” for influencers to disclose that “this is not financial advice,” simply saying the term will not protect them from the law as the “federal and state securities laws heavily regulate who can offer investment advice.” Australian financial …

Australia's financial regulator has issued a stark warning to Australian crypto asset providers amid launching civil proceedings against Australian firm BPS Financial Pty Ltd (BPS) over "misleading" representations concerning its Qoin crypto token. In an Oct. 25 announcement, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said it has commenced civil penalty proceedings against BPS Financial for making “false, misleading or deceptive representations” to its 79,000 users about its crypto token Qoin. It alleges the company engaged in “unlicensed conduct” relating to Qoin, a digital currency launched in Oct. 2019 which allows participating merchants to accept as payment for goods and …

Cryptocurrency mining involves using a computer, or several computers, to validate transactions on a blockchain. Technically, these computers solve cryptographic equations and record data in a digital ledger. The more computers solving equations, the faster the blockchain can validate transactions. When miners verify the hashes of unconfirmed blocks, they receive a reward for each verified hash. Mining can be energy and computationally-intensive, requiring specialized hardware and crypto-mining software. Among the most mined (and most profitable) cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin (BTC), Monero (XMR), Ravencoin (RVN), and Dogecoin (DOGE). Ether (ETH) used to be part of this list but Ethereum has recently shifted …

Australia’s chief financial market regulator has placed interim stop orders on three cryptocurrency-related funds set to be offered to retail investors, due to non-compliant target market determinations (TMDs). In a media release dated Oct. 17 local time, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said it has placed interim stop orders on three of Australian asset manager Holon's crypto funds — which separately aim to invest in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and FileCoin (FIL). A target market determination is a document that describes who a product is appropriate for, based on likely needs, objectives, and financial situation as well as …

In the early days of Bitcoin (BTC), crypto enthusiasts only required a basic personal computer with an internet connection to generate new BTC tokens through a distributed computing process known as mining. However, with more people chasing the same number of block rewards, Bitcoin’s mining process has become more challenging with time. In fact, the quantum of rewards will progressively reduce by half every four years, making it less rewarding for individual miners who will need to allocate greater computational resources with time. Available on blockchain protocols that employ a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, this mining process requires application-specific integrated …

2022 has been an exceptionally rough year for the crypto market, and the last few months of Bitcoin’s (BTC) price action could be a sign that bears aren’t even close to being ready to let up. Crumbling crypto prices also equate to diminishing profits for Bitcoin miners and this week’s regulatory action by the United States lawmakers requesting energy consumption data from four major BTC mining companies is bound to exert a bit more pressure on an already fragile situation. Despite the increasingly bearish climate, most of the Bitcoin miners Cointelegraph has spoken to are incredibly optimistic about Bitcoin’s short …

The chief of Australia’s financial services regulator Joe Longo has raised the alarm over the sheer amount of people that invested in “unregulated, volatile” crypto assets during the pandemic. Longo, chairman of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) made the comments in an Aug. 11 media release for its research conducted in November 2021, which looked into investment behavior following the onset of t COVID-19 pandemic, stating: "We are concerned about the number of people surveyed who reported investing in unregulated, volatile crypto-asset products” The survey found that crypto was the second most common investment product, with 44% of …

A Bitcoiner has "pooled" off another mining innovation. The 'waste' heat generated by mining Bitcoin (BTC) is used to warm his swimming pool. Bitcoin enthusiast Jonathan Yuan had kids who “love swimming, but the year before [he started using waste heat], they barely ever did it because it was always too cold for them.” Fortunately, he was interested in Bitcoin mining and understood that Bitcoin mining emits a lot of heat. Yuan told Cointelegraph that he purchased a “heat exchanger and setup some ASICs,” (application-specific integrated circuits), and subsequently managed to keep “the pool above 90F all summer.” The process …

Over the last couple of years, the world has been grappling with the lack of semiconductors, which are the substances that conduct electricity between metals and isolates. The most famous semiconductor is silicon. If correlating this concept to electronic devices, then the key semiconductors are processors and other microcircuits that are present in almost all devices that people use every day, from smartphones to cars. In 2021, semiconductors hit a world record in terms of sales. Electronics production also boomed, with hundreds of millions of complex semiconductors being devoured by gaming consoles. The number of GPUs produced grew to unseen …

Financial regulators are standing in the way of expanded crypto services on Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s (CBA) mobile app. In an Australian first, the bank aims to grant all of its 6.5 million users access to cryptocurrency services. The CBA’s crypto products started a pilot of the services late last year after which it hoped to open up to all of the users of its app, however it now appears to be moving toward a second pilot. The Australia Financial Review (AFR) reported on April 6 that the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) has tied up the launch with …

Michael Schmid first made contact with Bitcoin (BTC) in 2013; he installed Bitcoin core, mined a few BTC then bought some Bitcoin from MtGox. Schmid told Cointelegraph that shortly after the infamous Mt. Gox hack, in which Schmid lost his Bitcoin, he also “lost interest”. Timewarp to 2020 and Schmid got “very active again,” as concerns about the “endless money printing” troubled him. “With that [money printing] I found that I don't agree at all with Fiat money and believe that Bitcoin should be the global reserve currency and a store of value.” A studious and curious mind, Schmid bored …