Bitcoin is a tool to avoid police extortion in Nigeria, centralized social media is being censored amid Thai protests and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the central bank will readdress its previous 2% inflation target over the next decade.
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Top shelf
Police-resistant
To combat extortion and coercive policing in Nigeria, some, like Nigerian programmer Adebiyi David Adedoyin, are turning to bitcoin. Human Rights Watch has documented a trend in the country where police detain citizens, determine their life savings through force entry to their phones and seize it. It almost happened to Adedoyin. “The money they collected to let me go in that case would have been a lot more if I had more money in my account. But I had most of my money in bitcoin,” Adedoyin said. Police are less likely to look for a bitcoin wallet, he said.
Bitcoin fund
Fidelity Investments’ chief strategist, Peter Jubber, is launching a new bitcoin index fund. Disclosed in a Wednesday morning filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, “Wise Origin Bitcoin Index Fund I, LP” has a $100,000 minimum buy-in and is the latest example of Wall Street veterans warming up to bitcoin. Wise Origin links back to Fidelity Investments via Jubber and Fidelity’s brokerage service and distribution subsidiaries, both of which are set to receive sales compensation from the new fund. It also shares a Boston office building with Fidelity, Danny Nelson reports.
Centralized censorship
Thailand’s anti-government protests highlight the vulnerabilities of major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, CoinDesk’s Sandali Handagama reports. On Wednesday, Thailand’s digital minister Puttipong Punnakanta said authorities will continue an internet crackdown – including Facebook censorship and potential interference on Twitter – in an attempt to limit a groundswell of distributed political action in the country.
Exchange extortion
The New Zealand stock exchange has halted trading for the third day in a row as a result of criminal cyberattacks. Targeted disruption from malicious actors have knocked the NZX exchange’s hosting service Spark has knocked it intermittently offline. The criminals, potentially connected to the Amada Collective and Fancy Bear cybergangs, are demanding bitcoin in order to cease the attacks. Over recent weeks, the group has also attempted to extort bitcoin from PayPal, MoneyGram, YesBank India, Braintree and Venmo, CoinDesk’s Sebastian Sinclair reports.
Blockchain on the LINE
Messaging giant LINE has launched a wallet for users to manage digital assets and a blockchain platform where developers can issue their own tokens, tokenize digital assets and run decentralized applications (dapps). The wallet services are only available in Japan, at launch, where LINE is particularly well-known. The company, whose messaging app boasts 84 million users, aims to leverage its existing network to jumpstart the development of its token economies and accelerate adoptions of many dapps built on its proprietary blockchain platform – setting it apart from other messaging app blockchain experiments.
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