Bitcoin "fell dramatically in late April," writes The Street, "sinking from its mid-month high of around $64,000" to Sunday's current price of $47,600 — a drop of over 25% in less than two weeks.

So this week the Street spoke to Bobby Ong, the chief operating officer at the cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko, asking "Was that just par for the course — normal volatility — of something else?" Ong: The recent bloodbath on April 18 saw a record of approximately $9.77 billion worth of futures contracts liquidated in just 24 hours. There was already a massive amount of leverage in the market in anticipation of the Coinbase initial public offering. The excitement of having the first crypto company IPO also led bitcoin's price to hit a new all-time high of $64,804.

However, the direct listing of Coinbase also had a lukewarm reception from stock investors. More recently, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty spreading on social media due to various factors, including (rumors of) the U.S. Treasury taking legal action against certain financial institutions for money laundering, which turned out to be false information. Other than that, CNBC was recirculating news about the crypto ban in India, Turkey banning crypto payments, President Biden proposing a higher capital gains tax, and China bitcoin miners losing power.

The selloff happened during the weekend when there were thinner order books. With high leverage and thin order books, even a small decrease in price will trigger a sharp drawdown and cause a downward spiral in price.

Naturally, the market also needs to correct itself, because there were many over-leveraged traders. It is also important to note that bitcoin options expire towards the end of every month, which usually causes increased volatility in the last week of each month.

TheStreet: Do you see the decline as a chance for people to get into it at a cheaper price?

Ong: It depends on that person and their goals. The profiles of buyers today are very different before, when it was mostly libertarians. Today. it's U.S. institutions, and soon it will be governments.

The New York Times reports: A major United Nations report will declare that slashing emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas, is far more vital than previously thought... It also says that — unless there is significant deployment of unproven technologies capable of pulling greenhouse gases out of the air — expanding the use of natural gas is incompatible with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement...

The reason methane would be particularly valuable in the short-term fight against climate change: While methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, it is also relatively short-lived, lasting just a decade or so in the atmosphere before breaking down. That means cutting new methane emissions today, and starting to reduce methane concentrations in the atmosphere, could more quickly help the world meet its midcentury targets for fighting global warming. By contrast, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, lasts for hundreds of years in the atmosphere... While cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions will remain urgent, "it's going to be next to impossible to remove enough carbon dioxide to get any real benefits for the climate in the first half of the century," said Drew Shindell, the study's lead author and a professor of earth science at Duke University. "But if we can make a big enough cut in methane in the next decade, we'll see public health benefits within the decade, and climate benefits within two decades," he said...

Carbon dioxide is the biggest driver of climate change, but methane is more potent in the shorter term, warming the atmosphere more than 80 times as much as the same amount of carbon dioxide does over a 20-year period. That's bad news, but it also means that cutting methane emissions may be one of the most effective ways to immediately slow rising global temperatures... Unlike carbon dioxide or most other air pollution, methane isn't released by burning fossil fuels, but comes from leaks and other releases from oil and gas infrastructure, among other sources... Fixing those leaks in theory should pay for themselves by saving money, because capturing the gas means companies capture more product. That potential makes plugging leaks from oil and gas infrastructure the most effective and cheapest way to slow emissions, the U.N. report says...

Rolling back methane emissions would prevent more than 250,000 premature deaths, and more than 750,000 asthma-related hospital visits, each year from 2030 onward, the report finds. The lower emissions would also prevent more than 70 billion hours of lost labor from extreme heat and more than 25 million tons of crop losses a year.
One professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University tells the Times we've overestimated agriculture's role in methane while underestimating the fuel industry's role, while another researcher found that methane-reduction efforts in the top-polluting industries could slow global warming by 30 percent.

"Over all, a concerted effort to reduce methane from the fossil fuel, waste and agricultural sectors could slash methane emissions by as much as 45 percent by 2030, helping to avoid nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius of global warming as early as the 2040s, the report says."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: "More major corporations are abandoning the requirement of a four-year degree. At Apple, half of their employees don't have college degrees," reports NBC News. They also note that JP Morgan is "actively recruiting" people without a college degree for programs that train them for careers in areas like operations or consumer banking (showing one woman who ultimately got a $70,000-a-year position in Human Resources).

NBC warns that "this path is untested. Many jobs still require a Bachelor's degree, and on average, a college graduate makes 67% more than a high school graduate." But they add that "as the cost of college rises, some say the returns aren't keeping pace" — cutting to their interview with Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff. "To make a lot of money, you just need to get the skills. You don't need to go to college!" he tells them enthusiastically. "You can do it all online!"

NBC provides the example of an immigrant from Colombia who went through free online training with Salesforce that led to a job. And earlier in the segment Benioff admits that "I only went to college because my parents made me go to college...!

"Everybody thinks that if you don't have a college degree you can't be successful in the United States, and it's not true... You can create incredible value for the world without a college degree."

Technology/space pundit Robert Cringely writes that SpaceX's winning bid on NASA's Artemis lunar lander contract was helped by its flexibility in how it would be paid — made possibly by SpaceX's cushy financial position.

But he believes that's part of a larger story about SpaceX's "steadily crushing its competitors by building a hyper-efficient space ecosystem where the other guys are just building rockets," arguing that SpaceX has already won the global war of ISPs "at a net cost of ZERO dollars," if not a negative net cost, while realizing a dream of a satellite internet service that for 30 years has eluded investors like Bill Gates:

SpaceX making a profit where one would not normally exist comes thanks to U.S. residents who pay telephone and Internet bills. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been socking-away for a decade about $1.8 billion per year from you and me, saving-up to pay for expansions of rural telephony and broadband. There is now about $16 billion in this federal kitty and the FCC is starting to spend it with telephone and internet service providers, paying them to extend broadband and voice services to remote rural users who are presently underserved or unserved completely. All of this is both perfectly legal and even a good idea. Everybody wins. But circumstances are turning out to indicate that SpaceX is probably winning more than anyone else... So far SpaceX has won auctions for service in parts of 35 states for a total of $885 million... SpaceX just bid for potential customers in places where other companies typically didn't even bother to bid. They took the obvious remote customers and apparently won't be over-charging them or the government, either...

There is no FCC rule saying Comcast couldn't sub-contract...difficult customers to Starlink... Instead of earning $885 million of those FCC subsidies, Starlink is more likely to gain half of the full $9.2 billion — money that can be used for any purpose including financing that Artemis lander. But remember that satellites are a global resource. If SpaceX launches 4000 or 12,000 Starlink satellites to serve the USA, they'll also serve anywhere else the satellites overfly, even North Korea. The same level of service Starlink offers in Omaha will be available in Vietnam or on tankers in the Pacific ocean.

Once Starlink becomes effectively the dominant ISP in America, it will also become the dominant ISP in the world. And all at no cost to SpaceX since the expansion will have been financed from our phone bills.
Cringely cites estimates that 40,000 satellites would be enough to serve every Internet user on Earth, as well as IoT devices and even future as-yet-uninvented network services.

He also asks whether this might ultimately make it harder for China to censor the internet — and whether Apple might attempt a competing satellite-to-phone network, possibly using technology from Samsung.

Friday on Richard Stallman's personal web site, he posed the question: Am I Doctor Stallman?

He's received 15 doctorates honoris causa — doctorates "for honor" — in the company of others whose achievements impressed him... So I was shocked to read an article which describes this as a sleazy marketing scheme, and claims that recipients of these degrees are not supposed to call themselves "Doctor."

The article says that universities hand out "honorary doctorates" readily to donors who have essentially bought them, and to performing artists so that they will entertain the students at graduation...

But my experience is totally different. I am not an entertainer, except for a few minutes when I don the robe and halo of Saint iGNUcius, and that is comic relief for a long, serious talk. I never donated money to the universities that gave me doctorates, nor could they expect me to. What's more, I never saw such people receive degrees along with me. The other recipients, when there were others, were likewise being honored for their work, not as a quid-pro-quo.

Why this difference? My doctorates come from universities in other countries, not in the US. I conjecture that buy-a-doctorate and sing-for-your-doctorate are found in the US only. (How sad for the US...!)

[O]n reading that Florida Atlantic University explicitly says that recipients of doctorates honoris causa are not permitted the title of Doctor, I began to wonder about the policies of the universities which had given me degrees, so I asked people at some of those universities about their policies.

The replies were quite disparate. One said, like Florida Atlantic, that it was not permitted. Another said I should write "Dr.(h.c.)." Another said it had no objection. So it seems that I am entitled to call myself Dr. Stallman.

Why do I do that? The personal reason is that these doctorates recognize decades of work for an important cause, and I am proud of them.

The reason that is beyond personal is so that people who know little or nothing of my career may decide, based on the title of "Doctor", to pay a little attention to that work and that cause, which is the free software movement. That may help us defeat the totalitarian control that today's digital technology is designed to impose.

The Associated Press reports: In a ruling that reversed one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, 39 people who ran local post offices had their convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting overturned Friday because of what an appeals court said was clear evidence of "bugs, errors or defects" in an IT system.

The decision follows a years-long, complex legal battle that could see Britain's Post Office face a huge compensation bill for its failures following the installation, from 1999, of what turned out to be the defective Horizon computerized accounting system in local branches. Dozens of staff were convicted after the Fujitsu-supplied system pointed to an array of financial misdemeanors that bewildered the postal workers. Six others had their convictions quashed previously, while another 700 or so workers also are believed to have been prosecuted between 2000 and 2014... Jobs, homes and marriages were lost as a result of wrongful convictions, and some did not live long enough to see their names cleared by Britain's Court of Appeals.

Confirmation that the convictions were quashed was met with cheers and tears. A few bottles of bubbly were also popped.
Martin S. (Slashdot reader #98,249) writes, "As a software geek, the part I find most troubling is that blind faith that those in authority placed in the software without proper accounting..." The BBC reports some desperate sub-postmasters even "attempted to plug the gap with their own money, even remortgaging their homes, in an (often fruitless) attempt to correct an error."

The judge in the case complains that for years the Post Office had "consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable" and "effectively steamrolled over any subpostmaster who sought to challenge its accuracy," according to an article in The Scotsman: Nick Read, Post Office chief executive said: "I am in no doubt about the human cost of the Post Office's past failures and the deep pain that has been caused to people affected. Many of those postmasters involved have been fighting for justice for a considerable length of time and sadly there are some who are not here to see the outcome today and whose families have taken forward appeals in their memory. I am very moved by their courage."

There were 73 convictions in Scotland caused by the failure. Although a total of 47 postmasters in England and Wales have had their cases referred to the Appeal Court, there has never been similar action in Scotland.

However, now the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has written to the people it believes may also have been the victims of possible miscarriages of justice in Scotland relating to the Horizon computer system.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted Wednesday that bitcoin "incentivises renewable energy." And Elon Musk responded "True."

The BBC adds that the tweets came "despite experts warning otherwise." The cyrptocurrency's carbon footprint is as large as some of the world's biggest cities, studies suggest. But Mr Dorsey claims that could change if bitcoin miners worked hand-in-hand with renewable energy firms.

One expert said it was a "cynical attempt to greenwash" bitcoin. China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world...

The tweet comes soon after the release of a White Paper from Mr Dorsey's digital payment services firm Square, and global asset management business ARK Invest. Entitled "Bitcoin as key to an abundant, clean energy future", the paper argues that "bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers", because they offer flexibility, pay in a cryptocurrency, and can be based anywhere with an internet connection. "By combining miners with renewables and storage projects, we believe it could improve the returns for project investors and developers, moving more solar and wind projects into profitable territory," it said.

Author and bitcoin critic David Gerard described the paper as a "cynical exercise in bitcoin greenwashing".

"The reality is: bitcoin runs on coal," he told the BBC.... "Bitcoin mining is so ghastly and egregious that the number one job of bitcoin promoters is to make excuses for it — any excuse at all."

The mayor of Los Angeles is proposing the largest universal income pilot program in America, saying he hopes the program will "light a fire across our nation."

Newsweek reports: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed giving a "universal basic income" of $1000 a month to 2,000 poor local families for one year... The program would give 2,000 families below the federal poverty line monthly $1,000 checks for 12 months. The families could then spend the money however they please.

Garcetti said he hopes the program could provide a model for similar anti-poverty initiatives in other cities. "We have to end America's addiction to poverty..." Garcetti told LAist, a local news site affiliated with Southern California Public Radio. Similar programs are also being floated in at least four other L.A. county districts, according to the Los Angeles Times...

If approved, Garcetti's program would be at least the 12th time that a U.S. region has offered a basic income to its citizens.
Bloomberg notes that Los Angeles "will be the recipient of more than $1.3 billion in federal stimulus funds from the recently passed American Rescue Plan, which could be used to fund the payouts." Garcetti, a Democrat in his second term, is co-chair of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, which has been advocating for the policy at the federal level and funding local programs. The group, which has 43 elected officials as members, was founded last year by then-Stockton-mayor Michael Tubbs. It has received $18 million in seed money from Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey as well as $200,000 from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable arm of Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News's parent company.

California cities have been taking a lead with these programs... In San Francisco, grants and some revenue from hotel taxes will fund monthly payments of $1,000 to about 130 artists for six months beginning next month. Organizers said the pilot is the first to solely target artists. Oakland will tap private donations this summer to fund its guaranteed income program, providing $500 monthly to about 600 poor families.

Still, a majority of Americans oppose the federal government providing a guaranteed basic income, according to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center...

Ultimately the costs of such programs will be too big for cities to finance alone, he said. But with data proving it works, Garcetti said states and the federal government could be inspired to fund them.

Britain's Court of Appeals has cleared a group of 42 sub-postmasters and postmistresses for theft, fraud and false accounting. They were convicted, with some imprisoned, after the Post Office installed faulty software in the branches where these office operators worked. The BBC reports: Following the convictions - including theft, fraud and false accounting -- some former postmasters went to prison, were shunned by their communities and struggled to secure work. Some lost their homes, and even failed to get insurance owing to their convictions. Some have since died. They always said the fault was in the computer system, which had been used to manage post office finances since 1999.

The Horizon system, developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu, was first rolled out in 1999 to some post offices to be used for a variety of tasks including accounting and stocktaking. But from an early stage it appeared to have significant bugs which could cause the system to misreport, sometimes involving substantial sums of money. Horizon-based evidence was used by the Post Office to successfully prosecute 736 people. But campaigners fought a long and series of legal battles for compensation in the civil courts, which have been followed by referrals by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. A Post Office spokesman said: "We sincerely apologize to the postmasters affected by our historical failures. Throughout this appeals process we have supported the quashing of the overwhelming majority of these convictions and the judgment will be an important milestone in addressing the past."

Long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. reacts: As a software geek, the part I find most troubling is that blind faith that those in authority placed in the software without proper accounting. Accounting systems and Software are deterministic, well they should be. IF the system/software worked correctly, this missing money must have shown up somewhere. Software defects are always traceable. It might be expensive and time consuming but persistence will win in the end. Somebody somewhere is responsible for this and defacto framing of these people is criminal in principle, if not in law.

The U.S. Supreme Court slashed the Federal Trade Commission's power to seek monetary awards in court, throwing out a legal tool the consumer-protection agency has used to collect billions of dollars over the past decade. From a report: The justices on Thursday unanimously said the FTC can't seek consumer redress when it invokes a provision that lets the agency go straight to federal court to try to stop an alleged fraud. The ruling is a triumph for business trade groups, which urged the court to curb the agency's powers. The FTC in 2012 dramatically ramped up its use of the decades-old provision to recoup money. The agency reported winning so-called restitution and disgorgement of almost $12 billion in 2016 alone, including $10 billion in a settlement with Volkswagen AG stemming from its diesel-emissions scandal. Writing for the court, Justice Stephen Breyer said the FTC retains other avenues to get restitution for consumers, though those tools involve a more complicated process. "If the commission believes that authority too cumbersome or otherwise inadequate, it is, of course, free to ask Congress to grant it further remedial authority," Breyer wrote.

TikTok is facing a legal challenge from former children's commissioner for England Anne Longfield over how it collects and uses children's data. The BBC reports: The claim is being filed on behalf of millions of children in the UK and EU who have used the hugely popular video-sharing app. If successful, the children affected could each be owed thousands of pounds. TikTok said the case was without merit and it would fight it.

Lawyers will allege that TikTok takes children's personal information, including phone numbers, videos, exact location and biometric data, without sufficient warning, transparency or the necessary consent required by law, and without children or parents knowing what is being done with that information. The claim is being launched on behalf of all children who have used TikTok since 25 May 2018, regardless of whether they have an account or their privacy settings. Children not wishing to be represented can opt out. "TikTok is a hugely popular social media platform that has helped children keep in touch with their friends during an incredibly difficult year," says Ms. Longfield. "However, behind the fun songs, dance challenges and lip-sync trends lies something far more sinister."

She alleges the firm is "a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network" which has "deliberately and successfully deceived parents." She added that those parents have a "right to know" what private information is being collected via TikTok's "shadowy data collection practices."

In response, TikTok said: "Privacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to help protect all users, and our teenage users in particular. We believe the claims lack merit and intend to vigorously defend the action."

Amazon One is now testing its palm-scanning payment technology in Whole Foods, starting with a single store in Amazon's home city of Seattle. The Verge reports: The company has been using Amazon One payment technology in its Amazon-branded stores in the Seattle area (including Amazon Go and Amazon Books), but the Whole Foods rollout will make the most substantial expansion of the technology yet. The company says that thousands of customers have already signed up with Amazon One. According to an Amazon FAQ, the palm-scanning technology analyzes "the minute characteristics of your palm -- both surface-area details like lines and ridges as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns" in order to identify a customer, allowing them to use the biometric scan as an alternative (and, theoretically, faster) method of checking out than fumbling around with a credit card or cash.

Customers will be able to register their palms at kiosks in the supported Whole Foods stores, allowing them to associate a physical credit card to that palm scan. And of course, Amazon One users will be able to link their Prime accounts to their scans to get the subscription service's discounts when shopping. Amazon One will debut at the Madison Broadway Whole Foods in Seattle as an additional payment option for customers, with plans to expand it to seven other Whole Foods stores in the Seattle area over the next few months. Amazon hasn't announced plans to further build out the palm-scanning payment system outside of the Seattle area.

The Bank of England and the Treasury have announced they are setting up a taskforce to explore the possibility of a central bank digital currency. From a report: The aim is to look at the risks and opportunities involved in creating a new kind of digital money. Issued by the Bank for use by households and businesses, it would exist alongside cash and bank deposits, rather than replacing them. No decision has been taken on whether to have such a currency in the UK. However, the government and the Bank want to "engage widely with stakeholders" on the benefits and practicalities of doing so. The taskforce will be jointly led by the Bank's deputy governor for financial stability, Sir Jon Cunliffe, and the Treasury's director general of financial services, Katharine Braddick. The Bank has previously said it is interested in a central bank digital currency (CBDC) because "this is a period of significant change in money and payments." The use of cash in financial transactions has been steadily declining in recent years, while debit card payments have been on the rise. Use of credit cards and direct debits have also been increasing.

A one-man Bunco Squad is poking holes in Apple's App Store image. From a report: Recently, I reached out to the most profitable company in the world to ask a series of basic questions. I wanted to understand: how is a single man making the entire Apple App Store review team look silly? Particularly now that Apple's in the fight of its life, both in the courts and in Congress later today, to prove its App Store is a well-run system that keeps users safe instead of a monopoly that needs to be broken up. That man's name is Kosta Eleftheriou, and over the past few months, he's made a convincing case that Apple is either uninterested or incompetent at stopping multimillion-dollar scams in its own App Store.

He's repeatedly found scam apps that prey on ordinary iPhone and iPad owners by luring them into a "free trial" of an app with seemingly thousands of fake 5-star reviews, only to charge them outrageous sums of money for a recurring subscription that many don't understand how to cancel. "It's a situation that most communities are blind to because of how Apple is essentially brainwashing people into believing the App Store is a trusted place," he tells The Verge. There's a lot to unpack there: fake free trials, fake reviews, subscription awareness. We could write an entire story about each. Today, I'd like to focus on how one guy could find what Apple's $64-billion-a-year App Store apparently cannot, because the answer is remarkable.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: The company plans to start selling subscriptions to podcasts and keeping a slice of each transaction for itself. Apple CEO Tim Cook briefly mentioned plans to roll out a subscription feature during the company's keynote event Tuesday, without offering more details. But a person familiar with Apple's plans has spelled it out to Recode:

- Starting next month, Apple will let podcast publishers sell subscriptions to individual shows or groups of shows, and set their own pricing, starting at 49 cents a month in the US.
- Apple won't require podcasters to create Apple-only exclusive shows, but it does want them to distinguish between stuff they're already distributing via Apple and stuff going up on other platforms: That could mean ad-free shows or shows with extra content or brand-new shows that only exist on Apple.
- Apple will keep 30 percent of any subscription revenue creators generate in their first year on the platform. After that, Apple's cut will drop to 15 percent. That's the same pricing scheme Apple already uses for other subscription services, like TV streamers.

PayPal on Tuesday will begin allowing select customers of its Venmo app to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies as consumers increasingly look for ways to pile into the digital assets. Bloomberg reports: The firm will make it available to all the app's users, who number more than 70 million, within the next few weeks. For now, Venmo is allowing customers to trade in just four types of cryptocurrency: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. Users will also have the ability to share their cryptocurrency purchases on the Venmo feed.

"We do think some customers will certainly want to share this fun experience," Darrell Esch, senior vice president and general manager of the Venmo app at PayPal, said in an interview. "They can share with their friends and community that they've taken the step into this space."

Online electronics retailer Newegg said it is now accepting dogecoin as a method of payment. From a report: Customers will be able to complete transactions using the dogecoin held in their BitPay wallet, according to an announcement Tuesday. Newegg first began accepting payments in bitcoin in July 2014. The company is now among the first retailers to accept dogecoin as payment. Further reading: Dogecoin Rips in Meme-Fueled Frenzy on Pot-Smoking Holiday.

Google shifted more than $75.4 billion in profits out of the Republic using the controversial "double-Irish" tax arrangement in 2019, the last year in which it used the loophole. From a report: The technology giant availed of the tax arrangement to move the money out of Google Ireland Holdings Unlimited Company via interim dividends and other payments. This company was incorporated in Ireland but tax domiciled in Bermuda at the time of the transfer.

The move allowed Google Ireland Holdings to escape corporation tax both in the Republic and in the United States where its ultimate parent, Alphabet, is headquartered. The holding company reported a $13 billion pretax profit for 2019, which was effectively tax-free, the accounts show. A year earlier, Google Ireland Holdings paid out dividends of 23 billion euros, having recorded turnover of $25.7 billion. Google has used the double Irish loophole to funnel billions in global profits through Ireland and on to Bermuda, effectively putting them beyond the reach of US tax authorities. Companies exploiting the double Irish put their intellectual property into an Irish-registered company that is controlled from a tax haven such as Bermuda.

"The mania that drove crypto assets to records as Coinbase went public last week turned on itself on the weekend," report Bloomberg — as the price of bitcoin took a big dive: The world's biggest cryptocurrency plunged as much as 15% on Sunday, just days after reaching a record of $64,869. It subsequently pared some of the losses and was trading at about $56,440 at around 8:25 a.m. in Tokyo Monday. Ether, the second-biggest token, dropped as much as 18% to below $2,000 before also paring losses. The volatility buffeted Binance Coin, XRP and Cardano too.

Dogecoin — the token started as a joke — bucked the trend and is up 7% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

The weekend carnage came after a heady period for the industry that saw the value of all coins surge past $2.25 trillion amid a frenzy of demand for all things crypto in the runup to Coinbase's direct listing on Wednesday. The largest U.S. crypto exchange ended the week valued at $68 billion, more than the owner of the New York Stock Exchange... Dogecoin, which has limited use and no fundamentals, rallied last week to be worth about $50 billion at one point before stumbling Saturday. Demand was so brisk for the token that investors trying to trade it on Robinhood crashed the site a few times Friday, the online exchange said in a blog post.

There was also speculation Sunday in several online reports that the crypto plunge was related to concerns the U.S. Treasury may crack down on money laundering carried out through digital assets... Besides the "unsubstantiated" report of a U.S. Treasury crackdown, Antoni Trenchev, co-founder of crypto lender Nexo, said factors for the declines may have included "excess leverage, Coinbase insiders dumping equity after the direct listing and a mass outage in China's Xinjiang province hitting Bitcoin miners."

Gizmodo reports: The latest big name to get in on the NFT craze is former intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, who on Friday auctioned off an original NFT art piece for roughly $5.4 million worth of the cryptocurrency Ether. Titled "Stay Free", it's a digital self-portrait made out of pages from a U.S. Court of Appeals decision that ruled the National Security Agency's widespread surveillance of phone records violated the law, a practice Snowden brought to light in 2013 by leaking classified NSA secrets to journalists...

The NFT sold for 2,224 Ether, worth just over $5.4 million at the time of publishing. All proceeds from this sale will go to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit that develops open-source tools for whistleblowers and works to shield journalists from state-sponsored hackers and government surveillance. Snowden has led the organization as president since 2017.