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Some 600 bitcoin mining computers have been stolen in Iceland, in what is being described as one of the biggest thefts ever in the small island nation.  A total of 11 people have been arrested so far after four burglaries in the Reykjanes peninsula.  The computers are yet to be found and are believed to be worth almost £1.5m.  Icelandic media have dubbed the crime the “big bitcoin heist” and the thieves could potentially make more money if they use the computers to mine the cryptocurrency and then sell it. "This is a grand theft on a scale unseen before," police commissioner Olafur Helgi Kjartansson said,  NBC reported. "Everything points to this being a highly organised crime." Bitcoin hit the news last year after its value increased by more than 20 times from below $1,000 to a peak of more than $20,000.  It is a digital currency that was created in 2009 by a mysterious figure using the alias Satoshi Naka...

After a prolonged correction, Bitcoin is back big time. The “people’s currency” gained close to 7% this week, stabilizing around the $11,000 mark. Is this comeback for real? Hard to say, as there are hardly any “fundamentals” to judge whether Bitcoin is undervalued or overvalued at these levels. Still, there are a couple of bullish signs for the digital currency worth noticing. One of them is that Bitcoin is beginning to behave like the ‘new gold,’ shining in times of extreme uncertainty that take over Wall Street. There was a time when gold would shine as Wall Street faltered. That was long time ago, when it was the hedge against uncertainty. It was the asset where investors could park their cash in times of political and economic turmoil. Now Bitcoin is taking its place, as evidenced by the performance of the two assets overtime. Bitcoin, for instance, rallied last week, as conventional gold and stocks faltered, due to anxiety over the direction of int...

Bill Miller , multi-millionaire investor and founder of hedge fund Miller Value Partners, shared his positive view on the  cryptocurrency  market sell-off and talked about why it should not scare investors in a FOXBusiness  exclusive interview  Feb. 28. Calling himself a  Bitcoin  “observer”, rather than a Bitcoin “believer” or “evangelist”, in the interview Miller compared Bitcoin with other major inventions throughout history, stating: “What I observed with bitcoin is that it’s following a very time-honored path of disruptive innovation going all the way back to the printing press, railroad, electricity, radio in the 1920s, biotech, the internet.” While many on Wall Street  are worried  that cryptocurrencies are a  bubble  worse than the Nasdaq in 2000, and some even  forecast  Bitcoin dropping to as low as $1,000 this year, Miller says that the market actually needs this “bubble” to find out whether the idea of t...

As a decentralized system by design, it can be difficult to see where the real power lies in Bitcoin. There are a number of different players in the ecosystem (e.g. miners, hodlers, exchanges, developers), but one entity has more power than the others in terms of what types of protocol improvements will be made. As I’ve explained previously , the hodlers (again, not a typo) have the biggest impact on the bitcoin price due to the effect they have on the supply of available Bitcoin. Taking this point further, they also have the largest amount of power in terms of what types of improvements are made to the Bitcoin protocol because everyone in the system is incentivized to make the native tokens on the platform as valuable as possible. Why Investors Control Bitcoin The idea that investors are the ones who control Bitcoin is not a new idea. Multiple articles and blog posts have been written on the topic over the years.  Daniel Krawisz’s article on this topic  for the Satos...